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I still cannot believe how much Napoleon Dynamite rocks. I swear, I hate the idea of sitting down and watching the movie, but whenever I do, it makes me laugh my ass off every time. Even when I'm sick and just want to fall asleep. And there are these little nuances that you catch with every single viewing that you'd missed before. OMG it's just a perfect movie.

I nearly crapped myself after reading this a little while ago. It's probably one of the funniest things I've read in a long time.

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/image/essay/1

I posted a couple of days ago about the proposed system for digitizing medical records. Well eight of the tech industry's biggest players have jumped on the bandwagon. Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle to name a few. That's pretty cool, I guess, but then again there's a shitload of money to be made. Normally they all compete with each other in one arena or another, but they have formed an ambiguously-named alliance called the "Interopability Consortium" to "hasten the development of a digital health network."

"The challenge is to turn a call for change in the nation's health care system into actual change," said Neil de Crescenzo, who heads the health practice for I.B.M.'s business consulting services. "We got together to try to speak with one voice to the federal government and other stakeholders, and say this is an approach we will all stand behind."

Dude, like, no way. (Emphasis mine.)

Anyway, they want to start a nonprofit "company" called the "National Health Technology Standards Corporation." (Honestly, who comes out with these names?) They want to speak with "one voice" because they'll all make a boatload of money by keeping hoarding all of the business rather than letting other players get involved. Can't say I blame them; I'd do the same thing.

I like reading the NY Times's Health section periodically, and the other day, I read this, which is pretty funny, and entirely unsurprising. Well, it is surprising, but not really. Most people don't tend to have side effects to this degree, but the fact that it does happen isn't shocking.

Basically the woman was trying various anti-depressants, and she didn't like Zoloft, because while it helped, it killed her sex drive. (Her husband wasn't happy either, big surprise.) So her doctor switched her to Wellbutrin which is a much different drug.

Two weeks later, Susan called from her cellphone to say that the antidote was working. While shopping, she said, she spontaneously had an orgasm that had lasted on and off for nearly two hours . She was more delighted than alarmed, but I was stunned. I have had my share of therapeutic surprises, but this was hard to believe.

I don't find it hard to believe, but it is pretty funny.

But it does remind me of the woman who had a disorder where she orgasms continually with no stimulation whatsoever. She had to fight it to not orgasm. It was sad because she had a hard time holding down a job, or even getting out of bed in the morning. Consider having dozens of orgasms every day of your life. Jesus. You'd be exhausted 24/7.

It's pretty crazy, when you consider that the faster you move, the more energy is required to propel you. So as an object approaches the speed of light, the amount of energy required to make it go that fast approaches infinity. Nonetheless, it exists.

Jets of hot gas ejected from hyperactive galaxies can travel at 99.9% the speed of light. The jets of gas are referred to as blazars. Hooray funny words. The amount of energy required is intense. But there are even faster things, apparently. I'd ruminate further, but the Pats game is about to start. I'll leave you with this:

Ponder the power of the fast moving superheated gas, known as plasma:

"To accelerate a bowling ball to the speed newly measured in these blazars would require all the energy produced in the world for an entire week," Piner said. "And the blobs of plasma in these jets are at least as massive as a large planet."

The Economist has a cool story up on Einstein. It's worth the few minutes to read it if you're a big Einstein fan, as I am. He's one of my two personal heroes; I loved the extensive Einstein exhibit that the Museum of Science had up about a year ago. I think I read every placard in it. (The other personal hero being Ben Franklin who was also a mad cool motherfucker.)

The other cool article (maybe disturbing's a better word) that I discovered was about textbooks for American schoolchildren. Ugh, the more I read about politics and beauracracy, the more I want to just leave and start my own country somewhere else. It won't be perfect, but free thought will not only be allowed — it will be encouraged!

Paul Graham posted an essay that's been making the rounds on quite a few websites. It's quite long, but I actually sat down and read through the whole thing in one sitting. It's absolutely fantastic and spot-on. It's just a fucking great piece of writing. The only downside being that the talk was supposed to be given to high school kids, and the school administrators shot down having him. This is not surprising, though it is disappointingly typical of school administration types.

Some gems:

When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What will you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish someone had told you in high school? Their answers were remarkably similar. So I'm going to tell you what we all wish someone had told us.

I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think you're supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.

[...]

What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don't think that you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential. People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.

Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.

[...]

Kids are curious, but the curiosity I mean has a different shape from kid curiosity. Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at random about everything. In most adults this curiosity dries up entirely. It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. The mud flat morphs into a well.

Curiosity turns work into play. For Einstein, relativity wasn't a book full of hard stuff he had to learn for an exam. It was a mystery he was trying to solve. So it probably felt like less work to him to invent it than it would seem to someone now to learn it in a class.

Oh my God this whole essay is just perfect I wish I could just copy and paste it here, but that's not cool, so Go read it for yourself. (That emphasis is mine because I loved the analogy.)

…Now there's a huge surprise.

Church-going Americans have grown increasingly intolerant in the past four years of politicians making compromises on such hot issues as abortion and gay rights, according to a survey released on Saturday.

At the same time, those polled said they were growing bolder about pushing their beliefs on others — even at the risk of offending someone.

Honestly. How much did they pay for this study? I've noticed this since 9-11. Americans are more xenophobic and religious than they've ever been, and they act as though they have a God-given right *to be* this way. As though they're entitled to it. I'm not anti-America (though I don't like the country's recent attitude problem), I'm not anti-church, and I'm not anti-Republican (though I am anti-Bush). And I know I'm not the only one who feels this way about America. I don't generally write blog entries about political things, because I hate reading about politics, and I hate writing about them even more.

I think Green Day says it best:

Don't want to be an American idiot.
Don't want a nation under the new mania.
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mindfuck America.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the idiot nation.
Everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.

For that's enough to argue.
Well maybe I'm the faggot America.
I'm not a part of a redneck agenda.
Now everybody do the propaganda.
And sing along in the age of paranoia.

Don't want to be an American idiot.
One nation controlled by the media.
Information age of hysteria.
It's going out to idiot America.

The ironic thing is that the majority of the American rednecks out there seem to love this song. Which is kinda funny if you think about it.

(The album rocks, by the way. Highly recommended, and I'm not an especial Green Day fan.)

It seems that something that I've wanted to do for a while is becoming a reality. Moving from a paper records system to a system of digital records would be cost-saving in the long run, but expensive up front. But even more valuable than the saved money is what could be achieved with the data. Quoting myself:

Free (anonymous) access to academics so they can spot trends and make predictions and cull data from far more research than they've ever been able to do. I'd want all medical records indexed that we have, be they 50 years old or older. That means access to records from fifty years ago until that exact moment in time. This would make retrospective longitudinal studies easier to do, and more accurate. And they could theoretically be done in a matter of seconds. All patients' data, would, of course, be anonymous, unless they were a current patient, in which case their information would have a name attached to it for only those that should have it: their doctor, pharmacy, and perhaps their insurance company (albeit in a limited way). All privacy laws would be respected.

Now quoting from the article:

Yesterday, a group of 13 health and information technology organizations gave the Bush administration its recommendations for just such a road map for a national health information network.

The group's report suggesting the principles that should guide the creation of such a network made an emphatic call for open, nonproprietary technical standards for communication across the network.

The information on a patient inside a doctor's office, the report contends, must be capable of being sent across the network freely to hospitals, laboratories, specialists, insurers and researchers, if the promise of improved care and reduced costs are to be achieved.

All I can say is, it's about time. I hope they move forward with this rather than sit on their thumbs like so often happens with a beauracracy. Sure it's not my company making a fuckton of money, but it's still something that needs to be done. The question is "when?", and "how?"; not "if."