Apple Town Prince

The WSJ has an interesting article on Safeway’s healthcare plan:

Safeway’s plan capitalizes on two key insights gained in 2005. The first is that 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior. The second insight, which is well understood by the providers of health care, is that 74% of all costs are confined to four chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity). Furthermore, 80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable, 60% of cancers are preventable, and more than 90% of obesity is preventable.

While I was at Stanford in 1998 I took a course called “The Making of the Western Mind”. It was the first time the course was offered at Stanford and the new course had been approved only after the professor secured the support of the provost at the time, Condoleeza Rice. It was offered to both undergraduates and graduates and attracted students from the Stanford law school, the business school, and the graduate engineering programs.

It was one of the best courses I ever took at Stanford and received the highest student ratings ever in the Stanford humanities department. It was fortunate I took the course when I did because it was the only time it was ever offered as it was discontinued immediately.

I was not surprised then, to read another account of the suppression of western civiliation study in American universities:

For six years, I [Robert Koons, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin] was involved in efforts at the University of Texas at Austin to create a program in Western Civilization and American Institutions. Our vision was to offer to all undergraduates a sequence of Great Books seminars, beginning with the Bible and the works of ancient Greece and Rome, and culminating with the classics of the American founding. We sought approval of a certificate through which students could satisfy eighteen of their forty-two hours of general education requirements.

We made considerable progress. Perhaps as a result of that progress, we faced opposition from the major humanities programs (especially English, history, American studies, and religious studies), beginning in the spring of 2007. A New York Times article on September 22, 2008, “Conservatives Try New Tack on Campuses,” accelerated and consolidated that opposition, because it included our program and a quotation from me.

So, even though we secured a “concentration” for our program (a step below but toward a major), introduced a new field of study on campus, raised over $1 million, and hired four postdoctoral teaching fellows, the life of the program was brief.

In November of last year, I was dismissed as director, and in the spring the administration and faculty replaced our program with one on Core Texts and Ideas. The new program lacks any list or criteria for “core texts,” and the goal of a required sequence of courses has vanished.

Our program was rightly perceived as a threat to the monopoly of what I call the Uncurriculum, which prevails at UT and at most universities today. It is the absence of required courses and of any structure or order to liberal studies. The Uncurriculum dictates that students accumulate courses that meet a “distribution” standard—a smattering of courses scattered among many categories. Even within majors, the trend has been to eliminate required sequences.

The perfecting of the intellect and the formation of character through the attainment of what John Henry Newman called “liberal knowledge” have given way to engorgement with miscellaneous information. The suggestion that higher education should have something to do with acquiring moral wisdom is invariably met with the sophomoric query, “Whose ethics?” As Anthony Kronman has so well documented in his book The End of Education, nothing in the Uncurriculum encourages students to think through the great questions of life in a systematic manner, with the great minds of the Western tradition as their guides and interlocutors.

The Uncurriculum free-for-all gives undergraduates only the illusion of choice. In reality, the Uncurriculum model is entwined with the interests of the professoriate. If there are no courses students are required to take, there are no courses that professors are required to teach. […]

There was an interesting comment from a member of the faculty steering committee regarding the naming of the new center:

Tom Pangle emphasized that the proposed name of the new school was a major source of his objections to the school per se. As he told a Daily Texan reporter, these, these words, American, Western, and Civilization were just too “right-wing.”

If the words ‘American’, ‘Western’, and ‘Civilization’ are now right-wing (!) then what constitutes the left-wing these days?

A sobering thought: I have about 0.8% chance of dying next year and that probability is doubling every 8 years.

[A] startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.”  Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years.

Surprisingly enough, the Gompertz law holds across a large number of countries, time periods, and even different species.  While the actual average lifespan changes quite a bit from country to country and from animal to animal, the same general rule that “your probability of dying doubles every X years” holds true.  It’s an amazing fact, and no one understands why it’s true.

There is one important lesson, however, to be learned from Benjamin Gompertz’s mysterious observation.  By looking at theories of human mortality that are clearly wrong, we can deduce that our fast-rising mortality is not the result of a dangerous environment, but of a body that has a built-in expiration date.

All this reminds me of the cat, Oscar (pictured below) who, according the New England Journal of Medicine can apparently calculate double exponentials with great accuracy in his feline head.

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Finally signed up for Feedburner to be SEO compliant. ghm9tsyieq

There is a fairly lengthy list of tasks when first starting a website. This is a compilation for my future sanity:

1. Choose a website name (do this first because you need it for all subsequent steps. Don’t continue until you’ve done this because it’s almost impossible to change later.
2. Register the URL. I recommend hosting with Dreamhost. They’re great value for money and the support is excellent. In general, it’s easier to register your URL through your hosting provider.
3. Submit the URL to all the search engines as soon as possible. The crawlers will take a while to getting around to your site.
4. Download the Aptana IDE. It’s a great, free editor.
5. Download and install Firefox. Install the Firebug plugin.
6. Make sure you have 301 redirects to ensure that Google sees your website as a single URL and not two different websites (one for www.domain.com and another for domain.com). If you’re using Dreamhost this is easily achieved by selecting your preferred URL format under the ‘Manage Domains’ section of the Dreamhost panel. There is no need for a .htaccess file if you’re using Phusion Passenger.
7. Sign up for Google Analytics, Google Webmaster and (if you plan on advertising) Google Adwords
8. When designing your initial web layout, leave space for ads if you plan to add them later.
9. Good link for embedding video
10. After a month or so, use Hubspot to check your search engine hygiene.

I’ll add more to this list over time.

René Girard scrutinizes the human condition from creation to apocalypse. He sees:

the Bible as “anti-myth”— a description of humankind’s long climb up from barbarity. Violence, retaliation and a vengeful God evolve over centuries into themes of forgiveness, repentance and the revelation that the scapegoat is innocent.

Jeff Rubin, chief economist at CIBC gave a great talk on what caused the recession, why the oil price is going up, and the future of globalization.

I use the Rails console mainly to poke around in my database. Unfortunately the display of the records returned leaves a lot to be desired. Hirb solves this problem perfectly! Here are the quick steps you need to get the basic functionaliy:

1. Install the gem: sudo gem install cldwalker-hirb –source http://gems.github.com
2. Start the console: ruby script/console
3. Require Hirb: require ‘hirb’
4. Enable it: Hirb.enable
5. Try it: x = Model.find(:all)