admin – Page 316 – On The 8 Spot

September 16, 2008

Repost : Making Light: McCain's Health Care Plan

This hit home, health care is not simply getting medication and getting hospital care. Health care must be reframed to Care for Well Being, and people who do not get the whole package, quarterly physicals, psychological, nutritional, and of course the traditional care for sickness that people must demand from government to be a right that. We must not let people who do not have anything to die from us doing nothing.
from Making Light Blog here:

Here’s a fact: People who don’t have health insurance don’t get health care. Sure, if they’re unconscious or spurting blood they can come to the Emergency Room, but that’s a cruddy way of getting basic health screening that keeps things from getting to catastrophic conditions.
I’ve seen this myself. I’ve seen a man in his mid-forties die, choked on his own vomit, unconscious from undiagnosed diabetes. Why undiagnosed? He didn’t have health insurance to cover physicals. He was working three jobs—but they were all part-time jobs with no benefits.
Making Light: McCain’s Health Care Plan.

September 16, 2008

Oh No Another Excuse For Being Fat!

I Don’t Like This Because This Will Affect How I View My and Other People’s obesity, It just feels dirty blaiming genetics for everything , but nonetheless facts are facts!

Somehow I Think I Knew This Already…
from Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal by Brad DeLong
From Gordon’s Notes:
Exercise cannot control obesity gene associated weight gain: The title on this SciAm summary is silly…
Do I look fat in these genes? Exercise can cancel out effects of ‘heavy-weight’ DNA: Scientific American Blog: … Physically active people who carry gene mutations linked to obesity are no more likely to be overweight than those without the variants — as long as they exercise at least three hours a day…
Exercising 3+ hours a day is not compatible with life in a post-industrial world. If these results turned out be generalizable to a reasonable portion of the obese population (big if), then we’d know that exercise won’t control our expanding (sorry) obesity problem. We already know diet doesn’t work, so here’s hoping for great drugs …
Either that, or we get rid of our cars …

September 15, 2008

Repost: Anime Wine Mover

I confess that I had a pixar marathon this weekend (Incredibles, Ratatouille two times each), and It really helped me rediscover cooking again. I was planning a hackaton last saturday but it became a cookfest!
Thanks to j for the pointer: from here:

Anime Sommelier
Interesting piece from the Times Online on the biggest trend shaping the Japanese wine market:
Entire 20,000-bottle shipments of burgundy sell out within hours in Tokyo if he so much as looks at a glass, South Korea’s biggest film star is lined-up to play him in a TV drama and he has converted thousands of Asian women into the most discerning oenophiles.
In the rarefied world of superstar sommeliers, there may be none greater than Shizuku Kanzaki. The only snag is that he is a cartoon.
Despite his two-dimensional limitations, the hero of Kami no Shizuku (The drops of the gods) has emerged as an extraordinarily potent mover of Asian wine markets — far more so, say some in the industry, than flesh-and-blood wine critics.
The sales records of Japan’s largest wine merchants have been smashed because, in a single frame of comic, the hero has uttered a dreamy sigh over a 2006 New Zealand Riesling or closed his eyes in appreciation of a Saint-Aubin Premier Cru.
…….Shizuku’s adventures are read by about 500,000 Japanese each week and book collections of the comics have sold millions of copies. Wines that feature in his weekly manga activities regularly become overnight hits, particularly for Japan’s frenetic online wine markets.
In Taiwan a single reference to a relatively obscure French terroir shifted dozens of cases of the stuff within a few days.
…..
Watch your back Parker.
Posted by J at 8:43 PM
Labels: Miscellany
The Meaningfulness of Little Things: Anime Sommelier.

September 15, 2008

Idea For The Day

This is for Great Teacher Chuck!

China incentive of the day
from Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen
A handsome teacher in China is offering pupils autographed photos of himself to encourage them to work harder.
Ji Feng, also vice principal of Zhiyuan Foreign Language Elementary School, is so popular among students that a lot of them were asking him for pictures.
“I came up with the idea of giving them my signed pictures as a reward,” he told the Nanjing Morning Post.
Students who put in exemplary work can now pose for a picture with Ji who then signs the printed photograph.
Ji added: “It absolutely is not narcissism, but a way of encouragement. And only the students who perform the best can get such a reward.”
Here is the story, the pointer is from Allison Kasic.

September 14, 2008

Money and Blogging

I am not earning from my blog, through experiments I’ve seen ways of earning with simple changes in what I post. I write because I love writing, I blog because i’ve continually interacted with people who have enrich my life. I blog because I want to share. Money almost always changes everything, and oft times things become all for the the love of money. Like all great gold rush, and with the help of the invisible hand the money well will dry and the endless september of the blogging will finally begone!
from Doc Searls blog here:

What I don’t like is the corrupting influence of the advertising economy itself.
Right now online advertising is a river of gold flowing out of the ground in California, and millions of bloggers — along with countless new and traditional businesses — are rushing to grab some. In addition to the other economy-distorting consequences of this rush, it is corrupting blogging’s original nature, which is amateur in the best sense or the word. Amateur is derived from amatorem, the Latin word for lover.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with making money by blogging. I am saying there’s something wrong with blogging mostly to make money, or to let advertising determine the purpose of your blog and what you say with it. If your business is the latter, you’re flogging, not blogging.
There is an old and subtle distinction here. Businesses and professions at their best are ways to pursue passions and organize talents — not just to make money. Of course they can’t thrive unless they make money. But few of us go into business just saying “I can’t wait to return value to my shareholders.” Investors are the main exceptions, but the best of those know that human passions other than greed are at the heart of every good business.

September 12, 2008

Nice Idea For A Show

from Seth here:
All I know for sure is that it gives me a headache. I think there’s a huge opportunity for a trusted media source that takes on spin from all quarters and throws it back in the face of the spinner. Show them video of themselves from last week and ask them to respond. Oh, I’m probably just being a hopeful idealist.

September 12, 2008

Victimized

Do we have to be victimized for us to have compassion?
Damn, just got this idea for an Alan Moore Graphic Novel:
The main idea is that for people to be compassionate we need to be victimized, and in 2059 the government institutes a law that people have to be victimized to help them in the pursuit of happyness!
From Overcoming Bias here:

Guiltless Victims

When we are reminded of when others have victimized us, we are less able to see that we victimize others:

Wohl and Branscombe randomly divided [US] volunteers into groups. One group was reminded of the terrorist attacks, while another was told about Nazi atrocities in Poland during World War II. A third group was reminded of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. … Volunteers reminded about the Sept. 11 attacks were less likely to perceive the distress the [Iraq] war has caused many Iraqis, and less likely to feel collective responsibility, compared with volunteers told about the tragedy in Poland. … it makes no difference whether you remind them about the Sept. 11 attacks or about Pearl Harbor. …
The psychologists re-ran the experiment with Canadian volunteers. Two groups heard reminders of the Sept. 11 attacks and Pearl Harbor, while a third heard about a deadly terrorist attack in Sri Lanka. None of these tragedies affected Canadians personally. Wohl and Branscombe found no differences among the groups in whether they felt distress on behalf of Iraqis, or a sense of collective guilt. … The psychologists similarly found that Jewish volunteers in North America feel reduced guilt and responsibility for Israeli actions that cause suffering among Palestinians when they are first reminded about the Holocaust, compared with when they are reminded about the genocide in Cambodia.

September 12, 2008

I Think Most Bloggers Need To Read This

Sometimes form is an art unto itself! Think Comedy!
but often times people write just to write. There is nothing wrong with this.
The thing is at least once a week we should try to write something we are proud of, to at least try to fool ourselves that we are trying to do write something worthwhile!
from the Overcoming Bias blog here:

If you just want to look insightful yourself, then you’ll want to ape insight like everyone else. Use big words, attend to anal formatting rules, use many citations in academic articles, clever turns of phrase in popular articles, and so on. In literary articles give many quotes, in science articles show many data tables and statistical tests, etc.
But if you actually want to be insightful, you face a harder problem. Once you realize that most folks are merely aping surface features thought to correlate with insight, you see that doing this yourself may not actually help you to be insightful. You may face a choice between looking insightful and being insightful. Yes for some factors that correlate with insight, increasing your score on such factors will tend to cause you to be insightful, but for many other factors such an increase will reduce or have no effect on your insight.

September 10, 2008

Cold Call

I Gave Myself 6 months to put things in order before trying the Startup route again, this time not as an employee but as founder. The scars from the last startup haven’t healed completely but can’t sulk forever.
I know its a longshot but when I have finally done something/anything I think I’m gonna cold call/email Mark Cuban every little thing counts/matters for a startup and emailing him is not that much of a burden for me. I am expecting nothing , but hoping that I get a feedback, any kind be it the (f~ck you wasted 30 minutes of my life kind)!
I am quite excited just three and a half months to go!

from TechCrunch here:
How do people reach you?
Send me an email and in three paragraphs or less, tell me about your business. Dont say you need an NDA or want a call. Just tell me how youre going to make money and how I’m going to add value. Give me a URL if you have a website, I’ll figure it out. 5% of the people will hear back from me.
TC50 interview of Mark Cuban