Aug 132012
 

Paul Ryan has probably read more books than Sarah Palin, but they’re both cut from the same far-right cloth. Nate Silver is probably right; Romney wouldn’t pick Ryan if he felt that he was sitting pretty with his base and positioned strongly for the upcoming election. Ryan is a pick designed to reassure conservatives yet again that Romney really, truly is one of them. Solidifying the base may be a good strategy in a close election, but Ryan’s plans for scaling back entitlements may give independents pause.

I doubt Ryan will do much to sway the election; people vote for a president, not their running mates. The debate between Biden and Ryan could be interesting, though. It will be the aw-shucks youthful reactionary versus the garrulous old-school liberal.

Aug 102012
 

Slate has a good article examining the pros and cons of merging the Olympics and Paralympics. Some worry that the able-bodied sporting events would completely obscure the events featuring athletes with disabilities, while others believe a merger would give such athletes more visibility. I’m in the latter camp. As it is, the Paralympics receive almost no media coverage (although it sounds like the London Paralympics will receive a fair amount of coverage in the U.K.). A merger might result in a measurable audience actually watching wheelchair rugby. And any televised Paralympic event is bound to be more compelling than yet another tediously bland Ryan Seacrest segment.

Aug 082012
 

My ventilator alarmed unexpectedly during a packed meeting today. It was nothing serious and it’s happened before, but it’s a bit awkward to be the sudden focus of attention in the room. My co-workers weren’t fazed (they’ve heard my alarms before), but others probably wondered why I was in a conference room instead of the ICU. Afterwards, one of my colleagues joked that I was bored and wanted a break. And now I must confess: during high school, I would sometimes slip out of a particularly boring class under the pretense that I needed suctioning or some other medical intervention. It’s not something I’m proud of, but I still somehow managed to avoid a life of total slackerdom. Now, I’m more inclined to gasp for breath than miss part of a meeting.

Maturity!

Aug 072012
 

Have you ever stopped to think about how intertwined our various digital identities have become? Our e-mail addresses are linked to Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and any number of other services. And if a malicious hacker gains access to one of those accounts, it’s easy enough to wreak havoc on an innocent person’s digital life. Wired journalist Mat Honan writes about how he became the target of a brutal hack that wiped his Macbook and iPhone as well as his Gmail account, robbing him of gigs of personal data (including photos of his young daughter). Honan’s grim tale should remind us that on-line security is not something to be taken lightly. I’m certainly guilty of using the same password for multiple accounts and I intend to fix that. I’m also going to activate Gmail’s two-step authentication. The additional hassle is an acceptable trade-off for keeping disaffected youth out of my private affairs.

Aug 062012
 

We should all be so lucky as to experience in our own careers the elation on display in this video from the JPL operations center during last night’s Curiosity landing.

It’s difficult to overstate how remarkable this feat is. We dropped a fucking portable lab on another fucking planet from a hovering fucking rocket! I mean, fuck! Government can still accomplish plenty when it keeps its focus. Take that, Tea Party naysayers.

And no, I didn’t manage to watch the proceedings live. I had every intention of doing so, but my aging brain decided that sleep was a higher priority.

Aug 032012
 

I’m leaning towards losing a little sleep Sunday tonight to watch the results of the Mars Curiosity landing. The whole retro-rockets-and-skycrane landing method still strikes me as audacious, but I’m also not a rocket scientist. Best of luck to the teams at NASA and JPL as they embark on another expedition of the Red Planet.

Aug 022012
 

Any review or commentary regarding Game of Thrones and the subsequent books in the series is almost certain to mention sex. Violence and cruelty permeates almost every chapter, but it’s the sex that gets the attention and, occasionally, the condemnation. Author George R.R. Martin has this observation on our bipolar attitudes regarding sex and violence in popular culture:

I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people swearing off. To my mind this is kind of frustrating, it’s madness. Ultimately, in the history of [the] world, penises entering vaginas have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure; axes entering skulls, well, not so much.

I’m guessing that the libidinous Tyrion will be one of the few characters left standing when the series reaches its conclusion. But given Martin’s history of executing main characters, I’m hesitant to place any bets.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.

Aug 012012
 

Andrew Sullivan points us to a blog post written by a young pro-life mom who moved to Canada and discovered that universal health care is not so scary after all. But she makes some curious statements about people with disabilities:

With Universal coverage, a mother pregnant unexpectedly would still have health care for her pregnancy and birth even if she was unemployed, had to quit her job, or lost her job. If she was informed that she had a special needs baby on the way, she could rest assured knowing in Canada her child’s health care needs would be covered. Whether your child needs therapy, medicines, a caregiver, a wheelchair, or repeated surgeries, it would be covered by the health care system. Here, you never heard of parents joining the army just so their child’s “pre-existing” health care needs could be covered. In fact, when a special needs person becomes an adult in Canada, they are eligible for a personal care assistant covered by the government. We saw far more developmentally or physically disabled persons out and about in Canada, than I ever see here in the USA. They would be getting their groceries at the store, doing their business at the bank, and even working job, all with their personal care assistant alongside them, encouraging them and helping them when they needed it.

Why, she could be talking about me! Except my nurses just give me quizzical looks whenever I ask them to write my policy papers for me.

I’m not sure where the author lives now, but I’m fairly certain people with disabilities live in her general vicinity, buying groceries and working jobs. And many of us receive Medicaid, which has that same great socialist flavor as Canada’s health care system. That’s not to say that life on medicaid is plush, but I’m willing to bet our Canadian brethren have similar gripes about finding quality assistants and jumping through the hoops of the pre-authorization process.

What say you, Canadian gimps? Are you better off than Yanks like me?

Jul 312012
 

Peter Jackson has made it official: we’re going to get a Hobbit trilogy, just as Tolkien intended.

Wait, what? Three movies based on one book? Or is Jackson going to tack on all of The Silmarillion? If so, he may be the only person on Earth who actually finished The Silmarillion. I was skeptical of adapting The Hobbit into two films based on The Hobbit; three seems too invite way too many scenes of Gollum hissing to himself in the dark about hiss preciouss. I’m all for a Hobbit movie, but can’t we get one really great movie and maybe some extra scenes on the Director’s Cut DVD? I really don’t need to see how Elrond and Galadriel hooked up that one time while they were both at Valinor High.