Oh, The Corner..
When we quote stories like these at NRO, we get a lot of e-mail saying these are just “anecdotes”.
QUOTE-UNQUOTE anecdotes
And yes, if you look on yourself as being part of a government health system of millions of people, getting a bedsore and dying in hideous pain is no big deal in the scheme of things.
But I look on myself as being part of the Mark Steyn health system. So if I get a bedsore and die, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a 100% systemic failure.
That’s about as dumb as saying, “You can either die of a bed sore, or not die of a bed sore. In the Mark Steyn health system, that’s a 50-50 chance.”
The difference between government health care and a private system is that, under the latter, you’re free to say, “This dump’s filthy. I’m going to the state-of-the-art joint five miles up the road.” You may have to get out your checkbook, but ultimately the decisions are yours.
Two points for that penultimate sentence. Conservatives never get tired of imagining how tough they’d be in all sorts of different situations. And LOL, what the fuck? Get out your checkbook? Yeah, that’s a viable option when you HAVE NO FUCKING MONEY.
In a government system, the decisions are the bureaucrats’, and that’s that. My father is currently ill, and the health “system” is doing its best to ensure it’s fatal. When an ambulance has to be called, they take him to a different hospital according to the determinations of the bed-availability bureaucrats and which one hasn’t had to be quarantined for an infection outbreak. At the first hospital, he picked up C Difficile. At the second, MRSA. At the third, like the lady above, he got septicaemia. He’s lying there now, enjoying the socialized healthcare jackpot – C Diff, MRSA, septicaemia. None of these ailments are what he went in to be treated for. They were given to him by the medical system.
What happened to getting out the checkbook? Did the checkbook get septicaemia and die of bed sores too? Why does Mark Steyn hate his father?
If there’s one video that’s demonstrative of the utter failure of mainstream journalism, one that perfectly encapsulates the smug, petulant, self-aggrandizing nature of mainstream journalists, for me, it’s gotta be this one:
I happily and eagerly await the death of this fucking inanity.
Watch the whole thing. It’s worth it.
There’s a wonderful new wiki (called the Tricki) dedicated to all the clever little tricks used in mathematical proofs. It’s a project started by none other than Timothy Gowers, author of this wonderful compendium.
I’m always on the lookout for non-rigorous, ‘pictorial’ explanations of abstract mathematical topics. Because ones that are good, and also mostly correct, are difficult to find. And also I am not particularly fond of learning mathematics by plodding through theorems in a book. I find that only with the appropriate picture does a particularly daunting and abstract topic come into focus. And then plodding through the theorems is actually quite easy.
I found this short, but sweet introduction to differential forms, via the Googles. It must be good, because PageRank puts it on the first page.
In lieu of actually delving into this, I’ll just give a short description and let you go look it up on Wikipedia.
There’s a way of classifying or generating seemingly complicated surfaces using a sort of surface (or shape, I guess) that isn’t really that complicated.
The way you do it is this: Take one vector of the polygon, say the top A vector, and glue it head-to-head and tail-to-tail with the other A vector. Now do the same with the B vector. What you literally get is a kind of weird, oriented, triangular surface. In topology-land, of course, you can continuously deform this weird pseudo-prism into something we all know and love, namely a sphere. Or, in the fancy terms, you’re utilizing a homotopy equivalence between the two surfaces. The same thing can be done for arbitrary surfaces, as well, provided they are also closed.
For example, here’s a torus:
This is a neat way to visualize certain surfaces, especially when they cannot be embedded in three-dimensional space without self-intersections (such as the Klein bottle, or the real projective plane).
Andrew McCarthy, noted retard, writes about the release today of four torture memos written under the presidency and administration of George W. Bush (also a noted retard):
A terrible decision, pushed for aggressively by AG Eric Holder… Holder’s press release, which suggests that the interrogators are in fact guilty of torture (”‘The President has halted the use of the interrogation techniques described in these opinions, and this administration has made clear from day one that it will not condone torture,’ said Attorney General Eric Holder. ‘We are disclosing these memos consistent with our commitment to the rule of law.’”)…
If only McCarthy had bothered to adjust his ocular pitch about negative two degrees. You know, like when he’s “talking to a member of the opposite sex”. And by “talking”, I totally mean “thinking about tittie banging that loudmouthed broad”. If that wasn’t obvious.
To the person who broke into my car and stole my GPS:
I appreciate that you did not steal the pants lying in the back seat, though you clearly rifled through them.
I must remark, however, that the theft of my umbrella was a pretty dick thing to do.
Today it rained, and I did not have a spare.
I hope you die, forever.
