Some good news

Good news and some enlightening news. The Bailout currently bouncing around congress had a portion of it marked for providing contraception and abortion. Thankfully, that has been withdrawn. Here is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in an interview on ABC news before that part of the package was withdrawn.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy. Food stamps, unemployment insurance, some of the initiatives you just mentioned. what the economists have told us from right to left. There is more bang for the buck, a term they use, by investing in food stamps and in unemployment insurance than in any tax cut.

Abortion as an economic stimulus? Contraception as an economic stimulus? As absurd as this is, it is good news because it illustrates the progressive movement in this country. I'm tired of talking to people who say things like, "The government should pay for health care for its citizens." This is what happens when we count on government to take care of us. Government then has an interest in how that health care is being administered. They don't want to waste money treating people for "preventable" disease. So they're going to take action.

Examples: Government doesn't want to provide lobectomies and pneumonectomies for people who use tobacco, so it will take actions so it won't have to. There goes our right to smoke. But it won't stop there. Cirrhosis is an expensive disease which can be caused by alcohol consumption, so you could probably expect some kind of prohibition or restriction on your alcohol use. I'm sure your imagination can make the argument for gun control, so I won't elaborate. But lets not forget the national epidemic for obesity. Byopsies and heart meds are expensive enough and common enough that you'll probably be denied fatty foods. Government wants to put you on a diet.

I've got to say, I don't blame Government here. I think it makes a lot of sense. I don't want to pay for health care for those people that make "unhealthy" life choices either. I want those people to pay for there own health care. But that's not whats being presented with socialized medicine. We'll be paying for Cancer Man's chemo treatments. We'll be paying for Arthur's liver transplant. We'll be paying for Rosie O'Donnell's lipo. We'll be paying.

This is the logical conclusion of investing in something. Investors want to make sure they have a good investment and they're not wasting money. When government invests in your life, government has more of say in your life. Here's another way to look at this. When you're a teenager, your parents provide your food, your shelter, your transportation. I've often heard it said, "As long as you live under my roof, you live by my rules." And this is not unreasonable. Parents have a great deal of control over their children while they live at home. And this is precisely why kids leave the house... to enjoy the freedom that comes with supporting yourself. There is no freedom when you are not providing for yourself. You are a slave to your provider, and subject to their dictates.

Nancy Pelosi's comments illustrate this so well. Wait until health care becomes burdened, which shouldn't take long. You'll see a lot more "incentives" for so called "family planning." Translation, abortion and contraception. It won't be long before people start saying, "people with more than 3 kids are placing an undue burden on the socialized health care system." So there will be penalties for such people. Government will begin to dictate how many children couples will be allowed to have. If you think I'm crazy, go read Speaker Pelosi's comments again. The mentality is already there.

Roe v. Wade

I was extremely disappoint in conservative media this week as they chose to ignore the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. This is a tragic day worth mention to those outside of the liberal biased media. What the crap Rush? Isn't anybody going to do a story on this? Glenn, Sean, Bill? Nothing? Are you too scared? The Republican party can't handle it right now? Too many other problems? What a bunch of crap.

Oh, and John McCain, no time to come to the March for Life rally? Sam Brownback found the time. I'm glad I now know how important this is to all you folks. You don't care. Just string along the social conservatives to get the vote? The main stream media I understand, they don't present anything a conservative would want to see anyway. They'd probably laud this as a day where we became more enlightened as a country. But conservatives...

4000 a day. 50,000,000 since 1973. And we ignore it.

"A nation that kills its own children is a nation without hope."
-- Pope John Paul II

"It is a poverty to decide that a child must die just so that you may live as you wish."
-- Blessed Teresa of Calcutta

Farewell

Since we are in a time of transition in America, I thought it fitting to take note of it here. I watched President Bush's farewell address just now and found it very interesting. I'll hold my comments for now because that isn't what I was intending to talk about. I noticed a link on the side of the page to other presidents farewell addresses, so I started watching and found it rather interesting. I thought you might find it illuminating as well. I tried to find the most complete speeches and my apologizes for any cuts in the speech, and any news commentary. I tried to keep it to a minimum. I'm also not promoting any specific news agency, just trying to post it in full.







I was unable to find the rest of President Clinton's speech. If anyone finds it, please let me know.

I was also unable to find any farewell address from President George H. W. Bush.





The only other speech I could find was from President Eisenhower in 1961. Again, if you find any more I would be happy to add them.

Queen Covering Problem

Allow me to be nerdy for a bit. I came across an interesting problem the other day that a friend told me about. I did a little research and it turns out that it goes by the name "Queen Covering Problem." The problem is stated like so: Given an 'n x n' chessboard, what is the minimum number of queens that can be placed on the chessboard so that each square is occupied or being attacked by a queen. There is a varient called the "Independent Queen Covering Problem" where you have the added condition that the queens cannot be attacking each other.

So, being an amateur graph theorist, this kind of problem is right up my alley. A dominating set in a graph, G = (V,E), is a subset D of V such that every vertex of V\D is adjacent to some vertex in D. The dominating number of a graph G is the minimum order of any dominating set. This is often denoted gamma(G). The 'n x n' chessboard can be made a graph by taking the squares as vertices and defining two vertices adjacent if they are on the same horizontal, vertical, or diagonal. So the Queen Covering Problem is just a dominating number problem.

This is similar to another more familiar problem called the "Eight Queen Problem," place eight queens on a chessboard so that no two queens are attacking each other. There is even a wikipedia entry on this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_queens_puzzle
The queen covering problem gets a one sentence mention lower on the page, (or at least, it did when I was writing this). Apparently this problem isn't cool enough to get its own wikipedia entry. And according to Wikipedia, (the fount of all knowledge) the domination number for an 'n x n' board is 5.

I've only played around with this problem a little, the next obvious step is just to write a computer program to find these, which I am going to work on. I'll also look around at some combinatoric and graph theory journals to see what people have come up with. If you're reading this and you have any references for me, I'd be happy to hear them.

My results so far:
For n = 1, 2, 3. gamma = 1.
For n = 4. gamma = 2.
For n = 5, 6. gamma = 3.
For n = 7. gamma = 4.
For n = 8. gamma = 5.

New Church

January marks our being in Baltimore for one year. For that time we've been going to a church called "Church of the Crucifixion." We really love the church. The people seem really nice and the priests (yeah Idaho, that was plural) are awesome. Unfortunately we don't know anybody there. We haven't really found a way to fit in there. But despite this we really love the church.

My wife and I talked about going to a new church this year, which we did for the first time today. We went to St. Philip Neri this morning and it was good. It made us sad not to go to our old church, but we feel like there is no hope for community there. So we'll see how this new church goes.

I watched an episode of "King of Queens" yesterday where Doug and Carrie were looking for new friends. They decided a good place to go to meet other couples to hang out with was the paint department at the hardware store. Finding other couples to hang out with has been difficult for us so I found the episode kind of amusing. We have been blessed with an awesome couple that we have become friends with, and we have a lot of fun hanging out with them. But unfortunately for us they are Mormon, and so they don't go to church with us. Not that I have anything against Mormons, cause I don't. I actually love that about them. It would just be nice to have friends at Church too. Maybe I'm being too greedy... although being greedy for good friends has worked for me in the past. God has always been faithful to me in that.

This post depresses me. I just think about things like this too much. I promise I'll blog more about cooler stuff in the future. Once I get all this crap out of my system, that is.

Computers

My wife just got a new computer. Her father decided to buy really crazy gifts for everyone this year and we got an Asus desktop. Problem was, we live in Maryland and they gave us the computer in Idaho. We returned it in Idaho and got a gift card, with the intention of getting the same computer when we got back to Maryland. But in doing all that we decided to get Alicia a laptop instead; so we got a hp. It is pretty nice and faster than anything she will ever need. She is a little frustrated because she can't get flash media to work, but I'm sure she'll figure it out.

The computer has become hers, even though the original was given to us. She gives me grief if I use it. But I've had a laptop since I started grad school that I always said was ours, but really thought of as mine, so I don't mind so much. Except that the power cord for my laptop decided to die recently. Her power cord will power mine, but it won't charge the battery, which I find odd. I just finished purchasing a new power cord from eBay this morning, which is cool. My computer is a Dell, and Dell wanted $70 for a new power cord which I thought was crazy. Luckily eBay has them for less than $20. Thank God for capitalism. I have to wait 10-14 days, but I don't mind. I'll just use my wife's computer until then.

Other than that our very old desk top has finally died. I'm going to try and rebuild it eventually just to see if I can. It needs a new mother board. Original was a Gateway. Oh yeah, I don't recommend a Gateway. I like the Dell, it crashes every once in a while but I can't tell if that is Windows or Dell. The hp is nice, but we've had it less than a week so I can't say for sure. I was sad to return the Asus because I've heard good things, but maybe in five years I'll give up on my Dell and try one of those.