this week i

published our latest estimates of aca eligibility of the uninsured, of the size and makeup of the medicaid coverage gap created by the 2012 supreme court decision, and the state of health insurance coverage for american women.

found an honest to goodness bug in base r, fixed via distributed team effort.

started watching broad city.  mumus get a bad rap.

rented a comfy place in stockholm, mostly working.  seventy five, allright, allright.

toured the town.

trained to uppsala.

visited the vasa, sank thanks to swedish shipwrongs.

hung out at the hockey stadium.

walked around the open-air museum all day..

..drawn in 1649 without lifting the quill.

wonder about the tingling equivalent of when someone thinks about you while masturbating.  just, still, in the ears?

..in japan, this would surely be pornographic.

find stark inequalities no further than the other side of the screen.

read a dismal book on behavioral economics.  who cares.

imagine that four people share a meal and the bill comes to $100.  now, if everyone at the table pays $25, every person would feel some pain of paying.  in order to make this less abstract, let's assign "units" as a measure of pain.  we'll assume that paying $25 translates into 10 units of pain for a total of 40 units of pain for the whole table when it comes time to split the bill.  but what if one person pays the entire bill?  since the pain of paying dos not increase linearly with the amount of payment, the person who is paying will feel 10 units of pain for the first $25 that he or she pays; maybe 7 units for the next $25; 5 units for the next $25; and 4 units for the last $25.  the total of 26 units of pain lowers the amount of pain for the entire table by 14 units.  the general point is this:  we all love getting our meals for nothing, and as long as we can alternate payers, we can enjoy many FREE! dinners and derive greater overall benefit from our friendships in the process.

when the starbursts cost a cent apiece, the average number of candies per customer was 3.5, but when the price went down to zero, the average went down to 1.1 per customer

when the waitress came to bring us the check and take away the plate with the lone sushi, i asked her how often people leave a single piece at the end of the meal.  "oh," she said, "i find one extra piece left almost every time.  i think it is even more common than people finishing all their sushi."

if people actually get more satisfaction out of a product that has been hyped, has the marketer done anything worse than sell the sizzle along with the steak?

10/27

this week i

circled the nation.

stopped for the waterfalls.

i think countries should be based on watersheds

go to minnesota, step in the center of the creekbed, block the whole mississippi with your foot

cooked couscous, roasted coffee in sod homes, picnicked along the arctic ocean, drank pale ale while we waited.

i'm glad we didn't hike up into a geothermal glacier and lay down in boiling mud to watch aurora borealis.  boy would our faces have been red.

drove down to the towns inside the fjords, past the glaciers under the bridge, alongside the black-sand beaches, anywhere that caught the eye.

i'm really sweating under this, i'm wearing too many layers.  is that a type-one error or a type-two error?

played icelandic rock paper scissors: glacier beats lava, lava beats polar bear, polar bear beats glacier.

figured seven nights sleeping in the van, hose each other down like the bonnie situation.  shampoo for my real friends, real poo for my sham friends.

10/20