Quick Roundup 501

The Lucidicus Project

It wasn't until around the time of the special election for "The People's Seat" in Massachusetts that I had heard of the Lucidicus Project, but it's a cause that cannot receive too much extra publicity, so I'll pitch in:

The Lucidicus Project encourages young people entering the medical profession to examine the moral and economic foundations of individual rights and capitalism. The project was founded in 2005 and is based in Boston, Massachusetts. Our mission is to provide the Medical Intellectual's Self-Defense Kit to medical students across the United States and around the world.

As Barack Obama has indicated, the Scott Brown victory is only a breather in the fight to keep the government from dictating our medical choices.

Organizations like the Lucidicus Project, Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine, and Americans for Free Choice in Medicine need and deserve our continuing support.

Bolivarian Death Throes?

This means more misery for many Venezuelans as it plays out and I am concerned that Chavez will attempt to use a war with Colombia as a solution to his political problems, but Jackson Diehl explains why the clock may be ticking for Hugo Chavez. Along the way, he offers the following encouraging sign from the recent presidential election in Chile:

Sebastián Piñera, the industrialist and champion of free markets who won [and] has already done something that no leader from Chile or most other Latin American nations has been willing to do in recent years: stand up to Chávez.

Somehow, I don't see the President of the United States being on the right side of history factually or morally on this one, either.

I agree with a Democrat for once!

Or, more precisely, I agree with the sentiment:

Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., did more than ask. In a private meeting the day after Republican Scott Brown won Sen. Edward Kennedy's Senate seat, Titus used a profanity to describe to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and freshman lawmakers the Democratic Party's prospects in the midterm elections if it ignores the lessons of Massachusetts.

Unlike Titus, I will not, however, allow the need to describe Nancy Pelosi accurately to cause me to lower my standards for polite discourse.

Portable Ubuntu

One luxury I miss from academia is the freedom to run Linux at work. Cygwin (if you have admin privileges or can get it installed) or MobaXVT can at least help one make up for some of the lost Unix utilities, but I recently learned through Lifehacker of something that might be far better: An entire Linux distribution that lives on a (large) thumb drive, runs under Windows, and allows persistent changes (like installation of new software). I'm testing this on a virtual Windows machine at home and look forward to trying it out at work if all goes well.

Growlers Make a Comeback

In my home brewing days, I'd occasionally see some of the members of my beer club bring what looked like moonshine jugs to some of our meetings. The jugs, I learned then, were a special type of beer bottle called a "growler."

According to the New York Times, these folks were on the bleeding edge of beer fashion:

Mr. Granger, who says growlers constitute a large percentage of his sales, has tried to avoid [the] possibility [of beer spoilage due to improper filling]. He has a system in which bottles are filled under pressure through a plastic hose to keep out oxygen. Filled that way, he said, they could stay fresh for months unopened, and three to five days when opened.

That last sentence was important for me to hear. I don't drink enough beer in any given day to justify getting a growler for use at home. But if the beer remains fresh for several days, that's a whole other ball game!

Poker Etiquette

Reading this entertaining post on poker by Michael Bahr, I got a minor lesson in poker etiquette.

Mike McDermott, Matt Damon's card-playing protagonist from the movie Rounders, observed that a card player generally will not remember the play of most of his or her winning hands, but will recall with great accuracy the most outlandish bad beats he or she has suffered. In pro poker circles, this tendency is accepted at face value to the degree that telling a bad beat story is a social faux pas, the approximate equivalent of telling someone in detail about how one went to the bathroom.

Recalling a recent post of my own on the subject, all I can say is: Oh dear!

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Corrected spelling of Lucidicus Project. (2) One minor edit.