I was initially assigned the working title, “Pursuing Equality in Health Care for the Elderly Is Futile.” I prefer to think of that particular dead end of health policy as one of listening to the wrong music for too long. Hence, this article reprises and revises the title song of the early 1980s movie, Urban Cowboy, but with Johnny Lee’s original lyrics adapted as “Looking for better health [rather than either ‘love’ or ‘love of equality’] in all the wrong places.” (...) The better goal is to achieve more progress in improving health for more people, including the elderly. It need not be as futile as the pursuit of the elusive abstraction of “equality” for all — but only if we first move away from a path-dependent approach of recent times that remains too narrowly focused on statistical disparities in health care services received by particular groups. (shrink)

The dark matter and dark energy problem, that is now dominating the research in cosmology, makes the question of the origin of mass-energy content of the universe more urgent than ever. There are two philosophies regarding this question: according to Mach’s principle it is matter that generates geometry of space-time, and according to Wheeler’s geometrodynamics some configurations of space-time geometry are to be interpreted as its material content. Neither of these philosophies has led to success. In the present paper, we (...) show that there exists an algebraic generalisation of geometry that reconciles, in a sense, these two seemingly opposite standpoints. The geometry is constructed with the help of a noncommutative algebra of smooth functions on a groupoid and its derivations. The groupoid in question has a nice physical interpretation: it can be regarded as a space of Lorentz rotations. In this way, Lorentz symmetries are inherent to the generalised geometry of space-time. We define the action for this geometry and, by varying it, obtain generalised vacuum Einstein equations. It turns out that these equations contain additional terms which are naturally interpreted as the components of the energy-momentum tensor. Matter is thus created out of purely geometric degrees of freedom. We find two exact solutions. We argue that the creation of matter, being a global effect, makes the contrast between Mach and Wheeler philosophies ineffective. (shrink)

Miller finds a seven-year-old's perspective on the definition of time.