Quick Roundup 437

Details (Really Do) Kill

I would appear that indeed, as Tom Daschle once put it, "Details kill." Specifically, the very system of medical coverage he supports results in not only higher higher mortality, but poorer health, as a nice chart from Investors Business Daily indicates below.


Oh, and while we're entertaining invitations by the left to compare the semi-free business milieu for medicine in America with socialized medicine, where's Arnold Kling? Not only do we not need to try socialized medicine for ourselves to see whether it will work "this time," we don't need to follow his advice on the score of collecting any further data. (HT: C. August and Paul Hsieh)

Real Access to the Beach

Brian Phillips provides an update on a story I have touched on here before, and it's good news. There will soon be a chance for Texas voters to secure beach front property rights.

[T]he Texas Open Beaches Act (TOBA), which defines the area between the permanent vegetation line and the water as "public property". As a result, when storms and erosion move the vegetation line, private home owners can suddenly find themselves living on "public property" and they are forced to vacate their homes.

Texans will soon have a chance to put scenarios like this behind them.

Snow Rollers

Shortly before I moved last week, I saw the fascinating picture at right posted at Fresh Bilge:

[Snow rollers] are rarely seen so large and perfect. The biggest of these are about two feet high. They formed on March 31 in a field near Lewiston, Idaho. It was a very long, cold, and snowy winter in the interior of the Pacific Northwest this year.

From Watts up with That? is the following explanation:

[Such] snow rollers ... are extremely rare because of the unique combination of snow, wind, temperature and moisture needed to create them. They form with light but sticky snow and strong (but not too strong) winds. Some snow rollers are formed by gravity (i.e. rolling down a hill), but in this case, the snow rollers were generated by the wind.

More pictures there.

Have your laptop call home.

Over at Lifehacker is the following description of an interesting software program:

When your laptop goes missing Prey scans for open WiFi connections. When it can connect, either via WiFi or a hard line it will send you a report including the status of the computer, which programs are running, the active connections, a run down of the network location, a screenshot of the desktop, and if your laptop has an integrated webcam you'll even get a picture of the person sitting in front of it.

There are versions for Linux, Windows, and MacIntosh.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Minor edit.