Isegoria

From Father’s effort to save his family called ‘superhuman’:

The family got stuck in the snow November 25 while traveling home to San Francisco after a Thanksgiving trip to Portland.

They attempted to take a shortcut over roads that can be impassable in winter.

Temperatures at night hovered near or below freezing.

The parents ate berries, authorities have said, while feeding the children baby food and crackers. When their meager food supply ran low, Kati Kim — who was nursing the younger child — breast-fed both children.

After nine days James Kim left his family to seek help, promising to return if he did not find anyone.

Dressed only in street clothes, Kim made it eight miles through “rugged, steep, snowy terrain with sodden branches, slick rocks, downed trees and poison oak nestled between sheer cliffs,” before ending up where his body was found, in a ravine, about a half-mile from the car.

What should he have done? That’s not clear, but experts point the rule of threes for surviving in cold wilderness conditions:

1. You can survive for three hours without shelter
2. You can survive for three days without water
3. You can survive for three weeks without food

The CDC tracks the loss of natural teeth by state, and the numbers (for adults 65+) are much, much higher than you might expect: 42.8% in West Virginia, 38.1% in Kentucky, 32.2% in Tennessee, 31.9% in Alabama, etc.

Swivel Aims To Become The Internet Archive For Data — or, as they describe it, the YouTube for data:

Swivel Co-founders Dmitry Dimov and Brian Mulloy start off by describing their company as “YouTube for Data.” That’s a good start for someone trying to understand it, because the site allows users to upload data — any data — and display it to other users visually. [...] Uploaded data can be rated, commented and bookmared by other users, helping to sort the interesting (and accurate) wheat from the chaff. And graphs of data can be embedded into websites. So it is in fact a bit like a YouTube for Data.

But then the real fun begins. You and other users can then compare that data to other data sets to find possible correlation (or lack thereof). Compare gas prices to presidential approval ratings or UFO sightings to iPod sales. Track your page views against weather reports in Silicon Valley. See if something interesting occurs.

And better yet, Swivel will be automatically comparing your data to other data sets in the background, suggesting possible correlations to you that you may never have noticed.

Rising sun, falling birthrate looks at reverse mortgages, particularly for Japan, which is facing a pension crisis:

There is an alternative to home equity loans that does not jeopardize home-ownership, and may offer an alternative way to fund retirement: reverse mortgages. They are growing in popularity, but still misunderstood. Like traditional mortgages, reverse mortgage involve a homeowner borrowing against the value of his home. These loans, however, are not due until the homeowner dies or sells his home, and the bank only has access to assets from the sale of the house.

The most popular of these loans are guaranteed by the department of Housing and Urban Development and are available only to homeowners above the age of 62. The principal from the mortgages is distributed in a series of lump sum payments or an annuity. Essentially, seniors are converting home equity into an alternative pension plan.

Uninsurable notes that some people bemoan insurers’ increasing ability to pinpoint risk, because it means that those at risk will have to bear the burden of their own risk, which might be quite expensive for them:

Another way to look at it is that better ability to predict risks allows us to avoid many of them. If insurers can tell which houses in an earthquake zone will fall, they can raise the price on insuring that house. This produces a more efficient market outcome that seems to be independantly desireable: fewer people will build houses that are likely to be crushed by earthquakes. Even genetic risks have controllable environmental factors; those at risk for heart disease can adopt low-fat diets, excercise, and take statins; those likely to develop diabetes can go easy on dessert. Even carriers of the infamous BRCA genes generally opt to reduce their risk, through the drastic step of removing their breasts, and often their ovaries. They do this, not to avoid high insurance costs, but to extend their lives.

But what about the poor? It is hard to see any reason why insurance companies should subsidize them. If society thinks that poor families should have insurance, then society should pay for it through the tax code, not slap regulations on insurance companies to keep information from reaching the market.

If you enjoyed Shaun of the Dead, I think you’ll like Hot Fuzz. Watch the trailer.

Where Have All Our Cold Pills Gone? They’re off the shelves and behind the counter, so that meth labs can’t get their ingredients from Walgreens:

The federal law, which took full effect on September 30, requires retailers to keep cold and allergy remedies containing pseudoephedrine behind the counter or in a locked cabinet, forces buyers to show ID and sign a logbook, and limits them to no more than 3.6 grams a day and nine grams a month.

One commenter noted that honest-to-goodness amphetamines didn’t cause much trouble, back in the day:

Once upon a time, circa 1965, amphetamines were routinely prescribed for weight loss, depression and othe maladies. No drug problems or crime problem caused by this admittedly overprescribed class of drugs were observed at the time.

National Geographic is offering up live streaming video of African animals from Pete’s Pond in Botswana.

So far I’ve seen numerous DLAs — deer-like animals — and a crocodile. If I wait patiently, perhaps they’ll “play” together.

(Hat tip to Mike, who has managed to see baboons, elephants, and cheetahs, too.)

This clip from Before the Music Dies shows How to Create a Sexy Pop Star. Today’s sound engineers can literally push a button to bring off-key singing back on key.

Take a gander at these Hypnotic Flash Animations. They respond to your cursor as you move it. (And they make wind-chimey music, so turn down your speakers if you’re at work.)

This old Japanese Spider Man video is so very, very Japanese.

Amazon has a number of user-generated “So you’d like to…” lists, some useful, some tongue-in-cheek, some a bit scary, like So You’d Like To… Prepare for the Apocalypse (Tribulation):

Though the 7-year Tribulation (“Trib”) is not the end of the world (just the painful “birth pangs” before birth of the messianic age), it does include “great tribulation such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.” The products below are to help you to lessen your suffering during the Tribulation or to avoid it altogether if you are reading this before the rapture. The products are illustrative, not exhaustive.

(The why and when of the Trib is beyond the scope of this guide — see my other guide, “So You’d Like To…Understand Endtimes Prophecy (Frrom Pre-Trib, Pre-Mil View)”.)

**IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER**
If at the time of reading this you are already 3-1/2 years into the Trib, which is when the identity mark of the beast (666) is required for buying or selling, I AM NOT SUGGESTING YOU TAKE THE 666 IN ORDER TO BUY THIS GUIDE’S PRODUCTS. Doing so can only offer a bit of temporal comfort, but will seal your eternal doom in the lake of fire. My advice: do not take the mark!

LIST #1 – FOR THOSE LEFT BEHIND AFTER THE RAPTURE
At an unspecified time after the rapture, a certain man on the global scene will become a powerful world leader. At the point that he appears to solve the Middle East crisis by confirming a covenant regarding Israel, the 7-year Trib clock begins. He is your enemy, the Antichrist. Your chances of surviving the Trib are slim, so get ready. Your #1 SURVIVAL TOOL is a Bible as it can save your soul, explain, guide, warn, and comfort. Other survival suggestions (in chronological order, mostly from Revelation chapters 6-10)…

In A Conversation with Bjorn Lomborg, the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist notes the hysteria surrounding global warming:

Perhaps this is most clear when you look at the movie from Al Gore. Everything he says is technically true. He says for instance that if Greenland melts, sea levels will rise about 20 feet. This is technically true. But of course the very evocative imagery of seeing Holland disappear under the waves — or New York, or Shanghai — leaves the impression that this is all going to happen very soon. Where in fact the UN climate panel says that the sea level rise over the next 100 years is going to be 30 cm — about 20 times less than he talks about. So there is a dramatic difference between what we’re being told and what we’re actually seeing.

Lomborg notes that there are other, more serious problems, ones we can do more about:

If you just take the environmental problem first, it’s very clear that what causes by far the majority of deaths is lack clean drinking water and lack of sanitation. Millions of people are dying each year from this. Also taking the new WHO estimates of what really kills people, these are the huge issues.

The second biggest problem is indoor air pollution, which probably kills somewhere between 1 and 3 million people each year, basically because people are too poor to use good fuels and end up using dung or cardboard or whatever they can find. Only a very distant third comes climate change, which the WHO puts at 150,000 to die right now.

This of course ignores those people that are no longer dying from cold-related deaths. For some inexcusable reasons, I would argue, they have the idea that they will only look at things that are going to be bad and don’t have to look at will be good from climate change.

One of the top climate change economists has modelled — and several papers that came out a couple of weeks ago essentially point out — that climate change will probably mean fewer deaths, not more deaths. It is estimated that climate change by about 2050 will mean about 800,000 fewer deaths.

Nathan Smith explains increasing income disparity by contrasting The Restaurant Economy and the iPod Economy:

[L]ots of pretty good musicians will never get into my iPod at all. I would happily eat food cooked by a second-tier or third-tier chef. But there’s no reason for me to listen to a second-tier singer, because I can afford the best. The Billy Joels and Bruce Springsteens of gourmet cookery will always be out of my price range, but the Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen of rock-n-roll are accessible to any teenager earning minimum wage.

And this has implications for the pay structure of the respective professions. The best chefs earn $100K–$150K, less than 10 times more than a minimum-wage McDonald’s worker. Meanwhile, Paul McCartney’s net worth is $1.5 billion, in a profession that is home to thousands of the proverbial “starving artists.”

Why the difference? It’s because of the costs of reproduction. There is no way to cheaply mass-produce the art of a master chef. As a result, one of his meals is only worth as much as one affluent customer is willing to pay for it. And since the master chefs can only satisfy a tiny share of total demand, there’s plenty of room for chefs of lesser talents. But since Billy Joel’s music can be reproduced ad infinitum at almost zero cost, he gets his royalties from thousands or millions of listeners, and makes a fortune. And since a handful of rock stars can make enough music for everyone, lesser musicians — even some of considerable talent — are left out in the cold. And even for the rock-n-roll greats, success is precarious.

Apparently the new “backscatter” x-ray machine being considered for airport security has raised some privacy concerns. I can’t imagine why:

Susan Hallowell, the director of the Transportation Security Administration’s security laboratory, allows her body to be X-rayed by the ‘backscatter’ machine at the Transportation Security Administration in Egg Harbor Township, N.J., Wednesday, June 25, 2003. Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix Arizona will test the new federal screening system that takes X-rays of passenger’s bodies to detect concealed explosives and other weapons. The technology, called backscatter, has been around for several years but has not been widely used in the U.S. as an anti-terrorism tool because of privacy concerns.