For most people with a permanent medical condition there exists a lingering hope that out of the blue, a cure might be discovered. A faint glimmer in the back of the mind that quietly awaits a time to shine. Every malady has it’s day and today is the day for amblyopia.

For those of you who don’t know, amblyopia, aka “Lazy Eye” is a disorder that renders one otherwise perfectly functional eye generally useless. It occurs when the brain stops receiving a full neurological signal from one eye resulting in an extreme dominance of the other. The end result is that one eye ends up being used for normal vision while the other is delegated to “peripheral only” status. Effectively creating a cyclops that can only view the world in two dimensions.

Today researchers announced that playing a specially-designed virtual reality game (headgear and all) can effectively reverse the condition. The game is setup so that the dominant eye is forced to view peripheral aspects of the game (think, “fixed chase cam” or security cameras) while the amblyopic eye is given a first-person perspective. The end result is that the brain is forced to fire up those abandoned visual neurotransmitters…

“Traditionally VR has been used to present realistic environments in 3D so you imagine you’re there because of the depth of the world around you,” said Richard Eastgate of the university’s Virtual Reality Applications Research Team. “But we’re using VR to make something unrealistic. You could call it virtual unreality,” he told Digital Planet.

Now the question remains, “Where do I sign up?”

A brilliant move by the Afghanistan government has dodged the bullet of international condemnation. They declared that Christian convert mentally unfit to stand trial and released him into a protective custody while he awaits for the bureaucratic process to take it’s course. Italy has raised it’s hand like an anxious child in a classroom, “Oooh! Pick me! Pick me!” and has begun an accelerated asylum filing.

As expected, Afghanistan citizens protested the decision. It seems their thirst for blood will not be quenched this week.

I was surprised to learn from the article that the Afghanistan government institutes Sharia (Islamic Law) in their legal system—yet their constitution recognizes the United Nations declaration of human rights… Which declares freedom of religion. The two are contradictory… Complete opposites even!

Just saw this on BBC News:

The memo indicates both leaders acknowledged it was possible no unconventional weapons would be found in Iraq before the invasion, the New York Times says.

The note cites Mr Bush suggesting three ways in which Iraq could be provoked into confrontation.

The US “was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours”, Mr Bush said.

Related to that “no WMD” point, I’d like to point out the following quote from Bush, made 24 hours before he declared war on Iraq:

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. -George Bush March 18, 2003

Tony Blair also had this to say on the same day:

We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd. -Tony Blair, Prime Minister 18 March, 2003

The “blossom of democracy” in the middle east—Afghanistan—is about to execute a man for converting to Christianity. This in itself isn’t surprising considering the state of things in the country. What is surprising is that the execution is progressing forward with mainstream support—not only from the Afghanis, but from Muslims all across the middle east.

Of course, the U.S. official stance is that the whole situation (executing someone for their religious beliefs) is horrific. However, if the U.S. interferes in the situation it will fuel the fire burning inside Muslims all across the middle east who feel that the West is meddling in affairs it should not. I sort of agree with that sentiment—but probably not in the way that you’d think.

I personally believe that liberty and enlightenment must come from within. You can preach and demonstrate the benefits of freedom and tolerance all day, but in the end it is the people themselves who must choose to take that path. It is human nature to distrust the unknown and it is the nature of fundamentalist religions to entangle the minds of followers with mental roadblocks of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). Getting past this can be difficult and can take many generations. It is wishful thinking to believe that Afghanistan could become tolerant and free over the course of a few short years.

We shouldn’t give up hope, however. The man is on trial, he has not been found guilty of anything and it is possible that the Afghan people could surprise the world with a bit of progress. A grand showing of liberty and acceptance along with an advertisement, “We need your help to make Afghanistan a better place” just might benefit the country more than any of it’s citizens could know.

I just read over at BoingBoing a great article regarding an image created by Justin Watt that parodies a billboard put up by Exodus International (an evil organization hell-bent on spreading homophobia). Apparently they sent him a cease & desist letter with a threat to sue for copyright infringement and it created quite a stir in the blogging community. The ACLU wrote a great letter on Justin’s behalf to send to Exodus that can be read on Justin’s blog

Here’s the image (original is here)

I was just reading a fascinating article on the economics of global warming when I was blown away by this quote:

WN: The world, you write, needs more economists who think like ecologists. Please explain.

Brown: One of the most interesting manifestations of realizing this at the government level came in China in the summer of 1998, when there was extensive flooding in the Yangtze River basin. It went on for weeks and weeks.

It eventually caused $30 billion worth of damage, which is roughly the value of the annual rice harvest in China. This was a big hit on the economy. After some weeks of this, the government held a press conference in Beijing. And they said we’ve been saying this is an act of nature, and that’s true. But we’ve now determined that there’s a human contribution to this. And they then said they were going to ban all tree cutting in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River basin. They soon thereafter extended it to the entire country. They justified it in economic terms, and they said the value of trees standing is three times the value of trees cut. And what they were recognizing is that the flood-control services provided by forests are three times as valuable to society as the timber in those trees. In a sense, that’s what the world needs to see.

To me, this seems like a direct parallel to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans. Decades of river engineering and levy building destroyed most of the wetlands and barrier islands in the delta protecting the city. The short-term economic benefit of more and more urban development was never weighed against the long-term cost of destroying significant portions of the protective ecosystem. It is easy to look at a forest and just see trees when there’s money to be made in a booming real estate market. It makes me wonder if it is truly wise for our government to be encouraging people to move back into the region en masse.

The article overall discusses the “hidden costs” associated with global warming and how the interviewee came up with the $11 figure for a gallon of gas. It makes perfect sense if you believe the recent UK Report and/or NASA Scientists==

Even if you’re oblivious to global warming and oil prices, the article has a lot of interesting information about China that you might not know. The interviewee is Lester R. Brown and if you read his short biography, it seems he is well-qualified in what he is talking about.

Update: An article in Scientific American was just put out covering a new climate model from of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder that predicts ocean levels to rise 20 feet as a result of our current CO2 concentrations. No date is mentioned, but previous models showed that the most the ocean could rise would be 3-4 feet. The previous models were based only on speculations in the amount that ice would be converted into water. As it turns out, paleoglacial data shows that ocean levels were about 20 feet higher than they are today 130,000 years ago when CO2 levels were just a bit lower than they are today.

Verizon just signed a deal with CBS to provide exclusive content to FIOS subscribers effectively creating a content bubble for themselves. If this trend continues, what’s to stop one provider from gobbling up all the desirable content? Am I the only one who sees this as slippery slope? Where’s Net neutrality when we need it?

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(Taken from The Health Care Blog)

• 70% of the population that accounts for only 30% of all healthcare costs ($600 billion)
• 30% of the population that accounts for 70% of all healthcare costs ($1.4 trillion)

• 15% of all medicare dollars are spent in the final 3 months of life

  So let’s say for a moment that we were going to make the government pay for all our health care costs. That would be about $2 trillion dollars. Otherwise known as a 72% increase in the Federal budget.

  Update: I forgot that there’s some hidden info within those statistics. About 25% of those costs are overhead (administrative) that a government entity would not incur (for reference the overhead of Medicare is about 2% despite it’s scale/complexity). So the total would really be about $1.5 trillion if you don’t account for the discounts and such that a single payer system would entail (which, if you compare it to other socialized health insurance/care systems is around 50% less than what the U.S. consumer pays for health care/drugs¹).

  Combining the two factors of less overhead and single-payer discounts, you get an actual socialized health care cost of around $750 billion (optimistic estimate—if we ran things like they do in Europe).

  Update: Wow, another factor I didn’t consider: Medicare/Medicaid already account for $567 billion of the federal budget. That means if we just started covering all our citizens with Medicare/Medicaid we could be looking at only a $183 billion increase! I know that seems like a crazy small number—and it is. But it does add up. For safety’s sake, I’ll say that it would amount to about $300 billion more—or a 11% increase in the Federal budget.

  Why so low? Because the most expensive patients are the elderly and the chronically ill… Precisely the people who are currently covered under Medicare/Medicaid (also note that the poor tend to get sick more and they’re also covered under these programs).

  Here’s some more relevant statistics:

• The United States is ranked 37th in the world for health care.
• Canada is ranked 30th.
• France is ranked 1st.

• Don’t move to Myanmar: 190th.

  ...and according to Nation Master’s ranking of countries by Healthy Life Expectancy (i.e. how long you’ll live without requiring sponge baths and a respirator):

• The United States is 22nd, with an expectancy of 67.6 years.
• Canada is 18th with 69.9 years.

• Japan is 1st with 73.6 years.

  Update: More statistics here

• Did you know that 50% of all bankruptcy filings are due to health care costs?

  ¹ Taken from here (2002 data showing the per-capita spending on healthcare).

I just filled out the forms with honest answers and it says my life expectancy is 94! Not bad… I doubt they’re taking into account significant advances in medical technology.

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I was just reading some news articles about various unrelated things when I stumbled across a comment regarding socialized health care. The person basically threw the usual lines regarding how they didn’t want the government to make their health care decisions (“Do you want the government to decide whether or not you can get your nose fixed?”). It then occurred to me that perhaps others are equally confused. For future reference, let me make some things clear:

Socialized health care = Government controlled hospitals and regulations
Socialized health insurance = Government pays the bill via your taxes (aka “single payer” system)

Then there’s many different ways you can divide up those two completely different systems. For instance, regarding socialized health insurance, some people believe that the government should only act as an insurer that competes with other private insurers (i.e. you can opt into a medicare-like program). Others think that everyone should have to pay into the health insurance system regardless of whether or not they secure private insurance.

I don’t think there’s very many people in the U.S. that believe in communist-style socialized health care. Images of waiting lists and people dying because of bureaucratic messes pops into my head.