Even worse, I have the sense that Providence has the same priorities.

The fact is, most industrial nations have better health care than we do, it costs less for them, it’s more convenient, and the people like it. I thought this argument was well addressed in Michael Moore’s film “Sicko”, but unfortunately people don’t trust the messenger, and so they overlook his very good message.

Here are some links on the subject I’ve been collecting just in the past few weeks:

• Who was voted the Greatest Canadian of all time in a national poll? Tommy Douglas, the man who created the Canadian health care system.
• Stephen Hawking defends the British system; says without it, he would not be alive.
• Gordon Brown defends the British system
• Ten Questions to ask about our health care system: Ok, they are statements phrased as questions
• Is Public Healthcare in the UK as bad as the US right wing says? from the Guardian

Let’s face it, health care is a problem that has been solved, to a great extent anyway, by other countries than the US. So the real question is, why does the right wing think the USA cannot achhieve what these other countries have? Do they think our government is less competent than the governments of the UK and Canada and France? Do they think our government is more corrupt?

Now my habits are significantly different. I have loads of songs, and I hardly ever play them in iTunes. I mostly play them on my iPod, but I still want lyrics in the songs. I needed a better system, and it was looking like PearLyrics was failing to work, anyhow. Here is what I figured out after doing some research:

1) I found an AppleScript called No Lyrics to Playlist. It examines your iTunes library and creates a NO LYRICS playlist, which will contain all songs that lack lyrics. This is a necessary first step: now I have one comprehensive set of songs which need lyrics.

2) I installed an application called Gimme Some Tune. Gimme Some Tune will seek out lyrics to the currently playing iTunes song (and album art, as well), and copy it to the song metadata. It has some nifty features PearLyrics does not.

3) I installed an AppleScript called Needle Drop. Needle Drop will allow you to sample each song in a playlist for just a few seconds each. It will play a song just long enough for Gimme Some Tune to find the lyrics to each song. No need to play through the whole song.

So there, after some configuration, I just ran Needle Drop on my No Lyrics playlist. After a short time, my whole iTunes library is set with lyrics and album art. Actually, Gimme Some Tune could not find lyrics for about 580 songs (out of 3900 total), for various reasons. But it was pretty good.

In 2005, a Tunisian pilot flying from Italy to Tunisia lost power in both engines. What did he do?

Captain Gharby had turned the controls over to his co-pilot during the emergency and uttered a prayer, instead of following standard procedures that might have allowed him to land the plane at an airport.

The result? The plane went down in the sea off Sicily and 13 people were killed. Mr. Gharby was sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter.

By contrast, in the more well-known 2009 case of US Airways pilot Chesley Sullenberger, faced with a similar situation in densely populated New York City airspace, took over the controls from his co-pilot and followed procedures which he had previously and frequently trained for in simulators. As a result, he brought his plane down in the Hudson River with zero casualties.

The moral? Training and experience will beat prayer every time.

It turns out, I’ve seen four of their five nominees. I like all of them, but I would have to pick the brilliant concept behind Wall-E as the year’s best credit sequence. In these credits, we see scenes from the movie depicted in different styles from art history.

• The creator of the software got his start by developing sonar systems for detecting oil deposits
• AutoTune was apparently something he did as a side project, almost on a dare
• Creative artists who picked up on the software are using it in ways the developer never imagined
• You can use the same software to “improve” reality or distort it in completely unrealistic ways
• Widespread use of the software creates a new paradigm that changes the entire creative industry
• Users who are good at adapting to the new paradigm can be distinctive; but they have to keep expanding their repertoire
• A new understanding (and appreciation?) starts to develop of the imperfections of the old ways of doing it.

Except for the first two items, those descriptions fit equallly well to AutoTune and PhotoShop.