Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Crazy

  • No Such Thing as Socialsecurityandmedicare

    This article makes an important point. Yes, it’s from Mother Jones, the publication that released the Romney video. And full disclosure, Mother Jones was delivered to my house pretty much my entire childhood due to my commie pinko parents.

    But if you are worried that Social Security has a crazy mismatch of benefits paid vs. received, this is a good chart to consider.

    As the article points out:

    Generally speaking, you’re always being conned when people talk about “entitlements.” That usually means Social Security and Medicare, but they’re very different things. Social Security is fine, and will stay fine with nothing more than tweaks. Medicare is a bigger problem, and it’s the one that needs the most attention.

    But that’s leftist propaganda…

  • Geek Humor

    I missed this live, but apparently there was a tweet-fest with the hashtag #fivewordtechhorrors last night (and it seems to be still going on, click the link). Some great ones:

    The CEO wants FTP access

    Flash required to view content

    We’re rolling out Windows Vista

    It’s done, just needs testing

    Marketing department has an idea

    Developer jokes:

    It is all top priority

    // not sure why this works

    It works on my machine

    and as a bonus, my favorite:

    Math is not important

    (if you don’t get it I can’t help you).

  • Sugar Doesn’t Make Kids Hyper

    As a parent, typing that title was painful. Of course it does. Have you ever seen a kid on Halloween?

    Yet the studies say it doesn’t. With the classic quote, “the plural of anecdote is not data”, this video both does a great job of explaining double-blind studies and tells us that the sugar effect is all in our minds.

    When kids were given a sugar free drink and parents were told it had sugar, the parents reported that the kids were more hyper. The scientist in me is convinced.

    The parent in me is still skeptical…

  • Hospital Pricing

    This is both hilarious and crazy.

    It turns out that hospitals are completely capable of reporting prices over the phone. Ninety-five percent of facilities could tell you the price of parking. Only 15%, however, could give you the price of an ECG. The prices ranged from $137 to $1200. I have no idea how such a variance could be justified.

    They also seemed to offer free or discounted parking almost all of the time. So they can be sensitive to consumer demand. Just, apparently, not for actual care.

  • One of these things is not like the others

    Courtesy The Incidental Economist. Life expectancy (y-axis) and health care spending per capita (x-axis).

    We’re better than the Czech Republic! (at only 4x the cost)

  • Brilliant

    Sure, they’re getting old, but this is fantastic news. Monty Python has influenced my sense of humor (insert joke here) more than anything.

    If you aren’t familiar with Monty Python, feel free to stop reading at this point.

    Monty Python and the Holy Grail is still my favorite movie (and I can still quote pretty much the whole thing, including deleted scenes (“Dennis, have you seen the cat’s front legs?”).

    Some classics from the original show:

    From The Holy Grail:

  • Google in the 80s

    Hilarious. And functional.

    image

  • Change Blindness

    Courtesy of The Big Picture:

  • The Top of the Golden Gate

    These pictures were submitted anonymously to The Bold Italic (presumably from someone who climbed to the top illegally), and they are awesome.

  • We Are a Blade of Grass

    Via Neil deGrasse Tyson:

    If a football field were a timeline of cosmic history, cavemen to now spans the thickness of a blade of grass in the end zone