this week i

helped release our annual employer health benefits survey.  front page on the nyt, wsj, wpost, and ft.  more real news on page two.

india is now home to more poor people than the entire sub-saharan africa region.

see this as a larger metaphor of the northeastern states and the american south.

can't believe how many people read my wikipedia articles. (1) (2)

adjusted to a standing desk.  also, in return for writing some code for them, consultants working with edf sent me a chocolate r.

browsed the 2nd annual 17th st festival.  a tame drag show, but great company.

attended a fiesta at the costa rican embassy, both salsa lessons and mysterious spheres.

watched another lecture by the most intelligent person i know about the distinction between tragedy and evil, and the results of awareness of vulnerability.

the world of experience as it presents itself to us is literally and not metaphorically complex beyond our capacity to understand.  and that means that people deal in a real sense on an ongoing basis with the infinite.  and i believe that that fact is the reason why religious experience and belief is essentially endemic to mankind.  it's a human universal.  and it's not because people believe.  it's because human existence as such consists of a confrontation between the finite and the infinite.  and religious systems merely take that into account.

insufficiency is built into human experience

without limitation there is no being

if there was nothing out of your reach, there'd be nothing to do

evil is differentiated from tragedy by its lack of necessity and its volunteerism

ran eight instances of r at once.  to tile windows automatically like this, use the task manager.

created a program that loops through every data set in every year (1963 - 2010) of the national health interview survey, downloads the file, and then converts it to a csv and stata file. works well with last week's documentation-grabbing script.

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