Lee.org

It appears that the statisticians at California Pacific Medical Center are wrong. And they will continue to be wrong. The hospital system will lose money and reputation and because of it. Risk-wise, the procedure they are going to disallow should only be discontinued in a hospital that is dangerously understaffed. Note the word “dangerously”; lots of hospitals are “understaffed”, but this (shouldn’t) be their situation.

A protest march walked past my window a few minutes ago with signs reading “Got VBAC?” I was curious and found out that the local hospital, St. Lukes, which just joined CPMC is changing their policy on VBAC in August. They will now completely disallow the procedure.

Read the SFWeekly article, on both pages and especially the comments after the article

And go ahead and google for “VBAC“. You’ll find lots of information, feelings and statistics. Just about all of it says that it is a safe method of delivery as long as the hospital maintains an appropriate reserve staff for the 5 in 1000 chance of a critical emergency.

Here are the (very useful) comments from the article. It includes recommendations as to other places in the city where you should have your baby instead:

Continue reading ‘St Lukes stops doing VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean)’ »

Could turn out to be an interesting turn for Burning Man…

Note the deadline is soon so talk to your industry friends today. Normally, people end up having crazy stories to tell after a trade show but this… imagine sending Bob from the dog and pony show, road-warrior sales team to Burning Man..

Environmental Solutions to be On Display at Burning Man 2007 Artists and Inventors Invited to Showcase Emerging Technologies

This summer, Burning Man will hold its twenty-second annual event in the vast and remote Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Forty thousand participants from around the world, including more than 100 journalists, will attend this celebration of creativity. The year’s theme, “The Green Man”, explores the human relationship to nature, in particular our collective response to global warming, and sets the stage for an unprecedented informational exchange.

In recognition of this unique opportunity, Burning Man is inviting artists, manufacturers, developers, scientists, and inventors, to showcase their emerging environmental technologies at this year’s eight day event, Aug. 27th -Sept 3rd.

At the center of Black Rock City, home to Burning Man, will be the Green Man Pavilion, 30,000 square feet of shaded exhibition space for the display of interactive artistic, scientific and educational models, a “World’s Fair” of cutting edge technologies. Director of Burning Man, Larry Harvey said “Our goal is to create a space where breakthrough ideas and proven technologies addressing environmental issues such as energy production, solid waste management, and remediation of toxic substances, can be displayed and interacted with, against the backdrop of the world’s largest participant-created event. In fact, we believe this exposition may well be the only place in the world where such a wide range of technologies and solutions will be on display in an interactive environment.”

Burning Man has long been recognized as a nexus of ideas, information, and culture, a physical collection of human nodes for interactivity and information exchange. It is a place where artists, innovators, and the media share ideas and network like nowhere else on Earth.

In addition to directly reaching participants and through extensive media coverage, Burning Man will be opened to the world through a unique collaboration with Google, in a virtual 3D version of event called “Burning Man Earth”, which will allow a global audience to experience the Green Man Pavilion.

View full invite at: http://burningman.com/environment/pavilion_invitation.html

For information on how to propose a contribution to the Green Man Pavilion, please email: greenman-exposition@burNOSPAMningman.com

Deadline for proposals — July 1, 2007

Tomas McCabe
Burning Man – Green Man
Environmental Education Coordinator
510.290.8883 (mobile)

You can give us money if you want.

I want new sensory organs for my birthday (via).

For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth’s magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.

“It was slightly strange at first,” Wächter says, “though on the bike, it was great.” He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. “I finally understood just how much roads actually wind,” he says. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, “I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn’t get lost, even in a completely new place.”

On a visit to Hamburg, about 100 miles away, he noticed that he was conscious of the direction of his hometown. Wächter felt the vibration in his dreams, moving around his waist, just like when he was awake. […]

When the original feelSpace experiment ended, Wächter, the sysadmin who started dreaming in north, says he felt lost; like the people wearing the weird goggles in those Austrian experiments, his brain had remapped in expectation of the new input. “Sometimes I would even get a phantom buzzing.” He bought himself a GPS unit, which today he glances at obsessively. One woman was so dizzy and disoriented for her first two post-feelSpace days that her colleagues wanted to send her home from work. “My living space shrank quickly,” says König. “The world appeared smaller and more chaotic.”

Some brainstorming should be able to come up with other new senses for people… yes?

magnetic compass – as seen above :-)

X-Ray vision – If you can’t turn it off, you’d have to be careful not to walk into walls. And giving all your friends radiation sickness isn’t cool.

Thermal imaging

GPS

eyes in the back of your head

What else?

I called my Representative about it. It’s a 2 minute call to help keep the playing field level.

I don’t know why there are laws on this subject when there should just be contracts but there are. Without this (counter-) law, internet radio will disappear for all but the big boys. Institutionalized monopoly :-(

Read the article and then consider calling your congressional representative. I did.

I want a Methane Powered Rocket for Christmas.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Hell, I’d settle for the soundtrack.

Original (higher res) .WMV

This is unfinished but if I sit on it long enough, they’ll change the rules and it’ll be outdated. Also, feel free to comment on it so I can refine it. I wrote this in May 2007 after starting an LLC, Safe and Secure SF LLC. The company doesn’t exist any more but the instructions below are correct.

How to become a San Francisco, CA LLC Corporation

Good books on the subject:

I found several books that gloss over the hard stuff and dwell on the easy stuff. They’ll say “Then after you’ve filed with the state, you can…”And I say, “Woh! That ‘file with the state’ part is the horrid, byzantine, slow, red-tape part I need help with!” Here are two good books that cover this stuff:

• How to Form your own California LLC Before the Ink Dries
• How to Form a California Corporation or LLC From Any State by Kevin Finck.

You can probably find them at your library.

Some of the links below don’t work. They worked when I wrote this guide in May 2007. If you find working links, please leave a comment and I’ll update this page!

Here is a somewhat useful “How to” guide. (click on the right to get pages)

Verify that your business name hasn’t already been taken. There are subtleties like that “McDonalds” might not be a registered company in California but if you’re in the fast food business, it’d be bad ju-ju to try and register it. Go to the California Business Search page and the SF Ficticious Business Name Search to look for your company name. You should also Google for it and check the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Continue reading ‘How to become a San Francisco, CA LLC Corporation’ »

There’s Digg article about SWARM. Digg us if you like it.

Geeks Build Autonomous Swarming Orbs Covered with Steel Blades

You don’t want to run into ten of these in a dark alley. A bunch of geeks are building “art” consisting of plasma-cut steel blades wrapped around a spherical autonomous robot. Think “blades of a hand-push lawn mower, shaped into a giant hamster ball of doom”. Scroll down for videos. It’s open source so build your own!

Update 12-1-11: This program is permanently on hold as I don’t have AT&T residential service anymore.

I’ve had several people use my AT&T Referral Code. You just fill out a referral code on this page and get paid a while later. You could also think of it as an AT&T coupon. Check it out and we’ll both do well.

For further instructions, check out my page on the AT&T Referral Code thing.

Every couple weeks I receive in the mail yet another weighty book from one of the stocks that I own. And every couple weeks, I spend the time to rip it open, flip through it, wonder how much of my money it cost to produce this full-color glossy advertisement for a company that I already own. I then find the nearest person, show them some token shiny pictures, charts and graphs and hurumph to them, “This book here, it tells me that ‘we are going to try and make as much money for you as we can’.” Then it goes straight into the trash.

Last year I bought some Berkshire Hathaway stock. A couple weeks ago I got the Annual Report in the mail. I flipped through it. It’s different. It’s wonderful. It’s useful. It’s educational. It’s smart. The first 24 pages contains Warren Buffett’s Chairman’s Letter. Read the Berkshire Hathaway 2006 Annual Report for yourself.

Previous years reports