Chaos Program

One of my simple yardsticks for whether or not I like a TV show is the question, “Do I like the main character(s)?” This is not a hard and fast rule. I hated most of the characters in Battlestar Galactica – and most of the stories, especially that ridiculous lame ending! – yet kept watching the show. It’s an important factor, though. If I’m rooting for the characters to get killed or maimed, I’m probably not enjoying the action, either. Especially when they win.

This at least partially explains why Torchwood has never been one of my favorite shows. I just don’t much like the main character, Captain Jack Harkness. He’s too full of himself, too smarmy, and the way every story has to relate to his personal narrative strikes me as hackneyed and unnecessarily limiting.

How many shows have you seen where a mysterious female (not a given in Torchwood but never mind that) appears who turns out to be the hero’s long lost love and she has a child who may or may not be the hero’s? This sort of fake character development is a TV staple that gets exercised far too much in shows that take themselves too seriously (like Torchwood, or the execrable Sanctuary). Rather than revealing anything about the character it just provides contrived and manipulative melodrama that got old back when Gunsmoke still had smoking guns and Little Joe was still alive (I know he was on a different show. That’s how staples work. They bind multiple things).

Still, it’s science fiction and I’ll usually give science fiction a try, even after all the times I’ve been disappointed (such as EVERY Star Trek series made after the original). Besides. It’s summer and there’s even less on worth watching than usual.
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Remember the old days, when America had a space program? Me too. Forty years ago tomorrow, on July 20, 1969, my mother woke me up (I was young then and went to bed earlier than I do now) so I could watch Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon on small black and white TV set sitting on top of the piano in the living room.

I wasn’t as excited as I could have been, partly because I was half asleep but mostly because I was a huge science fiction fan. To me, walking on the Moon didn’t seem historic. It seemed inevitable. Neil Armstrong’s “One giant leap” didn’t seem like a giant leap. It was just a minor stepping stone in the grand adventure of exploring the universe.

The shortsighted stupidity of politicians and self-absorbed inertia of massive bureaucracies were unknown to me at the time.

Since the end of the Apollo missions, the official American space program has been marching in place, like a bored zombie. There are no colonies on the Moon or even a space station at L5 or some other adequate location. In two years or so, the U.S. won’t even have its own capability to send humans into space. After billions of dollars and a couple of decades of research into a follow on to the space shuttle, NASA apparently lost interest in the project. The agency that put a man on the Moon in less than 10 years, found keeping people in space was just too hard.

There are grounds for hope for real human space exploration as private companies begin to take up the slack that NASA has dropped. Companies like Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites and SpaceX develop their own technologies for reaching and dealing with space. It took a long time for people to figure out that NASA wasn’t in the game anymore and they would need to do it themselves but that leap seems to have finally been made. Even individual states are getting in on the act, as witness the announcement in January that Virgin Galactic has leased land for a space port in New Mexico.

So on this 40th anniversary of a truly historic achievement, I’m going to be wearing a black armband, in mourning for a once great agency that has become just another (albeit funny shaped) pyramid.

There’s a big push in the U.S. right now to computerize health records so they can be more easily searched, transferred and analyzed. The potential benefits touted include greater portability – go to a new doctor and never worry about getting all your records for them – and wonderful new technologies like automatic checking for unsafe drug interactions.

Of course there’s a lot of money involved, too. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (you know. The stimulus bill) created an Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and allocated billions of dollars to promote adoption of electronic health records (see article here). Yeah. That’s what the health industry needs: More bureaucracy.

The Spring 2009 issue of Rand Review (no link. I’m working from a hard copy) has an impressive array of charts and graphs and numbers claiming that health technology can save vast amounts of money. They even make the hilarious claim that computerizing people’s health records will improve privacy! Usually at this point I would put a list of links to articles about hacking incidents related to the subject I’m discussing but that doesn’t begin to show the magnitude of the problem. Instead, here’s one link to a Google search for medical records compromised: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=medical+records+compromised. It’s showing me 649,000 records when I run it today. Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of duplications.

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