sol8

No love for Eamon?

I've had a python code sharing post blocked on Facebook because it "violates community standards". If I remember right it was a script to search a word doc and highlight certain words by changing the color. Their bots are stupid.

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

Dobsonian telescopes are great for general observation. You get a lot of aperture for your money. But they are bad for astrophotography. Schmidt Cassegrain and Newtonian style scopes offer a good middle of the road for functionality. Having said that if you want to get serious about photography then its a money pit.

You need a quality mount and a good CCD. Some of the best photo setups I've seen use use refractors with a quality CCD. Search for Atik 414EX. The example photos on their sight tell you what hardware was used. Might give you some idea.

That's good point. I wouldn't expect pricing to function like that, especially in life or death situations. In our case, this was a surgery that was planned and scheduled a month in advance and at no time was a price ever mentioned. Just a letter from Anthem saying it was covered. We didn't start to see anything on the monetary side until after it was all said and done with. In advance of the procedure I tried to find some pricing data on the surgery but struck out. Apart from some articles about hospitals in California publishing prices for procedures, I could find nothing for the east cost.

The entire pricing scheme is an elaborate sham if you ask me. My wife had to have surgery. A outpatient laparoscopic procedure that required cutting a tendon. The time she spent at the facility (from the when they took her back and discharged her) was about 3 hours. A month later we got a statement showing they tried to charge $67k and were denied… followed by a separate bill for $7.5k We ignored the bill and contacted Anthem who said the hospital didn’t code it correctly. Anthem said they would resolve it. A month later… another attempt to charge $67k another separate bill for $7.5k. Again we repeated the same process. This time it appears it went through. Final total when they “coded it correctly” was $74k.

I have a friend who had to have an emergency appendectomy this year. She paid $1500 for it after insurance. My father had knee surgery he says they tried to charge the insurance company $64k for it.

At this point I think the pricing is all arbitrary. It’s about them trying to charge what they think they can get away with and sticking you for the rest. Kind of like raising the price so you can offer a deep discount later on. I think the real price of the surgery (without insurance) was probably the $7.5k.

I can think of no other business where you agree to have work done without an agreed upon price. The insurance company will tell you it’s covered but the hospital you go to may decide to play games with you. At the very least I suppose they are just hopping you pay so they can collect interest on your money on it before sending it back.

The price point on major 3d software packages were always a deterrent for me. When I first got into 3d (back in the mid 90s) I used POV raytracer. Its 3d modelling from a more programmatic point of view... You describe your scenes in a 3d language. Something like… sphere{ <0,0,0>, 0.75} Pass your scene file to POV which then parses and renders it. You can make some beautiful stuff with it.