If you are ever underinsured and you need to get a specific lab test done - you can order many without seeing your doctor.

For example, you want to get your X levels checked and you don't want to pay cash for a doctors visit in order to get a piece of paper that you take to to the lab and pay cash for the X levels test.

You can order the test directly from places like:

directlabs.com
healthcheckusa.com

The first emails you a .pdf which you print and take to a normal lab (the same place your doctor would send you) and then you can access your results from them (or they will mail them to you).

The second is the same but you have to wait for the lab paper to be mailed to you.

Obviously you still end up seeing your doctor if you need to have something done about the test.

1) It takes 30-40 minutes to have a customer support person join you on "live chat" to answer your questions. If you don't respond in 30 seconds to the joining, for example if you are DOING OTHER THINGS BECAUSE THEY HAVEN'T JOINED, they log you out of live chat.
2) It takes 3-4 days to receive responses to emails IF YOU RECEIVE A RESPONSE AT ALL.
3) When I called their phone it transferred me to hold music and then hung up on me.
4) When changing me from an old platform to a new platform, as part of their own transition, not at my request, they lost thousands of picture files I had backed up on their server. I realized this when my own hard drive started to crash and I wanted to pull the files from the website to another computer so I would still have 2 copies.
5) They only keep backups during their major transitions for 15 days so they did not have my picture files.
6) I managed to get the pictures back on the server from my failing hard drive and they used that as an excuse to avoid answering my questions about the lost pictures. "I see you have the pictures up now, so we won't try to reinstate your photos". When the truth was "we don't have them. Oops."

I'm definitely moving our site.

I was discussing misconceptions people have about the legal system in class today and I thought it would be fun to post about these and other interesting legal system facts as they occur to me. Particularly because my LJ is basically workblahweddingblahclimbingblahsailing lately.

Factoid #1: Who to blame?

When a defendant is convicted they almost always blame the judge and often their attorney rather than the DA. This is strange because the DA spent hours or even weeks smearing the defendants credibility and good name, telling the jury that the defendant did it and is a horrible guy. However, the defendants often blame the judge (can we say "authority issues").

If the defense attorney was a public defender, they often blame them as well. The guy that was fighting for them...for free. If they paid the defense attorney, they think the private defense attorney walks on water. We like to think we are smart and good people and if we paid someone a huge sum of money to represent us, then they must be good - we have a very effective rationalization process.

Although almost all judges, DAs and PDs have unlisted contact information, most death threats are against judges and PDs.

Thank goodness I (and the Skeptic) were WRONG WRONG WRONG

( Also see this letter from an NPS official )

Grand Canyon created by flood - era Noah

Dear sweet baby tiny infant Jesus in your tiny little diapers with your adorable smile, please tell me it isn't true that the parkservice can't tell people the date of the canyon? (/channeling Ricky Bobby in Talladega nights)

Readers: please de-bunk this, tell me it ain't so

Interesting Rolling Stone article on how it is possible for the economy to be growing steadily while most American's aren't getting any wealthier.

On the Colorado ballot simultaneously:
1) A referendum to define marriage as one man and one woman
2) A referendum to establish civil unions for same sex couples

I think it is quite interesting because if you vote yes for 1, you might be likely to throw the 'poor gay sinners' a bone and vote yes on 2. Unlikely because of this state, but I think having both on the ballot actually helps 2 with the more moderate.

And now, a diatribe...

If one's primary motivation is to protect the sanctity of marriage based on religious beliefs, why focus on #1? Is the biggest threat to the sanctity of marriage, gay marriage? I would argue that the biggest threat to heterosexual marriages is adultery. Also a biblical no-no. How many married hetero people are not only coveting thy neighbor but SHAGGING thy neighbor, or thy coworker, or thy person-thy-found-in-a-bar. So why not defend the sanctity of marriage by making adultery a criminal offense (it isn't now - it is grounds for divorce etc but not a criminal offense*)? Because it's not that people care about marriage, they just don't want people to be gay, and if they are gay they want to keep them marginalized. I predict that people in CO will vote yes on 1 and no on 2 - because their real motivation (not what is on the TV ads or the literature) is that they think being gay is wrong and want to do what they can to not let it be 'legitimized' (whatever that means) by our laws.

And to me, that's just bigotry. To me, it is no different than not allowing inter-racial marriages - which were demonized from the pulpits at the time based on similar logic (not natural, sinful biblically, etc).

Does anyone actually believe that in 20 or so years we won't have gay marriage. Or civil unions. Or something else that is the same as marriage. We will and our grandchildren will look back and be ashamed of the hate, bile, and bigotry of their grandparents. They will ask how we could have disallowed something that hurt no one just because we didn't like it. There is no way this legislation is motivated out of love - it is motivated out of fear at a minimum, if not hate. And what does it accomplish? What does stopping gay people from marrying do for hetero marriages at all? If people were motivated out of love not fear, we would have taken the money and time that has been spent on this anti-gay legislation nation-wide and spent it on pro-active gestures (marriage counseling, education, support) for straight couples.

Don't even get me started on the statistics - the staggeringly high suicide rates of gay teens living in highly religious communities and families - which suggest that even passive bigotry, internalized, can have real consequences for our loved ones.

*I'm not pro this either - but it would be more consistent with the stated reasoning.

PS - I think I'm going to be writing this same post every election year while living here.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, 'hmm.... that's funny" - Isaac Asimov

Your moment of zen.

Not quite as dangerous as box turtles...but still

Summers off? Winter breaks? The reality of working 12 months on a 9 month salary - pros and cons.

( The Summer Next Time )

I find this amusing. They are usually overgeneralizations and occasionally seem incorrect but they do remind me of the (for us) widening age gap between our own experiences and traditional age college entrants.

( BELOIT COLLEGE'S MINDSET LIST FOR THE CLASS OF 2010 )

Reprinted from a friend's journal. Recommended reading.

Article about the disturbed guy who founded/runs the "girls gone wild" soft-core porn empire. very interesting analysis and first-hand experience.

Bugmenot for password/username if you don't have one.

Thanks to a tip from mobil_homme I now have this t-shirt coming in the mail.



Ahhhh, a certain Frenchie will be most pleased.

My mot du jour (word of the day) came with a pirate example. Or an American 'detainee' facility, one or the other.

French: Si vous me dites la vérité, je vous laisse aller.

English: If you tell me the truth, I will let you go.

My favorite gmail ad thusfar*

While peeking in my spam folder I see:

Spam fajitas - Serves 8

*gmail pairs ads with whatever words are in your gmail screen. If your email is about climbing for example you might see a 'improve your climbing skills' book ad.

I don't have time to read the reports yet (just read the summary) but if you want the University's reports (public) you can find them here.

In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, 'write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?' Wallace's answer to those questions was published in the Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.

See how much you think his statements apply to our society today:

'The really dangerous American fascist," Wallace wrote, ". . . is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism he saw rising in America, Wallace added, 'They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."