Heartbreak & Health Care

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Health care in the US is the only kind that most Americans (most US natives, anyway) know: you pay a certain amount of money to a company; if you get sick, they try to get you well; if you stay healthy, they keep the money.  In the past, of course, most insurance companies could invest your money in the fabulous Stock Market, and make a lot of money, while they waited for you to get sick.  This is how they could afford to sit around arranging for your health care; after all, they were in it for the profits, and we did not hold that against them.

Health care in some other countries are paid for out of taxes; in other words, the government got to hold your money instead of private insurance companies, while the government waited for you to get sick.  In the US, of course, we hate the idea of the government holding onto money, and we would like to avoid it if possible.  I don't know why this is; surely we don't believe that the US government is more corrupt than say, the Canadian government.

Or maybe it's a matter of efficiency.  Maybe we feel that it would be better to let a private company handle health care rather than the government.  Like roads, for instance.  Oh, wait; roads are handled by the government!  Oops.  Maybe if we asked Blue Cross to keep the roads in shape, the roads would be in a heckuva lot better shape than they are now.  (But we would pay a lot more for the satisfaction.  And we could sue them if there were potholes.  And we could sue them if there was a traffic jam just when we wanted to get to the hospital in a hurry!  There are lots of strange pluses to farming out jobs to the private sector.)

The more left-leaning folks in government are more sensitive to the fact that people losing jobs are losing their health insurance.  At least some of these folks probably have family members who are sick just when they're handed a pink slip.  For anyone who doesn't completely avoid listening to media sources that are sympathetic to the plight of the unemployed, it is heartbreaking to listen to the horror stories of people who are unable to get health insurance.  The fiscal conservatives had a good platform when unemployment was low.  When unemployment is high, they really don't have a plan to look after the indigent.  I sometimes wonder what the doctrinaire conservatives really think about the plight of the working class.  Perhaps it is something like: well, someday they'll be well off, too; it's just a matter of time.  And they will thank us for making sure that the wealthy don't have to subsidize the subsistence of those close to the poverty line.  It is amazing that so many Americans of very limited means tend to vote in sympathy with really affluent people.  They do not realize that the problems of the ultra-affluent and the problems of the merely modestly well-off are very, very different. 

There are horror stories about the heartbreak of foreigners who got screwed by their health system, e.g. Brits who could not get decent health care, and Canadians who supposedly had to wait for months and months for health care.  Well, each case has to be examined on its own merits, and we must not only satisfy ourselves about the facts of each case, but also whether the British or the Canadian system, as the case may be, made changes in order to respond to that particular problem.  In the US, insurance companies do respond slowly to pressure from customers.  But they're ultimately responsible to their greedy stockholders, not their patients.

Conservatives in this country tend to respond more to the heartbreak of the insurance companies.  Compared to the large profits they've made in the past, their profits in more recent times must be slimmer, simply because the Stock Market is in trouble.  But a visit to the corporate headquarters of any major insurance company should cure anyone of a suspicion that all their resources are focused on keeping their customers well for a reasonable cost.  The health insurance industry is very high on the food chain, and the worse the unemployment situation gets, the more afraid they should be that Congress will make it very hard for them to keep swindling the consumers on an ongoing basis.

Many so-called "moderate Democrats" are afraid of being called names such as "Socialist" or "Communist" or the accusation of being a blind follower of the President.  All sorts of vicious name-calling has blossomed in response to the irrational reactions of the conservatives, and the influence of the health-insurance lobby.

Nobody is more aware of heartbreak in health care than doctors and nurses.  Many doctors and nurses no doubt went into the profession as a means for gaining power and a certain degree of affluence.  But an amazing proportion of them seem to be in favor of major changes in health care practice, and within the health insurance industry.  In the last analysis, perhaps it is self-evident that without a degree of altruism, one simply cannot be a physician or a surgeon, even if this suspicion seems at odds with our feelings when we get their bills!!!  Whatever the true facts are, doctors have come out in favor of health care reform, though perhaps not as radical reform as would make most Americans really happy once the reform is actually here.  Though it is possible that plans that work in other countries will not work here (because Americans are particularly prone to rip off the system?), the chances are that there is a plan that could work.  The difficulty is to find a plan that (1) can work well, (2) can be adjusted if it needs to be, in small ways, and (3) which cannot be subverted by the conservatives and Big Health in the future.  Because, rest assured, some of the best minds in the country may be trying to get us all better health care, but some good minds are working even now to sabotage the whole thing.

Arch

National Cheeseburger Day 2009

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The Holiday Insights Page has found no documentation of the origin of the annual celebration on September 18th.  But Hungry Girl, a website associated with Weight Watchers has done some research, and

Oh gosh!

Cheeseburgers come with a wide assortment of nutritional values.  A cheeseburger, of course, has a hamburger patty, but --according to Hungry Girl, anyway-- all cheeseburgers are not born equal.

Wendy's Junior Cheeseburger comes in the low-fat winner: 370 calories, and 12g fat.  (If they really like you and they're not too busy, they will make a "W" with the mustard.)

Hungry Girl is deeply grieved by McDonald's 1/3 pound Angusburger with cheese: 750 calories, 40g fat.
McD's were far more pro-nutrition in the past, says Hungry Girl.

Hardees 2/3 pound Monster Thickburger: 1420 calories, and 108g fat.  Its 60 grams of protein is hardly an excuse.

It should be possible to make your own hamburger at home with easily far less fat, and considerably less calories.  Grill a 95% or better lean patty on your George Foreman Lean Machine  (or similar) grill, put on a slice of low-fat colby or swiss cheese, use a reasonable amount of fat-free or low fat mayonnaise, a little steak sauce or ketchup (don't go overboard), and you've got a cheeseburger that probably comes close to the Wendy's Junior Cheeseburger minimum.  (The JC, I must say, has a really small patty, though it's satisfactory for a quick snack.)

Ray Cotes discusses the true cost of a cheeseburger on his page.

A

Tristan & Isolde, 2006

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While everyone else was probably watching a breaking news story, I was totally absorbed in a film of a legend on the periphery of the Arthurian sagas: Tristan and Isolde.

I had known the essence of the story since I was a schoolboy: a Cornish knight, Tristan, or Sir Tristram, had been sent out to Ireland to bring home to Cornwall an Irish bride, Isolde, to marry King Marke of Cornwall. The young knight and the princess fall in love, despite their painful awareness of their duty both to the political circumstances and the laws of chivalry, facilitated at least in part by the love potion that was to be administered to the girl to prepare her for marriage to the older King Marke. The potion has the tragic effect of making her fall (even more firmly) in love with the young knight Tristan. The story grinds to its inevitable end, made palatable sometimes, and more painful at other times, by the intense poetic sensibilities of the young lovers, the fussing and blundering loyalty of Isolde’s nurse and maid, Bragnae (or Brangane, in some stories), and numerous details that are inserted by various writers who have retold this tale, to sharpen the edge of the tragedy.

In many ways, having known of the legend since childhood, I was certain that I could not be as moved by the story as I had been as a child. Richard Wagner, too, had written one of his greatest operas based on this story, but that same opera had, in my mind, made the legend useless for all other writers and operattists, simply because Wagner extracted every iota of agony from the story in a score that is considered bloated and self-indulgent by some, and magnificent by others.

A problem with Wagner operas is that they transport medieval stories to some glorious sound-stage in the sky, where the action refers to familiar historic --or legendary-- events, but what one sees is so stylized that only the music saves it from being totally ludicrous. Cinema, meanwhile, has succeeded in many instances in presenting period scenes which are more convincing each year. Despite their heavy-handedness, Cecil B. De Mille’s representations of Roman times set a certain standard of realism that subsequent productions have to beat. I have always said that Monty Python’s Holy Grail, despite the relentless parody and pantomime, realized on the screen my own mental image of those terrible times. In contrast with the lush beauty of The Agony and The Ecstasy, and Romeo and Juliet, for instance, films set in medieval Britain have been, at least half of them, successful at depicting the contrast between the life at court, and the life of the peasants, and the contrast between the depiction of life at court in fairy-tale films such as Camelot, and in later movies which showed a more realistic, less stainless-steel-stylish view of knights and their ladies.

Tristan and Isolde, 2006, presents a step towards realism, even if it stops from going so far towards historical realism as to make the movie unwatchable. I’m probably reacting to the fact that the principals act and behave very much in line with the characters as they existed in my mind, which of course is not saying a lot. James Franco and Sophia Myles, who have the title roles, are perfect, and so is earnest King Marke, and the anxious Bragnae (played by Bronagh Gallagher). There are the usual horrible medieval bullies with their poison-dipped swords, and so forth --after all, one of the main messages of the story is about better living with medieval chemistry-- and enough locker-room humor to keep the men from going out for a cigarette and not coming back. Sophia Myles has a brilliant way of being the beautiful girl next door, who would or would not give you the time of day depending on her mood. Both the young lovers are people one could fall in love with (if one was the appropriate gender, I suppose), and I was so in love that --- I could not watch the ending. So this review is written under false pretenses. One of these days, I will watch the whole thing, and suffer. Three thumbs up!

[Below is a link to a fragment from the prelude to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.]



Arch

A few of Mozart's Last Masterpieces

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Don't misunderstand me: I do not mean to suggest either that Mozart wrote just a few masterpieces, or that they were all written at the end of his life.  I just want to talk about a few late ones.

The first is the Piano Concerto no. 23 in A major, Köchel 488.  This beautiful piece wafts in, like a soft breeze, and comes to an end like a happy smile, with one of his most modest codas.  (The "coda" is the last several chords and gestures at the end of a work, the blustery ending part which, in a Beethoven symphony, for instance, seems to go on for years...)

Here it is:

Note the opening few notes, the falling third as we describe it, from the fifth note of the scale to the third.  In this particular performance Malcom Bilson plays a fortepiano,  a gentler-voiced precursor to the modern piano, more appropriate to piano and orchestral pieces of this period, especially with a period orchestra, as that of the English Baroque Soloists (John Eliot Gardiner).  Note: this recording has been performed in a transitional style to bridge Baroque practice (the keyboard instrument plays throughout the work, and if it is a featured solo instrument, it is given special prominence during solo passages) and Classical practice (the solo keyboard sounds only during passages when it is explicitly scored for).  The constantly sounding fortepiano gives the music a certain "crunchiness" that might sound peculiar to those not accustomed to it.

This work is not only one of Mozart's most brilliant and beloved creations, but a jewel of all Western Art of all ages.  Though it does not contain an expression of great sorrow, or holy joy, it still manages to capture our ability to find pleasure in ordinary things.  John Eliot Gardiner describes Mozart's music as showing us what it means to be human, and I completely agree with this view.  The slow middle movement is lovely, with even painfully beautiful moments that interrupt its overall tranquility.

The same falling third is the opening figure of another beloved work of Mozart's, namely the immortal Clarinet Concerto in A, Köchel 622.  Equally well known and equally frequently played, the Clarinet Concerto has a wider range of emotions than the Piano Concerto. (Mozart wrote at least 27 piano concertos, but only one clarinet concerto has come down to us.)  The work ends with a definitely bubbly movement, in startling contrast to the problems with health, money and marriage that Mozart was thought to have been experiencing at the time at which the piece was written.  Mr Köchel's catalog is generally in chronological order or composition or publication--I'm not sure which, but we cannot really assume that the Clarinet concerto is as much a later work than the piano concerto as their respective catalog numbers would suggest.


The clarinet concerto too, has a beautiful slow (middle) movement which is simply gorgeous.  It comes out clearly, how much Mozart loved to write these slow movements, though the structure of the faster movements displayed his structural genius in more obvious ways.  In a slow movement it is impossible to hide behind structure, and your melodic inventiveness and your harmonic skill are painfully or happily exposed, as the case may be.  The falling orchestral "chorus" intersperses each solo essay by the clarinet, and Mozart uses poignantly different harmonies for the repeats.

At about the same time, Mozart also wrote his Clarinet Quintet, Köchel 581, for clarinet and string quartet.  This masterpiece (numbered between the other two, for whatever that's worth) features the same opening falling third as the other two works mentioned earlier.  Again, there is no fuss or drama here; it seems a pleasant conversation among friends, written by someone who had nothing to prove, except maybe that it is possible to write a perfectly satisfactory quintet with a clarinet as guest with a string quartet.


The slow movement of this one is every bit as delightful as those of the other two works; maybe even more lovely.  The intimacy possible with a string quartet is hard to compare with anything else. The phrases seem almost vocal, speech-like, earnest, ardent, eager, conversational.  Listen to the commentary by the string quartet to the opening statement of the clarinet!  Such perfect agreement!  The remaining two movements are jolly to the point of rowdiness, but that was Mozart all over.  Part of the wonder of the man was how such buffoonery and such ineffable elegance could reside within the same person.

These are among the greatest compositions within classical music of the past four centuries, but it is almost impossible to make a list of The Great Compositions of Mozart.  If you like these, there are many, many more, even if you want to give time for only the very best: the last five symphonies, the last five piano concertos, all the string quartets, the operas (most definitely Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, Cosi Fan Tutte), the masses, especially the Great Mass in C minor and the Requiem in D minor, the piano sonatas (especially K310, K330, my favorites); the five violin concertos, The Concerto for Flute and Harp K 299, the Gran Partita, K361, The Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola K 364, and The Sinfonia Concertante for Four Winds K 287b.

[Note: the fact of the two opening notes being the same for the three works featured in this post should not be given any special significance; I merely mention it as a curiosity.  The opening themes of compositions of this period were constructed from arpeggios and scales, and it is easy to see how this particular choice of a germ of a theme would appeal to Mozart.]

Archimedes

Meeting the Middle East: Then and Now

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On NPR this morning, author Vali Nasr talked with the host Steve Inskeep about the approach used during the colonial era to export Western ideas to the East. He illustrated with the story of his father, who was sent to Paris, where he was taught medicine, and Western manners, and who returned to Iran and struggled all his life to create hospitals and train physicians to improve health care in Iran. All that, of course, was washed away in the revolution of 1979.

Today, says Nasr, that approach is doomed. It is no longer possible to convert a small elite to Western ideas, and hope that they, in turn, can influence their people to move towards Western ideals. (The reasons are many, and perhaps my readers can see what they might be themselves, without help from Mr Nasr! Among other things, the Middle East appears to have learned one unintended lesson from the West: the suspicion of all elites.)

On the other hand, Nasr points out, a middle-class is emerging which, even if it is unswayed by Western morals and values, is eager for profits, and for access to Western markets. Most of all, he adds, this middle-class is peace loving.  (Peace is good for business, unless you're an arms manufacturer!)

He concluded that though the colonial instruments of morals and values and ideology come up against impenetrable barriers today, good old market expansion and profit margins may provide better common ground. (It seems to me that, for too long the West has been saying: well, don't you worry about profits; what you need is human rights, etc etc.)

Mr Nasr's view is ultimately a cynical one, but it seems plausible that the emerging middle class in the Middle East can divorce business from morals and ideology as successfully as has the middle class in the West.

Archimedes

How to prove SSS!

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Hello there, all you eager young Geometers!

As many of you know, there are lots of ways to prove that two triangles are congruent:

"Side-Angle-Side", or SAS: given two triangles, prove that two sides of one are congruent to two distinct sides of the other, and prove that the angle between the one pair of sides in the first triangle is congruent to the corresponding angle in the second.

"Side-Side-Side", or SSS: prove all three sides of one triangle are congruent to the sides of the other.

"Angle-Side-Angle", or ASA: prove that two angles in one triangle are congruent to two angles in the other, and prove that the common side in the first triangle is congruent to the corresponding side in the second triangle.

Now, in Geometry, ideally, we would like to prove everything. (Since we can't do this in real life, we like to do it in Geometry at least, to provide some feeling of security in our uncertain lives.) In particular, we would like to prove that all of the above criteria: SAS, SSS, and ASA, can be proved without assuming anything else. Unfortunately, as far back as 300 BC, roughly, Euclid realized that some things just can't be proved. Some projects like that are doomed to failure, including proving all three of SAS, SSS and ASA. Today, we use Axioms, which are springboard statements, from which we deduce as much as we can; the Axioms themselves, of course, have to be simply assumed.

Of the three criteria, SAS, SSS and ASA, it turns out that the easiest one to assume as an Axiom is: SAS. The other two can be proved from SAS! (and some simple theorems, such as the Isosceles Triangle theorem.)

Rest assured that we're not going to prove SSS here today, but the strategy is interesting! Here's the strategy.

We're given two triangles, ABC and DEF, and AB is congruent to DE, BC is congruent to EF, and the remaining pair of sides is also congruent.

Step 1. Make a third triangle! Copy triangle DEF onto the underside of line AC, using only SAS. In other words, copy the angle D over to the underside of A, mark off a line segment AB* exactly the same size as DE, and complete the triangle. Now DEF and this new triangle -- call it AB*C -- are congruent, by construction. Here's a picture of the situation now:Anyway, the rest of the work consists on proving that ABC and AB*C are congruent to each other. This is not hard, but involve using Isosceles triangles twice (the triangle with two red sides, and another triangle with two blue sides), and more serious work. I don't want to give the impression that things are as easy as just going ahead with the proof as described; for instance, we need to know where the line BB* falls; inside AC or outside? Still, the proof proceeds in essentially predictable ways.

Once we have shown that the two Siamese Twin triangles are congruent to each other, it follows that the two original triangles are congruent, using the principle of "transitivity", which says that if two objects are congruent to a common object, then they're congruent to each other.

So there you have it! Oh what a complex web we weave, when first we start proving theorems...

Archimedes, not the real one

Congress Struggles over How to Not Provide Health Care

. In a brilliantly written, hilarious article, The Onion --a website about which I know absolutely nothing-- describes the Health Care debate in Congress. There are quotes from members of Congress that are painfully funny, brilliant parodies. (I saw the initial reference to this post in Mano Singham's Blog: Mano Singham's Web Journal.) The whole thing is distilled in these four paragraphs:

WASHINGTON—After months of committee meetings and hundreds of hours of heated debate, the United States Congress remained deadlocked this week over the best possible way to deny Americans health care.

"Both parties understand that the current system is broken," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Monday. "But what we can't seem to agree upon is how to best keep it broken, while still ensuring that no elected official takes any political risk whatsoever. It’s a very complicated issue."

"Ultimately, though, it's our responsibility as lawmakers to put these differences aside and focus on refusing Americans the health care they deserve," Pelosi added. The legislative stalemate largely stems from competing ideologies deeply rooted along party lines. Democrats want to create a government-run system for not providing health care, while Republicans say coverage is best denied by allowing private insurers to make it unaffordable for as many citizens as possible.

The entire page is brilliant, and I urge you to read it! Arch, in a hurry

The Optimism of the US People

[Links will be provided later.] I awoke this morning to the news that a certain British playwright has written a play inspired by the contrast between the cynicism and despair widely found in Britain, and the optimism she observed while visiting the USA ---specifically at the inauguration of President Obama. Perhaps this lady's sample of citizens of the two nations is far from random or representative, since of course there was a concentration of optimists among those who had come to participate or enjoy the inauguration. Still, her admiration for the optimism of the American public, or the existence of backwaters of the US where optimism still lives on, is cause for rejoicing in this country, and gratitude abroad. The important thing is to remember that our belief in the ability to solve problems at home and abroad should not depend on the ability of the US military machine to apply force. I recently saw a bumper-sticker that said: "How come Our Oil is under Their Soil?" surrounded by numerous stars and stripes and other patriotic symbols. Doesn't it make one think? I can take a joke as well as the next guy, but I want to place on record that an equally funny line might be for a bumper sticker in almost any country outside the US: "How come Our Jobs are inside US Borders?" It's all very confusing. But it's still good that we're optimistic about things. And I mean that sincerely. Arch