Chouyu

chouyu_31


The ravings of a sane person.

People I choose to associate myself with.


(no subject)
atelierlune
My left ankle stays swollen. It hurts on the left side. I don't recall doing anything to it. I'm supposed to keep it elevated above my heart, but I can't type on my computer or game heavily and do that. It seems like a waste of the weekend.

This morning was the opener for my local farmer's market. I came in and bought my mother about 5 pounds of cod from the fish guy, ramps, and microgreens (lettuces and pea shoots, stuff like that). Due to insurance and other snafus, my mother hasn't received a paycheck or any kind of settlement for her hand surgery even though she's been expecting money she was told had been sent to her at the beginning of last week.

My mother has been asking me about how much she owes me for the various things I help out with around the house - the microwave and helping her with the mortgage and food and stuff. She's been talking in the range of $300 to $400 and I just demure and say she should focus on doing what she can... but part of me wants to bring up past years where I've helped her out with medicine and bills, reminding her of all the other times she said she'd pay me back and didn't, and that the tally is more like $2000 or something, but that's just not right, is it? I don't know how to say that to her without sounding entitled or greedy or like I'm just another bill collector or something. I feel like I ought to be scolded for either expecting nothing or wanting everything. I don't like it when my mother tells me she's going to get me things or do things for me and then it just goes by without a word though. I would rather she didn't, I guess. It's awkward for me and it shouldn't be.

A dream: wandering around in a Fallout 3 style wasteland. I enter a half-bombed-out research facility in time to see a woman killed by a flock of mutant doves who bore holes in her. I don't actually see the doves though, there's just a flittering, flicking sound. She's screaming and there's blood showering through the broken door through which I half see her. In another room there are raiders lying around, talking, having sex. They don't see me. There are other broken doors and tanks and things which animals that were being experimented upon must have been and surely there are more animals wondering around the facility. I have lots of weapons, and that is my only comfort. I think to myself that I can and will kill the raiders, the doves, and whatever else is in the building. That I should kill them. I keep walking down the hall and the woman being attacked by the doves is still screaming, loud enough that the raiders should be able to hear it too, but none of them act like they do.

More than a couple of the podcasts that I listen to have been getting on my nerves because I feel like the male hosts are assholes that are barely covering up their assholery, especially when it comes to female guests. They can't ever let them have an unchallenged, unchecked idea even when they're institutional equals (working for the same website or whatever) or when they've been brought on as "the expert". It's frustrating because I like the discussion that's going down otherwise; on one hand I feel like chucking these podcasts, but they aren't easily replaced. I have thought about writing critical emails, but they're easily blown off and could just get me labeled as an SJW (not helpful, strident and to be ignored) or start stupid meaningless drama.

I saw Flying Lotus last night. It was a good show. I wish I could have danced. FlyLo's light show is amazing - the best I've ever seen. It was just projectors playing visualizations on a opague rear and translucent front curtain that combined could make FlyLo look like he was surrounded by three-dimensional objects appearing out of thin air. Several times the crowd would go "OHHHH" at some new visualization because it was really that mindblowing. And it kept happening, even late into the set when some images started getting recycled. I wish he'd played that remix of Radiohead's Ideoteque so I could shriek "DATS MAH JAM" ... though that's been done before. FlyLo even went kind of Kanye on the front of house because his monitors were busted and was in conflict with house staff as to who was to blame. Later he demanded whiskey from the stage, was brought a bottle of Jameson, and he swigged it down right there and then.

I'm way more relaxed about this than I was today, but I'm tired, tired, tired of being used. I feel like my boss doesn't give a crap about me, and my father is the most slovenly man alive (Today: 2 cups left lying around the dining room and kitchen wherever he set them down. Toilet unflushed. Can't make microwavable ramen for himself, but makes me do it even though I haven't so much as set my bags down after coming home from work.) I spend most of my day picking up after one or the other. I know that I have no one to blame but myself here, but I can't ever seem to get free.

I have a four-day weekend coming up. It can't come soon enough.

VG Cats : Garden Wars
vgc

http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=322


Oof
gunn
I'm having a hard time getting out of bed this morning. It feels like my weekend has gone "poof" and that we're inching up on Monday with no clean clothes, the garden still unplanted, the bedroom a disaster, the kitchen full of dirty dishes, programming to do for Ring Ring, poetry to write for Ring Ring. I'm behind of my weekly runs, I need to make the new Ring Ring posters and another set of the cards to hand out.

I'm going to bribe myself with tea and get going. Ultimately, it's good that I've been able to stay on top of Ring Ring (just barely), and now that I don't have any other performances due simultaneously, things should be a little less overwhelming. I still look forward to a day when I can wake up, stretch and read for a bit.

Mon, May. 19 Electoral Vote Predictor
electoralvote

http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2013/Pres/Maps/May19.html

Virginia Republicans Nominate Ken Cuccinelli for Governor

There are only two elections with national implications in 2013 and one of them isn't very exciting: the gubernatorial contest in New Jersey in which Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) will defeat state senator Barbara Buono (D) by a wide margin. The other one, in contrast, has strong implications for 2014 and 2016. Yesterday, at a state convention, Virginia Republicans nominated an extreme conservative, Ken Cuccinelli, as their candidate for governor. Equally conservative candiates were nominated for lieutenant governor (a black minister, E.W. Jackson) and Attorney General (state senator Mark Obenshain). The Democratic nominee is Terry McAuliffe, a long-time Democratic fundraiser, who is about as apolitical as a candidate for elected office can be. He's kind of the mirror image of Karl Rove--he fights very hard to make sure his horse wins the race, but doesn't care so much what the candidate does after he wins. If McAuliffe wins--and current polls mostly put him ahead--he'll have to make choices, of course, but he probably hasn't gotten that far yet.

Click here for full story

(no subject)
atelierlune
My ankles were really swollen up until this morning. I'm relieved that they aren't anymore. I don't know what causes that or how exactly to make it go away. I associate swelling with injury (like a sprain) and heat (my hands like to swell on hot days).

I did 20 sit ups today and yesterday though. Too soon to declare it a regular thing. Or even it makes a difference. It probably doesn't.

Between that and the weird pain on the right side of my neck (sudden stretching pains), I'm not comfortable.

I'd really like to read the comments about the new Shinhwa MV, but LJ is cocking up again. Seems like every morning this week there have been server issues that prevent pages from being read.

I went to the Farmer's Market today and enjoyed myself thoroughly. The food trucks along Marquette were very busy and there was a parade of all different kinds of people walking up and down, standing in line, carrying food and checking things out - men and women, old and young, casual and professional. There aren't a lot of things in season just yet at the market but I got bread and meat for the family. I need to carry more or bigger bags for my shopping though, seems like. Unfortunately when I wash my canvas bags they always shrink.

It's ridiculous how much time I can spend looking at pictures I've seen dozens of times before on twitter.

Probability and Interpretations
goodmathbadmath

http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2013/05/12/probability-and-interpretations/

http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/?p=2180

I'm going to do some writing about discrete probability theory. Probability is an extremely important area of math. We encounter aspects of it every day. It's also a very poorly understood area - it's one that we see abused or just fouled up every day.

I'm going to focus on discrete probability theory. What that means is that we're going to look at things where the space containing the things that we're going to look at contains a countable number of elements. The probability of getting a certain sequence of coin flips, or of getting a certain hand of cards are described by discrete probability theory. On the other hand, the odds of a radioactive isotope decaying at a particular time requires continuous probability theory.

Before getting into the details, there's one important thing to mention. When you're talking about probability, there are two fundamental schools of interpretetation. There are frequentist interpretations, and there are Bayesian interpretations.

In a frequentist interpretation, when you say the probability of an event is 0.6, what you mean is that if you were to perform a series of experiments precisely reproducing the event, then on average, if you did 100 experiments, the event would occur 60 times. In the frequentist interpretation, the probability is an intrinsic property of the event. For a frequentist, it makes sense to say that there is a "real" probability associated with an event.

In a Bayesian interpretation, when you say that the probability of an event is 0.6, what you mean is that based on your current state of knowledge about the event, you have a 60% certainty that the event will occur. In a strict Bayesian interpretation, the event doesn't have any kind of intrinsic probability associated with it. The specific event that you're interested in either will occur, or it won't. There's no real probability involved. What probability measures is how certain you are about whether or not it will occur.

For example, think about flipping a fair coin.

A frequentist would say that you can flip a coin many times, and half of the time, it will land on heads. So the probability of a coin flip landing on the head of the coin is 0.5. A Bayesian would say that the coin will land either on heads or on tails. Since you don't know which, and you have no other information to use to be able to make a better prediction, you can have a certainty of 0.5 that it will land on the head of the coin.

In the real world, I think that most people are really somewhere in between.

I think that all but the most fervent Bayesians do rely on an intuitive notion of the "intrinsic" probability of an event. They may describe it in different terms, but when it comes down to it, they're using the basic frequentist notion. And I don't think that you can find a sane frequentist anywhere who won't use Bayes theorem to update their priors in the face of new information - which is the most fundamental notion in the Bayesian interpretation.

One note before I finish this, and get started on the real meaty posts. In the past, when I've talked about probability, people have started stupid flamewars in the comments. People get downright religious about interpretations of probability. There are religious Bayesians, who think that all frequentists are stupid idiots who should be banished from the field of math; likewise, there are religious frequentists who think that Bayesians are all a crop of arrogant know-it-alls who should be sent to Siberia. I am not going to tolerate any of that nonsense. If you feel that you cannot read posts on probability without going into a diatribe about those stupid frequentists/Bayesians and their deliberately stupid ideas, please go away and don't even read these posts. If you do go into such a diatribe, I will delete your comments without any hesitation.

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Psychics like Sylvia Brown are immoral frauds
denialism2

http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2013/05/09/psychics-like-sylvia-brown-are-immoral-frauds/

http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/?p=1834

In the wake of the dramatic events surrounding the discovery of three women including Amanda Berry, being held captive for a decade by a monster, it’s important not to forget another sociopath played a role in this drama. That sociopath is the psychic who told Amanda Berry’s mother that her daughter was dead:

Her mother, Louwana Miller, never gave up hope that the girl known as Mandy was still alive, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The case attracted national attention when Miller went on Montel Williams’s nationally syndicated television show in 2004 and consulted a psychic.

“She’s not alive, honey,” the psychic said. “Your daughter’s not the kind who wouldn’t call.”

After Berry’s mother died in 2006, there were occasional clues in the search for Berry, and police have conducted a number of searches over the years. All proved fruitless — until Monday night, when Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were rescued from the house in Cleveland.

As Ben Goldacre reminds us, that psychic was Sylvia Brown, speaking out of her ass, surely “just for entertainment purposes” when she told Louwana Miller her daughter was dead. As the Wiki shows, her predictions aren’t reliable, and not surprisingly, she has a history of criminal behavior, including indictments and convictions for fraud and grand theft.

Psychics are by definition frauds. They don’t have magic powers. No human has the ability to read minds or see into the future. If you then take money under such known false pretenses that is the definition of fraud. If they truly do think they have magic powers, they should submit themselves to James Randi’s 1 million dollar paranormal challenge to determine if they can perform in a blinded, controlled test (which none of these frauds has ever come close to passing). Not surprisingly, Sylvia Brown has refused, many times, to take this challenge. This is because psychics know they’re frauds. Worse, Brown has even been previously convicted of fraud but sadly not for giving psychic readings. As a criminal, I guess she smartened up since 1992, the question is, why don’t we treat all psychics as criminals all the time? The burden of proof should be on them to prove they have this exceptional ability under controlled circumstances. Until then, we should simply arrest people that take money from others on the basis of such lies.


Obama Makes Hospital Charge Masters Public
denialism2

http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2013/05/08/obama-makes-hospital-chargemasters-public/

http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/?p=1827

And the best article on the implications of this, surprisingly, comes from Huffington post authors Young and Kirkham:

The database released on Wednesday by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services lays out for the first time and in voluminous detail how much the vast majority of American hospitals charge for the 100 most common inpatient procedures billed to Medicare. The database — which covers claims filed within fiscal year 2011 — spans 163,065 individual charges recorded at 3,337 hospitals located in 306 metropolitan areas.

Within the nation’s largest metropolitan area, the New York City area, a joint replacement runs anywhere between $15,000 and $155,000. At two hospitals in the Los Angeles area, the cost of the same treatment for pneumonia varies by $100,000, according to the database.

We discussed this issue before when it was brought to the public’s attention by Brill’s “Bitter Pill” piece in Time. Hospitals have a wildly-irrational billing scheme that represents a war they are in with payers. However, Brill was wrong to attribute excess costs of US healthcare to the charge master problem, while the HuffPo piece gets this issue right. It’s not a problem for insurance companies, or government, since they don’t pay these bills. It only screws payers without negotiating power or knowledge of how to navigate these bills – the uninsured:

“The charge masters are totally irrational,” Robert Laszewski, a former health insurance company executive who consults for health care companies as president of Alexandria, Va.-based Health Policy and Strategy Associates, wrote in an email to The Huffington Post.

Hospitals used to base prices on health care costs and on the need for profit that would, among other things, enable them to make investments in their facilities, Laszewski explained. “They became the baseline from which the hospitals started,” he wrote. But over time, hospitals raised charges in anticipation of negotiating discounts with private health insurance companies while maintaining their revenue streams, he said.

Prices have continued growing over decades to the point where there is no plausible justification for them, according to Laszewski: “Over the years, the charge masters have become more and more disconnected from reality.”

And since they haven’t been public or shared before now, I suspect each hospital probably has some set of services that appear to be priced excessively compared to their near neighbor. The costs haven’t grown so much from a response to the treatments they provide, so much as the perceived ability to force insurers to pay a larger portion. Each hospital has probably independently evolved a strategy to do this, hence the wide variability in pricing.

The charges are the prices hospitals establish themselves for the services they provide. Although Medicare and Medicaid don’t base their payment rates on these figures, private health insurance companies typically do, which means they usually pay more for the same health care than the government does. That translates into higher premiums for people with insurance. And uninsured people are expected to pay the full list price or a discount from that number, which tends to mean they pay more than anyone else.

When a hospital doesn’t get paid as much as it wants from one source, it tries to make up the difference in other ways, such as billing so-called self-pay patients — almost always the uninsured — for the full list price of a service, said Robert Huckman, a health care expert at Harvard Business School. Even when hospitals agree to huge discounts for patients who can’t pay the bill, those discounts are taken from inflated prices much higher than those the government or private insurance companies pay, he said.

“The charge master is complete nonsense that really doesn’t matter — unless you are an uninsured person and you’re getting these huge bills driving you toward bankruptcy,” Laszewski wrote. “The biggest irony of the U.S. health care system is that only the uninsured — often people who don’t have a lot of money — are the only ones the hospital expects to pay these incredibly inflated list prices!”

Hospitals also inflate charges to raise money for things that aren’t related to treatments, said former Sen. David Durenberger (R-Minn.), who is senior health policy fellow at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis.

“The biggest factor by far, in my experience, is what are you trying to cross-subsidize,” he said. Hospitals will increase charges to finance things like technology upgrades and education and research and to compensate for their operational efficiencies, Durenberger said.

We’ve discussed extensively the sources of excess costs in US healthcare. It’s not the chargemaster. It’s excessive administrative costs of private health insurance, excessive drug costs (everything from direct-to-consumer advertising, the fact US citizens are charged more and GWB made it so medicare can’t negotiate for lower drug prices), inefficient delivery (primary care in the ER), redundant delivery, lack of a government-implemented or regulated standardized electronic medical record (EMRs from private companies actually increase costs), defensive medicine, excessive end-of-life care, and excessive reimbursements of procedures and diagnostic testing.

What will this data release mean for health care costs? Probably not much as the hospitals will now just normalize excessive bills to each other, rather than just having their own individually-irrational billing scheme. The charge master is unjust, but it’s not why we pay more for healthcare overall.

There is a solution to the charge master problem though, and it was found in New Jersey. Force hospitals to charge the uninsured what they charge Medicare. It’s that simple. It’s that easy.