Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

Much like Thudfactor, I already thought we were doing this everywhere, too.

The program takes treated sewer water, runs it through the same reverse osmosis process that bottled water companies use to purify their artesian (or tap) water, and then injects it into a deep aquifer that provides water for Orange County. The idea is to recycle as much of the water as possible and, in the process, reduce the water needs of a very arid and highly populated region of the country, southern California.

The article says that many people are “squicking out” about the fact that their water supply may contain water that came from someone’s toilet, but – as they also point out – pretty much all water came from someone or something’s toilet at some point in history. Heck, it’s only relatively recently that we’ve managed to find ways to ensure that water is safe to drink. Prior to that, people depended on the anti-microbial properties of alcohol in weak wine and beer to get safe hydration. Well, that is to say, they depended on it without realizing what “anti-microbial” meant. Let alone “microbe.”

Just like land, they’re not makin’ any more of water. The more we can process and reclaim it, the better off we’re all going to be.

Over at io9, there’s a brief article discussing the possibility that at some point in the future we could see people engaging in voluntary and recreational autism thanks to recent scientific breakthroughs.

Over the past year, researchers have demonstrated several times that they can turn mice autistic by messing with brain chemistry—and then “cure” them using the same techniques. The discoveries could lead to a scenario similar to the one in Vernor Vinge’s novel A Deepness in the Sky, where people are given a brain treatment called “focusing” that essentially turns them autistic and makes them obsessive, detail-oriented workers.

It’s a difficult concept to consider seriously, actually. I’ve written before on this blog (but not for a looong time now) about people who feel compelled to engage in experimental pharmacology – using prescription medicines for new purposes and/or experimenting with illegal drugs to get a result different from the common high the substance in question is usually used for.

And there are a lot of things out there that people experiment with. Lately, Provigil – a prescription drug used for narcoleptics – is used by some college students as a brain-enhancer and a stimulant to get them through long nights cramming and working on homework projects. The temptation is great – pop a pill and change the way your body and/or brain behaves long enough for you to do what you want to get done. It’s a recurring theme in Science Fiction from early radio dramas to Transmetropolitan, with – as some of the comments point out on the autism article – a nice stopover in Brave New World.

The problem with the idea of voluntary or recreational autism is that autism is more than just focusing on work and not caring about human relationships. There are a number of troubling issues that go along with autism, and many that don’t crop up in every single case. Autism is a very serious condition that at the moment has no cure. If such research leads to a cure for natural autism, then more power to it – but at this moment I have trouble imagining that anybody who is aware of what autism actually is would ever line up for a pill that would cause them to develop it – even temporarily.

In Sicko, Michael Moore relates the story of a man who wrote to his insurance company after being denied to inform them that Michael Moore’s next movie was going to be making a new movie about health care.

I wonder from time to time if the more popular bloggers get the desire to pull that card every now and then. For instance – when Blue Shield decided to deny his claim, re-evaluate it, pay only a portion of what they promised, then lie to him about having paid it and lied to the anesthesiologist about where to go for payment, do you think that maybe, just maybe, Kos had the desire to call them up and say, “Do you know who I am? Do you who I am? I’m the Daily Effing Kos!”

Their out is the line “preferred rate”. And the preferred rate for that procedure was apparently around $400.

Of course, we never asked them to process this at the “preferred rate”. We ask them to pay for the service. That’s why we’re paying over $800/month in insurance premiums. To be insured.

It gets worse, the office of the anesthesiologist has letters from Blue Shield claiming that the insurance company had sent us the money directly, so to bill us for the services. Of course, we never received such money. No such checks were ever cashed (which would be easy enough to verify if they were really interested in the truth, and not shirking their duties).

So they lie to us, claiming for seven months that they’ll cover the procedure. They lie to the anesthesiologist’s office, claiming they’ve already paid us the amount owed, and to bill us directly.

And now, finally, they truth comes out—they have a problem paying what’s owed and will refuse to do so, even though they sent us a letter saying they would.

[link via Boing Boing]