The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

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  • Health Care Debate Quote of the Day

    Ezra Klein writes what is fast becoming my favorite go-to blog regarding the health care debate (and politics at large), and he had a truly fantastic quote about the recent Michael Steele discovery of Medicare:

    “Still, what we’re seeing here is the GOP swearing that they will protect, defend and preserve a single-payer health-care system. And this comes after months spent fighting a “government takeover” of health care. If you could hook that kind of cognitive dissonance up to a turbine, we wouldn’t need cap-and-trade.” {bold added}

    If you haven’t read Klein’s blog, give it a whirl — it’s pretty insightful with just the right dash of snark.

  • Knowing is Half the Battle

    I was cruising TechDirt and saw a neat post on “Is The Federal Government The Most Interesting Tech Startup For 2009?”  The idea is that the recent data.gov initiative has led to an outpouring of with-it and effective apps allowing anyone to get a handle on the vast trove of information compiled by the federal government.  If you haven’t checked out data.gov, give it a whirl — it’s pretty astounding.  After a week of hearing about ludicrous claims of “death panels” and “keeping government’s hands off my (government-run) Medicare”, it was nice to be reminded that good people working hard can produce tremendous work — that government can serve a positive purpose and isn’t intrinsically evil, corrupt, or incompetent.

    Some of the nifty apps I saw (via the techdirt link) were

    This isn’t quite the level of Star Trek (“Computer, rearrange known data into a new theory of physics”) but it’s a step in the right direction.  🙂  And if the survival of democracy requires the active participation of an educated and engaged citizenry, then cataloging what is actually known can help secure the health of our republic.  For all the noise and thunder of the 24-hour news cycle, this is where the action really is.

  • Week 34 in the Program

    Weight this week | Change since last week | Total change
    259.8 | ? | -113.2

    OK, I should have posted this nearly a week ago.  But it’s been a whirlwind and I just couldn’t get to it.  Surprisingly still on track, despite my trip to California.  I had thought I’d gain some, since my exercise was irregular and my attention to the plan spotty at best.  But in fact I continued a weight loss, albeit a small one.  We’ll see if the weeklong roadtrip to DE and MD had any different effect…
    Weight 2009_0804

  • Week 32 in the Program

    Weight this week | Change since last week | Total change
    260.8 | -4.0 | -112.2

    I’m maintaining my 2 lb/wk rate, more or less, though it’s been a little erratic — for example, almost no loss last week, four pounds this one. That’s odd. The next month will be a challenge because I’ll be doing a lot of traveling and I won’t actually get to class more than once or twice. I’m relatively confident I can keep on the straight-and-narrow but we’ll see.
    Weight 2009_0723

  • Media Idiocy

    {Edited to spell Mr. Fineman’s name correctly.}

    Here’s one reason why political discourse in this country is so messed up. I watched the Presidential press conference on MSNBC. (Normally, I would not, but the remote wasn’t working and I hit MSNBC before any of the other news channels.) I found it to be above average, with President Obama tackling important questions about the administration’s health care plan and the looming political struggles over it. The questions were not bad, surprisingly, and President Obama was his usual erudite self. I think that, while little in the way of breaking news happened, he did capture the essence of the debate and make it meaningful for the average citizens.

    Because I couldn’t switch the TV off fast enough (remember, no remote), I accidentally watched a brief exchange between Chris Matthews and his trained expert (Howard Feinman? Fineman).  Mr. Matthews led off with something like “Didn’t the president just step on his own headline with that final remark about Prof. Gates’ arrest in Cambridge?  Isn’t his taking the side of the professor going to be the story tomorrow?”  And Mr. Fineman nodded sagely and offered up the idiotic sentiment (again paraphrased), “It will dominate the discussion because it was news while little of the health care part was.”

    Get it?  A citizen who watched the press conference — someone, we might assume, who tuned in because he or she is concerned about, maybe even a bit worried about about the state of their health care and the future of their family’s health treament — watched the President expound for 50 minutes in a solid, understandable way … this same citizen will apparently forget all of that and be seduced by the flash of a (notably pedestrian) discussion of the role of race in America.  Apparently that wipes out everything that went before, even though the citizen just spent an hour hearing it.

    Of course, that’s just stupid.  Anyone who watched the conference will walk away thinking about health care.  Of course, very many Americans did not watch the conference.  More than likely, Messrs. Matthews and Fineman are correct:  Those Americans will mostly discuss the race question.  Why?  Because the media — including Matthews and Fineman — will spend the next few days telling America that the race question was the important part!  Why will that message be pushed?  Because it’s “self-evident” that it will be.  And my main anger flows towards the media pinheads (such as Matthews and Fineman) who will bemoan the circus and will complain that President Obama blew his opportunity, without even once noticing that the circus results from the actions of the clowns … that is, the very same media pinheads.

    Political discourse is dying in thie country — indeed, if health care reform stalls, actual Americans will be dying in this country — because we have a media establishment that incentives flash and sizzle over substance and which actively discourages paying attention to serious issues by offering up tempests in teapots.

  • Annie-versary

    This is the one-year mark for Annie and me — one year ago we started going out officially.  It’s been an adventure, one I wouldn’t have missed for the world.  I have never felt the kind of love I feel for her, and I have never received the love she gives to me.  I don’t have much as a standard of comparision but I think our first year has been pretty awesome, one of the best in the history of first years.  I’m hoping for many many more.

    Annie and I at Valentine's Day Dinner

  • Joking about Science

    I regret the simple me-too-ism of just posting a link to an article, but this piece over at Project Syndicate is a nice, short reflection on how jokes scientists make (about their own profession) illuminate the two distinct views we hold of science (as relating to truth and utility).  Short, easy to read, and worth the time.

    As an aside, doesn’t “Project Syndicate” sound like an effort to produce an open-source organized crime gang?  🙂  Crime 2.0, baby!

  • Online Obscenity

    In this online review, Joe Brown of Wired waxes eloquent about the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport, a new ultra-high-end sports convertible.  The Grand Sport costs a cool 2.1 M$ and boosts appropriately over-the-top stats like a top speed of 217 mph and 1001 horsepower from a 16-cylinder engine.  It will come as no suprise to anyone who knows me, but I find this car — all cars, really — singularly unmoving.  I’ve never been an American in love with the road.

    Joe Brown is, or at least, he’s in lust with it.  His prose is rapturous while describing this overpriced, inefficient, and essentially unneeded major appliance:  He revels in the “isolationist joy, an out-of-body awareness that you’re moving faster than the world can react” and delights in watching “entire generations of insects die on your prow”.  A major draw seems to be that the car can outrun “not only the 5-0’s cruisers, but their helicopters, too”.  And it’d better, because driving that fast is liable to make your car an overpriced kinetic-kill weapon — the world’s largest and silliest bullet.

    But that’s OK, because no real person driving real roads would ever be able to get the car up to that speed, much less maintain it for anything but an infinitesimal time.  I’m always astounded by how crucial top speed seems to be to the ego of a car enthusiast, who must drool (at a distance) at the flights of fancy embodied in the speedometer.  Though the car will never, in any practical usage, reach this speed, the auto junkie needs to know that, by God, it could, if only no one else ever drove on the roads.  Of course, a car like this is by design the opposite of practical.  The admittedly impressive engineering involved (getting a convertible that can function at 200 mph is, I concede, quite a feat) is intended only to impress, not to achieve the elegant solution of a practical problem.  In that sense, it’s the exact opposite of engineering.  Indeed, this comes off as almost a streamlined Rube Goldberg machine:  What is the silliest way to move an individual between point A and point B?  The Grand Sport.  It’s not art in engineering; it’s just peacock feathers.

    Towards the end of the review, Mr. Brown admits “It is not perfect — no car will ever be.”  He laments that “We’re at the end of the petroleum era, the end of a golden age of supercars where speed can be sought regardless of consequence.”  Let’s certainly hope so.  Let’s hope we soon wake up from this delusional teenage fantasy of consequence-free open road indulgence.

  • “We are not a people who fear the future. We are a people who make it.”

    In general, I’m not overly impressed with the Presidential Saturday radio address (now of course really a YouTube address).  But I liked today‘s, probably because it resonates with something I’ve said before (twice, even).

    Happy Birthday, America.

  • Week 29 in the Program

    Weight this week | Change since last week | Total change
    267.0 | -1.4 | -106.0

    Not much of note here. I’ve really given up predicting the details of my weight change. I don’t know why it dropped off some, but that can apparently happen. Anyway, I’m still pretty happy with where I am.

    weight-2009_06702