Hotwire saved us $100 on a 1 week auto rental

Hotwire did far better than the competition on a recent car rental.

Including taxes and the like, our total cost is about $15-$16 a day for a 1 week rental.

Priceline, Travelocity and Kayak weren't in the same league.

American spine movement: Brooks signs up

Maybe it's the influence of Gail Collins, maybe it's disgust with the GOP's institutionalized hysteria, maybe it's just chance, but David Brooks wrote a largely sensible editorial today.

He's effectively joined the American Spine Development Association, a now bipartisan movement to bring a smidgen of the courage of past generations to our cowardly modernity.

Perfection is not an option. Planes will blow up. An America with a spine will lose fewer planes and spend less than eternity at war. Spineless America will elect Sarah Palin.

Spine is good.

What Saka (Indian civil calendar) year is it?

In 1752 America September 2nd was followed by September 14th. That's when the Britain and her colonies switched to the Gregorian calendar.

India still uses the Gregorian calendar, but, not surprisingly, they have many other calendars. The most official one is the "National Calendar of India, sometimes called the Saki calendar.

So what year will on the Saki Calendar when it's 2010 in America?

Calendar Converter

... A bewildering variety of calendars have been and continue to be used in the Indian subcontinent. In 1957 the Indian government's Calendar Reform Committee adopted the National Calendar of India for civil purposes and, in addition, defined guidelines to standardise computation of the religious calendar, which is based on astronomical observations. The civil calendar is used throughout India today for administrative purposes, but a variety of religious calendars remain in use. We present the civil calendar here...

This Fourmilab calendar page claims it's 1931, but elsewhere I've seen 1932. I hope the page is correct, because it has an awesome list of calendars including Julian, Hebrew, Islamic, Persian, Mayan, Bahai, French Republican and ISO-8601 (Y9K but not Y10K compliant):

ISO 8601 permits us to jettison the historical and cultural baggage of weeks and months and express a date simply by the year and day number within that year, ranging from 001 for January 1st through 365 (366 in a leap year) for December 31st. ... ISO dates in this form are written as “YYYY-DDD”, for example 2000-060 for February 29th, 2000; leading zeroes are always written in the day number, but the hyphen may be omitted for brevity.

All ISO 8601 date formats have the advantages of being fixed length (at least until the Y10K crisis rolls around) and, when stored in a computer, of being sorted in date order by an alphanumeric sort of their textual representations. The ISO week and day and day of year calendars are derivative of the Gregorian calendar and share its accuracy.

The Fourmilab calendar page is a very cool, very old fashioned web 1.0 page -- really a historic document.

So what, you might wonder, is Fourmilab?

Glad you asked ...

... This site is developed and maintained by John Walker, founder of Autodesk, Inc. and co-author of AutoCAD. A variety of documents, images, software for various machines, and interactive Web resources are available here; click on entries in the frame to the left to display a table of contents for that topic. Items which span more than one category are listed in all...

John Walker. A wealthy and eccentric geek of the first golden age of computing. Wow.

His personal web site is a blast from the past -- frames! There are links like "nanotechnology and eschatology", "consciousness studies" (including retrospychokinesis - martial arts students change past) and "Palm utilities".

Despite the charming HTML 1.0 feel, the site is not dead. He has a blog.

Funny world.

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Healthcare standards: how you know they blew it

You only need to know one thing to know that the frenetic healthcare standards efforts failed ...

Life as a Healthcare CIO: The Interim Final Rule on Standards

... The adopted vocabulary standards for procedures are the applicable HIPAA code set required by law (i.e.,ICD-9-CM) or CPT-4. The candidate standards are the applicable HIPAA code set required by law (e.g.,ICD-10-CM) or CPT-4...

CPT. Fully owned by the AMA, CPT is a rough collection of work descriptions sometimes loosely related to procedures. It's not a vocabulary, it's not a classification, and it has no stable semantics.

The adoption of CPT as a healthcare "standard" is not the only sign of failure, but it is the most telling sign.

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Thank you Mr President.

John Scalzi and Andrew Sullivan agree. President Obama has been a giant.

I say he's much more than American deserves. The roots of GOP rage are many, but one of them is that this man is so much better than they are.

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CARE.ORG for charity: four stars, never bugs us

We were very late with our 2009 donation to CARE.ORG. I just got it done.

We donate to CARE, and very little to anywhere else, for four main reasons:

1. Since they work with the most impoverished populations the reduction of human suffering per dollar donated is immense.
2. They have a four star Charity Navigator Rating - CARE.
3. Consolidating our donations to one organizations means less tax hassles and paper work.
4. CARE doesn't bother us.

The last is critical. Most of the places we've donated to in the past plagued us with spam, mailings, unwanted calendars, stickers, etc. With a very few exceptions, CARE does not. Once a year or so, often after our major annual donation, we may get an email. I respond by saying our annual donation is contingent on never hearing from them. That's been the end of it.

Strongly recommended.

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Cloud Lesson #72: The risk of letting Google own your web site

Google finally migrated our Page Creator site to Google Sites - six months late.

It's a train wreck.

Remind me again why we're supposed to trust the Cloud?

See also: Gordon's Notes: Nimbophobia: Why you should fear the cloud

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America, please grow a spine

Another mentally ill al Qaeda cannon fodder has tried to blow up an airplane. It's encouraging that they're still scraping the barrel to recruit suicide bombers.

Meanwhile, in America, there are rumors that we'll have to forsake electronics and all motion or access to personal goods for the last hour of flight. At one point it was rumored that we'd have to go without a book for the "last hour". We might as well scratch all children and many adults with medical, cognitive or psychiatric disorders from flying.

Oh, and I love they way they say "last hour" as though planes never spend 1-2 hours circling the airport or waiting for a gate.

Meanwhile anyone who's seen a movie or read a book about smuggling or prisons is waiting for the first bomb smuggled in by body cavity - or surgically embedded into the abdomen. The next generation of scanners will have to incorporate a rectal probe.

The TSA administrators can't be as stupid as they look. They must know there's really no practical way to secure an airplane (train, bus, public space) against a truly competent and determined attacker. The best we can do is balanced risk mitigation. As Schneier has told us so many times, the big changes post 9/11 were to secure the cockpit door and look to the courage of passengers.

So if the TSA administrators aren't stupid, where do these regs come from? They come from legislative pressure. Now, many of our legislators are stupid, but not all of them. So why do they do this?

Because they know if a plane blows up and they didn't max out on security theater they'll be out of office - because we American voters are who we are.

We gotta stop this. Voters and legislators alike need to grow an American spine -- before our fear and stupidity drives us off the deep end of history.

Update 12/29/09: Signs of vertebral development. The absurd early responses have been dropped. Also, rectal bombs have already been used in Saudi Arabia.

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In praise of cardiac risk calculators

I've always had annoyingly high cholesterol levels, but I recently hit both age 50 and a new high cholesterol (though also a new high HDL). I figured it was time to bite the Statins.

First, though, I made the rounds of the risk calculators. I stuck with those on US and Canadian government and educational sites. The results varied depending on where the modeling data was taken from, but I generally fell between a 5% and 7% 10 year risk of a cardiac event (Said even is not necessarily fatal, but certainly unpleasant).

Even more significantly the only thing that really shifted my risk was to change gender. Even a fantastic statin effect, such as taking my cholesterol below 190, didn't change my risk much (from 6% to 4%, for a 33% relative risk reduction but a mediocre absolute risk reduction).

Considering that the statins are unlikely to be risk free [1] I decided to wait until my personal risk tops an arbitrary 10% threshold. In the meantime I'll continue to focus on diet and (especially) exercise.

The key lesson here is the value of these dynamic, personalized, risk calculators. They drive home the lessons we were taught in the 90s about the difference between statistical and clinical significance and they are an early and practical application of the principals of "personalized medicine".

Now if we could only apply these basic principles to airplane security planning...

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Lipid guidelines: Sometimes the emperor really is starkers
• Gordon's Notes: The 2004 national cholesterol guidelines have no clothes

[1] We have good reason to believe that the published literature has a systematic bias understating the risks of high value medications. We also know these are powerful medications that act on a wide variety of lipid receptors. On the other hand studies of absolute mortality risk in the last decade have been encouraging -- but those studies were done on persons with much higher risks of cardiac disease than mine.

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Google Health and my Google password

Google is infamous for not providing direct customer service. If you lose control of your Google Account you can be in deep trouble very quickly.

I thought of that as I experimented with entering my recent (yechy) lipid results into Google Health. Google Health is a part of my suite of Google services; if I lose control of my Google Account I also lose control of my personal health record (PHR).

How long will Google be able to provide a "PHR" without support services? Will they run into regulatory issues now that legislators threaten to extend HIPAA rules into the PHR domain?

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Tech Churn: OS X Server, MobileMe and the Cloud

I've been gradually working through all the expected and unexpected* consequences of moving in a new machine and sunsetting my 6+ year old XP box.

Along the way I've run into another example of technology churn.

In our home we have 5 users and a guest account that are distributed across four Macs - an iMac i5, MacBook dual core, iMac G5, and a surprisingly functional though immobile iBook G3 running Camino. Each machine has its own uses, and most have six accounts.

It's a furball. It doesn't work well, for example, to put all personal files on an AFP share (Spotlight doesn't readily index shares, Mail and Aperture have issues with shares, there's no trash recovery post delete, etc). It's a pain to distribute passwords (keychain), credentials, desktops, etc. Let's not discuss our modern backup mess, shall we?

Once upon a time the answer would have been reasonably straightforward. I'd buy a used Mac Mini, stick OS X server and two 2TB firewire drives (one backup and one local) and do manage desktops.

Except Apple's iCal server fiasco tells me their server team is in disarray. There's also a relatively modern alternative to consider; at one time this is what MobileMe was marketed for. It was have been kind of OS X server in the Cloud, accessible both from the home firewall and from remote clients. (As of 10.6, incidentally, I think a MobileMe user name/pw associated with a user account in the Accounts Preference Pane acts like a kind of (undocumented) alternative global user identifier.)

So should I make good user of our family MobileMe account? Well, I'm kind of doing that, but there's churn there too. MobileMe has been caught in the iPhone, photo sharing, Google Apps and Facebook swhirlpool. Nobody, not even Steve Jobs, seems to know what the heck to do with it.

Or maybe we could extend what we've been doing for 3 years, and move more of our family functions into the gCloud? If Google does deliver a $150 Chrome OS netbook then each child will have one. Maybe we should start now.

Or maybe, because there's so much technological uncertainty, we should stall for time.

I think we're going to stall for time -- which means some combination of an AFP share, a backup server, MobileMe synchronization and continued use of our successful family Google Apps domain. That means OS X Server stays on the shelf for at least another six months.

Tech churn is a pain.

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: The MobileMe Massacre begins
• Gordon's Tech: MobileMe: Perspective of a crusty Palm veteran
• Gordon's Tech: MobileMe, Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, iTunes and yes, sync Hell
• Gordon's Tech: Google Apps for our family
• Gordon's Notes: Shared family calendars, PDAs and Google Android
• Gordon's Tech: Reaching for Nerdvana: Integrating family and work calendars
• Gordon's Tech: Big switch on my iPhone sync: CalDAV and Exchange server
• Gordon's Tech: Using OS X 10.5 iCal with Google CalDAV - cleaning up import disasters

Update 10/4/09: A positive review of OS X 10.6 server convinced me that I really don't want to go that route! If Apple does make MobileMe a sort of "OS X Server Lite" for that masses, however, I'd find value there.

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* Such as the 27" iMac's notorious flicker problem (which has been very mild for us), discovering the human factors limits of screen height, and unexpected software incompatibilities with 10.6.
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Amazon holiday

It's getting hard for me to remember pre-Amazon. I know I bought books in the first few months of operation, when that was all they sold.

For our children, Amazon is eternal.

This holiday the Amazon boxes made one heck of a pile. Between the things we bought and Amazon gift certs from aunts and uncles the store in the cloud provided over 80% of the kid stuff (including things like the scope that came from Orion via the Amazon storefront).

We're clearly not typical of anything, but I'm looking forward to seeing how they did against the competition (though I expect nobody did great this year).

Incidentally, one fringe benefit of Amazon is that the gifts are concealed. Prying eyes are much less of a problem.

PS. Not that Amazon is perfect. In theory you can cancel mistaken orders even after they've been placed. In practice that doesn't work for affiliates, the orders still get processed. I didn't say I loved Amazon.

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The health care bill

Odds are something like the Senate bill passed today will become law.

I didn't hope for much, but I did have one selfish desire. I hoped we'd get alternatives to employment based healthcare. I hoped individuals would be able to purchase insurance with large group pricing. It looks like we won't even get that. Instead the cost of open market insurance is expected to increase. Subsidies will offset those costs, but they will have an income cap.

Oh, and we'll be paying for the benefit expansion too - since costs won't be significantly contained.

Sigh.

On the other hand the current debauched system will be shaken up. I think, on balance, we'll move closer to what we need, even though that won't be the fantasy most Americans expect. We'll take two steps backward, 3 steps laterally, and 2 steps forward and we'll make progress. Given how stunned and confused Americans are and the state of the GOP this is probably the best we can do.

We need a better American citizen.

Update: Joe Paduda is even bleaker than I, but still thinks this bill is worth doing.
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Coldest major cities?

A biking book I was reading claimed Minneapolis (meaning St Paul) was the coldest major city on earth. That might be true of the US if you exclude cities with metro areas under 1 million ...

USATODAY.com

... The coldest major city in the USA is Minneapolis, which has an annual average temperature of 45.2 F. However, several other smaller cities are much colder, including Fairbanks, Alaska (26.7 F), Anchorage (36.2 F), International Falls, Minn. (37.4 F), Duluth, Minn., (39.1 F), and Caribou, Maine (39.2 F)...

There's no way it's true of the world however. Edmonton is insanely colder, and their metro population is now over 1 million very tough people. Montreal is slightly warmer than us -- though the weather there is far more miserable (gloomy, slushy, thaw, freeze - yech). Winnipeg is colder than Minneapolis, but it doesn't make the 1 million cut (they claim to the coldest western hemisphere city over 600,000 people).

Google has only one list and it omits Edmonton (but includes Minneapolis) ...

harbin: -13 C/ 8 F (the 10th largest city in China with 9.8 million residents)

qiqihar: -13 C/9 F
urumqi: -8 C/18 F
changchun: -10 C/14 F
minneapolis: -6 C/22 F
montreal: -6 C/22 F
moscow: -6 C/22 F
shenyang: -6 C/22 F

So even on this list, we tie for 5th place with 3 others -- and this informal list omits Edmonton. I suspect if we use St Paul's post global warming temperatures (1990 on) we might fall out of the top 10.

We're definitely not the coldest "major" city on earth -- though we might make the top 3 of coldest wealthy city.

Incidentally, Harbin once had a Jewish population of 20,000 - in the 1920s.

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Alzheimer's, cancer and aging

Alzheimer's syndrome is associated with reduced risk of cancer. I'm not surprised, I wrote about this sort of thing back in 2006.

What we call "Alzheimer's" is probably a variety of disparate processes that lead, over time, to brain failure. The most common of these processes is probably above average aging of the brain. In other words, "Alzheimer's" is what you find in aged brains, it's where we're all going. Some get it sooner, others later.

Those whose brains age faster, or who start with less capacity, get demented sooner. Since accelerated aging seems to be inversely associated with malignancy risk, those who get demented earlier are less likely to get cancer.