tisiwoota

Seed podcast of 7/28:

While environmentalists whine about the melting of the polar ice caps, one group of Greenlanders is making the best of the situation. An entrepreneurial company is turning the melted Arctic Island into beer. The first ever Inuit microbrewery is taking the fine water—over 2,000 years old and pollutant-free, according to the brewers—and using it to produce ale that supposedly tastes cleaner and smoother than other beers. The first 66,000 liters are on their way to Denmark, and the brewery says the US and Germany have expressed interest in the product.

1. Body World Exhibit: Are the bodies from shady sources?

2. Economic Populism and the Payday Lender Scourge
“To thwart legislation that put caps on payday lending rates, Republican lawmakers in Oregon had to pass it”

3. Blanks on a Blank A motherfucking brilliant short film contest.

4. Giant Robot Imprisons Parked Cars.
“The robot that parks cars at the Garden Street Garage in Hoboken, New Jersey, trapped hundreds of its wards last week for several days. But it wasn’t the technology car owners had to curse, it was the terms of a software license.”

5. Heat your House Geothermically

Last week or so, I remember reading an article (too lazy to find, sorry) about how VOIP is starting to drive the cell phone industry to allow users to get a price break by connecting to WIFI hotspots (or use phones that only work by WiFi). There were various advantages to this model, but the major drawback was the limited range of WiFi coverage in the country (and the difficulty of knitting together diverse overlapping networks in some places).

Then I read the previously-linked article about solar-powered WiFi stations for developing countries.

Aha! That at least solves one problem the big cell phone companies haven’t been able to address: emergency access when driving through the middle of nowhere. Lugging around individual WiFi stations isn’t an option for regular strolls through town, but it makes perfect sense to install in a car. And voila, cell phones would actually be the vital emergency tool they’re rationalized as being.

I’m sure someone somewhere has already made this possible. Now when will they make it?

Wherein I draw attention to the articles I regularly list in the happy little side-bar, but probably no one ever checks because I don’t know how to create a separate feed just for them…

Articles I’ve read and enjoyed on the Internet in the past week-ish
1. Solar Wi-Fi To Bring Internet to Developing Countries

2. Genes Reprogram Hunger Timing

3. Carl Zimmer: Open Source Evolution

4. Vote Count Fraud in Mexico’s Election

5.Scientific Copy Cats: Is China’s rash of plagiarism a deeply rooted cultural issue?

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

The American Journal of Bioethics editor’s blog puts it this way:

it had to happen eventually - health insurance companies have run the numbers and they are beginning to get it that if they provide incentives to employees to get their surgical procedures outside the U.S., patients will go, and the cost to employers will be dramatically decreased.

Right now these deals are pretty cushy– at one company they passed on $10,000 of the savings onto an employee as an incentive to get treatment abroad. Of course that will stop once the practice becomes more routine, but typical to my generation being able to take time off (and in another country) is incentive enough on its own. I just hope that when employers look to cut costs even more they don’t start taking it out of employees’ vacation time…

And yes, it will put difficult pressure on the health care industry in the US, with probably a lot of unforunate effects. But it’s the inevitable effect of globalization. (And besides, if the US _really_ wanted to effectively improve medical care here, we would would redirect the money we spend on farm subsidies to universal health care… And as a bonus that strategy would boost the economies of developing countries that have been kept in dependency by our agricultural protectionism, so that they can have stronger health care as well).