With my daughter, it's not just the schooling. It's everything. There is no planning going on in her brain, and without Ritalin, almost no independant thought.
The morning routine is a bit like this: Daughter wakes up. daughter: Can I get dressed now. me: yes, of course you can. daughter: what can I wear? me: there's a dress on the couch there for you, and some knickers in your drawers. daughter: (picks up dress) this dress? me: yes. daughter: is it going to be warm today? me: i think so. it should be just right for wearing that dress. daughter: so can I wear this dress? me: yes (I won't pretend not to be frustrated at this point) daughter: where are my knickers? me: in your drawers. (if, in fact, they are none in there afterall a major panic attack is had by daughter).
breakfast also is along the same lines: me: (puts daughters bowl of cereal at the dining table, in exactly the same place as it has been put every morning since we moved into this house 2 years ago) , come and eat your breakfast daughter: which one is mine? (hers is often only bowl at the table at that point) me: (points to bowl) that one. daughter: (sits down at table in her normal spot) so is this one mine? and so on.
Up until she was 3 or 4, she would never get out of bed in the morning by herself. If she woke up early she would lie in bed and chat to herself until she heard one of us moving around and could ask us if it was okay to get up now. She had been told repeatedly that it was okay to get up at any time past 7 o'clock but just couldn't think for herself. (and yes, she could tell the time enough to know when 7 o'clock was)
Diary writing is the whole thing over again. 'What do I write?'.
With ritalin, it's a whole lot better. She actually thinks for herself rather than being a robot that needs constant instruction.
The schooling thing was (before ritalin) a problem with things like the diary writing. She would not be able to think about what to do next, and would just start annoying the other kids, or if the teacher was lucky, just hide under the table out of the way.
We have (at home) learnt to cope with this to some extent, although I can't imagine it's a good way to conduct home life. But no teacher can be expected to devote almost all their time to one child. It's not fair on anyone else.
On the one hand, i agree with you that it's just a way of thinking that's different to 'normal', but so is autism, and to stretch your line of reasoning way beyond breaking point, so was the way of thinking of anyone whose grabbed a gun and started putting holes in anyone who's ever pissed them off. At some point you have to say 'this is a problem, either for this person or for everyone around them', and i believe that is where we are at with my daughter.
And even if it wasn't, $400 is not a lot to spend on clothing for 2 adults and 3 kids. One of which has feet which don't fit comfortably in any but reasonably expensive shoes. (take note - take care of your kids feet when they're young. $100 is nothing to spend on shoes if it saves a heap of problems later!!!)
None of which adds up to me not taking care of my kids. I don't see how you can gather enough evidence one way or another from anything i've ever posted to slashdot, even if you take it grossly out of context.
I don't know if you have kids or not, but it is so hard to see them having a hard time with day to day things (eg getting dressed in the morning), and being completely at a loss as to what to do about it. I've already answered on another post about why I asked the slashdot community. This isn't a substitution for professional advice, it's an addition to it.
Diabetes is treated with medication. Epilepsy is treated with medication (some of which has side effects far nastier than Ritalin). Various other psychological diseases are treated with medication. People are irrationally touchy about ADHD though.
It is not unreasonable for a teacher to want the kids in their class to shut up and sit down. Just because you know everything doesn't mean that half the class is desparately trying to understand what is being taught. A kid who takes up 80% of a teachers time because in class is one thing, a kid who does that but already knows it all is purely wasting the teachers time, and depriving everyone else of an education.
I got very self centered about this somewhere along the way. If I was bored in class it wasn't my problem. It was somebody elses. I guess i've come to realise that school _is_ a place of learning, provided you are able to learn at the prescribed rate. I wish i'd had the presence of mind at that age to just say to my teachers: 'I can sit at my desk and cause a distraction while you ramble on about stuff I already know, or I can finish my work, sit down out of the way and read a book quietly. How do you want it?'.
Analysis of a 'typical' ADHD brain shows one part of the brain going really slow, and another part going fast (sorry, don't know the actual names of them off hand). The theory is that the fast part is going fast to compensate for the slow part, but in doing so causes the 'problems' we associate with ADHD.
Stimulant medication, so the theory goes, speeds up the slow part, thereby allowing the over compensation to stop and the brain to function 'correctly'.
You site a few examples where ADHD is a positive thing, but completely ignore the fact that for some people it is an incredible disability. My two year old daughter has more sense than the seven year old when it comes to day to day tasks.
I respect and value your input as someone who has been treated with stimulant medication. But maybe you didn't have ADHD, but were in fact a smart kid who was just full of energy. It is fairly obvious when someone is taking a too higher does of ritalin. And for someone who doesn't have ADHD, any amount is too much. Seriously, if you don't have ADHD, ritalin will make things worse. One of the things we were told about neural feedback is that we'd have to watch her ritalin dosage, as once her brain patterns move towards 'normal', the amount she's on now would probably be too much.
Albert Einstein is dead. And i doubt you knew him personally. He may well have been given stimulant medication if he were a child alive today. It may well have numbed his mind (if he didn't have adhd), or it may have turned him from super genius to super-duper genius... maybe he would have finished that grand unified field theory thing he was working on. The fact is though, we'll never know, so bringing it up is just a little pointless.
I am pretty sure that all the examples you can find of stimulant medication causing problems, are cases where adhd was not the correct diagnosis. I would love to not have my daughter taking Ritalin, but it's the lesser of two evils at the moment and I will argue with anyone who says it doesn't have its place. For some people it's the difference between happiness and being able to interact with people, and the horror of social isolation.
I call bullshit on your line of reasoning. I'm not after expert wisdom. I'm after first hand experiences of people who have either tried it themselves, or who are close to people who have tried it themselves.
I have spoken to doctors and the like, and have heard this and that but have not had the chance to hear either 'I tried it and it fried my brain into a pretzel' or 'I tried it and it was the best thing I ever did'.
Ask Slashdot is a great forum for this, as reading the comments has shown.
It's the difference between him knowing he's busted right there and then and being able to take action (eg leave the country), and him having no idea anyone is onto him until the feds knock on the door. I'd go the stealth option if it were me.
America had it coming...
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Someone said this. Almost everyone appeared outraged. Anyone who wasn't outraged kept their mouths shut.
Ditto for anyone who suggests that a woman wearing a outfit and walks alone at night is asking for trouble.
There's a difference between 'had it coming', 'asking for trouble' and actually 'deserving it'. But any time someone suggests the former two, everyone seems to think the latter is implied.
Even if you try and explain the difference between 'asking for trouble' and 'deserving it', the person will most likely put their hands over their ears and chant "it's a womans right to go anywhere she pleases at any time of the day wearing whatever she wants without fear of attack" over and over again, without listening.
For some people, it's almost like anything coming even close to threatening someone's idea of a taboo causes a brick wall to close over their mind, and out comes the pre-programmed response.
But those grass eating machines produce methane, and a multitude of greenhouse gasses. Shouldn't they be replaced with a more modern technology, in the interest of the environment???
won't somebody think of the children!!!
this line of reasoning sounds familiar...
on
Best BBS Memories?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Me to wife: How the heck could you spend $400 on clothes?
... and don't start drinking the stuff to begin with. Give me water, or alternatively, a sweet, non-carbonated beverage.
Coffee is almost the opposite of drinking water. Dehydration has been suggested as one of the many possible causes of quite a few diseases, including alzheimers. True or not, if you drink nothing but coffee all day long you are going to feel like crap by the end of the day, purely through dehydration.
Just out of curiosity, if you are a coffee drinker, did you start drinking it because you liked it or because everyone else around you was drinking it?
I think the reason everyone knows about it, be it urban legend or not, was that Ford allegedly weighed up the cost of a recall vs the cost of potential liability, and decided that no recall would be done.
When I challenged someone on this, the response was that the danger wasn't from using the phone, but from dropping it when it was powered on.
Which is fair enough, but _every_ time I touch my car after getting out I get a big static zap. In my mind that is a far greater danger than my cellphone, which I leave on but in the car.
Probably both depending on where Mars and Earth are in relation to each other. Sometimes there's a great big hot yellow sun in between them too. Maybe need to route via Venus. That's going to add ms.
I recently was sent an mpeg of an ad for a Toyota Corolla (4mb or so, by email, oh the shame). It was actually pretty good, and if it wasn't so big I probably would have forwarded it on too.
It got me thinking... what a win for Toyota! They are paying nothing for the air time, and rather than me nipping off to the toilet or something while the ad break was on, it had my undivided attention for a minute or however long it ran for.
... except maybe this. Computer neural networks are modelled on how we think the human brain works and so the following possibly applies to the human brain too.
Say you have a computer simulated neural network consisting of 10 neurons, and it can classify 20 different inputs into one of 3 different outputs. The network as a whole 'knows' how to do the classification, the combination of all neurons is responsible for the outcome. In order to adjust it so that it mis-classified one of the 20 inputs, you would most likely have to adjust the weighting (connection) of each neuron, or at least several.
Have you ever done a Rubix(sp?) Cube? Cheating aside, it's quite tricky to move only selected pieces around without mucking up the rest. Each single action you perform affects multiple pieces. You need to make numerous single gross movements to have a net fine movement. Tinkering with the human brain is probably a lot like that only much much trickier. And without the pretty colors. And you can't pull it apart and put it back together, or just move the labels around to do what you want. And if you tried to manipulate a brain like you do a cube you'd probably get your hands a lot dirtier. Okay... maybe it wasn't such a good analogy.
IANABD (Brain Doctor), but remember, the connections between neurons in the brain aren't electronic like you might think of computer memory as electronic. The interaction between them is, partly, but the actual physical connection isn't and as I understand it, the connection configuration is where the 'information' is stored. In order to get in and physically change connections you'd have to be tinkering with the actual neuron cells, requiring physical interaction which would be really hard for anything not on the surface.
I guess that leaves us with drugs, brainwashing, or tiny little robots, or something we haven't thought of yet. Far simpler to simply pay someone lots of money to pretend they've forgotten the thing you wanted to erase.
Slashdot Mirror
With my daughter, it's not just the schooling. It's everything. There is no planning going on in her brain, and without Ritalin, almost no independant thought.
The morning routine is a bit like this:
Daughter wakes up.
daughter: Can I get dressed now.
me: yes, of course you can.
daughter: what can I wear?
me: there's a dress on the couch there for you, and some knickers in your drawers.
daughter: (picks up dress) this dress?
me: yes.
daughter: is it going to be warm today?
me: i think so. it should be just right for wearing that dress.
daughter: so can I wear this dress?
me: yes (I won't pretend not to be frustrated at this point)
daughter: where are my knickers?
me: in your drawers. (if, in fact, they are none in there afterall a major panic attack is had by daughter).
breakfast also is along the same lines:
me: (puts daughters bowl of cereal at the dining table, in exactly the same place as it has been put every morning since we moved into this house 2 years ago) , come and eat your breakfast
daughter: which one is mine? (hers is often only bowl at the table at that point)
me: (points to bowl) that one.
daughter: (sits down at table in her normal spot) so is this one mine?
and so on.
Up until she was 3 or 4, she would never get out of bed in the morning by herself. If she woke up early she would lie in bed and chat to herself until she heard one of us moving around and could ask us if it was okay to get up now. She had been told repeatedly that it was okay to get up at any time past 7 o'clock but just couldn't think for herself. (and yes, she could tell the time enough to know when 7 o'clock was)
Diary writing is the whole thing over again. 'What do I write?'.
With ritalin, it's a whole lot better. She actually thinks for herself rather than being a robot that needs constant instruction.
The schooling thing was (before ritalin) a problem with things like the diary writing. She would not be able to think about what to do next, and would just start annoying the other kids, or if the teacher was lucky, just hide under the table out of the way.
We have (at home) learnt to cope with this to some extent, although I can't imagine it's a good way to conduct home life. But no teacher can be expected to devote almost all their time to one child. It's not fair on anyone else.
On the one hand, i agree with you that it's just a way of thinking that's different to 'normal', but so is autism, and to stretch your line of reasoning way beyond breaking point, so was the way of thinking of anyone whose grabbed a gun and started putting holes in anyone who's ever pissed them off. At some point you have to say 'this is a problem, either for this person or for everyone around them', and i believe that is where we are at with my daughter.
The clothes thing was a joke. Laugh.
And even if it wasn't, $400 is not a lot to spend on clothing for 2 adults and 3 kids. One of which has feet which don't fit comfortably in any but reasonably expensive shoes. (take note - take care of your kids feet when they're young. $100 is nothing to spend on shoes if it saves a heap of problems later!!!)
None of which adds up to me not taking care of my kids. I don't see how you can gather enough evidence one way or another from anything i've ever posted to slashdot, even if you take it grossly out of context.
I don't know if you have kids or not, but it is so hard to see them having a hard time with day to day things (eg getting dressed in the morning), and being completely at a loss as to what to do about it. I've already answered on another post about why I asked the slashdot community. This isn't a substitution for professional advice, it's an addition to it.
Diabetes is treated with medication. Epilepsy is treated with medication (some of which has side effects far nastier than Ritalin). Various other psychological diseases are treated with medication. People are irrationally touchy about ADHD though.
Hope I didn't just feed the trolls!!!
It is not unreasonable for a teacher to want the kids in their class to shut up and sit down. Just because you know everything doesn't mean that half the class is desparately trying to understand what is being taught. A kid who takes up 80% of a teachers time because in class is one thing, a kid who does that but already knows it all is purely wasting the teachers time, and depriving everyone else of an education.
I got very self centered about this somewhere along the way. If I was bored in class it wasn't my problem. It was somebody elses. I guess i've come to realise that school _is_ a place of learning, provided you are able to learn at the prescribed rate. I wish i'd had the presence of mind at that age to just say to my teachers: 'I can sit at my desk and cause a distraction while you ramble on about stuff I already know, or I can finish my work, sit down out of the way and read a book quietly. How do you want it?'.
Analysis of a 'typical' ADHD brain shows one part of the brain going really slow, and another part going fast (sorry, don't know the actual names of them off hand). The theory is that the fast part is going fast to compensate for the slow part, but in doing so causes the 'problems' we associate with ADHD.
Stimulant medication, so the theory goes, speeds up the slow part, thereby allowing the over compensation to stop and the brain to function 'correctly'.
You site a few examples where ADHD is a positive thing, but completely ignore the fact that for some people it is an incredible disability. My two year old daughter has more sense than the seven year old when it comes to day to day tasks.
I respect and value your input as someone who has been treated with stimulant medication. But maybe you didn't have ADHD, but were in fact a smart kid who was just full of energy. It is fairly obvious when someone is taking a too higher does of ritalin. And for someone who doesn't have ADHD, any amount is too much. Seriously, if you don't have ADHD, ritalin will make things worse. One of the things we were told about neural feedback is that we'd have to watch her ritalin dosage, as once her brain patterns move towards 'normal', the amount she's on now would probably be too much.
Albert Einstein is dead. And i doubt you knew him personally. He may well have been given stimulant medication if he were a child alive today. It may well have numbed his mind (if he didn't have adhd), or it may have turned him from super genius to super-duper genius... maybe he would have finished that grand unified field theory thing he was working on. The fact is though, we'll never know, so bringing it up is just a little pointless.
I am pretty sure that all the examples you can find of stimulant medication causing problems, are cases where adhd was not the correct diagnosis. I would love to not have my daughter taking Ritalin, but it's the lesser of two evils at the moment and I will argue with anyone who says it doesn't have its place. For some people it's the difference between happiness and being able to interact with people, and the horror of social isolation.
I call bullshit on your line of reasoning. I'm not after expert wisdom. I'm after first hand experiences of people who have either tried it themselves, or who are close to people who have tried it themselves.
:p
I have spoken to doctors and the like, and have heard this and that but have not had the chance to hear either 'I tried it and it fried my brain into a pretzel' or 'I tried it and it was the best thing I ever did'.
Ask Slashdot is a great forum for this, as reading the comments has shown.
So
even at something like 1 billionth scale, a printout is going to be a bitch to fold!
Why not just print more money? A politician here in Australia suggested this so it must be possible.
Of course, she did jail time not long afterwards so maybe her comments should be taken with a bucket of salt.
Can Manned Spaceflight. Save George Bush!
okay then... a truck loaded with a generator powered pc connected to a large high density disk array. :p
It's already loaded when you get there.
i think it was a joke.
... some martian has silenced Beagle with a large mallet.
I bet it was playing Blur in cheap on-hold music style (think greensleeves). That would drive anyone crazy.
It's the difference between him knowing he's busted right there and then and being able to take action (eg leave the country), and him having no idea anyone is onto him until the feds knock on the door. I'd go the stealth option if it were me.
Someone said this. Almost everyone appeared outraged. Anyone who wasn't outraged kept their mouths shut.
Ditto for anyone who suggests that a woman wearing a outfit and walks alone at night is asking for trouble.
There's a difference between 'had it coming', 'asking for trouble' and actually 'deserving it'. But any time someone suggests the former two, everyone seems to think the latter is implied.
Even if you try and explain the difference between 'asking for trouble' and 'deserving it', the person will most likely put their hands over their ears and chant "it's a womans right to go anywhere she pleases at any time of the day wearing whatever she wants without fear of attack" over and over again, without listening.
For some people, it's almost like anything coming even close to threatening someone's idea of a taboo causes a brick wall to close over their mind, and out comes the pre-programmed response.
... had differences of similar proportions. And you know how that relationship ended.
I'd call the whole thing off if I were you. As a Debian man you should really not be dating down at that level. *runs for cover*
But those grass eating machines produce methane, and a multitude of greenhouse gasses. Shouldn't they be replaced with a more modern technology, in the interest of the environment???
won't somebody think of the children!!!
Me to wife: How the heck could you spend $400 on clothes?
Wife to me: Don't worry, I got about $1000 worth.
... and don't start drinking the stuff to begin with. Give me water, or alternatively, a sweet, non-carbonated beverage.
Coffee is almost the opposite of drinking water. Dehydration has been suggested as one of the many possible causes of quite a few diseases, including alzheimers. True or not, if you drink nothing but coffee all day long you are going to feel like crap by the end of the day, purely through dehydration.
Just out of curiosity, if you are a coffee drinker, did you start drinking it because you liked it or because everyone else around you was drinking it?
The fact that no other album sounds like that does not make it a good album. :p
I think the reason everyone knows about it, be it urban legend or not, was that Ford allegedly weighed up the cost of a recall vs the cost of potential liability, and decided that no recall would be done.
When I challenged someone on this, the response was that the danger wasn't from using the phone, but from dropping it when it was powered on.
Which is fair enough, but _every_ time I touch my car after getting out I get a big static zap. In my mind that is a far greater danger than my cellphone, which I leave on but in the car.
Probably both depending on where Mars and Earth are in relation to each other. Sometimes there's a great big hot yellow sun in between them too. Maybe need to route via Venus. That's going to add ms.
... she refuses to accept the idea. Supermodels can be difficult that way sometimes.
now there's another TLA ready for recycling.
I recently was sent an mpeg of an ad for a Toyota Corolla (4mb or so, by email, oh the shame). It was actually pretty good, and if it wasn't so big I probably would have forwarded it on too.
It got me thinking... what a win for Toyota! They are paying nothing for the air time, and rather than me nipping off to the toilet or something while the ad break was on, it had my undivided attention for a minute or however long it ran for.
Is this the future of advertising?
... except maybe this. Computer neural networks are modelled on how we think the human brain works and so the following possibly applies to the human brain too.
Say you have a computer simulated neural network consisting of 10 neurons, and it can classify 20 different inputs into one of 3 different outputs. The network as a whole 'knows' how to do the classification, the combination of all neurons is responsible for the outcome. In order to adjust it so that it mis-classified one of the 20 inputs, you would most likely have to adjust the weighting (connection) of each neuron, or at least several.
Have you ever done a Rubix(sp?) Cube? Cheating aside, it's quite tricky to move only selected pieces around without mucking up the rest. Each single action you perform affects multiple pieces. You need to make numerous single gross movements to have a net fine movement. Tinkering with the human brain is probably a lot like that only much much trickier. And without the pretty colors. And you can't pull it apart and put it back together, or just move the labels around to do what you want. And if you tried to manipulate a brain like you do a cube you'd probably get your hands a lot dirtier. Okay... maybe it wasn't such a good analogy.
IANABD (Brain Doctor), but remember, the connections between neurons in the brain aren't electronic like you might think of computer memory as electronic. The interaction between them is, partly, but the actual physical connection isn't and as I understand it, the connection configuration is where the 'information' is stored. In order to get in and physically change connections you'd have to be tinkering with the actual neuron cells, requiring physical interaction which would be really hard for anything not on the surface.
I guess that leaves us with drugs, brainwashing, or tiny little robots, or something we haven't thought of yet. Far simpler to simply pay someone lots of money to pretend they've forgotten the thing you wanted to erase.