It's time to start understanding the killing of women and children by men is a way of life and not a crazy extra on the 5 o clock news. It happens all the time, all over the world and all through history. Time to end it as well. First by memorializng it, giving these deaths names and faces and wide publication. Starting with saying, look this is a huge problem.

Next step? I'm not sure.

“There were probably fifty of us squeezed in tight with our rec sacks sitting in our laps,” he said. “We were strapped in like a race car… and then all of the sudden we were going down.”

The pilot was performing a tactical landing in which they raced to a high enough altitude to avoid surface-to-air missiles and then landed as quickly as possible, like a 150,000-pound stone falling from the sky.

His mind spinning, he was put into a convoy that would take him into the small town of Al Owja, where Saddam Hussein had been captured less than a week earlier. Almost immediately, they came under enemy fire.

“I just kind of sat there,” he said. “Someone said, 'Parrish! Shoot back!' I didn't know what I was shooting at, so I just stuck my gun< out and fired.”

It had been a week since he had learned that he was going to Iraq. Before he would return home, he would survive some of the fiercest fighting in the region and, eventually, stand in the middle of Saddam Hussein's palace.

of course I'm not lesbian, cause lord knows I'd be dating women by now if I had a chance at it but I think it's still a fair assesment.

Recently there was a series of articles in the newspapers talking about the way white supremacists were infiltrating the Armed Forces as a way to get training. One thing that was almost amusing was that no one touched on another facet of these guys: you think these guys are just racist? I guarantee you they hate women, too, but women are of such little importance---or else abuse against them is so universally accepted----that this doesn't even get mentioned, even though women are the majority of the population. Rather than shock the senses that such a large proportoin of the population is subject to abuse of various kinds, it has the effect of normalizing it, and radicalizing complaints against it.

This promising approach to understanding the cosmos is based on a collection of theories called loop quantum gravity, an attempt to merge general relativity and quantum mechanics into a single consistent theory...Are particles nothing more than tangled plaits in space-time?...

At every instant, quantum fluctuations rumple the network of space-time links, crinkling it into a jumble of humps and bumps. These structures are so ephemeral that they last for around 10-44 seconds before morphing into a new configuration. "If the network changes everywhere all the time, how come anything survives?" asks Markopoulou. "Even at the quantum level, I know that a photon or an electron lives for much longer that 10-44 seconds."

Markopoulou had already found an answer in a radical variant of loop quantum gravity she had been developing together with David Kribs, an expert in quantum computing at the University of Guelph in Ontario. While traditional computers store information in bits that can take the values 0 or 1, quantum computers use "qubits" that, in principle at least, can be 0 and 1 at the same time, which is what makes quantum computing such a powerful idea. Individual qubits' delicate duality is always at risk of being lost as a result of interactions with the outside world, but calculations have shown that collections of qubits are far more robust than one might expect, and that the data stored on them can survive all kinds of disturbance.

In Markopoulou and Kribs's version of loop quantum gravity, they considered the universe as a giant quantum computer, where each quantum of space is replaced by a bit of quantum information. Their calculations showed that the qubits' resilience would preserve the quantum braids in space-time, explaining how particles could be so long-lived amid the quantum turbulence.

Smolin, Markopoulou and Bilson-Thompson have now confirmed that the braiding of this quantum space-time can produce the lightest particles in the standard model - the electron, the "up" and "down" quarks, the electron neutrino and their antimatter partners (www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0603022).

Meanwhile, Markopoulou's vision of the universe as a giant quantum computer might be more than a useful analogy: it might be true, according to some theorists. If so, there is one startling consequence: space itself might not exist. By replacing loop quantum gravity's chunks of space with qubits, what used to be a frame of reference - space itself - becomes just a web of information. If the notion of space ceases to have meaning at the smallest scale, Markopoulou says, some of the consequences of that could have been magnified by the expansion that followed the big bang. "My guess is that the non-existence of space has effects that are measurable, if you can only see it right." Because it's pretty hard to wrap your mind around what it means for there to be no space, she adds.

The ... remove large portions of text. So go read the article too.

This is why I love science so much. It just keeps falling into places that make sense. I mean, this is a very real possibliity of how the universe works.

We could actually figure that crap out someday and maybe someday soon.

1,2,3,4,5,6...the only way she can make it to the top of a 5 floor walk-up with 30 pounds of sleeping toddler was to count each and every step. His jaw made small clacking noises as it bounced lightly on her skull with every upward step. His arms and legs dangled loosely around her neck. Her arms reached up and around his back, keeping him from sliding off her shoulders.

Some days felt as though they were just too much. Some moments you only got through by knowing that it would end at some point in time.

Old guys know what to do when insulted. PUNCH EM!

And if you've been to the moon you aren't growing old and soft. Buzz Aldrin took a young man out!

It's been a long while since I update this and other blogs but I have many busy things in my life and have had no energy for the personal computer use when not doign the business. Always doing the business. Good for me! Money in the Bank! Bad for me! Hole in Soul!

anyone miss me?

not that I think these internet petitions actually do anything but what the hell, can't hurt either.

It's crazy

First, there’s these things called edits. Edits would be better called gotchas, as they function pretty much that way. Let’s say you have two different surgeries, procedure A and procedure B. You perform both procedures at the same time, and try billing them together, on two separate line items. Gotcha! Edits say you can’t do that–and if you do: a) you will not get paid for one of them, and/or b) you are guilty of fraud. You see, B is considered to be included in the payment for A (a component edit), or B is deemed to be mutually exclusive with A. The Feds publish these updated edit lists quarterly, made up of thousands of paired procedure codes–and it’s up to you to be sure you check them before submitting your claim. Otherwise, gotcha! Oh, and did I mention: many insurance companies have what’s called black box edits: they deny payment for procedure B when billed with procedure A–but don’t tell you that up front, and you don’t find out until after your claim is denied. And they won’t disclose these to you–even though you have a contract to provide services to their clients for payment. Nice.

Then there’s these things called globals. When you perform a surgery, you get paid not only for the surgery, but also for the postoperative care, for a predetermined number of days–usually 90 days for major surgery, 10 days for minor procedures like a laceration. Some simple procedures have a zero day global–which means you can charge for subsequent related care–but not for related care on the day of the procedure (”So why 0 days, and not a 1 day global?” “Quiet please, sit down”). Such post-procedure care is said to be bundled–that is, included in the package fee for the procedure or surgery. No matter if the care proves simple or complex, one visit or 90 in the postop period: same reimbursement.

This is after a explanations of how the pricing structure is basically set up in the first place. And how the Feds Fucked It ALL UP!