The Senate Finance Committee’s version of the health care bill is out, but only as a 223-page PDF. OpenCongress has translated it to HTML, but David Moore rightly complains that the whole damn process is too convoluted. Because it hasn’t yet been introduced, it’s not available in THOMAS, and even if it were, we’d need the kind souls at OpenCongress and GovTrack to convert it into a usable format. (Even worse: the way we write legislation is stupid. Why do we need three different versions of the bill if they’re all going to be reconciled in conference committee anyway?)
September, 2009
Sep16
Sep13
Dr. Norman Borlaug, agronomist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, is dead at 95. By developing strains of wheat and rice that could grow much more densely, he helped Mexico and South Asia increase crop yields by staggering margins, and in turn saved more lives than any other person in the 20th century. The Times has written a lovely obituary; it reminds me that science is a force for optimism and can help us solve the problems that we ourselves create.
Sep12
The “Configurable” pattern
If you don’t know about Raphaël, you’d better ask somebody. It provides a vector drawing API that works in all major browsers (by abstracting between SVG and VML).
I’ve been working on a JavaScript charting library called Krang. Krang is designed to take a data set and produce any chart (line chart, pie chart, bar chart) …
Sep2
Helen Thomas & Barack Obama
Taken a few weeks ago in the briefing room. Obama and Thomas share a birthday. (It’s most excellent that The White House is on Flickr.)
