Health Insurance Costs

Most of the time you read about the cost of healthcare, the article really means healthcare insurance, not the cost of care. Healthcare insurance costs have gone up 119% from 1999 to 2008, while salaries went up 34% during the same period.

Quotable

The world pays a salary for what you know and wages for what you do.

Vincent van Gogh

On July 29, 1890, Vincent van Gogh died at age 37 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the abdomen. He was born in the Netherlands and had a happy childhood, but suffered serious mental problems during his adult life.

He committed himself to an artistic career at age 27, and all of his art was produced during the next decade. A quote of his, "As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed."

While van Gogh’s Christian affiliations resulted in his interest in the suffering of others, when he moved to Arles he ceased painting poor peasants, and instead subjected himself to suffering under the undue strain of painting. Having known early in his life about the suffering many peasants undergo, it is no surprise that when he learned of Buddhism, van Gogh would embrace its ideas of enlightenment through suffering, as he did to Christianity.

Van Gogh was born with a brain lesion that many doctors believe was aggravated by his prolonged use of absinthe, causing his epileptic condition. Dr. Gachet, another of Van Gogh's physicians, was thought to have treated his epilepsy with digitalis. This prescription drug can cause one to see in yellow or see yellow spots. This may have been one of the reasons why Van Gogh loved this color.

PC Monitor All in One

A few weeks ago, I showed a complete PC on a keyboard with built in monitor. This week we have a monitor PC, but without the keyboard built in.

The Averatec D1005 All in One PC comes with a 22 inch WXGA LCD display, and Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 3GB of DDR2 RAM which can be increased to 4GB, a 320GB SATA hard drive and a DVD drive.

On top of that there is Intel X4500HD graphics, 802.11n WiFi, Ethernet, a 2.0 megapixel web camera, 6 x USB 2.0 ports, and a card reader. All this for $799. Hey, maybe this chocolate and graham cracker keyboard might work with it.

To Drink or Not to Drink

That is the question. A study in Scotland of 6,000 working men, aged 35 to 64 from West and Central Scotland were tracked for 28 years, and yielded some interesting results. It didn't say, but it appears that a 'unit' is an ounce. According to the article, twenty one units of alcohol per week is the government’s recommended maximum weekly amount.

The results showed that men drinking over 22 units of alcohol a week had a 20% higher rate of admissions into acute care hospitals than non-drinkers, but low levels of alcohol consumption increased the number of days stayed in the hospital.

Those downing 22 or more weekly units had more admissions for respiratory illness, but they had the lowest rates of admission for coronary heart disease. Non-drinkers had the highest rates of admission for coronary heart disease.

The number of admissions for stroke started with a weekly tally of 15 units, and progressively increased the more weekly units were consumed.

Men drinking 22 or more units a week had more admissions for a mental health problem, but non-drinkers had a higher rate of admissions for mental ill health than those who drank between one and 14 units a week. Kind of reaffirms the old adage - all things in moderation.

Quotable

He’s a real outdoorsman. He drinks like a fish, sleeps like a log, and wakes up like a bear.

Jinni

If you like movies, especially free movies, this might be an interesting site to visit. It is in beta and has a free signup. The idea is to allow you to search for movies, compare your taste to others, and rank movies.

You can search according to plots, genre, actors, or even according to your mood. You can type in nearly any search phrase and something will come up. If you are confused about the connections between some of the movies that appear, you can click on a button that will tell why the movies are related. It has old movies and new movies. Interesting concept and moves another step closer to internet TV.

Pet Rock

Do you remember the pet rock fad that was around a long time ago?

Here it is updated to a USB pet rock. That's rockin'.

Quotable

In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins, not through strength, but by perseverance

I Don't Believe It

There is a new site, on the order of Snopes that allows you to find out if the web page you are reading is disputed by other sources and what the alternative points of view are.

As you browse, Dispute Finder looks for disputed claims. If it finds any then it highlights them. Clicking on a disputed claim brings up evidence for and against that claim found by other users of Dispute Finder. It allows you to mark new disputed claims and see what disputed claims have been marked by other users.

It is from Berkeley and beta, and somewhat biased from what I have seen so far, (You know how those damn academics are) but still might be fun to try. One example about Global Warming being a scam - it offers government data that shows the Earth's average surface temperature has increased by about 1.2 to 1.4ºF in the last 100 years. Take off your clothes, another thousand years or so and this place will be about eleven degrees hotter. For those that use Firefox, there is a Dispute Finder extension. I use it and it seems stable.

San Diego Border

The border station is now the busiest on earth. It has a whopping 24 lanes of northbound traffic for those traveling through from Tijuana to San Diego and another 6 southbound lanes for those going the other way.

Every day up to 50,000 vehicles pass through this gate, plus another 25,000 people on foot, and that's just into the United States. Plus it's in the process of expansion.

Hmmm! Maybe the idea should be to reduce it to 6 lanes north and make the 24 lanes south.

Quotable

One difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.

Shoefiti

The fine old game of flinging shoes over wires or trees. A shoe tree, not to be confused with the shoe-preservation device of the same name, is a tree or a powerline pole or other wooden object that has been festooned with old shoes.

Shoe trees are generally located alongside a major local thoroughfare, and may have a theme, such as high-heeled shoes. There are currently at least seventy-six such shoe trees in the United States, and an undetermined number elsewhere. There have been many explanations why this happens, but no one really knows for sure. They do make an interesting, though weird, artistic statement.

Quotable

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.