This photo speaks for itself; what it says, I suspect, is entirely up to the listener. The man in the picture is picking up loose change off the street. Thanks to ChezWhat for keeping a cell phone cocked and ready for photo opportunities like this.
Hope for Change
I started a class on Chi Running today. It’s supposed to be a blend of Tai Chi and running that uses mental focus, posture and the martial arts’ focus on core strength to avoid injury and increase efficiency. No matter–within 5 minutes my addled mind had left all that behind and was cranking out David Carradine jokes. Running with a rope around your neck and pants around your ankles is apparently bad for you.
Once that had run its course, I noticed the instructor was still talking so I began to listen and follow. I got the parts about elongating my spine and relaxing my shoulders. But lifting my pelvis? That took awhile. Then it was to the track to start running while holding the position of a store window mannequin. It did get easier with each lap and the additional focus on striking with the midfoot and not the heel helped as well. The focus on efficiency is right up my alley and I discovered that I’d already been trying to do a lot of this on my own but didn’t know how. I still don’t but maybe after 6 classes I will.
That said, my knees were killing me by the time I left. Only ran a mile or so today. Ran three yesterday and will go four tomorrow and due to the excessive heat, nearly all of my runs for the past 2 weeks have occurred on a 1/16th mile indoor track. The constant turning and changing stride has begun to play havoc with my shins and knees. So tomorrow I’ll head out on the road at 6am, I prefer road work anyway.
The culmination of this class is a 5k sponsored by our church. That will be my first actual organized event.
The current health care system is riddled with inefficiency. Health insurance companies spend, what, 1/3 of their money on overhead? Vs 1/2 of 1% for Medicare? I’m not saying reproduce Medicare, but there’s a hell of a lot of room between 33% and .5% for cutting. And let’s not get into Big Pharma and their advertising budgets for Celebrex or whatever they’re pushing this month (God damn the pusher man…)
Give me a public option plan, minimal overhead like Medicare that lists exactly what they will pay for and how much (be it a drug or a procedure), and watch it drive down everyone else’s fat-ass profit margins to something far more reasonable. You don’t think providers will take patients from a public plan that covers 20% of the population? They’ll just ignore that?
Seriously, THIS IS NOT FUCKING HARD. A ten-year old can grasp the math. You don’t need a degree in economics, just basic sense. But ten-year olds don’t need campaign money if they want to turn 11.
Story on CNN.com today, out of the blue, about how sex scandals can be bipartisan. Thank you for reminding us that Democrats also have dicks (if they only had balls to go with them). Blatant overcompensation–the second Dem example is Gary Hart, whose scandal was barely pre-dated by the most recent Scritti Politti album. There are legally-drinking college graduates who were not alive when that happened. The other Democratic examples were Spitzer and that drunk senator who flipped for the stripper in 1974. The Pinto debuted in 1974 so, yeah, that’s timely. Assinine.
Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz throws it down. We’re going to be paying for this for a long time–weak economic growth due to poor economic systems will cause more crises, and the loop may start anew.
Here is a great representation of the ideological history of the Supreme Court. Click on the image to go to the web site and start playing with the data. It is interesting that our activist court is quite firmly in the red, on average.
The Martin-Quinn ideological scores of Supreme Court justices
Fucking Krauthammer. Apparently the results of our glorious liberation of Iraq didn’t work, so why not get involved in Iran? Is he seriously this stupid? “The entire trajectory of the region is reversed?” Where have I heard that before?
Fucking moron. We keep our mouth shut because otherwise the reformists are tarred as being in league with foreigners, aka the Great Satan. Anything we do openly would undermine what we want to achieve. The Bush team learned this the hard way. Apparently K can’t follow the lesson. We’ve got techies here helping the Iranians communicate through the internet, but for the US gov’t to get involved directly would be sheer idiocy.
Most of us have had to deal with the “last day of school.” How much are you going to learn when you’re brain has already checked out for the summer? This has to be the best way ever to blow off the last day of school.
There is a great “aside” in this bike blog about the “race to the bottom” concept. I have been thinking about this a lot subconsciously lately, I never really had a name for it. Each day recently we have made the boy pick up the 18 toys he has managed to leave lying around the house and simultaneously shop for his birthday next week. I think our family is above-average when it comes to intelligent consumption, social consciousness and conservation… but boy, do we still have a long way to go. We’re taking a stab this week at putting a bunch of stuff on craigslist, including my 8′6″ long board that I break out every 3 years. It’s mostly just taking up space.
In January, I bought a Dell Mini 9 netbook with Ubuntu Linux rather than Windows through the Dell Outlet for ~$200. It’s a pretty stripped version, with only a 4gb SSD, but I was tired of lugging my 7lb Inspiron through airports and I’d been inclined to try a Linux machine anyway.
It has worked out pretty well, though a bit sluggish. The Dell version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron, a Long-Term Support version) included a quick launcher bar broken down by category:
I found it generally more useful to go into the “classic desktop” view, however, since the quicklauncher wasn’t particularly suited to finding files. Dell recently started updating the version through their repositories (Linux sponsors provide “central” locations for updates) rather than the Canonical one, and I was hit with two updates in one week. The first seemed primarily about the battery manager and was welcome. The second sped up the machine, but somehow reorganized the “classic desktop” that I’d been using into something much more like the quick launcher, with a single drop-down menu (Windows-like) rather than the Apps/Places/System trifecta that traditionally rules Ubuntu. Furthermore, the power button disappeared from the screen, hidden (again) in the drop-down menu.
Trying my limited patience, I initially searched for a way to undo the “improvement” on the Dell boards. Time to try the “Netbook Remix” edition that is directly available from Canonical. It took about 20m to install off a USB key, and what a visual improvement:
It’s smaller (on the drive) than the Dell version, it’s faster, and it uses the limited screen size much more efficiently. I should have done this months ago. All the software is more up-to-date (Open Office 3.0 rather than 2.1, the latest version of Firefox, etc) and it’s overall prettier.
I’m not a hardcore Linux nut, but I appreciate the open-source software movement and use a variety of open-source programs already on my Windows work machines (Firefox, R, 7-Zip). The Ubuntu flavor is improving quickly, with new releases every 6 months. I don’t know that it will ever be as big as Windows or Apple, but for those willing to try it out, it’s already “there” in terms of usability, and it will make you start wondering why anyone pays for operating systems currently. I’ll probably upgrade the SSD in the near future.