Boy Scouts build a catapult

For our August camping trip, the project was to practice lashings by building a catapult. It was highly successful!



NOTE: No trees were harmed in building this catapult! We brought our own poles.

Soaring Health Care Costs?

Hedge-fund manager Clifford Asness, writing at Stumblingontruth.com:

Myth #1 Health Care Costs are Soaring

No, they are not. The amount we spend on health care has indeed risen, in absolute terms, after inflation, and as a percentage of our incomes and GDP. That does not mean costs are soaring.

You cannot judge the “cost” of something by simply what you spend. You must also judge what you get. I’m reasonably certain the cost of 1950’s level health care has dropped in real terms over the last 60 years (and you can probably have a barber from the year 1500 bleed you for almost nothing nowadays). Of course, with 1950’s health care, lots of things will kill you that 2009 health care would prevent. Also, your quality of life, in many instances, would be far worse, but you will have a little bit more change in your pocket as the price will be lower. Want to take the deal? In fact, nobody in the US really wants 1950’s health care (or even 1990’s health care). They just want to pay 1950 prices for 2009 health care. They want the latest pills, techniques, therapies, general genius discoveries, and highly skilled labor that would make today’s health care seem like science fiction a few years ago. But alas, successful science fiction is expensive.

In the case of health care, the fact that we spend so much more on it now is largely a positive. The negative part is if some, or a lot, of that spending is wasteful. Of course, that is mostly the government’s fault and is not what advocates of government control want you to focus upon. We spend so much more on health care, even relative to other advances, mostly because it is worth so much more to us. Similarly, we spend so much more on computers, compact discs, HDTV, and those wonderful one shot espresso makers that make it like having a barista in your own home. Interestingly, we also spend a ton more on these other items now than we did in 1950 because none of these existed in 1950 (well, you could have hired a skilled Italian man to live with you and make you coffee twice a day, so I guess that existed and the price has in fact come down; my bad, analogy shot). OK, you get the point. Health care today is a combination of stuff that has existed for a while and a set of entirely new things that look like (and really are) miracles from the lens of even a few years ago. We spend more on health care because it’s better. Say it with me again, slowly – this is a good thing, not a bad thing.

By the way, I do not mean that the amount we spend on health care in this country isn’t higher than it needs to be. Myth #4 covers that.

In summary, if one more person cites soaring health care costs as an indictment of the free market, when it is in fact a staggering achievement of the free market, I’m going to rupture their appendix and send them to a queue in the UK to get it fixed. Last we’ll see of them.

Do you believe in fairies? Unicorns? BMI?

Mathematician Kieth Devlin of Stanford points out that even the CDC engages in junk science occasionally -- and the "Body Mass Index" is his example.

According to this CDC endorsed metric, these people are all overweight: Kobe Bryant, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Will Smith, and Denzel Washington. Tom Cruise scored even worse, being classified as downright obese, as was Arnold Shwarzenegger when he was a world champion body-builder. With definitions like that, no wonder Americans think of themselves as having an overweightness epidemic. (Using the CDC's BMI measure, 66 percent of adults in the United States are considered overweight or obese.)

Outraged over the AIG bonuses?

I was, too. Then I read this.

Dilbert on the abuse of graphics

Since I'm going to an Edward Tufte seminar on Monday, I thought today's Dilbert comic was quite timely:

Language peeve of the week: "forecasted"

I'm seeing this more and more lately. Consider this, from ABC news:

"In a speech this morning at an economics conference in northern Virginia, just outside Washington DC, Romer, noting that 'the deeper the recession, the more rapid the rebound,' forecasted that when the country recovers from its current crisis, it will enjoy a period of 'very rapid growth'”.

Forecast works perfectly well as a past-tense. And doesn't it just sound better to say that Romer "forecast that when the country recovers?"

I know, your dictionary says "forecasted" is ok. Well, Theodore Bernstein says it better than I can:

"If you think you have correctly forecasted the immediate future of English and have casted your lot with the permissivists, you may be receptive to broadcasted, at least in radio usage, as are some dictionaries. The rest of us, however, will decide that no matter how desirable it may be to convert all irregular verbs into regular ones, this cannot be done by ukase, nor can it be accomplished overnight. We shall continue to use broadcast as the past tense and participle, feeling that there is no reason for broadcasted other than one of analogy or consistency or logic, which the permissivists themselves so often scorn."

Forecast is derived from the word "cast." Would a fisherman say "I casted my line into the stream?" I think not.

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