I did not see that coming

Well, that was a surprise. I did not expect to see the Trumpcare bill crash and burn as it did yesterday when the speaker Paul Ryan pulled it from the floor of House of Representatives shortly before the scheduled vote because he did not have the votes to pass it and wanted to avoid an embarrassing defeat, although the effective defeat is being seen as equally devastating. I thought that too many factors were in favor of some version of it passing.
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Doesn’t Rick Perry have anything better to do?

Rick Perry was appointed by Donald Trump to head the Department of Energy, the department that Perry said he wanted to eliminate when he ran for the Republican nomination in 2012 but famously flamed out when he forgot it when trying to list the three government agencies that he thought should be gotten rid of. It makes sense that he would be assigned to head that particular agency as part of the Trump administration’s seeming goal of destroying the government.
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Why are Republicans so cruel to the poor?

There has been high drama about the Trumpcare (aka ACHA) health bill introduced to replace Obamacare and whether it will pass both houses of Congress despite Republicans having majorities in both. Yesterday’s deadline for a vote, set for the stupid symbolic reason that it was the seventh anniversary of Obamacare’s passage, came and went without a vote and another deadline has been set for today.
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My first day of spring

On the first day of each spring, I like to play some version of George Harrison’s Here Comes the Sun because it perfectly captures the joy of emerging from winter, even when the winters have been so mild as the last two have been in Cleveland. Of course, the first official day of spring was this past Monday but I sneer at being bound by calendars. For me, the first day of spring has to feel warm, sunny, have no snow on the ground, and be late enough in the year so that even though it will snow again, that snow will quickly disappear within a day or so.
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Film review: The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (2013)

The premise of this utterly hilarious Swedish film is right there in the title. On his 100th birthday, as the staff of the nursing home where he lives are getting a cake ready for the celebration, Allan Karlsson decides that he has had it with nursing home life. So he climbs out of the window of his room, wanders down to the local bus station, and buys a ticket for as far as the little money he has on him will take him.
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The menace of ‘predatory journals’ and the future of journals and peer-review

Traditional science journals get their money from ads and/or individual and library subscriptions. You cannot pay to have your paper published and thus this system avoids obvious conflicts of interest for authors and journals. The catch is that this prevents wider dissemination of the articles since the subscriptions are expensive. The costs have risen so dramatically that even libraries cannot afford to maintain the range of journals they once had. Why these costs have risen so much and the role of for-profit publishing houses in pushing up those costs is a hot topic but not the issue I want to discuss in this post. What this is about is how an effort to find a solution to the cost and low accessibility problems has had unintended consequences.
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Russia cuts military budget

It became clear after the end of the Cold War that the then USSR was finding that the cost of maintaining parity with the US military was crippling them economically. There have been suggestions that the US deliberately ramped up their defense spending in order to achieve the goal of straining the USSR’s finances. While Russia now seems to have ceded dominance to the US, they have clearly shifted to a mode where they accept second-tier status while still maintaining enough strength to serve their own needs.
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Kurt Gödel and how the US could become a dictatorship

Kurt Gödel is widely recognized as being one of the premier mathematical logicians of all time whose incompleteness theorems revealed a stunning limitation on the limits of the axiomatic approach. “His findings put an end to logicist efforts such as those of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead and demonstrated the severe limitations of David Hilbert’s formalist program for arithmetic.” He was also notoriously eccentric. After suffering from severe digestive disorders due to an ulcer, later in life he became convinced that he was being poisoned and his wife acted as his food taster. But his digestive problems and his refusal to eat led to him finally dying of starvation in 1978 at the age of 71.
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