this week i

published on employer-based market trends over the past fifteen years.

met riya in lutherville-timonium while priyanka and rupak cooked a legit meal.


can now get on a plane and visit the majority of the world's population.

listened to jordan peterson..

if you take a female cat..and you take out basically it's whole brain: the limbic system that's responsible for its emotions and the whole cortical cap - so it basically has no brain except for a spinal cord and a hypothalamus - and if you keep it in a relatively closed environment, like a cage, it pretty much acts like a normal cat.  it can do all the normal cat things..it can eat..it's hyper-exploratory, which is extraordinarily peculiar because the last thing you'd expect of a cat with no brain would be to be hyper-exploratory..it can't build up the memory representations that would inhibit the exploratory activity..it's easier to see what you've already learned than to see the thing itself..basically what you're doing is learning in order to ignore.  because what, you want to pay attention to everything all the time?  it's like, that's a short path to exhaustion.  because if everything's relevant then your body goes on hyper-alert and you produce cortisol and you're ready for anything.  and that's kind of exciting but as a long-term survival strategy, it's a bad one.  you just don't have the energy to maintain that for any length of time.  so part of the reason the cat is hyper-exploratory is because the systems that mediate exploration are still intact as long as it has a hypothalamus and some of the rough underlying circuitry that associates that with the motor output system.  but it can't remember what it's explored, so it just stays hyper-exploratory

3/24

this week i

broke out medicare beneficiaries by race and ethnicity.

worked at the office.  everyone was there.

cleaned out my father's attic, dusty up there.



3/17

this week i

helped out with an assessment of obamacare exchange enrollment so far.

think it an unresolved question whether we are the first sentient creatures to roam this planet.  perhaps we see our current biomass - today's human proliferation across the globe - as an answer to the question, "wouldn't other similarly dominant species have left an abundance of fossils?"  but our scientists have warned of the unsustainability of this population - so maybe ruling organism demographics inflate then deflate in quick enough of a geological heartbeat to go unnoticed in the subsequent digging that occurs eons in the future.  so in the billions of years of this planet's existence, why should we be certain that we can detect the footprint of another conquering species?  if humanity dies out in the next ten millennia and then - millions of years onward - another intelligent animal evolves: would they know of our civilization?  we don't even know dinosaur skin color.

lined up two simultaneous google drive accounts on a single computer.  be sure to use ascii quotes.

never knew lyndon johnson met fdr.  more surprising than clinton meeting kennedy, maybe only because of the distance of time.

ate swordfish and then laughed for a couple of hours.

3/10

this week i

focused on the medicaid-eligible uninsured.  and then medicaid's role for american indians and alaska natives.

coined the term wikibacons, the number of rambling clicks from one entry to a seemingly-unrelated second.

make a producers reference: trump has springtime for hitlered his way to the republican nomination.

joined my father as he passed out cookies to the hospital nurses who previously only knew him in delirium - shock and hugs.

cleaned out the house.


would not have believed that brazil spans 8,358,140 square kilometers versus 8,080,464 for the contiguous united states.

learned how to recursively loop through a remote ftp and how to use every processor.

submitted a succinct bug in windows r version 3.2.3 after a week trying to whittle it down.

listened to jp..

she was in this like protective crouch, it's like a startle-response and i think that if you're traumatized often what happens is your body throws itself into a state of hyper-preparation.  and then unless you can, unless you can bring the meaning of the traumatic event up, and articulate it, and throw away what it isn't..too global and vague a formulation to be helpful

hungry people will dream about food

so you can think of dream as a hypothesis in some sense

read..

(1) long war for ukraine

even with one front line moving somewhat one way or another, the conflict will morph into a frozen zone.  in the latter case, the self-declared donetsk and lugansk people's republics together will become a giant version of all the other post-soviet frozen conflicts, such as transnistria in moldova or abkhazia and south ossetia in georgia.  in these places russia is in de facto control of slices of other countries, but they have not much of an economy or prospects of a brighter future for their people, and so the young and dynamic leave.  we cannot know what putin may decide to do, but right now this third outcome seems the most likely


(2) religious accomodations

as oliver wendell holmes jr. is said to have remarked: "the right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."


(3) so the vaccination hoax did not lead to bin laden

3/3