Other than me, Han Solo and Magnum PI are the most awesome guys of the early 1980s. Now they’re together.

Han Solo, PI

And side by side:

Heavy infant in Grand Junction denied health insurance – The Denver Post

This is just appalling. Long story short, a health insurance company refused to cover a 4 month old baby because he was in the 99th percentile for weight. They state that they don’t cover any baby above the 95th percentile in height or weight.

Ignoring the moral and ethical qualms of not covering a perfectly healthy 4 month old, the concept of basing it on percentile is absurd.

Suppose that someone figured out a way to have all the babies in the 95th percentile and above lose enough weight to drop below the 95th percentile. You’d think they would all be able to be insured, right? Wrong. Since it’s percentile based (and not raw data based), the actual value of the 95th percentile would be recalculated based on the existing population. This means that no matter what weights the entire population is, the insurance companies are deciding that 5% of babies are completely uninsurable, regardless of their actual health. They’re deciding that 1 out of 20 babies don’t deserve any kind of insurance, not because they’re unhealthy, but because they’ve decided to use a percentile based system to define insurable and uninsurable. Percentiles change based on the overall population.

Combine this with the insurance company’s statement that they don’t take babies with height or weight over the 95th percentile is tantamount to stating that 10% of all babies don’t deserve their health insurance.

As a quick aside, I know that the baby height/weight percentile charts are rarely updated (about once every 25 years), so this argument isn’t 100% true, but the entire concept of basing it on percentile, instead of raw data is flawed, and is particularly flawed if you use the actual definition of percentile, and recalculate based on the current population.

It’s no wonder our healthcare system is completely broken. Arbitrary definitions of “conditions” which affect coverage are meaning that insurance companies are not only not insuring high risk clients, but also denying coverage for perfectly healthy, low risk clients.

IKEA has moved from Futura to Verdana. After 50 years of Futura, which in my opinion, is one of the greatest typefaces (perhaps even a notch above Helvetica – blasphemy, I know), IKEA is moving to Verdana.

It’s not that Verdana is a bad face. This website uses Verdana (though I was considering changing that in the future). In fact, I think it’s quite well designed for on screen use. In print, however, it’s fairly boring, and looks unfinished to me. Large sizes are particularly poor.

Futura, on the other hand, is smooth and classic, almost timeless. Kristen and I have decided on it for our wedding typeface (shhh! Don’t tell her I spilled the beans). There’s also something distinctly IKEA-like about it’s European simplicity, which reflects the products IKEA carries.

This would almost be a good script for a half hour comedy, on FX or some other deep cable channel. Too bad it’s true.

Video seems inconclusive as to who initiated the melee that left 38-year-old Kenneth Gladney of St. Louis injured outside of U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan’s forum on health care last week.

But it does raise eyebrows when one sees that Gladney, who was there to protest health care reform and is now the cause celebre of the limited government-advocating “Tea Party” movement, is seeking donations to pay for a knee injury.

Brown told the crowd that Gladney is accepting donations toward his medical expenses. Gladney told reporters he was laid off recently and has no health insurance.

(via KansasCity.com)

Step 1. Hate the concept of government provided healthcare.
Step 2. Get injured at protest about government provided healthcare.
Step 3. Have no health insurance, private or otherwise, because you recently lost your job.
Step 4. Ignore the cognitive dissonance that arises from hating the very healthcare that could provide for you right now.
Step 5. Ask for donations to cover your medical bills.
Step 6. ???
Step 7. Profit

Oh but there’s more. The rabbit hole of stupidity goes much, much further.

Enter the Investor’s Business Daily editorial, which clearly also isn’t a fan of the proposed healthcare reform:

The U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the “quality adjusted life year.”

One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on.

The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Good point, it sounds like Stephen Hawking really wouldn’t have stood a chance of receiving good healthcare in the UK.

Just ignore the fact that Hawking was born in Oxford, and has never lived outside of England.

Never underestimate the ability of stupid people to write letters that the POTUS actually(?) reads.

Now my letter about the zombie-robot-vampire threat? Fell on deaf ears at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Bill Shatner, you just made up for the Transformed Man with that.

Ah, hell. Who am I kidding? I have the Transformed Man in my iTunes library.

I’d be freaked out if some baby preacher starts yelling at me in tongues about how I’m going to hell. At least Darwin is fairly quiet, considering he’s been dead for 127 years.

They probably both smell the same though.

TopatoCo via Gizmodo