• Brilliantly smart-ass responses to completely well-meaning signs (via John Nack)
• It’s been a very long two weeks. Get prepared. — A hilarious gem from the Bloggess that includes (what’s this?) Nathan Fillion and twine.
• What Fuels the Athlete With Type 1 Diabetes? — A really great article from medical journalist Miriam Tucker. Buy me a Diet Coke and I’ll tell you my own story.
• New Zealand — Kris Freeman is still taking names and kicking ass.
• An Absence of Advocacy — Chris thinks he’s not a good diabetes advocate. Sometimes being present is enough, man. Oh, and having a kick-ass podcast certainly bolsters one’s D cred.
• Fuck Yeah Diabetic Cat — . . . I mean even this is advocacy, Chris.
• Observing demos hurts learning, and confusion is a sign of understanding — Let this article blow your mind. (via Software Carpentry)
• JAMA: The Hazards of Evidence Based Medicine — As with everything it’s about what and how you measure.
• Want To Keep (And Motivate) Your Best Employees? It’s Not About The Money — Relationship-driven leadership.
• Radiology Wife: How To Read A Chest Radiograph — This is pretty much the approach I take when looking at DICOM files our customers send us.
• Nine Deadly Sins of Project Planning — The worst? “Not Learning from Past Planning Sins”
• Scientific photography: Escher in water, eggs exploding, & more — Oooh! Shiny!

• Ultramarathon — The always hilarious author of The Oatmeal describes his long-ass run.
• Inbox 10,000 — E-mail sucks . . . and is mostly worthless. Am I right?
• The Joy of Cycling — A poster.
• Getting Bin Laden — What happened that night in Abbottabad
• The unavoidable power of compromise — The issue of raising the debt ceiling may no longer be a hot topic, but Scott Berkun’s take on the value of compromise is evergreen.
• The Growing User and the Perennial Beginner — A mental model for anyone who creates software interfaces for people of different competency levels.
• Yeah. We know. — You hate needles. We do, too.
• A pair of articles from Victoria Cumbow. In “It’s Political, and It’s Personal” she hopes you’ll encourage President Obama to attend the UN summit on noncommunicable diseases; and “A Gentle Reminder” reminds us why we need to advocate for better education and attitudes for health care professionals. (This kind of experience is why I stopped answering the phone when my insurance company’s nurses called. Bad me.)
• O Is For Outrage — Go sign the petition to President Obama, please.
• Kelly Kunik says, “I’m Not Afraid Of My Pump Being Hacked, Because Like You, I Am The Only User On My Personal Pump Network.”
• Five Ways To Solve The Diabetes Crisis With Data-Driven Design — Just FYI, Fast Company, “Solve” might be over-promising just a wee bit.
• Semifinalists in “Data Design Diabetes Challenge” tackle a major health issue in ingenious ways — The iMedicalApps people have the tone a little better.
• It’s Broken — By “It” many of us mean “the entire system around software patents.”

Listen here . . .

But I don’t think they’re too happy about a leaked Rolling Stone interview with “Lancer,” the band’s faithful roadie. Here’s the full, previously unpublished article with details of an (as yet) unknown tell-all book about the band.

Rolling Stone: Lancer, you’ve written a book called Logbook: My Life on the Road with Blunt Lancet —

Lancer: You know, it was originally supposed to be called F**k the D-Police: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold our Blood Sugars Back.

RS: Really?! So how did it end up as —

L: Logbook? Yeah, I wasn’t too happy about that. I mean the band hates logbooks. But the lawyers made us do it, you know? Both Chuck D and Ice Cube threatened to sue. And if there’s one thing I wanna steer clear of, it’s that whole East Coast / West Coast bullsh*t.

RS: In your book, you reveal that the band had different names in the past, too. I think most die-hard fans know about the performances (and bootlegs) by “Dull Poker,” but what were some of the other names?

L: Yeah, there were about a dozen names the band used or considered. Most of them never came to anything, but we did produce a couple 45s under a couple of the names. [Conspiratorially] That’s something for you vinyl junkies out there to be on the lookout for.

RS: And what were some of those names?

L: Oh, right. Well, they tried “The Fab-104s” and “The BGs.”

That last one actually was the thing that got the band together, you know. We were all sitting around in Raw Sugar‘s basement when the BeeGees came on the “Hi Fi,” and we’re all thinking “We gotta check our blood sugar.” So Testkit, who was feeling a little hypo at the time pulls out a guitar and just starts riffin’ on “Stayin’ Alive.” And I’m thinking, “Hey, I think we really might have something here.”

RS: You tell in the book about the band’s troubled relationship with British heavy metal band Motörhead.

L: Tossers!

RS: Care to explain?

L: See, we were initially named “Blünt Lancet,” ’cause, ya know, it sounded really f**cking cool when Syringe would try to say it with his Aussie’s faux German accent. Anyway, we scrapped the umlaut because when we put the “U” with the dots on the drum kit — well, it just looked a bit too happy for the hardcore mood we were trying to set. That didn’t stop motherfü**ing Motörhead from using it. And “Ace of Spades?” PLEASE! We played those losers “A1Cs of Spades” one day, and they just totally ran with it. . . . “And don’t forget the poker. . . . Ace of Spades!”

RS: “Ace?”

L: Yeah, the “1″ is silent. What else do you wanna know, man?

RS: They’re not the only musicians you’ve feuded with in the past, though. Brian Eno, for example.

L: If you want to call that atmospheric stuff “music.” [pause] I see that you do.

It’s like this. The group is always up for switching it up. I mean we started punk/disco. Went country for a bit. Threw some R&B into a few albums. But all that “made for soundtrack music” that he wanted us to do was just dull as sh*t. I mean he’s a great producer, but I think he took the band’s name a little too seriously.

RS: Not to keep going on a sour note, but Motörhead wasn’t the only group that you “inspired.”

L: That’s right. Def Leppard pretty much stole “Pour Some Sugar on Me” from our B-side “I’m Low And I Need Some Juice.” That was something our (two-armed) drummer, Pancreas, said when we were on tour with them, and she wrote down the melody in the 15 minutes it took to rebound. That’s partly why it’s so ridiculous. People are always stealing our stuff.

RS: From time to time the results of working with other artists must be a little more positive. Any you want to share?

L: Well there was this one time we were all hanging out in the back of the bus with Carly Simon, and we were checking our BGs again, and Pumps was like “You’re all veins.” Carly was beside herself with joy. I don’t want to be too egotistical, but really that song is all about us. I got a writing credit on it, you know.

RS: Pumps?

L: F*******k! Backup singer — Sh*t! I swore I wasn’t going to say anything about that Fleetwood Mac-like period of the band. They were great times, but the drama. Both Pumps and Bumps were fighting over supplies and got busted by the D Police all the f**king time, man.

RS: Bumps?

L: Next question!

[We suspect that either "Pumps" or "Bumps" might be K2, the former lead singer of the on-again-off-again Insulin Whores Riot Grrrrl punk trio. — RS]

RS: When —

L: I don’t think I mentioned in the book that we got kicked out of East Germany. . . . We were playing some underground venues, but we overstayed our “diplomat” visas by a few hours. So they showed us to the border. We had to watch the wall come down from a bar in Frankfurt. It’s a shame. 24 hours later, and we might have been playing “Rage Bolus” from atop the wall.

We got kicked out of Tuscaloosa, too.

RS: So what’s next for the band?

L: Well, I’m just the roadie.

RS: Now you’re being modest.

L: Or maybe a bit coy. I don’t want to jinx anything. [Pause] We’re trying to get a bunch of bands together for SugaPalooza. The Insulin Whores, SugaSheen, George Simmons, . . . maybe even the alt/contemporary-classical group Langerhans Quartet. They’re hard to get. And weird, man.

RS: Motörhead?

L: Funny. Are we done here?

“But, Jeff, there’s nothing to do at work in the days leading up to American Thanksgiving. Entertain me!” Oh, okay. Here are some wonderful, fun sites I discovered recently:

• Bookshelf Porn
• Forgotten Bookmarks
• Secrets of Paris
• The Oatmeal

Enjoy your pre-Thanksgiving TSA pat-down.

Unless you follow a very narrow group of people or like to see a hodge-podge of randomness, it’s most useful when applied to a list in Twitter. Here are a couple examples from my lists:

• Lightroom
• Diabetes

Go ahead, make your own paper. Discover some awesome articles.

Here are a few performance-related articles and presentations that I stumbled upon recently:

Igor Ostrovsky at Microsoft wrote a very useful description of various processor cache effects. Here are the notes I took while reading it:

• Array access is slower than math
• Data alignment can determine how many cache lines are touched
• Keep modifications/accesses within the same cache level
• Be aware of instruction level dependencies and parallelism opportunities
• Avoid touching too many memory locations from the same cache line, causes contention
• There’s a trade-off between the size of what you’re putting in the cache and the number of elements you touch in it. — What does that mean, Jeff? Not exactly sure, but cache assoc. is usually not a huge deal compared to other issues.
• Because cores have their own caches and because memory needs to remain consistent, avoid letting two threads modify data on the same cache line.
• Even when you think you know what you’re doing, there’s other crazy stuff going on.

Isn’t that last one the sad truth about performance optimization?

Igor also has an excellent article about branch prediction. Basically, if you structure your code so that if branches are predictably true (or predictably false) the CPU can start walking down that code path until it’s proved wrong. But if it’s close to random, you’ll see performance hits.

Joe Duffy, also at Microsoft, debunks the “premature optimization is evil” myth. Joe summarizes the article himself quite well, so I’ll just quote him.

In this short article, we’ll look at some important principles that are counter to what many people erroneously believe this [“avoid premature optimization”] statement to be saying. To save you time and suspense, I will summarize the main conclusions: I do not advocate contorting oneself in order to achieve a perceived minor performance gain. Even the best performance architects, when following their intuition, are wrong 9 times out of 10 about what matters. (Or maybe 97 times out of 100, based on Knuth’s numbers.) What I do advocate is thoughtful and intentional performance tradeoffs being made as every line of code is written. Always understand the order of magnitude that matters, why it matters, and where it matters. And measure regularly! I am a big believer in statistics, so if a programmer sitting in his or her office writing code thinks just a little bit more about the performance implications of every line of code that is written, he or she will save an entire team that time and then some down the road. Given the choice between two ways of writing a line of code, both with similar readability, writability, and maintainability properties, and yet interestingly different performance profiles, don’t be a bozo: choose the performant approach. Eschew redundant work, and poorly written code. And lastly, avoid gratuitously abstract, generalized, and allocation-heavy code, when slimmer, more precise code will do the trick.

Follow these suggestions and your code will just about always win in both maintainability and performance.

If you do anything that falls under the labels of “multicore,” “multithreaded,” or “multi-processor,” then you should definitely add Multicore Info and Intel’s software blogs to your RSS feed aggregator.

One recent Intel offering is a recording of “Introducing Intel Parallel Building Blocks”. The Intel folks discusses Intel Cilk Plus, Threading Building Blocks (TBB), and Array Building Blocks. Here are some notes from the 45 minute presentation:

• Intel Cilk Plus is a lower-level way to expose parallelism and the potential for vectorization to C++ code. It currently only works with the Intel compiler.
• TBB is awesome. That’s me saying that. I use it to easily exploit data parallelism in our existing codebase. (Because I use it already, I didn’t take many notes on it. Sorry.)
• Array Building Block (ArBB) provide the highest level of abstraction presenting the ability to specify array data containers (1-D to N-D, including nested containers and [soon] sparse data) and then do vector operations on the data in the containers. Sounds familiar.
• Cilk Plus includes reducers to prevent data races, has #pragma simd to empower the compiler to make vector assumptions, and has a mechanism for specifying a range of vector data.
• Parallel Inspector and Parallel Amplifier are alleged to help squeeze performance out of code that uses TBB.
• ArBB uses a two-part compilation process, one of which is a runtime JIT.
• There are collisions between the schedulers in Intel MKL and Cilk (and TBB, etc.). Beware.

And finally, there’s a recording of a webinar about Intel Parallel Advisor that may be of interest. It’s next in my queue of things to watch.

Living with Diabetes: Sarah has a really great piece on her site about growing up with the “bad kind” of diabetes. At least that’s how people differentiated type 1 and 2 while she was growing up. But really, all diabetes sucks, especially if you try to ignore it.

Software Development: Keith Swenson’s article 26 Hints for Successful Agile Development is full of good advice about how to do software development effectively — even if you’re not really doing Agile development. (via Infoq)

Functional Programming: Here’s a really l-o-n-g article about functional programming. It’s good, but . . . damn!

Risk and Oil Spills: You would think that a company like BP, whose contractors deal with potentially deadly situations on a daily basis, would have a better handle on risk. Even if BP engaged in neutral cost-benefit analysis, as this NY Times article suggests, it should have chosen the option that lowered its risk exposure. Remember: risk is cost of vulnerability times likelihood of vulnerability. In the case of deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, we’re seeing that the cost of an oil spill is astronomical. The probability of failure would have to be completely zero to make it worth choosing a less expensive option.

Time Machines: Stephen Hawking tells you how to build one using wormholes. He also advises against creating paradoxes where you kill yourself.

The Artificial Pancreas: So what’s this “artificial pancreas” that people with type 1 diabetes keep talking about? Let Wired magazine or Aaron Kowalski tell you. It’s not a cure, but (if done correctly) it will hopefully lower a lot of the variability that we see in our blood glucose levels. Basically, it’s an expert system built into a pump plus continuous glucose monitoring combo. It’s also a bundle of assumptions and heuristics. I find it somewhere between amazing and hella scary.

First off, what does the new legislation do? The New York Times and the Washington Post each have good overviews. I honestly don’t understand why these easy-to-understand recaps were so elusive in the weeks leading up to yesterday’s votes.

Who wins and who loses in the healthcare bill? In a nutshell, around 32 million uninsured people and the name-brand drug companies gain the most, followed closely by people with pre-existing conditions. For doctors, hospitals, insurers, and generic drug companies, it’s a mixed bag of gains and loses.

In my opinion, the people leaving the most empty-handed seem to be the Republicans who proposed legislation very similar to this in the 90s but didn’t pursue it aggressively. And then over this last year — depending on your point of view — were either shut out of crafting the healthcare reform law or sat out in protest. Despite claims to the contrary, the plans are very heavily centered in the private sector, bringing lots of new healthcare consumers to private insurers, favoring private insurers over public plans, preserving drug company profits, and bringing federal dollars to hospitals, doctors, insurers, etc.

The costs and benefits for individuals/patients/consumers are mostly positive (in my opinion). There’s more access to insurance and less chance that it will be taken away or capped. New high-risk pools bring insurance options back for many of us. There are some tax increases on the wealthy (families making more than $250K per year would pay an additional tax on payroll and investments). And there are modest (probably too modest) penalties for people who don’t buy insurance; subsidies and low-cost options should make it possible for everyone to buy insurance.

The opinions of working-age people with chronic illnesses are mixed, just like in the rest of the population. Kerri at Six Until Me writes about how she feels liberated to start a new business now that she isn’t tied to one employer for her health benefits. Meanwhile, Sarah of Sugabetic wonders whether we’ll be paying the same amount for our healthcare plus a bit more in taxes. Mainly there’s a lot of wait and see and hope that it makes things better.

For one Canadian’s perspective — which sounds a lot like what my Canadian coworkers have said, though from a somewhat religious perspective — check out what Sarah at Emerging Mummy. She prefers universal, single-payer healthcare and doesn’t understand (or like) the tone of the last couple weeks down here.

Almost in the background of the healthcare debate, there’s healthcare. Not many doctors write on weblogs compared to patients. “Who has the time for that?” they ask. (It’s too bad, because patients are putting a lot of effort into our own health 24/7 and exposing our difficulties and vulnerabilities; but . . . that’s a post for another day.) Anyway, two cardiologists with blogs engaged in a thought experiment about what would happen to two hypothetical patients — one wealthy, one not — who are having heart attacks in England and the US.

If you really, really want more political and media meta-analysis about what happened, check out Dan Kennedy’s as-always well-written take on David Frum, Paul Krugman, and Rep. Steven Lynch (D-MA).

As for myself, I feel surprisingly upbeat. Soon I’m sure I’ll feel like Debra Gordon, who wants to pull the covers up over her head, but for now I’m happy. Because hopefully things like this and this will be leaving our social discourse.