Links for 2009-12-28

“At least where I live, and I bet for almost everyone with health insurance, it’s very difficult to avoid making several trips to the pharmacy to have various prescriptions filled. If you take (say) four pills a day, and will forever (or until death parts you from them), and you have prescriptions for a month’s worth of each, it would be very nice to be able to go to the drugstore and pick them all up each month at once. However, if it so happens that one or another of these was first filled on a different day from the others, it can only be refilled on the thirtieth day after that. The insurance company will not allow you to reset the refill day, because that would mean their paying for a month’s worth of new pills when you still have old ones, and incurring a cost. Tsk!”

“[T]he 2003 Licensing Act had been designed to tap into popular antipathy towards an outmoded licensing regime. The closing of pubs soon after 11pm – ‘throwing out’ time – was seen by many as a paternalistic imposition which exacerbated drunken violence by forcing irate customers onto the streets en masse. The government’s remedy was to be the establishment of a more ‘Continental’ drinking culture,where stuffy pubs gave way to sophisticated urban bars operating a more relaxed system of variable opening times. Five years on, few would claim that this experiment has been a success. However, it is unclear whether this is due to a failure of policy or, as is often claimed, to some inherent British tendency towards drunkenness. For many, binge drinking is, in the words of one recent headline, ‘as British as rain’. But is this widespread assumption accurate, or is the story more complicated? “

“It is now time to come clean. This glittering depiction of the quest for knowledge is… well, perhaps not an outright lie, but certainly a highly edited version of the truth. Science is not a whirlwind dance of excitement, illuminated by the brilliant strobe light of insight. It is a long, plodding journey through a dim maze of dead ends. It is painstaking data collection followed by repetitious calculation. It is revision, confusion, frustration, bureaucracy and bad coffee. In a word, science can be boring.”

“My brother-in-law needed a costume to wear to his family’s Christmas party, and asked me to make him Ralphie’s deranged Easter bunny pink nightmare costume.

I couldn’t pass this up.

You can buy a similar costume online for $100, but where’s the fun in that? This only cost around $30. Plus a lot of hours of course, but it was worth it.”