| There's a storefront church in Ithaca prominently labeled the "Jesus Only Apostolic Church of God". I have wondered for a while exactly what theology they were advertising with that name.
I think I've figured it out, and think they are some form of Oneness Pentacostal.
Anyone have any other ideas?
While talking to a friend today about what we thought that church name signified, we got talking about Apostolic Succession. After a bit of initial confusion (where the ideas of the Petrine Doctrine were muddled in the mix) I mentioned that the RCC recognizes the apostolic succession of clergy in schizms from RC -- specifically that Rome recognizes Anglican ordinations and thus makes it relatively easy for Anglican bishops and priests who convert to Catholicism to take up parishes and diocese without retaking the sacrament of Holy Orders. I also mentioned that the RCC makes a distinction between having the ability to successfully administer Holy Orders (which a schizmatic bishop can do), and therefor being able to create priests and bishops who can perform transubstantiation and other things only bishops and priests can do, and having the authority to do so. A priest ordained by a schizmatic bishop can convert bread and wine into body and blood, but isn't supposed to.
There are specific terms used in Roman Catholicism to refer to these two states. I know one is "valid" -- an Anglican Ordination is considered "valid" by Rome -- but I can't remember the other term, referring to having the authority. Can anyone help me? | comments: Leave a comment   |
| ...my Dr's office is doing enough without them.
When I saw my Doctor in September, I asked him about a flu shot. He said it was a good idea, and suggested I make an appointment to get one. I did, for the same time I was coming in for fasting blood work, later that week.
The office called to reschedule, for mid-October.
In mid-October, the office called to reschedule, for mid-November.
Just now, the office called to reschedule, for late December (solstice, actually).
If I get the flu before getting the vaccine, do I get any compensation? | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) skitten and I are planning a trip to MD (the Baltimore area) and VA (Richmond area) from 11 December to 20 December.
Our plans currently are to drive south on 11 December and crash at Mad Mike's the night of the 11-13th, head to Richmond the evening of the 14th, visit gordon92151 until the 16th, drive back up to Mike's and stay there until the 20th, when we would drive home to Ithaca.
There are a lot of people we'd like to see while we're in the area, which I'm not going to try to list for fear of leaving someone out. Suffice to say that if we've discoursed with civility in the past and are around, I'd probably like to meet up with you.
Unfortunately, I don't know people's schedules, or were people are, or the best way to meet up with everyone. Logistics are a pain when working 5 hours away with limited information.
I am asking for help. Does anyone who lives in the MD/VA area have any ideas that might go into a reasonable itinerary? | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | My throat culture came back positive for strep. I was advised by my doctors office to make sure I take the full run of antibiotics and get back to them if things didn't get better. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| This past weekend I hadn't been feeling my best. I had a sore throat and occasional chills, and fatigue, etc. The fatigue, etc could be explained by poor sleeping habits and similar lifestyle sundry. The sore throat was more worrisome.
What I didn't have: headache, fever, nasal congestion, excessive sneezing or coughing, massive body aches, or anything egregiously debilitating. So I didn't believe it was the flue.
In fact, I wouldn't have been surprised if a good nights sleep, getting current on my hypertension and diabetes meds, taking a long, hot, shower and immediately getting into warm, clean, clothes would make me feel 100% better. (On a side note, the washing machine we bought on Friday was delivered and installed today, so there should be less issue about warm, clean, clothes in the future). It almost did -- it made me feel confident about my health to go to Binghamton this last weekend -- but not confident enough to do things like drink from the same chalice as everyone else or similar potentially germ-spreading behaviors.
But the sore throat didn't go away. If anything, it got worse. It was worst in the mornings, got better over the course of the day, and then was real bad in the mornings again. It feels crunchy, and swallowing can feel like I'm dragging something hard and sharp over it.
I didn't go to Bound For Glory last night, telling them that I didn't feel like I was contagious, but not wanting to take a chance. This morning, I phoned my boss telling him that I'd rather go to the doctor than to work. I saw my doctor nominally at 3:10 this afternoon, and spent most of the day sleeping until then.
When I got the doctors, they immediately gave me a mask to put on, but within a couple of minutes of seeing the doctor, he told me I could take it off -- it's not right for H1N1, and it doesn't even sound right for anything viral. He had no comments about my ears or nose after he looked in them, and he said my lungs sounded clear. My throat is inflamed, and he seemed concerned about the lymph nodes in the neck.
He said there's a number of possibilities (he mentioned strep, I mentioned staph, he mentioned another bacterial possibility that I hadn't heard of and can't remember), took a throat swab to test for strep, and prescribed azythromycin. I'm cleared to work tomorrow, and there seems little risk of contagion.
I've already taken the initial dose of antibiotics, and I've 4 more days to go with it. I expect I'll probably be feeling a lot better by tomorrow morning or Wednesday, but I'm not stupid enough to stop taking the antibiotics simply because I feel better. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| The Language Log blog recently had a discussion on the question Is Irony Universal?. To set up the discussion, he clarified exactly what he was talking about:
First, let's clarify the terminology. For the purposes of this discussion, irony means "A figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used", and not "dissimulation of ignorance as practiced by Socrates in order to confute an adversary". My guess is that Socratic irony is less likely to be a cultural universal — it seems to have caught the attention of Socrates' contemporaries as something new and unexpected — but in any case, this is a different question.
And I want to focus specifically on cases like "Wonderful!" as a response to something unwanted, or "Good job!" as a comment on culpable failure, leaving open the question of whether things in the ironic penumbra — e.g. dramatic irony, "incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs" — are the same thing as irony in the more narrow sense.
I hadn't necessarily seen all those definitions of irony before, and if "Wonderful!" and "Good job!" are examples of irony and not sarcasm (which he defines as "A sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark; a bitter gibe or taunt"), I've probably called way too many things sarcasm and not irony.
Still, it remains an amazing bit of (dramatic) irony that the song "Isn't It Ironic" has so little examples of irony (although I suspect the line "yes I really do think" would qualify as sarcasm). | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I now have a Google Wave account. Does anyone have an idea what it's good for?
My observation is that Reggae music in general and Reggae covers of Pink Floyd specifically are not conducive to a productive work environment. I just slouch back, feel my mind go fuzzy, and chill to the beat.
I dined at WildFire, the new restaurant in Ithaca replacing Lost Dog. 'Twas good, caused me to take home my main course, fuller review upon request.
Everyone says "Get a flu shot! get a flu shot!" My doctor's office has said (twice) "We need to reschedule your flu shot, can you come in 3 weeks later?". I hope I get the shot before the flu. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| What LPs (flat platters of black polyvinyl chloride plastic approximately 30cm in diameter upon which approximately 22minutes of sound is recorded in an analog format in a long spiral groove on each side, when rotated at the design speed of 1 revolution every 1.8 seconds) sound better when played at 45RPM, in your opinion?
Experimentation in our office has preliminary results that instrumental works sound faster, but not much different (for instance, Kraftwerk is reputed to sound like Daft Punk when played at 45, reggae sounds like reggae, and piano instrumentals sound completely and utterly unchanged). There is a certain amount of chipmunks-effect with vocal stuff. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| When we got home tonight our cat, Willow, was sitting under my chair making a grunting sound with every breath. She continued to do so even after I picked her up and put her on a much softer surface. Calls to emergency vets suggested that she should be brought in, and after searching around for an inexpensive vet open at 9pm that could take her we finally took her to Cornell Companion Animal Hospital. As soon as the triage vet saw her and picked her up she wanted to whisk her away to be put on oxygen due to her labored breathing.
The vet told us that this was a major quality-of-life issue, and that she was suffering with the breathing, even in the oxygen. The two most likely causes for this sort of issue were congestive heart failure (there was a noticeable heart murmur and liquid sounds in the lungs) or cancer. It would be expensive to find out what it was, and there was a small probability of being able to do anything once they did find out. In the mean time, she would be suffering with the breathing all the time. She also confirmed that if we hadn't brought Willow in tonight, we wouldn't have been able to have brought her in tomorrow. We let her go.
We are now a 3 cat household. | | comments: 11 comments or Leave a comment |
| A caller on Car Talk this week asked the guys to confirm something her co-worker had told her. As a person involved in emergency medicine (I didn't catch her exact involvement) she often sees people brought in suffering from CO poisoning from boating. Again, I didn't catch exactly how come fishers/boaters get exposed to CO to the point of needing medical care. One of her coworkers commented that the patients could have gotten the same effect by simply sitting in their car in a closed garage for an hour or so and bypassed the sunburns, boats, etc. Another of her coworkers (a resident) countered that modern car's emission systems are so good that one could run your tank dry in a closed garage and there would be hardly any CO buildup.
The Car Talk guys sided with the resident, noting that nowadays the needles on the emissions testers barely budge when testing a car, as compared with the old days when no emissions tester was needed to tell that lots of bad stuff was coming out the tailpipe. They suggested that you would be more likely to die from oxygen deprivation then CO poisoning.
Below the cut are my calculations and thoughts on the matter...
( c'mon, you know you want to see the math... )
Should I send it to the Car Guys? | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| A new Five Guys Burger and Fries place opened in Ithaca today. Five Guys is a relatively understated national chain specializing in, well, burgers and fries. Their menu consists of burgers, "little burgers", hot dogs, fries, and grilled cheese. The burgers come in hamburger, cheeseburger, bacon hamburger, and bacon cheeseburger, with two patties in the regular burgers and one patty in the little burgers.
Their pitch is good ingredients -- all beef burgers hand-made from fresh ground beef (80% lean), fries cut on site from sacks of Idaho potatoes, kosher hot dogs, etc -- and few frills. There are a large number of toppings, all of which are free, and they provide roasted peanuts (in shell) as an appetizer while you wait (self-serve).
When I got there at 11:30ish it was packed, with the line stretching a good thirty-feet from the counter to the door (as it had opened in Ithaca only 30min earlier). It didn't take long to make it to the counter, but I probably spent more time waiting for my grilled cheese (with mushrooms and tomato) and fries than waiting to order. It gave me plenty of time to observe how they worked, as the kitchen is completely exposed to the dining area.
It was very assembly-line oriented. There were five stations, which I'll call "veggie grill", "meat grill", "cold", "assembly", and "bag&fries". It was easiest to watch the assembly person (all the stations had multiple people working it, except assembly, and she was not a bottleneck), as she was a single person and most exposed. When an order came in, it goes to both cold and the grill; the cold takes buns and puts tomatoes, lettuce, etc on them, puts them on foil sheets, and passes them down, one whole order at a time, to the assembly person. She arranged them to her liking, and waited for the meat. When the grill was done with patties, a grillman would come over with patties (with and without cheese) to put on the waiting prepped buns. Then she would close up the sandwich, wrap it in foil, label it with either the order slip or a numbered sticker (indicating that this is sandwich 1, 2, 3, etc in the order), and once an order is ready passes it to the bag&fry station. The order slip is pulled off the sandwich and slapped onto the top bag on a stack, which is opened, the sandwiches loaded, and the cup of fries filled and added. Then they take a measured amount of fries and dump it in the bag on top of everything. Once that's done, they take the bag to the counter and call out the order number.
My opinion? The grilled cheese was moderately better than I expected. It was grilled on a bun (not sliced bread), using standard yellow American cheese. The cheese wasn't fully melted. I suspect the fresh tomato and (canned or grilled, not fresh) mushrooms did a good job of making what would have been horrid acceptable. The fries were pretty good. I'll try the cajun fries next time. I also suspect things might be faster at another time. | | comments: 9 comments or Leave a comment |
| I've been watching some Dr.Who-and-related I haven't seen before lately. I've watched the first two stories from Sarah Jane Adventures over the past few days, and today Zahde brought over "Delta and the Bannermen" and "The Infinite Quest".
For those more into Who than I... Is Sarah Jane's address (13 Bannerman Rd) a coincidence or an homage (or, worse, foreshadowing).
Another question: Was "Delta and the Bannerman" typical of McCoy-era Dr.Who? What was the fan feeling concerning Mel as a Companion?
"The Infinite Quest" was pretty good. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Now heave to and hand over your cargo or we'll sink your ship.
Wait, that's not in the proper spirit...
I know...
"Hello, I am calling to negotiate on behalf of the men who have taken over your ship. They wish to get $50,000,000 in return for the safe release of your crew, cargo, and ship...."
What? That's not how pirates talk? | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Body aches, check, especially in arm and shoulder muscles, some in kidney region, some in legs, with no apparent cause.
Sore throat, mildly, but not much.
Fever, nope.
Runny/stuffy nose, no more than usual, definitely breathable, seemingly dry.
Chills, nope.
Fatigue, not really.
If things change, I'll let you know. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| skitten just came home crying from a music jam a couple of hours before it's end. Apparently, the hostess of the jam asked her to move to a different seat outside the main circle "so the musicians can join the circle".
If you are unaware, skitten went to college at a high-ranked music school, competed for 13 years in a Barbershop chorus and quartet, attends as many jams as she can, but doesn't play nearly as much as she had since her stroke 3 years ago. Currently she plays hammered dulcimer and voice, as there aren't that many 1-handed instruments she can either afford or is willing to play.
She considers herself to be a musician, and to be asked to move to make room for "the musicians" really hurt. | | comments: 33 comments or Leave a comment |
| I just finished watching Funky Forest: The First Contact, an unusual Japanese film I got on Netflix. It isn't bad; if it were bad, I wouldn't have watched the whole movie. But it is...strange.
An IMDB reviewer described it as like a David Cronenberg comedy. My feeling is that it maintains the tight, plot-driven focus of some great American movies like Amazon Women on the Moon and Kentucky Fried Movie. The movie features segments of stories, ranging from a few seconds to several minutes (the 150+minute movie had 44 chapters, which means the average chapter is 3m24s long, and each chapter corresponds to a break/jump from one segment to another). Many of the segments feature recurring story-lines or people, so there aren't 44 stories in this collection.
This is the work of 3 directors, each claiming credit for a total of 21 of the segments, and another 22 credited to "Interval" on the DVD (all three directors plus Interval claim credit on segment 44, "End Roll"). One director, 石井克人 (ISHII Katsuhito) directed four of the recurring stories. "Guitar Brothers" is about three "brothers" who live together who are apparently decidedly unattractive to women (for different reasons). I wouldn't say there was an overall plot to that story. "Anime Brothers" is about two brothers who are doing all the animation for an anime ostensibly written by Pero, a small dog (the elder of the brothers finds the situation with Pero and his interpreter to be "fishy", and believes the interpreter is the real director). We do get to see the finished animation. With "Babbling Hot Springs Vixens" it becomes quickly clear that the vixens are babbling more than the springs are. "HOMEROOM !!!!!!!!!" features the morning announcements of different classmates during a homeroom session in school -- for an oddly configured class. In addition to these four stories (ranging from 2 segments for Anime Brothers to 5 for Guitar Brothers), ISHII also directed two standalone segments, one featuring the "Mole Brothers", the other featuring a girl named Hataru. Overall, he gets credit for 65m of the movie.
The second director, 三木俊一郎, MIKI Shunichiro, is responsible for some of the more bizarre imagery in the work, as his three segments all involve odd prosthetics or puppetry of distinctly... well, it's clear that they are alive, and it's clear in two of the segments that they are considered normal in the world of the segments, but they are clearly not a product of our world. If you look at the DVD cover, you'll see in the upper left a pink thing in the upper left and two guys dressed in yellow fursuits. Those are from his segments. "Wanna Go For A Drink" is about an odd encounter a schoolgirl has in the school hallway. "Youth Classroom" takes place in the youth classroom of a school, while "After School Club" is based, well, you can probably guess. It's hard to say that there is an overall plot or theme, or reason, for these segments. Overall his segments account for 25m.
The third director, ANIKI, clocks in with one 46m story in three segments. This story, "Notti&Takefumi", is probably the most coherent story of the bunch, centered around two characters: a real cutie named Notti and a young schoolteacher named Takefumi. Notti was a student at Takefumi's school, but now they are/are not dating. This is the central conflict of this story -- Takefumi loves Notti and wishes they acted more like a couple (including going on a world trip together) while Notti has no real desire to be a couple. The first segment sets up their relationship, while the other two segments are them each telling about a dream they had. While the imagery and motifs of the dream sequences are fantasy, it's clear in the setup that they are dreams (the three segment titles are "Notti&Takefumi -- Prologue", "...-- Takefumi's Dream" and "...-- Notti's Dream"). The struggle of Notti&Takefumi's relationship is clearly reflected in their dreams: Takefumi spends his dream following the direction of Notti, while begging her to express her feelings towards him, while in Notti's dream Takefumi doesn't appear at all.
The "fourth director", Interval, has 22 segments, including a 3-minute intermission, taking a total of 7m46s, averaging 21s each (without the intermission, it's 13.6s each). With just a couple of exceptions the intervals are extensions or cuts from the other stories.
The stories are slightly interlocked via shared characters. Takefumi appears in "After School Club", while many of the characters across several stories meet up for a rather disastrous "Single's Picnic". Hataru is in the "Youth Class Room", and one of the Guitar Brothers is a coach in the After School Club.
While watching bits of it again to write this write-up, I noticed things which escaped me in the first viewing -- characters whose significance wasn't apparent until later in the film, for instance.
The DVD features the ability to watch the movie in order, or to watch just the segments which belong to each director. The latter ordering provides a somewhat more coherent picture, and is how I was able to break things out by director, but it isn't a real substitute to watching the movie in it's released order. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| I want to upgrade my Mac to the most up-to-date Mac OS X it'll support: Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger". I've already asked one friend and he thought he had an appropriate set of disks, but it turned out he had 10.3 "Panther", not "Tiger" (all his machines are currently running "Leopard", and he had to search to find the old install disks.
Anyone know where I can get Tiger? | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Back in July I got another Dreamwidth invite code. It's been sitting in my inbox since. Anyone want it? | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| In my last journal entry about the Investor's Business Daily's editorial board, I posited two compelling opinions regarding their editorial about the House health care plan. I suggested that either (a) they were incompetent, or (b) they were deliberate liars pushing an ideological agenda.
Sensing that (1) was unlikely, I leaned towards (2).
Evidence has surfaced that, well, perhaps I was a bit hasty in overlooking (1).
In an editorial which has since been corrected online, the IBD apparently claimed that:
"People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."
Obviously, since it has been corrected, the basic problem with this has been pointed out to them. But they should have caught it before it got to print in the first place.
The basic problem is simple: For the entire time that Stephen Hawking has been suffering from ALS he has been under the care of the NHS, the very service the IBD claims would value his life as worthless and let him die, a fact that any cursory research on Professor Hawking would have revealed. Sure, he speaks with an American accent, but he's English, through-and-through.
So perhaps incompetence is not as unlikely as I thought. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| There is a load of laundry in the washer. Initial indications indicate that the washer needs more supervision than it has needed in the past, and a new one is probably a good idea soon, but it washes again. I'll see soon if it spins.
The part necessary to fix it cost under $11.
Update: It doesn't spin. In fact, when it gets to a spin phase, it just seems to stop. I can put it to a wash cycle, and it runs fine, until it gets to a spin. Then it stops. It spun fine when I first tried it out. I suspect that the shaking of the first full wash cycle jiggered a connection. Possibly the connection to the lid switch. Either way, it's buggered for tonight. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Funny, the pictures online of direct-drive couplers for washing machines like mine don't seem to have the big crack/gap in the side of one of the three pieces like I see in the one in my hand.
(I can get a new coupler online for under $15+shipping, I'll check the local appliance repair shop first.) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | A quick scan of the websites for Lowes', Best Buy, Sears, and Home Despot show that the apparent going rate for a new low-end laundry washer is about $300, presumably plus tax and installation. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| I want one of these. I've wanted the basic idea for a while for aerating our compost/food-waste-bin, but thought I'd have to make it somehow. Then I saw the Amazing Auger the other day on telly, and realized it was exactly what I had in mind. A quick google search to see what people thought of it, well, sent me back to the drawing board. Somehow, I found the Yard Butler on Amazon, read the reviews, and came across three major differences between it and the Amazing Auger: (1) It's not a piece of crap, (2) it's less expensive, especially figuring in S&P fees, (3) I think the longer auger blade will do a better job, and (4) it's not a piece of crap.
I get paid on Friday, I'll probably order it then. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| | How many of my readers, when they hear the quoted pair of sentences "As he read it he stiffened visibly. With an ejaculation, he handed it to his wife." can identify the source, and how many wonder what sort of book I'm reading? | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| This may best be looked at on my journals page, if your LJ style mucks about with background and text colors.
My personal preference in reading text on screen is to have the maximum contrast between the letters and background as possible. If going for dark-on-light, it may be acceptable to have the light darkened modestly, but for the most part the darks should be as dark as possible.
That means I prefer black text over gray, blue over cyan, etc. when having a white or off-white background. One friend of mine consistently uses purple text in her LJ posts and comments, except when particular journal styles would make it hard to read. I find the purple works well the way she uses it, and have no real problem with it.
I have noticed, however, a growing trend on various sites to start using a dark gray for the main body text of their content. And it's not always the same gray. A number of sites use an 80% neutral gray; it appears to be the default for the Blogger software package. Scientificblogging.com boosts the lightness to a 71% gray (while also using a 4% gray as a background). WikiHow darkens things a bit with a 93% gray, while Hungry for Knowledge counters with a very light 67% gray. The Fresh Loaf chimes in with an 87% gray. Some of the darker grays look close to black.
These aren't the only shades of gray I've noticed, and I've even found a couple of sites which don't use a neutral gray, but rather colors of very low saturation (For instance, this parenthetical comment is written in a color I grabbed from FogBugz, and it's a dark but very slightly blue gray).
To me, some of the color choices are just slightly more difficult to read. When I first noticed it, my thought was that something was wrong with my monitor, as the letters looked almost blurry. For a while, I simply increased the text size in my browser (and was worried my vision might also be implicated). Then at some point I had the idea of checking what fonts they were using, as many sites use bad fonts without realizing they are bad. I was surprised and astonished to discover it was font color.
Obviously some designer somewhere decided that black text didn't look good, and would be improved by reducing the contrast with the background. Since that goes against what I thought I knew about legible design, it seems bizarre to me. I can't imagine a responsible site designer saying "Let's make this page harder to read", yet it seems to me that was the outcome of the decision. And the wide variety of sites and color choices indicates that this wasn't decided once and then copied, but rather multiple designers thought about it and made that choice.
This isn't the first time I've wondered at the font color choices in software. Anyone else remember the blue-on-light-blue color choice of the majority of word-processing software in the MS-DOS age? I still don't understand how that was considered acceptable. But maybe it was better than gray-on-white, when you think about it. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| OK, someone correct my understanding of the health care bill situation...
Currently, my health care payment options are:
(a) pay my doctors directly, out of pocket,
(b) if I'm poor, have the Government pay via Medicaid
(c) if I'm elderly or disabled, have the Government pay via Medicare
(d) if my employer (or my spouse's employer) offers it, have an insurance company pay via an employer-based group policy.
(e) have an insurance company pay via an individual policy.
(f) if I am a child, have my parent arrange for payment via one of the above options, or through special programs like SCHIP
I am allowed at most one of options (b)-(f), and I might not be able to qualify for any of them.
Insurance companies offer a variety of plans which differ in benefits covered, doctors reimbursement, copays, deductibles, and cost. Employer-based group policies might be paid for by employers somewhere between not at all and wholly.
Doctors can choose which plans they will accept for payment. If, as a patient, I need a new doctor I am limited to doctors which accept the plan I'm on. (I have recently had two friends who's doctor closed his practice. When they asked for recommendations it took a while to find a recommended doctor which accepted their plan.)
Insurance companies may reject or cancel my individual policy based on "pre-existing conditions", meaning I need to get an individual policy before I get sick.
Most of the insurance-based plans are expensive, although I might not see it if my employer is paying for it.
Insurance companies can require pre-approval for various treatments, allowing them to direct a patients medical care for cost reduction, but in ways which do affect quality of care.
The changes I hear about in the House Bill are basically...
Insurance policies will be standardized in terms of benefits, copays, and deductibles, leaving doctors reimbursement and cost as the major visible differences between policies.
Insurance companies may not reject or cancel policies based on pre-existing conditions, nor may they differentially charge members of the same plan.
There will be a new government-run plan, the "public option", which will offer the standardized policies and will be open to individuals and businesses -- effectively making the government a non-profit health insurance company. The cost of the government-run plan will be income-based; low income participants will have some or all of their premiums subsidized by the government.
I am unclear if the public option will replace Medicare and Medicaid, or will be a third government-based health care system.
I have heard some rumblings about requiring everyone to be on a plan.
Things which I haven't heard about, but I feel are important to be addressed.
Will Doctors still have broad freedom to accept or reject plans, forcing patients to choose only doctors that participate in their plan?
Will Doctors still have to bill insurance companies directly, or are there concrete plans to reduce the administrative overhead involved in billing?
Will Insurance Companies still have broad preapproval capabilities?
Does anyone know these answers better than I do? | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| | I was just about to explain why Steve Job's health problems didn't affect my decision to use Apple for my landscaping and plumbing needs when my alarm-clock went off. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I walk to work, about 20 minutes, the first half of which is along a tree-lined street.
I walk home from work, about 20 minutes, the second half of which is along a tree-lined street.
I walk to lunch, about 5-10 minutes, at noonish, with no shade.
I walk from lunch, about 5-10 minutes, at noon-thirty-ish, again with no shade.
Other than that, I spend most of the time inside.
I dislike the feel of sunlight on my skin, and avoid it as much as possible. When I feel sun, get out of it.
I'm starting to get sunburned this year. | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| I got a book out of the library entitled The Illustrated Hassle-Free Make Your Own Clothes Book, which was published in MCMLXXI, so it's about as old as I am. To get a flavor of the book, the first paragraph of the inside-flap text reads:
Men, Women, Brothers and Sisters, AC-DC, boys and girls, little kids, grannies and Aunt Lil too (you've been doing wrong for years)!&emdash;listen there's no need to lock yourselves into fickle trends of transient and exploitive plastic fashions. WEAR WHAT YOU WANT! Dress like a Queen Victoria, a wandering minstrel, a farmer boy, a factory worker, a biker, holy man, a nun, silent star siren, cuckoo clock, Aztec Indian ... a geisha, Hessian mercenary, bebop blue suede, Douglas Fairbanks .. Whatever you want, you're free to do it and not only that&emdash;MAKE YOUR OWN CLOTHES! No kidding: inexpensive, comfortable, groovy to wear, simple to do for humans of all ages, size, sex and affiliation.
I'll also note that the book does not, as far as I can tell, have patterns to allow you to dress like Douglas Fairbanks, a geisha, a Hessian, an Aztec, etc. I really wish it did show how to dress like a cuckoo clock; that would be neat.
But I'm uncertain about a few things. I'm not sure how one would dress like a Queen Victoria (I could see dressing like the Queen Victoria, but not from this book), for instance.
But the main point of confusion is "AC-DC". I'm uncertain in this context what it means. There is a section in the book for AC-DC clothes, but the only things discussed are kaftans (which look like hooded floor-length T-tunics to me) and ponchos.
I know some of my readers lived through that era, and perhaps even in or around that social group. Can anyone help out on what the term means? | | comments: 13 comments or Leave a comment |
| Hey kids, ever hear that certain bills in Congress are hundreds, nay, thousands of pages long? here's why:
( Section 102 of the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, 3.5 pages )
That certainly didn't seems like 3.5 pages to me when reading it. The reason why the page counts are high is in part that in posting it here I stripped out a lot of extra formatting. The bills the congresscritters read are formatted for ease of markup: wide margins, every line numbered, large line spacing, etc. On average there appears to be less than 25 numbered lines per page, and each line is short as well: "included within the definition of health insurance" is an example line size.
But I'm not here to bitch about large page counts. Nor do I pick random pages of thousand-page-long (even if they are short pages) bills to read and post about. Rather, I'm here to talk about the editorial in the Investor's Business Daily concerning this bill, and specifically concerning the "'uh-oh' moment" they had when reading page 16 of the bill.
The lede from the editorial says:
It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of the bill clearly states:
"Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law.
So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.
I would have expected the editors of the IBD to know how to read. I would have expected the House Ways and Means Committee to know how to read as well. So I can't believe they would have missed the "Grandfathered Health Insurance Coverage Defined" subsection title between the "Orwellian header" and the "section" (actually, paragraph) title they cite. I can't believe they would walk out of a discussion with congressional staffers and not realize that "such coverage" refers to an existing plan grandfathered in to the new scheme.
Given that three pages later (page 19), in the same section even, the bill discusses new individual health coverage plans, I fail to see how anyone genuinely appraising this bill (or at least these 3.5 pages) could feel that the bill "outlaw individual private coverage".
I'm left with an unmistakable conclusion:
Either (a) The editors of Investor's Business Daily are incompetent at their job of reading, analyzing, and reporting on the bills of interest to their readers,
or, (b) they are willfully, knowingly, and transparently lying to their readers, pandering to their political viewpoint, and deliberately taking quotes out of context to bias their readership against a bill for false reasons.
They know that the vast majority of people won't fact-check them, won't read the bill for themselves to judge the accuracy. In fact, they are counting on it. You'll note, when you read the article, that they identify the bill as "the House's 'health care for all Americans' bill", which I found completely unhelpful when trying to find the text to HR.3200 America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009. The editorial is already circulating through the blogosphere, and the opponents of health care reform are going to leap on it, requote the out-of-context portion of the bill, banter about the "outlaw individual private coverage" line, as well as the remainder of the rant in the editorial, and scream about how horrid this bill is. It's deliberately quotable and inflammatory, and I'm sure the IBD editors know that and are counting on it.
But I fact-check, it's my service to you. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| Meow Meow purr....
Purr, meow, mur, meow -- HISS!!!!
Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark.
(Now is that a haiku or a senryu?) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I've managed to get completely caught up on my backlogged podcasts (well, I have 1 hour remaining, a This American Life, a 60-Second Science, and an NPR News Summary, but practically caught up). This will not do. It means I'll have nothing to listen to over the weekend.
I'm looking for suggestions.
My preference is for relatively short (less than the length of a walk to work, or about 15min max) and based on science, technology, news, or trivia.
Examples of existing podcasts are Ben Goldacre's Bad Science; BrainStuff and Stuff You Missed In History Class by HowStuffWorks.com; Randy Cohen's Ethicist; Skeptic's Guide To The Universe and Skeptic's Guide 5X5 by the New England Skeptical Society; Stephen Fry's PODGRAM; More Or Less: Behind the Stats from the BBC; News Summary Podcast, Car Talk, On Science, Planet Money, Story of the Day, Sunday Puzzle, and Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! all from NPR; This American Life from PRI; Radio Lab from WCNY; and 60-Second Psych and 60-Second Science from Scientific American. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| an IM conversation:
Me: How's Tiger doing? Is he still in the music room?
Skitten: little glutton ate almost all of the tuna *lol*
Skitten: he was really really hungry
We'll see how this goes. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| One of our cats (Tiger, for those keeping track) has been getting thinner lately, but has been just about as energetic as usual, doesn't seem to be in pain, etc. The main behavioral change we've noticed is (a) he's been begging for attention more often, in the way he used to do mainly to inform us that the cat water bins needed refilling, and (b) he's been after human food leftovers aggressively, when he never really did that before. Skitten wants to take him to a $10 vet clinic, and I've encouraged her to make an appointment.
Skitten suggested that I take a look at his teeth, to see if he has any obvious dental issues which could be making eating painful for him. I did that this morning, briefly (I haven't mastered the art of holding a cat's mouth open, so I looked during the brief times I got it open before he closed it again) and saw one tooth where I would have expected to see four. Perhaps I didn't look well enough. So our initial diagnosis is that he's not eating the dry food we feed the cats because he's lost teeth and can't chew it. When I left this morning, we had segregated him away from the other cats with a plate filled with a can's worth of tuna, and he seemed to be eating away at it.
He's about 13-14 years old, and seems otherwise in good health. With luck, feeding him wet food will fill him out again, but putting him on a separate diet from the other three is going to be a challenge. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| | This morning I'm going in for a fasting blood draw. Which means I can't eat until probably close to 9ish. Of course, skitten and I usually eat breakfast together, and this is a routine she doesn't like to break. So, today she wants me, as hungry as I am, to watch her eat breakfast before I leave for the doctors. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| In case you are the dieting type, you ought to know that you can put recipes into Wolfram Alpha and get back nutritional information in the form of a standard US Nutritional Information label.
For instance, my morning breakfast usually consists of a 3-egg cheese omelet and half a banana. Searching on Wolfram Alpha for 3 eggs + 1T olive oil + 2oz Cheddar Cheese + 1/2 banana yields the results that it's a 571 Calorie meal, with 27g protein, 15g carbs (2 of which are dietary fiber), and gives me 24% of the RDA of Vitamin A (based on a 200Cal diet), among other things. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| That was the subject line on a piece of spam I got today at work. That spawned a discussion of who has died in hell. Most people who go to hell die first, so they don't die in hell.
Orpheus, et al., have gone to hell and back, but they didn't die in hell. We couldn't come up with anyone who was known to die in hell.
Can anyone think of anyone who has died in hell? | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| A few things I've noticed so far that I haven't seen listed as improvements on any site yet...
1. Better support for smart playlists. I'm assuming it's a smart playlist feature: I have a smart playlist which is basically "All podcasts I haven't played yet, from newest to oldest". Before today, if I stopped listening to that playlist and went and played something else, I'd lose where I was in that play list, and might end up having to search for the last thing I listened to. The playlist would only be updated when I synced my phone. Now, the playlist updates by removing things I've listened to. I'm assuming this is because of the playlist definition.
2. New iPod controls. When listening to a podcast, there are now three new controls. I can now send an email with a link to the podcast to folks, suggesting they listen to it; I can jump back 30 seconds; and I can change the playback speed (between half, full, and double speed), which doesn't change the pitch of the speech, but does change the pace.
I'm wondering what other little surprises and improvements are in store. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space, listen..."
I saw the above quote attributed to "Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" today and it irked me. In DA's novel, the quote was attributed to The Guide, and in the radio play, The Narrator was reading it from The Guide.
Another example would be:
The first time I was a drill instructor I was too inexperienced for the job--the things I taught those lads must have got some of them killed. War is too serious a matter to be taught by the inexperienced.
I have seen other things from the exact same source attributed to Robert Heinlein, but Heinlein (to the best of my knowledge) was never a DI. It seems to me that it should be more appropriate to attribute it to Lazarus Long, a character of Heinlein's, but I've seen it more often attributed to Heinlein.
On the other hand, I have never heard of anyone attributing "Live Long and Prosper" to Roddenberry, but rather to Spock. "When you have eliminated the impossible..." is cited from Sherlock Holmes more than form Doyle, and there are many other cases where it is typical to give credit to the character who said it, not the author.
Are there rule for this sort of thing? How would you prefer to see the HHGG and TEFL quotations attributed? | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| TV Tropes is a huge timesink. It took me 40 minutes to write that last sentence, because I made the mistake of double-checking the URL.
(aaaand another 8 minutes lost...) It's rather addictive. It doens't cover just TV, but also anime/manga, film, literature, music, etc. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| My finances are almost under control. I've got an auto bill-paying system taking care of my bills with about 50% of my biweekly pay. I don't have any current creditors screaming down my throat (long-past creditors, which I need to fish out of my credit report and do something about, yes, but not current creditors).
That's the good part. The bad part is that the other 50% isn't getting saved, but rather spent, and spent even somewhat frivolously, mostly on more expensive food than I really need. Changes in my habits would free up cash to save, and keep me from being in the situation I'm in now.
My bank balance is $0.97, having frittered away all of my last paycheck already. I'm at home rather than out seeing a friend who's in town that I haven't seen in a few years (since the last time I saw her, she's gotten married and moved to Oregon, not necessarily in that order). I feel it's rude to go to a commercial/service establishment (in this case, a bar/club) with no intent to engage in commerce.
The irksome thing is that I should have money. Today was payday, but payroll had some glitches and was submitted to the direct-deposit folks a day late (Thursday instead of Wednesday), and my pay hasn't hit the bank yet. If I'm lucky, it'll be processed tomorrow and I'll have money to do things then. If I'm unlucky, it'll be Monday.
In the meantime, I can't get or do things I want, like see old friends, or get clear garbage bags to pack recycling in, or get new books, or go out to eat, or... I've said that brass in pocket is a great anti-depressant for me, and it's true. This is annoying. | | comments: 10 comments or Leave a comment |
| I've got a lot of friends in the MD/VA/DC area (including two sets of parents/stepparents, friends, ex's, etc). It would be nice to visit them. I'm also looking at my pay stub, and seeing the accrued vacation time creeping up towards 60hr, and very much bearing in mind the limitations on how much I can carry over into next year.
So a vacation to MD/VA/DC area sounds attractive.
Scheduling and savings issues suggest that the week of August 22nd through 30th would be good -- and that now would be a good time to start planning.
So...
Who wants to see me in MD/VA/DC? | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| I've barely been up an hour or so; my eyes are still fuzzy from sleep. I'm reading blogs.
I found a blog that was recommended via another blog I recently found. The text is hard to read, it looks thin and blurry, as if my monitor is having problems with the edge (it shouldn't, it's an LCD monitor, so it shouldn't have the focusing problems of a CRT). Increasing the font size doesn't make the situation much better.
Obviously, it's a bad font choice; some fonts work well on monitors, others don't. I can use Firebug to find out the font and perhaps override it with my preference.
What did I find? "color: #555555;". The blogger chose to post in a 66% gray on a white background, explicitly overriding the implicit black text.
Thinking this was, perhaps, a Wordpress thing, I checked out a few Wordpress blogs, and it appears that the color preferred by Wordpress is #666666, which is even worse. I did find some #222222, and a few #333333, but only a couple #000000.
Worse, I discovered that my math blog, by default, used #29303b, a dark blue-grey. It's fixed now to black.
Why would someone choose to do that? Why would someone intentionally lower the contrast and make it harder to read? | | comments: Leave a comment |
| A recent "Penn Says" is about the statement by a Cardinal in the Catholic Church that Atheists are not fully human. Penn is decent enough to give more context, in that the Cardinal was saying that the transcendent experience was part of the human experience and that Atheists, cutting themselves off from that experience, don't fully participate in the human experience.
Penn's reaction: "Fuck you".
I'm fully aware that that's not a cogent, rational argument, but I'm uncertain exactly which rhetorical fallacy it is. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
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hungry