Painfully Obvious.

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?)

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.

I don’t spend much time comparing blogs — favorably or unfavorably — to the mainstream media. But Deadspin’s feature on how NBA stat crews pad their own teams’ stats is far more newsworthy than anything that happens in (for example) The Brett Favre Saga.