I’m not watching C-Span today: Consider this, published by a team of U.S. health care researchers in 2004: “Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States.” That was five years ago. The quiet tragedy associated with a lack of health insurance has continued, the numbers growing in the …
Continue reading ‘On health care policy, a personal story’ »
Two hundredths of an inch of rain this evening was enough to put the first water in our new rain barrels!
One of an amazing set of pictures Lissa took on the Olympic peninsula last month. Our New Mexico sky looks nothing like this:
In the last five years, I’ve somewhat haphazardly accumulated what’s turning into a pretty good time series of data on the ecology of my backyard. Or, more specifically, the birds therein. Since 2008, when I caught the eBird bug, I’ve submitted 483 lists for the yard. Number 484, collected this evening, is a puzzle. Sometimes …
Continue reading ‘In which your backyard naturalist blames nighthawks and swallows on drought’ »
On vacation, we found and then refound this little pullout on the west side of Whidbey Island facing out to the Strait of Juan Fuca and the Pacific Ocean. It’s a little public parking area wedged between beach houses. When Lissa and I revisited Thursday, there were a couple of surfers desperate to try to …
We’ve been doing this all wrong. Growing up in LA with a May 5 birthday, I was steeped from the beginning in the whole “Cinco de Mayo” thing, the “Mexican Independence Day” that’s not. It had yet to turn into the beer marketing event that it is today. I realize now that the community I …
Via the economist Tyler Cowen, I learned today that the artist Ed Ruscha is from Oklahoma. When I mentioned this to Lissa, she wisely observed that many of the people we think are from California are not. That’s one of the central points of Carey McWilliams’ classic “California: The Great Exception”, which I am rereading. …
Here’s a great reminder that technology properly understood is not just the gizmo, it’s the human-gizmo interaction. The old people apartments where Mom lives some time ago added big-screen TV’s on the wall between the elevators on every floor. The idea was to use them as a messaging system, giving residents up-to-date information on stuff. …
Lingering at my sister Lisa’s dining room table this evening after dinner, my eye drifted to this casserole on a shelf opposite. My memories of childhood are vague, and I often depend on Lisa for the sort of specifics I can’t quite grab hold of. But neither of us could remember the casserole’s story, other …