കുമാരേട്ടനും ചിന്തകളും ...

കുമാരേട്ടൻ കാലത്ത് നേരത്തെ എഴുന്നെറ്റു. ഇന്ന് ശനിയാഴ്ച ആണല്ലോ. ജോലിക്ക് പോകേണ്ടല്ലോ. ഭാര്യ ദാക്ഷയിനി ഉണ്ടാക്കിയ കട്ടൻ ചായയും കുടിച്ചു വരാന്തയിലെ തിണ്ണയിൽ ഇരിപ്പുറപ്പിച്ചു. പുറത്തു ചാറ്റൽ മഴ പെയ്യുന്നുണ്ട്. അയൽ വീട്ടിലെ സരോജിനിയുടെ മകൾ പുഷ്പവതി പാല് വാങ്ങാനായി പാത്രവുമായി പോകുന്നു. അവൾ പതിവുപോലെ ഒരു ചിരി പാസാക്കി.

കഴിഞ്ഞ കാലത്തേക്ക് കുമാരേട്ടൻ ഒരു നിമിഷം ഒന്ന് എത്തി നോക്കി. കുമാരേട്ടൻ ആലോചിക്കുകയാണ്...ജീവിതം ഒരു നാടകം തന്നെ. എത്രയോ റോളുകൾ നമ്മൾ ജീവിതത്തിൽ അഭിനയിക്കേണ്ടി വരുന്നു. എല്ലാം മനപൂർവം ആകണമെന്നില്ല. ചിലർ സുഹൃത്തുക്കളായി നമ്മുടെ ജീവിതത്തിലേക്ക് കടന്നു വരുന്നു. അവരിൽ കുറച്ചു പേർ കുറേ നാൾ നമ്മുടെ ജീവിതത്തില് ഉണ്ടാവും. വേറെ ചിലർ പുതിയ മേച്ചിൽ പുറങ്ങൾ തേടി അവിടേക്ക് യാത്രയാകുന്നു. എന്താണ് ഈ ജീവിതത്തിൽ സ്ഥിരമായുള്ളതു? 

കട്ടൻ ചായ പകുതി കുടിച്ചു കഴിഞ്ഞു. കുമാരേട്ടന്റെ ജീവിതവും പകുതി താണ്ടി കഴിഞ പോലെ.. തലയിലെ മുടി കുറേ നരച്ചിരിക്കുന്നു. കഷണ്ടിയും ആവശ്യത്തിനുണ്ട്. ഈ യാത്ര ഇനി എങ്ങോട്ടാണ്? ശുഭാപ്തി വിശ്വാസത്തോടെ മുന്നോട്ടു പോകുക തന്നെ. മക്കളുടെ പഠിപ്പ്, പിന്നെ അവരുടെ കല്യാണം..ഇങ്ങിനെ നിരവതി ചുമതലകൾ മുന്നിൽ കിടക്കുന്നു. ജീവിതം ഒരു യാത്രയാണെന്ന് പറഞ്ഞു കേട്ടിട്ടുള്ളത് ശരിയാണ്. 

അടുക്കളയിൽ നിന്ന് ദാക്ഷയിനിയുടെ ശബ്ദം...നിങ്ങൾ അവിടെ എന്താലോചിചിരികുകയാണ് മനുഷ്യാ...എന്തെക്കിലും ചെയ്തു കൂടെ? കാലത്തെഴുന്നേറ്റു ഇങ്ങനെ ഒരു കുത്തിയിരിപ്പാണ്‌...ഒരു പണിയും ചെയ്യില്ല...ഇങ്ങനെ ഒരു ജന്മം...

കുമാറേട്ടൻ പെട്ടന്ന് ഒരു അടി കിട്ടിയത് പോലെ ചാടി എഴുന്നേറ്റു. കഴിഞ്ഞ കാലത്തെ പറ്റി ഓർക്കുകയായിരുന്നു എന്ന് പറഞ്ഞാൽ പിന്നെ ഡോസ് കൂടുതൽ കിട്ടും ...അതൊന്നും പറയേണ്ട ...ഞാൻ ഇതാ വരുന്നു ....ഇന്ന് കടയിൽ പോകണ്ടേ.. നീ ആ സഞ്ചി എടുത്തു തരോ? പിന്നെ അതിനു നിങ്ങള്ക്ക് വേറെ ഒരാൾ വേണം. വേണ്ട ഞാൻ എടുത്തോളാം ..കുമാരേട്ടൻ സഞ്ചിയുമെടുത്തു കടയിലെക്കിറങ്ങി. ശരിയാണ് ജീവിതം ഒരു യാത്രയാണ്‌ ...അനന്തമായ ഒരു യാത്ര :)

A day at Lake Compounce amusement park at Bristol, Connecticut

We had wonderful time at Lake Compounce amusement park at Bristol, Connecticut, USA on July 5th, 2013.

History of Lake Compounce:

Opened in 1846, it is the oldest continuously operating amusement park in USA.

Its name is derived from John Compound, a native american. On December 3, 1684, his wife and several tribal members affixed their waxed fingertip marks to a deed that conveyed the "Compound's Lake" to a group of white settlers, including John Norton, who had migrated to central Connecticut from Massachusetts, for pennies on the dollar and miscellaneous trinkets, including a large copper tea kettle. Legend has it that Chief Compound drowned while trying to cross the lake in a large copper tea kettle.
The park's roots trace back to 1846, when a descendant of John Norton, Gad Norton, hired a scientist to perform an experiment using explosives. Though the experiment failed, Norton noted that thousands of people had shown up for the event and was inspired to open a park. He put a path around the lake, set up picnic tables, allowed public swimming and rowing on the lake, built a gazebo for lakeside band concerts and built a few rides. Lake Compounce had officially opened to the public as a picturesque picnic park. The park prospered as a picnic park through the post-Civil War era.
In 1914 the Green Dragon, Lake Compounce's first electric-powered roller coaster, opened to the public. It was torn down in 1926, and in 1927 was replaced by the Wildcat, a wooden classic designed by Schmeck and built by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company, which is still running to this day.

Wild Cat roller coaster

Lake Compounce was went through financial trouble for a long time.Early in 1996, an agreement was signed with Kennywood Entertainment, owners of Pittsburgh's historic Kennywood amusement park, to purchase Lake Compounce. After many years of financial troubles and management issues, Kennywood devoted itself to creating a clean, family-oriented and family-themed amusement park. All the remaining rides were then either repaired or removed. The Wildcat roller coaster also was renovated and reopened. The park opened that Memorial Day weekend in 1996 with real success. Every year since, the park has enjoyed much success and many millions of dollars in renovations and improvements including more waterslides, a couple high capacity water rides, a looping roller coaster, and in 2000, the Boulder Dash, which received the 2004 Golden Ticket Award for the #1 rated Wooden Roller Coaster by "Amusement Today." In 2005, Boulder Dash took the #2 spot and in 2006 tied for 3rd in the Golden Ticket Awards for the best wooden roller coaster. Boulder Dash also was voted #1 Wooden Roller Coaster in the World by the National Amusement Park Historical Association. Over the last 10 years, Kennywood has invested nearly $70 million in rides and attractions.

How is it today?

Lake Compounce has grown to include three roller coasters and more than forty attractions. The park also includes a large water park by the lake, "Splash Harbor." The water park includes several slides, a wave pool, a lazy river, and an interactive complex, making it the biggest water park in Connecticut. The park also has three midway game areas and over ten food service locations. Lake Compounce is known for offering free Pepsi soda to all guests and employees who visit the park. Private catered events take place for such companies as the local Bristol-based ESPN and Pfizer. The park also hosts a 4 July firework show over the lake every year.

During October, the park transforms itself into a Halloween experience for adults and children. The midways are decorated, and many of the park's rides are run in the dark. Produced by Graveyard Productions, the haunted house is dubbed "The Haunted Graveyard." The experience consists of a 45-minute walk-through of catacombs, castles, special effects, and graveyards, as well as many other houses being added every year. The Haunted Graveyard started in 1991 and found a home at Lake Compounce in 2001. Portions of the proceeds are donated towards Juvenile Diabetes research.

How did we spend our day there?

We arrived there by 11 AM. We followed the directions from GPS to find only an employee parking lot!! We looked for visitor parking but couldn't find one. Finally we went to employee parking lot and they gave us a paper with directions to visitor parking lot. This was a bit hassle. They could have put directions to visitor parking lot on the way.

Kids had lots of fun in the wave pool. It was packed with people. They also went on different rides and it was real fun. Son wanted to go to the haunted house and he didn't seem scared after coming out of it.

They had nice fried dough ice cream which was really delicious. We watched a great acrobatics show by a group of men around 5:30. It was awesome.

We took a train ride which was really nice. It took almost 25 minutes. We could see the preparations for fireworks while riding in the train.

We had two hour drive to back home and everyone was exhausted. We got back in our car around 6 PM. 

It was a fun packed day and will be there in our memories.

What makes you nostalgic?

Nostalgia is a soft, sentimental feeling about a past experience, event or a song.

Why do we get nostalgic while listening to a beautiful old song? Suddenly lots of memories come to our mind and we humans have this great power to go back to those times in a split second of time!! WOW..super amazing!! Music has the power to evoke poignant memories from our past, making us feel sentimental for a time long gone.

Sometimes we get nostalgic when we meet an old friend of ours after so many years.

We have so many memories which, when relived, evoke a state of nostalgia. The five senses are always in the present moment and so when we relive (not daydream) those memories, we are living them in the now with deep sensitivity and feeling in the five senses.

One song which brings back lots of memories for me is "Unarumee gaanam urugumennullam..." from the malayalam  movie Moonnam pakkam.

Would you like to share the songs or events which makes you nostalgic? 

Please share it here..

Runner's high

THE runner’s high: Every athlete has heard of it, most seem to believe in it and many say they have experienced it. But for years scientists have reserved judgment because no rigorous test confirmed its existence.

Yes, some people reported that they felt so good when they exercised that it was as if they had taken mood-altering drugs. But was that feeling real or just a delusion? And even if it was real, what was the feeling supposed to be, and what caused it?

Some who said they had experienced a runner’s high said it was uncommon. They might feel relaxed or at peace after exercising, but only occasionally did they feel euphoric. Was the calmness itself a runner’s high?

Often, those who said they experienced an intense euphoria reported that it came after an endurance event.

The runner’s-high hypothesis proposed that there were real biochemical effects of exercise on the brain. Chemicals were released that could change an athlete’s mood, and those chemicals were endorphins, the brain’s naturally occurring opiates. Running was not the only way to get the feeling; it could also occur with most intense or endurance exercise.

The problem with the hypothesis was that it was not feasible to do a spinal tap before and after someone exercised to look for a flood of endorphins in the brain. Researchers could detect endorphins in people’s blood after a run, but those endorphins were part of the body’s stress response and could not travel from the blood to the brain. They were not responsible for elevating one’s mood. So for more than 30 years, the runner’s high remained an unproved hypothesis.

But now medical technology has caught up with exercise lore. Researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true: Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner’s body pumps out, the greater the effect.

For athletes and nonathletes alike, the results are opening a new chapter in exercise science. They show that it is possible to define and measure the runner’s high and that it should be possible to figure out what brings it on. They even offer hope for those who do not enjoy exercise but do it anyway. These exercisers might learn techniques to elicit a feeling that makes working out positively addictive.

The lead researcher for the new study, Dr. Henning Boecker of the University of Bonn, said he got the idea of testing the endorphin hypothesis when he realized that methods he and others were using to study pain were directly applicable.

The idea was to use PET scans combined with recently available chemicals that reveal endorphins in the brain, to compare runners’ brains before and after a long run. If the scans showed that endorphins were being produced and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain involved with mood, that would be direct evidence for the endorphin hypothesis. And if the runners, who were not told what the study was looking for, also reported mood changes whose intensity correlated with the amount of endorphins produced, that would be another clincher for the argument.

Dr. Boecker and colleagues recruited 10 distance runners and told them they were studying opioid receptors in the brain. But the runners did not realize that the investigators were studying the release of endorphins and the runner’s high. The athletes had a PET scan before and after a two-hour run. They also took a standard psychological test that indicated their mood before and after running.

The data showed that, indeed, endorphins were produced during running and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain associated with emotions, in particular the limbic and prefrontal areas.

Why umbrella insurance?

An umbrella policy was created to provide additional coverage when a lawsuit brought over injuries and/or property damage that you cause exceeds the liability limits on your car insurance, home insurance, boat insurance, etc.

An umbrella policy has three advantages. It provides additional lawsuit coverage of $1 million or more. It provides added coverage for defense costs, which can easily amount to $100,000 or more. And finally, it provides liability coverage for some lawsuits not covered by your underlying auto or home insurance. Examples include if you're sued over an incident involving a boat you rented on vacation, a car you rented in Europe, or even your work on a nonprofit board of directors.
Everyone concerned about losing income or assets in one large lawsuit needs an umbrella policy. An umbrella insurance policy is the absolute best buy in the insurance business. It costs only about $150 to $200 for the first $1 million of coverage, then about $100 for each additional $1 million.

You can't control whom you might injure. If you injure, for example, the CEO of a large corporation, a professional baseball player or a doctor, you would owe for lost wages, medical bills, and pain and suffering. The lost wages alone for those types of people, if they can't work for 10 years, could start anywhere from $2 million to $3 million and run up to as much as 10 times that amount. Medical bills might be about $500,000. And then, there is compensation for pain and suffering.

The point I'm making here is that you can't be overinsured for lawsuits.

When buying an umbrella insurance policy, buy $1 million more than you think you will need. You can't go back and buy more later, if and when you need to use it.

Google automatic cars and car insurance

Driverless cars could help obliterate $200 billion in personal and commercial insurance premiums.

According to some top insurance companies, it would be 20 years before Google’s cars cleared all the potholes, resistance, and necessary legislation and actually hit the road.
Insurance companies believe that if  80% of accidents are eliminated, they will save big on the  time and expense on the claims which will be a big boon to them.

Being a competitive market, these savings associated with reduced costs of investigating claims/ paperwork would quickly translate across the industry, in the form of lower premiums.

Even with a a 20% adoption rate of incremental driver-assist technology might result in significant enough reductions in accidents to trigger material reductions in premiums. In other words, insurers will feel the effects of driverless technology long before fully autonomous cars become ubiquitous.

Car manufacturers already have assisted parking, and all sorts of sensors to help avoid accidents. Even if Google’s technology isn’t implemented quickly enough to be the silver bullet to the car insurance as the mp3 was to the CD, the trend towards a fully computerized car will undoubtedly quicken.

There is no doubt that far more friction remains for Google to put the driverless car on the road than existed for the mp3 to replace the CD, or for digital photography to replace film.

Obstacles include regulatory hurdles, the cost of insuring cars switching from drivers to manufacturers -- something car makers would be loath to do, in large part to due to the uncertainty and chaos of no previous existing model for it, to getting the average person to accept a computer driving them around, and those fuming that they paid 30k for a new car just a couple years earlier, and damned if their going to lose out on their investment.

However, the trend to me seems clear. The pace of innovation and disruption is only increasing. Film went the way of the dodo when the digital camera arrived. Travel agents, newspapers, and high-commission stock trades were done in by the Internet. PC’s are rapidly being replaced by tablets and mobile phones. And few people in those industries were prepared for the massive shifts.

It’s my belief that car insurance in its current form will disappear, and at minimum, the vastly cheaper rates of insuring a fleet of driverless taxis will take away a substantial amount of the float insurance companies use to generate their profits.

If nothing else, I’ll certainly miss those funny GEICO commercials.

Rising US Healthcare Costs!!

Over the past decade, healthcare costs have risen much faster than salaries.

In the time period, 1999 to 2009 average salaries has risen 38% whereas the health care premium have risen 131 %.

A close examination of the data indicates that this blame is misplaced. Something else is revealed by digging deeper into the key components in healthcare spending: Technology, administrative expenses, hospital costs, lifestyle choice and chronic disease conditions have all had greater impacts on rising overall healthcare costs than physicians.

Some critics have suggested that physicians’ incomes and the fact that physicians direct most healthcare spending (80 percent is a frequently used number) are the real culprits in soaring healthcare costs. Yet despite this, physicians are not necessarily the principal beneficiaries of healthcare spending. The bulk of medical procedure payments go to hospitals and device manufactures.  For example, in California, Medicare pays on average$18,000 for a total hip replacement – $16,336 to the hospital and $1,446 to the surgeon. This reimbursement disparity is certainly not limited to California, and is representative of a broader trend on a national level. Moreover, doctors’ net take-home pay amounts to only about 10 percent of overall healthcare spending.

Once the physician impact on healthcare costs is placed in proper perspective, the true role of other key factors can be examined more clearly.

The first area is technology.  There is consensus among experts that technology is the most important driver of healthcare spending increases over time. Installing and implementing electronic health records is costly – often as much as $25,000 per doctor for a system and a monthly subscription fee on top of that – and requires significant resources.

Admin expenses and hospital costs represent two additional areas of significant concern.  Physicians are continually frustrated as they see increasing administrative regulations as significant burdens that take away from patient care, and they are deeply pessimistic as they struggle to sustain their practices. Seventy-seven percent of physicians feel negatively about the future of medicine, according to the Foundation’s survey of more than 13,500 physicians. Many independent practicing physicians are seeking employment at larger hospital systems to avoid administrative burdens.  Forty percent of primary care physicians today who see patients at hospitals are employed by the hospital, which has doubled since 2000.

Hospital costs during 2010 in the U.S. constituted $814 billion or 31.4 percent of all healthcare expenditures. Furthermore, the cost of care will only continue to rise as we shift into a consolidated healthcare system and programs like Medicare allow higher payments for services performed in hospitals as opposed to independent private practices. One widely reported example found a Nevada patient whose echo cardiogram bill came to $373 before the physicians’ practice had been purchased by a hospital system and then increased to $1,605 after the merger.

Finally, another vital factor to consider is that of life style and chronic conditions. Chronic diseases are the most common and costly of all health problems, but they are also the most preventable. According to the CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, our common, health-damaging but modifiable behaviors – tobacco use, insufficient physical activity, poor eating habits, and excessive alcohol use –are responsible for much of the illness, disability and premature death related to chronic disease. And people with three or more chronic disease conditions generally fall into the costliest one percent of patients who account for 20 percent of all healthcare spending in the U.S.

Moreover, there is a real issue of health disparities that exists in this country leading to higher healthcare costs. Between 2003 and 2006, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies estimated the total direct and indirect costs of health inequities affecting racial and ethnic minority populations, including lost wages and productivity – exceeded $1.2 trillion.

Clearly, to achieve true cost savings in our healthcare system, experts must look at all of these factors that are driving healthcare costs above the gross domestic product, population growth and inflation – and recognize that the literature and data simply do not point to physicians as a primary or even secondary cause of rising healthcare costs. Physicians have been a target of blame for many years, but the facts about what drives healthcare costs indicate otherwise.