grokster

Don't Be Evil

2010-03-21T23:11:00.000-07:00

So, [sorta] Health Care Reform actually really passed.

A year of dithering, noise, misrepresentation, back-room dealing, and Deity knows what else, and now the US health care system can now resemble .. the second most expensive system in the world, the Swiss one. Woo hoo!

I have a lot of disappointments from the past year, mostly regarding how non-progressive is the new legislation, and how all efforts to introduce any form of single-payer system were cut off at the knees (and from the top).

However, I reserve the highest contempt for the Republican Party, which relied on bad faith, constant outright lying, and fake "grass-roots" campaigns to derail even the slightest reduction in profits for their benefactors AKA the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

If you needed any convincing on the absolute evil of the GOP, this past year should seal the deal. These people do not represent their constituents, they care nothing about truth, and most shamefully they do not care about their own country. They just don't. They look straight into the camera and lie, shamelessly. And they collect their lobbying checks and perks while selling their constituents short and their country down the drain.

The GOP's despicable behavior is matched only by their genius at somehow getting people to vote and make noise against their own interests. Medicare-for-all would save the country lots of money and keep countless people from having to go bankrupt if/when they get sick, but none of that seems to matter if you wave the boogeyman of Socialism in the face of Joe Sixpack.

(There's plenty of evil on the other side of the aisle, and I'm not just talking about those Blue Dogs that almost derailed HCR. I'm talking about Dems who mouth the words of reform, but when it comes down to backing their words, golly gee they just can't muster the votes. Oh, and thank you for the kind donation, WellPoint.)

The GOP has shown its true face, and it deserves to sink without a trace. Perhaps someday there will be an actual fiscally conservative party (that doesn't operate on crony capitalism) in its place. I don't hold much hope on that account, and the Libertarians .. sorry, been there, done that (yah, I actually voted for Ron Paul for President in 1988).

Until then, all we have are the Dems and their apparent ability to snatch Defeat from the jaws of Victory. These are the folk who are going to re-regulate banking and finance in the US? And actually do something about global warming and US energy self-sufficiency?

Well, maybe. At least Hope didn't die tonight.

Pasta Dogs!

2009-08-02T23:41:00.000-07:00

I ran into this concept at the link above, and months later finally tried my hand.

Lots of fun, and pretty tasty, though I wish I'd made a sharper cheese sauce and/or had spicier chili or coney island sauce.

Also should have used more pasta per dog.

Try this at home!

Left Lane Bandits: Right Lane Bullies

2009-07-27T22:10:00.001-07:00

So I just drove from Portland, OR to Mountain View, CA. 10 hours of fairly nice scenery, mountain passes, and really boring and hot central California. Would you believe 112F in Red Bluff (about an hour south of Lake Shasta) at 4pm??

For the most part, people are fairly polite on the road. However, our police surveillance society always makes passing long, tedious, and dangerous. People are always paranoid about going too much faster than the speed limit, so in a 65 MPH zone you might be going 72 MPH passing someone who's going 71.5MPH.

I'm told that the New York State used to have a rule where for up to 1/4 mile you could drive at unlimited speed, so that passing could be quick, efficient, and safe. I doubt if that's true now.

So people tend to set their cruise controls and motor along in the left lane, because it's too easy to lose time if you move to the right and get caught in a squeeze play. This is where you need to pass a slower car, but you can't move back to the left lane because someone is closing just fast enough to keep you there, and just slow enough that you have to slow down because they're taking so long to get by you both.

This inevitably leads to those rude people who 1) pass you on the right and 2) butt in while you're passing traffic, forcing you to slow down and waste a lot of energy/gas in the process.

These people have an attitude problem. They just assume you don't mind slowing down for them and that the gap you leave in front of you is not reaction time buffer but instead reserved for them. They also rarely signal - perhaps out of general rudeness, but perhaps also as part of a "surprise them!" strategy.

This irks me for all sorts of reasons. This all happens under the noses of highway cops, who are measuring car speeds for ticketing instead of looking out for dangerous drivers.

In the vein of Friedman's "China for a Day", I wonder if we could become a bit more Teutonic about driving behavior. On Germany's Autobahns it is Simply Not Done to pass someone on the right. I did it once and received quite the disapproving glare. In Europe, passing on the right seldom becomes an issue, because everyone is trained to stay in the right lane(s) except to pass.

I know, I'm just dreaming. In America, driving is a right (despite what the DMV booklets all say) and if you can't stop people from buying SUVs, you sure as hell aren't going to keep them away from their left lane entitlement.

2009-07-26T15:57:00.001-07:00

So I found my old Vectrex game. It was mind-blowing when it came out - a vector console for your desk!

There are emulators, but they just don't have the same game play.

Methinks I'll take it to work and hang a sign on it, "Play this game if its older than you."

Kim Il Jong: Pancreatic Cancer Poster Dictator?

2009-07-26T09:46:00.000-07:00

Unless you are both rich and very lucky (this means you, Real Steve), pancreatic cancer is pretty much a death sentence. By the time you are diagnosed, you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of months you have left.

My dad managed about 18 months, due to an experimental "drip system" chemo developed at UCLA. He barely made it to 1994, which was just about when the Web started exploding. He went back in computing to the days of analog computers (for example, modeling the Lockheed Electra wing problems with differential equations), and I know he would have loved the Web.

1994 was some years after Dr Bernard Bihari started exploring the use of Low Dose Naltrexone for the treatment of cancer and other dread diseases like AIDS and Multiple Sclerosis

...almost all cancers have a lot of receptors for endorphins on the cell surface, and that seems to be necessary for it to work. Some of the cancers that respond most dramatically are Multiple Myeloma, Lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease, breast cancer, all the cancers of the gastrointestinal tract, like pancreatic cancer, non small-cell cancer of the lung, the kind associated with smoking. I've got several patients with tumors that have stopped growing; they have no symptoms, and then after a year, year and a half, in about half of that group, the tumors start shrinking and disappear.

There have been other results since then, notably from Berkson. Why isn't mainstream medicine pursuing research along these lines? Simple - the patents on Naltrexone ran out long ago, and nobody would make any money on curing cancer with it.

Perhaps LDN isn't The Answer - I wish the FDA and NIH would do their job and get on the case.

Meanwhile, in resource-poor no-health-care North Korea, I'd put even money that Dear Leader will happen along this treatment. It would be ironic indeed if he survived, and the world "discovered" a cheap, effective treatment through its use on a murderous despot.

Other LDN/cancer references:
http://cancerx.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/naltrexone-for-cancer/
http://www.geocities.com/~vera_b/alts/naltrexone.html
http://www.lowdosenaltrexone.org/gazorpa/interview.html
http://www.libnot.com/2009/05/31/pancreatic-cancer-and-autoimmune-diseases-treated-with-low-dose-naltrexone-and-intravenous-alpha-lipoic-acid-protocol/

Krugman on Health Care and the Free Market

2009-07-25T18:58:00.000-07:00

In other words, "insurance" is the wrong model for health care.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/25/why-markets-cant-cure-healthcare/

There are a number of successful health-care systems, at least as measured by pretty good care much cheaper than here, and they are quite different from each other. There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. And people who say that the market is the answer are flying in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence.

If you still find the concept difficult to fathom or swallow, try looking at motivation. Listen to the various players in the health care debate, and ask yourself what are their stakes in the whole thing. Including following the money to their campaign contributors.

Then contemplate Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.

Up To No Good (continued)

2009-07-22T20:24:00.000-07:00

From DailyKos

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/7/20/755418/-Kristol-on-healthcare:-dont-appear-constructive,-instead-go-for-the-kill

Taking a page out of the Jim DeMint playbook on health care reform Republican-style, Bill Kristol doesn't even pretend that there is any goal other than to kill it:

With Obamacare on the ropes, there will be a temptation for opponents to let up on their criticism, and to try to appear constructive, or at least responsible. There will be a tendency to want to let the Democrats' plans sink of their own weight, to emphasize that the critics have been pushing sound reform ideas all along and suggest it's not too late for a bipartisan compromise over the next couple of weeks or months.

My advice, for what it's worth: Resist the temptation. This is no time to pull punches. Go for the kill.

It's hard to believe that this needs to be said again, but obviously it does: Republicans aren't interested in bipartisanship. They aren't interested in meaningful health care reform. And God knows they don't give a damn what it means for millions of Americans. The only thing they want is a political victory. Period.

Up To No Good

2009-07-21T20:09:00.000-07:00

So it's getting down to crunch time on health care reform, and despite the Democrat's huge margin of victory in 2008 and the overwhelming desire of the electorate to have at least a Public Option, if not actual Single-Payer health care, there seems to be serious doubt as to whether Obama can deliver on Big Issue H.

Who's at fault? Certainly the Republican party carries most of the blame. Whether it's because of hyper-partisanship or complete deference to their corporate benefactors, the idea of absolutely all Republicans voting as a bloc against everything Obama does is truly repulsive. These people are beneath contempt. They are up to no good, and have no shame or principle.

There are unfortunately enough "Blue Dog" Democrats who feel they can hold health care hostage for their few measly votes (simply because they know the Republicans will vote 40-0 against). I very much doubt if they have any actual principles at stake - Lieberman comes to mind here - aside from simply being bought and paid for by the very corporations that their voters hired them to regulate.

This Salon article about Big Issue E is both relevant and depressing.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/07/22/economic_crisis_part_one/

The final storyline of criminality is the biggest of all. It is bigger than the current financial crisis. It is corporate America's complete control of our nation's elected officials, especially our Congress, through lobbying and campaign donations. Yes, the banks played this game, but the game was much bigger than just the financial industry. Coal-fired utilities have so watered down impending legislation concerning global warming that they have now come out in favor of it in the House vote. TARP money went to banking friends of Hank Paulson, although 97 percent of congressional correspondence from the American people was against it. The credit card industry took a minor slap on the wrist, but faces no limitation on the egregious interest rates it can charge its customers. Pharmaceutical and hospital corporations are fighting hard to keep Americans from having a public alternative to their healthcare, and right now are winning that fight. The transportation industry is at the government trough trying to pass a $500 billion windfall. The AARP prevents any meaningful reform of Social Security; the teachers' union does the same for education reform. Is it crazy to think that defense companies like Dick Cheney's Halliburton (which saw its stock price increase 700 percent during the Iraq war, thanks to no-bid contracts) may be promoting U.S. aggression around the world?

Basically, it amounts to the US having the worst of all worlds. There is no central authority with any ability or stomach to make long-term plans. Friedman's "China for a Day" can be tempting until you remember that China is actually a GOP capitalist paradise, with no health care, redistribution of wealth, or dissent.

Perhaps Obama should listen to Bill Maher and become George W for a day. He was "elected" by the thinnest of margins (twice!), yet claimed a mandate and managed to ram most of his degenerate agenda through Congress. Obama has way more popularity and persuasive power - it's time he used it.

If he doesn't, American will fall further into Third World status and be ripe for a takeover by an even cruder version of the idiocracy that plundered it during the last administration.

40 Years Ago Today!

2009-07-20T23:45:00.000-07:00

What more is there to say? It's still a mind-boggling achievement. And from JFK's announcement in 1962 to Apollo 11 was, what, 7 years?

The earliest estimates of our ability to return to the Moon are targeting 2020, 11 years from now. This is with all the prior art, the literally million-fold increase in computing technology, etc etc.

Color me disappointed. If and when we finally send a few people out of Earth's orbit, it will again be in flying gas cans, not from, say, a sky-hook. It will still be the projection of a nation's resource to send a teeny few.

Which is not to say I have anything but admiration for the astronauts and the organization that pulled it off. Neil Armstrong is a pilot's pilot - he held a number of altitude and speed records as an X-15 test pilot long before he was an astronaut. Multiply that across the whole of NASA - everywhere you turn, you have the best people in the world pushing back the frontiers of science and technology.

July 20, 1969 - when men were men and giants walked the Earth ... and the Moon!

Gang of Sickos: Frenemies of Health Care Reform

2009-07-19T11:48:00.000-07:00

This "bipartisan" groups of six senators have issued a demand for a slowdown of the health care reform process. While claiming to be heeding the wishes of their constituents, they are in fact doing the bidding of their benefactors in the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Below is the article exposing all this, plus the list of senators and their industry contributions. Hopefully shining some light on these sickos will take some wind out of their sails. The article also lists contact information for these senators, for what that's worth.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Gang-of-Sickos-Six-US-Sen-by-Mark-C-Eades-090719-152.html

Ben Nelson (D) Nebraska $2.2 million
Mary Landieu (D) Louisiana $1.6 million
Ron Wyden (D) Oregon $1.4 million
Joe Lieberman (I) Connecticut $3.6 million
Olympia Snowe (R) Maine $1.1 million
Susan Collons (R) Maine $1.6 million

Can anyone be surprised by the appearance of Joe "Sleazebag" Lieberman on this list? I am however shocked to see Ron Wyden, who I thought was a very progressive guy.

While the appearance of a "public option" in the House and Senate health care bills is somewhat of a relief, I wouldn't bet against the whole thing being stopped in its track by groups like the above. Or worse, neutralized by bazillion amendments that will keep us locked into the current system forever.

By far the simplest and least expensive option for health care reform would be

extend Medicare to everyone - it's already covering the elderly, who are by far the most expensive health demographic
undo the Bush drug non-benefit and insurance leeches (Medicare middlemen) additions

If you aren't angry about the health care situation in America, or your anger has cooled a bit, go watch Sicko online now. And tell your friends.

Boom-Bust: Positive Feedback Economies are Unstable

2009-07-19T06:53:00.000-07:00

This is part 1 of my General Economic Theory. It's very complicated and difficult to understand. Ready?

Positive Feedback Systems are Unstable
Economies are Positive Feedback Systems
Economies are Unstable

Got that?

Control Theory is an arbitrarily complex field. I took it for a year in college, and unfortunately forgot most of it. Stability is a formally defined concept within Control Theory. If you can model a system, you can discover if it is stable.

Generally speaking, most stable systems use negative feedback. That is, for any fluctuation there is a corresponding correction. Think of what you do to keep a car going in a straight line - if the car veers, you steer in the opposite direction. Eventually you don't even think about it, and your passengers never notice the infinitesimal corrections you constantly make to keep the car going straight.

One of the simplest and best analyzed forms of negative feedback control systems is the Phase-Locked Loop, which for example is the basis of all modern radio and TV tuners.

Economies are complex, non-linear systems with lots of feedback loops of varying amplifications ("gains") and delays. Most of them are positive feedback, and all of them are difficult to model.

Capitalism is of course positive feedback. Making money gives you more opportunity to invest, where you can make even more. Speculation is an extreme example - you make money on something, and other people want to get in on the action. People become convinced that Tulips are a fantastic investment, and the price of Tulips shoots through the roof .. until the bottom falls out and the last people in lose everything to the first people in (to use a zero-sum oversimplification).

As with other systems, negative feedback provides stability in economic systems. The extreme form of this is Communism ("from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"), in which the lack of incentive for personal gain slows everything to a crawl.

Stagnation is an undesired form of stability.

How do you create a "vibrant" (e.g. unstable) economy, yet avoid economic bubbles? Two words: regulation and taxation. Part 2 of my General Economic Theory comes later.

Thomas Jefferson in the 21st Century

2009-07-18T11:56:00.000-07:00

I've often wondered what artifacts of today I'd want to take back or forth in time with me ("Which three books would you take?" said Filby to H.G. Wells' housekeeper). Electronic gizmos would be really cool .. so long as they don't depend on Internet, GPS satellites, or cell networks, for as long as the batteries hold out.

Even then I wouldn't be sure if people will gawk in wonder at my iPod Touch or burn me at the stake. And how much time would I have to explain the cascade of technologies that make it possible?

I was never a big fan of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. But really, it would seem far more satisfying to bring people from the past into the present. Once they got over the shock of indoor plumbing and electric lights, it would be great fun - and often more than a little embarrassing - to show off the tech wonders of our world.

I got to thinking about this again while watching the excellent John Adams series on DVD. We can revere the Founding Fathers, call them lucky gentlemen revolutionaries, or whatever, but it's pretty amazing what they came up with given the times in which they lived, and their inability to predict the future.

Thomas Jefferson seemed particularly interesting. He authored most of the Declaration of Independence and is the subject of quotes like JFK's about how a gathering of the Best and Brightest might have approached the intellect of Jefferson when he sat alone in the same room.

Aside from all of his political and historical significance, Jefferson was also an architect and an inventor. Look around you and imagine how he might appreciate even the smallest detail of what you take for granted. 20th century stuff for sure - cars, airplanes, radio, etc. But I think he would even more appreciate the expanse and growing organization of human knowledge.

He would never get over the shock of computing in general. Hell, I have a hard time grokking the fact of my laptop containing many billions of transistors. But the Internet in general, and Wikipedia and search engines in particular would really fascinate him. I can almost see him nodding in appreciation as he learns about inverted indexes, divide and conquer computing, etc etc.

Motion pictures would blow his mind. He'd seen plays, of course, but the simulated realities necessary in rendering special effects would really impress him. The Navier-Stokes equations had yet to be derived in Jefferson's time, and most people today have no appreciation of how essential is actual simulation in the making of effects. Jefferson would appreciate it, and his hosts would have to play tag team in explaining all the math, science, and technology that makes it all work.

Great stuff.

Well, that is until we get to television. Jefferson would be aghast, not just at the crassness and shallowness of TV in general, but the complete distortion of political discourse that TV enables. Watching Fox News would probably make him wonder about the wisdom of repealing the Alien and Sedition Acts that Adams signed into law.

Jefferson would be particularly troubled at the Idiocracy that is today's Republican Party. Watching John Boener and his blow-dried colleagues reciting their corporate talking points, knowing they are false yet having no shame in doing so, would probably make his blood boil. He would think of the massive sacrifice, the care of thought, the hardships .. and wonder if it was all for nought.

We might have to work hard to cheer him up ("Hey Thomas, you'll never guess what's at Mount Rushmore!"), but then again maybe he would enjoy retreating into the massive study and exploration it would take for him to catch up on the last two centuries of technology.

In that respect, Thomas Jefferson might find solace in the company of fellow nerds who know they can't fix the world, but do their best to advance technology and understanding when they can. And after all, he should be proud of his enormous contribution to history.

Pulling Jefferson forward in time would of course lead to the question of whether to send him back (he wouldn't want to go), but then early America would lose the correspondence he and Adams shared in their later years, and our history might change in some small respect from losing the fact of them both dying 50 years to the day after July 4, 1776.

Looking Back: The Omega Glory

2009-07-13T21:48:00.000-07:00

I hadn't seen this Star Trek episode in a very long time.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708474/

When I first saw it, I was fascinated by the not-quite-parallel planet depicted on the show. Said planet had Yankees (Whites!) and Communists (Asians!), and even the minutest detail of the US Pledge of Allegiance and Constitution .. yet differed in a slightly larger sense of having suffered a biological war that wiped out most of the planet. Hmmkay..

Viewing it today, it's funny/sad to see the characature of Americans that is the Yangs:

"Impossible even to communicate with!"
"Totally contemptuous of death!"
"Freedom? That's a worship word - Yang worship!"

And I tell ya, them Yangs remind me a lot of today's Republicans, who

attempt to substitute talking points for reason, and are bound by a hyper-partisanship that goes beyond ideology
have no problem sending other people's sons and daughters into harm's way to protect their business interests
keep saying "terrorists hate us for our freedom"

Star Trek was televised about 15 years after the McCarthy days, and I wonder if Roddenberry (who also wrote the episode) was at the same time telling a morality tale and poking fun at his contemporary wing-nuts (aka "Birchers").

Fall Guys: Lynndie England

2009-07-11T19:56:00.000-07:00

This American Life is such a great show, and podcasts are an ideal way for non-radio types like me to follow it.

A couple weeks back they ran a story about fall guys. The most interesting of its four parts was the segment on Lynndie England, the poster girl for American torture.

http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1304

The story of a famous but not well-understood political fall guy, someone who became a scapegoat for American policies worldwide. Philip Gourevitch writes about listening to nine hours of interviews with Lynndie England, the American servicewoman photographed at Abu Ghraib prison holding a leash with a naked, Iraqi prisoner on the end of it. Philip Gourevitch's book about what happened in that prison and in those photos is called The Ballad of Abu Ghraib. Audio in this act came from Errol Morris's interviews in the film Standard Operating Procedure. (15 minutes)

It's an amazing story, and not a little surprising. Perhaps most amazing is how little involvement she actually had - she was an admin, ordered to pose for a The Photograph - yet how she was one of very few people convicted or even accused of wrong-doing in the whole Abu Ghraib affair.

And of course the entire chain of command, leading up to Generalissimo El Busho himself, managed to avoid any sort of consequence.

Lynndie England is recognized everywhere, and hated as The Person most responsible for stuff like beheadings of captured Americans.

And she was a Fall Guy, big time, for the most criminal administration in US history.

It's Just Not Practical

2009-07-11T15:25:00.001-07:00

I may never forgive Ralph Nader for killing the Corvair (my first car), or worse, for taking enough votes away from Al Gore in 2000 for the election to be stolen.

But he speaks the truth:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/11

Last year, the excuse was a Bush veto. So the Democrats didn't even try to advance reforms they believe in, knowing Bush and his Republican Party would stonewall. What's the excuse this year with Obama in the White House?
After all, it was only a year and a half ago when nominating and then electing an African-American President was "not going to happen, was not practical."
But since it did happen, why aren't these and many other long overdue beneficial redirections and efficiencies happening for the American people? Why aren't there rollbacks, at least, of the Bush-driven inequities and injustices that have so damaged the well-being of working people?
Why isn't a simpler and more efficient carbon tax more "practical" than the complex corruption-prone, corporatized cap and trade deal driven by Goldman Sachs and favored by most Democrats? The avaricious tax cuts for the super-wealthy are still there.
The statutory ban on Uncle Sam negotiating volume discounts on medicines purchased by the federal government are still there. Taking the huge budgets for the Bush wars in Iraq and Afghanistan off their annual fast track, and putting them a meaningful House and Senate Appropriations Committee hearing process has not happened.
Face it, America. You are a corporate-controlled country with the symbols of democracy in the constitution and statutes just that-symbols of what the founding fathers believed or hoped would be reality.
Even when the global corporate giants come to Washington dripping with crime, greed, speculation and cover-ups, and demand gigantic bailouts on the backs of taxpayers and their children, neither the Republicans nor the now majority Democrats are willing to face them down.

It's really depressing that a lot of elected Democrats are acting like they have the moral high ground, but are just as beholden to corporate benefactors as their wingnut Republican counterparts.

There's a difference between "giving the Health Insurance Industry a seat at the table" and presenting Aetna president Ron Williams as a friend to health care reform.

Blowing the Whistle on the Health Care Industry

2009-07-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

Bill Moyers interviews ex-Cigna PR chief Wendell Potter:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/watch2.html

Insurance is just the wrong model for health care. Too many conflicts of interest.

BILL MOYERS: We obtained a copy of the game plan that was adopted by the industry's trade association, AHIP. And it spells out the industry strategies in gold letters. It says, "Highlight horror stories of government-run systems." What was that about?
WENDELL POTTER: The industry has always tried to make Americans think that government-run systems are the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, that if you even consider that, you're heading down on the slippery slope towards socialism. So they have used scare tactics for years and years and years, to keep that from happening. If there were a broader program like our Medicare program, it could potentially reduce the profits of these big companies. So that is their biggest concern.
BILL MOYERS: And there was a political strategy. "Position Sicko as a threat to Democrats' larger agenda." What does that mean?
WENDELL POTTER: That means that part of the effort to discredit this film was to use lobbyists and their own staff to go onto Capitol Hill and say, "Look, you don't want to believe this movie. You don't want to talk about it. You don't want to endorse it. And if you do, we can make things tough for you."
...
BILL MOYERS: So your plan worked.
WENDELL POTTER: It worked beautifully.
BILL MOYERS: The film was blunted, right?
WENDELL POTTER: The film was blunted. It--
BILL MOYERS: Was it true? Did you think it contained a great truth?
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely did.
BILL MOYERS: What was it?
WENDELL POTTER: That we shouldn't fear government involvement in our health care system. That there is an appropriate role for government, and it's been proven in the countries that were in that movie.
You know, we have more people who are uninsured in this country than the entire population of Canada. And that if you include the people who are underinsured, more people than in the United Kingdom. We have huge numbers of people who are also just a lay-off away from joining the ranks of the uninsured, or being purged by their insurance company, and winding up there.
And another thing is that the advocates of reform or the opponents of reform are those who are saying that we need to be careful about what we do here, because we don't want the government to take away your choice of a health plan. It's more likely that your employer and your insurer is going to switch you from a plan that you're in now to one that you don't want. You might be in the plan you like now.
But chances are, pretty soon, you're going to be enrolled in one of these high deductible plans in which you're going to find that much more of the cost is being shifted to you than you ever imagined.

20 Years After the Al Franken Decade

2009-07-09T22:02:00.000-07:00

When in 1979 Al Franken announced on SNL that the 80's would be "The Al Franken Decade", I thought he was an arrogant jerk. No more so than, say, Chevy Chase, but it just seemed a bit presumptuous.

Of course, the Al Franken 80's might have been better than the Reagan 80's .. but we'll never know.

SNL was the first time I saw him draw a map of the US, while discussing something else. I wish I could remember what it was, and there's probably video of it somewhere (too bad NBC's video archives are so suckily unsearchable).

But it's cool to see he's still doing it! Consider the following, in which he carries a Q&A on health care while drawing the map.

The average politician doesn't seem all that smart to me. I'm glad the US Senate finally has Al Franken .. or rather, that we now have The Al Franken Senate.

BTW I second Victor Navasky's wish that he allow himself to be funny. Most humor comes from observation and analysis anyway. Most politicians are unintentionally funny - I'd rather have a professional funny man on the job.

The Watchmen: This American Life on The Meltdown

2009-07-05T19:29:00.000-07:00

This American Life is a great show, and I only recently started listening to its podcasts on a regular basis.

TAL has done a number of shows during the financial meltdown, and doing a marvelous job of explaining just what's been happening.

The most recent of these is called The Watchmen, where they look for the agency or agencies whose job it was to regulate AIG. Partly because they don't expect the Congress to perform such a search, and partly because even if they do it would be in a circus atmosphere with no positive outcome.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1301

Since Congress hasn't held 1930's-style hearings into the causes of the financial crisis, we stage one of our own. The subject? The regulators and watchdogs who were supposed to be overseeing the banks and the finance industry—to make sure things wouldn't blow up like they have. Clearly something went wrong. Today we pound a gavel and ask: where were the watchmen?

This is very worth an hour of anyone's time to listen to. As much as the show cautions against anger towards each of the miscreants as they are revealed, it struck me that the Office of Thrift Supervision was nominally in charge. This agency had formerly been the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp FSLIC (or was it the Federal Home Loan Bank Board FHLBB?) .. and was simply rebranded and, yes, de-fanged by Bush I and later Clinton.

Alas, it's not so simple, and listening to the twists and turns basically leaves one with the impressions that

the system was structurally incapable of preventing the problem
all reform was pretense, and the issues of the S&L crisis were simply swept under the rug

Listen, be angry, and try to think of ways to really prevent another recurrence.

Tennis: Kind of Offensive

2009-07-05T15:34:00.000-07:00

I can't say I actually hate tennis. I've watched various championships on and off over the years, including a lot of this year's Wimbledon, and one has to admire the skill, art, and athleticism of professional tennis players.

However, I am always creeped out by the environment in which they play. First off, you can't really have much fun playing tennis unless you have someone else chasing errant balls for you. Although, I suppose you could bring a bucket of balls if you aren't too concerned with stepping on one during a game.

At the professional level, of course, there is a small army of ball/towel kids waiting hand and foot on the players. I wouldn't be at all surprised if tennis ball kids do their job for free (and the thrill of being on the same court as tennis greats). But, jeez, the manner they have to exhibit is just so demeaning. When they have a ball, they hold it up as high as possible and only bounce it to the player when bidden. "Here, sir, I have a ball for you, sir, may I please bounce it to you? Pick me oh please pick me sir!"

On the baseline, a player might condescend to holding out his racket, upon which the ball kid carefully places three balls, standing at attention until dismissed or until said player finishes wiping his brow. The players don't even acknowledge their existence. "One doesn't break concentration to notice the help."

For a sport of gentlemen and ladies, it sure has a lot of refs. I think tennis holds an all-sport high for the ratio of umpires and linesmen to players. It's got to be nearly a dozen people, each carefully watching one line for the all-important in/out decisions. Most team sports have 2-3 referees watching 10-30 players and the court boundaries.

I suppose polo tops tennis for sheer snoot value, but I can't think of any other sport that expends so much resource for so few participants.

And don't get me started on tennis scoring...

The World is Still Watching (We Hope)

2009-07-04T11:10:00.000-07:00

So much has been said of the Iranian crackdown having silenced the protests. There are a lot of ways this can be so:

people have been cowed
the movement has lost steam
people have been eliminated

1 and 2 are certainly part of the equation, but I think what really happened is 3, and the survivors are scared of the same happening to them.

http://internationalpost.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/280/

In the words of Josef Stalin, "One death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic." Remember the uproad of Neda a few weeks ago? Iran seems to be heading toward the realm of statistics.

Iran has suffered under dictatorships for 55+ years. It's shameful that the US had a major hand in the first 25 of those, and very sad that the revolt against the Shah enabled the last 30.

Recent events have shown the Islamic dictatorship to be the most brutal. This is the direct effect of religion's ability to get people to think of Us vs Them and treat the opposition as sub-human. The Shah stepped down partly because he wouldn't order his forces to shoot into crowds. Khamenai and Ahmadinejah seem to have no such compunctions.

All very scary and sad. Scary for the US as well, as the neo-cons who are most vocal about how we should intervene are the same people who would have the US become more of a Christian dictatorship than it already was during the Bush years.

The Al Franken Senate!

2009-06-30T20:36:00.001-07:00

Today, at long last, Minnesota decided maybe it should actually have two senators in Congress.

Pity the poor GOP, whining and obstructing non-stop. Is it too much to hope that they'll start cooperating? Yes, of course it it. Is it too much to hope they'll just go away? Yes.. but they're so busy alienating everyone that nobody will miss them once they've all been voted out.

Here's hoping the Democrats manage not to screw the pooch, now that the national agenda belongs to them.

Debate Over Socialized Police Heats Up!

2009-06-29T21:20:00.000-07:00

Salon has a great article today showing how ludicrous is the debate over The Public Option for health care.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/06/30/police/

Now that the president and the Democrats in Congress have set a fall deadline for legislative action on universal police protection for all Americans, battle lines are being drawn on Capitol Hill. On the right are conservative defenders of America's system of for-profit, private mercenaries. The Democrats are divided among progressives who favor universal, publicly funded police who would protect all citizens against crime, and moderate and conservative Democrats who argue that any citizen security reform should leave America's existing system of soldiers for hire in place.
"Do we want long wait times when we call for the police, like people in countries with socialized police forces?" Sen. Russell Flack, R-Ga., asked during a floor debate yesterday. "Under our system, we can choose our own police officers, as long as we pay for protection out of our own pockets. Do we want some government bureaucrat choosing the police for us?"
Progressives, however, argue that the American system of privatized policing is no longer affordable. They point to data showing that the U.S. spends twice as much per capita on police protection as countries in Europe and East Asia, where police are public servants paid out of taxes. Although the U.S. pays twice as much for police as the average developed country, more than 40 million Americans remain without police protection because their employers do not pay for crime insurance and they cannot afford to purchase it on their own.

It's funny and to the point, but our current police system is already more socialistic than the most radical of health care options before us. Single-payer health care AKA Medicare-for-everyone only socializes payment - doctors and hospitals would be in private practice, and choice would be up to the consumer.

Just like it is in those scary socialistic countries like Canada and France.

America doesn't need a health insurance industry. We'd be much better off without one.

Which Religion Allows This?

2009-06-28T10:26:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/world/middleeast/28iran.html

When Mahtab and her colleagues tried to leave the shop to go home, she said, the forces began clubbing them while shouting the names of Shiite saints. “They do this under the name of religion,” she said. “Which religion allows this?”

All of them, unfortunately.

Oppression Has the Upper Hand in Iran

2009-06-27T17:27:00.000-07:00

Are we done mourning Michael Jackson yet?

People are still getting beaten, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered in Iran.

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/06/26/iran-night-raids-terrorize-civilians

HAARM on Health Care

2009-06-27T17:18:00.000-07:00

It would be funny if it wasn't so true.

Republican lie about everything, why should we expect different behavior regarding the public option:

http://eideard.wordpress.com/2009/06/27/why-do-republicans-lie-about-canadian-health-care/

My favorite one, and the talking point most often brought up by the lying liars of the GOP and the Faux News parrots.

GOP: Canada’s government decides who gets health care and when they get it. While HMOs and other private medical insurers in the U.S. do indeed make such decisions, the only people in Canada to do so are physicians. In Canada, the government has absolutely no say in who gets care or how they get it. Medical decisions are left entirely up to doctors, as they should be.

Of course the noise level of a GOP official on the subject is directly proportional to the size of his/her contributions from the health insurance industry.

I'm shocked, shocked..

Iran Proves the Need for Separation of Church and State

2009-06-23T22:40:00.001-07:00

It's both sad and thrilling to see developments in Iran.

Sad, because the theocracy that Iranians brought upon themselves in 1979 is still trying to bully them back to the 8th century.

Thrilling because, well, look at what the people are doing despite the incredible dangers to themselves and their families. And imagine the courage it's taking to do that. (It's especially amazing to Americans given how placidly we accepted the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004).

I hope Iran finds its way out of oppression and religious dominance. Whether or not the bulk of people there choose to remain Muslim is a lot less important than the fact that giving clerics final say (or any say) in running a country is a recipe for disaster.

Religion is all about control. Worse, it's about dehumanizing opponents in order to coerce them. Richard Dawkins says that you need religion for good people to do bad things. That's really at the foot-soldier level - we're seeing pretty clearly how evil and corrupt are the people at the top.

And we very nearly let it happen in the US. Margaret Atwood said that she wouldn't have been able to write The Handmaid's Tale recently because it's "too possible".

Here's wishing peace, enlightenment, and freedom to the people of Iran. They have suffered way too long, for 25 years under a dictator we helped to install, and for another 30 under an oppressive theocracy. They are proving to the world that they deserve better, and I hope they finally achieve it.

We Don't Need A Health Insurance Industry

2009-06-23T22:01:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago I watched an excellent Bill Moyers program on health care. In the last part of it, he interviewed a pair of doctors who made several points, some of which I hadn't heard before.

The most interesting to me was how Canada decided to do away with its health care industry and replace it with the single-payer system they have today. And despite what you hear from right wingnuts, Republicans, main-stream media .. and even elected Democrats (shame!), the Canadian system is a huge success.

And you will pry single-payer health care away from the Canadians only from their cold, dead hands.

Check out The Greatest Canadian AKA Tommy Douglas (also the father of Donald Sutherland and grandfather of Keifer "24" Sutherland). As premier of Saskatchewan, he presided over the junking of its health insurance industry in 1962, an experiment so successful that it was voted in to all of Canada in 1966.

"OMG it's socialism!" - Damn straight, and it works. Actually it's less socialistic than, say, having collectively funded highways, police forces, etc etc, because in a single-payer system, the health care entities themselves are private. It's just the funding that's public. No bureaucracy, no red tape, no 200% overhead to deal with insurance companies. Private physicians, clinics, and hospitals provide care, they bill the government, and we all pay less tax to support it than we're paying in health insurance premiums now.

The next time you see an elected official bad-mouth single-payer and/or repeat the line that the health care industry knows best, or deserves a seat at the table, whatever... follow the money and find their motivation. These people aren't ideologues, they're just corrupt, for-sale jerks who are forsaking their constituents and giving their benefactors an incredible return on their investment.

In what other endeavor than bribing a politician can you get trillion dollar returns for a few measly million? Only in the United States Congress!

Don't let the health insurance industry buy Congress and the media away from the people who overwhelmingly support single-payer health care. Forget the Republicans, they can't be reasoned with, they don't care about what's best for the country, and they don't matter. They lost BIG, remember? And the only reason they have 40 seats in the Senate is because there's only 1/3 turnover every 2 years.

Forget "the public option". There should be only Medicare, which will suddenly become much cheaper per capita when it isn't just covering old and disabled people.

The health insurance industry is the least essential industry - we need a new word, something like dis-essential - in the world, and we won't miss it one bit when it's gone.

These Statements Have Not Been Evaluated by the FDA

2009-06-20T05:02:00.000-07:00

And why the hell not? Isn't that what we pay it to do??

I always thought my father was a hypochondriac. He took an amazing array of vitamin supplements every day, in what I was sure was a vain attempt at immortality.

Yet today, and every day, I take at least as many pills as he did. I can give you good reasons for every one of them. At best, each will do its part to stave off the ravages of aging. I hope that at worst they are a waste of money (and an unpleasant test of my highly developed gag reaction).

Actually, I think most of them don't make a difference, either because they correct deficiencies I don't have or because they don't actually do anything in the first place.

And the FDA isn't helping one bit. Every one of these pills comes in a bottle with carefully worded statements of the form "this may help do blah blah blah" and the standard disclaimer, "These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA".

If the FDA was doing its job, it would make a serious investigation into the benefits of taking 3 grams of vitamin C daily. Or 15 grams - I know people who take that much when they aren't sick.

What about the Glucosamine/Chondroitin complex I've taken since before my knee surgery? Does it help or do nothing?

I've been taking Alpha Lipoic Acid and Carnitine since attending a talk by Bruce Ames, the cancer-in-rats researcher at Berkeley who said his rats "did the macarena" after being dosed. This stuff is supposed to keep my DNA from getting replication errors. Sounds good to me, and it's backed by research and theory .. but can the FDA puh-leeez sponsor some big studies to support or refute these claims?

Again, it's what our tax money is supposed to pay for.

My list goes on - Lysine/Proline complex, B12, CoQ10, Omega3, Piracetam (and friends), Huperzine/Vinpocetine. I probably take a dozen pills a day, with full knowledge that probably 90% are unnecessary. If only I knew which 90%...

Even the Saw Palmetto "Prostate Formula" things, which have a measurable and repeatable effect, carry this useless disclaimer.

Why is this? I don't buy the line that supplement manufacturers would rather thrive on uncertainty than have their claims possibly disproven. I think it's because America has been drinking the "Free Enterprise Is Always Right" Kool Aid for so long, it doesn't know any other way.

I'm no fan of Big Government, and I can think of lots of things I really don't want the government to run. But I do expect it to provide police, highways, environmental oversight, etc etc etc. And I want the FDA to actively evaluate everything that is claimed to have an effect on health. That what we pay them for, because this is not a job for capitalism.

امیدوار به بهترین در ایران

2009-06-19T22:41:00.000-07:00

زمانی که در این دوره از وقایع انسانی آن را برای مردم لازم می شود که خودشان را از یوغ استبداد دینی و آزاد ، جهان را به نفس خود
را نگه دارد.

(من نیز امیدوار است که گوگل "فارسی - آلفا" خدمات ترجمه آثار بسیار خوب!)

Poor Iran

2009-06-15T23:13:00.000-07:00

Watching the impending elections with hope, and seeing the awful theft and its aftermath makes me both sorry for the people of Iran yet proud they are trying to do something about it.

We saw pretty much nothing after the stolen US elections in 2000 and 2004 - perhaps partly because the GOP and Diebold were a little more subtle about it than Iran's rulers. Just a few thousand votes in a few Florida (2000) or Ohio (2004) counties, and George W was installed and retained. By and large, people seem to believe he actually won, both then and to this day.

About all we could muster in 2004 were a bunch of "Sorry Everyone" pictures, which unfortunately didn't stop the dreadful violence in Iraq or any other of the multitude of Bush II disasters.

Would a fair election and peaceful change of leadership in Iran fix the Mideast? No.. there are belligerents and grudges enough to last for a few thousand more years. But having even one country over there become a little less theocratic wouldn't hurt.

It's sad the US literally can't do anything about Iran's situation. Decades of meddling and in particular the last 8 years of George W have made us the anti-ally of democracy in the area. We can't even say stuff like "overthrow your oppressive regime" because everyone remembers what happened after George HW urged the Kurds to overthrow Saddam.

Then again, maybe there's something we can do. If instead of talking about being a beacon of light, we actually became (or returned to being) one, people over there would take notice and have one less country to demonize.

Bring Back the Fairness Doctrine

2009-06-15T22:59:00.000-07:00

Was it too much to hope that the right wing noise machine would shut down .. or at least quiet a little .. once the people had spoken and elected Barack Obama? (Not by a little, but by a lot, and with a Congress and a mandate to Do Something, Dammit. But more on that later.)

Apparently it was. Fox News and its right wing nut cases have been working overtime to undermine the new administration, the losing and totally out of touch GOP has become comical in its overreaching drive to block any and all progress, and Big Fat Idiot (AKA Rush Limbaugh) is spewing more hate and black-is-white illogic than ever.

Not coincidentally, we've had an upswing in bigoted and/or religious nut case violence, egged on by Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Rush.

However, my guess is these guys aren't as stupid as they sound, and they understand they're in the entertainment business. If only their listeners did .. but if they were smart enough to realize that, they wouldn't be listening, would they?

Anyway, enough is enough. Hate speech is not free speech, and unchecked continuous scare drivel is mean and irresponsible. It may be a coincidence that Limbaugh's program showed up the year after Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine, and I don't expect him to crawl back into his hole if we get it back (I can hope, though).

But really, if there was 1/10th the oversight of right wing nut media as of Janet Jackson's boob, we'd all be a lot happier, and probably a lot less riled up.

Come Work At Bell Labs!

2008-05-02T10:52:00.000-07:00

Recruiting video from 1979, starring Greg Chesson!

I Drink Your Milkshake!

2008-04-13T00:06:00.000-07:00

So I'm a little late to this party. I only saw There Will Be Blood a few days ago.

I'd read and seen reviews, and as always when they reveal way too much plot in the previews, I pretty much knew how the whole thing was going to turn out.

"I guess you could call me an Oil Man.." - check
"There's an ocean of oil under us..." - check
"I have a competition in me..." - check
"I've abandoned my boy!" - check

So I thought we'd gotten past all of the plot reveals, and Daniel Plainview had alienated everyone in his life and was, literally, face-down in the gutter, when Eli returns and Daniel re-animates. Going from drunk and dead to the world to alive and on the attack, he brings his full force to bear on the now-struggling Eli and says, of course, "I drink your milkshake!" with a chilling effect that many have likened to Hannibal Lecter.

Lots of people have had fun with this .. and I'm glad to have missed these particular plot spoilers.

Like this mashup .. or this more dance oriented one using the same song .. and finally this SNL skit (sorry, I'm sure there's a more direct link, but SNL has no video search).

After which follows the Surprise Ending, after which I realized that the title of this movie is really a promise. There Will Be, and There Was.

Boy I could really use a milkshake about now...

Oil Men

2008-04-11T22:13:00.000-07:00

I think we're down to 9 months and about 10 days until Crawford TX gets its village idiot back.

In the meantime we will all continue to sweat out this long, painful year hoping for a minimum of additional damage to the world, America's reputation, and the trend of 21st century history.

A few weeks ago I watched a video of an excellent talk Robert Zubrin gave at Google about Energy Victory. A lot of it is unsurprising - Hydrogen Power is a hoax (anyone pushing it is either stupid or a liar), using corn to make ethanol is a big lose, etc. His major point is that the single biggest thing America can do to free itself from oil is by mandating every car sold in the US be flex-fuel, that is, able to run on any sort of hydrocarbon fuel.

The cost is near zero. All engine controls today are electonically controlled closed loop feedback systems, and the hardest part is making the physical plumbing resistent to rust otherwise brought about by hydroscopic fuels like the alcohols.

This step has to be mandated, though, because otherwise there will be no incentive to provide the universal infrastructure necessary to support non-petroleum fueled cards. In other words, without eggs there will be no chickens.

Is this hard? Not really. In fact, one country already did this 10 years ago. Brazil is now completely independent of oil and is in fact an ethanol-exporting country. (Oh, and the US has placed a tariff on foreign ethanol.)

Which brings me to the subject of Oil Men. Ignoring whether Fearless Leader and his buddies are mendacious, incompetent, Manchurian candidates ... or all of the above ... the one thing I think that hurts the most is that they are all Oil Men.

And one Oil Woman, Condoleeza Rice. You know, the ex-board member of Chevron after whom they named an oil tanker.

What do Oil Men have in common? They all believe oil is the only source of energy and the most vital resource on earth. They believe that owning land is the key to wealth. They believe that wealth comes out of the ground and that it's worth sending men into harm's way to grab oil-rich land.

In all these things, the Oil Men who run the US are just like the Oil Men who run despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia, Venezuala, etc, and believe that oil rights are more important than human rights. Our Oil Men support the rest of the world's Oil Men and get rich making them rich. And they get richer with kick-backs from their Oil Men benefactors.

The things that distinguish our Oil Men from foreign and corporate Oil Men is that our Oil Men a) were never very good at it, and b) have no imagination. And our Oil Men have plunged the US into unfathomable debt, destroyed what reputation we have in the world, and nearly forced us all past tipping points of global warming, peak oil, and food shortages.

In other words, they've been busy selling off the US and the world to their benefactors and fiddling away while Rome burns. And losing us eight critical years in the process.

I hate Oil Men more than I hate MBAs and lawyers. Can we please have no more Oil Men, no more "MBA Presidents", no more frat-boy jerk-offs who have no business running a company, much less a country? Pleez?

Three sixty three

2008-01-23T22:55:00.000-08:00

On January 20, 2009, 363 days from now, assuming W doesn't pull a Musharraf and cancel elections, we will have a new president.

This president will inherit a pointless, endless, catastrophic, ruinously expensive war, a DOJ packed with religious loonies, an exhausted and dispirited armed forces, an astronomic national debt, and a completely polarized Congress.

Oh, and we will have lost 8 years on the global warming front, with the tipping point closer than the most pessimistic scientists have imagined.

How could this have happened? We know that the 2000 and 2004 elections were both stolen, but how could they have been close enough in the first place that they could be stolen? How could a pack of thugs with an admiration for the principles of Nazism, who treat Orwell not as a cautionary tale but as a blueprint, have gotten into power in the land of the free and home of the brave?

I don't know, and I've had outrage fatigue for so long that I can't really be coherent on the subject.

Thanks to the spineless Democratic majority we elected in 2006, who instead of taking the mandate from the people have taken impeachment off the table, we can but count the days.

I hope the rest of the world can forgive us. I know they can feel us wince every time W struts around or opens his mouth in public. The shock of 2004 - you mean we didn't send the idiot back to his village? - is freshened with each new embarrassment, each new outrage.

363 days until the Worst President Ever, the man with the inverse Midas touch, the frat boy who carefully takes an opposite path of what both Bill Clinton and his father would do (and is thus always perfectly wrong), will go back to Crawford. With any luck we'll be able to forget about him and perhaps keep out of our minds that the deaths of a million Iraqis don't seem to perturb his sleep.

And we'll get to clean up his mess.

60 MPG!

2006-09-04T09:54:00.000-07:00

Sounds amazing, dunnit? Well it's true .. mostly.

It happened during a drive to the Point Reyes Lighthouse, which BTW is really cool but surprisingly distant from the South Bay. Part of the exercise was to discover what sort of mileage characteristics my new toy was capable of.

I'd been getting just under 40 MPG with it so far, mostly driving the 5 miles to and from work. It's kind of too bad that some of this time is spent in warm-up mode, which disables some of the hybrid functions.

So, how would it fare on a longer, mostly highway trip? I was surprised to be having trouble keeping it even at 45 MPG on the 880 freeway north. There was some stop/go traffic, perhaps from everyone else avoiding SF because of the Bay Bridge closing over Labor Day weekend. And there was a headwind. Sigh.

After leaving the lighthouse, I discovered why I'd been keeping the A/C on (as the owner's manual says, A/C affects mileage more on hybrids than other cars). Stupidly, I had managed to put the climate control in recirculate mode, which is great for A/C effectiveness but not for getting fresh air into the car. Being able to turn off the A/C, plus having a tailwind and being forced to stay below 40 MPH, kept it at or above 60 MPG for the entire 40 miles I was staring at the "empty" mark and sweating the search for a gas station.

This mileage continued through the rest of Mill Valley, up until US101 and the trip through SF and the 19th street path to I-280.

At speed, the story is only slightly worse. I tried setting the cruise control to 65 MPH (which, surprisingly, was about the speed of traffic on US101 from SFO on south), and I was a tad surprised to see the mileage hover between 53 MPG and 54 MPG.

All in all, very cool. Having this very interesting and rewarding system to oversee makes driving on the freeway a lot more interesting ... and I'm looking forward to taking another trip and being a bit more fastidious about taking lab notes. Driving to please the MPG meter is nothing new - Car&Driver's Pat Bedard wrote about this a few years back.

Recovering Energy, Part Deux

2006-08-30T17:36:00.000-07:00

It has come to my attention, through my friend Simon, that perhaps I was too glib and a tad misinformed regarding the power characteristics of jet engines. There are a lot of variables to consider, and simply saying stating the thrust of an engine doesn't tell you all you need to know (unless you're on the Senate Arms Committee).

Here is a cool reference on jet engine ratings, and Wikipedia has a nice page on jet engines. It seems that maximum thrust is not constant with airspeed .. but it doesn't go down linearly either, so you're still better off in the power game than with piston engines.

Simon also thought my main point about energy and driving was a bit muddied, so I'll restate it here.

Constant acceleration requires linearly increasing power .. until you are working against drag, in which case it takes, uhh, quartic power? Exercise for the reader: drag goes as speed squared, so power to move against drag goes as speed cubed.. so what about accelerating against drag?

Similarly, constant deceleration requires linearly decreasing power. Since a hybrid can only recover a maximum amount of power, the deceleration you can invoke that does not dissipate power goes as 1/speed. Lift off the gas at 60 MPH and you're maxing out the Civic Hybrid regenerator, ditto for touching the brakes at 30 MPH. And standing on them at 5 MPH only barely gets you there (but there's not enough energy at 5 MPH to care about anyway).

This is not the way I want to train myself to drive, nor would I like it as a passenger. I just hope we don't have a generation [sic] of hybrid drivers with their eyes glued to the regen meter while they're braking.

Recovering Energy

2006-08-29T02:49:00.000-07:00

Reversing the acceleration profile is Not Smooth!

Let me explain. Part of the fun of how calculus, physics, and getting your driver's license all happen at roughly the same time in high school is how nicely these disciplines all mesh together.

F=ma explains so much, like how constant power becomes decreasing acceleration with speed. (And, coincidentally, how stating jet engine performance in terms of thrust instead of power explains their speed advantage over pistons and propellors.)

You can think of it many different ways, but the fact that kinetic energy goes as the square of speed means that the same acceleration takes more power at higher speed. This is why you never feel like you have enough power*.

Similarly, the amount of energy dissipated by constant deceleration goes linearly with speed. Gears mean nothing in braking - you get the same deceleration from your brakes regardless of speed, but they heat up faster if you are braking from speed.

Woa, woa, woa.. gears mean nothing unless you want to recover energy instead of dissipating it! Hybrids use regenerative braking to recharge their batteries. And just as there is a limit to how much power they can add for acceleration, there is a limit to how much power they can absorb.

Which means that just lifting off the gas on the freeway pegs the regen meter .. and just touching the brakes at 30 MPH pegs the regen meter .. and you basically have to stand on the brakes at 5 MPH to register at all.

Oops. This is not the way I or any passenger wants to be driven around. Have you ever been in a car with someone who saves their hardest braking for the end? Not Fun (and very disconcerting on the track, I might add).

So now I'm wondering how many hybrid drivers are going to let their driving habits be governed by the energy gauges in their cars? Kind of a scary thought..

* "When you can lay two black stripes between the exit of one corner and the entrance of the next, then you have enough power" - Mark Donohue

Hawaii

2006-08-25T20:59:00.000-07:00

I've only been to Hawaii a few times, but I definitely have a favorite island. Actually it's a place on an island, because the island is The Big Island (Hawaii).

That place is Kailua-Kona, aka Kona. It's the home of the Iron Man competition, some really cheesey souvenier shops, and perhaps the best snorkeling in all of the islands.

We got into this place by accident, really. We signed up for a points-based timeshare (Vacation Internationale, if you care), which gives us time at whatever condos they have in their system (more time off-peak, etc). And their place on Hawaii is on the west coast, just south of Kona.

And also just north of a fantastic snorkeling area. The usual amazingly colorful fishes abound, and we have visited with sea turtles many times.

Kona also is a stopping point for at least one cruise line. The boat shows up on Monday, hangs around for a couple days, and then steams off into the sunset. At some point in my life I should take a cruise..

Most Hawaiian islands have varied micro-climates, and they appeal differently to different folk. Californians tend to favor the east coasts, with their daily rain and lush vegetation. Northwesterners get quite enough rain in their lives, thank you very much, and opt for the west coasts.

If condos aren't your bag, about an hour north of Kona is the Waikaloa Hotel, which is swanky etc - how many hotels do you know have an interior water slide? You'll be visiting the area anyway, because very close to it is Hapuna Beach, a very wide beach with a gentle slope into the sea ... and huge waves. We're talking close-the-beach, occasional fatality huge.

Our routine for Kona is pretty simple. United flys there non-stop from SFO, and you arrive in the early afternoon, with time to load up with the week's food at the Costco on the way to Kona. This is also where I pick up my customary cheap Hawaiian shirt.

After that, it's swim/read/sleep/eat - the condos have a bank of Weber grills, and nearly every meal is a cookout.

Damn, it's only August - I want to go there now.

Driving a Hybrid

2006-08-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

So I have a week of driving this Civic Hybrid under my [seat] belt. I want to talk about the Navi system, but I need to grok it more before talking about it - just yesterday I poked around and learned about a cool feature.

There's the dynamic driving part, too, like how well it rides and corners. My first impressions still hold, that its steering is very direct and with good feel, and that it is surprisingly well-balanced for a front-engined car.

It does push (understeer) a bit when it gets near the limit, as expected, but it's not nearly as much as I would expect for a mass-market car. I still want to find a stiffer rear anti-roll bar so that I feel more comfortable in turns.

And why should you care about cornering well? Excellent question, glad you asked!

Hybrids are all about efficiency and recovering energy. People have such misconceptions about what wastes energy while driving. The proverbial jack-rabbit start does not inherently waste energy. Think about it - it takes the same amount of energy to reach 40 MPH whether you accelerate quickly or not.

The energy considerations of the jack-rabbit start have to do with 1) enrichment of fuel mixture under heavy throttle, 2) the thermodynamic efficiency of engines at various throttle settings, and 3) energy loss through an automatic transmission.

Roughly speaking, 1) enrichment takes more fuel, though not as much as in the days of carburetors and "accelerator pumps", 2) Carnot-cycle engines are typically most efficient at 60% speed and 60% throttle, and 3) slip is bad - think of holding still on an upgrade, wasting energy going 0 MPH.

I've spent way too much time on acceleration. The biggest expenditures of energy are 1) drag and 2) throwing heat away through the brakes.

Hybrids have tiny engines and are very aerodynamic. This is so they can be working harder (and more efficiently) at speed, and to reduce the drag at speed. No matter what your aerodynamics, drag still goes up as the square of speed, power required goes up as the cube, and mileage goes down as the square. So, if you get 40 MPG at 60 MPH, at 80 MPH you'll get (3/4)^2 of that, or 22.5 MPH!

This does not bode well for hybrid economy in Si Valley, where CA-85 seems to be a nickname for the speed you have to go on it to avoid being run over.

Now, finally to braking, and my original mention of cornering. Hybrids attempt to recover energy during braking by using the electric motor as a generator instead of just the brakes. It has a maximum generation capacity, however, so if you need to slow down faster, it's going to require the brakes.

The Civic Hybrid has a smaller battery and generator than the Prius, and you have to brake very gently indeed to avoid actually invoking the brakes.

Better not to have to slow down at all, I say! This is where racetrack and car control training come into play. The fastest way around a corner is also the smoothest, and it's important to take the right line through it. It sounds simple - and it is - but you'd be surprised how many people do this completely wrong. Like most of you. Yes, I'm talking to you .. next time you're on the road, try looking ahead more and driving smoothly.

As three-time world driving champion Jackie Stewart says, a good race driver is also a good chauffeur - the passenger shouldn't be able to tell exactly when she starts braking, turning, or accelerating. To go fast on the racetrack (and on the freeway on-ramp), you go slow in the cockpit.

And when you're driving a hybrid, go easy - very easy - on the brakes, and give the car the best chance possible to do its magic.

Click here for more advice on how to maximize Civic Hybrid fuel economy.

Grokking

2006-08-22T22:10:00.000-07:00

I should probably explain the title of this blog. Grok of course is a verb invented by Robert A. Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land that is a combination of absorbing, understanding and, well, eating an idea or person.

To grok something is to have taken it in, tasted it, internalized it. To truly, uh, grok this concept, do read this beautiful and thoughtful book that touches on humanity, religion, politics, and thought.

What does this have to do with Unigrok? Heh, well I guess I just wanted to embellish the concept of grokking and give it an official-sounding corporate flare. As Wile E. Coyote would say, "Universal Grok, Inc .. I like the way that rolls out .."

Unigrok is also the name of an XML application server I wrote a few years ago. I'll describe that too, after I resurrect http://unigrok.com. It was/is very cool, very expressive, very compact. It may fall short of the integrated detail of later works like Ruby on Rails or TurboGears, but it felt all of one piece. And I miss it when I encounter today's web app languages.

<aside>
I suppose another interpretation would have the uni part mean not universal but one. But ugh, understanding one thing reminds me of The Hedgehog Principle, a concept put forth in a truly odious book on business,
Good to Great. Which BTW I am listing here only so you can see the comments on Amazon .. do not buy this book! And if a prospective employer is run by someone who believes in it .. run!
</aside>

Civic Hybrid with Navi!

2006-08-21T21:21:00.000-07:00

Well! After watching the progress of hybrid cars - and waiting for a model that actually comes in my size - I finally took the plunge and ordered a Honda Civic Hybrid. 45mpg city/highway or some such.

This was 7 months ago.

Ordinarily, and even in California, the waiting list for things like this isn't nearly this long, but as long as I was going to get something "special" I thought I would go for the cool navigation unit. Which apparently is a rare commodity. More on this soon.

But first, the wait. My first salesman, who is no longer with the dealer ("perhaps your car will arrive in my son's lifetime"), thought it would show up in 5 weeks rather than the normal 2-3 weeks for the regular model. Longer if I cared to specify the color.

So I thought it was fine. I wasn't sure I could afford a new car just then, and I wasn't sure I wanted to give up my current ride (and I'm still not). But after 3 months passed without a word from the dealer, I started getting concerned. They had $500 of my money and I wondered if they were giving priority to new customers who offered extra money.

So every month or so I'd pay a visit to the dealer. No word, and they don't find out what's coming until the day before it shows. Don't you think Honda would understand about supply chain management? I sure do.

Time continues to pass and I start thinking about checking other dealers in other states. When I finally did check, the next day I got The Call, my car had arrived, and couldn't I run over and finish buying it.

Say, what? You make me wait for 7 months and you expect me to re-arrange my life with a phone call?

It got worse. I visited the dealer after work and was immediately asked to sign a bunch of papers.

"Can't I see the car first?"

"Um, oh, sure..."

So I see what it looks like in my non-favorite color. Hmm. Well, okay. Let me think about it. "No, no, please sign the paperwork!" Any by the way put down all of your bank accounts etc in the credit application. Nothing like being treated like you're fresh out of high school.

By this time it's 8pm, I hadn't gotten a decent night's sleep in 4 days, and I just wanted to go home. The salesman wouldn't let me.

"No, no, people have come by and offered more money!"

"Why are you so worried about me not getting this car? The worst that can happen is I don't buy it and you can make $3K more selling it to someone else."

Finally the finance manager either took pity on me, noticed my gray hair and realized maybe they should treat me better, or just decided to stop the salesman at .95 Jerk, and they let me walk out uncommitted.

And I came in the next day and bought the car. As I said, it came in my size (although we'll have to do something about thigh support), the navigation system is ultra-cool (and the voice activation covers the radio and A/C too!), and it drives really well (although I've already decided it needs a stiffer rear anti-roll bar).

I just wish the purchasing experience was more pleasant. 7 months of uncertainty and non-communication followed by 2 days of high pressure just isn't a good customer experience, and I had expected more of Honda.

Vonage, Take II

2006-08-16T23:50:00.000-07:00

Well! 15+ years after we all failed to get AT&T the least bit interested in the Internet, I, ex-Bell Labs employee and long-time AT&T customer, have at last given up on Ma Bell and its recent mutation/resurrection. I made my first Vonage phone call today.

It was sort of a non-event, though the notion of getting a dial tone from router-appendage is taking some getting used to. BTW please raise your hand if you really understand where dial tone really comes from and what it's for.

It's taken many years and "The Will to Fail" (as Andrew Hume used to put it), but AT&T has at last managed to plow itself into the ground.

For a while in the 90's I was rather amazed to be getting 4 or 5 bills from AT&T. Let's see, there was my phone bill, my cable bill, my Universal Card bill .. there must have been more. That all vanished except for my silly insistence on keeping A&T for long distance. All of $10/mo or so.

When I moved to Si Valley last year, I was fairly insistent on getting DSL. Static IP, known upstream bandwidth, all that. It took a goofy, unwanted router and psychotic customer non-service to disabuse me of that notion. That was SBC, which has since bought the AT&T label and calls itself The New AT&T.

My internet comes through Comcast (don't get me started), yet my SBC/AT&T bill was $100 for two lines with voicemail etc. I expect to pay $15/mo for VoiP .. and I'm only doing that because I want to accept incoming POTS calls.

The old AT&T's worst fears have come to pass. Back when telecom was starting to lose its regulation, AT&T wanted to charge extra for data. Never mind it was using 64Kbps to transmit your voice at 8KHz. Actually, it mattered quite a lot, because this was AT&T's equivalence for purposes of calculating rates. If you leased a T1 line (1.4Mbps, or 24 times 64Kbps), AT&T wanted to charge 24 times the rate of a voice line because you could use it to bypass their network.

As Sandy Fraser (who invented Virtual Circuits) used to say, they were afraid that if they had to charge a reasonable amount for data, they'd have to give voice away. That pretty much sums up the state of things now - AT&T retreated from everything except Long Distance, which became a worthless commodity and was AT&T's epitaph.

RIP.

Vonage - Two Line Adapters

2006-08-14T21:20:00.000-07:00

I'm on the phone with Vonage customer service right now. After deciding to stop paying $100/mo to SBC/AT&T for two-line service that I essentially don't use, and seeing that Vonage could transfer my existing phone numbers, I decided to take the VoIP jump.

Hoo boy, the more things change...

I used to work for The Phone Company, or at least its research arm (Bell Laboratories), and my first-day experience with Vonage brought with it a creepy sense of deja vu.

I had studied the network phone adapters available, and was pleased to discover one that could handle both of my phone lines. So, when I finally decided to take the plunge, I knew exactly what plan ($15/mo) and which adapter to get.

Great, one number down, one to go. Basically you set up one number first and add the second later. No sweat, I'll just .. wait a minute, why isn't their web site letting me not get another network phone adapter? I just want to add another line to the adapter they're already going to send me.

So I poked and prodded at the site, and couldn't un-check the radio button. Drat. Well okay, the adapter is $50, but there's a $50 rebate, and maybe I'll find a use for an extra one. Clicking Continue I realized that in my pokings I had accidentally chosen the $25/mo plan for line two.

No sweat, I'll just switch plans.. but oops, changing plans costs $10. There must be something wrong with that. Two emails later it's clear that no, Vonage won't simply switch me back even though I sent the request minutes after getting the wrong selection.

The irony of course is that I was trying to save them money. Sheesh.

Okay, so 45 minutes on the customer service line later, they cancelled the second line so I can start from scratch. Oops, but they can't actually refund my money .. no, they applied a credit to my account that should get used up in, oh, four months.

Well at least I'll only get the one network phone adapter, which was the whole point, and .. oops, what's this second shipping notification and tracking number in my mailbox? Sure enough, Vonage cancelled the second line, and I didn't re-order it, but they're sending me a second adapter anyway.

This is astonishingly messed up. I've been a Vonage customer for a week and I already have a weirdly entangled and still unsettled account with them.

And I have yet to actually make a phone call.

The End of Faith

2006-08-13T22:54:00.000-07:00

Sam Harris has been shaking people up recently. His book The End of Faith has stirred up a lot of controversy, not the least for his assertion that religious moderates are more to blame for the current culture wars than the religious extremists actually killing people.

Here's a 20 minute talk he gave recently on the subject. I like his use of the term calling a spade a spade, which are exactly the words I've been using in hopes that the spineless democrats in the US will finally stand up and stand for something.

Harris' book starts out as a vigorous polemic that says 1) most of the horrors visited by man upon himself have roots in religion, and 2) religions are fundamentally intolerant, especially of other religions.

My simple logic has always been that if one religion is right, the others all have to be wrong. Therefore none of them are right.

Interestingly, his last chapter muses on the curious divide between East and West on the notions of consciousness and religion. Why, he asks, has Western thought never left the dogma stage, always asserting there's a Higher Being that we talk to in prayer, whereas Eastern thought has explored the nature of consciousness and studied the many levels possible?

Kate Bush - Aerial

2006-08-12T09:37:00.000-07:00

This is my favorite CD.

My previous exposure to Kate Bush was her contribution to Peter Gabriel's Don't Give Up.

I know, I know, Kate Bush has been a phenomenon ever since her debut in 1978. But it wasn't until the VH1 guy on CBS Sunday Morning gushed over Aerial that I took the plunge.

Wow, what a record! It starts out with King of the Mountain, which I didn't know until later was a tome about Elvis (and I hadn't taken the cue of her slurring her words like The King).

why does a multi-millionaire
fill up his home with priceless junk?
the wind is whistling through the house

How to Be Invisible is another great track. There is so much ambience and presence to the music, you're just set up to be swept into her words.

take a pinch of keyhole
fold yourself up
cut along the dotted line
you think inside out
you're invisible..

The second CD (what, I didn't mention it's a double album?) is all of one piece, a glorious celebration of sky and its inhabitants. From Sunset to Somewhere In Between with a touch of Kate doing a chirping duo with an Aerial Tal, you are simply and utterly transported to another world.

somewhere in between the waxing and waning wave
somewhere in between the night and the daylight
somewhere in between the ticking and the tocking clock
somewhere in between what the song and the silence say
somewhere in between breathing out and breathing in

Mind Science

2006-08-12T08:39:00.000-07:00

This is a great talk! Set an hour aside for a brief history of science and its near-complete, willful ignorance of mental phenomena.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=983112177262602885

B Alan Wallace started the Santa Barbara Institute, which at first glance might seem like a fuzzy, new wave endeavor (it must be a coincidence that USA Network's new Psyche TV comedy detective show is also set in SB). However, Alan is a Physics PhD who wants to get started on applying the scientific method to the study of the non-physical stuff that happens and lives in our brains.

What is consciousness? What is thought? Sure, memories are chemical RNA encodings, but how do we perceive them? How do you measure these things? How do you tell if things are even happening if all you have is the first-person account of the one experiencing them?

Well, here's a start. Richard Davidson at U of Wisconsin did fMRI's of meditating Buddhist monks and saw some remarkable things. Interestingly, the effects were directly correlated with the amount of training - tens of thousands of hours - of the individuals in the study.

So, what's going on with these monks? They're working to achieve Enlightenment, but there's a measurable physical effect. Alan wants to study this further, by colocating these professionally trained folk with scientific observation. Maybe he can come up with the F=ma of mental phenomena .. wouldn't that be great!

For my part, I want to take a shortcut to enlightenment (little 'e'). There are so many styles of meditation, and it's so hard to concentrate without concentrating on concentration, etc. "Be aware of your breathing", "as each thought rises, note it and let it go".. there are dozens of little instructions like this buzzing around in my head when my mind should be otherwise working its way to another level of consciousness.

This all reminds me of Peter O'Toole's character in The Ruling Class, who decides he is Jesus Christ because he discovered while praying that he was talking to himself.

Wouldn't it be great to have bio-feedback during meditation? Forget all the rules, forget being frustrated that "it isn't working for me", just get straight to recognizing the feeling of changing your consciousness and learn how to deepen the experience. Sign me up!

Two Left Turns

2006-08-12T07:43:00.000-07:00

No, this isn't a political discourse. This is a rant on the nearly universal, mindless unskillfulness that I see on the road every day here in Si Valley.

Si Valley is famous for its growth, and in many ways for ungraceful growth. But, show me another area with such limited space that has gone from groves of fruit trees to suburbia cum industrial park that has managed to support the amazing increase in traffic.

And it has built and rebuilt this support. I still marvel at the cloverleafs on Central Expressway that were (and often still are!) one square block of neighborhood.

Another aspect of this support, and the one I'm talking about here, is the double left turn lane at most major intersections. The leftmost lane is for left and U turns, while you can only turn left in the rightmost left turn lane.

It turns out that people do something else in the leftmost turn lane. And that, to my continuing horror and annoyance, is turning too early in the first part of the turn, only to have to pinch it in the last part so that 1) the clueless driver can mostly stay in the proper lane and 2) the clueless driver can avoid T-boning the car in the other left turn lane.

Why oh why do people do this. Over and over, completely unable to figure out the cause? Just when they should be unwinding the steering and accelerating, they are slowing down, jinking the steering wheel, unsettling their passengers, and frightening the person in the next lane (that person would be me).

Repeat after me. Start by going straight and turning the wheel slowly. Your path should be a quarter-circle and you should not repeat not have the feeling you are running out of road at turn's end.

It's really easy to get rid of this bad habit. Trust me, I have instructed dozens of people in exactly this skill on the racetrack. Guess what, this is also one of the secrets of going fast... but that's another post.