Day: May 16, 2011

Biology is special that way, [with real success often arriving in mid- or even late-career, after a few false starts and fruitless sidetracks]. It takes years for people to get a feeling for the organism—for how nature actually works. Young people come in all the time knowing a bunch of fancy math. They say, ‘What if it’s like this computational model, this physical problem?’ They’re terrific ideas, but they’re wrong. Nothing works the way you think it should.

David Eagleman, aforementioned graduate student, now running his own lab. Presumably with a few bags of potatoes stashed around there somewhere.
But: yep.
Source: newyorker.com

I remember, when he was writing [a computationally modeled neural tissue], he had a sack of raw potatoes under his desk. He would cook a potato in the microwave, put it in a cup, and lean over and bite it while he was typing. It kind of set the tone for my lab for the succeeding decade. It chased away the faint of heart.

Read Montague, recalling his then graduate student David Eagleman and their salad days at Baylor College of Medicine.
I spent many a formative evening which then took the form of seemingly endless years at BCM earning this very same degree. But let’s just say I never saw a sack of potatoes under anyone’s bench. And not because I wasn’t looking.
But: every thesis adviser thinks this way. So you know.
Source: newyorker.com

It’s just sort of sitting there. Given the high price it is now, and the tremendous debt problem we now have, by all means, sell at the peak.

Ron Utt, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation working hard every day and putting the “think” in think-tank on selling the gold in Fort Knox.
I’m quite sure gold would stay at peak prices from the first ounce to the 147 millionth ounce. There is absolutely nothing that can go wrong with this brilliant plan. We should begin immediately at solving all Our National Problems.
Heritage is made up of serious people with courageous ideas.

If you replace a system that actually pays seniors’ medical bills with an entirely different system, one that gives seniors vouchers that won’t be enough to buy adequate insurance, you’ve ended Medicare. Calling the new program “Medicare” doesn’t change that fact.

Paul Krugman, reflecting on the Village Edict that Democratic claims that the GOP plans to “end” Medicare are misleading.
The stupidity of our discourse truly knows no bounds. Yes, a program called Medicare exists in the Ryan Plan. But that is where the similarities end. That realizing this requires reading even an executive brief of said Ryan Plan is why the Village will never, ever come to know this.