Ratings for reviews will appear above the fold, while the review itself will appear below the fold to avoid spoilers for anyone that wants to go into it with a blank slate.
Jean-Paul’s rating: 1/5 stars
a.k.a. Die Hard With a Paycheck. a.k.a. A Good Day to See Any Other Movie.
There is so much beauty in this world that is completely invisible to us. Take the infrared for instance. There is so much light swirling around us all the time that we never see with our primitive eyes. Luckily, though, we have science! And that’s how we can get videos like this:
I found this through my main source for all things beautiful in the universe, Phil Plait. While watching the video, I noticed that certain things like the sky seemed to be coming through in color and I thought to myself, “Wait, that can’t be right…”. If it’s in infrared, the sky almost certainly shouldn’t be blue. I then read Phil Plait’s explanation of the video and he pointed it out as well! I love it when I notice things that don’t seem quite right and then get confirmation of my doubts. Skeptic-sense engaged!
The United States has a long term budget problem. That problem has nothing to do with too much spending on defense or building bridges to nowhere. That problem is almost entirely a healthcare problem. Medicare and Medicaid are, by far, the largest drivers of our deficits. If anyone tells you otherwise, they either don’t understand large numbers or they are deliberately trying to mislead you.
As the Baby Boomers get older, the costs of Medicare and Medicaid will increase dramatically. Or will they? Yes, yes they will. But! But, it’s looking likelier that things are not nearly as bad as everybody predicted they would be.
You see, the problem has been that, for decades now, the cost of healthcare has been growing much faster than everything else in the economy. So, predictions of future costs has always assumed that Medicare and Medicaid would continue to grow much faster than the economy. For the last few years, that hasn’t been true. Healthcare appears to have started growing apace with the economy. This changes everything. Those massive predicted deficits almost disappear.
Of course, the $500 billion question is if healthcare costs growing apace with the economy is a new normal or a temporary adjustment. I believe that it is a new normal. It seems economically dubious that healthcare spending would continue to grow faster than the broader economy forever. I can’t think of another industry that has had this long of a run rising costs for customers. Healthcare isn’t like other industries, though, so maybe that thinking is flawed. With Obamacare and the level of governmental oversight that it brings, I’m guessing that healthcare spending will slow down as a greater emphasis is placed on bring costs down.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a case challenging a key component of the Voting Rights Act next week. Given the current makeup of the Court, his does not bode well for free elections.
At issue is Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is the section that gives muscle to the Act. There are certain states and certain counties in those states which shall remain nameless (*cough* The South *cough*) which have an unfortunate history of disenfranchising people who, shall we say, are a shade darker than the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Section 5 requires those states/counties to seek Federal approval (preclearance) before making changes to election laws. This can, at times, be a significant burden. Simple things like changing polling places to across the street requires Federal approval. But because of the counties’ history of changing polling places to across the county, these things need to be done.
There are recent examples of state laws being rejected because of Voting Rights Act violations. South Carolina’s Voter ID law for instance. The number of rejects has certainly dropped significantly since enactment, though. But that isn’t the point. The entire Voting Rights Act has been deemed Constitutional in the past. The current Court, though, is only in favor of precedent if it fits within their narrow world view. And their narrow world view is likely to ignore Constitutionality and precedent and say to the world that things are better now and those states and counties no longer have to seek preclearance.
I am somewhat sympathetic to complaints that it is unfair to single out certain states and counties for preclearance. Can their past sins ever be legislatively forgiven? If we lived in a fair world, the answer would be yes. But this is far from a fair world which is why we need the Voting Rights Act in the first place.
This past election cycle has shown that preclearance is still a good idea. I think the ideal outcome would be to rule preclearance Constitutional, but the singling out of certain states and counties Unconstitutional. The result would be to force all states to request preclearance before changing voting laws. This would certainly be unwieldy at first. That could be fixed by a 21st Century Voting Rights Act that deals away with the bothersome portions of preclearance like moving a polling place across the street.
This may come as a surprise to you, but big things are big. Take the Moon for instance. Pretty big. Except if you compare it to the Earth. And the Earth is pretty big except if you compare it to the Sun. When you scale up by orders of magnitude it becomes very difficult for the human brain to comprehend what exactly is being talked about.
That’s how politicians can throw around numbers like one trillion and scare people. Numbers that large are so far out of our everyday experience that we can’t wrap our head around them. I liken it to how the trip to Grandma’s house seemed like it took forever when you were a child but now it seems like a short jaunt in the car. You have to work regularly with large numbers for them to make sense. If you don’t work with large numbers, you should be very cautious of what conclusions you draw from anyone throwing large numbers at you. It is likely that they’re taking the large numbers out of context to make them scarier than they actually are.
All that to say that when you try to wrap your head around things that are big, it’s good to have a familiar frame of reference to compare to. That’s what makes this picture of the continental United States superimposed on the Moon so useful. The U.S. is about 3,400 kilometers across at its widest longitude and the Moon has a circumference of around 11,000 kilometers. So this looks about right if it isn’t perfect.
Kind of cool, huh?
I was thinking about the incredibly awesome meteor that decided to streak through the skies of Russia last week and something occurred to me. How close to nuclear war did we come?
Think about it. A rocket-like object suddenly starts hurling itself across the Russian sky and explodes with nuclear-like ferocity. You have to imagine that someone within the Russian army was getting an itchy trigger finger while all of this was going on. Especially since many other close calls have occurred over lesser incidents. I guess it all depends on if Russia was even capable of detecting the meteor on radar.
Maybe Russia has become more careful with their nuclear triggers since the Cold War has ended. What about other countries though? What if a meteor struck Pakistan? Would we be looking at a nuclear war between Pakistan and India? I would say that the odds are pretty good of an overreaction on either side’s part given the tensions between those two countries.
Chances are that if a meteor hits us, we’re not going to see it coming. And given humanity’s penchant for the dramatic, chances are some government will overreact to it. Our biggest threat in the event of a meteor strike is likely not the meteor itself but the actions of the government of the country that it hits. And that’s scary.
No, that is not a typo. It turns out that, due to an oversight, Mississippi has never actually ratified the 13th Amendment banning slavery. Better late than never?
I find it very hard to believe that this was an actual oversight, but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. Still, Mississippi didn’t actually vote for ratification until 1995. 1995! How is that even possible? I wonder if each year until 1995 there was someone that said, “Maybe we should finally ban slavery?” And the overwhelming response was, “Dude, too soon! Too soon! Our wounds are still healing!”
More proof of a post-racial America.
Never before has data analysis been used to better serve humanity. I present to you the porn actress demographics study. Not that I have any first-hand knowledge of such things, but I would have expected there to be many more blondes.
Have you ever wondered what the United States would look like if all fifty states had the same population? Wonder no longer!
How cool is that? It’s very difficult to conceptualize how dense certain parts of the U.S. actually are and how sparse other parts are. This map really makes it easier. Look at how large the new state of Ogalalla is even though it contains Denver.
This map also shows how much room for population grown the U.S. has. Places like the United Kingdom and Germany have 200 people per square kilometer. The United States? 34. Our population is around 315 million people right now. If we had the population density of Germany or the U.K., we’d have 1.8 BILLION people.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Good news from the Arctic Ocean! I’m just kidding, there is never good news from the Arctic Ocean unless you happen to own a shipping company. The Arctic sea ice is even lower than the direst of predictions.
In 1979, there were 16,855 cubic kilometers of sea ice during the sea ice minimum. In 2012, just 3,261 cubic kilometers. That’s down 80% in 33 years. Scientists are now predicting an ice free summer for the Arctic ocean in as a decade from now.
There is very little we can do at this point to save the Arctic ice. It’s as good as gone. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do anything to prevent future warming, though. We might not be able to save the Arctic, but we can still save ourselves.