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Miscellaneous

Health Insurance woes

Read Why Your Health Insurer Doesn’t Care About Your Big Bills

The Affordable Care Act kept profit margins in check by requiring companies to use at least 80 percent of the premiums for medical care. That’s good in theory but it actually contributes to rising health care costs. If the insurance company has accurately built high costs into the premium, it can make more money. Here’s how: Let’s say administrative expenses eat up about 17 percent of each premium dollar and around 3 percent is profit. Making a 3 percent profit is better if the company spends more.

Pleasantly surprised to read this piece from ProPublica/NPR. Michael Frank was my professor for a Health Insurance course I took while at Columbia and he was a terrific one at it. Though I moved on to Property and Casualty Insurance as an Actuarial Analyst, I continue to be intrigued by Health. Who wouldn’t be -…

Lifting the veil

Just about a decade ago, we leased a property on a pristine and desolate beach. The house didn’t have robust walls – It just had a few curtains to protect us from the elements. The rooms internally had walls full of transparent glass. It was a beautiful property with lots of cross-ventilation and something that…

Reimann Hypothesis

I wouldn’t say I understood all of it, but this video from Quanta Magazine is one of the best explanations I’ve seen so far that attempts to connect prime numbers with the Reimann Hypothesis.

Ephemeral devices

This is fascinating! A few GPS devices apparently had a mild(?) path offset issue few days ago: The issue has to do with the ephemeris data file, also called the EPO file (Extended Prediction Orbit) or Connected Predictive Ephemeris (CPE). Or simply the satellite pre-cache file. That’s the file that’s delivered to your device on…

The Perinkulam Library

I chanced on Calibre-Web last week and finally got around better organizing my book collection. I really like the way it’s turned out and if anything, this has been a silent nudge to read more and read frequently! The beauty of this is that, I can now share my collection with friends and family just…