Brandt's Tumblr

"The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we’ve failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is insuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It’s viewed as the art of medicine. That’s a mistake, a huge mistake."

Annals of Medicine: The Checklist : The New Yorker. Excellent article. (But you’re gonna need Readability to get through it all.)

"In order to prevent an overloading of a single availability zone when everybody tries to run their instances in us-east-1a, Amazon has added a layer of indirection so that each account’s availability zones can map to different physical data center equivalents."

Matching EC2 Availability Zones Across AWS Accounts. Wow, I had no idea. And here I’ve been avoiding us-east-1a for just that reason!

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If you’ve got a model where revenue is tied only to web page views, switching to full-content RSS feeds will hurt, at least in the short term. The problem, I say, isn’t with full-content RSS feeds, but rather with a business model that hinges solely on web page views. The precious commodity that we, as publishers, have to offer advertisers is the attention of our readers. Web page views are a terribly inaccurate, if not outright misleading, metric for attention. Subscribers to a full-content RSS feed are among the readers paying the most attention, but generate among the least web page views.

A reader asking for a full-content RSS feed is a reader who wants to pay more attention to what you publish. There have to be ways to thrive financially from that.

Daring Fireball: Attention Is the Real Resource. This reminds me of someone I used to work with, who (despite my being overworked) didn’t want me to become more productive because we billed by the hour, so a boost to my productivity would hurt the company’s revenue. It saddens me when people shy away from opportunity just because it doesn’t fit their existing model. I’m always happy to find well-reasoned pieces like this to refer them to.

"Under the circumstances, you would never know that Americans living in the United States were in vanishingly little danger from terrorism, but in significant danger driving to the mall; or that alcohol, tobacco, E. coli bacteria, fire, domestic abuse, murder, and the weather present the sort of potentially fatal problems that might be worth worrying about, or even changing your behavior over, or perhaps investing some money in. Terrorism, not so much."

(emphasis added) Fear Inc.. He goes on to a spot-on critique of Obama’s response to the underwear bomber.

"HI. You’re using libxml2 version 2.6.16 which is over 4 years old and has plenty of bugs. We suggest that for maximum HTML/XML parsing pleasure, you upgrade your version of libxml2 and re-install nokogiri. If you like using libxml2 version 2.6.16, but don’t like this warning, please define the constant I_KNOW_I_AM_USING_AN_OLD_AND_BUGGY_VERSION_OF_LIBXML2 before requring nokogiri."

Best error message I’ve seen in a while. Now if I could just convince my client’s hosting company to upgrade from Centos 4…

"When visiting encrypted pages, you have to allow Opera to get in the middle to decrypt and re-encrypt (via Opera Software), breaking what’s meant to be an end-to-end security chain. You need to ask yourself if you need another potential opaque layer of insecurity between you and, say, your bank account?"

The case against Opera Mini on the iPhone. As they say on 30Rock, that’s a deal breaker.