chakravyuha

This wonderful collage of moves by dance masters past reveals how Michael Jackson developed his signature style.

[via]: fimoculous

A awesome set of Diwali picture from the always excellent The Big Picture blog. Be sure to check them out.

The best new series of 2009

• Community – A comedy featuring bunch of grown-ups who join a community college after failing to make it so far in the big bad world.
• Modern Family – The new Arrested Development. Very very good.
• Bored to Death – Noir(ish) adventure of a Brooklyn man suffering writers block who finds his way into the detective business after his girlfriend dumps him. The mysteries are light, finding a stolen skateboard, a missing woman and such. Zach Galifianakis and Ted Danson are the other major characters – and characters they are.

And the best continuing series of 2009

• The Big Bang Theory – Kunal Nayyar, Simon Helberg and Sheldon Cooper are absolutely brilliant as the young PHd nerds at a university that’s obviously a stand-in for CalTech.

We are all familiar with the Chivalric literature featuring popular characters like King Arthur and Lancelot – brave knights who are strong and moral, uphold virtue, save damsels in distress, and are overall awesome people. It turns out that the real medieval (circa. the high middle ages – 12th, 13th century) knights were nothing better than thugs and villains. The local life in a medieval village was cut-off from the distant king. It was the local knight (or knights – there could be more than one knight in one area) who had the wealth and power. Encased in armor when they went out and protected by their stone castle walls when they were at home, knights acted as gangsters, ordering people to pay taxes in exchange for – theoretically at least – offering protection. Knights with land also forced peasants to work on their lands, most of the time for free. Most of what the peasants produced went into the hands of someone else. According to Philip D, Chivalric literature developed by these medieval plutocrats in an attempt to whitewash or at best to salvage the reputation of these otherwise extremely unpleasant people. So the next time you read about the knights of the round table, you know that it’s a fantasy in the very real sense. Even the characters it’s supposed to be based on, were not quite the heroic people that are described and hailed in these texts.

[Source]: Philip Daileader, Associate Professor of History at The College of William and Mary in Virginia, on the Planet Money podcast.

I have quoted the last point almost verbatim from commentator “Hank Van den Berg” and I find it the most convincing and

[Source]: Points derived in large part from the NYT thread “The Catastrophic Option”

[Update]: Tim Hartford, in the FT blog post titled “A brilliant (and doomed) template for healthcare reform“, proposes (at least) considering a system where we pay for medical services the same way we pay for our cars or our food or a roof over our heads

He believes that the high cost of health care is because the users are disassociated from the actual bill of the services rendered. Since people never bear the actual cost of the services and never see the actual bill they never have to wonder about whether a procedure was worth the price. He then goes on to say “I never had to ask myself whether my doctors and I were treading the path of cost-effectiveness, straying off into wasteful indulgence, or indulging in dangerous penny-pinching. Someone else always picked up the bill.“

To tackle catastrophic events then he suggests that it is perfectly possible to design a system where redistribution, forced saving and “real” insurance – that is, against unexpected and very costly events – address these concerns without whisking away every bill before the patient sees it.

And finally, to refute my first point,

it is true that patients do not today have the information they need to make sensible decisions about buying their own healthcare. But then, why would they, given the current systems? I recall the local press in the US being full of articles along the lines of “the city’s 50 best dermatologists”. Value for money was never mentioned, but ask patients to buy their own treatment and you can be sure that such articles would soon be supplemented by the medical equivalent of “cheap eats” reviews.

Here’s one reason why the Euro is not a viable alternative (emphasis mine).

Among the greenback’s chief rivals, only the euro is widely held as a reserve currency, but it has some significant disadvantages relative to the dollar, including fractured debt markets and fiscal policies.

[Source]: The Economist Blog

just went up by a whopping 18% for 2010. I am fortunate enough to be working for a decent sized company with a decent medical coverage and they will absorb about 13% of that. So I am facing a premium increase of a (still absurd) 5%. There will be some increase in the deductible limits though.

Health care reform has still some way to go but I am glad it at least got out of the finance committee. There’s a long road ahead but I hope that we’ll get something meaningful out of it.

In 1965 the average CEO was paid about 24 times as the average worker.
In 2007 the average CEO was paid about 275 times the average worker

[Source]: The New Yorker, Oct 12 - 2009