I’ve been busy with real work of late, so I haven’t had much time to blog here.  Not that there hasn’t been a-plenty to blog about with this health care crap going on still.

First and foremost, I want to wish a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to the five or six of you that read this blog.  I hope your new year is better than the last.

I’ve decided to just post a few things that have piqued my interest lately with no particular rhyme or reason.

The Known Universe

I’ve been waiting for my friend over on Blastrophysics to post about this, but I haven’t seen it there yet so I’ll post about it.   The American Museum of Natural History made a movie of the “known universe.”  The movie starts above the Himalayas and then continues to zoom out to show the observable universe with most everything that we’ve ever catalogued correctly placed in the video.  Here, take a look:

It’s hard to even comprehend how monumentally insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things.

More Equal

With this great health care debacle going on in Washington, there’s so much stupidity it’s really hard to pick just one thing to blog about.  The one that I’ve chosen today, is about the deal made to Nebraska in order to buy Senator Ben Nelson’s vote.

The deal, if the bill passes, will permanently exempt Nebraska from paying its share of Medicare costs.   Does Senator Nelson know how to suck that public teat or what?   I think it shows a certain amount of desperation on the Democrats part that they could even think up a deal like this, let alone actually act on it.  If he had held out a little longer he probably could have gotten a solid gold senate seat with wings on it thrown in so he could fly around the senate chamber and taunt the other senators.

Some states are already making noise about challenging this move legally.  What chaps my hide the most is what seems to be the “ask what your government can do for you” mentality that seems to pervade Washington at the moment.  For example, here’s a quote from that MSNBC article from the House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn:

“Rather than sitting here and carping about what Nelson got for Nebraska, I would say to my friends on the other side of the aisle: Let’s get together and see what we can get for South Carolina.”

There’s so much fail in that one sentence it could be a blog post all of its own.  So, I guess rather than being mad at my state’s senators for voting for this bloated crap legislation, I should be mad at them for not working a better deal for Oregon get more than its fair share of the pie.  What a wonderful lesson that is for our posterity.  I really hope every single citizen in our country joins me in making sure to vote against every incumbent for the next few years.

Blame Taco Bell

This one was bizarre enough to include here.  Not much information in the story, but something rattled San Diego County last Monday that no one is owning up to.  They’ve ruled out earthquake and military exercises so I’d start looking south if I were them.

Fixing Problems

I don’t recall where I came across the link to this story, but being a programmer the truth of it rang very true.  The story is about torpedoes in WWII.  About how they had a problem specific to the torpedo that they fixed, but unintentionally introduced a whole new problem.  The story isn’t very long but it’s definitely worth the read.

Programming is like that, when you’re fixing one thing you have be sure that your fix doesn’t have unintended consequences at some other point in the program. 

I’m sure there’s more stuff that I’ve come across but haven’t had time to blog, but I’ll close it here for now.  Happy Holidays!