Today is Saturday, 12 December 2009.

Einstein is often attributed with defining insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." He may be on to something there: Congress has been tasked, now and again, with Health Reform. Currently, a plan that came out of the House that appeared to win some praise as potentially reformative has been undergoing revision, compromise and 'adjustment' in the Senate -- primarily a lot of objection and obstruction from folks less interested in reform than in actually claiming to have made changes without actually impacting their gravy train from the insurance lobby.

Basically, lots of wheel spinning, no real lessons learned, increasingly complicated items to deal with and no understanding of how to effectively address the issues. Imagine if we applied a similar approach to life and parenting?

Click to enlarge. Attribution: xkcd.¹

Mark Twain made an interesting exploration on revisions and revising:

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "gj" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

    Mark Twain (1835 - 1910),
    "A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling"

With that in mind, I bid you a good day.

This is an Open Thread.

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Footnote
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1.   From the XKCD site:

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Note: You are welcome to reprint occasional comics pretty much anywhere (presentations, papers, blogs with ads, etc). If you're not outright merchandizing, you're probably fine. Just be sure to attribute the comic to xkcd.com.

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