Category: observations

What do people die of (WISQARS)?:

Top 6 causes of death by years of potential life before age 65 (US, 2002)
Unintentional Injury (2,159,266)
Malignant Neoplasms (1,903,274)
Heart Disease (1,434,511)
Perinatal Period (924,364)
Suicide (666,398)
Homicide (579,268)

Over 50% (1,166,780) of the years lost due to Unintentional Injury are due to motor vehicle injuries. If we counted it as a separate category it alone would be the third leading cause of death. Drive carefully, folks.

That’s a surprising statistic: auto accidents account for more than half the years lost to premature death.

To follow up on the ordeal of overflowing washing machines, dead dishwashers, et al, I have ordained that there is a special circle in Hell for electricians who add circuits to existing switch panels without labeling same. And adjacent to that is another cozy spot for appliance manufacturers who ship appliances without fittings that their products require and which sell for the outlandish sum of $3.41. Yes, Frigidaire/Electrolux, I’m looking in your direction. If I need a 90° male fitting coupled with with a 3/8 inch compression fitting — hardly the kind of thing one would just have handy in the kitchen junk drawer — why not ship one? I suspect a large transnational appliance manufacturer could knock the price down even lower.

So I have a new dishwasher, after one trip to buy it and two more to buy wire nuts and the aforementioned fitting. Dishwashers are actually an easy appliance to install: they’re physically light and the connections are pretty simple to make.

And how was your weekend/Mother’s Day?
Continue reading “purgatorio”

I needed to find some way of burning a DVD with this “unsupported” DVD drive I have, and just assumed there was a way:

Mac Help – iDVD Hack/Easter Egg – Burn DVDs to an External Burner or an Image:

Seems to work. And all due to a couple of empty files?

Now playing: World Party by World Party from the album “Private Revolution” | Get it

I checked my site (at the urging of someone whose RSS reader is more persnickety than mine) and found that none of my feeds are validating.

I checked a friend and his do (mostly). And I note that he is still using 1.2.2.

Some talk at WordPress HQ that a plugin might be to blame but I haven’t found that to be the case.

Mark A. R. Kleiman: A vaccine against tooth decay?:

On Thursday, as I was leaving the UCLA dental clinic after having a crown re-cemented, I paused to read a research poster (whether student or faculty I couldn’t tell) about the prospects for developing a vaccine against dental caries (cavities). The poster claimed that vaccine development was technically feasible, though not likely to happen quickly, and that immunity was likely to be passed down from mother to child in breast milk, so that vaccinating one generation would protect future generations.

Where would I sign up?

[Introspect: what proportion of your lifetime income would you, personally, pay to never again have a filling, a crown, or a root canal, including the cost of the procedures themselves? A tenth of 1%? That is, if you expect your lifetime income-stream to average $50,000 a year, would you be willing to pay $500 a year of that to avoid all caries-related dental work? Surely not less, even if your teeth are much better than mine. I’d pay a couple of percent without thinking twice. Gross World Product is running about $50 trillion a year; a tenth of one percent of that is $50 billion. (Yes, I know the relevant number is personal income rather than gross product, but for back-of-the-envelope purposes we can ignore the difference.) What’s the value of a stream of benefits of $50 billion per year? Assuming a discount rate 10 points higher than the rate of growth of income, and a useful life of 20 years starting 10 years from now gives a present value of about $180 billion. Compared to numbers in that range, whatever we’d actually have to spend is rounding error.]

Next, they need to develop a way of tricking the body to grow teeth to replace lost of broken ones: imagine a broken tooth being simply removed while it’s identical replacement grows back in. This has a special place in my heart right now.

Failed Business Model Tee :: Creative Commies :: Giant Robot Printing Store:

a red shirt with the text “your failed business model is not my problem…” printed above the Creative Commies logo. Because, seriously, it’s about time they got a new one.

I just ordered mine.

Every Dog Has His Day from the album “Every Dog Has His Day” by Let’s Active

I was re-organizing the office/data center/room full ‘o cables today and needed to reboot the router/internet server. Judge of my amazement when Comcast refused to supply a new network address for it.

How do I know it’s that and not something else? Easy: I plugged in my iBook, got a different address, and all was well. Then I plugged the other machine in, nothing. In fact, I was getting the same address it had before, even after I wiped out the dhclient.leases file.

I swapped the cables to the cards, adjusted the myriad of files that needed it, rebooted and there it is, networked and ready, with a new network address (different from the one it had before for 25 days or so and from the one the iBook was issued). So obviously, they’re doing something incomprehensible like binding to a hardware address and refusing to expire old leases upon request.

Calling Speakeasy just moved up my to-do list.

Sphinx:

Cat with wings:

Sphinx: