Berlyn decided he wanted to bring a stuffed doll to the daycare today. Happens that this doll is a teddy bear sized stuffed version of the Hindu god Ganesh from the movie "My Friend Ganesh" that my sister sent him from India. He was very considerate in taking off all the bangles so that "Nobody would break them" and was pretty excited to hang it in his cubby.
The lady who watches the kids, who I know is religious, asked what it was. When I told her her face changed to a frown and she said, "Oh!". Apparently having a graven image in the classroom isn't something she enjoys.
After telling me with a shocked expression that they have "Over a million gods in India" she said, "They have so many problems over there!". I left it at that and didn't expound on the similarity of the hindu gods to the trinity, or any deeper meaning. I'm beginning to think that literalist religion is antithetical to multiculturalism, which is no surprise given the "my way or the highway" beliefs of most monotheistic religions.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Wow...this raised the hackles
Favre a Viking?
Looks like it finally happened. The nemesis of Vikings football has signed a contract to play for the other side. Interesting...
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Wow..just, wow!
WOW! This takes the old, "If a savage is born and dies without knowing Christ?" question and puts it on it's ear. It's more like, "If a person is born Hindu, and you're to dumb to understand what that means, does that excuse your crude and racist attempts at conversion?"
And sometimes I catch myself wondering why surveys come back saying that most kids can't find Iraq on a map, or that only 18% of Americans know what party is in control of the house, who the secretary of state is, and who the prime minister of Britain is? This video explains why. Stupid people really do exist...and in vastly greater numbers than one might expect.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Liberal Bias? Not CNN
LONDON, England (CNN) -- Britons including Prime Minister Gordon Brown have leapt to the defense of their creaking healthcare service after President Barack Obama's plans for a similar system in the United States were branded "evil" by Republicans.
The above quote is the lead from a CNN story about how the British are reacting to Republican criticism of their national health system. What bothers me is the use of the word "creaky", something that would be fine if it were addressed in the article but is not. This leaves an obvious bias in the article, but a completely unfounded one. I am not British, but I have heard no rumors of NHS being on it's last legs financially or any other way. There may be problems, but calling it creaky is the pot calling the kettle black. If NHS is creaky our system is a smoking wreck.
Second, the statement, "Barack Obama's plans for a similar system in the United States" is simply a fabrication. The bills in Congress right now are nothing like Britain's NHS. NHS is a single payer system directly funded by taxpayer dollars in a country with virtually no private insurance plans except in niche markets. Obama's plan, or rather those written by congress as Obama never formally set out a plan, is at least 90% based on private health insurance with the possibility of a small public option which may or may not grow depending on who you talk to. The congressional bills are based on a mandate that requires people to have insurance, and requires insurers to cover everyone, this is lightyears away from single payer, government run systems. NHS does not mandate anyone have insurance, in Britain simply being in the country is enough to guarantee you are covered.
I personally think it is shameful that we aren't looking harder at single payer, although possibly less like the British system given that we obviously can't completely eradicate the private insurance systems overnight. Most of the waste in healthcare is in the inane billing systems set up by insurance companies, and the costs as insurers scramble to jettison anyone who might possibly be sick now or in the future, causing huge costs down the road which are eventually absorbed as bankruptcies (medical bills being the second most prevalant reason for bankruptcy in this country) and by the federal government through low income insurance like Medicaid and payments to hospitals to cover emergency room care for the uninsured.
The idea of allowing for-profit health insurance is sickening to me. Should health be driven by profit motive? I don't think so. Yet there is little talk of reigning in the ridiculously lavish spending on executive pay in the insurance industry. Republicans?? I hear plenty of Republican grumbling over wall street pay, why are you silent on the excesses of insurance? At the very least I would like to see insurance forced to be run as non-profit. Although Blue Cross (the largest non-profit insurer) is far from perfect, there is a much lower temptation to profit through denying care in that system than a purely for-profit one.
CNN is a terrible source of news, but this article is anything but liberally biased. Has anyone showed this to Fox News? They should be crowing from the rooftops over this one.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
I feel so loved
Moscow was picked for one of the new so called "Atheist Billboards". I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Great Fathers day
What a great fathers day. My mom decided to make up blueberry pancakes that were cooking just as I woke up. Yumm!! Then Berlyn and I went to Moscow and met up with Mommy. Berlyn did an admirable job of keeping his fathers day secret from me for a whole week...then slipped on the way to the mall with the revelation that we were going to the batting cages. That was alot of fun. I haven't hit a ball in a long time.
Berlyn is a natural with a bat. He has no fear whatsoever of the yellow balls flying at him, and steps right into the pitch. He got two turns in the cage adn hit 8 balls by himself, and a bunch more with my help. He really smacked the last one of the day. You can see it on the video.
Then we dropped into the icecream shop in the mall and had ice cream cones. Yummy! All in all it's been a very nice fathers day.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Holy Sh**, F***n' Insane
Who knew that the falls I went to all the time as a kid would be run by a kayaker. Previous to this the people who where best known for going over where drunk college kids falling off the rim by accident...none of whom survived.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Take that...
...Second, I like very much the spatial take of your analysis. I think it is creative, useful, and effective...I think it makes an interesting contribution in framing the study. Third, in the second half of the paper, you do a very good job of explaining the information, then analyzing and summarizing it. This is terrific...In the end, this is a well researched and well framed history. I hope that it served you well in some way in your graduate work.
Prof. X
This goes out to the chumps who thought I'd lost the touch since my undergrad days. I'm an OC*. I took my knocks in the 90's but don't be half-steppin', I can still write a term paper in the 00's better than half ya'll sucka's!
Just kidding. But I am pretty proud of the fact that I can still write 28 pages of academic primary research in less than 24 hours, hand it in two minutes before the deadline with the paper still warm, and get an A. Add to that only two hours of sleep while writing it, and averaging less than five hours of sleep for the previous 5 days. As a bonus throw in two previous all-nighters that week. Heck yeah, bring it on!
*Original Christiansen. The last name of the prof who started us all out freshman year with the expectation of a 50 page term paper...and didn't give us the research topic until two weeks before the end of classes. (It ain't Compton, but it was certainly a school of hard knocks that semester)
Friday, May 15, 2009
I'm Done!!!
I turned in my last paper of the semester today. It feels great to be done. For various reasons this semester has been the busiest I've had so far and rivals only my first semester at Mac in terms of the sheer number of all-nighters. I'm to tired to explain, here's a pictorial of the events of my last week.
Friday, May 08, 2009
Feeling really smart...
...and incredibly dumb at the same time.
I've beaten myself about the head all week trying to figure out a homework question for my multivariate statistics class. I finally gave up on it and focused on preparing for my first masters committee meeting this morning (Which went well BTW). I actually turned in the assignment before class today figuring it was a lost cause.
Then...the prof was illustrating another unrelated problem and there was the answer, clear as day in front of me! I feel quite smart at the moment. Unfortunately the answer was aggravatingly simple. Still...it's nice to figure something out in this class. The professor has made it a constant struggle with his own unpreparedness and inability to get the simple concepts across, let alone the complex ones.
Still, I can now explain why minimizing the trace of the pooled covariance matrix of a dataset is equivalent to minimizing the sum of squared error criterion when doing discriminant analysis. Try dropping that nugget of knowledge at your next dinner party!
I'm quickly becoming a super-nerd!!
About Me
- Jens Hegg
- I am a Masters student in Water Resources at University of Idaho studying Chinook salmon life history through heavy isotope analysis of their ear bones (otoliths). Previously I have been an itinerant scientist helping to design next gen coronary stents with a humongous corporation with stints in plastics bioengineering, analytical chemistry, and fisheries ecology. Outside of work I enjoy time with my 3 year old son, playing acoustic guitar and anything that gets me outside and away from cubicle life.
