SWCAMBORNE

This is a great YouTube video for Breast Cancer Awareness sent to me by Jane F.

I’m back in the YouTube business.

When I was in the UK last month my brother Tom took Rebecca and me to see the Cromford Mill near Derby.

It’s claim to fame is that it is “The First Factory.”  It was founded in 1771 by Richard Arkwright and was according to the brochure “the world’s first water powered cotton spinning mill.”

One of the things they do very well today is spin superlatives and I very much appreciate them.

The spinning machinery that built the mill from an idea in 1771 to a huge industrial enterprise in 1820 has all vanished.  But the concepts of water powered equipment, factory towns and organized labor that came out of Cromford resonated around the world.  The Lowell Mills National Park in Massachusetts is a descendant of Cromford. The water for the mill came from the drainage of a Lead mine nearby and the mills closed pretty quickly when the drain was changed in the 1820.

Whether Cromford was the first factory depends on the definition of factory but there is no doubt that for people who love the history of industrial development this is a great site.   We had an excellent tour and followed it with lunch at the Greyhound Hotel in Cromford.  I recommend the Pannini sandwiches.  Although I’m sure the curries are excellent.

One last story.  The mill was founded in Cromford and used cotton not wool because this was the time of the “Machine Breakers” who opposed any change to the craft based spinning and weaving industry.  The machine breakers also known as the Luddities drove Arkwright out of Liverpool and he moved to the countryside near Derby to try out his inventions.  The rest as they say is history.

There is an opportunity here for someone to organize a Science, Technology and Industrial Tour of England.  It could include sites like the Coal Mining Museum in Wales, Iron Bridge, Cromford Mill and the Museum of Science and Technology in Manchester.  Advertise it in Invention and Technology Magazine and Scientific American. Maybe start with articles about and a tour book describing the relevant sites.

One of the critiques of ObamaCare has been its proposal to use review panels to allocate medical resources to areas where the payoff would be best.  On a micro scale this used to be called triage and it makes perfect sense.  In Viet Nam when incoming wounded were overwhelming the medical staff on duty at the hospital where I worked triage decisions were routinely made about where to allocate the very limited resources.  Both those who would likely live without help and those who would likely die with help were forced to wait while those who would likely only live with help were treated.

I spent some time in the Emergency Rooms at Huntington Hospital and two different Kaiser hospitals this week helping my Father-in-Law through his latest crisis so I had lots of time to think about review panels, triage and allocation of resources.  In fact I also had enough time to read The Hidden Symbol, Dan Brown’s (author of The DaVinci Code) latest thriller.  I agree with President Obama that it is a bad allocation of resources to give a new hip ($40,000) to a ninety year old with a bad heart but I also agree with Obama’s critics that I don’t want “death panels” to be deciding if I get to live.  BTW by calling the “review panels” “death panels” the critics won this one on the name.  Think “homeless” vs “bums” we help homeless people we didn’t help bums.

I’m not sure that we will get to review panels and I’m not sure if they can work unless the incentives to providers, receivers and allocators of medical services change significantly.   For instance in the current model: If Medicare is paying, who at Kaiser would benefit from not putting another stent in a ninety year old bedridden man?  How would the man or his heirs benefit from not having it since the stent is free?  And what allocator would be able to defend withholding the stent against a crying grandchild on CNN?

We will need to change the incentive to all of these groups before any progress can be made toward controlling medical costs.  But don’t lose heart (we have stents for that),  I have devised the ultimate triage test and I will share it with you. (By clicking on the read the rest of this entry button I agree that Simon is writing what follows as a thought provoking joke and that without training I will not try to apply the test to real world situations) Read the rest of this entry »

The Oxometer was invented about 1930 by a friend of Albert Jay Nock.  Nock wrote about it in his book The State of the Union.  It is really a simple device and in our time we need it more than ever.   The Oxometer is a devise for detecting and separating “bull’ from the solid substance of discourse.

If it worked and we could shovel into the Oxometer the current political dialogue we would have no shortage of fertilizer pouring out.

I just finished “The Devils Company” on my Kindle 1. It has been been my primary reading tool for two years now.  Kindle 2 which I have fondled but don’t own is a significant improvement.  I welcome the entrance of The Nook.  Competition breeds change and some of the change is good.  I am however buying more Amazon stock.  My guess is that Barnes and Noble doesn’t have the committment to electronic books that Amazon does.  They have a huge investment in brick and mortar book stores.  So like Kodak at the beginning of the digital photography era they are doomed.

Technology changes and the printed book is no longer the low cost way to deliver stories.  Printers will go the way of scribes and storytellers.  “Digitizers” will become the new important link in the chain between creator and reader.  Don’t worry agents and editors will still be there.

Here is the first post I made about Kindle in January 2008

If you give the State the power to do something for you, you give it an exact equivalent power to do something to you.

Albert Jay Nock

The State of the Union  Essays in Social Criticism

Liberty Fund 1991

I got this joke from my friend Wally G:

This is something to think seriously about.    Will I Live to see 80?
I recently picked a new primary care doctor.  After two visits and exhaustive Lab tests, he said I was doing ‘fairly well’ for my age. (I just turned 60.)
A little concerned about that comment, I couldn’t resist asking him, ‘Do you think I’ll live to be 80?’
He asked, ‘Do you smoke tobacco, or drink beer or wine, indulge in chocolate or coffee?’
‘Oh no,’ I replied.  ‘I’m not doing drugs, either!’
Then he asked, ‘Do you eat rib-eye steaks and barbecued ribs?
I said, ‘Not much…. my former doctor said that all red meat is very unhealthy!’
‘Do you spend a lot of time in the sun, like playing golf, sailing, hiking, or bicycling?’ He asked.
No, I don’t,’ I said.
He asked, ‘Do you gamble, drive fast cars, or have a lot of sex?’
‘No,’ I said.

He looked at me and said…  ‘Then, why do you even give a shit?

I was witness to the creation of a new word this weekend.  Michele Wucker created it to explain her feeling toward some rowdy teenage guests at her hotel in Washington, DC.  She is the author of Lockout about the failure of the US immigration system and a Facebook friend.

A usage example: “Michele Wucker is feeling teenicidal toward the mobs of entitled brats who have confused her hotel with a prep school dormitory.”

Definition: Teenicidal: “Extremely angry at the actions of a teenager and considering killing said teen.”

A Google search for teenicidal turned up only four hits.

The Prickly Pear Cacti in Eaton Canyon

have a white mold looking stuff on them. This years there is a lot of it.

Inside the mold is a small sac of red liquid created by a bug called: Cochineal-dactylopius coccus.

The red liquid used to be the only really good source of red dye and was one of the early exports from the “New World” to Spain.  It still is used as a red dye in foods.  So when you eat red velvet cake part of what you are eating is bugs.  More information

I see an opportunity for local, natural, organic, color dyes to sell at farmers markets.

Belle, one of Rebecca’s cat.  Not Eileen