How? Huh?

My MIL sent me a link to this picture from the NYT. How, exactly, were the track marks in the snow made? Every time I think I figure it out, the fact that there aren't two wheeled cars trips me up. A trailer? Unicyclists? Just an axle? Photoshop?

HOW?

What's real?

Half the time when I'm watching a movie, I can no longer reliably tell what is real and what is computer generated -- but I never realized how ubiquitous the green/blue screen is on television. (although why I should be surprised by this is beyond me, with lower budgets it makes perfect sense that they build backgrounds and such via computer.

But this is still pretty cool.

At it again

The religious whackoloons are at it again in Utah. They have proposed legislation that would make miscarriage a criminal offense.

Utah is posed to become the first state in the U.S. to criminalize miscarriage and punish women for having or seeking an illegal abortion. Utah's "Criminal Miscarriage" law:

* expands the definition of illegal abortion to include miscarriages
* removes immunity protections for women who have or seek illegal abortions
* assumes women are "guilty of criminal homicide of an unborn child" if a pregnancy ends after "intentional, knowing, or reckless" behavior.

But even among states that punish illegal abortions, this "Criminal Miscarriage" law is unique. It doesn't punish individuals who perform illegal procedures; it punishes women.

It has a very minimal chance of passing, since it's vague enough that it would be impossible to actually enforce. Is riding a bike ocnsidered reckless? How about hiking? How about swimming? How about a job that exposes them to second hand smoke? Drinking coffee? Having sex? What other "controls" do they plan to put on women to ensure they fulfill their role as walking uterus?

They didn't think this one through, from a applicability perspective, but they sure as hell thought it through from a position of punishing women and forced pregnancy. These people hate women, there is no other possible way to interpret this. It is too grotesque for words.

And they are obivously ignorant of the fact that miscarriage is very, very common -- up to 40% of all conceptions miscarry (many of those fertlized eggs that never implant), and of the roughly 4 1/2 million pregnancies every year, half a million end in miscarriage, and another thirty thousand or so in stillbirth or infant death. These statistics include all women, not just those the Utah legislature seem to want to target -- the women who are "reckless" and intentionally do things that can cause a miscarriage. Not just the ones who "deserve" to go to jail because they got pregnant. Becuase, as we all know, a woman is just a container for a fetus, once she gets pregnant. Idiots.

Women may have to PROVE that the miscarriage they had was not 'criminal'. Think about that. Think about the woman you know who had a miscarriage (we all know a few)...dealing with the loss of a pregnancy which they most likely wanted and hoped for...and to be criminally investigated and forced to prove they didn't do anything "wrong". I'm so angry I'm having a hard time typing that.

The legislators in Utah really want their own particular version of morality to be enforced. Their version of morality is hateful and wrong and evil. Regardless of what side of the abortion issue you are on, this is beyond the pale.

Even better, they are now going to classify anything that causes a miscarriage as "illegal abortion", and, if you read the text of the bill, it eliminates any option for elective abortion. It is not only a ban on legal abortion except in very narrow circumstances, it criminalizes everything else. O

This law: - defines legal abortion as a procedure "carried out by a physician or through a substance used under the direction of a physician." Anything else that terminates a pregnancy is now defined as illegal abortion - including miscarriages.

This is the 21st century? Could have fooled me.

More at DailyKos

The full text of the bill is here.

TILT

Strange thing I learned today (I so love the interwebs! I really do!)

The word "sibling" is not a naturally evolved English word but instead a modern revival of a lost Old English word generally meaning kins-person or relative rather than specifically referring to brothers and sisters.

This popped up from another blogger, who picked it out of a footnote from a book published in 1942:

Sibling is a coined word use by scientists for both brothers and sisters. The English language lacks such a word.

I find this astonishing.

Geeky Cooking

I was browsing around for recipes and came across 'Cooking for Engineers', -- simple recipes, fully explained, and definitely written with the engineer in mind.

I am totally enamored of the big charts at the bottom of each recipe, though. They appeal to my geeky sense of process.

Berit, Again

Well, we did follow-up bloodwork on the pink beastie, and her platelet count is so low that our vet advised us to not let her outside without supervision. This happened before Christmas (and for all we know, it has been a constant problem that we only managed to fix for the time she was on steroids. At any rate, she's back on steroids because her platelet count is 5,000. It's supposed to be somewhere between 140-170,000. Not good.

She seems to be fine, which is weird. At a count this low, she is at risk for spontaneous bleeding, which could be very dangerous. So, no romping outside with the blue beastie, and we're trying to keep her quiet and give the meds a chance to work. She rebounded really quickly last time, but we obviously didn't find the cause of the problem. It's an immuno-suppressive issue, at any rate, but all the tests came back as negative, so we don't know what is causing this. It's possible that a year of allergy shots messed up her immune system. Fun, en?

Not quite getting it

This just made me laugh (and then cringe a bit). Methinks they don't really understand medicare or socialism at all. Tea-party FAIL.

Let's test them first

Tom Tancredo (yes, I'm embarrassed to be from his state) wants to bring back literacy tests for voting. You know, the "literacy tests" that were used to bar certain people from voting. Rachel Maddow had the only possible response:

"But I want you to know first, that this is what it was like. You would head down to the courthouse to register to vote, if you dared. In order to register, you‘d face an exam. It was sometimes called a literacy test, but it wasn‘t testing to determine necessarily if you could read or write. If you were black, the test was designed purely to afford a legalistic veneer of justification for denying you your constitutional right to vote.

The questions weren‘t about ABCs. They were—they were questions like this one, from Alabama‘s literacy test in 1965. If a person charged with treason denies his guilt, how many persons must testify against him before he can be convicted? Do you consider yourself qualified to vote in this country? Can you answer that question?

You want to hear it again? If a person is charged with treason—if a person charged with treason denies his guilt, how many persons must testify against him before he can be convicted?

Or how about this one from the same test: In what year did the Congress gain the right to prohibit the migration of persons to the states? Do you know the answer to that one?

Again, these are from Alabama‘s literacy test in 1965. It was applied selectively, of course, to black voters, to keep them from registering.

If you lived in Georgia in 1958, you would have faced questions like this one: Who is the solicitor general of the state judicial circuit in which you live and who is the judge of such circuit? If such circuit has more than one judge, name them all.

How did you do on that one? Or how about this one: What does the Constitution of Georgia provide regarding the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus?

If you wanted to vote in Georgia in 1958, those are the questions you would have to answer. But, of course, not everyone would face those questions. The board of registrars had the sole authority to determine who got asked which literacy test questions and whose answers to those questions rendered them ineligible to vote.

The idea was that black voters weren‘t being denied the right to vote based on race. That would be illegal. No, those voters just couldn‘t pass this literacy test.

This isn‘t the plot of some Kagzo (ph) Klansman gothic short story. This isn‘t a theoretical for first-year law students. This isn‘t some State Department report on some tin pot dictatorship halfway around the world that we can‘t pronounce.

This is American history. This is really, really recent American history—as in this lifetime for a lot of people American history.

And the opening night speech at the national tea party convention this weekend proposed bringing the literacy test for voting back. And that proposal got a warm round of applause

I suggest that the FIRST people to have to pass a "literacy test" should be the ones calling for it. Since they seem to be misinformed bigoted cranks absolutely unaware of history (or uncaring of it), it should be easy for them, right? Right?

I couldn't answer those questions. Could you?

Love Languages

I've often read about love-languages on my SIL's blog, about the way that people express love and feel loved. I've never read the book, but a recent conversation with my sister about communication and expectations of marriage prompted me to google it and I found an online quick quiz to figure out what "type" you are -- do you value quality time or gifts or supportive words or acts of service as an expression of love? Would you rather get a gift, or have your spouse do laundry and pick up groceries on the way home? Would you rather be told how much you are appreciated, or hugged and snuggled?

I realized that I value quality time and acts of service as being meaningful to me -- filling my car with gas or stopping on the way home to pick up a loaf of bread make me feel loved and secure and appreciated. Bringing me flowers is nice, but I'd rather have the Adorable Husband come home an hour early. It would be difficult if we didn't realize what the other expected or wanted -- and it's definitely got to be difficult trying to figure out what those things are.

I may have to actually pick up the book. Hmph.

Antique Cars

Watch the flickr slideshow carefully...absolutely fabulous!

Not only a great photographer, but.. oh, just watch!

I need a cape!

I have discovered that I have a Superpower. Oh, nothing as exciting as leaping tall buildings or running faster than speeding bullets or invisibility or anything, oh, no.

Nope. My superpower is discovering (or causing, the jury's out on that one) weird and unpredictable problems in computer code, that no one else has seen before.

Every day for the last week, I've found something strange and inexplicable in the application that I'm building. Weird characters show up, things work and then they don't, data disappears at random...you name it, I've been dredging it up in my code.

Hmph. I'd rather be able to burst into flame or hurl lightning bolts.

Gradeschool moves

Perhaps the ridiculous teleprompter sneering will stop, now. Whaddya, think?

It took this long?

Everyone has heard the rather bizarre claim that 'vaccines cause autism', which has fostered an almost rabid anti-vaccine movement. It was based on a single study, which has been debunked thoroughly over the last few years as being invalid. Despite the claims of the anti-vac crowd, there is absolutely no, none, zero, zip, nada connection between autism and vaccines.

Well, the Lancet has finally completed disavowed the study and come out a report that the author of the study, Andrew Wakefield, falsified the data and manipulated medical records to make his study give specific results. The study is completely, utterly, wrong. The methodology and data aren't even valid. Wakefield is accused of unethical behavior, on top of it all.

Of course, the damage has already been done. People continue to believe the thoroughly disproven results. The study was flawed from the beginning, but it apparently said something that made True Believers out of a lot of people -- someone to blame, something to point at as a cause for autism. I can only imagine that for parents with children who are autistic, it was something to cling to. But for the thousands of people who refuse to vaccinate their kids? Hey, idiots -- herd immunity only works when 95% of the population is vaccinated...and this ridiculous campaign has dropped that to less than 80% in some areas. Measles is back the US because of this. It's likely the resurgence of Whooping Cough is probably related.

I'm just surprised that it took this long to come out formally against the paper, and sad that for most people, it probably won't make any difference.

Life Lesson Learned

Do not, whilst walking merrily along on the treadmill listening to your ipod, lean down to fix your shoe.

I'm a boomerang

While I feel better that I'm not the only one with this problem, it is quite obvious that I cannot walk in a straight line. I list to the left, and if I don't pay attention, I'm sure I'd walk in an enormous circle and end up back where I started (a risk if you're walking in the desert, for example).

How do I know this? Walking on the treadmill is way harder than it looks! You're not supposed to hang on, and I find myself edging towards the left side of the belt if I'm not very careful.

I can see a rather spectacular crash in my future -- I'll be like those funny commercials of people shooting off the back end of the treadmill into the wall, I just know it.

He-man!

I am very glad that I have not only a handy husband, but a brawny one!

With the Christmas money from my Dad this year, we (well, really, I) decided to get a treadmill. I need to get off my butt and move, and walking has always worked for me -- but getting outside and walking around here can be dependent on the weather and I don't need any possible reasons to avoid walking, which I will glom into at the slightest provocation (yea, I know, rain, snow, cold are pretty normal around here and I'm not a delicate little wilting flower, but as an excuse, "It's freakin' cold out there' certainly works for me!). So - indoor treadmill. I know people who have them and they like them.

I found a really nice treadmill, which the Adorable Husband picked up from the store today. And then he man-handled the 300lb, 7' tall box down the stairs into the basement to be put together.

And now he's heading off to the chiropractor to fix his back. Sigh.

Ensuring Stupidity

Another knee-jerk idiotic response to a "concerned parent" -- read: moronic idiot -- from a school district. This time, removing dictionaries from the schools because they (gasp!) define terms of a sexual nature.

Perhaps it's not that surprising that a mother in Menifee, California, asked the Menifee Union School District to ban all copies of the 10th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary after her child stumbled across the term "oral sex." What is surprising, indeed horrifying, is that district officials immediately complied with her request, and pulled all dictionaries off classroom shelves throughout the Southern California school district, which serves 9,000 kids, kindergarten through eighth grade.

They removed a dictionary.

Read that again: a DICTIONARY because a single parent had her delicate widdle sensibilities ruffled and demanded that everyone bow down to her carefully sterilized little world view. What a complete fucking mess.

Oh! The horror! That a school child might read a factual definition of a term in a dictionary. 'Cause we all know how damaging that could be. Might expose them to ideas . This goes beyond prudish or sensitive to ridiculous and awe-inspiringly stupid. That the school board actually responded to this twit of a woman by removing the dictionary and seriously considering a school-district-wide ban is absolutely mind-boggling to me.

I suppose it's a way to ensure that the next generation is even more stupid, closed-minded, and rigid than the current one.

Wait until she realizes that there's a whole, real, physical world out there that might possibly expose her and her child to...words! And actions! that she might not "approve" of! What then? Demand that the rest of the world be sanitized and bowdlerized? What about other words -- like breast and fornicate and homosexual and concupiscense and bondage and ..well, you get the idea. Let's eliminate all the words in the dictionary that might offend someone! I'm sure there are LOTS of words in that dictionary that this woman finds offensive and disagrees with. Oh, what her child might learn from reading the textbook definition of polygamy or gay or any of the millions of other words in our language for ideas and concepts she doesn't like. I'm sure there are thousands of ideas out there someone disagree with, not even just the sex ones! The possibilities are endless! We could have a dictionary with just a few pages of "approved" words!

Wait! What about enclopedias! They have articles about things she disapproves of! Better ban all those National Geographics before Jr gets a good look at a pair of naked breasts. Better ban the Bible, too, it's got some pretty racy passages. Oh, my god! The internet! They might have access to such things online! Ban it! Shut it down! The list is never-ending! (please imagine the previous few sentences read with breathless, wide-eyed fanaticism and enough sarcasm to drown a fish, ok?)

How pathetic that she can't even face answering a question from her child about what oral sex is, if the kid comes across it in the dictionary. How frightening that she truly thinks that it might be titillating or prurient. What is she going to do? Never let her kids leave the house or participate in life? I wouldn't want my hypothetical kids to be reading The Kinsey Report or Joy of Sex, but that's far different than not wanting them to read a dictionary that contained words related to human sexuality. That' takes prudishness to a whole new level I hadn't even imagined before.

A single person simply does not have the right to enforce censorship --and no waffling here, this is censorship of the highest order --of books. Exempt your own child from their education by refusing to allow them to read things you don't like, that cover subjects you are not comfortable with or disagree with, but that's where your control ends. I'll still mock you, of course, but that's your choice for your own kid. Learning about, reading about, thinking about subjects that are outside your comfort zone are important. Difficult, perhaps, but important to developing a critical, thinking, capable mind. Hiding from these topics and themes doesn't make them go away, despite people's best efforts.

But did you notice that this story (which is only the latest in a long line) only really worries about some knowledge? They're trying to carefully filter knowledge through their own lens. How telling is it that you never hear of anyone protesting a book or demanding censorship of a dictionary because they contained entries like genocide, torture, rape, famine, war, or hatred?

So her kid read the definition of oral sex (which, btw, is "oral stimulation of the genitals") and she just didn't want to have to address it with her kid like a responsible adult and explain it terms a kid would understand. No, she'd rather hamstring the education of an entire district's worth of school children because she could complain and the school-board pandered to her ridiculous demand. I think she's an idiot, but I blame the school district for actually responding to this with anything but derisive laughter and downright rejection. They're actually whining about having to 'read the dictionary' to discover if there are any other words that might be questionable. Common sense is apparently not in supply. 'What about the chiiiillll-ddrrruuun' here has run to ridiculous lengths.

Shame on the Menifee Schoool District! Knowledge and reason are the root of ethical society, not censorship.

Solution to a non-problem

I just saw a commercial for a Lysol hands-free liquid soap dispenser with the tagline, "never touch a germy soap pump again".

Talk about solving a non-existent problem...um, even if the soap pump does harbor germs (and I'm sure it does, you're touching it with your pre-washed hands)...you're going to wash your hands after touching it. Anyone who is "concerned" about germs on their soap dispenser is spending way too much time fostering paranoid and ridiculous phobias.

Hands may come into contact with millions of germs every day. Hand washing is one of the most important steps to help stay healthy. But have you ever thought about those germs ending up on your soap pump?

Fact: Your soap pump can harbor a lot of bacteria.

Introducing the LYSOL^® No-Touch Hand Soap System, it automatically senses your hands and dispenses just the right amount of soap that kills 99.9% of bacteria.

For use in the kitchen or bathroom, the antibacterial hand soap is enriched with moisturizing ingredients and comes in three great scents!

Never touch a germy soap pump again.

I don't like the explosion of anti-bacterial soaps and surfaces and wipes and sprays. They are unnecessary, and resistant bacteria are a real problem. Sure, wipe down your kitchen with it after cutting up raw chicken, but otherwise? Seriously - plain soap and water does the job just fine. This near-phobic approach to germs is ridiculous and dangerous. If you believe the advertising, you need to spray everything with bleach, shouldn't touch any surface, and need to disinfect every single object in your whole life, all the time.

But this product seems designed specifically to enable the believers in the idea that their houses and lives and bodies must be sterile. I can even see a non-touch soap dispenser; they get all goopy and gross after awhile, so just waving your hand under the sensor eliminates the mess, but do to it to avoid germs? Really? That's like suggesting you wipe down the handles to the faucet before washing your hands with a Chlorox wipe or something. Why?

And of course, minutes after washing your hands, they are once again covered in germs. Or the towel you wipe your hands on has billions of them. Even a paper towel. It's a bizarre illusion of 'clean', if you ask me.

Leaping Gazelles

The time for the fastest man (a 26yo) in this year's "Skyrise Chicago" stair-climb at the Willis Tower was thirteen minutes and nine seconds to get to the top of a 110-story building. (see the rest of the results here). That's 2, 109 steps.

The fastest woman (age 40, who has claimed the title for the past eight years) clocked in at 15:08, and the fastest kids (both age 10) were at 22:26 and 22:51, respectively. Last year, a firefighter did it in full gear.

They must have been taking the stairs two or three at a time and leaping, gazelle-like, from landing to landing, is all I can figure.

Just to put it in perspective, this is from a poster on one of the forums I frequent:

"To give you a point of comparison, the first time my firm did a post-9/11 fire drill, where folks wanted to actually go all the way to ground level to prove to themselves they could, even the people who bolted way ahead of everybody else took twenty minutes to go only sixty floors, and they were going DOWN!"

World Statistics

An absolutely fascinating look at world population statistics--life expectancy, income, family size, population, the works, by Hans Rossling. I bet you haven't seen things displayed like this before!

Best Stats You've Ever Seen