23. May 2009 by admin.

I believe strongly in a single-payer healthcare system in the United States, as I’ve written about before in covering here the interview of Dr. Quentin Young by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now.

Though I don’t know how much good it will do, I wrote a letter to Pres. Obama  to urge him not to take the single-payer option off the table in his current discussions.  Paul Krugman has a great op-ed piece at the NYT, that you can read here.

I urge you and your friends and family to send similar letters on health care reform to the President if you share my beliefs that we need a single-payer system.

Here’s the letter I sent to our President today:

President Obama,
I voted for you and convinced others to vote for you.  Your intelligence and oratory abilities are very welcome after 8 years with your predecessor.  Since I understand that you do actually read some of the mail sent to you as time permits, I hope this e-mail gets passed on to you.

As happy as I am to have you as my President and as much as I admire your considerable talents and abilities, I (and many many others I know) am profoundly disappointed by what appears to be your current position on healthcare reform.  Earlier in your career, you supported a single-payer system (and had views on healthcare which seemed much more in keeping with those of many Americans who in survey after survey have indicated a strong preference for a single-payer system) but now appear to have completely regressed on that position, to the extent that you now are not even inviting your former advisor on healthcare reform, Dr. Quentin Young, to your White House discussions on the subject. 

I don’t understand why you have taken the discussion of single-payer system entirely off the table.  I don’t buy your public statements that we can’t start over from scratch and have to work with what we have.  FDR made major changes when the times called for it–so can you, with the help of Congress.

Please don’t cave into the HMO, Insurance and Pharmaceutical lobbies and end up with a solution which only appears to solve the problem and in reality is just a bad compromise that merely preserves the existing broken system to the benefit of the business interests behind it!  A majority of doctors and nurses support a single-payer system…if it’s not an option, why are so many healthcare professionals like Dr. Quentin Young so strongly behind it?

The current healthcare system is crippling private business, crippling hard-working Americans who play by the rules, and more than anything, is a big waste of the taxpayers’ money.

Your legacy ultimately will derive from what you do for the environment, (so that your children and mine can survive), what you do to reform healthcare, and what you do to restore sanity to American Foreign Policy.  Please don’t let this leg of the tripod remain ‘business as usual".

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17. May 2009 by admin.

I don’t know about you, but I was getting at least 2 calls a day on my mobile phone from this extended auto warranty telemarketing outfit.  It is a recorded message, and if you try to call back, you usually get a recording or no answer.

Well, some enterprising people have figured out how to access this company’s voicemail and fill up the inboxes with messages. If you have been harassed by this company, as I have, you might consider looking at the following for advice on how you can give the company a little of its own medicine. 

To be clear, I’m not advocating doing anything illegal or destroying existing voicemail messages, or using the company’s information for any illicit purpose.  However, I see no harm in leaving the company voicemails on its own system and waste their time the way they waste ours.

You can access info about the company’s phone number and how to leave voicemail here.

Also, here’s a hilarious (at least to me) video of a guy who is messing with a telemarketer from this venal organization:

Extended Car Warranty from Adrian Chen on Vimeo.

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1. May 2009 by admin.

Researchers at UCLA have come up with "…serial time-encoded amplified microscopy (STEAM) technology enables continuous real-time imaging at a frame rate of more than 6 MHz, a shutter speed of less than 450 ps and an optical image gain of more than 300 — the world’s fastest continuously running camera, useful for studying rapid phenomena in physics, chemistry and biology…".

You can read more here.

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1. May 2009 by admin.

Some enterprising young whipper-snappers have come up with a Theremin-like virtual interface you can use to interface with various applications using gestures.  For instance, you can ’scratch records’ without actually having any turntables or records.  And it’s all done with sensors that track your movements in 3 dimensions.

Watch the video below:

3D Computer Interface from Free Flow on Vimeo.

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