Hi blog public, it's me, blogging.  As previously agreed nothing is more boring than a blogger blogging about not blogging, and so I won't do that.  I'm just going to blog.

Today is Veteran's Day, and I wish to observe a moment of silence and respect for all veterans, especially my father (a Dutch veteran of WWII, now sadly no longer with us), and my oldest daughter (a veteran of the Iraq conflagration).  Thanks! 

And now to blogging.  You will be delighted (or frightened) to know, I about 200 juicy blogworthy items saved in my RSS reader, stretching back to October 2011, when I stopped blogging regularly, and over time I'll try to work them in.  A steady drip seems preferable to a one-shot deluge, don't you think? 

I'll just note parenthetically that somehow RSS feeds seem to have fallen from favor, but I still think they're a wonderful way to scan hundreds of news sources daily without spending hours doing so.  There was a biggish kerpuffle over Google having discontinued their Reader blog reader, but there's a lot of other ways to monitor RSS feeds.  I use a freeware program called SharpReader which is now about 10 years old, and it works great.

I'm going to stay away from Obamacare bashing.  You are either for it or against it, and I'm not going to change your mind.  Anyone who can't see that there's no free lunch - that some of us must pay more for health insurance so that others of us can get it at all - is not going to be convinced by mere logic.  How much more are you willing to pay so that previously uninsurable people can get health insurance?  I'd be willing to pay a little more, I guess, but not very much. 

The real key to this problem is lowering the cost of healthcare overall.  Two things would surely help, cap liability, and unlink reimbursement from Medical and Medicaid.  Also medical insurance should be insurance, a hedge against disaster, not a way to share ongoing maintenance expenses.

This is pretty amazing: Amazon is closer than ever to running the US Postal Service.  Does anyone still care about real mail?  Seems like if it's important, it gets sent UPS or FedEx.  Increasingly the USPS is simply a way to distribute recyclable trash. 

From LGF: The Feynman Series: Beauty.  Beautiful! 

From Kottke: The Feynman Lectures in Physics, in HTML.  Good to know in case you're in the mood for some light reading :) 

This is good to know: How to Edit Wikipedia.  Raise your hand if you've ever done this?  Aha, thought so.  Wikipedia is amazing, we should all help make it more amazing.  It's so easy, too. 

Something I missed: Messenger!  Amazing pictures of Mercury.  Fun fact: Mercury's "days" are twice as long as its "years". 

Tim Bray says Ads in Front of Things are bad.  He's entirely correct.  "When I see it, I suspect a broken business model; if you need to inflict this kind of abuse on your readers, a barrel’s bottom is being scraped."  Yep. 

So, you might ask, what prompted you to blog?  Well...  today is an anniversary of sorts, an inflection point, if you will; I'll tell you more about this over the next days and weeks.  But I figured what the heck.  Yeah, I missed you too!