Boutique doctors

In the Seattle Area, Dr. Daniel Frank sends a mass-mailing to us on Mercer Island advertising his "personal physician on retainer" system, where he charges $99/month (in addition to whatever insurance you have) to be your personal doctor. No waiting, plus instant attention to every ache and pain -- it sounds pretty appealing to me, and I'd probably sign up if I were a little older and thought I'd need more doctor services.

Now the New York Times weighs in with an article about
Lavish Care by 'Boutique Doctors' - [subs required]. After discussing some of the benefits, they add the obligatory reminder that this raises ethical concerns for how it's not fair to the people who don't pay.

Huh? The Super-Rich have always had this kind of medical care, and they always will. Same goes for people with a doctor in their family, or who for whatever reason are blessed by circumstance to be tied into the medical community. What's wrong with expanding this kind of service to everyone? The fee is within the paying ability of almost every American who values it enough to forgo other necessities. For people with chronic medical conditions or who for other reasons find themselves visiting a doctor regularly, I bet this is actually cheaper than the alternative because you get personal attention before an otherwise bothersome condition becomes serious.

Environmental Heresies

This is an old one, and I'm not sure how I missed it. Stewart Brand is the California thinker behind the Whole Earth Catalog and a bunch of other hippie-tech ideas dating back from the 70s. In May 2005 Technology Review, he makes several strong claims about how the environmental movement will reverse its position on the following issues over the next 10 years: population growth, urbanization, genetic engineering, and nuclear power.

I'll add another one: Republicans, not Democrats, will be seen as having the innovative solutions to environmental problems. Today's Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and others are so anti-Republican that they are turning off mainstream people who are otherwise sympathetic to what's happening to the earth. Smart environmental organizations are already working to show their appeal to progressives on the right as well as the center-left.

Napoleon Dynamite (Movie Review)

This is probably a good movie to watch with your high school friends. It’s clean but not particularly funny humor focused on an awkward teenage boy named Napoleon who lives in a small town with relatives who are even more dull than he is. If you no longer harbor a grudge against your parents for forcing a clueless family on you, you probably will find this movie boring.
I watched it because there was a reference to it in a company meeting a few weeks ago, when it was the subject of a funny skit with Bill Gates finding himself back in college rooming with Napoleon. Unfortunately, the skit was funnier to me than the movie itself.

My Son the Fanatic

I watched this movie because I wanted to understand more about the circumstances for how an immigrant family can turn radical. A Pakistani taxi driver loves England, the country he adopted with his family decades ago. He is honest and hard-working, longs for a better life for his only son, who was born here and is now an adult contemplating marriage to the daughter of the local (white) police captain. Life is good. But although the father rather enjoys the freedom and diversity of life in a secular society, the son suddenly begins to reject it, turning to Islam for meaning in his life. Events unfold that ultimately pit the father’s secular life, including a prostitute he has befriended, against the son’s radical view of the world.

Unfortunately the movie focuses on the driver and his secular life, not on the on the religious fanaticism of the son, so I don’t recommend this movie if you want a view on why terrorism can become appealing to a native-born and otherwise well-integrated Muslim.

Apple Computer on a roll

Apple has a new software packaged called Aperture that finally goes seriously after the photo processing market. It's designed for professional photographers, letting you edit photos like you can't imagine.

The Unshaming of America

Reason: Echo Chamber in the Superdome: A Louisiana National Guardsman explains how he dealt with false rumors being piped into Ground Zero of Hurricane Katrina

Lots of things we heard about New Orleans after Katrina just aren't true:

• Rescue helicopters were never fired on


• There were hundreds of National Guardsmen in the Superdome the entire time, equipped with radio communications and responding to all security issues.

New Orleanians have been kind of cheated, because now everybody thinks that they just turned to animals, and that there was complete lawlessness and utter abandon, when that wasn't the case. Because if there was, we would have completely lost control of the Dome. And we never did. People just kind of hung on, through the heat and through everything, until they got on a bus and left.

EULAlyzer

End-User License Agreements (EULA) are so common these days that few people, if any, take them seriously. When you want some software, you download it, then you quickly click through all the "I Agree" buttons until you have the software running. But aren't you worried that there might be a strange clause in there? You could do a quick search for "firstborn child", or you could use EULAlyzer. This free Java applet claims to analyze a EULA for common clauses, flagging those that you might want to read twice.