Ah, if only we had
China's socialized journalism in the USA! Then no one would notice huge stonking ripoffs like this:
Senate Dems quietly move a bill to countermand a 21% cut in Medicare fees for doctors, which will add $247 billion to the deficit over ten years. Of course, the Baucus health care reform bill achieves its famed deficit neutrality through cuts in Medicare fees, mainly to non-physicians--saving (by my reading of the CBO analysis) at least $184 billion from Medicare over the same period. Plus there is a special panel set up to recommend further cuts. Jonathan Cohn and Ezra Klein might productively explain a) Why this isn't a shell game, with Dems granting Medicare increases in one bill and then taking ostentatious credit for partly-offsetting cuts in a separate bill; b) Why Congress' unwillingness to put up with the scheduled Medicare doctors' cuts this year doesn't indicate that it won't put up with scheduled cuts in future years...link[etc]
-We saw Brief Encounter at the ACT last night. The staging and side characters were great, but some combination of the writing and lack of chemistry doomed the main plot (when two married people start an affair with each other, you shouldn't be wondering 'why?' or 'who cares?').
J. didn't want to speak ill of it while we were leaving with the crowds, for fear of tainting the experience of others. Perhaps this is also why everyone else was also silent, instead of saying things like, "That was so romantic, when he said 'perhaps I shall go to the pictures this afternoon as well' and 'Could I see you next Thursday?'".
-'Whip It', on the other hand, has roller derby and Juliette Lewis, and hita all the points that one would hope for. Director Barrymore gives herself multiple fun bits - nosebleeds, cold-cocking, dominance. The girl from Juno is in it and she is perfectly good when she isn't forced into Diablo Cody's retard-speak.
-Coders at Work is a collection of in-depth interviews with programmers. Most of the interviews as solo pieces are at least of interest to programmers. Because the subjects are mostly really bright and have brains that spin around a lot, there are a few bits of profound philosophy which fall out. But the interviewer generally keeps it technical. Read together, there are also a lot of interesting commonalities which I wouldn't necessarily have expected:
-Few have actually read through Knuth
-Fewer still have any regard for Design Patterns
-Most say that programming in modern practice involves a lot of aggregation, and knowing assembly and lower is handy but not as essential as it once was.
-Threading is a problem
-Most are willing to own up to debugging using printf