this week i

watched the summit. zoom in to see a link to our side-by-sides and a ridiculous eyesore.

appreciate the words "if you don't write it down, it didn't happen."

was wowed by rodrigo y gabriela.

landed in jacksonville late friday night.

drove clockwise around the okefenokee swamp. (map of the full route)

swamp hiked.

swamp camped.

swamp boated.

saw swamp creatures..

swamp hawks

swamp trees

swamp larks

turkeys

swamp hounds

softshell tortii

and camouflage

for this guy

swamp raptors..

does..

scarred pines..

swamp reasons for

'no swimming' signs

concluded that the literary theme of any swamp romp is and always will be 'reflection'..

..for example, that last picture is upside down.

want 'upsidown' added to the dictionary.

like swamps.

3/4

this week i

published this issue brief examining the characteristics of the low-income uninsured to help states understand how a medicaid expansion would change the current medicaid population.

learned r's fix function. calls the data editor for data frames and the text editor for user-defined functions.

began to understand the uncertain history of american freedom of the press thanks to the most dangerous man in america.

perked up when arthur benjamin said, "the single best predictor of a person's total lifetime potential income is the number of math courses that they've taken in college."

admired bill gates' talk on energy miracles.

began watching the bbc's amazing planet earth series. that's a seal in its mouth.

..best scene so far: gang of otters attack crocodile - episode 3, minute 17.

accompanied geir to a swedish embassy concert.

2/25

this week i

was cited by my statistical programming hero - a link to my article on professor thomas lumley's survey analysis in r page.

ate caribbean cod at my dad's.

recommend this full screen no frills weather map. click temperature/precipitation/clouds.

laughed out loud at an old xkcd comic.

accessed my google search history. holy christ. 3 years, 30,000 searches. ~27.3 daily

won a visit from curtis, in town for a physics conference.

saw the terracotta army.

browsed the national geographic lobby.

enjoyed live byob jazz. talked about the horizon radius of black holes against the backdrop of the saints go marching in. apparently if earth's mass were condensed to the size of a cranberry, it would be one. also: black holes' horizon points are not necessarily spherical until they've fully collapsed.

imaxed out. journey to mecca and space station 3d.

went to the national portrait gallery. better than i remember.



celebrated fat tuesday. a free concert at 6pm 365 days a year + half off beers that were $5 to begin with makes millennium stage the best happy hour spot in the city.

experienced thai-x-ing.

soiree'd at the french embassy, with..

..and..

all-you-can-eat crepes, indoor umbrellas

helen thomas look-alikes on trombone

convenient french-press vials

ambassadors hogging fondue fountains

luxury. insanity.

think i convinced him to come back.

read some articles..

(1) gender inequality this century

"must be embraced as the moral battle..as totalitarianism was in the twentieth and slavery was in the century before that."

(2) american incarceration

"several states now spend more on state prisons than state colleges."

(3) obama's gerald ford decision

"there are now more hired american contractors in both nations than there are military personnel."

"if it costs him his presidency, what other achievement can match it?"

(4) the blue dogs

"it contained a public option, but a weak one, tied not to medicare reimbursement rates..but based on negotiated reimbursements...their great concern is cost containment, and no more effective cost-container has been proposed than the robust public option; yet many were against it."

(5) israel palestine unreasonable expectations and the reset button

2/18

this week i

calculated how the distribution of out-of-pocket spending (on premiums, pcps, hospitalizations, etc.) among elderly americans varies by different characteristics (like age, sex, living situation).

converted to gmail's multiple inboxes.
blizzard-watched friday afternoon over a wood fired pizza with naveen.

ventured into the tundra on saturday night..

..for a party at george & michelle's. afterward, our host graciously offered me one avocado for the road.

rooted for the underdogs, fans in the pew.


didn't enjoy creation, about charles darwin. best line: "must our children be revolutionaries at nine years of age" - emma d. set entirely in england during the post-adventure phase of his life, unclear to me why the filmmakers skipped his five year voyage around the earth.

staycationed. a little profiling of medicaid recipients' out-of-pocket health spending-to-income ratio, a little investigating of the new hospital data, a lot of loafing.

read some articles..

(1) social organization of the (open source) r project.

(2) the end of the cold war.

'in the nine months that gave birth to a new world..the united states and the soviet union were largely passive midwives. they made history by what they did not do.'

'psychologists have christened "hindsight bias"-the tendency to regard actual historical outcomes as more probable than alternatives that seemed real at the time'

(3) evidence-basis and the doctor-patient interaction.

'his wife with metastatic ovarian cancer had spent six days in the hospital without a single doctor engaging her in a genuine conversation.'

'the new people in charge..believe that care should be configured as a commodity, its contents reduced to equations, all of its dimensions measured and priced, all patient choices formulated as retail purchases.'

(4) the socially deviant lion.

'they watched him mate for two days straight with a lioness he had killed.'

(5) utopian disaster response.

'human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful, and imaginative after a disaster.'

2/11