Because her whole attitude changes when she's suffering. She DID have serious pain. She stopped playing, stopped purring, and stopped being interested in her food. Now she purrs, plays, and expresses preferences betwen types of foods quite cheerfully.
I think people underestimate exactly how much one learns when living in close concert with other creatures. So long as she's interested in life- interested in interacting with the world around her, and i don't mean whether she's bored... if her eyes get that glassy listless look, her coat gets dull, and she mewls in pain when she moves, that's when i'll know she's hurting most. Until then, we deal with day-to-day pains as they come up, and she seems really interested in life and living and the world around her.
Speaking as someone who spent an exorbitant amount
on
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· Score: 1
..to keep a cat alive, who had been born with congenital malformations, and then abused by- you guessed it- a person! - I actually can understand this. I can't argue its necessity above the need to save children, trees, cows, or any other cause you could name. But I can say this: when I was faced with the option of putting myself into debt to save the life of a charming, good-natured, sweet little creature who was relatively innocent, barely a year old, and might not even live to see me paying off the bill I chose to spend the money and get it done, and I've never regretted it.
She's still with me. I made a choice based on my earnest belief that I had a chance to help a creature who was in need. I probably wouldn't have made this choice for a stray, choosing first to support the 'higher issues' that people are referring to here- other people, for example. And if she hadn't lived, I still believe that it would have been worth it. Why? Because I couldn't live with the thought that I had let her die without trying. That's why these people will pay for these transplants.
Part guilt, part love. I know my time with her is limited. Eventually, her hips will give out due the calcification there, and her fused-from-the-middle-down spine won't give her the flexibility to work around it. and the hours of physical therapy i've done with her- yeah, I know, physical therapy for a cat- won't be able to make up for it, and to ease her discomfort she'll be put to sleep. But in the meantime, she fell asleep with her head on my arm last night. She won't last till they have replacement parts. Too many things wrong. But how do you look at an animal that you've accepted into your family- and that's the key moral issue for most people- and deny them treatment that might let them live?
it isn't necessarily right, but we make our choices based on what affects us closest to home first. It takes a lot of guts and perspective to accept those other issues out there- poverty, hunger, disease, the ecological state of our planet- as part of our own household.
Just some thoughts; feel free to pick apart and disagree.
You're in an auto accident. You've got sole biometric access to your accounts. All of them, including your work, home, bank, etc. And there's enough left of you to salvage- but to avoid somebody stealing a finger and using the DNA/fingerprint system, they require an additional ID 'print' as well. Your eyes have been ruined. Your voice is damaged. What do you do?
You use a pin number, because that's the backup. Lowtech. Or your housekey. There are flaws in every system, and total technology can mean total failure. Or rather, Biometrical Access Control could become the Single Point of Failure for future secure systems.
# of exceptions it takes to disprove a rule?
on
Half Mast
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Or worse, a socially accepted stereotype? Yes, Asperger's Syndrome is an interesting subset of Autism. And yes, most people live somewhere on the spectrum of 2 + 2 = 4 and call that sanity. But I had a high school teacher who got this right.
He said, two plus two equals four for the mainstream, and that's what we're going to call sanity. We need rules to keep society ordered and we need a common ground to talk from. But everybody has their places where they don't line up to the norm. For some peeople, that's everywhere. For some people, 2 + 2 = 22, or twelve, or bright green. And Some day, they're going to betalking you down from the top of a building (he was addressing the whole class) and they're going to ask you, gee, what the H* were you thinking? And you're going to say, well... i don't know. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time...
And that's not the scary part. The scary part is, that it will be true: it really will have made sense at the time. You will have found the place where, for you, two plus two no longer matches the four that everyone else comes up with.
I don't offer this to excuse anything that anyone has done. Murder is murder. But I offer this as thought-fodder against the prediliction that we have, as a society, for nice little categories and nice little diagnoses. There's a wide range of stuff out there in the human mind-spectrum, some of it dangerous and some of it good, and not all of it definable by our current terms. Yeah, and I hated high school, too. But I think a lot of social fringe elements are actually better prepared for the outside world, and tend to do better in it, than their high school tormentors, because they have been forced to face the world as an individual without backup. It isn't right and it isn't necessarily worth it, but let's not forget that if superman hadn't had those powers, he never would have made it through high school without being stuffed into a locker either- or else he would have been one more football captain.
"Silicon implants in women who had had cosmetic breast surgery were also known to have exploded during cremation."
Anyone out there want their info to go when they do? And what's more- does anybody want to think about where those smart Bio Chips are gonna go, if they aren't slagged? Do you really want that around forever? (On the other hand, it would make one heck of a 'memory album' for the great-grandkids...)
I'm sorry, the guy just lost his credibility with me; i mean, he just lost any base credibility that he might have had just as a speaker with something to say.
If the implement of theoretically-impending broadcast doom had in fact been functioning at a heat hot enough to successfully fry an egg, that would be one thing. But... Here's this crackpot spouting doomsday prophesy about the 'napster of the future,' says that his wife can't use it anyway, and then tries to fry an egg on it?
Oke. there's so much wrong with this picture that i don't know where to start. 1.) if his wife can't use it, then why is he worried about it, since obviously the average consumer will give up anyway. (or else he's just royally insulted his wife.) 2.) if he's so concerned with the heat at which they operate, why did he bring one home to his wife in the first place?
and 3.) did this guy do a test run? did it work the first time he tried to fry an egg on it?
And they take this person seriously? he also completely undermined everything he had to say, with a visual demonstration that his hot-enough-to-fry-an-egg thing didn't work out...
On the other hand, i'd have paid to see that on cable!!
This should be good for a laugh, but one of the biggest uses i've seen by PDAs are by the people with the least status to symbolise.
Having a PDA means that they have an alarm to tell them when to take their meds, that they have something to put all their doctor appointments in, and that those with ADHD can have something to keep them occupied when they'd otherwise be going crazy looking for something to do. (or bothering you on the train, if you're unfortunate enough to sit next to some of our patients.)
It allows for medical record keeping, so we encourage the use of ProfileMD or similar applications, and it allows for keeping things like journals of conditions. It also allows our doctors to keep the enitre PDR on cartridge so that they don't have to be thumbing through books in front of a patient. It lets the patients have it on cartridge too, so if the doctor's got no idea and starts spouting medical jjargon, the patient can look it up.
I'd be lost without mine, because i can't carry too much stuff and it lets me keep my info all in one place. On the other hand, if i lose it, i'm screwed for however long it takes me to get a replacement and download the info again...
So i see them being used all the time, but admittedly in a very small and specific cross-section. They are allowing us to have a 'reminder' nanny for the patients that need them, once everybody's trained to always look everything up. And it lets us beam data back and forth. Readable data, which comes in handy when trying to understand the inevitable medical glyphs that doctors and nurses are famous for...
It's a big day when a patient shows up on time and has taken their medication and remembers the instructions you gave them last time, because you entered it into their PDA.
If we could only get them for the blind...
But i don't see a lot of turnover at this level, because people mostly need something that works and then they stick with it. At that level they don't care about upgrading, and the docs are too busy. They upgrade when somebody buys them a new one. Interestingly enough, drug companies were handing them out like crazy two years ago- Lilly was handing out Da Vincis, some of which turned out not to work at all, and there were Pfizer drug ones that said things like zoloft on them. This was about the same time that there was the huge flap about companies handing out camcorders and vacations?
It caused quite a stir, especially when it got out that whole shipments of them were duds. Who needs a PDA that says Prozac on the front, anyway?
This is actually an important subject, as trite as it sounds, because what i think they are getting at is NOT that laughter doesn't help, but that, in the words of one survivor, "Cancer doesn't give a rat's ass whether you have a positive mental outlook."
The point isn't that people with good attitudes don't have a better chance; the point is that the general public for a very long time has been encouraged to believe that cancer is affected more by the mental than by the physical, and this leads to a lot of misconceptions about cancer. There's no question that laughter, or even the anticipation of laughter, is good for you. It boosts endorphins, it helps the immune system, but while these things may make cancer easier to deal with symptomatically, they don't address the underlying causative issues, and the implied connections encourage people to believe that you just aren't playing or praying hard enough.
The point here, of this article and the growing movement behind it, is that people feel guilty- horribly, horrendously, unnecessarily guilty- when they get sick or have to watch someone else get sick, and it's going to take a lot to make that social environment change. I volunteer time to help a group of people online who deal with chronic illnesses, and this study is of unimaginable relevance to them. It means that for once, someone in the medical community is shaking their head and saying- by the way, it's not your fault that you have cancer. You should do everything you can to stay upbeat, but the 'cure' doesn't exist yet, it's not your failure to utilise this particular 'cure' that is keeping you from being healthy.
And that's important. That's important on a lot of levels, and treatment is one of them, because when a patient knows that they don't have to fake their way into a smile every day, they can get down to processing the very real grief and loss that go with a chronic illness- and this can substantially increase their quality of life, however long that life may extend. I've had to watch people day in and day out coping with this, and feeling worse because those around them feel that they must stay cheerful in order to survive. It becomes the last defense for a lot of family members who can't otherwise deal with having someone near them sick- to blame it on the patient, to try to make sense out of it by describing it as a failing- they were sick and they just lost hope, so they didn't get better... Just as it's beginning to be recognised in the medical community that depression is a symtpom of, and not the cause of, many other illnesses. Remember when ulcers were entirely attributed to stress?
I'm all in favour of a positive mental outlook. But i'm not in favour of letting our prejudice for cheerful patients create a false image of what it takes to get through it- good cheer and optimism are only a part of the puzzle. Bad things really do happen to good people, and being a better person isn't always going to make it stop. I think this article is a good start- and i think it's true. Cancer doesn't care. We care, so we will cling to anything that we can. And miracles do happen, but not necessarily because of the reasons that we attribute them to. As we come to understand illnesses better, there may be more studies like this, just to remind people that while we hold a lOT of power to change things, we need to know where the buttons are before we can press them- and a smile apparently didn't do it for an illness like cancer.
However, i'll keep reading the funny pages and slashdot comments, because passing the funny ones along seems to at least have cheered people up. (and there are occasional ward uprisings... do you hear a sound, as of somebody playing with the wiring? um- gotta go check and see what folks are feeling energetic enough to be destroying today!!!)
Inuyasha was not what i intended. I meant to tune in to A science special on mummification. I accidentally ended up on the cartoon network watching InuYasha, and haven't gotten free since. I resisted the anime invasion, i thought i was safe- a friend just about tied me down to make me watch some... and those seeds have borne fruit.... how can i be addicted to such an obvious ploy for audience? *sigh* but since i refuse to give up my addictions once i've got them, i guess i'm stuck. Did anyone else fiercely resist the anime craze? Maybe it's something in the water.
Simply put: I was a vegetarian and happy that way. IT almost killed me, because it turned out i have multiple allergies AND Celiac, which means that i can only eat two grains- rice and corn. No others. I can eat meat, and now i have to; i can eat most vegetables. I can have dairy if it's lactose-converted, and i can't eat most of the chemicals and artificial additives (or, for that matter, most natural additives.)
Anyone want to guess how much weight i lost with that kind of shock to my system? I only weighed 126 to start with, and most of me was muscle. I dropped to 106. And here's the important part: that kind of weight loss does damage. Every time. You're making a bet, on a high-protien diet, that your risk of injury from losing weight that way is less than your injury from remaining obese. Which is why my nutritionists and the other members of my medical team- that's right, i said team were in earnest when they told me that this is NOT a good way to lose weight- ever. THey told me that Atkins was not a fraud, but to take that idea to an extreme the way people do is a very bad idea. One piece of bread is not enough carbohydrates to stave off gout or other diet-linked damages.
So what am i doing now? Well, i weigh about 116, which is due to a serious effort to eat more, period. If i can take in more than the 1632 calories that i burn on an average day, I will probably gain weight. Some of those have to be carbohydrates, enough to keep my body in the habit of using them as fuel. The kicker is this- I NEVER liked rice. And there's wheat in most soy sauce, so that rules out the take-out diet.
My point: extremity is bad, you're likely to lose weight on the Atkins diet, and it's likely to do you lasting harm, as evidenced by how fast they started trying to get me off my accidental wander onto it. I'm holding steady at 116, and I miss my coca cola breakfasts. (I'd also point out that most of the geeks I know are in great shape, and some of them are slashdotters. So some slashdotters are in great shape.)
We saw this with Ebonics. We're seeing this with Spanish and Spanglesh. We saw this with hedge french down south, too. We have seen this before.
What's more, we'll see it again.
Not only is the question evolving, but so is the answer. We recognise that not everyone speaks- or writes- the same language. But people are bilingual without meaning to be. How many people have included an HTML tag in a document? Raise your hands. Be honest. How many people have tried to use tags in a limited-to-plain-text format? Because that's what school english is: it's no smileys, no phone text, use the language and get graded on how well you do with it. No shortcuts, no abbreviations, no shorthand notes. (Remember shorthand?)
How many people can go from writing a full document in HTML to having a verbal conversation in regular speech?
We are already doing it, folks. And we should require of the kids that they live up to the standard: don't mix codes unless they're compatible. Is school english the same as street english? NO! Do we sound different when we call home than when we answer the phone at work? Yes, if we're in an old-school business environment- and if we do, we frequently get recognised for it, no matter what our middle managers can't spell. What's happening is that excellence is having an even greater field for visibility: the more they can't spell or speak in one coherent language at a time, the more those of us who are multilingual and fluent in our many fields look great by comparison.
YES. Grade them accroding to what's required. And acknowledge that there are places where this is acceptable, and that if they don't even know what they're writing, they aren't paying enough attention. They need to know what language they're using, and they need to know how to keep their codes clean. (by the way, this coment is being written by someone whose code is awful, and i'm having to clean it up, too.)
And here is an article to really bend your brain over just how much argument has existed just within the 'what's plain english?' bracket over the years.
For the record, i found a way to keep my Handheld/PDA graffiti out of my handwriting. I use my left hand for their writing system, and my right for regular script. This would probably be more difficult for someone who isn't ambidextrous, but with a little practice works just fine. Picked up the tip from a neuropsych buddy with whom I had a long debate over brain centers and speech.
What do you do when someone mails you a photograph of the place from which your house can be broken into?
From a security standpoint, I have to address the fact that Warchalking is a powerful factor in the integration of physical and in-wire security, because this requires both parties to have an awareness of the ramifications and risks inherent in the act. Because these have always been such separate departments, and it's such an important phase in the integration thereof, Warchalking is a USEFUL trigger and catalyst.
And it's from that perpective that warchalking breaks into two distinct categories, as well. If we define warchalking as the mere markup of a building that represents an unsecured wireless site, then yes, it is technically illegal, but only as
a.) graffiti, and
b.) possible incitement and abetment of a crime [theft of bandwidth.] It is also a minor offense, one which is the equivalent of putting graffiti near the unsecured perimeter of a locked down area. It is not the theft of bandwidth itself.
And because of this, it IS useful; it is the equivalent of having someone send you a photo package containing pictures of the open risks in your physical security. It's scary, and it's problematic, but it's stuff that you needed to know about.
If someone logs on, it's also technically trespassing, in the same way that punching someone while they are in their car is technically trespassing. It is an uninvited entry into an owned property - the bandwidth in question- for the intent of taking something -in this case ALSO the bandwidth in question. If you USE the warchalks to steal bandwidth, that's a crime. It's a different crime than an employee using the wireless at work for outside stuff- it's a non-affiliated person entering through a hole in the fence and using the phone system to call strangers in foreign countries.
But what if the argument is made that by not securing the premises, the place is effectively open to the public? Powerful arguments can be made that people are effectively using the company phone AFTER it has been placed out in the public arena. For example, if I install a telephone on the sidewalk, I'm an idiot if I expect people not to use it. For this reason, I think that it should be a nonprosecutable crime, unless
anything other than benign surfing occurs,
any attempt is made to access company files
any attempt is made to impersonate a company employee in ways other than simply accessing the net.
Basically, if the person is a squatter in an unfinished building that hasn't got any guards, they are benign trespassers. It's like any hacking- the Force is neither dark side nor light side till it's used.
(The next important question, and one which needs to be separated from the legal implicationa while this gets sorted out in the public forum- is whether this is ETHICAL.) We're grateful to warchalkers because they are doing us a favour that other hackers haven't done: they are letting us know where the holes are. Frankly, that's a movement that I endorse and consider ethically acceptable, and it's our responsibility to act on the risk and see that no one gets to use the hole in the fence that they so kindly sent us a photo of.
It's high time that the two security systems were integrated: someone should be patrolling ALL the perimeters, and if you aren't, it's a lot harder to make the case that someone who's only marking up the property risks is guilty of anything more than a chalkmark or a photograph.
This site offers a chance to spend someone else's money to make superman's birthday brighter.
This is the Christopher Reeve site where you get to send an e-card. As everybody I'm sure remembers, he promised that he'd walk before he was fifty. Well, that's coming up fast (the 25th, i think) and he can walk- but only underwater, where he doesn't have to carry his full weight. In the meantime, there's this: for every ecard sent, there's a dollar promised to the foundation he started.
If there's one thing that I love better than charity, it's charity with someone else's money.
Oke. I'm a girl who has a traditionally male first name. And i can't tell you how many cashiers i have berated for not checking my signature. They look at me blankly, and say, "Oh, i thought it was your husband's card."
And i silently hold up my ringless left hand, and as they blink, cluelesly, i explain to them that i always want them to check the signature. What if a guy were to swipe my card? i then show them my license, etc.
I USED to write, "Please request identification," on the card. Oddly enough, it was the bank that made me stop this, because they said that i had to have a valid signature, or they wouldn't be able to acknowledge ANY fraudulent charges. Darn it. THat worked best but is now not allwed to me, so i settle for not signing anything until i see them actually look at the card. And if they don't raise an eyebrow when they see my unusual name on the card, i stand there until they compare the signature...
I used to be a cashier, too. And i have seen it all: the people who actually use whiteout on the back of the card- the new, rollon whiteout can be used, with a little epoxy, to create a new (but very inauthentic looking to a close look) signature strip; the people who bring the unsigned card up and then offer to sign it in front of you; the people who give you the card, write an entirely different name, and then tell you that it's their husband's/ wife's card- and offer you a note giving them permission to use it!!!
As for my problem? Well, i talked it over with the bank. As long as it's not actually written on the signature strip, you can write anything you want on the back of the card. So, in indelible ink on the top of the back, it reads: DO NOT PROCESS THIS CARD WITHOUT CHECKING ID.
Has it worked? Mostly. I still get the occasional brainless cashier, but for the most part, they pay attention. Tha bank was happy, i'm happy, and my imaginary husband whose card they think it is- well, he's just out of luck.
I am one of the ten girls i know who know who play pinball. Mind you, i'm no steel wizard, and that little ball eludes me enough of the time that i don't win many free games.
I think that the reason pinball itself seems beyond the modern kid's immediate attention span is this: pinball is a bewildering game, at first glance. Not only are you trying to get the hand/eye co-ordination down, there is a plot to most games, whichmeans that you not only have to take in what you're doing, you also have to figure out the flashing lights and the flags and bumbers- and then try to hit them. The net result is a lot more that a video screen, it's deciphering an environment at the same time that you try to interact with it, much like the first time you use linux, or an immersion course in a foreign language.
Now, this does not mean that pinball is not for modern kids. It just means that it's an entirely different approach. And a little bit of footwork will turn up a few good machines- they tend to put them in the corners of bars, pool halls, and arcades. If you want to avoid the death of pinball, go out and play. A steady stream of quarters once every two weeks or three weeks will remind the owners that this is still a moneymaker, and what's more, a two or three minute conversation with the manatger or owner- "you know, i really come here just because you have a pinball machine," will do even more to make sure it stays.
I used to have a bunch of friends with whom i'd go play pinball. Lately, mostly because we all did the relocation shuffle, i'm on my own (and if you think folks look at you strange when you're a girl asking for parts for an '86 audi, you should see the looks they give you when you're a girl playing pinball!) It's one of those things where there's still, in spite of our best efforts to change things, a percieved gender gap.
Also- about the electronic versions- like email, it's great for the stripped down concept, but you lose the texture. Somethin' nice about having the real thing. Electronic is for getting the feel of the flags- you have to have the real to get the co-ordination down.
My point: pinball is still cool, and if you think so, you need to be out playing it, just to keep it from going out of style. And don't believe the doubters: pinball will never be gone completely. We will open retro underground pinball halls, and be passing out free drinks at the million marks, before we ever let that happen.
And i might just pick up one of the old machines, just to have a head start... hmmm.... *back to the planning lair for further consideration*
There's actually been a lot of discussion about giant squid over the years. Here are some of the most common links, and i'm not going to vouch personally for all of the data or opinions in them, but at least they provide a few other places for a look at this subject.
Frankly, all that i can do is offer my best jacques cousteau impression, and hope that they don't evolve further.
And if anybody wants to know how i happen to know any of this, let's just say that i dated a marine biologist. It won't be true, but it would make my mum happy....
Slashdot Mirror
Because her whole attitude changes when she's suffering. She DID have serious pain. She stopped playing, stopped purring, and stopped being interested in her food. Now she purrs, plays, and expresses preferences betwen types of foods quite cheerfully.
I think people underestimate exactly how much one learns when living in close concert with other creatures. So long as she's interested in life- interested in interacting with the world around her, and i don't mean whether she's bored... if her eyes get that glassy listless look, her coat gets dull, and she mewls in pain when she moves, that's when i'll know she's hurting most. Until then, we deal with day-to-day pains as they come up, and she seems really interested in life and living and the world around her.
She's still with me. I made a choice based on my earnest belief that I had a chance to help a creature who was in need. I probably wouldn't have made this choice for a stray, choosing first to support the 'higher issues' that people are referring to here- other people, for example. And if she hadn't lived, I still believe that it would have been worth it. Why? Because I couldn't live with the thought that I had let her die without trying. That's why these people will pay for these transplants.
Part guilt, part love. I know my time with her is limited. Eventually, her hips will give out due the calcification there, and her fused-from-the-middle-down spine won't give her the flexibility to work around it. and the hours of physical therapy i've done with her- yeah, I know, physical therapy for a cat- won't be able to make up for it, and to ease her discomfort she'll be put to sleep. But in the meantime, she fell asleep with her head on my arm last night. She won't last till they have replacement parts. Too many things wrong. But how do you look at an animal that you've accepted into your family- and that's the key moral issue for most people- and deny them treatment that might let them live?
it isn't necessarily right, but we make our choices based on what affects us closest to home first. It takes a lot of guts and perspective to accept those other issues out there- poverty, hunger, disease, the ecological state of our planet- as part of our own household.
Just some thoughts; feel free to pick apart and disagree.
You use a pin number, because that's the backup. Lowtech. Or your housekey. There are flaws in every system, and total technology can mean total failure. Or rather, Biometrical Access Control could become the Single Point of Failure for future secure systems.
He said, two plus two equals four for the mainstream, and that's what we're going to call sanity. We need rules to keep society ordered and we need a common ground to talk from. But everybody has their places where they don't line up to the norm. For some peeople, that's everywhere. For some people, 2 + 2 = 22, or twelve, or bright green. And Some day, they're going to betalking you down from the top of a building (he was addressing the whole class) and they're going to ask you, gee, what the H* were you thinking? And you're going to say, well... i don't know. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time...
And that's not the scary part. The scary part is, that it will be true: it really will have made sense at the time. You will have found the place where, for you, two plus two no longer matches the four that everyone else comes up with.
I don't offer this to excuse anything that anyone has done. Murder is murder. But I offer this as thought-fodder against the prediliction that we have, as a society, for nice little categories and nice little diagnoses. There's a wide range of stuff out there in the human mind-spectrum, some of it dangerous and some of it good, and not all of it definable by our current terms.
Yeah, and I hated high school, too. But I think a lot of social fringe elements are actually better prepared for the outside world, and tend to do better in it, than their high school tormentors, because they have been forced to face the world as an individual without backup. It isn't right and it isn't necessarily worth it, but let's not forget that if superman hadn't had those powers, he never would have made it through high school without being stuffed into a locker either- or else he would have been one more football captain.
"Silicon implants in women who had had cosmetic breast surgery were also known to have exploded during cremation."
Anyone out there want their info to go when they do? And what's more- does anybody want to think about where those smart Bio Chips are gonna go, if they aren't slagged? Do you really want that around forever? (On the other hand, it would make one heck of a 'memory album' for the great-grandkids...)
I'm sorry, the guy just lost his credibility with me; i mean, he just lost any base credibility that he might have had just as a speaker with something to say.
If the implement of theoretically-impending broadcast doom had in fact been functioning at a heat hot enough to successfully fry an egg, that would be one thing. But... Here's this crackpot spouting doomsday prophesy about the 'napster of the future,' says that his wife can't use it anyway, and then tries to fry an egg on it?
Oke. there's so much wrong with this picture that i don't know where to start. 1.) if his wife can't use it, then why is he worried about it, since obviously the average consumer will give up anyway. (or else he's just royally insulted his wife.) 2.) if he's so concerned with the heat at which they operate, why did he bring one home to his wife in the first place?
and 3.) did this guy do a test run? did it work the first time he tried to fry an egg on it? And they take this person seriously? he also completely undermined everything he had to say, with a visual demonstration that his hot-enough-to-fry-an-egg thing didn't work out... On the other hand, i'd have paid to see that on cable!!
This should be good for a laugh, but one of the biggest uses i've seen by PDAs are by the people with the least status to symbolise. Having a PDA means that they have an alarm to tell them when to take their meds, that they have something to put all their doctor appointments in, and that those with ADHD can have something to keep them occupied when they'd otherwise be going crazy looking for something to do. (or bothering you on the train, if you're unfortunate enough to sit next to some of our patients.) It allows for medical record keeping, so we encourage the use of ProfileMD or similar applications, and it allows for keeping things like journals of conditions. It also allows our doctors to keep the enitre PDR on cartridge so that they don't have to be thumbing through books in front of a patient. It lets the patients have it on cartridge too, so if the doctor's got no idea and starts spouting medical jjargon, the patient can look it up. I'd be lost without mine, because i can't carry too much stuff and it lets me keep my info all in one place. On the other hand, if i lose it, i'm screwed for however long it takes me to get a replacement and download the info again... So i see them being used all the time, but admittedly in a very small and specific cross-section. They are allowing us to have a 'reminder' nanny for the patients that need them, once everybody's trained to always look everything up. And it lets us beam data back and forth. Readable data, which comes in handy when trying to understand the inevitable medical glyphs that doctors and nurses are famous for... It's a big day when a patient shows up on time and has taken their medication and remembers the instructions you gave them last time, because you entered it into their PDA. If we could only get them for the blind... But i don't see a lot of turnover at this level, because people mostly need something that works and then they stick with it. At that level they don't care about upgrading, and the docs are too busy. They upgrade when somebody buys them a new one. Interestingly enough, drug companies were handing them out like crazy two years ago- Lilly was handing out Da Vincis, some of which turned out not to work at all, and there were Pfizer drug ones that said things like zoloft on them. This was about the same time that there was the huge flap about companies handing out camcorders and vacations? It caused quite a stir, especially when it got out that whole shipments of them were duds. Who needs a PDA that says Prozac on the front, anyway?
This is actually an important subject, as trite as it sounds, because what i think they are getting at is NOT that laughter doesn't help, but that, in the words of one survivor, "Cancer doesn't give a rat's ass whether you have a positive mental outlook."
The point isn't that people with good attitudes don't have a better chance; the point is that the general public for a very long time has been encouraged to believe that cancer is affected more by the mental than by the physical, and this leads to a lot of misconceptions about cancer. There's no question that laughter, or even the anticipation of laughter, is good for you. It boosts endorphins, it helps the immune system, but while these things may make cancer easier to deal with symptomatically, they don't address the underlying causative issues, and the implied connections encourage people to believe that you just aren't playing or praying hard enough.
The point here, of this article and the growing movement behind it, is that people feel guilty- horribly, horrendously, unnecessarily guilty- when they get sick or have to watch someone else get sick, and it's going to take a lot to make that social environment change. I volunteer time to help a group of people online who deal with chronic illnesses, and this study is of unimaginable relevance to them. It means that for once, someone in the medical community is shaking their head and saying- by the way, it's not your fault that you have cancer. You should do everything you can to stay upbeat, but the 'cure' doesn't exist yet, it's not your failure to utilise this particular 'cure' that is keeping you from being healthy.
And that's important. That's important on a lot of levels, and treatment is one of them, because when a patient knows that they don't have to fake their way into a smile every day, they can get down to processing the very real grief and loss that go with a chronic illness- and this can substantially increase their quality of life, however long that life may extend. I've had to watch people day in and day out coping with this, and feeling worse because those around them feel that they must stay cheerful in order to survive. It becomes the last defense for a lot of family members who can't otherwise deal with having someone near them sick- to blame it on the patient, to try to make sense out of it by describing it as a failing- they were sick and they just lost hope, so they didn't get better... Just as it's beginning to be recognised in the medical community that depression is a symtpom of, and not the cause of, many other illnesses. Remember when ulcers were entirely attributed to stress?
I'm all in favour of a positive mental outlook. But i'm not in favour of letting our prejudice for cheerful patients create a false image of what it takes to get through it- good cheer and optimism are only a part of the puzzle. Bad things really do happen to good people, and being a better person isn't always going to make it stop. I think this article is a good start- and i think it's true. Cancer doesn't care. We care, so we will cling to anything that we can. And miracles do happen, but not necessarily because of the reasons that we attribute them to. As we come to understand illnesses better, there may be more studies like this, just to remind people that while we hold a lOT of power to change things, we need to know where the buttons are before we can press them- and a smile apparently didn't do it for an illness like cancer.
However, i'll keep reading the funny pages and slashdot comments, because passing the funny ones along seems to at least have cheered people up. (and there are occasional ward uprisings... do you hear a sound, as of somebody playing with the wiring? um- gotta go check and see what folks are feeling energetic enough to be destroying today!!!)
Inuyasha was not what i intended. I meant to tune in to A science special on mummification. I accidentally ended up on the cartoon network watching InuYasha, and haven't gotten free since. I resisted the anime invasion, i thought i was safe- a friend just about tied me down to make me watch some... and those seeds have borne fruit.... how can i be addicted to such an obvious ploy for audience? *sigh* but since i refuse to give up my addictions once i've got them, i guess i'm stuck. Did anyone else fiercely resist the anime craze? Maybe it's something in the water.
Anyone want to guess how much weight i lost with that kind of shock to my system? I only weighed 126 to start with, and most of me was muscle. I dropped to 106. And here's the important part: that kind of weight loss does damage. Every time. You're making a bet, on a high-protien diet, that your risk of injury from losing weight that way is less than your injury from remaining obese. Which is why my nutritionists and the other members of my medical team- that's right, i said team were in earnest when they told me that this is NOT a good way to lose weight- ever. THey told me that Atkins was not a fraud, but to take that idea to an extreme the way people do is a very bad idea. One piece of bread is not enough carbohydrates to stave off gout or other diet-linked damages.
So what am i doing now? Well, i weigh about 116, which is due to a serious effort to eat more, period. If i can take in more than the 1632 calories that i burn on an average day, I will probably gain weight. Some of those have to be carbohydrates, enough to keep my body in the habit of using them as fuel. The kicker is this- I NEVER liked rice. And there's wheat in most soy sauce, so that rules out the take-out diet.
My point: extremity is bad, you're likely to lose weight on the Atkins diet, and it's likely to do you lasting harm, as evidenced by how fast they started trying to get me off my accidental wander onto it. I'm holding steady at 116, and I miss my coca cola breakfasts. (I'd also point out that most of the geeks I know are in great shape, and some of them are slashdotters. So some slashdotters are in great shape.)
What's more, we'll see it again.
What happened last time? Well, Boston just had a huge flap over whether to conduct classes in Spanish. The answer? None yet but here's more background. And ebonics. Everybody remember ebonics?
Not only is the question evolving, but so is the answer. We recognise that not everyone speaks- or writes- the same language. But people are bilingual without meaning to be. How many people have included an HTML tag in a document? Raise your hands. Be honest. How many people have tried to use tags in a limited-to-plain-text format? Because that's what school english is: it's no smileys, no phone text, use the language and get graded on how well you do with it. No shortcuts, no abbreviations, no shorthand notes. (Remember shorthand?)
How many people can go from writing a full document in HTML to having a verbal conversation in regular speech?
We are already doing it, folks. And we should require of the kids that they live up to the standard: don't mix codes unless they're compatible. Is school english the same as street english? NO! Do we sound different when we call home than when we answer the phone at work? Yes, if we're in an old-school business environment- and if we do, we frequently get recognised for it, no matter what our middle managers can't spell. What's happening is that excellence is having an even greater field for visibility: the more they can't spell or speak in one coherent language at a time, the more those of us who are multilingual and fluent in our many fields look great by comparison.
YES. Grade them accroding to what's required. And acknowledge that there are places where this is acceptable, and that if they don't even know what they're writing, they aren't paying enough attention. They need to know what language they're using, and they need to know how to keep their codes clean. (by the way, this coment is being written by someone whose code is awful, and i'm having to clean it up, too.)
And here is an article to really bend your brain over just how much argument has existed just within the 'what's plain english?' bracket over the years.
For the record, i found a way to keep my Handheld/PDA graffiti out of my handwriting. I use my left hand for their writing system, and my right for regular script. This would probably be more difficult for someone who isn't ambidextrous, but with a little practice works just fine. Picked up the tip from a neuropsych buddy with whom I had a long debate over brain centers and speech.
From a security standpoint, I have to address the fact that Warchalking is a powerful factor in the integration of physical and in-wire security, because this requires both parties to have an awareness of the ramifications and risks inherent in the act. Because these have always been such separate departments, and it's such an important phase in the integration thereof, Warchalking is a USEFUL trigger and catalyst.
And it's from that perpective that warchalking breaks into two distinct categories, as well. If we define warchalking as the mere markup of a building that represents an unsecured wireless site, then yes, it is technically illegal, but only as
a.) graffiti, and
b.) possible incitement and abetment of a crime [theft of bandwidth.] It is also a minor offense, one which is the equivalent of putting graffiti near the unsecured perimeter of a locked down area. It is not the theft of bandwidth itself.
And because of this, it IS useful; it is the equivalent of having someone send you a photo package containing pictures of the open risks in your physical security. It's scary, and it's problematic, but it's stuff that you needed to know about.
If someone logs on, it's also technically trespassing, in the same way that punching someone while they are in their car is technically trespassing. It is an uninvited entry into an owned property - the bandwidth in question- for the intent of taking something -in this case ALSO the bandwidth in question. If you USE the warchalks to steal bandwidth, that's a crime. It's a different crime than an employee using the wireless at work for outside stuff- it's a non-affiliated person entering through a hole in the fence and using the phone system to call strangers in foreign countries.
But what if the argument is made that by not securing the premises, the place is effectively open to the public? Powerful arguments can be made that people are effectively using the company phone AFTER it has been placed out in the public arena. For example, if I install a telephone on the sidewalk, I'm an idiot if I expect people not to use it. For this reason, I think that it should be a nonprosecutable crime, unless
anything other than benign surfing occurs,
any attempt is made to access company files
any attempt is made to impersonate a company employee in ways other than simply accessing the net.
Basically, if the person is a squatter in an unfinished building that hasn't got any guards, they are benign trespassers. It's like any hacking- the Force is neither dark side nor light side till it's used.
(The next important question, and one which needs to be separated from the legal implicationa while this gets sorted out in the public forum- is whether this is ETHICAL.) We're grateful to warchalkers because they are doing us a favour that other hackers haven't done: they are letting us know where the holes are. Frankly, that's a movement that I endorse and consider ethically acceptable, and it's our responsibility to act on the risk and see that no one gets to use the hole in the fence that they so kindly sent us a photo of.
It's high time that the two security systems were integrated: someone should be patrolling ALL the perimeters, and if you aren't, it's a lot harder to make the case that someone who's only marking up the property risks is guilty of anything more than a chalkmark or a photograph.
This is the Christopher Reeve site where you get to send an e-card. As everybody I'm sure remembers, he promised that he'd walk before he was fifty. Well, that's coming up fast (the 25th, i think) and he can walk- but only underwater, where he doesn't have to carry his full weight. In the meantime, there's this: for every ecard sent, there's a dollar promised to the foundation he started.
If there's one thing that I love better than charity, it's charity with someone else's money.
Oke. I'm a girl who has a traditionally male first name. And i can't tell you how many cashiers i have berated for not checking my signature. They look at me blankly, and say, "Oh, i thought it was your husband's card." And i silently hold up my ringless left hand, and as they blink, cluelesly, i explain to them that i always want them to check the signature. What if a guy were to swipe my card? i then show them my license, etc. I USED to write, "Please request identification," on the card. Oddly enough, it was the bank that made me stop this, because they said that i had to have a valid signature, or they wouldn't be able to acknowledge ANY fraudulent charges. Darn it. THat worked best but is now not allwed to me, so i settle for not signing anything until i see them actually look at the card. And if they don't raise an eyebrow when they see my unusual name on the card, i stand there until they compare the signature... I used to be a cashier, too. And i have seen it all: the people who actually use whiteout on the back of the card- the new, rollon whiteout can be used, with a little epoxy, to create a new (but very inauthentic looking to a close look) signature strip; the people who bring the unsigned card up and then offer to sign it in front of you; the people who give you the card, write an entirely different name, and then tell you that it's their husband's/ wife's card- and offer you a note giving them permission to use it!!! As for my problem? Well, i talked it over with the bank. As long as it's not actually written on the signature strip, you can write anything you want on the back of the card. So, in indelible ink on the top of the back, it reads: DO NOT PROCESS THIS CARD WITHOUT CHECKING ID. Has it worked? Mostly. I still get the occasional brainless cashier, but for the most part, they pay attention. Tha bank was happy, i'm happy, and my imaginary husband whose card they think it is- well, he's just out of luck.
I am one of the ten girls i know who know who play pinball. Mind you, i'm no steel wizard, and that little ball eludes me enough of the time that i don't win many free games. I think that the reason pinball itself seems beyond the modern kid's immediate attention span is this: pinball is a bewildering game, at first glance. Not only are you trying to get the hand/eye co-ordination down, there is a plot to most games, whichmeans that you not only have to take in what you're doing, you also have to figure out the flashing lights and the flags and bumbers- and then try to hit them. The net result is a lot more that a video screen, it's deciphering an environment at the same time that you try to interact with it, much like the first time you use linux, or an immersion course in a foreign language. Now, this does not mean that pinball is not for modern kids. It just means that it's an entirely different approach. And a little bit of footwork will turn up a few good machines- they tend to put them in the corners of bars, pool halls, and arcades. If you want to avoid the death of pinball, go out and play. A steady stream of quarters once every two weeks or three weeks will remind the owners that this is still a moneymaker, and what's more, a two or three minute conversation with the manatger or owner- "you know, i really come here just because you have a pinball machine," will do even more to make sure it stays. I used to have a bunch of friends with whom i'd go play pinball. Lately, mostly because we all did the relocation shuffle, i'm on my own (and if you think folks look at you strange when you're a girl asking for parts for an '86 audi, you should see the looks they give you when you're a girl playing pinball!) It's one of those things where there's still, in spite of our best efforts to change things, a percieved gender gap. Also- about the electronic versions- like email, it's great for the stripped down concept, but you lose the texture. Somethin' nice about having the real thing. Electronic is for getting the feel of the flags- you have to have the real to get the co-ordination down. My point: pinball is still cool, and if you think so, you need to be out playing it, just to keep it from going out of style. And don't believe the doubters: pinball will never be gone completely. We will open retro underground pinball halls, and be passing out free drinks at the million marks, before we ever let that happen. And i might just pick up one of the old machines, just to have a head start... hmmm.... *back to the planning lair for further consideration*
Frankly, all that i can do is offer my best jacques cousteau impression, and hope that they don't evolve further.
NASA
Another Squid Site
Discovery Channel and the Giant Squid
Weird Squids In Action (that one's just fun for the cool giant squid graphics- how would YOU have done it?)
A A 1996 article regarding giant squid discovery>
A 2002 discovery of a MUCH smaller 'giant' squid
and of course, proof that there's a convention group for everything.
And if anybody wants to know how i happen to know any of this, let's just say that i dated a marine biologist. It won't be true, but it would make my mum happy....