I’m shopping at American for flights from SFO to LAX, and they have a variety of non-stops for fifty-nine bucks. But what’s bizarre is that they offer one-stops as well (e.g., through Seattle, or Dallas). And they only charge four hundred bucks for them. How many people buy one? You have to really want the miles, and like riding in airplanes. I wonder if it’s just an artifact of their reservations software, that no one has bothered to fix? Or if they’ve ever actually sold one?
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The Democratic War On Science
President Obama’s science advisor is on the front lines. It’s a shame that no one questioned him on this during confirmation.
Oh, Goodie
Just in case you haven’t had enough bad news lately, the new H1N1 virus strongly resembles the 1918 flu.
The Hidden Cost Of Health-Care “Reform”
The Threat To Innovation
…from Obamacare.
[Update a few minutes later]
…the truest answer as to why we do not accept Medicare is that the service does not focus on what we feel is paramount: practicing effective and efficient medicine in order to ultimately achieve and maintain the good health of our patients. The service’s paltry reimbursement structure coupled with its impossible to-adhere-to regulations doesn’t allow us to offer a complete service to our patients. This complete service includes wellness care as well as the ability to take the time to understand each patient’s unique medical needs and circumstances.
The crux of the issue is that Medicare worries about the forest, in other words, the internal process, money management, reimbursement and policing agreements, data mining, and organizing dozens of internal bureaucracies. These agendas and policing policies help the Medicare service to manage the forest, however these are often in direct conflict with what we feel is key to effective healthcare: taking care of the individual, or each tree.
OK, Dems, want us to have confidence in a “public option”? Fix Medicare first.
Flash Problem Solved
For anyone having similar problems to mine with Firefox 3.5 in 64-bit Linux, here’s the solution. You have to use Adobe’s beta 64-bit flash (or get the 32-bit wrapper installed properly). Here’s the scoop.
Backlash
So What’s The Deal With Firefox 3.5 And Flash?
I’ve to 3.5 now with the Fedora 11 upgrade. I thought that 3.5 was supposed to have flash embedded, but when I go to a web site that requires it, it tells me to install flash. I’ve installed flash from the Adobe site, and my installer says it’s installed, but it doesn’t show up as a plugin to Firefox. Anyone know what the deal is?
Electric Cars
…are not a moon shot:
“What people overlook is that accomplishing ‘big picture’ programs like Apollo require accepting the concept of unlimited spending to achieve the mission,” says Ron Cogan, editor and publisher of the industry authority Green Car Journal and editor of GreenCar.com. “Current levels of unprecedented federal spending notwithstanding, electric cars are not an exclusive answer to future transportation challenges and consumers will not be willing to buy them at all costs.”
As I pointed out at the last Apollo anniversary, it’s time to stop using this economically ignorant analogy. And that means you, Mr. President. The only time that he ever talks about space is when he can use it as an excuse for one of his non-space economically nutty programs.
A Nanotech Pioneer
…is recognized. Alan Boyle has an interview. I found this interesting:
It turns out that nanomaterials can play a huge role in many areas of therapeutics. One example is HDL [high-density lipoprotein], the “good” kind of cholesterol. That’s a nanostructure. We have statins that allow you to lower the levels of LDL [low-density lipoprotein, which is “bad” cholesterol]. To be healthy, what you really like is a good HDL-to-LDL ratio, so you’d like to learn how to raise HDL levels.
We’ve learned how to build nanostructures based on gold particles that mimic the properties of natural HDL, and we think that will lead to a whole new class of therapeutics that will be the complement to statins. If you think about what that can do for cardiovascular disease, the impact could be enormous. And it’s not just cardiovascular disease. HDL is implicated in a lot of different diseases, as a positive thing to battle inflammation. Being able to raise effective HDL levels could be quite important. We’re now testing particles that mimic the properties, the size and structure of HDL, and the ability to bind cholesterol and transport it. So we’re really excited that this might lead to a whole new class of therapeutics designed to raise HDL levels and have an impact on cardiovascular disease as well as a wide range of diseases that involve inflammation.
I think that the down side of statins is significantly underplayed. They seem to cause muscle degeneration, and I suspect that they do this to everyone who takes them, to some degree, even if not everyone has overt symptoms. And hey, I learned in science class that the heart is a muscle. My cardiologist wants to put me on them, but I’m resisting (I have no symptoms of cardiac problems, other than high LDL, and high blood pressure, which I’ve had all my life along with a fast pulse). She prescribed Crestor, which I went to the Pfizer site to look up, and it said that while it reduced cholesterol, it didn’t reduce heart risk — for that, you had to go to Lipitor.
Anyway, I wonder if the artificial HDL being described here could allow you to improve the ratio by boosting the numerator, and ignoring the denominator, eliminating the need for statins? I guess only clinical trials will tell, if they get to that point. Anyway, I hope that Obamacare won’t end up cutting off funding for this kind of research.