The healthcare mash...

The healthcare mash...  Remy, from Reason.  Even if I didn't have libertarian leanings, I'd go read their blog to make sure I didn't miss their excellent (and occasionally quite entertaining) reporting.

Mac OSX “Mavericks”...

Mac OSX “Mavericks”...  I installed this a few days ago, and so far I am well pleased.  My installation was completely painless, though I've read that's not true for everyone.  Three features in particular I'm finding very nice:

Memory management.  This one I did not expect, but the improvements in OSX memory management have completely eliminated the problems I used to have with Firefox eating all my RAM.  I used to be in the habit of restarting Firefox several times a day, especially after having lots of tabs open, just to get rid of memory it was hanging onto.  If I didn't do this, my whole machine would grind ever slower.  Now I can use Firefox all day long without any issue at all.  Marvelous!

Menu and dock on every screen.  Hallelujah!  Happy days are here again!  Handsprings and fireworks and joy!  Finally!  My normal working setup has two 27" Retina screens, and now they are equal in all respects.  It works flawlessly.

Battery lifetime.  Better CPU management in Mavericks means my laptop battery lasts much longer.  The battery life was already great on my Macbook Pro, but now it lasts two to three hours longer – it really is close to an “all day” battery now.

Nice job, Apple.  Free was a nice touch...

That pretty well sums it up!

That pretty well sums it up!  Reader Jim M. sent me this:

Remember when Nancy Pelosi said: “We have to pass it, to find out what’s in it?”

A physician called into a radio show and said: "That's the definition of a stool sample."

Pretty much.

I give up!

I give up!  Trying to keep up with the ObamaCare news, that is.  I can't figure out whether it's going to collapse under the weight of poor design, poor implementation, and poor optics – or make us all yearn for the healthcare system of Bangladesh...

My personal, immediate issue is this: after I retired this past January, we continued my former employer's healthcare through the COBRA program. We can do this for up to 18 months, but ... the annual enrollment period is underway, and finishes on November 15.  So sometime in the next two weeks, I have to figure out whether it makes more sense for us to buy private insurance directly, use the ObamaCare exchange, or to extend our COBRA insurance.  I have no freaking idea which makes more sense.  Any advice from my readers?

Finally – the one-handed zipper!

Finally – the one-handed zipper!

The Mpemba effect...

The Mpemba effect ... solved.

Stalin's rope roads...

Stalin's rope roads...  All in the pursuit of manganese.

Estonian mushrooms...

Estonian mushrooms...  Ah, this article brought back some very nice memories for me!  First, watching the Estonian faces in the video took me right back to the happy times I had driving around the nether regions of the country.  Then the story about the mushrooms raised memories of my many hikes through the taiga and swamp forests of Estonia – where many of the people I met were searching for berries, mushrooms, or meteor craters.  It's been quite a few years now – more than ten – since my last visit to Estonia.  I'd like to go back again, with Debbie...

The F-35's capabilities are simply amazing...

The F-35's capabilities are simply amazing – but the idea of a manned fighter aircraft seems pretty much obsolete, given the capabilities (present and future) of drones...

The Benghazi story is finally starting to come out...

The Benghazi story is finally starting to come out, and it isn't pretty.  It seems likely to me that a toxic combination of incompetence and political meddling led to the deaths of Americans (including our Libyan ambassador).  I used to expect better from my country, but those days are long gone...

Seeing in the dark?

Seeing in the dark?  You might be able to do it already.  Well, not really – but your brain may be synthesizing an image of your body parts from other information it has available, even in total darkness.  Scientists have now confirmed that these are genuinely perceived images, and closely related to the experiences of synesthesia, a condition that has long fascinated me... 

A banana flower...

A banana flower...  No, seriously – just not the way you expected to see it.  This is a cross-section of a banana flower as it develops, imaged in an MRI...

Where oh where is the dark matter?

Where oh where is the dark matter?  Cosmologists have a problem.  They've posited the existence of so-called “dark matter” as the explanation for why the observable mass (mainly in stars and nebulae) is less than could possibly account for the gravitational effects observed in the motions of stars and galaxies.  There were originally quite a few candidates (mainly different kinds of sub-atomic particles) proposed as the culprit, but one by one these have been getting knocked out.

Now a bunch of them have bitten the dust, ruled out by the LUX detector (more on Science News ($)).  These results need to be duplicated, so they can't be called definitive yet – but it's not looking good for the particle candidates.  And if not them, then what?

War of the worlds...

War of the worlds...  The Orson Welles radio play, I mean.  You can download the whole thing from this page.  Awesome!

Also available (my mom will like this): The Shadow.

There's a lot more at the Internet Archive.  I could spend several happy days pawing through this collection...

Flying pig moment!

Flying pig moment!  It's been obvious since the dawn of portable electronics that operating them on a passenger flight posed no danger to the aircraft.  The FAA took roughly 25 years to figure this out, but they have (at last!) decided to allow passengers to use smartphones (though not to make calls), tablets, laptops, etc. at all times during a flight.

I suspect the lag time for healthcare technology decisions will be roughly the same...

The battle for power on the Internet...

The battle for power on the Internet...  Bruce Schneier has a powerful essay posted, a must-read for anyone who uses the Internet (that would be just about everybody except those cannibals 2,000 miles upstream on the Amazon – and I'm not too sure about them).  The introduction:

We're in the middle of an epic battle for power in cyberspace. On one side are the traditional, organized, institutional powers such as governments and large multinational corporations. On the other are the distributed and nimble: grassroots movements, dissident groups, hackers, and criminals. Initially, the Internet empowered the second side. It gave them a place to coordinate and communicate efficiently, and made them seem unbeatable. But now, the more traditional institutional powers are winning, and winning big. How these two side fare in the long term, and the fate of the rest of us who don't fall into either group, is an open question -- and one vitally important to the future of the Internet.

In the Internet's early days, there was a lot of talk about its "natural laws" -- how it would upend traditional power blocks, empower the masses, and spread freedom throughout the world. The international nature of the Internet circumvented national laws. Anonymity was easy. Censorship was impossible. Police were clueless about cybercrime. And bigger changes seemed inevitable. Digital cash would undermine national sovereignty. Citizen journalism would topple traditional media, corporate PR, and political parties. Easy digital copying would destroy the traditional movie and music industries. Web marketing would allow even the smallest companies to compete against corporate giants. It really would be a new world order.

This was a utopian vision, but some of it did come to pass. Internet marketing has transformed commerce. The entertainment industries have been transformed by things like MySpace and YouTube, and are now more open to outsiders. Mass media has changed dramatically, and some of the most influential people in the media have come from the blogging world. There are new ways to organize politically and run elections. Crowdfunding has made tens of thousands of projects possible to finance, and crowdsourcing made more types of projects possible. Facebook and Twitter really did help topple governments.

But that is just one side of the Internet's disruptive character. The Internet has emboldened traditional power as well.

Single points of failure and security layers...

Single points of failure and security layers...  Megan McArdle has a good introduction to the ideas, in a non-technical post.  Nicely done!

Some people know how to correct their mistakes...

Some people know how to correct their mistakes.  Chris Muir, of Day by Day, is most definitely one of them:

Sometimes I despair for my species...

Sometimes I despair for my species.  And then, usually, I stumble on something like this...