Writ of Mainprize

I'm running my first duathlon ever next weekend in Welland. Olivia will be doing a triathlon. We've been training for months now. We just did a practice "brick" which is the bike/run portion on Friday night. It went pretty well, but we both moved a little slow on Saturday. Just a few more training days left. The race is a full length duathlon, but not a long as an Olympic or iron man race. My duathlon is 5 km run, 30 km bike and 5 km run. Olivia's triathlon is 750 m swim, 30 km bike and 7.5 km run.

Think your privacy settings on your browser are enough to protect you from being snooped, tracked, or profiled? Think again. Apparently Adobe's Flash plugin has its own set of places for things like cookies and other potentially personalized content. These are not removed when you empty the cache, and they are not normal browser cookies. For every browser you use, visit the Flash Player Settings page to set your security level to something better than "Hi internet, here's my damn wallet, ID, money, and my monthly banking records".

We returned to Alma this year for the annual two-day "Scotland, USA" open invitational highland games. The weather was absolutely beautiful and absolutely sweltering. We played a march/strathspey/reel set on Saturday and our Medley on Sunday. We didn't win though. Oh well, maybe next time! ... Read the full post »

With the multitude of health supplements out there, it's difficult to figure out which ones work and which ones do not. Ideally, we'd follow the results of good scientific studies that have been corroborated by other studies. Unfortunately, wading through the results is extremely difficult. There is a good attempt and collating some of the results and categorizing the benefits by the reliability of the evidence. The people at Information is Beautiful have made a very nice bubble visualization of a whole host of supplements and the level of evidence for their supposed benefits. They even have a Google Doc with their source info that can update the visualization! Great work.

Finally! I don't understand why it was such a problem to get this bill passed. Actually, I do understand. A lot of idiots went ballistic stating that this was gonna bankrupt America and lead to government control of the quality of healthcare. And this somehow was against the very nature of the American dream. Anyways, it clearly fixes a lot of problems with the current system and introduces a slew of regulations that control the behavior of intransigent insurance companies to provide coverage for low-income and for those with pre-existing conditions. It proposes trying out new fee schemes that reward performance rather than fee for service. It is gradual. It is fair, and only those people with "Cadillac insurance" plans will feel any real pain in the form of tax on their premium benefits.  Some argue ... Read the full post »