Some additional reading December 28th from 17:15 to 18:23:
- Hullabaloo – Long Run Fantasy – Condi Rice and Laura Bush are insisting that the administration will be vindicated by history for all the wonderful work it has done around the world. Rice, especially, is intent upon making the case that if the world gets better some time in the future, Bush will be given the credit for it. (This isn’t the first time she and Bush have made this stupid comment.)This definition of success would mean that you have to reevaluate Tojo since Japan has since become a prosperous, first world country. After all, if it weren’t for him, the world wouldn’t be where it is today. Hell, where would Western Europe be if it weren’t for that bad man in the mustache — or Eastern Europe if it hadn’t been for Stalin? Hey, even Caligula can be seen to be a hero if you believe that the world is better off today than it was during Roman times.
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- U.S. Health Care Costs Part VI: At What Price Physician Autonomy? – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com – “The wonder is that neither Congress, nor the medical profession, nor private health insurers has so far felt obligated to come to grips with these enormous variations in health spending nor even to evince any curiosity about them.According to the Dartmouth researchers, if physicians with relatively higher cost preferred practice styles could be induced to embrace the preferred practice styles of their equally effective but lower-cost colleagues, overall per-capita Medicare spending probably could be reduced by at least 30 percent without harming patients, and similarly for commercially insured younger Americans. How can a nation that routinely wails over its high cost of health care ignore such important research?”
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- Matthew Yglesias » Physician, Heal Thyself (or at least do it more cheaply) – “including the striking fact that “on average, American patients receive the recommended treatment for their condition only slightly more than 50 percent of the time.” Yikes.
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Repower America – “By making buildings and homes more efficient, ramping up renewable energy generation, constructing a unified national smart grid, and transitioning to clean and affordable plug-in cars, we can address our country’s economic and national security challenges—all while making huge strides to solve the climate crisis.
Please join with Al Gore and more than two million others calling on our leaders to Repower America with 100% clean electricity within 10 years.”
- Three-dimensional chess – Watching our cats jockey for position. They’d probably excel at Tri-D Chess
“The original Star Trek prop was assembled using boards from 3-D Checkers and 3-D Tic Tac Toe games available in stores at the time (also visible being played in the original series episodes) and adding futuristic chess pieces. Rules for the game were never invented within the series; in fact, the boards are sometimes not even aligned consistently from one shot to the next within a single episode. The Tri-D chessboard set was made popular by its inclusion in The Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph, who invented starting positions for the playing pieces and short additional rules. The complete Standard Rules of this game were originally developed in 1976 by Andrew Bartmess (with approval from Joseph), and he has subsequently expanded and fine-tuned them.”
