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Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Interesting statistic

I found myself reading "Assessment Guidelines for Counter Terrorism"-R. Hall and ran (rather quickly) into the following quote:

Historically, the risk of death from terrorism has been small relative to many other causes. The single largest cause of death in the United States – heart disease – produces as many fatalities in an average two-day period as all major acts of terrorism produced against the United States in the 1983 – 2005 period. Homicides in the United States produce a comparable number of deaths in a 3-month period.
I am a strong supporter of fighting terrorism, but judging from those numbers, we should be investing in ways to combat heart disease.

Friday, August 03, 2007

And so it begins

The robots are finally armed.

Practice your kneeling, for the robot overloads approach.

ha. Its interesting that it took that long to get them into the theater. Hopefully they help out. I don't know if they will do more harm that good. If a foreign country parachuted a group of robots onto your town, would you welcome them more than soldiers? I assume the kids will think it is cool, I wonder what everyone else will do.

Thursday, August 02, 2007

I have become a man.

I compiled my ownz window manager today. It is one of those 'elitest' window managers that you configure by changing the source code and recompiling. dwm.

And, due to my laptop being out of commission for a while (thanks Dana!)... I have to play with it here(my desktop). I am probably getting a usb keyboard to last me a bit, then ordering a replacement one for the laptop soon (maybe tomorrow, but it will have Canadian keys, I can just replace those with the ones that I have)

So, anyway, I compiled and ran/installed dwm on my windoze box to play with it. I'll see how it goes. I was using wmii on the laptop, and really liked it. This dwm is supposed to be its little brother. I didn't know how to start an xterm.... guess what? The source was right there, and bam-o! alt-shift-enter. The key bindings were conveniently in the config.h file, so thats an easy thing to figure out. Supposedly less than 2000 lines of source code. I'll play with it more ... !@#$. In about a week as I will be moving out this weekend. No more desktop for me. (no more playing past tonight.. and it is already late)

In case anyone on the intertubes was wondering what I did, I had a working version of cygwin installed, with the X server (Xwin) working. I downloaded the recent snapshot of dwm, un gzipped, untar, you know the drill. 'make clean install' just like the readme said.

The only thing else to do was modify a bat file (startxwin.bat) in the /usr/X11R6/bin directory. I changed the line

"%RUN% XWin -multiwindow -clipboard -silent-dup-error" to be
"%RUN% Xwin -rootless -clipboard"

Then I did not have it start the xterm (stick a "REM" in front of that)

Add "%RUN% %CYGWIN_ROOT%\usr\local\bin\dwm"
done.

Oh yeah, and a shout out to Adam, my Commenter of the Week.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Congrefs and their messing around...

Dysphagia: a medical term defined as "difficulty swallowing."

H.CON.RES.195 : Expressing the sense of the Congress that a National Dysphagia Awareness Month should be established.
Sponsor: Rep Wamp, Zach [TN-3] (introduced 7/27/2007)
Cosponsors (None)
Committees: House Oversight and Government Reform
Latest Major Action: 7/27/2007 Referred to House committee. Status: Referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

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CONCURRENT RESOLUTION

Expressing the sense of the Congress that a National Dysphagia Awareness Month should be established.

Whereas dysphagia, or difficulty with swallowing, is a medical dysfunction that affects as many as 15,000,000 Americans;

Whereas the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that 1,000,000 people in the United States annually are diagnosed with dysphagia;

Whereas the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has estimated that 60,000 Americans die annually from complications associated with dysphagia;

Whereas based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mortality data, this is more than the total number of Americans dying from all forms of liver disease, kidney disease, and HIV/AIDS combined--and nearly as many as those dying from diabetes, the number 6 killer of Americans;

Whereas the most common complication arising from dysphagia is aspiration pneumonia--caused by food or saliva entering the windpipe and into the lungs;

Whereas one in 17 people will develop some form of dysphagia in their lifetime, including 50 to 75 percent of stroke patients and 60 to 75 percent of patients who undergo radiation therapy for head and neck cancer;

Whereas as many as half of all Americans over 60 will experience dysphagia at some point;

Whereas complications due to dysphagia increase health care costs by resultant hospital readmissions, emergency room visits, extended hospital stays, the necessity for long-term institutional care, and the need for expensive respiratory and nutritional support;

Whereas the cost of managing a patient with a feeding tube, which for many has been the primary treatment option for this condition, is reported to average over $31,000 per patient per year;

Whereas the total annual cost to Medicare just for enteral feeding supplies for outpatients was more than $670,000,000 in 2003, nearly 6 percent of the total Medicare budget for that year;

Whereas including the monies spent in hospitals, the total cost of dysphagia to the health care system is well over $1,000,000,000 annually;

Whereas the condition of dysphagia is a vastly underreported condition and not widely understood by the general public; and

Whereas observing June 2008 as National Dysphagia Awareness Month would raise public awareness about dysphagia and the need for early detection and treatment: Now, therefore, be it

    Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That it is the sense of the Congress that a National Dysphagia Awareness Month should be established.
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I mean, not being able to swallow sucks. But do we really need a month for it? Could picking what to call each month be pushed to some smaller committee? Could you solve this with an awareness campaign that doesn't tie it to a month?

When will congress start working, and stop messing around? I am slightly proud of them this year, I think they are starting to pass the budget before the financial year starts. This should be mandatory, and they should lock them in the room with no food and water during September if they can't agree on the budget.

I hope the karma police don't come by and make it difficult to swallow...