Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

A lot of people have had fun ridiculing the Obamacare website, and I especially enjoyed Jon Stewart’s take on it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7InS-xW1LCI I have not visited the dysfunctional site, because I don’t want to, and (fortunately) don’t need to. As Megan McArdle pointed out, though, those who have finally gotten through and managed to sign on…

Pointman’s latest. It is a hoot. And devilish clever. It has just occurred to me (1125z) that I should add a quote from the piece to get readers interested. Here goes: Wol is a person I admire of the highest personal integrity combined with great moral fibre and a true believer in the essential wholesomeness…

There are those who still think that we should be fighting the war on drugs. I wonder what they think about the war on privacy: Remember Lavabit and Silent Circle, the encrypted email providers that closed their doors because they faced government pressure to enable government snooping on their customers (Silent Circle still offers other…

Just got back from hearing Beethoven’s 33 Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli performed by Andras Schiff. It is a marvelously obsessive piece, which takes a fairly simple theme and expands, contracts, and spins it into something which seems to straddle the fence between music and what I suspect might have been Beethoven reflecting on…

Reason Magazine thinks the Federal Obamacare signup site is unfixable. Josh Barro, who is basically supportive of the law, writes that “there’s no reason not to level with the public right now, unless the truth is so horrible and the website is so un-fixable that Obama administration officials can’t bring themselves to discuss the matter…

      Well I never knew her that way. And I hope I never do. Eric though, may have met her. Original link from a comment at Reason.

Is the failure of the ACA Online presence intentional? New York state’s guaranteed issue and community rating rules—the two regulations that limit how insurers can charge based on health history and require them to sell policies to all comers—took effect in 1994. At the time, there were about 752,000 policyholders in the state’s individual market,…

In light of the highly emotional uproar over natural occurrences at Mt. Rushmore, I wonder what the WND crowd might make of the fact that all the American flags on the moon have turned white. (The same thing would have happened to the flags here, but never mind…)

Quick question. Can anyone tell me what in the world (or out of the world) this contraption is? It measures about 16″ and is labeled “Brookstone” on the back. When you plug it in, those four black things (cushions inserted into plastic collars) rotate at different times and at different rates. Above each rotating object,…

A blast from the past! Amazing to find a video of that place after all these (now 20) years. For years, my club’s space was the proud home of the House of Usher — “The Bay Area’s largest Gothic and Industrial Nightclub.” Is there anything that can’t be found on Youtube? (Of course, what was…

As a libertarian who happens to be a Republican (or might that be Republican who happens to be a libertarian?), I have long been sympathetic to the Tea Party principles, which are usually stated thusly: Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government, and Free Markets Core agreement on the above can unite a broad coalition on the…

I got the link from a comment on this piece.

The Ku Klux Klan would love this: …race concordance — defined as shared racial or ethnic identities between clinicians and patients — is related to patient reports of satisfaction, participatory decision making, timeliness of treatment, and trust in the health system. The above comes from a 2009 report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) which…

Well, this is weird, I was trying to have a Facebook discussion on my own page, and the system will not allow me to say anything, so I thought I might as well put it here for lack of a better place. A friend asked this: As I understand it, thinking requires rationale whereas belief…

I’m a bit horrified to see a total political hack like former DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe poised to win election to the United States Senate Virginia Governorship, but I guess that’s just the way things have to be. Hillary is stumping for McAuliffe, and his (her) opponent Cuccinelli seems to be doing his level best to…

While I always look for simple explanations of seemingly inexplicable problems, in the case of a recurrent problem I did just that, and it is beginning to appear that I was wrong. When I fill my gas tank, I have noticed that the little notches in the fuel pump handle that hold the lever in…

A beautiful explanation of the atmospheric system. And funny thing – you don’t need anything but classic physics/chemistry to understand it. Here is a starter: P is pressure. V is volume. If pressure goes up, volume must go down as long as all other things are kept equal (that is, the other side of the…

Earlier I saw something on Facebook that made me say, “Damned if logic isn’t frustrating sometimes!” I found this especially puzzling because I happen to have a group of very puzzled dinosaurs (who call themselves the “TriLateralCeratopsian Commission”) and they have been puzzling over a puzzle for over a week now. They don’t know what…

By reducing wear and tear on healthcare equipment: A joke? Nope. It is true. Ah. But surely it is only one hospital. Nope. Six. At least. Well. It could be worse. You could get your face eaten by mice. Musta been engineered by a 1984 fan. Well they should have done a root cause analysis.…