2/14    http://www.harpers.org/TheSecretMainstream.html
        Yet Herzog continued working with Kinski--they eventually made five
        films together--and in this, one can detect something of the
        perversity that impelled the director to drag a boat across a mountain
        in the first place. Herzog has never really been able to fully account
        for his and Kinski's twisted reliance upon each other. He did pull
        from Kinski some astonishing performances--particularly in Woyzeck, a
        film basically composed of several long one-take sequences--but their
        working relationship involved serial pledges to kill each other.
        Kinski, who died in 1991, wrote in his autobiography that "I
        absolutely despise this murderous Herzog. . . . Huge red ants should
        piss into his lying eyes, gobble up his balls, penetrate his asshole,
        and eat his guts!" [16][4]

2/14    Valentine's Day special:
        http://www.csua.org/u/i1i
        Do Silicon Valley geeks really want to date over the hill
        Marina chicks?
        \_ Holy crap!  In that fashion pic. Marv Su is wearing almost the
           exact button up shirt my wife got me, and I refused to wear!
           \_ Why the hell would you refuse to wear that, especially when
              it was a gift?
              \_ It wasn't exactly a gift, she generally buys clothes for me
                 when she goes shopping, and returns the ones I don't like.
                 It's hard to see in the photo, but on mine the grid pattern
                 was barbie-purple.  It looked like something the nerd from a
                 bad 80's teen movie would wear.  Apparently it's now in
                 fashion.
                 \_ "barbie-purple".  :-)

2/14    Amazing photo (Comet Between Fireworks and Lightning)
        http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070205.html
        \_ Lightnings are just fractions of a second.  How do photographers
           capture them?
           \_ It's pretty clear that's a longer exposure.  But I've seen some
              equipment that actually detects flashes.  Also, in a good
              thunderstorm, if you just click a bunch of exposures as fast as
              the camera will go over a few seconds, you'll get some lightning.
              \- er how is that supposed to work? lighting happens at t0,
                 reaches "flash detector" at t0+\episilon, shutter opens
                 at t0+\epsilon+\shutter_lag ... with no AF, the shutter
                 lag on expensive professional bodies [Canon 1D, Nikon D2]
                 is in 10s of miliseconds (there are a couple of consumer
                 camera that are faster, but not in the "couple of ms" range.)
                 How long does a lightning bolt last, do you think?
                 Anyway, you would normally do this with a bulb setting and
                 a pretty decent aperture ... note also on a digital it
                 might be kinda noisy. Shooting lightning at night and day
                 as as different as night and day ... so to speak. i havent
                 personally shot any lightning but have done some night
                 long exposure stuff [ymte valley ... came out ok] and some
                 fireworks [didnt come out well].
                 \_ You do know that lightning is not an instantaneous
                    phenomenon, right?
                    \- i've given you some numbers on shutter lag.
                       where are yours? photo flashes are not instantaneous
                       either but from the point of view of the shutter
                       flash-flash syncing basically occurs at the same time.
                       flash->flash (slave) syncing basically occurs at the
                       same time.
                       BTW, I am not saying this wont work any way any how ...
                       i am just curious how it would given the numbers i am
                       aware of.

2/14    I always thought the boobs on the female Autobots in the
        Transformers movie were totally hot.
        \_ I found hotter boobs.  http://flickr.com/photos/oliviamiao

2/14    http://geekz.co.uk/schneierfacts
        In Soviet Russia, Bruce Schneier considers Edsger Dijkstra harmful.

2/14    A few days ago there was a brief discussion about socialized health
        care.  Walter Williams has a column today that addresses existing
        problems of Canada and UK health care.  -emarkp
        http://csua.org/u/i1p
        \_ The Canadian statistics there are interesting.  They give numbers
           like "the median wait for a CT scan across Canada was 4.3 weeks,
           but in Prince Edward Island, it's 9 weeks".  PEI is the smallest
           and poorest province in Canada, though, so that's not really
           surprising.  All the above-the-median examples they give are from
           the small, poor provinces -- this suggests that wait times in the
           major provinces (Ontario, Quebec, BC) are significantly lower than
           the numbers in the article, which fits with what my friends and
           relatives have experienced.  --mconst
           \_ Wrong--not "significantly lower" than the median.  A little
              googling turned up the publication:
              http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/shared/readmore.asp?sNav=pb&id=863
              "Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia had the shortest wait
              for computed tomography (4.0 weeks)" -emarkp
           \_ Oh, and here's the Observer article from 2002:
              http://observer.guardian.co.uk/nhs/story/0,,661090,00.html
              "The number waiting a dangerously long time has doubled in two
              years, says a devastating official study obtained by The
              Observer." -emarkp
        \_ BORRRRRING
           \_ Not necessarily.  If the population on PEI and other poor regions
              is low than their numbers won't have a dramatic impact on the
              average across the country.  I don't have numbers for these
              places and honestly don't care enough to look them up but your
              basic logic is flawed.
        \_ I'd rather wait 9 weeks for a govt paid CT scan than 2 days for
           one that costs $15,000 out of pocket.
           \_ What if your condition becomes terminal in that 9 weeks?
              \_ There's no question that there's a trade off.  But in the
                 end I believe that more people would benefit from the service
                 who don't have healthcare than those who would suffer because
                 of wait times.
                 \_ So, it seems like the obvious solution here would be to
                    allow people to pay for fast service if they wish. (I
                    haven't read the article yet.) -jrleek
                    \_ Which is explicitly disallowed, at least in Canada.
                       -emarkp
        \_ There is a lot of room for debate on whether we should move to
           socialized medicine. However, I find http://TownHall.com to be distress-
           ingly partisan. Thank you for the article; please let us know if a
           more reliable source has something to say. --erikred
           \_ You attack the messenger because you don't like the message?
              How about we examine the message itself.  Is there a flaw in
              their data or reporting?
           \_ http://TownHall.com is a collection for opinions on the right.  If you
              reject a source of debate that you don't like, how can you have a
              debate?  Williams is an economist and from reading his columns, I
              think he's clearly libertarian (in philosophy if not in party
              registration).  I'm perfectly happy reading opinions from the
              left on (say) http://moveon.org, etc. and opinions from the right on a
              different site.  Why do you object to that? -emarkp
        \_ Of course, anytime you ration the use of something, you are going
           to cause a wait for it. In the US, we just ration by ability to
           pay, in Canada they do it by the severity of your problem. People
           die all the time in the US because they can't afford treatment,
           and Dr. Williams is being disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
           \_ Ah, but the difference is that when people bid up the cost of
              something, there is financial incentive to bring more players
              into the market.  The US system, while deeply flawed, does allow
              government (or charities) to subsidize the cost of care for
              people who can't afford it, and those who can afford it can get
              it by paying cash. -emarkp
              \_ Where do the blood sucking parasites, I mean, insurance
                 companies fit into this equation?
                 \_ Insurance simply spreads risk.  We pay them to manage risk
                    for us.  However, the current insurance/medical regime is
                    the problem with the system.  To some extent we *do* have
                    socialized care, since medical essentially determines
                    reimbursment amounts, and mandates care at emergency rooms.
                    -emarkp
                    \_ Tell me again how "no one dies" due to lack of
                       medical care in America:
                       http://www.csua.org/u/i26
                       But yes, in many ways we have both the worst of
                       socialism and the worst of capitalism all rolled up
                       in our terrible medical delivery system.
                       \_ I never said it in the first place. Can't you read?
                          -emarkp
                         \_ "I challenge anyone to show me people dying on
                             the streets because they don't have health
                             insurance." So you didn't say it, but your
                             source did.

2/14    http://lil-markie.livejournal.com