Watching a puppy a trying to listen to episode two of Fundamentally Broken. Everything is at least four times as hard while watching a puppy.

My Instapaper queue is down from 88 to 19.

I guess you could say it's been a productive day.

18

So it turns out I'm not very good at math. I ended up spending a day on Twitter 10 days short of a year.

You know what? It was fun. I talked to a few people who I haven't heard from in a while. I put a little lighthearted nonsense into the world. But mostly it was fun because it was temporary.

It's easy to ignore the bullcrap when you know you don't have to see it for very long. Also, my buddy Michael reminded me that I needed to fix my about page. So I did.

I've been singing this tune for years. Insurance is utterly broken, but by focusing on that, the real problem continues to spiral out of control.

Unlike any other business, prices in healthcare bear no relation to value. If you pay $50,000 for a car, chances are very good that you'll get a nicer car than if you pay $15,000. If you pay $2200 or $4500 for an MRI, there is pretty much no chance that you will get a better MRI than if you paid $730 or $420. (Yes, these are real prices, all from the same local market.)

It has been 365 days since I last posted to Twitter. Shortly after my sabbatical began, I added micropost support to this site. That scratched the itch of sharing snippets with the world easily.

Even when I invevitibly turn Twitter back on, I think I'll keep doing this. I like owning my words, even if I'm not so delusional to think they matter.

When turned to if. If turned to why.

Every once in a while, I will open Tweetbot just to see what's going on in the world. I close it quickly, because it's at least 90% garbage.

That 10%, though...

For a day, I'll come back. Feel free to @ me today, and I'll respond. But don't @ me tomorrow. It's just for today.

It's some weird sort of irony when an issue of an email newsletter urges you to unsubscribe from email newsletters, in order to simplify your life.

Frank Pasquale on the all-powerful algorithm:

Far more worrying is the shady world of thousands of largely unregulated data brokers who create profiles of people, profiles built without people's knowledge, consent, and often without the right to review or correct. One casual slur against you could enter into a random database without your knowledge - and then go on to populate hundreds of other digital dossiers purporting to report on your health status, finances, competence, or criminal record.

More to reinforce your paranoia:

An inference like this may not be worth much on its own. But once people are so identified, it could easily be combined and recombined with other lists - say, of plus-sized shoppers, or frequent buyers of fast food - that solidify the inference. A new algorithm from Facebook instantly classifies individuals in photographs based on body type or posture. The holy grail of algorithmic reputation is the most complete possible database of each individual, unifying credit, telecom, location, retail and dozens of other data streams into a digital doppelganger.

If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that digital paranoia is usually justified.

On the likely source of the next pandemic:

Looking at epidemics and pandemics through this evolutionary lens makes it clear that the most important condition necessary for the evolution of virulent, transmissible disease is the existence of a human disease factory. Without social conditions that allow the evolution of virulent, transmissible disease, deadly outbreaks are unlikely to emerge.

Human disease factory. That's an image for you.

Potatowire is back. Aww yeah.

So now I am going to make some rules. I'm going to set expectations. Namely, I plan to post something every weekday and most weekends. I'll probably skip most days I'm on vacation.