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bobak:

infinity-imagined:

Timelapse of Cepheid variable star RS Puppis taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.  Light echoes ripple through the surrounding nebula as the star pulses in a 41 day cycle.

*makes whimpering noise*

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masterpiecedaily:

Claude Monet

Stacks of Wheat

1891

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pretty much

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Saturn’s Moon Wears the Weirdest Mountain Range in the Solar System:

Of all the moons in the solar system, Iapetus has to be among the weirdest. Named after a spear-wielding Titan, the strange Saturnian satellite is less than half the size of Earth’s moon. But it’s …

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birdsonly:

Northern Pintail ~ Speißente ~ Anas acuta

Check out the little streak of metallic green! :-)

2014 © Jesse Alveo

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workman:

karl martens

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gandalf1202:

Claude Monet – The Studio Boat [1876] on Flickr.

[Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia – Oil on canvas, 72.7 x 60 cm]

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eyrequotes:

Moving into my new place!

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j-yphoto:

While You Were Sleeping

So, this is what I miss out on every morning.

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newbirder:

I just love these brown noddies! Their white eye rings and foreheads really make their faces seem so expressive. The colors of the rust and the water just adds to the whole scene. These were taken in Florida’s Dry Tortugas National Park.

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Literary-Inspired Web Series You Should Be Watching:

matterofawesome:

Once you’ve read all your favorite authors’ works and watched all the movies and TV shows based on said works, what do you do? Surely there can’t be another way to continue to enjoy the books beyond re-reads and re-watches? Oh, but there can! Thanks to the wonder of YouTube, literary enthusiasts, filmmakers, and fans have come out full force with their own web series based on beloved books. Whether it’s a loose adaptation or a true re-telling of a story, or even taking literary lives and famous figures and modernizing or satirizing them, the bookish adventures needn’t end! Check out these literary-inspired web series you should be watching: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries This was something of the grand dame of the resurgence of literary web series. This is an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice modernized and re-told through the eyes of 20-something grad student, Lizzie. The Bennet family rides again, even if Kitty is actually a cat, and is replete with costume …

Hey, you guys are on Hello Giggles!!!!

Laura Kadner has excellent taste in literary-inspired web series. By which I mean, she picked the exact list of ones to highlight that I would have picked.

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We have finished filming the first season!  (though we are still editing)  There are 24 episodes (plus the prologue).  This is because Kyle wants to be Jack Bauer when he grows up.

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As if this isn’t hard enough:

sophisticatedajumma:

zoekeating:

On May 13 an MRI found 20 tumors in my husbands brain. On May 15 he could barely breathe and was in a lot of pain. A CT scan that day revealed he had a softball-sized tumor in his lung, tumors in his other lung, his liver and possibly his bones. On our way home from the imaging…

I know someone whose husband is a Dr.  He doesn’t use social media and his address and phone number are both unlisted.  He is very difficult to look up online.  It’s almost like he lives in hiding.  He works from home.  When Stuttgart and I were introduced to him, he was very vague about what he did for a living.  I didn’t care for him at all. Later on I found out that he works for a large insurance company.  He is the Dr. the insurance company hires to find loop holes in medical cases to deny insurance claims for people who need costly treatments like cancer or organ transplant.  The reason he lives in hiding is because he is afraid that someone might look him up and come after him after their child dies from cancer because of his work for the insurance company.

What a scum bag.  He went to medical school so he could make money by pulling legit health care from people that need it most.

It isn’t necessary for there to be great evil at work at the level of individual humans for the system to be evil — though doubtless there are individual humans (CEOs, doctors; whomever) who are evil. There are evil people in every sphere of human activity.

But I don’t expect the proportion of them is greater in the healthcare field (including the healthcare insurance field) than in any other field. The proportion might even be lower than in the population generally. But it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter because in this case the ordinary operation of capitalism is sufficient to cause great evil, even when the individuals in the system are each just doing their jobs. With companies free to pursue their own economic advantage (indeed, with publicly traded companies legally required to pursue that advantage, by virtue of their officers’ fiduciary responsibility to shareholders), the current U.S. healthcare system creates conflicts between profit-pursuing insurance companies and the very ill. In that conflict, one side has all the advantages, the other all the disadvantages. One side has huge professional staffs highly incentivized to find ways to deny coverage for expensive treatments. The other side has isolated humans struggling to deal with horrific life events.

The software engineer in me sees this as a solved problem. This experiment has been run, over and over, and the results are clear. There’s no need to inflict needless suffering on people who already are suffering horribly. The answer is for the U.S. to begin immediately to plan and execute a transition to a single-payer system that provides universal coverage. It doesn’t even really matter which model we choose to move to. It could be something akin to the Canadian model. Or the British model. Or the French model. Or the German model. Or the Japanese model. Or a combination of all of them. Whatever model we choose will be better than what we have now. It will produce better outcomes at lower cost.

There’s no excuse for this not to happen now.

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bourbakiaxiom:

View out the bedroom window this morning…
The town of Pomena on the island of Mljet, Croatia.
#croatia, #euro2014, #mljet, #myphotography, #dalmatia

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erinwert:

Because lies asked and I’m in mobile and can’t fancy reply to the reply-

I’m just moving across town- a but farther from work but closer to the boyfriend and also to just a lot of stuff- shopping and things to do. Right now I’m close to work but in the middle of nowhere. And I drive over to my bf’s side of town four days a week.

I extended in Kansas City til the end of august. We’ll see but there’s a decent possibility I will look for a permanent job here.

So what you’re basically saying is, everything’s up-to-date in Kansas City and you’ve gone about as fur as you can go. Is that it?

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zoekeating:

On May 13 an MRI found 20 tumors in my husbands brain. On May 15 he could barely breathe and was in a lot of pain. A CT scan that day revealed he had a softball-sized tumor in his lung, tumors in his other lung, his liver and possibly his bones. On our way home from the imaging center our primary care doc called and told us to turn around and get to the hospital right away. My husband was admitted and they promptly removed more than a pint of fluid from his lungs, which helped him breathe better. We were there for 6 days while they performed a bronchoscopy, did more scans, gave him drugs to stop his brain from swelling and administered emergency chemo.

Today I got a letter from Anthem Blue Cross regarding his hospital stay:

“Coverage for the requested service is denied because the service does not meet the criteria for “medical necessity” under your description of benefits. To assist our Medical Director in making this decision, we have put a process in place to send all information about the service to a clinical reviewer with appropriate credentials. Based on their opinion, we have determined that covered for the requested service is denied. Our Medical Reviewer Layma Jarjour MD has determined we cannot approve your hospital stay for cancer. We do not have enough facts to show that it was medically necessary. “

Anthem is owned by WellPoint. Did you know Wellpoint CEO Joseph Swedish earned almost $17 million during his first year on the job? Now you know how they can afford to pay him.

I’ve been a fan of Zoë Keating for a long time. This story hurts and angers me on multiple levels.

Warning: Upcoming harsh language.

Fuck cancer. Fuck our broken healthcare system. Fuck opposition to single-payer/universal coverage that is rooted in nothing more than batshit ideology. These are real people facing real problems.

Grr.

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“Being a woman is kind of like being a cyclist in a city where all the cars represent men. You’re supposed to be able to share the road equally with cars, but that’s not how it works. The roads are built for cars and you spend a great deal of physical and mental energy being defensive and trying not to get hurt. Some of the cars WANT you to get hurt. They think you don’t have any place on the road at all. And if you do get hurt by a car, everyone makes excuses that it’s your fault.”

– A friend of a friend (via onesmallflowerofeternity)

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bethanyhagen:

Haute Couture alphabet: Hanna Touma s/s 2012

Yes.

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