Kansas Doctor Killed for Providing Healthcare

and The Right Wing is spending their weekend celebrating the murder--what is wrong with these people? The Ten Commandments--the same Ten Commandments Christianists want displayed in every court house in the nation--explicitly forbid murder, and here they go murdering. In church, no less.

X Prize in Healthcare

This is obviously a great idea: A $10 million prize for designing a better healthcare system. Thumbing through the website, this stuck out:

Consumer(1) engagement: Consumers must opt-in to any programs the teams offer. The assignment of people to a team makes high rates of participation a requirement for success.

And there's the rub: People do things that are harmful to themselves. And, just as infuriatingly, people irrationally do other things with no demonstrable benefit in hopes of protecting themselves. An X Team can tell people not to smoke, for example, but who hasn't heard that before? In fact, is there anyone in America who smokes but hasn't heard, at least a million times, that smoking causes lung cancer, emphysema, chronic bronchitis, bladder cancer, hastens heart disease, etc, etc, etc? Or food: who would choose hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, diabetes, coronary artery disease, and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis over health? Everyone who eats beef more often than once a week, it turns out, and probably everyone who eats McDonald's more than once a month.

But on the other end of the spectrum are those who obsess over organic produce, ear candling, full body CT scans, executive physicals, and the like, who waste just as much effort from an overtaxed cohort of physicians, nurses, hospitals, and fellow insurance purchasers as the souls who indirectly choose tobacco, fat, and salt over health.

1. Healthcare is not a commodity for consumption. Medical care is the energy, skill, and literally care a physician or nurse uses to lighten the load carried by a patient, a sufferer, a fellow human being who bears a burden.

Google's war on America/Christianity/"Creationism"/you-name-it

Sheesh.

"As per..."

Can we all just agree not to say "as per..." ever again? It is annoying, because no one seems to know what it means. It is impersonal, shifting authority, blame, and responsibility to the cloud.

Next time you are about to say it, just ask yourself if you really need both the "as" and the "per," and since you probably don't, ask yourself if you wouldn't sound like an ass if you said "per." Since you would, and the "as" doesn't add anything, you sound like an ass when you say both together.

Free Chocolate!

From the Mars Real Chocolate Relief Program: A free candy bar to the first 250,000 people who sign up every Friday.

The Espresso Book Machine

A souped-up copy machine to print books (trade paperbacks) on demand. Fun to watch it work.

$100 million

Dorkiest Blog Yet

Stapler of the Week. Also, they don't seem to have that famous red swingline.

db Bistro Moderne

We swear the waiter was German, which would make his thick French accent a complete affectation, but the food here was phenomenal.

Also, the wine, Ramsay Pinot Noir, rocked. If you know where to pick up a bottle or two, let us know.

May We Recommend

A Moleskine City Notebook. The combo of map, pocket to hold tickets, and notebook to jot down restaurants, etc, was perfect to navigate the city while we were on vacation this weekend. You are going to want a map in your pocket, so why not grab one of these and fill it with your trip plans a week or so before you leave?

Dylan's Candy Bar

Just came back from NYC, where the inner child went wild for this over-the-top candy store, the brain child of Ralph Lauren's little girl. More pictures here.

Peeps!

from the Washington Post.

What a waste

Most of the Beatles' catalog will be re-issued. On CDs, because EMI thinks that is state of the art in digital audio, not Blu-Ray, DVD-A, or, God forbid, iTunes. Whatever. Chances are the new CDs were mastered on a Mac with ProTools.

Puh-lease

Britney Spears stops performance because of cloud of pot smoke hanging around the stage in Vancouver.

Microsoft v. Apple, Round Whatever

Apple is trying to innovate its way through the Great Recession, but only just: they shipped a workstation with Intel's latest and greatest chip a full month before Intel officially released the chip to other computer makers, but they tethered it to a neutered graphics card, so it is not clear what anyone would do with the $3000+ MacPro if they could actually afford one.

Microsoft, which doesn't actually make PCs, has answered with a campaign of their own: Settle for us.

Physicians and Torture

Medical workers--by which they seem to mean physicians, physician's assistants, and others--helped the CIA torture prisoners at Gitmo. We are physicians, and we remember the oath we took: the physicians who took part in this should be stoned.

Maybe this is how I'll decorate my new apt

Like finger painting, but with spaghetti.

What exactly is a depression?

It is an excellent question, and there really isn't a well-defined answer.

Some combination of negative economic growth, greater than 10% unemployment, and widespread destruction of durable assets for survival, ie, burning furniture for warmth, desperately selling the family land for cash, eating the milk cow--what else? And how to quantify?