Freedom of Choice Act

Wow. Seriously? I hope that everyone has a chance to read this bill prior to it being voted on by Congress. It expands Roe v Wade to allow termination of a pregnancy for any reason prior to “fetal viability”. “Viability” is determined subjectively by the physician performing the abortion and is defined by the bill itself as: “The term `viability’ means that stage of pregnancy when, in the best medical judgment of the attending physician based on the particular medical facts of the case before the physician, there is a reasonable likelihood of the sustained survival of the fetus outside of the woman.“

I have serious concerns about the intellectual capability of an individual who aspires to be the President of the USA who does not realize or acknowledge that the ability of a fetus to survive outside of the mother depends very much on the care received. There is absolutely no reason that this definition could not be applied to a full-term, healthy baby since it too has a zero chance of survival outside the womb if it is simply abandoned.

Oh, and the bill would remove the right of the states to make their own abortion laws.

So really, which of the candidates has the most “extreme” position on abortion?

to Yahoo…

1) Move Jerry Yang from CEO to CTO.
2) Cut 50% of non-US staff and facilities. Retreat back to your core, original, loyal base.
3) Sell Search. Yes, I realize this was your first service and that all of Yahoo was built from it, but it’s a dog. And you won’t catch Google.
4) Buy Skype from eBay and then wait for eBay to totally tank. Resurrect Yahoo Auctions and link it to Shopping.
5) Forget developing your own peer-networking stuff. It’s been done to death, just use someone else’s API.
6) Flickr is great. Answers is pretty cool. Finance is nice. You have stuff to build on.
7) You are a portal. Make it the best, easiest, nicest place to go for news, stocks, video, etc. iGoogle is nowhere close and MSN may already have you beat. But it’s the only thing that really defines Yahoo as a single entity anymore.

Global climate change theology

The big question in climate change… do the collective actions of humans significantly and potentially disastrously affect the climate and environment of the world.

If you subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible, then the answer is obviously an unequivocal yes. See, theologically speaking, the world was created by God as a paradise for mankind. That paradise was destroyed due to The Fall / Original Sin thus allowing for sickness, pain, and climate conditions that are altogether unfit for people who like to run around naked (fig leaf or no) surviving on eternally-ripe fruits and veggies from abundant sources. So really, the question about humans creating bad changes in the world climate is moot.

“The debate is over.”

Dear Mr. Millionaire, here’s some more dough. You’re welcome.

Anyone see anything odd?

Did I just watch a massive, taxpayer-funded stock pump and dump? Around mid-morning yesterday, Comerica’s stock (CMA) was around 29.00 per share. At opening this morning, it jumped to 54.00 on a volume of around 700k shares and then immediately fell into the 40s and now 30s with a more normal volume of 50-100k shares. Doesn’t it strike anyone else as odd that a single stock could nearly double in value in less than 24 hours, get massively traded and then fall back to its starting price… all within 8 minutes of the opening bell!? I mean, it’s no secret that the government just injected a couple hundred billion dollars into the financial business (thanks a lot, Republicrats), but is it really a coincidence that someone or some group of folks just made a total fantasy killing of around 1.75 million bucks of profit in 8 minutes flat???

Cores, Corals, and CO2

At the risk of being branded a heretic, there are a few things about the global warming issue that bother me. First, any scientific endeavor that is molded by preconceived notions, be they public opinion, political favor, faith, or heritage must be viewed with a suspicious eye by any respectable scientist. When I see people proudly flying the anti-creationism banner next to the global warming banner, I wonder if they really know or even care about the reasoning and science behind either.

Let’s start with the coral reefs and CO2:
Carbon dioxide dissolved in water creates carbonic acid, which dissolves the calcium carbonate bodies of coral. Cooler water can contain a higher percentage of CO2 than warmer water, which is why corals do not generally live very deeply under water. As the oceans warm (presumably from global warming), it actually creates a more favorable environment for the precipitation of calcium carbonate shells and structures. It should be noted however, that warmer waters can also cause the death of zooxanthellae (a symbiotic algae that live in corals, providing them with nutrients and color) which in turn causes the “bleaching” of coral reefs. These algae are present in many, though not all corals, and the ability of different coral species to adapt to environments that are not favorable to the algae is largely unknown.
The point: Water temperature is just one of many many factors (current, turbidity, clarity, depth, dissolved gas, etc) that affects coral growth.

Now the ice cores:
It has been published over and over that current atmospheric CO2 levels are higher than they have been in the last 400,000 years. This is based on the Vostok ice core data, available here. The aspiring scientist will notice that the most recent CO2 concentration data begins at roughly 2000 years ago. This means that there is no ice core data for last year, or the last decade, or the last hundred years. The famous hockey-stick graph uses direct atmospheric sampling data from one location to “fill in” the missing data from another location and medium and then highlights the discrepancy. This is a violation of the scientific method and just poor laboratory procedure. But hey, an orange looks enough like an apple anyhow, right? Additionally, when the data is plotted, two things become evident:
1) CO2 concentration correlates very well with changes in temperature, indicating that there is definitely a relationship between the two (though not necessarily as simple as we would like to think.)
2) There are four events in the data that clearly show a rapid rise of atmospheric CO2 and temperature followed by a more gradual decline of the same. For those not in the know, that’s the telltale sign of a negative feedback system. Said another way, long before humans started burning coal or driving cars, the Earth experienced similar episodes of global climate change, and each time it “recovered”.

The Earth System clearly includes an incredibly complex system of feedback and compensation mechanisms, and it is nothing more than an a display of hubris and arrogance for one individual or entity to claim an absolute understanding of all of the processes… or to claim that “the debate is over.”

Health Insurance Gone Wild

Just a single example among many that provides an illustration of why our healthcare/insurance system is broken.

A dozen times a day in our county alone, HVA transports patients by ambulance from one hospital to another simply because the patient has the wrong insurance for the hospital that they were transported to initially. Not only does this waste EMS resources, it results in huge bills to the patients insurance.
If we figure that one ALS transport to a reasonable (less than 30 miles) distance costs around $600 (with BLS transports costing $300-$400), we’re talking about $7200 in insurance bills per day… roughly one county. Keeping in mind that this is one ambulance service in a single county of one state. There are 83 counties in Michigan and many of them have a much lower population density, so many of them will have fewer inter-hospital transports, so let’s make it 50 counties to even things out as a rough guess. 50 counties x 12 patients = 600 transports/day for the state of Michigan. At $600 per transport, that comes out to:
$360,000 billed to insurance companies per day in this state, simply because all hospitals do not accept all insurances. Multiply that by 50 states: $18,000,000/day.

Keep in mind two things: These numbers are GROSS estimates based on my anecdotal experience, but I would bet that they come out within an order of magnitude of the real numbers, so the sense of scale should be the same. Additionally, this is just ONE tiny example of the wastefulness of our insurance system that would be eliminated by a universal healthcare insurance.

Returning from Art Weekend

AW08 was a productive, relaxing, and fun getaway was some very good friends that I haven’t spent any quality time with since several years ago. We all got to the cabin near Scranton, PA on thursday evening, spent the evening relaxing, and the next two days working on whatever creative projects that we’ve been neglecting for the past far-too-many years. I discovered that it took me until saturday morning to get my head cleared out enough to really get into the rhythm of writing creatively. The result was that I wrote more in one day than I have in last five years… and even then I didn’t write nearly as much as I intended or hoped that I would. But that is always the case, and the important thing is that I was able to produce *something*.

Sicko

I watched Moore’s Sicko yesterday, and while it provided some good food for thought, it certainly didn’t convert me to the Moore Camp. Here are some points that I agree with:

• Health insurance premiums are out of control and quickly becoming unaffordable for employees, employers, and unemployed.
• The cost of medical care for the uninsured (and even the co-pays for those insured, as we found out from the birth of the twins) is a huge financial drain, if not a recipe for immediate bankruptcy
• Physicians are hog-tied by HMOs and paralyzed by legal fears, causing them to over-diagnose and over-prescribe in some case, and under-treat in other cases.
• Medicare/Medicaid is the broken, beaten stepchild of a bandaid to national healthcare. (Marie’s OB/Gyn told us that Medicaid will only compensate physicians $700 for care for a pregnancy, including pre and post-natal care and delivery.)
• Doctors don’t go to houses anymore, so patients have to come to them. Patients without transportation call ambulances. Ambulances don’t go to doctor’s offices, they go to emergency rooms. ER waiting rooms are aptly-named… a 6-hour wait (for a non-emergent patient) is not unusual.
• Actually… this list could go on for a very long time….

Some things that Mr. Moore and I disagree about:

• “Free” healthcare in other countries is not free. Everyone pays, whether they use the services or not.
• Health care for prisoners is not just at Guantanamo Bay… all prisons are obligated by law to provide health care to those incarcerated.
• By law, emergency departments can not knowingly deny life-saving or stabilizing care to any person, regardless of insurance coverage, which is why the uninsured are overwhelming the emergency system… the ER is the *only* place that can’t turn them away.
• I noticed that he didn’t ask any of foreign doctors who developed the drugs that they give away to their patients. Could it be those evil (American) drug companies that only exist to line their own pockets?
• Some people have to live with disabilities. There is no natural or legislative right to perfect health.

So… do I think we should institute universal, socialized health care? Well… we pretty much already have, it’s just broken. Those of us with health insurance already pay high premiums to a nation-wide organization that dictates to us which doctors we can see, what hospitals we can visit, and what treatment we can receive. Those that don’t have insurance… well that’s where things are really broken.

Marie and I have both experienced the phone-tag-not-it-revolving-door-pass-the-buck-not-my-problem attitudes of our insurance companies, and I guess my thought is, would a nationwide, government-regulated health plan really be any worse that what we have now?

Shocking “news”

Apparently, Anna Nicole died of a drug overdose. No, really! It comes as a total shock to the millions of people who were deeply involved with her life (likely because they lacked one of their own.) And she was such a nice girl, too.

Blech.

There’s nothing that makes me turn off the TV faster these days than news about A.N. And I’m not sure what disgusts me more, that the news channels play the story as if it has any importance whatsoever, or that people actually watch it.

Step on it

In an effort to squeeze an extra couple of miles per gallon out of our new family-hauler, I’ve been accelerating very gently out of stops and trying to go easy on the brakes as I approach them. I had always been taught that the most efficient driving involves avoiding quick stops and starts.

So I got thinking about it from a physics approach and had to dust the cobwebs off my memories of 1D equations of motion and the definition of work and kinetic energy. It turns out that there shouldn’t be any difference at all between the fuel usage of the driver that punches the gas out of a dead stop and one who accelerates slowly from it. Since work (the energy that it takes to get the car moving to a certain speed) is simply the difference between the kinetic energy at rest (0) and the kinetic energy at final speed (1/2mv^2), the energy used is the same regardless of how fast the car gets to that speed.

On the flip side, it is definitely easier on the engine and brakes to avoid fast stops and starts, but mileage is more affected by the number of starts and stops. (Tailgating with frequent brake-tapping kills it too.)

The moral of the story is obviously that to save gas, one should avoid stopping. (Stop signs, red lights, brick walls, lakes….)