cloudsoup

It had to happen. After VALGOL:

        like y*know (I mean) start
        if pizza =like bitchen and
          b =like tubular and
          c =like grodyax
        then
          for I =like to oh maybe 100
            do wah -(ditty)
            barf(1) =totally gross(out)
          sure
        like bag this problem
        really
        like totally (y*know)

and other similar spoof programming languages, now comes Lolcode:

HAI
   CAN HAS STDIO?
   VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
   KTHXBYE

More examples at: lolcode.com.

I like Carrie too, I just preferred her when she was lead singer of The Who.

George and the City, Harry’s Place

I blacked out this morning. Luckily I was in hospital at the time.

I’d popped along for my fortnightly blood test but this time the phlebotomist couldn’t get the vein in my arm to show itself properly; it was just a faint bluish trace under the soft skin of the crook of my elbow. After about five minutes tapping me and strapping my right arm she gave up and tried the left, with no better luck. So she went ahead anyway.

I felt a sharp pain shoot right the way down to my fingers. ‘Something not quite right here’, I thought, as I struggled not to cry out. The phlebotomist saw me wincing. ‘Should I stop?‘, she asked. ‘No, no, carry on‘, I said and then yelped as she wiggled the needle and the same pain shot down my arm again. ‘I think I’ll stop‘, she said, and in a slight panic knocked a box of the tubes that would have held my blood for the various different tests all over the floor and almost knelt on my groin as she stretched for some cotton swabs.

I felt sweaty and sick and my vision started to go. The other medic in the room  glanced at me. ‘Leave him alone for a moment, he looks very pale‘, she said. Then I passed out.

I came round with  five or six nurses hovering about. Once I could sit up they helped me to an examining couch, where I lay down and chatted to the nurse who’d been detailed to make sure I’d suffered from nothing more serious than a faint. After a while I felt better and another very solicitous phlebotomist came into the room to try taking the blood sample again. This time all I felt was a small sharp sting and the job was over in seconds.

‘I can’t understand it‘, I said, ‘I’ve had blood tests before, I’ve donated blood, this has never happened‘. I got to my feet. The senior nurse said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, it happens all the time. Besides, some people are more careful when they take samples‘.

So I think what probably happened is that the needle went straight through my vein and probably hit a nerve – that might account for the sharp pain down my arm.

Back again in a fortnight.

On the US healthcare system:

We need to move to a system where most people pay most medical bills out of pocket, and insurance companies step in only when the costs are completely unaffordable. To get there, we need to eliminate the deductibility of health care costs. Why should health care be deductible on income taxes when food is not? Food is way more important to your health than is a doctor’s care. So is exercise, but neither one is deductible.

The Angry Economist, American Health Care is Totally Broken

When Helen was studying for her MSc in Comparative Social Policy and was telling me about the need to control markets and profits and so on in our health system (in the UK), and contrasted it with various other systems in the US, Canada and France in particular, I wondered why we thought it necessary to intervene in the Health market, because health is terribly important, but not in the Food market, as if that wasn’t important.

I suppose you could say that good enough food is available to all as a matter of fact. Perhaps it’s the free market that’s made that the case, of course.

Harford’s book relates problems in health insurance markets to Akerlof’s work on adverse selection, or the ‘lemons’ problem (as in, buying used cars that are so-called ‘lemons’). He agrees that a private insurance solution will be patchy, costly, bureaucratic, and present patients with choices they’re not equipped to make. Unfortunately, he points out that Government-provided solutions tend to fail also.

If I remember rightly, The Undercover Economist ends up hinting that the Singaporean health care system has quite a lot to recommend it: big unpredictable health problems are covered by the Government through taxation and the rest through private insurance.

David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton of the very interesting philosophy podcast Philosophy Bites are producing a series of podcasts in conjunction with the Open University, Ethics Bites. The format’s the same in both – Edmonds and Warburton briefly introduce a subject and then work through the major issues with a guest specialist.

Their most recent Ethics Bites interview is with Mary Warnock on the subject, ‘Do we have the right to have a baby‘. Baroness Warnock is probably best well-known for chairing the Commission on Human Fertility and Embryo Research and, as she was a professional philosopher, might have been expected to have been able to offer a slightly more coherent and thoughtful contribution to the show than any other randomly-plucked 84 year-old. I was disappointed.

Edmonds sets the up the show with two questions:

does everybody have a right to have a child; and does the state have an obligation to pay for treatment to achieve this?

Warnock agrees that people cannot be said to have a right to have a baby; but she then asserts that at least three cycles of IVF treatment should be available to all heterosexual couples in the UK and she says that having a baby is more important than a patient’s right to have a drug in the treatment of a particular illness.

Warburton politely challenges her on this, pointing out that just because we may have strong feelings about all sorts of things the State isn’t obliged to indulge us; Warnock agrees that it’s important to distinguish between a right and a very strong desire but that in this case the desire was so strong that assistance is something people are entitled to.

Warburton presses the point. With some illnesses, medical intervention alleviates physical pain but in treating infertility, medicine is at most alleviating psychological distress. Warnock doesn’t budge, pointing out that inability to have children can have profound long-lasting effects such as depression and marriage break-up; she goes so far as to say the comparison is just like weighing up mental illness against physical illness.

So Warnock’s emphatic: the State should be obliged to provide IVF treatment because of the extraordinarily strong desire to have babies that people have, and because of some powerful cultural traditions, and because of the possible ill-effects of not treating infertility. One may not agree with her but she is at least clear in her position.

But then she’s asked whether everyone should have equal access to IVF treatment: lesbian couples, for example. At this point Warnock puts aside her earlier argument completely. Although she thinks that lesbian couples should be allowed to have IVF treatment, she says:

the NHS might want to very reasonably decide to limit treatment to heterosexual couples

Edmonds asks her why that would be acceptable and she defends her statement on economic grounds.

Remember that Warnock’s reasons for obliging the State to pay for treatment in the first place was simply the strength of the desire to have a baby, the probable resulting long-term distress, and the possibility of chronic depression and suicide. It was on the face of it a utilitarian calculation; but at the last moment she effectively says that concerns for the strength of desire of lesbians to have children, or the likelihood of their becoming depressed, may be shrugged away.

It’s an incomprehensible argument, one I can attribute only to an old prejudice.

A Youtube user called Beamoo seems to have found my advice on using a USB microphone with Audacity on Linux helpful. That’s very gratifying.

So the Inland Revenue (the HMRC) has got back to me. They say:

It is clear we have not handled your tax affairs as well as we should have done and have failed to provide the level of service you are entitled to expect from us. I am sorry for this…

…we linked the computer record of another of our customers (sic) to [your record]…This was done because the other customer was inexplicably updated with the same address as yours…I am sorry for this as I am unable to explain why this happened

Which has the virtue of being honest, I suppose. Here’s the question: would you now trust the Government to run a National Identity database?

I saw the original of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer‘, (‘The wanderer above the sea of fog’), or a painting very like it, several years ago, in a travelling exhibition in Edinburgh titled, ‘The Romantic Spirit in German Art’ (which I’d misread as, ‘The Romantic Shirt in German Art”).

This particular Romantic Shirt painting by Friedrich is used on the front cover of my battered old copy of ‘Ecce Homo‘, Nietzsche’s collection of engagingly barmy essays published shortly before his permanent breakdown and the final 10 or 11 years of silence from him, which I bought and tried to read long ago in a bout of moody teenage autodidacticism. I understood … not very much of Nietzsche’s excited ranting but I was quite taken with his little aphorisms and strange snippets of advice. I very much concur with his recommendation about walking in the open air, in the mountains:

Remain seated as little as possible … put no trust in any thought that is not born in the open to the accompaniment of free bodily movement..all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking

A few weeks ago, for example, walking on the fells (the hills) of the Cumbrian Lake District, Helen and I got into a conversation about the Mind and Brain, during which she produced the best knock-down case against epiphenomenalism I’ve ever heard.

Every year, Helen teaches a new intake of more-or-less interested pupils a little about the philosophy of consciousness and the Mind, taking them on a quick tour of dualism, monism, eliminative materialism, qualia and the other members of the exotic bestiary. Although the course module, Freewill and Determinism, contributes relatively little to the final grade, the cleverer students, who will almost never have come across the debates and ideas before, find it fascinating.

One of the supposed explanations of Mind, mental states, and mental events is Epiphenomenalism, the position that mental events are not causal. Although this is a rather improbable claim on the face of it, it has attracted some support because it tries to get around the problem of dualism by denying mental events the capacity to effect behaviour. The commonest brief analogy to help people think about the idea is to liken mental events’ relationship with behavior to the froth on waves. The notion has received a little fillip in recent years following the experiments by Libet which have been taken by some to imply that unconscious neuronal activity precedes apparently volitional acts that experimental subjects believed had been consciously inititiated.

Helen’s objection points out, quite simply, that we are the products of evolution and although there might well exist several, or many, human characteristics that are spandrels, in the accidental, circumstantial, contingent sense that Stephen Jay Gould argued for, and against which Dan Dennet took issue, it would be nonsensical to suggest that consciousness could be such a non-adaptation, needing no explanation. Yet if consciousness – Mind – the sense of volition – is purely epiphenomenal then it could never have been selected for through Natural Selection because its existence or otherwise would have no phenotypic effect which could be operated upon by the forces of evolution.

I haven’t read anyone else make this point although it seems very clear and irrefutable.