Hey look, a glimmer of sanity:
WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 - The giant spending bill that Congress passed on Saturday eliminated money for developing new nuclear weapons, including one that would be used to destroy underground bunkers. It also deeply cut the Bush administration's request for money for a new factory to make the triggers for nuclear bombs.
I had almost forgotten what it looks like.
This is a little creepy:
Now, a camera-and-microphone surveillance system is using his insights to recognize -- instantly, and with high accuracy - the sound of a gunshot, and only a gunshot within a two-block radius.
It can then locate, precisely, where the shot was fired; turn a camera to center the shooter in the camera viewfinder, and make a 911 call to a central police station. The police can then take control of the camera to track the shooter and dispatch officers to the scene.
It says it's based on "neural" technology, but doesn't elaborate beyond references to the brain, so I don't know if it's an actual PDP model or what.
Christopher Hayes spent 7 weeks knocking on doors in Wisconsin, trying to convince undecided voters to vote for Kerry. His observations in the TNR last week (yes, it requires registration, see bugmenot) range from insightful to humorous (if perhaps also borderline condescending). Read this article and tell me that some of the profiles he describes don't cause you to envision specific "undecideds" you may have talked to in the past.
For example, his point that "Undecided voters do care about politics; they just don't enjoy politics." fits my dad perfectly.. Conversely, "The worse things got in Iraq, the better things got for Bush." describes my friend Nick's political reasoning perfectly:
Saturday's NYT has a piece on Tenncare. Not much new substance, but a good tour of the issue, along with some weird bits:
Meanwhile, the governor has grown increasingly vocal about what he calls the advocates' intransigence, and ratcheted up his rhetoric, comparing the health care program favored by Mr. Bonnyman to "a dictator in a glass coffin" and declaring the program he was proposing as "more American."
Dictator in a glass coffin? What? More American? And then there's this beauty:
The advocates have also shown a willingness to appeal to emotions.
"Certainly, some people will die who would not otherwise have died," if the program is killed, Mr. Bonnyman said.
Wow, what a shameless display of manipulative rhetoric. It's amazing what depths people will stoop to in order to keep people from dying, like pointing out that they will die. How does he sleep at night? Help, I can't stop being sarcastic.
Physicists in Switzerland have confirmed that information cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light. Nicolas Gisin and colleagues at the University of Geneva have shown that the "group velocity" of a laser pulse in an optical fibre can travel faster than the speed of light but that the "signal velocity" - the speed at which information travels - cannot (N Brunner et al. 2004 Phys. Rev. Lett. 93 203902).
Ladies and gentlemen, the new Jetta.
And I thought the new BMW 6-series was boring and ugly. Phew.
Courtesy of Amanda, I've been listening to this album Please Describe Yourself by a band called Dogs Die in Hot Cars (worst band name ever). My token recursively referential description is "vocals: andy partridge meets robert smith; music: xtc meets howard jones meets men at work".
From the the Onion's review, though:
The members of Scotland's Dogs Die In Hot Cars claim they hadn't heard XTC before they wrote the bulk of the songs on their debut album, Please Describe Yourself. That seems plausible, considering XTC's slow disappearance into the record collections of thirtysomethings. But there's no denying the sonic similarity between the two groups, particularly the heady timbre of Craig Macintosh's voice, which an expert might mistake for Andy Partridge's.
What a crock. The resemblance to XTC of the Skylarking/Oranges&Lemons period is so uncanny it's not even funny. They even have a song called "Apples & Oranges" for cripe's sake. Please.
That said, it's still a pretty great album. So far, I'm impressed.
Last one for a while on tenncare, I swear.
As an example of the idiotic blame being thrown at Bonnyman, I'm copying this comment I made over at Bill Hobbs' post on Tenncare:
The Tennessee Justice Center is nothing more than a left-wing law firm with a two-fold agenda: rake in millions of dollars of taxpayer's money by suing the state
Bill is being silly. TCJ, by his own figures from a previous post has been paid 3.56 million since 1996, over 8 years.
Let's do some math.
3.56 million divided by 8 years = 445,000.0/year.
Judging from their staff website, they have 11 employees.
The Nashville City Paper article he links to says:
Johnson, as managing attorney makes roughly $48,500 per year, she said. Bonnyman as executive director receives $68,000.
So that leaves 328500.0 a year for 9 other employees, leaving around $36k/year per employee.
Wow, what a bunch of fat cats! I bet they can afford to buy brand-name ramen instead of Kroger generic!
Naturally these legal fees are probably not their only source of revenue, but his claim that they are "raking in million dollars" rings a little hollow given these numbers. Tenncare is, what, a $2.3 billion/year program? I hardly think the $445k/year in legal fees is what's breaking their bank, sorry.
The CBPP has weighed in on the effects of Bredesen's proposal to scrap Tenncare. Among the highlights:
- Eliminating TennCare apparently would not produce the level of savings for the state budget that the Governor seeks, unless the replacement of TennCare by a smaller Medicaid program is accompanied by other substantial cuts in health care coverage, such as substantial reductions in health care services for those remaining eligible under Medicaid.
- The reductions in state expenditures associated with the switch from TennCare to Medicaid would cause the loss of almost twice as much in federal funding, which would lead to a substantial reduction in business activity and employment in the state.
- The loss of TennCare coverage would create serious financial problems for Tennessee health care providers.
What the report says is, essentially, that not just Tenncare is in danger: because of the accompanying loss of matching federal funds (which, if I'm not mistaken, was the reason McWherter originally came up with Tenncare in the first place), benefits for those remaining covered by Medicaid will be slashed as well. Bredesen is claiming this is in line with other states, but evidently that is not the case: