TORQOPIA - Abundance All Around Us

Quote for the day

2012-01-22T15:21:00.001-08:00

"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."

-- Albert Einstein

Cold feet?

2012-01-21T22:25:00.001-08:00

From Tom Toles:

The state of U.S. manufacturing

2012-01-21T14:06:00.000-08:00

Here's a fascinating article about how and why Apple moved their manufacturing from the U.S. to Asia... and about the future of the U.S. economy. Well worth a read.

Quote for the day

2011-10-14T11:56:00.001-07:00

"God writes straight with crooked lines."

-- Walker Percy

What happened, Netflix?

2011-09-19T14:11:00.001-07:00

Lame lame lame. That's all I can say about Netflix's recent price increases (which I could live with) and their latest announcement: that they are separating their streaming and DVD businesses into two separate websites. What, I'm supposed to manage two queues instead of one? How is this progress? People seem to universally hate the idea (the announcement and customer comments here).

I just reduced my service level down to two DVDs a month with no streaming. I've found a better streaming experience with Vudu anyway.

Quote for the day

2011-09-10T10:40:00.000-07:00

Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.

-- Joan Collins

I woke up this morning thinking, "Love done burn down my house."

Concert of the year

2011-08-14T12:10:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since I've enjoyed a concert as much as Adele's last Thursday...

(Video link)

For Tara

2011-07-30T17:29:00.000-07:00

She was one of my best friends as a kid; she was my first love. We've long since lost touch with one another, but Billy Joel's "She's Got A Way" has always been the song that comes to mind when I think of her.

(Video link)

I want a time machine

2011-07-30T15:50:00.001-07:00

Back in the 80s, even Reagan knew how and when to compromise.

And then there was cruising Main Street, listening to music like 38 Special's "Hold On Loosely."

(Video link)

Sigh.

The refrigerator on top of your television

2011-06-26T13:35:00.000-07:00

All I can say is, "Wow."

There are 160 million so-called set-top boxes in the United States, one for every two people, and that number is rising. Many homes now have one or more basic cable boxes as well as add-on DVRs, or digital video recorders, which use 40 percent more power than the set-top box.

One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of 446 kilowatt hours a year, about 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot energy-efficient refrigerator, a recent study found.

These set-top boxes are energy hogs mostly because their drives, tuners and other components are generally running full tilt, or nearly so, 24 hours a day, even when not in active use. The recent study, by the Natural Resources Defense Council, concluded that the boxes consumed $3 billion in electricity per year in the United States — and that 66 percent of that power is wasted when no one is watching and shows are not being recorded. That is more power than the state of Maryland uses over 12 months.

Full story from the New York Times.

And then there's this from a few months ago, also from the Times:

In California, where about 400,000 people are licensed to grow marijuana for personal medical use or to sell to dispensaries, indoor cultivation is responsible for a whopping 8 percent of household electricity usage, costing about $3 billion yearly and producing the annual carbon emission of a million average cars.

Cuomo rocks: "We reached a new level of social justice this evening."

2011-06-25T10:48:00.000-07:00

Here's a great speech from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo after last night's historic passage of gay marriage in New York state:

(Video link)

Think about it... 25 years ago, the New York Times obituary section still referred to the partners of gays and lesbians as "longtime companions."

We've come a long way, baby.

Happy pride, San Francisco! Happy pride, Seattle! And most of all, HAPPY PRIDE, NEW YORK!!!

New York becomes the 6th and largest state to legalize same sex marriage

2011-06-24T20:28:00.001-07:00

Woo hoo, who would have ever believed it? From the New York Times:

The same-sex marriage bill was approved on a 33-to-29 vote, as 4 Republican state senators joined 29 Democrats in voting for the bill. The Senate galleries were so packed with supporters and opponents that the fire marshals closed them off....

Senate approval was the final hurdle for the same-sex marriage legislation, which is strongly supported by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and was approved last week by the Assembly. Mr. Cuomo is expected to sign the measure soon, and the law will go into effect 30 days later, meaning that same-sex couples could begin marrying in New York by midsummer.

Quote for the day

2011-06-23T10:39:00.001-07:00

"No Americans are in harm's way. It's just flying robots killing Libyans. You know, peace."

-- Stephen Colbert, last night on The Colbert Report

Another "what's wrong with our healthcare system" story

2011-06-17T22:38:00.000-07:00

Double CT scans:

Performing two scans in succession is rarely necessary, radiologists say, yet some hospitals were doing that more than 80 percent of the time for their Medicare chest patients, according to Medicare outpatient claims from 2008, the most recent year available....

In 2008, about 75,000 patients received double scans, one using iodine contrast to check blood flow, and one that did not. “If you do both, you bill for both,” Dr. Pentecost said.

Radiologists say one scan or the other is needed depending on the patient’s condition, but rarely both. Double scanning is also common among privately insured patients who tend to be younger.

Double scans expose patients to extra radiation while heaping millions of dollars in extra costs on an already overburdened Medicare program. A single CT scan of the chest is equal to about 350 standard chest X-rays, so two scans are twice that amount

The New York Times has an ongoing series of investigative reports about the overuse and misuse of radiation for medical purposes in America.

Fishy

2011-06-17T20:59:00.000-07:00

It sucks that you can't trust anyone:

Recent studies by researchers in North America and Europe harnessing the new techniques have consistently found that 20 to 25 percent of the seafood products they check are fraudulently identified, fish geneticists say.

Labeling regulation means little if the “grouper” is really catfish or if gulf shrimp were spawned on a farm in Thailand.

Environmentalists, scientists and foodies are complaining that regulators are lax in policing seafood, and have been slow to adopt the latest scientific tools even though they are now readily available and easy to use.

Particularly because it's so important that consumers choose their seafood wisely.

Obama's logic problem

2011-06-17T20:55:00.001-07:00

Funny how everything seems different when you get into that big White House...

I have been generally supportive of our efforts in Libya, but I have to admit I'm a little dubious about President Obama's reasoning on this one:

President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Brilliant

2011-06-17T20:48:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of a co-worker:

(Click for larger image)

Quotes for the day

2011-06-11T11:09:00.000-07:00

If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere.

-- Frank Howard Clark

It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.

-- Ram Dass

Remember when life's path is steep to keep your mind even.

-- Horace

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

-- Carlos Castaneda

You did it

2011-06-11T11:06:00.000-07:00

Congrats to all those riders and roadies who are finishing up AIDS/LifeCycle 10 today!

I'm looking forward to see if they can beat this:

(Video link)

One big score

2011-06-09T20:20:00.000-07:00

I think I'm going to let Gunther IV hump my leg.

Another "what's wrong with our healthcare system" story

2011-06-07T22:29:00.001-07:00

You may have heard that there's a new drug for one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer, melanoma. Combined with an existing cancer drug, the treatment has the potential to lengthen the lives of patients with skin cancer that has spread. The story got a lot of airtime over the weekend and was described by a melanoma specialist as offering an "unprecedented time of celebration for our patients."

But if you look closer, you might notice that "more than half of patients with metastatic melanoma would not be helped all that much by either drug" and that "experts said they might add two to several months to the expected lifespans of people with advanced melanoma."

Two to several months? I can only speak for myself, but that doesn't seem like much of a breakthrough to me. If I had advanced cancer, I would find it difficult to put myself through any treatment that wasn't likely to extend my life for more than a year (maybe even two).

This "breakthrough" highlights one of the major reasons we spend so much on healthcare in this country: expensive new drugs that provide marginal improvements in lifespan or quality of life. And most of the media lacks the expertise to accurately report on medical and scientific research or even to identify which stories are truly significant.

Sigh.

One man's experience: living with HIV for 30 years

2011-06-04T17:00:00.000-07:00

In today's New York Times, Mark Trautwein shares his experience of being infected with HIV for the last 30 years. From the early days of uncertainty, fear, and death and the years of juggling complicated pill regimens, Trautwein has learned some lessons about life:

The dead don’t have problems, so I was grateful for mine. I was alive and my deathly companion less insistent. AIDS and I have been together for almost 30 years now. My relationship with AIDS is one of my most enduring ones, and has both enriched and beggared my life. It robbed me of friends and loved ones, and with them memories we would have had and repositories of my own history. It ended a career I loved. It cost me a marriage. My intimacy with health care in America has been costly and exhausting. I know these are small prices to pay for life.

What I’ve gained is precious. Above all, the constant companionship of plague has taught me that life is about living, not cheating death. Fighting disease is required and struggling with life inevitable. But I accept the outcomes now, whatever they are. My disease does not make me special, nor does my survival make me courageous.

On that day I walked from the hospital knowing I had “it,” I was given a great gift: the realization that we all dangle from that most delicate of threads and that the only way to live a life is to love it.

I haven’t died on schedule, and I’ve been learning not to live life on one either

Thirty years ago...

2011-06-04T15:30:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow will mark the 30th anniversary of the first report in the medical literature of the disease that was to become known as AIDS. From the CDC's MMWR Weekly:

In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the patients died. All 5 patients had laboratory-confirmed previous or current cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection and candidal mucosal infection. Case reports of these patients follow.

I was fifteen at the time, still struggling in a small Midwestern town with my conflicted sexuality. It would be four more years before Rock Hudson died of AIDS and brought the disease home to me personally, leading me to slam shut a door I was just on the verge of opening. I remember riding around in my car one warm summer night, taping myself on my cassette recorder: Why did this have to happen now? Just when I was thinking that I could finally express who I am? Will I have to hide forever?

Thirty years. In those three decades I've come out. Demonstrated with ACT-UP and Queer Nation. Had countless friends test positive and several diagnosed with AIDS (though miraculously, only a couple have died). I've walked to raise money. Danced to raise money. Rode to raise money. I've studied the disease in classes. Been tested for it dozens of times. I've seen infection with HIV transition from being a death sentence to something much more manageable... and watched attitudes shift as well. Throughout these years the virus and the disease have been constants in my life as a gay man. Something to be afraid of. Something to fight. Something to assimilate as a fact of life. But it's never over, and each year brings a change in how this disease affects my community and how it affects me.

THE TENTH ANNUAL AIDS/LIFECYCLE begins tomorrow: a couple thousand riders and many hundreds of volunteers making the 545 mile journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I rode that route in 2007, and last year I volunteered for the medical team. I so wish I were going to be there this year!

To all my friends who will be: "Know that you are heroes for countless people. Ride safe and don't forget to use the hand sanitizer. :-) But most of all, when the going gets tough, remember that I love you. I'm so very proud of all that you're doing."

(Click to see a larger image)

And as a reminder of the long road from where this all began to the future we still hope for, here's the "I just wanna be there" scene from 1989's Longtime Companion.

(Video link)

I just wanna be there.

For 99 cents, sure...

2011-05-23T22:44:00.000-07:00

From Lady Gaga's new album, Born This Way, which Amazon had on sale for 99 cents today, here is "The Edge of Glory."

(Video link)

And here's to a new day tomorrow. :-D

Violence and political change

2011-05-22T19:00:00.000-07:00

I finished all 483 pages of Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order today. What a great book! I highly recommend it if you're interested in human history and political, social, and economic development.

Given the scope of the book and the many millenia it spans, I don't feel up to the task of summarizing it right now. So I'll just share this quote on the role of violence in political change that I found interesting:

The ability of societies to innovate institutionally thus depends on whether they can neutralize existing political stakeholders holding vetoes over reform....

The stability of dysfunctional equilibria suggests one reason why violence has played such an important role in institutional innovation and reform. Violence is classically seen as the problem that politics seeks to solve, but sometimes violence is the only way to displace entrenched stakeholders who are blocking institutional change. The fear of violent death is a stronger emotion that the desire for material gain and is capable of motivating more far-reaching changes in behavior. We already noted ... that economic motives like the desire to put in place a large irrigation system were highly implausible causes of pristine state formation. Incessant tribal warfare or fear of conquest by better-organized groups is, by contrast, a very understandable reason why free and proud tribesmen might agree to live in a centralized state.

Fukuyama cites the disagreement over slavery in the U.S. as a conflict that "could not be solved under the Constitution and necessitated a war that claimed more than six hundred thousand American lives." And as a consequence, the power of the federal government expanded significantly.

He also makes the claim that accountability in political systems is not sufficient to support good governance, arguing that the emergence of modern liberal democracies requires "a relative balance of power between a cohesive state and an equally well-organized society that can defend its interests." While the rarity of that condition explains why the English parliamentary case is unique rather than typical, the increasingly free flow of ideas since the Industrial Revolution has allowed other nations to more readily borrow and adapt such institutions to their own needs. Still, the success of externally imposed nation building is limited by the degree to which a society can be mobilized on its own behalf...