Deja Vu All Over Again

There was a movie release in 1981 called "Rollover", in which the ticking bomb is the question:  will the Arab oil barons rollover their investments in US bonds. Sounds like current concern over whether China will keep buying US bonds.

Ineffective Bureaucrats at Apple

Apparently someone at Apple forgot about changing from daylight savings time to standard time and vice versa, so new I-phones misbehave when the switch occurs.  I can only imagine the glee with which conservatives would greet such a mistake by some government bureaucrats, but this episode won't lead anyone to doubt the efficacy of private enterprise.

Inside Versus Outside

Probably as long as we have had government, people have been critical of it.  And as long as we have had government, many such critics find it's different when you're working within government.  Here Ned Hodgman links to an interview of someone who moved into FDA, and learned that lesson.

Horses. Bears. and Bison

In the 19th century there was controversy over whether horses, when galloping, ever got all four feet off the ground.  One of the first time-lapse photographers proved they did.  (Foregoing based on aging memory).

I was reminded of that when I saw the pictures of a bear chasing a bison down a road, CNN via Treehugger.
When you're running for your life, or for your dinner, you get all four feet off the ground.

And a Merry Christmas to Federal Employees from the Tea Party

Via The Monkey Cage, here's a blog post outlining the logic for a government shutdown in December.

On Not Knowing the Negative

One frustration of an RSS reader (I assume it applies to all, not just Google) is you never know when the feed stops working.  Is it that the blogger got tired, switched to Facebook or Twitter, lost his ISP, or maybe died?  Or did the feed stop working?  Or, worst of fates for a blogger, does one never wonder about them.

Anyhow, I've discovered my Berry Deep France feed wasn't working, so belatedly found some of Dirk Beauregarde's posts, including this moving one on the death of his mother.

So, I Was Wrong

My prediction for Senate election results was totally wrong.  Now looks like 51 Dems plus 2 independents.

Props to Serb President

Listening to BBC TV news concerning a visit of apology by the Serbian president to the Srbenica (sp?) site where Croats were killed (think I got that right--wasn't listening closely).  Watched "Nanking" documentary last night, covering the "rape of Nanking" by Japanese military after its capture in 1937 war. It took the Japanese until 1995 to apologize. So the Serb gets credit for responding much much faster than the Japanese.

46 Buried. 25 Killed

Now that's a headline begging for a story to be written under it. It's a true headline according to this extension piece.
It's a reminder that the way things happen makes a difference.  If we had a coal mine accident which killed 25 people it would be a big, big story.  But we really have 46 accidents where farmers are buried in grain storage bins, killing 25.  There's no story there.

There's Transparency and There's Transparency Which Works

The Reston Hospital Center has tried to be more transparent, by measuring the response time in their ER and posting the expected wait time on the Internet. (It was 9 minutes when I checked in when drafting this.)

I don't know whether they're measuring the extent to which people are using this, but they should. It seems to me like something which would be useful, assuming you're a person who uses the ER as a substitute for a doctor.  Maybe I'm naive, but I'd guess there's not too many of those in Reston--it's rich enough most people will have health insurance and a doctor.

Of course there's also the issue of image building.  Even if no one uses this, it does give the image of an up-to-date institution, which one wants if you have to go to the hospital.  And it might have been easier to sell the idea of measuring ER response time to your ER staff if sold as a way to inform the customers, rather than as a way to make them more productive.  I'm assuming that if they can cut the response time, they've reengineered their business process to be more efficient.