The RIAA is attempting to get it to enforce a State law. Not a Federal Law.
Nesson is saying that he thinks the State law is so badly written that it is unconstitutional on its face. But that doesn't matter. Because...
The Judge is saying that Nesson has to comply specifically with the Federal law in this regard, which does not prohibit what he has been doing so long as he does it according to its provisions. And the Judge tells him what he already knows: he will be in deep doo-doo if his publishing of these matters makes it difficult to seat an unbiased jury. What the Judge has NOT said, in a VERY LOUD WAY, is also important: there was no mention at all of the Massachusetts law that the RIAA states Nesson is violating. Federal Judge, Federal Court: Federal law trumps State law. That's as it should be.
Basically the RIAA does not have an argument here that they can bring before the Federal Court. They could charge Nesson in a State Court with violating State law. That would lead to a hell of mess with regard to jurisdiction between the Federal Government and the State... in 225+ years, the Feds and the States have worked very hard together to avoid having to face that kind of mess. No one wants to go there. Some things are best left undefined, such as lines of sovereignty and jurisdiction between Federal agencies and the States that are hosting them.
As much as I dislike the RIAA, the law is with this one in this case.
I'm not so sure that this is true.
Is a state law (Massachusetts law making it a felony to record a conversation without prior consent of all parties) binding on a Federal Court? I think probably not; I think a Federal Court would be in the same circumstance as a VA Medical Center or other Federal reservation: by policy it would comply with local laws to the extent that these do not interfere with its mission, but there is no agreement that State law is enforceable on a Federal agency operating in the State. My understanding is that both states and the Federal government have historically gone to considerable length to avoid resolving the ambiguities of sovereignty.
I think that the RIAA might need to do this as a separate action in a Massachusetts Court, since it is a Massachusetts law. Which would probably lead to a jurisdictional nightmare. Which is exactly the kind of thing that the courts have been attempting to avoid for 225 years or so. Some legal questions are better left undefined.
Replying to my own post here, and quoting myself, which are things I don't generally do.
HTML v4.01 has a clear future path to HTML 5, but the future of XHTML is not at all clear.
Less than 48 hours after I posted this, the W3C announced that further development of the XHTML standard is ending. Development effort will be focused on bringing HTML 5 along at a faster pace. HTML 5 will effectively converge the HTML and XHTML evolutionary paths back into a single path.
I guess I'm prescient wrt web technologies. Or something.
If I had mod points this morning, I would mod parent up. Sicne I don't have any at the moment, I'll argue why someone else should mod parent "insightful" or maybe "informative".
If the defendant were not clearly guilty, the ruling might simply be overturned.
This is exactly why I'm pleased that she is appealing the ruling on constitutional grounds. The appellate courts can (and should) look for every other possible basis for deciding a case before they start looking at constitutional issues and setting precedents. Since the preponderance of evidence says that the law was broken, this is now the first good test to see whether the law itself is good. And, ideally, whether the techniques of institutional barratry used by the RIAA and their member corporations are legal.
You wouldn't want to use HTML for something like this, especially with newer versions of HTML
Well, that sort of depends on where the value of the paper is.
Some academic papers are pure fluff, and-- you are right-- these do not fare well in a semantic mark-up language like HTML. If there is no meaning in the content, then the semantic tags are being applied in a purely arbitrary manner and the result ends up looking as void of sense as it is actually is. OTOH, if the content of the academic paper has meaning, then the semantic mark-up of HTML will emphasize this meaning and make it clear to the bots and spiders that index the web, and the paper will be quickly integrated into the universal library of knowledge that is being built. That's a good thing.
As far as appearances go, once the semantics are done properly, then CSS can style the paper so it presents well on the screen and, through the modern miracle of "@media print", it can also produce quality hardcopy.
It is true that it would be very difficult with today's CSS to generate the kind of detailed hardcopy formatting needed to comply with the American Psychological Association's standards and other, similar, standards. But these standards were put into place to enforce a common semantic meaning on whitespace and typography usage; they were actually attemptng to do the same thing on paper that HTML semantic tags succeed in doing in digital formats. They are increasingly being replaced by HTML (since HTML does this so much better). It has been many long years since I've heard any academics talking wishfully about page scanning machines that could run through the last five years of JAMA journals and extract all the citations. Now you can do that with a few lines of script built around a regex that searches for <cite> tags...
Aspirin seems to mess up people's stomach lining much more than acetaminophen/ibuprofen.
I'm pleased that the word "seems" was used here.
Historically what happened is that some comparative studies were done 40 to 50 years ago that correlated aspirin use with aggravation of peptic ulcers. The role of H. pylori as the cause of peptic ulcers was not recognized until much later, in the late 1980s. It is now known that by far the most common cause of ulcers is an infection. If you bathe an infected sore with an aspirin solution, that is likely to cause you an increase in discomfort, but it obviously the aspirin was not cause of the sore.
I'm not in a position now to do any literature research on this, but I have not heard of any recent studies that have either
gone back to the original aspirin - peptic distress studies and attempted to correct them for the now known effects of H. pylori, or
repeated those studies while taking H. pylori into account
Cynical as I am about the American health care industry, I doubt that any USA research will be done on this, since there is no room for profit with aspirin based therapies. But perhaps Canada or England would run a new large scale study.
I would suggest that part of such a study should involve doing the cheap breath test for H. pylori on all test subjects who reported G.I. distress on taking aspirin, treating any sub clinical H. pylori infections discovered (expect a minimum of 50% to be H. pylori positive; the bug is that common), and seeing if their toleration of aspirin improves after they are free of the H. pylori infection.
Google on "acetaminophen patents". You will find that there are over a million articles and the first dozen at least describe different patents of manufacturing processes that are in effect today. In contrast, there are many fewer articles on "aspirin patents" and only one in the first dozen or so that describes a current patent (by Bayer, for a sustained release formulation). Most of the aspirin articles are historical, which makes sense since aspirin was the first synthetic drug and an early patented drug (possibly the first of these, too.)
So there is still a lot of money being made in the IP surrounding the marketing of acetaminophen.
To put this in perspective, there is some doubt that these "hot spots" are indicative of any genetic differences at all. The article is describing epigenetic phenomena (the still mysterious thing that turns genes on and off, either according to some bootstrap sequence or through sensing environmental changes in some unknown way.) It might be that the schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are products of perfectly normal genes that were activated in an unusual sequence.
It turns out that mapping the human genome is not going to be enough. When we have that done, we will find that we've only reverse-engineered the subroutine libraries and maybe the API; we still don't have a clue where the high level programming that uses this stuff is located.
Think about the incredibly detailed and precise processes involved in mitosis. This is definitely not happening under the direct control of genes, since it is the genetic structures themselves that are being acted on. So what are the mechanisms that guide this process, and where is the code for this process, and how can we learn to read that code? I'm guessing that these are central questions that the emerging study of epigenetics is looking at.
Red Flayer, you are amazing! 13 posts in 7 different threads in 6 hours... impressive. And nearly every one of them confrontational to boot.
COX 2 inhibition is one mechanism of anti-inflammatory action typical of the NSAIDs. When Vioxx was introduced, it was thought to be a better anti-inflammatory agent because it preferentially inhibited COX 2 over COX 1 (and COX 3, whose functions are not well understood as yet), and that this would reduce the incidence of gastric irritation associated with aspirin and some other NSAIDs. But it has been withdrawn from the market as its use significantly increases the risk of thrombus incidents: heart attacks and strokes. And it is now thought that this happens when the balance between COX 1 and COX 2 is shifted in a bad way. Which would suggest that aspirin, which nonselectively inhibits both, is possibly safer than any of the COX 2 inhibitors.
So, Red Flayer, your facts are correct... and they undermine your argument.
Besides, we were talking of the analgesic use of these drugs, and specifically in their role as a synergetic for oral opiates. This is a very different purpose with a very different kind of dosage regimen, and the COX inhibition mechanisms may not even be involved.
Oh, this also needs some further comment:
Re: the higher margin between therapeutic level and destructive overdose level, I'm not sure, and I can;t be bothered to look up the LD50 and therapeutic levels right now. What I DO know is that the margin between minimum therapeutic level and minimum toxicity level is much smaller for ASA than APAP. For a lot of people, side effects from ASA are experience at a *lower* blood concentration than the minimum therapeutic level.
The "minimum toxicity level" you are talking about here is the fully reversible tinnitus that I described as an early warning sign. Your spin doctoring seems inappropriate. Aspirin's way of usually causing "ringing in the ears" before any irreversible damage occurs remains an important positive feature of the drug. (I do realize that for someone posting so frequently over such a broad range of subjects, looking up certain critical details can be a bother, and I believe me I fully understand where you are coming from with that.)
Okay, I've been a good boy scout and fed the trolls. Hopefully in a way that some third parties reading this will find something of interest here.
The acetaminophen is added because it increases the effectiveness of the narcotic, so a lower dose of the narcotic is needed for good pain control. Has nothing at all to do with controlling illicit drug use.
But what is fucked is that aspirin has this same effect with the narcotics and is much safer to use, and in fact aspirin + narcotic compounds used to be the common thing back in the day (prior to 1980). The change to acetaminophen compounds had to do with the profit margins of the pharmaceutical companies more than for any other reason. (Aspirin was the first ever drug synthesized in a laboratory and neither it nor any of the process that is used to make it can be patented. Plus the stuff is so easy and cheap to make that there is no way for a large pharmaceutical company to squeeze out smaller competitors. So aspirin is a failure in the American health care industry, despite its therapeutic effectiveness. No profit there.
While what you say is true, aspirin has the same synergistic effects with oral opiates as acetaminophen, and is equivalent in terms of antipyretic and anti-inflammatory action as well. However it has a much wider margin between therapeutic level and destructive overdose level, and since overdosing usually causes tinnitus (ringing in the ears) long before any permanent damage is done, it comes complete with an audible overdose warning system.
So there is not, and has never been, a valid reason for creating acetaminophen based competitors to the aspirin based compounds that were prevalent before 1980. Such as Emperin #3 (replaced by Tylenol #3), APC, APC with Codeine, and so on.
The problem with aspirin in this regard is that about three decades ago several marketing campaigns were pushing Tylenol products by putting undue emphasis on aspirin sometimes causing stomach distress in some people. This was before it was known that stomach ulcers were caused by a bacterial infection, and it was easy to suggest that too much aspirin could be causing some ulcers.
The modern American health care industry is riddled with these kinds of bullshit pharmaceutical fads. "We'll do anything for a buck" seems to be the motto.
Aspirin isn't without its own problems. High doses for an extended period of time can lead to long clotting times, for instance. But on the whole, it is a whole lot safer than acetaminophen. It just isn't as profitable.
My earlier reply was both more snarky and less informative than was necessary, and I apologize. So although it wasn't incorrect, it was still wrong, and I can do better.
A simple script can process the final HTML fragment of each page and insert id="unique" attributes on each paragraph, etc, and targets where these would be useful.
That use of the "name" attribute has been deprecated for years. I don't know of any browser that doesn't support id targets.
The name attribute has been deprecated in XHTML, but it is not deprecated in HTML. These are two very different kinds of markups, despite their similarities. One of the major differences is that HTML v4.01 has a clear future path to HTML 5, but the future of XHTML is not at all clear. XHTML may end up being one of those constructions based on solid theory that did not work out in practice (except in niche applications). There have been a few of these among the computer languages: Forth, Smalltalk, Pascal, etc. The main point here is that when working in the HTML v4.01 Strict standard, the name attribute is not deprecated.
On a closely related note, while one can do something like <p id="target"> and then somewhere else do <a href="#target">goto target</a>, this kind of construction muddies the semantics and makes the page more brittle. During revision, there is nothing to clue the rewriter that the id attribute is being used as a target, and that changing it, or removing it, would break links. So while it is possible to do this, it should not be the practice; the practice should be to use the anchor <a name="whatever"> to keep the semantic structure clear. (Or go ahead and use <a id="whatever"> if you want, but the older practice is fully acceptable and is also guaranteed to work in even antique browsers.)
I've arranged my bookmarks into daily/weekly/monthly folders based on topics.
What a fantastically neat idea! I've always categorized them by subject area, but there is no reason why I can't set up calendar categories as well, and simply have dual entries for some sites.
I'm often browsing with a dozen tabs open, but rarely more than that. Once the horizontal scroll kicks in, any advantage to keeping multiple tabs open is lost; it makes more sense to invest the minute or two it takes to make and organize some bookmarks.
Try reading the documentation (one of many possible sources) before speaking up on a subject you know nothing about. And remember: a closed mouth gathers no foot.
The anchor tag, <a>, has to have a name attribute to be useful in its eponymous function. Or to put it in blunter terms, if you ain't got a <a name="there"></a>, you can't do a <a href="#there">Goto There </a>. And despite how harmful gotos might be in other environments, on these Intartubes, it is these gotos that put the hyper in the web.
I'd show you how it works in this post, but in its infinite mechanical wisdom the slashdot lameness filter prevents self-referential links in the comments. Prolly a good thing, considering what the younger members of our population are sometimes like.
For the right persons, transcribing the handwritten notes and sketches would be very rewarding. Werner Von Braun was pivotal technologist whose work for the Nazis either posed one of the greatest threats to England during WWII or, through high level monkeywrenching, managed to keep that threat from becoming a reality. He was definitely a very complex character who succeeded in doing a helluva good balancing act on dangerously high political high wires.
So access to his notes in exchange for doing the drudge work of transcribing them could be very interesting to biographers, technology historians, and the like. There are probably at least half a dozen very different biographies that could be written about this man, all of them equally accurate.
I'll forego using mod points on this thread to reply. I'll burn them off on some other topic.
It's surprising that there's not a single really overweight person commenting here, considering that 90% of overweight (by BMI) are simply fat.
I qualify by BMI (29.5, just shy of "obese") and by personal assessment (yes, I do look feel fat in this body right now). I was forced into a more sedentary life style 20 years ago and for many years I was obese by any standard, but I've shed more than 20 lbs from my heaviest weight. I am now reasonably fit, bicycling over 100 miles per week and self-training to do century ride in a month or so. I also do flat water kayaking, which is a good complement to the biking.
Here's the thing: my personal ideal body weight will give me a BMI of 27.0 at the weight where I felt best before the accident that changed a lot of things in my life. This is still "overweight" by accepted standards. But to get to the top of the "normal" BMI range at 25.0, I would have drop to my weight when I graduated from high school, when I was a skinny guy with all the muscle tone of a boiled noodle. My long term (5 - 10 year) goal is to drop another 20 lbs to a BMI of 27, but I would have to drop 33 lb to get down to a BMI of 25, and that would definitely be unhealthy.
BMI can be sort of helpful to people of European and Asian descent in possibly refining their personal ideal self-image, but it isn't going to work so well with descendants of Native Americans, Polynesians, or Arctic peoples. But it isn't very accurate, and if it does not match up with a healthy person's ideal self-image, it should be ignored.
the SECOND MOST IMPORTANT aspect of the documents is that it is easily searched.
The FIRST is of course making a high fidelity digital copy of the original pages, that will serve as the authority on all questions of possible ambiguity in the handwriting, or whether a figure in the margin is a thumbnail sketch or a mere doodle.
A 600 or 1200 dpi.png image of each page in full color would do as the master digital archive. The.png format is an excellent choice since it is open, well understood, and going to be around for a long, long time. Its accuracy is more than adequate for this work. That it supports lossless compression is a bonus: images of pages usually compress very well. Copies of the master digital library should be kept at various institutions and made available on request to anyone.
Then for public and research use, convert each page to HTML 4.01 strict, (since it is universally available, will be around for a long, long time, and Google, etc, can do the indexing for us). UTF of course, especially since Werner used some German and Greek glyphs in his handwriting.
Suggest using OCR to handle conversion of the typed notes, and volunteers or cheap student labor to transcribe the handwritten material (use consensus of several transcribers to assure accuracy). These can be incorporated into the main pages as divs and spans inserted into the correct place in the flow (use classes like "left margin" and "rightmargin"). CSS can use absolute positioning to make them marginal accordians (expand from the margin on mouseover), etc.
Treat sketches like the handwriting: put an img of the sketch into a div or span at the right place in the flow, then also add a searchable text description of the sketch in that div.
A simple script can process the final HTML fragment of each page and insert id="unique" attributes on each paragraph, etc, and <a name="unique"> targets where these would be useful.
The finished NASA product should be a simple online database using server side scripting to compose and serve out pages on request. It should be built with cooperation from Google and other search platforms so that spiders will have good access to the body of the work without causing excessive bandwidth problems. It should be possible for any researcher to develop his own custom search engine. Ideally, it will support not just the notes, but also concordances, wiki discussions, etc.
I once did a lot of this kind of work in moving sermons and such that were circulated by mimeograph in the 1960s and 1970s to web pages. I digitized the pages with a Minolta Z1 camera on a reverse tripod using indirect lighting, and converted to OCR with OmniScan (IIRC). The OCR came out in Word 97 format, and I used Perl scripts to transcribe to HTML. If the technical quality of the originals is good, this can go pretty fast and is highly accurate, even as a basement project. If the original notes use consistent formatting, which I would expect of Werner, then scripting with good use of regular expressions cna do the bulk of the HTML markup.
Thanks for the support. I certainly did not write that as flamebait, and I'm glad to see that -1 has now been offset by a +1 mod. In retrospect I do feel that I dragged that post to the wrong side of the tl;dr line, but that makes it boring, not flamebait.
Again, thanks. In my previous incarnation here as MysticGoat, #582871, I had karma to burn, but I have just started with my WillWoodhull account and so far my karma is only in the "good" range. More importantly, I've got a long way to go before this account is as befriended as the late, lamented MysticGoat account was. (Somewhere some bits got crossed up in the MysticGoat configuration and I cannot reset the email address, and anyway I've now grown into an Elder Curmudgeon who no longer feels the need to use a nom de web on these new fangled intartubes.)
It is exceedingly hard to fire someone from the US Civil Service, especially after 38 years. There are good reasons for this: it assures some stability in government as elected officials and their political appointees come and go, for one thing.
Carlin is at or near retirement. The usual way to handle a problem child like him is to give him the lateral arebesque: assign him to a specific Siberian task that isolates him and limits the amount of damage he can do to the institution, such as having him work on the problems in the Grants database.
Carlin is unlikely to stay in Federal employment for much longer. This looks like a well prepared swan song prior to his voluntary retirement, that will sound very sweet to the ears of his new employers in the private sector.
One does have to look at the broader context in situations like this.
First point, since it has some humor value, is that Carlin's field is economics. He is expert in the same studies and techniques as those wonderful quants who gave the financial world those marvelous risk management tools called "derivatives". Economics was nick-named "the dismal science" for a couple of reasons, one being a reference to the quality of the extrapolations that economists have used in their predictions.
More serious points: this news is presented to the world through the Competitive Enterprise Institute. It has a $3 million+ annual budget, and is supported by donations from ExxonMobil, American Petroleum Institute, Dow Chemical, General Motors, Ford Motor Company, Phillip Morris, and others. It is characterized as a "libertarian" think tank ideologically opposed to any government regulation of business conduct. It has taken an active role in advocating for "free-market environmentalism" where corporations and not governments would determine the best way to manage the environment. It has been a continuing, constant critic of global warming concerns. (See Wikipedia article, also validation of primary source, also Google on "Competitive Enterprise Institute".)
WRT Alan Carlin himself: he has been in the US Civil Service for 38 years, so he is fully vested in one of the best retirement packages in the world, and he is at retirement age. His title is "Senior Operations Research Analyst" at the National Center for Environmental Economics of the EPA. He would be at the top of his pay scale at this point, and it is unlikely that continued Federal employment has anything to offer him that he would be interested in doing (a common theme through the papers he has published in the last few years shows a bias against the kinds of Federal protections that the Obama Administration is involved in setting up). It is not at all unlikely that he will soon start drawing his Federal pension and begin a second career in the private sector as a consultant with expertise on EPA matters, or as a staff person in a think tank not unlike CEI. (see synopsis of A. Carlin's career.)
WRT the emails that were sent to Carlin, that were then mysteriously leaked to the national media through CEI: Carlin attempted to inject his argument against a policy decision into the works after he would have known that the period for such commentary was closed. Further, he was acting out of his area of expertise, which is economics, by attempting a review of the recent literature of climate research papers. Further, and to me most telling, is that he admits that he has not formatted his work in accordance with EPA standards, nor is providing proper citations that would allow distinguishing between crap and peer reviewed papers. I see this clearly showing that he had an ulterior motive of monkeywrenching the process, since his past publications show that he knows very well how to write these kinds of papers. It looks very much like he knew his work would be rejected, planned on having it rejected, and planned on collecting the emails that he would receive afterward to use in the way that these emails have been used. (See the.pdf referred to in the article summary, and note that the 4 emails were cherry picked from a much longer body of correspondence.)
BTW, taken in context,the quote from Carlin's boss, "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision," takes on a very different meaning. What Carlin is being told is that discussion has moved on from what the science is to what the legal and societal implications are, and how to frame a policy that addresses those c
Agreed, there are too many unknowns and no theory is provable. However TFA does a credible job of dismissing a group of theories from further consideration, so it is significant in narrowing things down a little bit.
This wikipedia article on the galaxy seems like a good overview of known data; a long article but well worth the reading, as recent observations have caused major changes to the model of the Galaxy a lot of us grew up with. The specific section I'm pointing to describes how Sol bobs from one side of the galactic plane to the other every 43 million years or so, and that this seems to correlate with mass extinction events. One possible mechanism being an increase in asteroid hits as we bob through the denser stuff on the plane. No need to posit gamma death rays; simple Newtonian kinetics as we dash from one side of the freeway to the other would be sufficient.
Default is what happens when you don't show up to meet your obligations, legal or otherwise. You are making the "none of the above" choice
Exactly so! Which is why it is such a bad choice for labeling the factory settings of software, or anything else, for that matter.
A better choice would have been the word "preset". As in 'The software installs with preset configuration values which can be changed through the Preferences menu.'
Unfortunately, the decision to use the word "default" had to be made a long time before the first electronic thesaurus by some geeks who knew much more about artificial machine languages than they did about the language that came out of their own mouths. They made a poor choice, and now we are stuck with it.
Re:A good translation for default to other languag
on
On the Humble Default
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"Default" was a poorly chosen word in this context, even in English. It has too many negative connotations; it suggests that a user who hasn't changed the factory settings has failed in some way. "Preset" is a synonym in this context, and a better word, since it is neutral.
While I agree circumcision is a form a mutilation, comparing it to female circumcision isn't quite right. For the two to be comparable, it would be like removing the glans of the male genitalia, not the foreskin.
FGM and MGM are both mutilations inflicted on children, and up to that point I and parent post agree.
But the implication that MGM is more acceptable than FGM because it is somehow a lesser amount of mutilation is not something I can follow. Either one of these would be clearly criminal activity if done by perverts who kidnapped children, had their little bit of fun, and then released them otherwise unharmed. When viewed without the prejudice of cultural biases, any kind of mutilation of children is equally reprehensible. Whether MGM, or FGM, or chopping off the little fingers at the distal joint, or at the medial joint... it is all mutilation of human beings without their informed consent.
Also, there is more damage done to the penis in circumcision than parent post is recognizing. After the foreskin is removed, through a process called cornification the entire glans changes from a mucosal surface to an epidermal surface like that of the fingers or toes. So circumcision not only removes more than one third of the sensitive surface area of the erect penis, it alters the sensitivity of what remains. That has to happen. I can tell you as an entire male, that it is exceedingly uncomfortable to have the exposed uncircumcised glans rubbing against the fabric of pajamas or underwear. There is definitely some loss of sensation with circumcision, or the 30% of men who have been circumcised would either run around with their cocks hanging out, or be wearing oversized codpieces to hold their jockey shorts away from their junk.
Whether circumcision interferes with sexual pleasure is not important to this discussion. But I will say this: the most profoundly sexual organ in the human body, and in the final analysis the only one that matters as far as pleasure goes, is the brain. If you want to give your partner a good time, figure out how to tickle his or her brain. If the two of you really click, then he or she will be doing the same for you. Sexual ecstasy and orgasm occur behind the eyeballs and above the throat.
After analysis of almost 40 years of medical research on circumcision, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued new recommendations today (March 1) stating that the benefits are not significant enough for the AAP to recommend circumcision as a routine procedure.
Article does not support parent post claim that there are any measurable benefits to circumcising infants. It says the opposite: no statistical difference in the health of circumcised and entire men has been found in forty years.
From the fifth paragraph of article:
For the first time in AAP circumcision policy history, the new recommendations also indicate that if parents decide to circumcise their infant, it is essential that pain relief be provided.
So at least in the last 10 years the process is being made a little less barbaric than it was in the last millenium. Gee I guess that's an improvement, huh?
On a closely related note, something that really bugs me about these discussions is the incredibly severe sexist language that is always used. Female genital mutilation is, according to UNICEF,
...a fundamental violation of the rights of girls. It is discriminatory and violates the rights to equal opportunities, health, freedom from violence, injury, abuse, torture and cruel or inhuman and degrading treatment, protection from harmful traditional practices, and to make decisions concerning reproduction. These rights are protected in international law.
And its counterpart for boys is properly called male genital mutilation. But instead the euphemism "circumcision" is consistently used. Until discussion of mutilation of all children is put on a gender neutral basis, these conversations are reinforcing sexual stereotypes, and the inherent sexism will continue to dominate the discourse, and interfere with the emergence of any rationally based consensus.
Call circumcision what it is: male genital mutilation. Then after correctly identifying the topic with the use of this phrase which is based on gender neutral UNICEF terminology, see where the discussion goes.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a Federal Court.
The RIAA is attempting to get it to enforce a State law. Not a Federal Law.
Nesson is saying that he thinks the State law is so badly written that it is unconstitutional on its face. But that doesn't matter. Because...
The Judge is saying that Nesson has to comply specifically with the Federal law in this regard, which does not prohibit what he has been doing so long as he does it according to its provisions. And the Judge tells him what he already knows: he will be in deep doo-doo if his publishing of these matters makes it difficult to seat an unbiased jury. What the Judge has NOT said, in a VERY LOUD WAY, is also important: there was no mention at all of the Massachusetts law that the RIAA states Nesson is violating. Federal Judge, Federal Court: Federal law trumps State law. That's as it should be.
Basically the RIAA does not have an argument here that they can bring before the Federal Court. They could charge Nesson in a State Court with violating State law. That would lead to a hell of mess with regard to jurisdiction between the Federal Government and the State... in 225+ years, the Feds and the States have worked very hard together to avoid having to face that kind of mess. No one wants to go there. Some things are best left undefined, such as lines of sovereignty and jurisdiction between Federal agencies and the States that are hosting them.
As much as I dislike the RIAA, the law is with this one in this case.
I'm not so sure that this is true.
Is a state law (Massachusetts law making it a felony to record a conversation without prior consent of all parties) binding on a Federal Court? I think probably not; I think a Federal Court would be in the same circumstance as a VA Medical Center or other Federal reservation: by policy it would comply with local laws to the extent that these do not interfere with its mission, but there is no agreement that State law is enforceable on a Federal agency operating in the State. My understanding is that both states and the Federal government have historically gone to considerable length to avoid resolving the ambiguities of sovereignty.
I think that the RIAA might need to do this as a separate action in a Massachusetts Court, since it is a Massachusetts law. Which would probably lead to a jurisdictional nightmare. Which is exactly the kind of thing that the courts have been attempting to avoid for 225 years or so. Some legal questions are better left undefined.
Replying to my own post here, and quoting myself, which are things I don't generally do.
HTML v4.01 has a clear future path to HTML 5, but the future of XHTML is not at all clear.
Less than 48 hours after I posted this, the W3C announced that further development of the XHTML standard is ending. Development effort will be focused on bringing HTML 5 along at a faster pace. HTML 5 will effectively converge the HTML and XHTML evolutionary paths back into a single path.
I guess I'm prescient wrt web technologies. Or something.
If I had mod points this morning, I would mod parent up. Sicne I don't have any at the moment, I'll argue why someone else should mod parent "insightful" or maybe "informative".
If the defendant were not clearly guilty, the ruling might simply be overturned.
This is exactly why I'm pleased that she is appealing the ruling on constitutional grounds. The appellate courts can (and should) look for every other possible basis for deciding a case before they start looking at constitutional issues and setting precedents. Since the preponderance of evidence says that the law was broken, this is now the first good test to see whether the law itself is good. And, ideally, whether the techniques of institutional barratry used by the RIAA and their member corporations are legal.
You wouldn't want to use HTML for something like this, especially with newer versions of HTML
Well, that sort of depends on where the value of the paper is.
Some academic papers are pure fluff, and-- you are right-- these do not fare well in a semantic mark-up language like HTML. If there is no meaning in the content, then the semantic tags are being applied in a purely arbitrary manner and the result ends up looking as void of sense as it is actually is. OTOH, if the content of the academic paper has meaning, then the semantic mark-up of HTML will emphasize this meaning and make it clear to the bots and spiders that index the web, and the paper will be quickly integrated into the universal library of knowledge that is being built. That's a good thing.
As far as appearances go, once the semantics are done properly, then CSS can style the paper so it presents well on the screen and, through the modern miracle of "@media print", it can also produce quality hardcopy.
It is true that it would be very difficult with today's CSS to generate the kind of detailed hardcopy formatting needed to comply with the American Psychological Association's standards and other, similar, standards. But these standards were put into place to enforce a common semantic meaning on whitespace and typography usage; they were actually attemptng to do the same thing on paper that HTML semantic tags succeed in doing in digital formats. They are increasingly being replaced by HTML (since HTML does this so much better). It has been many long years since I've heard any academics talking wishfully about page scanning machines that could run through the last five years of JAMA journals and extract all the citations. Now you can do that with a few lines of script built around a regex that searches for <cite> tags...
Aspirin seems to mess up people's stomach lining much more than acetaminophen/ibuprofen.
I'm pleased that the word "seems" was used here.
Historically what happened is that some comparative studies were done 40 to 50 years ago that correlated aspirin use with aggravation of peptic ulcers. The role of H. pylori as the cause of peptic ulcers was not recognized until much later, in the late 1980s. It is now known that by far the most common cause of ulcers is an infection. If you bathe an infected sore with an aspirin solution, that is likely to cause you an increase in discomfort, but it obviously the aspirin was not cause of the sore.
I'm not in a position now to do any literature research on this, but I have not heard of any recent studies that have either
Cynical as I am about the American health care industry, I doubt that any USA research will be done on this, since there is no room for profit with aspirin based therapies. But perhaps Canada or England would run a new large scale study.
I would suggest that part of such a study should involve doing the cheap breath test for H. pylori on all test subjects who reported G.I. distress on taking aspirin, treating any sub clinical H. pylori infections discovered (expect a minimum of 50% to be H. pylori positive; the bug is that common), and seeing if their toleration of aspirin improves after they are free of the H. pylori infection.
Google on "acetaminophen patents". You will find that there are over a million articles and the first dozen at least describe different patents of manufacturing processes that are in effect today. In contrast, there are many fewer articles on "aspirin patents" and only one in the first dozen or so that describes a current patent (by Bayer, for a sustained release formulation). Most of the aspirin articles are historical, which makes sense since aspirin was the first synthetic drug and an early patented drug (possibly the first of these, too.)
So there is still a lot of money being made in the IP surrounding the marketing of acetaminophen.
To put this in perspective, there is some doubt that these "hot spots" are indicative of any genetic differences at all. The article is describing epigenetic phenomena (the still mysterious thing that turns genes on and off, either according to some bootstrap sequence or through sensing environmental changes in some unknown way.) It might be that the schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are products of perfectly normal genes that were activated in an unusual sequence.
It turns out that mapping the human genome is not going to be enough. When we have that done, we will find that we've only reverse-engineered the subroutine libraries and maybe the API; we still don't have a clue where the high level programming that uses this stuff is located.
Think about the incredibly detailed and precise processes involved in mitosis. This is definitely not happening under the direct control of genes, since it is the genetic structures themselves that are being acted on. So what are the mechanisms that guide this process, and where is the code for this process, and how can we learn to read that code? I'm guessing that these are central questions that the emerging study of epigenetics is looking at.
Red Flayer, you are amazing! 13 posts in 7 different threads in 6 hours... impressive. And nearly every one of them confrontational to boot.
COX 2 inhibition is one mechanism of anti-inflammatory action typical of the NSAIDs. When Vioxx was introduced, it was thought to be a better anti-inflammatory agent because it preferentially inhibited COX 2 over COX 1 (and COX 3, whose functions are not well understood as yet), and that this would reduce the incidence of gastric irritation associated with aspirin and some other NSAIDs. But it has been withdrawn from the market as its use significantly increases the risk of thrombus incidents: heart attacks and strokes. And it is now thought that this happens when the balance between COX 1 and COX 2 is shifted in a bad way. Which would suggest that aspirin, which nonselectively inhibits both, is possibly safer than any of the COX 2 inhibitors.
So, Red Flayer, your facts are correct... and they undermine your argument.
Besides, we were talking of the analgesic use of these drugs, and specifically in their role as a synergetic for oral opiates. This is a very different purpose with a very different kind of dosage regimen, and the COX inhibition mechanisms may not even be involved.
Oh, this also needs some further comment:
Re: the higher margin between therapeutic level and destructive overdose level, I'm not sure, and I can;t be bothered to look up the LD50 and therapeutic levels right now. What I DO know is that the margin between minimum therapeutic level and minimum toxicity level is much smaller for ASA than APAP. For a lot of people, side effects from ASA are experience at a *lower* blood concentration than the minimum therapeutic level.
The "minimum toxicity level" you are talking about here is the fully reversible tinnitus that I described as an early warning sign. Your spin doctoring seems inappropriate. Aspirin's way of usually causing "ringing in the ears" before any irreversible damage occurs remains an important positive feature of the drug. (I do realize that for someone posting so frequently over such a broad range of subjects, looking up certain critical details can be a bother, and I believe me I fully understand where you are coming from with that.)
Okay, I've been a good boy scout and fed the trolls. Hopefully in a way that some third parties reading this will find something of interest here.
The acetaminophen is added because it increases the effectiveness of the narcotic, so a lower dose of the narcotic is needed for good pain control. Has nothing at all to do with controlling illicit drug use.
But what is fucked is that aspirin has this same effect with the narcotics and is much safer to use, and in fact aspirin + narcotic compounds used to be the common thing back in the day (prior to 1980). The change to acetaminophen compounds had to do with the profit margins of the pharmaceutical companies more than for any other reason. (Aspirin was the first ever drug synthesized in a laboratory and neither it nor any of the process that is used to make it can be patented. Plus the stuff is so easy and cheap to make that there is no way for a large pharmaceutical company to squeeze out smaller competitors. So aspirin is a failure in the American health care industry, despite its therapeutic effectiveness. No profit there.
While what you say is true, aspirin has the same synergistic effects with oral opiates as acetaminophen, and is equivalent in terms of antipyretic and anti-inflammatory action as well. However it has a much wider margin between therapeutic level and destructive overdose level, and since overdosing usually causes tinnitus (ringing in the ears) long before any permanent damage is done, it comes complete with an audible overdose warning system.
So there is not, and has never been, a valid reason for creating acetaminophen based competitors to the aspirin based compounds that were prevalent before 1980. Such as Emperin #3 (replaced by Tylenol #3), APC, APC with Codeine, and so on.
The problem with aspirin in this regard is that about three decades ago several marketing campaigns were pushing Tylenol products by putting undue emphasis on aspirin sometimes causing stomach distress in some people. This was before it was known that stomach ulcers were caused by a bacterial infection, and it was easy to suggest that too much aspirin could be causing some ulcers.
The modern American health care industry is riddled with these kinds of bullshit pharmaceutical fads. "We'll do anything for a buck" seems to be the motto.
Aspirin isn't without its own problems. High doses for an extended period of time can lead to long clotting times, for instance. But on the whole, it is a whole lot safer than acetaminophen. It just isn't as profitable.
My earlier reply was both more snarky and less informative than was necessary, and I apologize. So although it wasn't incorrect, it was still wrong, and I can do better.
A simple script can process the final HTML fragment of each page and insert id="unique" attributes on each paragraph, etc, and targets where these would be useful.
That use of the "name" attribute has been deprecated for years. I don't know of any browser that doesn't support id targets.
The name attribute has been deprecated in XHTML, but it is not deprecated in HTML. These are two very different kinds of markups, despite their similarities. One of the major differences is that HTML v4.01 has a clear future path to HTML 5, but the future of XHTML is not at all clear. XHTML may end up being one of those constructions based on solid theory that did not work out in practice (except in niche applications). There have been a few of these among the computer languages: Forth, Smalltalk, Pascal, etc. The main point here is that when working in the HTML v4.01 Strict standard, the name attribute is not deprecated.
On a closely related note, while one can do something like <p id="target"> and then somewhere else do <a href="#target">goto target</a>, this kind of construction muddies the semantics and makes the page more brittle. During revision, there is nothing to clue the rewriter that the id attribute is being used as a target, and that changing it, or removing it, would break links. So while it is possible to do this, it should not be the practice; the practice should be to use the anchor <a name="whatever"> to keep the semantic structure clear. (Or go ahead and use <a id="whatever"> if you want, but the older practice is fully acceptable and is also guaranteed to work in even antique browsers.)
I've arranged my bookmarks into daily/weekly/monthly folders based on topics.
What a fantastically neat idea! I've always categorized them by subject area, but there is no reason why I can't set up calendar categories as well, and simply have dual entries for some sites.
I'm often browsing with a dozen tabs open, but rarely more than that. Once the horizontal scroll kicks in, any advantage to keeping multiple tabs open is lost; it makes more sense to invest the minute or two it takes to make and organize some bookmarks.
Try reading the documentation (one of many possible sources) before speaking up on a subject you know nothing about. And remember: a closed mouth gathers no foot.
The anchor tag, <a>, has to have a name attribute to be useful in its eponymous function. Or to put it in blunter terms, if you ain't got a <a name="there"></a>, you can't do a <a href="#there">Goto There </a>. And despite how harmful gotos might be in other environments, on these Intartubes, it is these gotos that put the hyper in the web.
I'd show you how it works in this post, but in its infinite mechanical wisdom the slashdot lameness filter prevents self-referential links in the comments. Prolly a good thing, considering what the younger members of our population are sometimes like.
Now get offa my lawn!
For the right persons, transcribing the handwritten notes and sketches would be very rewarding. Werner Von Braun was pivotal technologist whose work for the Nazis either posed one of the greatest threats to England during WWII or, through high level monkeywrenching, managed to keep that threat from becoming a reality. He was definitely a very complex character who succeeded in doing a helluva good balancing act on dangerously high political high wires.
So access to his notes in exchange for doing the drudge work of transcribing them could be very interesting to biographers, technology historians, and the like. There are probably at least half a dozen very different biographies that could be written about this man, all of them equally accurate.
I'll forego using mod points on this thread to reply. I'll burn them off on some other topic.
It's surprising that there's not a single really overweight person commenting here, considering that 90% of overweight (by BMI) are simply fat.
I qualify by BMI (29.5, just shy of "obese") and by personal assessment (yes, I do look feel fat in this body right now). I was forced into a more sedentary life style 20 years ago and for many years I was obese by any standard, but I've shed more than 20 lbs from my heaviest weight. I am now reasonably fit, bicycling over 100 miles per week and self-training to do century ride in a month or so. I also do flat water kayaking, which is a good complement to the biking.
link to the NIH BMI Calculator used below.
Here's the thing: my personal ideal body weight will give me a BMI of 27.0 at the weight where I felt best before the accident that changed a lot of things in my life. This is still "overweight" by accepted standards. But to get to the top of the "normal" BMI range at 25.0, I would have drop to my weight when I graduated from high school, when I was a skinny guy with all the muscle tone of a boiled noodle. My long term (5 - 10 year) goal is to drop another 20 lbs to a BMI of 27, but I would have to drop 33 lb to get down to a BMI of 25, and that would definitely be unhealthy.
BMI can be sort of helpful to people of European and Asian descent in possibly refining their personal ideal self-image, but it isn't going to work so well with descendants of Native Americans, Polynesians, or Arctic peoples. But it isn't very accurate, and if it does not match up with a healthy person's ideal self-image, it should be ignored.
Let me fix that for you:
the SECOND MOST IMPORTANT aspect of the documents is that it is easily searched.
The FIRST is of course making a high fidelity digital copy of the original pages, that will serve as the authority on all questions of possible ambiguity in the handwriting, or whether a figure in the margin is a thumbnail sketch or a mere doodle.
A 600 or 1200 dpi .png image of each page in full color would do as the master digital archive. The .png format is an excellent choice since it is open, well understood, and going to be around for a long, long time. Its accuracy is more than adequate for this work. That it supports lossless compression is a bonus: images of pages usually compress very well. Copies of the master digital library should be kept at various institutions and made available on request to anyone.
Then for public and research use, convert each page to HTML 4.01 strict, (since it is universally available, will be around for a long, long time, and Google, etc, can do the indexing for us). UTF of course, especially since Werner used some German and Greek glyphs in his handwriting.
Suggest using OCR to handle conversion of the typed notes, and volunteers or cheap student labor to transcribe the handwritten material (use consensus of several transcribers to assure accuracy). These can be incorporated into the main pages as divs and spans inserted into the correct place in the flow (use classes like "left margin" and "rightmargin"). CSS can use absolute positioning to make them marginal accordians (expand from the margin on mouseover), etc.
Treat sketches like the handwriting: put an img of the sketch into a div or span at the right place in the flow, then also add a searchable text description of the sketch in that div.
A simple script can process the final HTML fragment of each page and insert id="unique" attributes on each paragraph, etc, and <a name="unique"> targets where these would be useful.
The finished NASA product should be a simple online database using server side scripting to compose and serve out pages on request. It should be built with cooperation from Google and other search platforms so that spiders will have good access to the body of the work without causing excessive bandwidth problems. It should be possible for any researcher to develop his own custom search engine. Ideally, it will support not just the notes, but also concordances, wiki discussions, etc.
I once did a lot of this kind of work in moving sermons and such that were circulated by mimeograph in the 1960s and 1970s to web pages. I digitized the pages with a Minolta Z1 camera on a reverse tripod using indirect lighting, and converted to OCR with OmniScan (IIRC). The OCR came out in Word 97 format, and I used Perl scripts to transcribe to HTML. If the technical quality of the originals is good, this can go pretty fast and is highly accurate, even as a basement project. If the original notes use consistent formatting, which I would expect of Werner, then scripting with good use of regular expressions cna do the bulk of the HTML markup.
Thanks for the support. I certainly did not write that as flamebait, and I'm glad to see that -1 has now been offset by a +1 mod. In retrospect I do feel that I dragged that post to the wrong side of the tl;dr line, but that makes it boring, not flamebait.
Again, thanks. In my previous incarnation here as MysticGoat, #582871, I had karma to burn, but I have just started with my WillWoodhull account and so far my karma is only in the "good" range. More importantly, I've got a long way to go before this account is as befriended as the late, lamented MysticGoat account was. (Somewhere some bits got crossed up in the MysticGoat configuration and I cannot reset the email address, and anyway I've now grown into an Elder Curmudgeon who no longer feels the need to use a nom de web on these new fangled intartubes.)
It is exceedingly hard to fire someone from the US Civil Service, especially after 38 years. There are good reasons for this: it assures some stability in government as elected officials and their political appointees come and go, for one thing.
Carlin is at or near retirement. The usual way to handle a problem child like him is to give him the lateral arebesque: assign him to a specific Siberian task that isolates him and limits the amount of damage he can do to the institution, such as having him work on the problems in the Grants database.
Carlin is unlikely to stay in Federal employment for much longer. This looks like a well prepared swan song prior to his voluntary retirement, that will sound very sweet to the ears of his new employers in the private sector.
One does have to look at the broader context in situations like this.
First point, since it has some humor value, is that Carlin's field is economics. He is expert in the same studies and techniques as those wonderful quants who gave the financial world those marvelous risk management tools called "derivatives". Economics was nick-named "the dismal science" for a couple of reasons, one being a reference to the quality of the extrapolations that economists have used in their predictions.
More serious points: this news is presented to the world through the Competitive Enterprise Institute. It has a $3 million+ annual budget, and is supported by donations from ExxonMobil, American Petroleum Institute, Dow Chemical, General Motors, Ford Motor Company, Phillip Morris, and others. It is characterized as a "libertarian" think tank ideologically opposed to any government regulation of business conduct. It has taken an active role in advocating for "free-market environmentalism" where corporations and not governments would determine the best way to manage the environment. It has been a continuing, constant critic of global warming concerns. (See Wikipedia article, also validation of primary source, also Google on "Competitive Enterprise Institute".)
WRT Alan Carlin himself: he has been in the US Civil Service for 38 years, so he is fully vested in one of the best retirement packages in the world, and he is at retirement age. His title is "Senior Operations Research Analyst" at the National Center for Environmental Economics of the EPA. He would be at the top of his pay scale at this point, and it is unlikely that continued Federal employment has anything to offer him that he would be interested in doing (a common theme through the papers he has published in the last few years shows a bias against the kinds of Federal protections that the Obama Administration is involved in setting up). It is not at all unlikely that he will soon start drawing his Federal pension and begin a second career in the private sector as a consultant with expertise on EPA matters, or as a staff person in a think tank not unlike CEI. (see synopsis of A. Carlin's career.)
WRT the emails that were sent to Carlin, that were then mysteriously leaked to the national media through CEI: Carlin attempted to inject his argument against a policy decision into the works after he would have known that the period for such commentary was closed. Further, he was acting out of his area of expertise, which is economics, by attempting a review of the recent literature of climate research papers. Further, and to me most telling, is that he admits that he has not formatted his work in accordance with EPA standards, nor is providing proper citations that would allow distinguishing between crap and peer reviewed papers. I see this clearly showing that he had an ulterior motive of monkeywrenching the process, since his past publications show that he knows very well how to write these kinds of papers. It looks very much like he knew his work would be rejected, planned on having it rejected, and planned on collecting the emails that he would receive afterward to use in the way that these emails have been used. (See the .pdf referred to in the article summary, and note that the 4 emails were cherry picked from a much longer body of correspondence.)
BTW, taken in context,the quote from Carlin's boss, "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision," takes on a very different meaning. What Carlin is being told is that discussion has moved on from what the science is to what the legal and societal implications are, and how to frame a policy that addresses those c
Agreed, there are too many unknowns and no theory is provable. However TFA does a credible job of dismissing a group of theories from further consideration, so it is significant in narrowing things down a little bit.
This wikipedia article on the galaxy seems like a good overview of known data; a long article but well worth the reading, as recent observations have caused major changes to the model of the Galaxy a lot of us grew up with. The specific section I'm pointing to describes how Sol bobs from one side of the galactic plane to the other every 43 million years or so, and that this seems to correlate with mass extinction events. One possible mechanism being an increase in asteroid hits as we bob through the denser stuff on the plane. No need to posit gamma death rays; simple Newtonian kinetics as we dash from one side of the freeway to the other would be sufficient.
Default is what happens when you don't show up to meet your obligations, legal or otherwise. You are making the "none of the above" choice
Exactly so! Which is why it is such a bad choice for labeling the factory settings of software, or anything else, for that matter.
A better choice would have been the word "preset". As in 'The software installs with preset configuration values which can be changed through the Preferences menu.'
Unfortunately, the decision to use the word "default" had to be made a long time before the first electronic thesaurus by some geeks who knew much more about artificial machine languages than they did about the language that came out of their own mouths. They made a poor choice, and now we are stuck with it.
"Default" was a poorly chosen word in this context, even in English. It has too many negative connotations; it suggests that a user who hasn't changed the factory settings has failed in some way. "Preset" is a synonym in this context, and a better word, since it is neutral.
Does Hindi have a term equivalent to "preset"?
While I agree circumcision is a form a mutilation, comparing it to female circumcision isn't quite right. For the two to be comparable, it would be like removing the glans of the male genitalia, not the foreskin.
FGM and MGM are both mutilations inflicted on children, and up to that point I and parent post agree.
But the implication that MGM is more acceptable than FGM because it is somehow a lesser amount of mutilation is not something I can follow. Either one of these would be clearly criminal activity if done by perverts who kidnapped children, had their little bit of fun, and then released them otherwise unharmed. When viewed without the prejudice of cultural biases, any kind of mutilation of children is equally reprehensible. Whether MGM, or FGM, or chopping off the little fingers at the distal joint, or at the medial joint... it is all mutilation of human beings without their informed consent.
Also, there is more damage done to the penis in circumcision than parent post is recognizing. After the foreskin is removed, through a process called cornification the entire glans changes from a mucosal surface to an epidermal surface like that of the fingers or toes. So circumcision not only removes more than one third of the sensitive surface area of the erect penis, it alters the sensitivity of what remains. That has to happen. I can tell you as an entire male, that it is exceedingly uncomfortable to have the exposed uncircumcised glans rubbing against the fabric of pajamas or underwear. There is definitely some loss of sensation with circumcision, or the 30% of men who have been circumcised would either run around with their cocks hanging out, or be wearing oversized codpieces to hold their jockey shorts away from their junk.
Whether circumcision interferes with sexual pleasure is not important to this discussion. But I will say this: the most profoundly sexual organ in the human body, and in the final analysis the only one that matters as far as pleasure goes, is the brain. If you want to give your partner a good time, figure out how to tickle his or her brain. If the two of you really click, then he or she will be doing the same for you. Sexual ecstasy and orgasm occur behind the eyeballs and above the throat.
First sentence in article cited by parent post:
After analysis of almost 40 years of medical research on circumcision, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued new recommendations today (March 1) stating that the benefits are not significant enough for the AAP to recommend circumcision as a routine procedure.
Article does not support parent post claim that there are any measurable benefits to circumcising infants. It says the opposite: no statistical difference in the health of circumcised and entire men has been found in forty years.
From the fifth paragraph of article:
For the first time in AAP circumcision policy history, the new recommendations also indicate that if parents decide to circumcise their infant, it is essential that pain relief be provided.
So at least in the last 10 years the process is being made a little less barbaric than it was in the last millenium. Gee I guess that's an improvement, huh?
On a closely related note, something that really bugs me about these discussions is the incredibly severe sexist language that is always used. Female genital mutilation is, according to UNICEF,
...a fundamental violation of the rights of girls. It is discriminatory and violates the rights to equal opportunities, health, freedom from violence, injury, abuse, torture and cruel or inhuman and degrading treatment, protection from harmful traditional practices, and to make decisions concerning reproduction. These rights are protected in international law.
And its counterpart for boys is properly called male genital mutilation. But instead the euphemism "circumcision" is consistently used. Until discussion of mutilation of all children is put on a gender neutral basis, these conversations are reinforcing sexual stereotypes, and the inherent sexism will continue to dominate the discourse, and interfere with the emergence of any rationally based consensus.
Call circumcision what it is: male genital mutilation. Then after correctly identifying the topic with the use of this phrase which is based on gender neutral UNICEF terminology, see where the discussion goes.