Riverview

It is the floody time of year. A headline in my wife’s hometown newspaper reads “County Ditch 56 Now In Flood Zone”. The Weather Underground site where I post weather pictures has flooded roads, streets, and parks. Usually these are posted in a section called VIP for Very Important Picture, indicating that they are weather related pictures happening now. Today when I went to look for one, the section was empty. I suppose that this means that the snow is melting slowly, the Spring rain has slacked off, the rivers are moving, the sandbags are holding. The rivers are subsiding.
And so it is too with things like ObamaCare. From mid-November to today, everyday was some crisis for those who were for and for those who were against. They are still flapping but it will subside.

With rivers, there are many ways to look at them. The towboat captain looks at them as a highway with traffic, dangerous curves, rough spots, narrow lanes. The fisherman looks at them as a place to find a quiet out of the way spot to anchor, sit or stand and try to fool the fish. The Corp of Engineers looks at a river as something to be controlled. And the river looks back and thinks to itself “What a foolish idea”.

The farmer looks at the river and hopes that it comes up and refreshes that bottom land and then goes back in the banks and quietly flows away soon enough that he has time to plant, wait, and harvest before frost comes again. The River Street resident hopes that it does not come up at all.

Heraclitus said “You can never step in the same river twice”. So it is with the passage of the Health Care Bill the country is immutably changed.

Change for the better and change for the worse. The net result remains to be seen. For some it will be a blessing. For some it causes difficulty. For others just the change will be painful as the comfort of the old-same-thing is replaced by the new-same-thing.

Changed it is. Get used to it.

Blessings

I am blessed that last month my son son became a member Upsilon Pi Epsilon (ΥΠΕ), the International honor society for people with interest and ability in Computer Science (CS).
I am impressed that in a small school, the UPE inductees include a young woman and young man with a visual handicap.

Forbidden Fruit II

I do not claim any understanding of Nelder-Mead or anything like it, also called a downhill method of finding a minimum for a system of equations, which, if you keep up with these things, may be old news. But consider the possibility of the inverse, nearing the summit realizing that whatever your strategy and method, the climb has led you up the wrong peak. Or more to the point, in the valley, you cannot realize or see that the adjacent (or some very distant) valley is lower but not chosen because the initial solution set off in the wrong direction. The desired goal is now distant. Maybe in Step n, there could be a global check for other minima. Or maybe this accomplishes that trick.

Forbidden Fruit I

Those who might have noticed an up-tick in the “On the Player”. Not to mention that there is an up-tick in the volume. My wife is away taking care of folks that took care of the country in World War II. Both of them are ok but they want to be independent and strong and some of those things start to fade.
So I am here taking care of the cats (5 neutered males, 2 neutered females, 3 stray males), doing the laundry, dishes, and listening to music that is…not usually permitted.
Challenge: Find a 10 second segment of any 20 second segment of “Dust Devils” that would not make an outstanding ring-tone (not necessarily for you, just for someone). If you have that in mind do not waste you time looking at t’boli or squeal piggy.
Challenge 2: A sub-woofer for a cell phone that replicates the heart-stopping pulse of a car-trunk kick speaker or floor bass.

Busy Weekend

After a bit of snow on Friday night/Saturday morning, my daughter came down from Asheville in the afternoon. We had supper of spaghetti and salad and music that we rarely get to hear. Sunday, my son came down from school, BLT’s for lunch, naps, daughter changed the oil in her car and we had meat loaf and baked potatoes for supper.

Analemma

Tomorrow night you will be [nodding | shaking | scratching] your head at President Obama’s State of the Union Address. As a politician, Obama (or his speech writers) will make sure that all of the right buttons are pushed. As a citizen, you will be shaking your head at all of the unfulfilled promises of the campaign trail. And as a real live person, you will be scratching your head as to [where are we now? | what should we do? | long range plans?]. Yes, Barack Obama is the ultimate enigma. Perhaps, recent election results will energize him to new ideas and directions. Hopefully the face-to-face with the massed Congress will be a wake up call to both the Congress and the President. I suspect that despite the applause, most of the 435+100+9+1 will sleep through class. Do not blame the professor (at least I expect him to show on time, the Secret Service will see to that), I suspect insufficient pre-class preparation by the occupants of the lecture hall is the main problem.

Health Care

With the secret House-Senate committee sorting out the differences between the House and Senate versions of the so-called Health Care bills, it may be the time to say that what was needed was a lot less and way more than what is being discussed.
What is needed less is government imposed price controls ala Medicare and Medicaid. Price controls lead to shortages. But you are probably too young to remember Jimmy Carter’s government induced gasoline shortage.
What is needed more is supply. So end the government supported insurance oligopoly. Reduce state regulation to fiduciary oversight. No imposed benefits. Allow companies to sell insurance in other states. Just make sure that the insurance companies deliver what they contracted to deliver. The rest will take care of itself.