Universal Massachusetts Health Care?

In 2004, Mitt Romney introduced legislation designed to get as close as practically possible to statewide universal health care in Massachusetts. From NPR:

Effective July 1, 2007, the law, which uses federal and state tax dollars, is aimed at making health insurance affordable to all residents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, including low-income populations. Those who fall below the federal poverty line may be eligible for health care at no cost. A Health Disparities Council has been created to monitor and reduce racial and ethnic health disparities.

The law's "Individual Mandate" provision underscores the state's requirement that each resident make it his or her personal responsibility to secure health care. Those who choose not to abide by the law will be subject to penalty. State income tax forms in 2008 will be used to verify insurance coverage.

Employers who do not offer health coverage to their employees will be subject to fees imposed by the state.

This may be the closest the United States will ever come to universal health care. I am interested since I would like to have concrete evidence whether some type of system which provides health care for everyone would work or not.

I would like to see whether the government can give out health care better and cheaper than the private sector. Michael Moore's new movie claims that's the case. The movie Sicko claims that the United States has a terrible health care system, #37 in the world, and it costs the American people far more than the universal systems of other countries. Ie.. he claims the government run health car has proven to be cheaper and better than what the private sector can provide according to real world statistics.

I honestly don't know if this could be the case in the US, but Massachusetts will help see things a little more clearly.

Bush Commutes Pluto's Sentence

This from Uncertain Principles:

WASHINGTON, DC (UP News Service)-- In a move that supporters say shows sensitivity and compassion, President Bush today commuted the sentence of the planet Pluto, which was demoted to a "dwarf planet" by the International Astronomical Union in August of 2006. Under the President's new order, Pluto will once more be regarded as a full-fledged planet, though he left unchanged the part of the decision in which the astronomical object must share its name with a cartoon dog.

"Pluto's crimes have been well-documented," said the President in a short statement from the Oval Office, citing in particular the once and future planet's crossing of Neptune's orbit every couple hundred years. "However, we feel that having to live in an eccentric orbit in the outer regions of the solar system is punishment enough. Also, removing Pluto totally screws up the memory thing we learned: My Very Elegant Mother Just Sat Upon Nine Porcupines. Heh. That's funny."

Conservatives hailed the decision as a visionary act. Noted writer and blogger Jonah Goldberg interrupted his busy writing schedule to post about the decision, saying "I'm pretty sure this is the most brilliant thing Bush has done yet. Maybe some readers could help me out by sending in a few reasons why that's the case? Pretty please?"

Democrats, on the other hand, were quick to say that the decision show's Bush's increasing disengagement from reality.

"Honestly," said Majority Leader Harry Reid (D- Nevada), "The man wouldn't know a Kuiper Belt object if it fell on him. And he's talking in the first person plural now? Is that a royal 'we'? Is he talking about Cheney? Does he have a mouse in his pocket?" Reid hinted that Congress would consider holding hearings on the subject. Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama, in training for a basketball game in Schenectady, NY, dismissed the decision as an attempt to boost the President's sagging approval ratings. "At this point," he noted, "frozen chunks of methane four billion miles away are more popular than this President and his failed policies."

Scientific reaction to the decision ranged from bafflement to frustration. "We have to talk about Pluto again?" whined Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. "Things were just starting to settle down from last year, and now this starts up again? Am I going to have to go on the Colbert Report again?" A spokesman for the International Astronomical Union noted that President Bush has neither relevant scientific expertise, nor any authority over international scientific organizations. "Anyway, what's he going to do about the other dwarf planets? Announce that Ceres is harboring Al Qaeda terrorists and blow it to rubble?"

The White House insisted that the President's authority to overrule IAU decisions was a well established power deriving from his position atop the Great Chain of Being. They dismissed Democratic claims as mere partisanship. "Harry reid is just jealous that he didn't think of it first," said White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, continuing "Nyahhhh, nyahhh."

Snow refused to comment on the possibility of Al Qaeda fighters on Ceres, saying only that "It's something we're considering very seriously."

Boinc = Distributive Computing!

Last month, Dr. Seth Shostak ( a SETI senior astronomer) came to Baylor University to spread his SETI propaganda. Actually it was a great talk (he gives like 50/year) and he believes that within the next 20-30 years we will probably find sources of an extraterrestrial civilization within our galaxy. He actually had a convincing argument and it was enough get me interested in helping out analyze the data that SETI is recording from the heavens.
Basically, distributive computing is done by breaking up whatever computer process you want to perform into pieces that individual computers can execute. This pieces are processed by any computer in contact with the internet and can be run in the background. In reality, our processors aren't used very much when we're not looking at the screen doing stuff, so might as well not let our little Intel's or AMD's go to waste, right?!

The program that SETI uses (and a few other groups too) is called BOINC. Boinc sends you different jobs to run and once completed they get sent back and you are given credits. These credits are added up to show how much work you have done. You can also join other groups to have your credits help them out (BYU has some groups...hint, hint).
It's a really cool system and you can use the GUI output of the program as a nifty screen saver. I am currently running two different processes: one for SETI and the other is called Rosetta. (though I can't get my screensaver to work now, though maybe that's a Vista problem...) Rosetta is a program that runs protein folding simulations using energy minimization principles. (there's even a protein folding program that uses your graphics card to run programs, called folding@home, which is not affiliated with Boinc)
It's a really neat idea and I can feel so warm and fuzzy by letting other people use my computer to help in the cause of science! (Yeah for me!!)

Here's some screeshots from the web of SETI@home and Rosetta:

The Loop Quantum Big Bounce

Theoretical physicist Martin Bojowald of Pennsylvania State University in University Park has a cosmology model, based on Loop Quantum Gravity, that claims to to be able to peer back before the big bang. What does his analysis find? It finds that our universe formed from another universe that collapsed down to a point then bounced back. This previous universe may have been physically different then ours in various ways, but after the bounce it became the universe we know and love. Also, he predicts the relics of the previous universe are probably too faint to be detected.

Not everyone is satisfied with the result. I for one a skeptical of loop quantum gravity since I don't understand it (yet) and the vast majority of theorists think other methods are better. Personally I really like the String Landscape model, which is being covered extensively at TASI 2007. (The theme is "The String Universe") Plus, the blog is named after the idea that the universe is formed from some sort of eternal inflation process so the bias has to come out.

Others like Caltech Cosmologist Sean Carroll have already blogged against it. A quote from him: "Someday we’ll understand how the Big Bang singularity is resolved in quantum gravity. But the real world is going to be more complicated (and more interesting) than these simple models."

Or as the Scientific American states:

Physicist Donald Marolf of the University of California, Santa Barbara, says the finding would be strengthened if it turned up in other models of quantum gravity, such as string theory. "No one has good control over this physics in any approach to quantum gravity," he says, "and it is important to explore a broad range of models and ideas."

Here is an article by New Scientist.

Hopefully in the future we will be able to test such theories.

NASA's Global Warming Q&A

Since I now work in solar physics, I seem to get a lot of questions about global warming. Mostly, these come from people who want me to say that the sun is responsible for climate change, not human activities. When I tell them that changes in the sun's output (which some evidence suggests has gone up in the past 100 years) are at least an order of magnitude too small to account for global warming since 1950, I then get put into the "crazy/hippie/liberal-wacko" group. And I'm really starting to get sick of that.

In the interest of full disclosure, when I was in high school in the late 90's, I was pretty skeptical of global warming myself. But with the data that has come out in the past decade, there really isn't much room to scientifically argue whether human activity is driving global climate change since 1950. But for those of you who still need convincing, or have friends who do, check out this very helpful and informative Q&A put out by NASA on climate change.

One thing that I appreciate about NASA's Q&A is that they are very careful to use science rather than scare tactics. Many people who doubt global warming are skeptical because they saw some poorly dressed nerd working himself into a frenzy on the Discovery Channel and claiming global warming is going to kill us all in 20 minutes. I know the threat is real, but that claim just isn't believable. Even worse, you have movies like The Day After Tomorrow that sensationalize the issue to the point that global warming looks about as credible as Godzilla attacking Tokyo. Anyway, kudos to NASA for a well thought out, non-sensational presentation of the facts about global warming.