NSFW, but fun.

I guess I retain my capacity for astonishment. Via The Carpetbagger Report, this story that will make your jaw drop:

A woman has complained to the governor and an abortion rights group about Wal-Mart workers who wouldn’t give her morning-after contraceptive pills that don’t require a prescription.

Tashina Byrd, 23, of Springfield, said the pharmacist “shook his head and laughed” when a pharmacy attendant asked this month about giving the woman and her boyfriend Plan B. The hormone pills can help prevent pregnancy if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex.

The attendant told Byrd and her boyfriend, Brian O’Neill, 37, of Columbus, that the store stocked Plan B but nobody would give it to them, the couple told the Columbus Dispatch for a story Monday.

Byrd wrote Gov. Ted Strickland and contacted NARAL Pro-Choice America and Wal-Mart Watch, an activist group that seeks to change the retailer’s practices.

“I could go to church if I wanted to be told how to live my life,” said Byrd, who ended up getting the pills from a CVS pharmacist in Springfield, about 45 miles west of Columbus.

The Food and Drug Administration decided in August to allow nonprescription sales of Plan B emergency contraceptive pills to women. Because those under 18 need a prescription, pharmacies stock the pills behind the counter and check identification.

NARAL, which fights for reproductive rights, is pushing pharmacies to stock Plan B and to write policies ensuring that it will be made available.

“There’s a duty to dispense … without delay, without any kind of harassment,” said Nancy Keenan, NARAL president.

Legislatures have considered measures to either increase access or protect pharmacists who refuse to dispense certain drugs. Strickland has no specific plans, but “does not believe (pharmacists) should be engaging in that kind of behavior,” spokesman Keith Dailey said, referring to what happened at the Wal-Mart.

Brent Beams, the pharmacist, told the Dispatch that he denied the couple’s request for the contraceptive pills because he believes “in preserving life, and I do not believe in ending life, and life begins at conception.”

After the pharmacist turned them down, the couple asked for a store manager who “came over and said, ‘The pharmacist has the law on his side,’” O’Neill said. [!! Not. - LG]

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Scientific American reports:

Your walls, clothes and teeth not white enough for you? Good news: scientists have identified the source of the dazzling whiteness of a beetle called Cyphochilus, and harnessing that knowledge could help make everything from paints to t-shirts more blindingly white. It turns out that the bug’s scales contain a porous network of random protein fibers that scatter all wavelengths of light strongly, the prerequisite for an intense white color.

The beetle might not stand out against the brilliant blue of a butterfly, but “in terms of sheer design ingenuity, for me this is my favorite,” says optical physicist Pete Vukusic of Exeter University in England, who has studied the bright coloring of dragonflies and butterflies.

Vukusic knew he was on to something when he saw Cyphochilus on an insect collector’s Web site. “Something this amazingly bright and white had to be coming from something very thin,” meaning its thin coat of scales, he says. “That in itself is quite interesting. Any industry can make something very white that’s thick.” The more layers a material has, he says, the stronger it can scatter light and the brighter its color can be.

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In general we know that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure (even though we often fail to apply this knowledge), but studies are few that investigate the savings from prevention of disease. Perhaps if more studies were done, insurance companies would not be so reluctant to cover preventive care—but maybe not: if they don’t cover preventive care, they don’t have to pay, and then later, when the illness is severe, they can simply deny coverage and cancel the policy. At least that seems to be their approach.

At any rate, here’s the result of a study of the savings from polio prevention:

A new study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) finds that polio vaccination in the United States has resulted in a net savings of over $180 billion, even without including the large, intangible benefits associated with avoided fear and suffering. This first study to retrospectively demonstrate the enormous benefits of polio vaccination appears as part of a special issue on polio in the December 2006 issue of Risk Analysis.

The history of polio vaccination in the U.S. spans over 50 years and includes different phases of the disease, multiple vaccines, and a sustained significant commitment of financial resources. Lead author of the study, Kimberly Thompson, associate professor of risk analysis and decision science at HSPH, emphasized that this study “should help people understand and better appreciate the huge economic savings that can come from investments in public health interventions.”

The researchers, Professor Thompson and Dr. Radboud Duintjer Tebbens, a research associate at HSPH, estimated the costs and the effectiveness of historical polio vaccination strategies. They found that the U.S. invested over $35 billion between 1955 and 2005 and will continue to invest billions into the future to pay for polio vaccination. They estimated that these historical and future investments translate into over 1.7 billion vaccinations that prevent approximately 1.1 million cases of paralytic polio and over 160,000 deaths, thus saving Americans hundreds of billions of dollars in treatment costs.

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From New Scientist:

Some traditional philosophical problems — unfortunately not many — can be solved scientifically. Among them is the problem of what it means for matter to be alive, where scientific explanations are now sufficiently good that we cannot recover the passion with which this was debated by our great grandparents.

Another problem on the way to a solution is consciousness. This is a problem for much the same reasons that thinking about life is: how can the brain, a biological (material) mechanism, cause conscious (apparently immaterial) states, and how are those states realised in the brain?

Next to consciousness is the even trickier “free will” problem. Could there be a scientific solution? The problem of free will is how to reconcile our experience of our free actions with what we believe about causation. Our general approach to reality seems to presuppose causal determinism. If you ask why the Oakland freeway collapsed in 1989, I can tell you about the Loma Prieta earthquake. Given the way the causes worked, the freeway “had” to collapse; the causes were “sufficient” for it to collapse.

Because we assume there must be some such story for all events, including human actions, there seems to be an easy solution to free will: it does not exist. All our actions are caused. They have causally sufficient conditions which determine that the actions happen once the causes happen. Why can’t we just accept that and go home?

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A big master-list of links for a load of online courses, including (for example) iTunes language courses—Japanese and others.

Dumb Little Man has a good post on three sites that let you look at some measures of school quality in case you’re thinking of moving—or just curious about how your current school measures up. The Man’s favorite is greatschools.net.

A little setback in the weight-loss report: 229.2 lbs. I can see a couple of big-calorie days (one evening of popcorn, and one day of a beef roast with red wine). So it goes. I am now just barely under the projected line of progress: a straight line drawn on a timescale from my starting weight on 9 Dec 2006 to my goal weight (185) on 31 Dec 2007. If I stay under the line, I make it. I had built up some reserve, now squandered. So this week will see rigorous adherence to 1500 calories/day and perhaps even some exercise. In the meantime, the current average is 1.4 lbs lost per week. Could be worse.

Yet another hypersmooth shave. One is loath to brag about one’s technique, but…

I used Col. Ichabod Conk Almond soap, since someone had been talking about it in the Wet Shavers Group, and lathered up with the Emperor 2 Super on my face. My gold Merkur Progress has a Feather blade that’s seen 3 shaves or so, but it just saw another one. Like the Futur and the Vision, the Progress has great acoustics: a fine sound of cutting. Three passes, finished with hot-water rinse, cold-water rinse, alum bar, and then Thayers Lavender witch hazel. No nicks, lovely shave. Good coffee.