One of the bad things following the passage of Obamacare and Sarah Palin’s invocation of “death panels” is that now it’s considered necessary by some (certainly not all) conservatives and libertarians to automatically assume that any research finding that might also reduce costs is automatically some variant of “rationing” or on the slippery slope to a “death panel”.

To wit – this one by Althouse, linked last week by Instapundit following a link to Dr. Helen’s rather innocuous post on rates of prostate screenings.

No matter how I look at it, I can’t see the relationship between the rates of prostate screening, pain research, pap smears, expense, fairness, and the Buffett-rule that Glenn Reynolds apparently finds obvious. So now I’m wondering about him falling for or into mere drama where anything can be taken to be “rationing”. Or a precursor of a “death panel”.

Is stretching an idea, meme, partisan point, etc., to the breaking point the same as jumping the shark? If not, it should be!

Since I periodically lose interest in posting and too often let this space sit idly unblogged, I think that would be a wonderful thing to happen here, so here are my links to Little Green Footballs (Charles Johnson) and Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan, it appears, has also lost interest in blogging on his blog, so maybe he’ll take it up here.

*not a misspelling

BlogRolling has largely been on auto-pilot for the last six months or so. The people who built it for us don’t work for us anymore. Even though it doesn’t make us any money, we wanted to keep it running because we know folks like it.  But we’re not really comfortable with the code causing security warnings and that means it’s probably time for the service to end. 

The big ScienceBlogs brouhaha over selling a blog to Pepsico was fun — in the sense that watching a trainwreck can be called fun. The best roundup of links and a decent explanation of what upset many of the bloggers over at SB is Oh, Pepsi, What Has Thou Wrought? by Carl Zimmer at Discover.

At first… now other bloggers are leaving SB too. Or going on strike. This is going to expand my science blogroll, because now I can’t just use the SB blogroll to easily get to them.

I’m going to miss ScienceBlogs. It was great while it lasted.

What’s up Google? Maybe I should just uninstall Chrome. I have trouble with YouTube with it sometimes too.

The most complex year involved 4 non-resident state returns, including California which required several more pages and ‘forms” than the federal return. I’d have never figured it out without the software.

(Note: the memories he invoked have little to do with his essay other than the importance of the people doing the communicating. There’s much more there than what I reminisce about here.)

She used to send messages to me in my *office* via my printer from her bedroom. Yes, we had a home network facilitated by Cat5 cables (and Windows 95/98) strung from one end of the house to the other. These were not installed, they merely laid on the floor, also facilitating tripping and making vacuuming and mopping more fun. Not that I did a lot of vacuuming or mopping.

Believe it or not, we had 3 telephone lines into the house in those days. One was the primary voice number, it’s secondary line being the daughter’s line. The other was another “line 1″ for either fax or modem, mostly modem. A 56k modem which usually worked at 24k… because the lines were noisy. But we were wired, folks… wired.

My older daughter communicated through writing also, but not nearly as easily. There’s 6 1/2 years difference in their ages… and the ability to communicate a passing thought was much easier for the younger one than for the older, I think… because the younger one had the electronic advantage.

Now, through email and Facebook, we can all share our immediate thoughts much more easily and readily than ever before. Not to mention photos. I love digital photos!

Mr. Kinsell writes:

Properly used, the communications technology we now enjoy makes a whole lot of things easier and less time-consuming so that we can actually spend more time and energy on what’s really important.

Exactly. The key words there? “Properly used” and “what’s really important”.

1) Marginal Revolution’s qq linked to Neuroskeptic’s  War on “Interesting” which is a compelling, significant, worthy, notable, intriguing, fascinating, and relevant essay on the non-interesting aspects of interesting.  

2) Erin, another from Marginal Revolution, linked to Ceviche and Fish & Chips at The Language of Food. I hope Mr. Jurafsky keeps writing.

3) If you think you might be a coffee snot snob, think again because it just got harder and more expensive. Volokh commenter JKB links to this article on coffee’s Third Wave.