Odd Lots

I’ve been low-energy for a month or so, following the worst chestcold I can recall. Still coughing a little bit; still low-energy. I’m working up the nerve to write a a series on health insurance that will doubtless infuriate everyone, but since I’m also furious, I guess it factors out. Stay tuned.

• HBO is making no friends with their current stunt, which was to harrass a 13-year-old girl for posting a painting entitled “Winter Is Coming.” The painting has nothing whatsoever to do with Game of Thrones, as any fool with three brain cells could tell. Granted, it may be like me giving up whisky for lent, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before I ever give HBO a nickle. I’m a little surprised this hasn’t gone more viral than it has; give it a hand if you can.

• Why did we move to Phoenix? Lots of reasons, but this recent video set from Montreal is the biggie: Frozen water liquefies on compression, greatly reducing the coefficient of friction. In simpler terms, when it snows, heavy stuff runs into other heavy stuff, and makes lots of broken stuff, including (in this case) a snowplow trying to stuff a police car into the hind-end of a city bus.

• Not that Colorado Springs is immune to such things. Here’s our entry. And Part 2. Be careful with your speakers; the narrator is, um, free with his language.

• And here’s the reason we didn’t move to North Dakota, not that that was ever a possibility. Hell, I’ve already done my time in Chicago.

• We’ve just seen the steepest drop in global temps since record-keeping began, almost certainly due to the end of the near-record El Nino we’ve been having. A temperature spike is not climate. It’s weather. What El Nino gives, La Nina takes away.

• SF writers, heads up: Here’s one of the best sites I’ve ever seen on advanced rocket tech, much of which was completely new to me.

• Articles like these can get tiresome if you’re not an enthusiast, but I continue to post them because we need to break people of the government-forged assumption that fat is bad for you. Eating more fat may help you lose weight, depending on the specifics of your metabolism. It certainly did for me. That said, making universal statements is impossible because of individual differences in human beings. As I said in my metadiet picobook, you are the experiment. Do the science.

• And another: Butter won’t hurt you. Margarine could kill you. New science shows animal fats to be harmless, but when you get to the end, read carefully: The supposed health experts in the UK simply reject the science out of hand, because to do otherwise would require them to admit that they’re wrong. Experts never do that, because if they did, it would mean that they’ve been fake experts all along. (Thanks to UK reader Dermot Dobson for the link.)

• I call this sort of thing a sarcalisticle, and here’s one about the Republic (not the state) of Georgia. I’m interested in Georgia because it’s the world center of medical bacteriophage research. There may be a local-color thriller in that, involving a near future in which we’re confronted by a bacterial plague that defies all antibiotics. I hadn’t given any thought to actually going there, but I admit, the pictures make it look pretty good. Lonely Planet has more photos and additional information.

• Here’s yet another way that Obamacare is screwing patients: Insurers publish lists of in-network providers, and those lists are often hideously inaccurate. There are rules governing directory accuracy, and those rules are rarely enforced. My solution: Require providers to remain on a network list for five years after signing up for it, and pull the licenses of providers who refuse to treat patients who are in-network according to the current directory. Better, fine insurers heavily (I’m talking many millions of dollars per error) for leaving errors in their directories. Better still: Forget networks (which are just back-door care rationing anyway) and go back to the days of “any willing provider.”

• Narrow networks can be so narrow that for some patients, care is impossibly far away. To me, this is serious insurance fraud. Somebody should do hard time. I nominate Jonathan Gruber.

• Although I generally don’t do politics, ESR published a brilliant essay about the recent election that I think needs to be read in its entirety by both sides, keeping in mind that he is not a Republican. (Neither am I; there are such creatures as political independents in the world, really. In fact, I’m pretty sure that independents decided the recent election.)