US Health Care Reform Passes – Good Or Bad News ?

 Politics  No Responses »
Mar 222010
 

So a short while ago the Democrats pushed through their health care reform package through.

Good or bad news ?

Well, it seems that the share prices of health care companies went up at the news. Now this could be a glitch or perhaps the market investors know something we do not. Does this indicate that the reforms are still going to allow companies to make excessive profits – or even that their profits will grow ?

Of course for the uninsured in the US, this will at least mean they get some form of decent health care which is definitely good news.

But if the US does not take any action on the costs of their health care system, they will sooner or later be faced with a bill they cannot pay. The US currently spends twice the amount in terms of GDP per capita that their competitors do. And I doubt that the reform bill is going to make a bit of difference to the cost of health care.

Can We Stop Calling It 3D ? It’s Stereoscopic

 Film, General, Media  No Responses »
Mar 222010
 

The world seems to have gone 3D mad with films like Avitar, 3D TVs, 3D laptops, etc; fair enough you may think but what is this 3D they are talking about ?

Well it’s not 3D at all. What they are all talking about is a stereoscopic effect where two different images in two dimensions presented to different eyes give the impression of a three dimensional scene. Just film a scene with two different cameras a little distance apart and you too can produce an illusion of three dimensions. But walk around the back of Scarlett Johansson or Brad Pitt and you will soon see why it is not 3D at all.

That is not to say it is bad – just deceptively named. Call it “stereoscopic” and I’ll be happy.

Sexist Jokes

 Humour, Politics  No Responses »
Mar 202010
 

There are five men and a single woman all dangling from a rope, waiting for someone to rescue them. Unfortunately the rope starts to fray and they all decide that someone has to sacrifice themselves to save the others. After some time discussing who should sacrifice themselves, the woman says that as women are used to sacrificing themselves and that men are the better sex, she will sacrifice herself. The men all applaud her, and an hour later the woman is rescued.

Mildly humorous ?

Now try it the other way around :-

There are five women and a single man all dangling from a rope, waiting for someone to rescue them. Unfortunately the rope starts to fray and they all decide that someone has to sacrifice themselves to save the others. After some time discussing who should sacrifice themselves, the man says that as men are used to sacrificing themselves and that women are the better sex, he will sacrifice herself. The women all applaud her, and an hour later the man is rescued.

Still funny ?

It sometimes seems that it is far more acceptable for men to be portrayed as stupid in jokes than women. Is this fair ? If it is wrong to portray women as stupid in jokes, it is wrong to portray men as stupid too; similarly if it is funny to read about stupid men, then it is funny to read about stupid women.

Dealing With An Invisible Window With Enlightenment

 Computing, Linux  No Responses »
Mar 162010
 

Probably of not much use to most, but useful to me …

On occasions, I have been known to start an application and switch virtual desktops as the application window appears which can sometimes lead to Enlightenment (but the DR16 version) “displaying” the window in a non-visible location. Fortunately there is a convenient and fairly trivial fix for this :-

  1. Open a terminal window
  2. Display a list of windows with the command eesh window_list (or eesh wl for short).
  3. This displays a list of two columns – a window ID and the title of each window. Pick the window ID of the window that is not visible.
  4. Next iconify the window with the command eesh wop iconify ${window_id}.
  5. At this point the icon for the application window should appear in your iconbox and you can uniconify it with the mouse and it should appear on the currently displayed desktop.

Mephedrone Deaths ??

 Media, Politics  11 Responses »
Mar 162010
 

The media (I’ve picked the BBC but they are not the only ones) have come up with a news story about two teenagers who died after apparently taking mephedrone (apparently a legal recreational drug). The story is horribly slanted towards the point of view of those who want to make mephedrone illegal. That is not to say that the drug is in any way safe, but if you look beyond the headlines, it gets a little more interesting.

The BBC (see the above) reported that the two teenagers had been drinking until the early hours before taking mephedrone, before (in a TV news report) also taking methadone. And then died. According to the report “post-mortems are being carried out”, but despite the fact that the cause of death is unknown (otherwise why bother with a post-mortem ?), the headlines imply that the cause of death was mephedrone.

Why? It is perfectly possible to die from an overdose of alcohol alone, and when you combine it with another two recreational drugs, well who is to say which one is responsible ? Taking one recreational drug increases the risk of something nasty happening; taking three does not just increase the risk additionally – there may be poor interactions between the drugs to dramatically increase the risk.

It may be that mephedrone killed these two teenagers. It may be that alcohol killed these two teenagers. It may even be that methadone killed these two teenagers.

Or it could be the combination of two or even all three drugs was particularly dangerous and killed these two teenagers.

Whilst mephedrone itself may be harmful and there may well be a case for making it a controlled substance, inaccurate reporting such as this does not help anyone make an informed decision about the risks of this “legal high”.

This post originally referred to the drug in question as “methadrone” – a common mistake amongst those who have heard the drug’s name rather than seen it written; the correct spelling is “mephedrone”.

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