Florida recently passed a law that prevents doctors from gathering information about firearms in the homes of their patients, unless the doctor believes that the presence of said firearms has a direct relationship to the condition that is being treated.  To no-one’s surprise, the doctors have gotten a lawyer.

Now, our family doctor has been seeing us for so long that she knows a lot about our lifestyles just by osmosis. We’ve even talked about guns, hunting, and computers during a few visits, so she’s pretty familiar with my hobbies.  Where I become a little more reserved is with doctors in the emergency department and urgent care clinics.  These doctors, for whom I have a healthy respect and am lucky to have available for emergencies and when I can’t get in to see my PCP, don’t know me from Adam, and vice versa.  So they get the bare minimum on anything that’s not part of the problem I’m seeing them for.

If a doctor asks if there are firearms in my home, unless their presence is a factor in my malady, I won’t answer.  Which I guess is pretty much a yes, but I’m not going to give them any further information than that.   I have had only one pediatrician ask Junior Bear if there were guns in his house, and I cut that off.  I also don’t let my kids see a doctor without either me or Irish Woman in the room, for this and other reasons.

I guess my point is that while we shouldn’t be ashamed of our hobby, we don’t need to share details like what guns we have, how and where we store them, and do the children know where they are, unless of course we deem it necessary.

Now to the bigger point.  Does the government have the power to tell a medical professional which diagnostic questions may or may not be asked of a patient, assuming that a patient may refuse to answer any question?  The answer is, of course, no.  It is none of the government’s business what I discuss with my doctor, or what she wants to ask me.   If the American Medical Association wants to come out with its own regulations to compel some questions and forbid others, that’s a matter between the doctor, a private citizen, and the AMA, a private organization.  The Florida legislature needs to find something better to do with its time.

Since I became a father in the early 1990’s, it’s probably safe to say that I’m intimately familiar with Pixar Studios and their work, as well as the work of other studios who copied their digital approach to filmography.  Even a cursory look at the success of The Lion King, Shrek, and How to Train Your Dragon will show that these artists and their distributors have caught lightning in a bottle.

But almost all of the offerings in computer animation have been kid or family oriented.  The exception, of course, is Avatar.  Let’s get over the political and social commentary that this film is supposed to contain, and admit that James Cameron at least had the vision to take the medium that has worked for kids and make it work for an adult audience exclusively.

There are a lot of books in all of the genres that I have read that I think would make a really good movie, but due to problems with either the settings, characters, or story would be difficult to translate from paper to celluloid.  Some attempts have been made, such as Dune or Starship Troopers, with varying levels of success.  Some stories, such as Dune or Starship Troopers have so much commentary and story happening solely in the minds of the characters that no matter the medium, they would be difficult to make and still stay true to the original story, no matter the medium.

So what do you all think?  Are there books that you’ve enjoyed, and would like to see produced as a movie, especially if Pixar’s methods would do a better job than traditional cinema?

A company in Wisconsin is reporting that they have found a way make biofuel out of wood chips and agricultural waste such as corn stalks.  This may be a significant step.  If fuel can be made from what is normally a waste product, then the increased demand for food grains such as corn, and the resulting higher prices for food, could be eliminated.  It would be even more interesting if this process uses the cellulose in the plant matter to make ethanol, and not just the sugar in it.  That breakthrough would allow just about any plant material, such as grass or leaves, to make fuel.

Before cheering about this, I want to see some math that shows that more energy is produced by this fuel than is used to make it. That’s always been one of the drawbacks of corn based ethanol.  The amount of energy a gallon of ethanol provides is dwarfed by the amount of energy from petroleum that is needed to plant, fertilize, harvest, transport, and process it.

So, on the whole, I’ll give this one a qualified “cool”.  If this company can a) produce fuel that has a net increase in the energy produced and b) can do it economically enough that it can compete with petroleum fuels, then I’ll upgrade it to a “sweet”.

Or someone might have gotten hurt.

A man in Chicago was attacked by a group of youths on Saturday night.  And by attacked, I mean smacked by a baseball in the head and then beaten by 15 to 20 youths, and by youths I mean the semi-civilized denizens of our cities who get together to do nothing better than lay a beating on a random stranger.

The misguided children of the night fled when the police arrived, and apparently several were arrested.  Something tells me they weren’t members of the National Honors Society or the Boy Scouts.

At least this happened in Chicago, where I can almost guarantee that the recipient of the beat down was unarmed.  If he’d had a gun, he might have utilized it to either prevent the attack or to stop it before it progressed.  I mean, one of these poor unfortunates might have been harmed, either by running from an armed man who refused to be beaten within an inch of his life by a pack of urban wolves, or maybe even ventilated in the torso or cranium by someone who had the audacity to object to being victimized on the streets of a major American city.

Luckily, all the target of this mob had to defend himself against 20 to 1 odds was his rapier wit, and the police arrived to chase the group of youths away before he was beaten bad enough to actually die.  So I guess everyone won here.  The youths got to beat up a stranger, the stranger is still alive, and the police can claim they saved a man’s life when they go for funding next year.

Isn’t it nice when a story has a happy ending?