22 April 2010 (pm)

Sports

I am not a baseball fan though I used to be one and I played (incompetently) many years ago. But, I admit that I’ve never seen this type of play at the plate before:

Health Care Reform

One of the many reasons we needed this bill: some companies will find an excuse to cancel your coverage if you get sick:

Shortly after they were diagnosed with breast cancer, each of the women learned that her health insurance had been canceled. There was Yenny Hsu, who lived and worked in Los Angeles. And there was Patricia Reilling, a successful art gallery owner and interior designer from Louisville, Kentucky.

Neither of these women knew about the other. But besides their similar narratives, they had something else in common: Their health insurance carriers were subsidiaries of WellPoint, which has 33.7 million policyholders — more than any other health insurance company in the United States.

The women paid their premiums on time. Before they fell ill, neither had any problems with their insurance. Initially, they believed their policies had been canceled by mistake.

They had no idea that WellPoint was using a computer algorithm that automatically targeted them and every other policyholder recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The software triggered an immediate fraud investigation, as the company searched for some pretext to drop their policies, according to government regulators and investigators.

Once the women were singled out, they say, the insurer then canceled their policies based on either erroneous or flimsy information. WellPoint declined to comment on the women’s specific cases without a signed waiver from them, citing privacy laws.

That tens of thousands of Americans lost their health insurance shortly after being diagnosed with life-threatening, expensive medical conditions has been well documented by law enforcement agencies, state regulators and a congressional committee. Insurance companies have used the practice, known as “rescission,” for years. And a congressional committee last year said WellPoint was one of the worst offenders.

Social: there are some big changes ahead for those who serve on submarines:

As of Dec. 31, smoking aboard the entire submarine fleet will be summarily banned — no small hardship for the estimated 35 to 40 percent of sailors who are nicotine addicts and can’t exactly step outside whenever they want a puff.

Barring intervention by Congress in the next few days, the Navy has also said it intends to let women join submarine crews by the end of 2011, a move that isn’t going over well with many active-duty and veteran members of the Silent Service, the stealthy nickname of the force.

On top of all that, the military is girding for another social revolution that might take some getting used to inside the cheek-to-jowl confines of submarines: allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the ranks.

“The Silent Service is right now very much a boys’ club,” said Joe Buff, a military commentator and the author of six pulp fiction thrillers involving submarine adventures. “They’re always bellyaching, and they always hate change. But I think the men are going to be better at all these changes than they’re willing to let on.” [...]

My two cents: my experience with submarines is limited; I did one patrol on the SSBN-622 (James Monroe) and on the SSN-674 (Trepang) My guess is that there will be some growing pains with this policy but it will work out in the end. Change is never easy.

Skepticism
James Randi attacks the woos and quackery:

Science One of my favorite scientists (Jerry Coyne) reviews Richard Dawkins The Greatest Show on Earth and an attempt at a book on evolution called What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini; the latter is what happens when a philosopher and a cognitive scientist attempt to write about a field that is not theirs. Here is part of the review:

One type lies within the bodies of living organisms. In a wonderful chapter called “History Written All Over Us,” Dawkins shows that animal anatomy is like a medieval palimpsest, carrying traces of our evolutionary ancestry. Human goose bumps, for instance, serve no function: they’re remnants of the muscles used by our mammalian ancestors–and our living relatives like cats–to erect their fur, making them warmer and giving enemies the illusion of greater size. Modern genome sequencing has also uncovered vestigial DNA: useless, broken genes that are functional in our relatives and presumably were too in our ancestors. Our own genome, for instance, harbors nonfunctional genes that, in our bird and reptile relatives, produce egg yolk. Embryology–the study of development–brings more proof to the table. The pharyngeal arches of the early, fishlike human embryo are derived directly from the gill arches of fish, though they go on to become, among other things, our larynx and eustachian tube.

Even more evidence for evolution comes from the “bad designs” of animals and plants, which, Dawkins observes, look nothing like de novo creations of an efficient celestial engineer. His favorite example–and mine–is the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which runs from the brain to the larynx. In mammals it doesn’t take the direct route (a matter of a few inches) but makes a curiously long detour, running from the head to the heart, looping around the aorta and then doubling back up to the neck. In the giraffe, this detour involves traversing that enormous neck twice–adding about fifteen feet of superfluous nerve. Anyone who’s dissected an animal in biology class will surely agree with Dawkins’s conclusion: “the overwhelming impression you get from surveying any part of the innards of a large animal is that it is a mess! Not only would a designer never have made a mistake like that nervous detour; a decent designer would never have perpetuated anything of the shambles that is the criss-crossing maze of arteries, veins, nerves, intestines, wads of fat and muscle, mesenteries and more.”

Creationists often object to this sort of argument, saying that it’s not scientific but theological. God is inscrutable, they claim, so how could we possibly know how he would or would not design creatures? But this misses the point, for the “bad design” we see is precisely what we’d expect if evolution were true. The laryngeal nerve takes that long detour because, in our fishy ancestors, it was lined up behind a blood vessel, with both nerve and vessel servicing the gills. As the artery moved backward during its evolution to the mammalian aorta, the nerve was constrained to move behind it, although its target (the larynx, an evolutionary descendant of the gill arch) remained up in the neck. If you insist that such designs reflect God’s plan, then you must admit that his plan was to make things look as if they had evolved.

Finally, Dawkins provides evidence from a completely different realm: that of biogeography, the study of how plants and animals are distributed over the earth. Why do volcanic islands like Hawaii have plenty of unique plants, birds and insects (most resembling species from the nearest mainland) but no native amphibians, freshwater fish or land mammals? Such patterns defy explanation by any form of creationism. Instead, they bespeak long-distance migration of ancestors to newly formed islands, followed by the evolution of new species.

Surf to the link to read more.

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