Penny wise, pound foolish

That saying arose when a pound was a unit of money, a pound of sterling silver, in fact.

Study says that long waits for health care cost billions.

Conducted for the Canadian Medical Association by the Centre for Spatial Economics, the study measured the impact of the absence of both patients and their caregivers from the work force, as well as the increased costs of extra appointments, tests and medication required when patients languish in a queue.

When those factors were totalled, the authors concluded that it cost the economy $14.8-billion in 2007 to have patients wait longer than medically recommended for four procedures: joint replacements, cataract surgery, coronary bypasses and MRI scans. And that, in turn, cut federal and provincial revenues by $4.4-billion, the study says.

Only four procedures were examined in the study. Imagine what the total cost for all procedures might be!

What caused the I35-W bridge disaster?

Well, it was neglect of needed repairs, of course. But why did the highway department and the state neglect them? Barking Nonsequitur has a plausible chain of events to the bridge disaster. the 2002 report that said rumors of the bridge's deterioration were exaggerated. One of the commenters points out that follow-up reports to that report, issued in 2005 and 2006, used the exact same photographs, so more cracks, if present, would not be noted. In 2007, the bridge collapsed catastrophically, dropping traffic into the river and killing several people.

British bank fees

This just came to light in the BookCrossing chat forum. One of the members asserts that British banks have no right to charge fees that are higher than their costs. Just scroll down until you find it.

The search for the red knot

The red knot is a bird, a species of sandpiper. In 2000, my step-daughter volunteered for a research project that looked for red knots' nesting sites in the Canadian Arctic. The New Jersey Fish & Wildlife service was looking for them because the red knot passes through on its migration to the Arctic and populations of Red Knot breeding in North America have experienced a drastic decline in numbers in the past thirty years.

The red knot stops at Chesapeake Bay in the U.S. state of Delaware and fills up on horseshoe crab eggs; but fishermen are competing for the eggs, which they sell for fish bait, pet food, and even fertilizer. The crabs depend for their survival on producing enough eggs to feed every passing bird or fish plus living through the hazardous life of a larval crab. The fishermen are scooping off the crabs' necessary surplus.

Calgary health services are overwhelmed

Average wait times have jumped to 13 hours. And that's in the only province that has so much oil income that it doesn't feel the need to charge retail sales tax. This is partly the fault of centrist planning, and also of trimming services. The hospitals are 98% percent full. They can keep up with a slow, steady trickle of emergencies. But emergencies don't come in a trickle: they're unpredictable, stochastic. A report calls for some changes.

Hunting cranes

Something like 12 of the 15 species of cranes around the world are endangered. Sandhill cranes are not endangered: there are perhaps half a million of them. They have recovered from low population numbers and are only endangered in some areas. They did go through quite a narrow evolutionary bottleneck, reducing their genetic variability and their future viablility. But according to governments, it is OK to hunt them.


If there were only one city of human beings in the world, I suppose we would not have to worry about them dying out: half a million is lots.

Mangroves, tsunamis, shrimp

From Living the Scientific Life: Mangroves and Tsunamis: The Shrimp Connection. This article by Grrlscientist was nominated for a Koufax award.

Abstain from shrimp lest your mangrove forests be destroyed and your people die in tsunamis.

Plague of voles in Spain

Mild winter and a fruitful spring seem to have brought a plague of voles to Spain. Hundreds of millions of moles are munching their way through the crops. There are so many that you can smell them. The government of Castille-Leon has started to burn harvested fields in hopes of roasting some of the mouse-like rodents. Several methods are being tried to kill them, including driving them with ultrasonic sound. Maybe they should get more cats, too.

Here's some vole info.

Experiments in the biochemical basis of monogamy were conducted on voles.

Nestle is still endangering babies

For years, Nestlé has promoted the use of formula in poor countries - where families can not afford to keep buying it, where bottles won't be sterilized, where it won't be made with clean water. In those conditions, babies are much safer drinking breast milk. But once a baby has been drinking formula for a while, breasts are running dry and mothers lose confidence. They feed diluted formula. Babies don't get enough food, or they do get gastroenteritis. Thousands of babies die of it.

Maybe Nestlé has stopped dressing its sales people as nurses in these countries. But it is still trying to make those sales.

Now Nestlé is saying that it doesn't believe this is promoting their products. Then why are they doing it?

A Guardian investigation in Bangladesh found widespread use of "prescription pads", where Nestlé reps give health workers tear-off pads, with pictures of their products, for them to pass on to mothers. Nestlé spokesman Robin Tickle said he did not believe the pads equated to promotion of the company's formula milks. The device was "a safety measure", to help mothers to be sue the milk they were buying was the right kind for their baby.

Niche blogging

Step on over to doshdosh for an introduction to the theory and practice of creating niche blogs to make money.

Disposable vs. Reusable cups - lying with statistics

Bento Box has an interesting article on recyclable paper cups vs. foam cups vs. re-usable cups - are they or are they not good for the environment? I threw in a comment but, I fear, without reading the original article carefully enough. Check it out for yourself.

What to recycle

It bothers me every time I visit Orange County, California: out of habit I collect the papers, cans, and bottles when tidying but there's no recycling program! After years of landfill-reduction programs, I've been trained.


This is one internal recycling program for a Government of Ontario office building. As well as the recycling, there are small bins where employees can dump food scraps for the composting program.

Scientists confirm Nabokov's hypothesis

Vladimir Nabokov was a lepidopterist long before he was a famous author. Mark Derr reports that in the 1940s, he

solidified his reputation as a lepidopterist by reclassifying the wide-ranging North American butterfly genus Lycaeides, the ���blues.���

Nabokov divided the blues into two large species ��� Lycaeides melissa, the Melissa blue, and Lycaeides idas, the northern blue, with overlapping ranges in the mountains of the West. He also theorized that the blues he found high in the Tetons and Colorado Rockies were hybrids, but he lacked the tools to prove it.

Follow the link for the rest of the article and an image, "The Alpine Lycaeides genome represents a mosaic of the parent species."

Grenada dove endangered by Toronto developers

I'd like to get wider notice for this article on The Torontoist. One of Toronto's hotels, the Four Seasons, is planning a new development on Grenada that will likely wipe out the endangered Grenada dove.

Other forms of evolution

Evolution is a scientific fact. The great pressure to find a scientific explanation (a.k.a. "theory") came from the overwhelming evidence that it had occurred. It is researched as a historical fact and undisputably it happened. Its mechanisms are studied both from historical evidence and by experimentation as well as vigorous debates about its mechanisms. In fact, it couldn't NOT happen unless every animal reproduced itself exactly in the exact same conditions that it grew up in. Other things evolve by other methods.

Languages and words evolve with cultural selection instead of natural, and invention or crossing with other languages instead of mutation. Linguists track the EVOLUTION of language through history. We all know that French, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish (as well as some less common languages) developed from Latin. In some language collisions, new hybrids appear and become established. (They are called creoles.) English itself is a sort of hybrid of AngloSaxon overlaid with French and then with German. In the short term, some words find favour and are kept. Old words fall out of use or change their meaning. New words are needed for new inventions. No one claims that it didn't happen or that we can't say "skyscraper" because it wasn't used in the bible.

Products evolve as well. Instead of energy in the form of sunlight or prey, they gather money. Those that don't attract enough money are no longer produced. Those that do, flourish and develop into more and different products. Anyone contemplating the change from a functional horse-drawn carriage to a functional car with the shape of a carriage to a streamlined roadster notices the similarity to organic evolution. They also notice, if they are paying attention, that the vehicle was functional at all points of its development. People in the 1920s didn't look at new cars and say, "No thanks, I'll wait for a Corvette."

In both of these other kinds of evolution, more new forms are invented than survive. Branch and prune, branch and prune is the usual way of all kinds of evolution. When a new product comes on the scene, many companies jump in with their version. They compete for the public's money. And at some point there is a "shakeout" when the losers drop out of the business or are swallowed up by their competitors and cease to function independently. Some fads bloom and die out (hula hoops); some are widely adopted for the long term (telephones); some settle into a specialized niche (teddy-bear stores). Makes you think, doesn't it?

Perhaps one of the reasons that the idea of evolution is so powerful and persuasive in our culture is that we can see it happening all around us.

How about an infusion of cold, hard cash?

Suicide from economic despair: Farmers in India drink pesticides to escape crushing load of debt, which sees families sold into debt-slavery.

Ecosystem collapse

Walking the Berkshires has a nice article on economic boom and subsequent bust of natural populations.

Misogyny or mere practicality?

Is it mysogynistic to account 80 million or more women missing from a population as merely a loss to male stability? Or is it just practical? Not that it's going to change anyone's actions: "Oh, I'd better have a girl so that the rising generation won't get restless." No, it's the tragedy of the commons* all over again: "I need a son to work the fields, inherit, carry on the family name, worship the ancestors, or receive a dowry instead of paying one." One thing that is happening is that families with a son are not finding anyone to marry him unless they also have a daughter that they can marry to their son's bride's brother.

Maybe it's not misogyny: maybe it's just a way to get people's attention.

You can follow the link to this article, read about the issue, and comment.

"If I graze one more cow, I'll be one cow richer, and the whole community has to share the cost in overgrazing, so it's only 1/50th my problem."

Abolish debt slavery

Evolution proves that we are all cousins.

Let us remember how we want our cousins to be treated and do everything in our power to abolish modern slavery.

Virgin sturgeon

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, sturgeon have become endangered by uncontrolled fishing and poaching.

English is so peculiar that "virgin" and "sturgeon" rhyme:

Caviar comes from the virgin sturgeon.
Virgin sturgeon's a very fine fish.
Virgin sturgeon need no urgin'--
That's why caviar is my dish!

Have you heard about the Sturgeon,
Russia's source of food supply?
Virgin sturgeon need no urgin'—
And here's the reason why:

Years ago, when we were tadpoles
In Paleozoic slime,
No one needed any urgin'
And we all had lots of time.

... all lyrics here