this week i

finalized our open source replication of how to stack multiple years of complex sample survey data then calculate statistically significant trends.

woke up to snow-cover.  beer for breakfast to feel more like jim morrison.

find none of youtube's famously caustic comments on old videos of ray charles.  a sentiment analysis would detect only positives.

read love in the time of cholera a dozen years ago.  every page of one hundred years of solitude reminds you why life is worth living.

sir francis drake had gone crocodile hunting with cannons and that he repaired them and stuffed them with straw to bring to queen elizabeth

poems inspired by remedios, which he had taken with him when he left, and those he had written later on during chance pauses in the war.  "promise me that no one will read them," he said.  "light the oven with them this very night."  ursula promised and stood up to kiss him good-bye.  "i brought you a revolver," she murmured.  colonel aureliano buendia saw that the sentry could not see.  "it won't do me any good," he said in a low voice, "but give it to me in case they search you on the way out."  ursula took the revolver out of her bodice and put it under the mattress of the cot.  "and don't say good-bye," he concluded with emphatic calmness.  "don't beg or bow down to anyone.  pretend that they shot me a long time ago"

victorious in villanueva, defeated in guacamayal, devoured by motilon indians, dead in a village in the swamp, and up in arms again in urumita

shook him as hard as they could, shouted in his ear, put a mirror in front of his nostrils, but they could not awaken him

you can't do that to a poor aunt unless you have a special dispensation from the pope

at twelve o'clock, when aureliano jose had bled to death and carmelita montiel found that the cards showing her future were blank, more than four hundred men had filed past the theater and discharged their revolvers into the abandoned body of captain aquiles ricardo.  a patrol had to use a wheelbarrow to carry the body, which was heavy with lead and fell apart like a water-soaked loaf of bread

aureliano segundo opened the door and saw the courtyard paved with rabbits, blue in the glow of dawn.  petra cotes, dying with laughter, could not resist the temptation of teasing him.  "those are the ones who were born last night," she said

colonel aureliano buendia could understand only that the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.  he would get up at five in the morning after a light sleep, have his eternal mug of bitter coffee in the kitchen, shut himself up all day in the workshop, and at four in the afternoon he would go along the porch dragging a stool, not even noticing the fire of the rose bushes or the brightness of the hour or the persistence of amaranta, whose melancholy made the noise of a boiling pot, which was perfectly perceptible at dusk, and he would sit in the street door as long as the mosquitoes would allow him to.  someone dared to disturb his solitude once.  "how are you, colonel?" he asked in passing.  "right here," he answered

the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle

pilar ternera died in her wicker rocking chair during one night of festivities as she watched over the entrance to her paradise.  in accordance with her last wishes she was not buried in a coffin but sitting in her rocker, which eight men lowered by ropes into a huge hole dug in the center of the dance floor.  the mulatto girls, dressed in black, pale from weeping, invented shadowy rites as they took off their earrings, brooches, and rings and threw them into the pit before it was closed over with a slab that bore neither name nor dates, and that was covered with a pile of amazonian camellias.  after poisoning the animals, they closed up the doors and windows with brick and mortar and they scattered out into the world with their wooden trunks that were lined with pictures of saints, prints from magazines, and the portraits of sometime sweethearts, remote and fantastic, who shat diamonds, or ate cannibals, or were crowned playing-card kings on the high seas

think about hard problems for a living, currently from a city that unpretentiously exceeds every expectation.


11/26

this week i


published the basic coverage and eligibility statistics of what the aca means for women's healthcare.

helped out with one two explanatory reports on patient cost sharing in the 2016 exchanges.

have the best country.  this is a good map.  and catch-22 and tautology are erstwhile antonyms.  and whoops (pronounced whuu-ps).

would take a stone-masonry class only to etch the words, "pardon our dust."

spend my life making excuses for not living in new york.  one day will run out.

give myself credit for moments of pause.

succeed as a recent historian if i were lazy: the early internet, flipphones, pog culture.

listen to david sedaris these mornings.

spiders, unlike mammals, do only what they’re supposed to do

"look at that mud on that carpet," she said.  but i was way ahead of her.  "number one reason not to blow a horse in your bedroom," i told her.


would not call myself a skilled chef, but i do excel at going to the supermarket, buying things, eating them.


11/19

this week i

responded to bevin's election by calculating the size of their coverage gap if they had not expanded.  john oliver reads our numbers to the camera.

reviewed each of miguel's works of art, as distant as we all may be, a part of my life.

think it was audrey hepburn who first said, "bacon is always a good idea."

wish you long life.  https://twitter.com/ChuckGrassley/status/644483076513505280

have yet to decipher the meaning of the weight.  an expulsion from eden story, but which one?

spent $100 so far this week.


woke up like this.  #beyonce

think it a nice recently-bombed city.  half of the people look like they'll be on the next flight to rome, everyone else recently back from a duck hunt.





wonder about the future.  on the horizon of our lifetime: robotics, robotics, but babelfish too.  will we still care about sofas and iced tea?  how will human-to-human interactions differ?  what will this earth look like in fifty years? among those currently in power, who will lose it and who will replace them? what will the state of our resources be? (a) depleted (b) sustainably utilized (c) dwindling but to the consumer still seemingly infinite.

grasped for the name of the scientific field most necessary for the survival of modern civilization, perhaps it's not yet been coined?  what would a  university call a researcher who studies the combination of demography and energy?  malthusian studies sounds both too bleak and too campaign-like, what's the technical term?  disciplines like petroleum engineering do not quantify the demand, and demography does nothing to understand the future supply.  environmental studies departments examine the effects, not the causes, and not the future trends.  resource depletion and scarcity drives most every human conflict, how is this not a formal field of rigorous inquiry?  population pressure science

worked mostly in solitude, occasional outbursts in any direction.



11/12

this week i

published on vulnerable americans: dementia, the medicaid gap, health disparities in that gap, and the remaining uninsured by race and ethnicity.

could not identify serbia on a map.  not important, a quiet place to work.



celebrated the scientific discovery that salted meats are well worth the risks.  yes they are.

read cultural anthropology (third edition) by marvin harris, his textbook.

the elements in spoken language seldom bear anything other than an arbitrary relationship in their meaning.."ding-dong" may sound like a bell to speakers of english but not to germans, for whom bells say "bim-bam."

native speakers can distinguish between grammatical and nongrammatical sentences even when they have never heard particular combinations before.  a classic example is: a. colorless green ideas sleep furiously. b. furiously sleep ideas green colorless.

about 14 percent of the most basic words in a language's vocabulary will be replaced every 1,000 years

the total animal biomass - the weight of all the spiders, insects, worms, snakes, mammals, and so on - in a hectare of central amazon rain forest is 45 kilograms.  this compares with 304 kilograms in a dry east african thorn forest. in east african savannah grasslands, 627 kilograms of large herbivores are found per hectare, far outweighing all the large and small animals found per hecare in the amazon

the livestock population of the united states consumes enough food calories to feed 1.3 billion people

a common feature of melanesian redistributive feasts is that the guests gorge themselves with food, stagger off into the bush, stick their fingers down their throats, vomit, and then return to eating with renewed zest

for the polyandrous tamil of the malabar coast of india, the semen of several different males is believed to contribute to the growth of the same fetus

kin terminological systems are never the planned product of any inventive genius.  most people are unaware that such systems even exist.  clearly, the major features of these systems represent recurring unconscious adjustments to the prevailing conditions of domestic life
 
the occasional killing of a supposed sorcerer results in much more than the mere elimination of a few actual or potential antisocial individuals.  these violent incidents convince everyone of the importance of not being mistaken for an evildoer.

a spectrum of redistributive systems ranging from the scrupulously egalitarian to the ruthlessly hierarchical

contributions to the central store cease to be voluntary, they become taxes; access to the farmlands and natural resources cease to be rights, they become dispensations; food producers cease being the chief's followers, they become peasants; redistributors cease being chiefs, they become kings; and chiefdoms cease being chiefdoms, they become states

the inca ate his meals from gold and silver dishes in rooms whose walls were covered with precious metals.  his clothing was made of the softest vicuna wool, and he gave away each change of clothing to members of the royal family, never wearing the same garment twice.  the inca enjoyed the services of a large number of concubines who were methodically culled from the empire's most beautiful girls.  his wife, however, to conserve the holy line of descent from the god of the sun, had to be his own full or half sister.  when the inca died, his wife, concubines, and many other retainers were strangled during a great drunken dance in order that he suffer no loss of comfort in the afterlife.  each inca's body was eviscerated, wrapped in cloth, and mummified.  women with fans stood in constant attendance on these mummies, ready to drive away flies and to take care of the other things mummies need to stay happy

statistical correlations exist among (1) protein scarcities, (2) nursing of children for 1 year or more, (3) prohibition of sexual relations between husband and wife for 1 year or more after the birth of their child, (4) polygyny, (5) domestic sleeping arrangements in which the mother and child sleep together and father sleeps elsewhere, (6) child training by women, (7) patrilocality, and (8) severe male initiation rites

in several parts of africa, clitoridectomy was followed by a procedure in which the two sides of the vulva are attached to each other by stitching with silk or catgut sutures or by thorns, thus preventing vaginal intercourse until their removal at the time of marriage

according to the federal reserve board's 1983 "survey of consumer financing," 2 percent of u.s. families owned the following:
    20 percent of all real estate
    50 percent of all privately held stocks
    39 percent of all taxable bonds
    70 percent of all nontaxable bonds
    33 percent of all business assets
    30 percent of all liquid assets

 
11/5