Christian? Maybe I should rename him Jewish

One of my concerns, in the wake of Scruffy's death, has been to find a playmate for Shadow. Friday I went down to the Elmsford shelter and filled out paperwork, and I saw several lots of cats, including a beautiful little grey cat with a white chest, who was very affectionate and allowed herself to be picked up. She was absolutely perfect, but then it appeared that she doesn't get along with other cats very well. So, no go. By the time the shelter closed I hadn't found a cat that fit the bill, so I left empty handed.

I had completed the paperwork, however, and although I was up at West Point for the weekend, I did have time to get some of the litter and food that the shelter uses, to make the transition for Hypothetical Cat a bit easier. I returned to the shelter today, and quickly found another nice grey cat, but as I petted him I guess he got overexcited and he bit me with enough force to draw blood. He went back into his cage. The next cat that seemed a possibility, a cute black and white kitty, turned out to be part of a pair, so since I don't have the room for three cats, that cat was also a no go. But the shelter staff led me to a largish grey/brown tabby named Christian, who is about two years old and was a stray until the beginning of the summer. He was very affectionate, and seemed ideal. I guess they checked my references over the weekend, because they let me take him home right then:


For the moment, he is living in the bathroom (which, as was pointed out to me, is much bigger than a cage) so the cats can have the opportunity to get to know each other a bit without having the opportunity to maul each other.

The two cats have sort of met. I had the bathroom door open a crack so they could see and smell each other. Christian seemed curious, as did Shadow, but she also gave a tiny hiss - like a brief bit of soft static on the radio, so I don't think she's ready to accept him yet.

Why healthcare is expensive

I just stumbled across this post, about what appears to be a current debate in England regarding what type of medical care should be provided by the state (England has socialized medicine, so in theory, all medical care is provided by the state). Two issues are on the table:
1 - should the state pay for expensive medical care that is unlikely to yield much benefit?
2 - should the state pay for medical care that is needed due to the patient's own folly, e.g. a heart-lung transplant for a chronic smoker?
The writer of the post seems to think that the state should indiscriminately pay for these things. I disagree. But before I go intot he reasons why, I'd like to discuss why medicine is so expensive to begin with.

We have yet to figure out how to pay for all of medical care that people lay claim to. There are a few reasons for this.
* Many people are their own worst enemies when it comes to maintaining their own health. People eat too much of the wrong foods, and not enough of the right ones. People fail to get adequate exercise. People smoke, drink, and fill their bodies with all manner of noxious substances. The result, of course, is poor health.
* Much of modern Western medicine is expensive. CTs and MRIs are useful, but pricey. Lab work can be costly. Pharmaceutical costs can rival mortgage payments. And neither medical education nor malpractice insurance are cheap.
* More medical care is given than is needed. Reasons for this include defensive medicine and patient demand (e.g. demand for antibiotics to treat a common cold).
* Many people without access to a true primary care provider are left using the emergency room for all of their care. ER beds are among the most expensive beds in the hospital, so using one to treat a common cold is extremely wasteful.
* Similarly, the complicated nature of insurance sometimes makes a visit to the ER appear to be the easiest way to go.
* Some people delay seeking medical care (often because they can't afford it, or can do so only with real difficulty) until their problems become severe; severe problems are more costly to treat than minor ones are.

So, our medical costs are high, and in the forseeable future, they are only going to get higher (greying of the population, etc).

Next: the necessary choices we face (link fixed 5 Feb 2008 0207hrs)

Does anyone remember the card catalog?

There used to be a piece of furniture that was standard in any library of more than, say, 100 books. It was large, heavy, and cumbersome, and the space it occupied could have been replaced with every book ever written by Stephen King, plus all those by Nora Roberts. The more research-minded could have stored the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary in its space, and perhaps the Encyclopedia Britannica as well. This piece of furniture was the card catalog.

I don't miss the card catalog.

What I do miss is the reverence with which the card catalog was held - reverence enough that one day in school we all trooped over to the school's library to be shown how to use that vast monstrosity of alphabetized index cards, sorted by author, title, or subject. "Pay attention," we were all told, "you'll need to know this."

As it turned out, we didn't need to know it. Or at least, not for very long. By the time we got to college there were electronic catalogs, and just around the corner was that greatest of all catalogs: the internet search engine. Need to know when the Russo-Japanese war was fought? Google it. Want to know who wrote "Leaves of Grass?" Ask Jeeves. Curious as to how the chunnel was dug? Plug it into Yahoo. The search engine bypasses the card catalog entirely, taking you directly to the information you want - if you know how to use it.

Was anyone taught how to actually use a search engine? Perhaps I was absent that day. But it seems to me that the electronic search engine can take more time to use thant he card catalog, if you don't really know what you're doing. Which is why I rejoiced when I found this little tool (rejoiced? well, I tagged it for delicious, which is pretty much the same thing, right?). As you create your search query on this overlay of Google, using any or all of several advanced options, it shows you how to create the same search directly in a standard search box. Basically, it teaches you all of the syntax and operators needed to make a quick, useful search. Halleluijah.

The exam answers you wish you gave

I don't know where these came from originally, but I first saw them in an email at school. Click to enlarge.

Survival of the most valued

Yesterday on NPR, or perhaps the day before, I heard a spot on the domestication of the cat. Current theory proposes that early, proto-domesticated-cats would have been valued for their abilities to catch and destroy vermin. We can also propose that those cats who were encouraged to stay (or at least, not chased away) would have been those who were the most pleasing to the people in need of vermin control. Part of a cat's appeal would be the nature of its voice, and as cat owners know, there is something appealing in [most] house cats' calls. There is something endearing about the timbre, volume, inflection - something about their calls is socially encouraging.

The speaker compared the socially encouraging nature of house cats' voices to those of wildcats in the zoo, which he found sounded "permanently angry". Truthfully, I might be permanently angry if I was incarcerated in a zoo, and I don't know that I've ever seen a zoo inmate that I'd have called happy, but the point for this discussion is that wildcats, which I gather are genetically similar enough to house cats to successfully mate with them, have voices that are much less pleasant to our ears. The proposal, therefor, is that humans have unnaturally selected house cats for their voices, and for other features we find desirable.

At first glance, this may not seem much different than any form of natural selection - those cats whose traits best enabled them to survive in the world of humans flourished, while those cats who always seemed to be pissed-off failed to survive and procreate. But to look at the issue this way overlooks one key difference. This selection of cats was driven by human intervention. There may not have been a plan behind it, but there was definite intent - "oh, this cat is cute and has a pleasant voice; I think I'll feed it and provide it with shelter."

The phenomenon we describe as natural selection looks only at the relationship between the individual and its environment, and does not consider any guiding intelligence on the part of either. In the case of house cats (and dogs, and domesticated species generally) we find an element of intelligent design, for although we cannot design a species from scratch (yet), we can selectively breed individuals to enhance traits we prefer and reduce traits that we don't. We have hijacked Darwin.

Which leads me to a discussion of healthcare. Individuals who in the natural course of events would die without reproducing are allowed, through the tools and techniques of medicine, to survive, and their genes, including those that made them sickly and inclined to die, are preserved in the gene pool. Thus, instead of naturally shedding undesirable, and even harmful, genes; which would keep the gene pool and the species strong; we keep them and make our species as a whole weaker.

If our medical technology ever gives up or out, then we as a species may be doomed.

Revenge effect

Edward Tenner, in his book Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences ((C) 1996, Knopf), coined the phrase revenge effect to describe the unintended negative consequences of technology. An example is the revenge effect of the air conditioner: air conditioners work by exporting heat and excess moisture from a building, making the air inside the building more comfortable; the revenge effect is that, since the air conditioners move this heat and moisture outside, the outside world becomes hotter, more humid, and less comfortable. This is most noteworthy in cities, where thousands, if not millions, of air conditioners do their part to made the outside air (and the inside air, for those who lack air conditioning) hot, humid, and miserable. Like this air-conditioning example, many revenge effects undermine the expected gains of the involved technology.

Revenge effects can be found in many, many disciplines, but some of the largest revenge effects involve disasters. New Orleans is an easy example: dikes and walls allowed the city to expand into otherwise flood-prone low lying areas, with the revenge effects being 1) the constant requirement for pumping water out of the city, and 2) catastrophic flooding when the dikes broke. But New Orleans is not the only example.

For many years, the forestry service had a policy of suppressing all forest fires, whether naturally occurring or not. At the time, this seemed a good idea, uncontrolled fire being generally a destructive thing, and money, men, and machines were poured into this effort, successfully containing and extinguishing forest fires. The eventual result, however, was the build-up of the underbrush that such fires had previously periodically cleared out. Today, forest fires burn hotter and fiercer than they used to, destroying trees that tended to survive normal fires, because the flames feed off of the built-up underbrush. Our previous fire suppression activities have made today's fores harder to suppress.

I have previously discussed risk homeostasis as it relates to driving, and arguably, this is another type of revenge effect.

Revenge effects are difficult to avoid, in part because they are difficult to predict. Everything is interrelated and interconnected. But they do deserve special attention, because the astute observer may see them before they become severe. Of course, the solution may well have revenge effects of its own. Two steps forward; one step back.

Yes, sir; no, sir

I've written about my SAT students' propensity to address me as Mr Badger, rather than just calling my by my first name as my DAT and MCAT students tend to do. I'm now teaching at West Point, as well, and my students here address me as "sir". I find this a bit humorous, a bit peculiar, a bit touching, and at times a bit unsettling.

Part of my reaction relates to my feeling very much their contemporary, in spite of the fact that I'm instructing them on the MCAT, which I have taken, and they haven't. Admittedly, though, I am as old as they are plus half again, and maybe that makes me less their contemporary than I tend to feel.

There is also the sense I have that using sir when addressing an instructor or authority figure (or maybe even a civilian, based on my encounters on campus) has been all but beaten into them. I'm not sure that they always realize that they're saying it. No doubt there are some psychological or sociological observations that could be made about that.

I'm having difficulty stating why I find it a bit touching, though. Maybe if I figure that out I'll come back and leave it as a comment.