Thursday, February 03, 2005
Introducing Skeptic’s Circle
The actual entries are even more interesting than what I expected when I saw the announcement, which describes the meme as:
This one focuses on critical thinking and how it is applied to pseudoscience, quackery, bad history, and urban legends.
Imagine taking the kinds of things you might look up in Snopes for veracity, or debunk because someone learned their history wrong or is making stuff up for a cause or believing bad rumors, and you have the Skeptic’s Circle You may want to check it out.
Bonus Sadie
Had to post this as it goes with the other one so well. She’s surprisingly strong and determined about, say, tugging your hand to her mouth in an effort to use it as a teething toy.
Your Daily Sadie
Just a reminder: You will normally get a larger version, twice the width, in a new window by clicking the picture.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Boo Hiss
So I just got home from work and the supermarket, where I spent too much but very effectively, and got Sadie’s very first real food too, and Deb told me she had attempted to watch some of the State of the Union.
As the President started to explain how Social Security will go broke, she could swear she heard a strange sound that seemed disapproving. Not booing, per se, but a disapproving sound like a moan; the kind of “boo substitute” used in polite company to express disapproval instead.
Disgusting. I have never seen anything like it, and I frequently like to watch the SOTU.
She also tells me he explained Social Security in little words and simple concepts that even a Kennedy could understand. Well, I extrapolated the Kennedy part, but she told me how cool it was that he made it so explicit, detailed, and simple to grasp. But then, he’s always been good at relating to real people.
It’s Dead Jim. Oh No, They Killed Archer… Those Bastards!
It is ironic that Enterprise’s demise has come after Berman and Braga stepped out of the way enough to let some real writers make this season the best of the series, and more than distinguished in overall Trek history.
It’s sad that the killers themselves will be writing the series finale. May they never be allowed to lay hands on any Trek project - if there are any - after that.
Frankly, the Enterprise setup lends itself to feature films, as it gets into the founding and early days of the Federation. After loosing audience so avidly with the series before allowing it to be good, I suppose the Trek killers have precluded such films from ever happening. What a shame.
UPDATE: Aded to today’s Beltway Traffic Jam.
Did I mention that there’s teething?
She’s asleep for the moment...we’ll see how long it lasts. This kid is running me ragged.
And in the TMI department, I’ve discovered why I’m so amazingly cranky. Things should be better in a day or two.
Yeah, I know. But where else am I going to bitch about it? It’s my blog, you know?
These Things Happen
You may have noticed we were down for most of an hour. That was caused by the server AV is hosted on developing a bit of a stubborn streak and making people jump through hoops to get it behaving again. At least it was relatively fast and we’re back.
My Turn To Write About The Medical Antics
I’m pleased to report that, apart from the outrageous wait (I know it’s called a “waiting room,” but really...) that was about as bad as it’s ever been, my part of the visit to the doctor went well. So did Sadie’s, assuming that we don’t have to take her back once he researches the birthmark behavior. It’s gotten kind of puffy. Probably nothing.
Anyway, I lost 13 pounds since 2 months ago. Not a surprise, given the timing of 2 months ago, right in the midst of holiday month, after Thanksgiving. Though I had gained shocking amounts of weight already since getting married. Which means I’m still way above where I ought to be. I told them we used the “buy larger pants” method of ensuring I’d shrink.
My blood pressure was about perfect. As in 114/86. Not unprecedented, so I think they acted overly surprised, but impressive. I was able to get away with not fessing up to having been out of the most powerful of the three drugs for a week, having only been back on it two days before the appointment. It also eased the acceptance of my having been off the low dose of potassium for a month or so to no apparent ill effect.
I had blood drawn again and if the result is good, no more potassium. If not, I’ll get a new prescription for the correct dose (no more cutting pills in half) and be able to start getting it from the CVS closer to home, which is also a 24 hour store, unlike the one near work I have used for years. My favorite “vampire” drew my blood while regaling me with how much she hates the Patriots and irritates her husband. From her I learned that Superbowl Sunday is the worst day of the year for domestic violence. Hey guys, it’s only a game.
Blood has to be drawn from the back of my hand, not my arm, so they use a butterfly needle. Trouble is, those are small. Potassium is large enough that a small needle breaks it down and makes tests inaccurate. Turned out they had new, large butterfly needles. Piece of cake. She was nervous though, having not had to do that before.
So I’m pretty happy, but I think my positive results, as I was first, just made it feel worse when Deb’s pressure was a little high. And by my standards, “a little” is the correct term. The big problem there is not so much the doctor as the nurse, who is obsessed with weight and diet and salt. I’m starting to get annoyed every time she mentions salt. We’ve long established that my blood pressure doesn’t seem to be particularly sensitive to diet. The doctor is fairly low key about it, and both he and one doctor prior were rather intent on finding a cause. For instance, pheochromocytoma (hope I spelled that right without looking it up); an adrenal tumor pumping things up. I seem to be in the small percent of “cause unknown” hypertensives.
I’ve been rewarded with not having to go back for three whole months. Yay! Wish I could say the same for all of us. We were kind of hoping we could do the three appointments together again. But no; we will have appointments in middle February, early March, early April, and early May, at least.
More On The Ayn Rand Centenary
Cox & Forkum have also marked the Ayn Rand Centenary. As they say, in part:
Today it’s often taken for granted that “freedom” is an obvious good. But not everyone longs for and values freedom. Some consider it a moral duty to subjugate others for the sake of some “higher” good, whether for the sake of Allah in the Middle East or for the sake of the “common good” in the West. Freedom cannot be spread abroad nor protected here at home without a moral defense of individualism and capitalism. Ayn Rand provided that defense and many other ideas in her philosophy of Objectivism.
Go see the graphic and read the whole thing. If you are unfamiliar with her, it’s a decent, brief introduction and overview.
Reflecting On Rand
Ian Hamet has posted fascinatingly about today’s hundredth anniversary of Ayn Rand’s birth. It sounds like he has read more of her than I have. At least, I haven’t read The Romantic Manifesto, though I believe I eventually got my hands on a copy. I agree with much of what he says, and I, too, fall short of agreeing with her completely. Some of the fanatics struck me the same way, clubby - I’d probably use the word cliquish - if not downright cult-like.
I never went through that phase of hating her as he did. My introduction was through seeing her mentioned many other places. Someone wrote a work - I don’t remember if it was an article or longer, or where it was published - titled It Usually Starts With Ayn Rand. For me it started with Robert Ringer, if I recall correctly, and rapidly moved to Rand.
I had read The Fountainhead first, I forget when. In the fall of 1981 I read 1984. That gave me nightmares, something I was never prone to having before then, and helped tip me into a months long bout of depression. What brought me out of that was reading Atlas Shrugged, even though I couldn’t get all the way through “the speech” until a later reading. I’d absorbed an extrapolated enough to know what the speech was all about anyway, and didn’t need the repeated beatings with a cast iron clue bat it represented.
I found We The Living especially depressing, but a good book, clearly formative and different from the others. I pick on public schools, but my late cousin Wendy say We The Living in my collection, got all excited because she had read it in high school, and borrowed it to read again. How amazing! A public high school in relatively northern Maine was assigning Ayn Rand as reading as little as about 20 years ago. Not bad, showing what communism wrought.
I went through a phase of collecting any of her books I could find, and even reading some of them. One of the clearest indicators of why Rand was needed is represented by one store clerk’s reaction to my asking for The Virtue of Selfishness. Understandable, given the common definition and connotation imbued into the word, but silly in that it’s ultimately what we’re all about, what makes us tick and keeps us alive.
Anyway, go read Ian’s post. It’s better than mine.
Baby stats!
Sadie had her four month well-baby visit yesterday. Woo-hoo! She’s 13 pounds 14 ounces and 25 inches long, which puts her at the 50th and 75th percentiles, respectively. So it isn’t my imagination--she really *is* putting it all into getting taller. She’s hitting all of her milestones handily and has been cleared to start eating real food whenever we feel like starting with her. I’m not in a hurry, but I think she is, since she keeps trying to grab her daddy’s dinner. 
And that’s about it. She didn’t tolerate the shots as well as last time, but she slept great last night once she finally slept. Now if she’ll actually nap today we’ll be in good shape, I think.
Oh, and the doc seemed very impressed with how well we’ve done with breastfeeding, which was a nice salve for my ego, especially considering how little I actually like it. I got the feeling we’re a relative rarity in having succeeded in giving her nothing but breastmilk for 4 months. And you know what? It may be natural, but it’s hard frigging work and I appreciate the appreciation something fierce.
Your Daily Sadie
I really don’t think I’m going back.
’Cause you know what? *You* try keeping a baby happy and quiet in your waiting room for *an hour and a half* and then we’ll see how your blood pressure is doing, m’kay?
(Good thing they didn’t take it after telling me that they want me to do the same thing *every two weeks* but that they won’t treat it because I should be able to bring it down *by myself* because normally they’d tell a nursing mother to go ahead and eat but, well...you know, I obviously must eat like crap because I’m so fat [yeah, slightly paraphrased but that was the message]).
See, the fun part about having a blood pressure problem is that once you get really, really good and pissed at a doctor you can’t ever get it to read right in their presence again. I don’t care how much my husband likes this guy or how good he is with the baby. I’m done. Bye-bye. Pffffffffffft. Baby stats in another post later. I’m still pissed.
UPDATE: Well, I sound brave but I’ll have to go back if I want to use the same midwives for my next pregnancy (assuming there is one). Double pfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft. We couldn’t even make appointments last night because we were there so late and all of the reception staff had gone home (well, except for the one who was still physically in the office but unwilling to take the two minutes, but that’s another rant). Of course, it’s crossed my mind to dump them, too, since I was pretty unhappy at the way we were treated when Sadie was born, but that’s a whole other rant. I suppose what I should do is make them actually look for a cause for my problems, which nobody has ever bothered to do. Maybe there’s something actually, honestly out of whack. ‘Cause I’m not that much fricking fatter than I was before.
Remind me to rant about how we’ve slid from “you can decrease your chances of a problem” or “you can help this problem” with a certain behavior to “it’s all your fault, fat & ugly.” My bp was borderline when I weighed 50 pounds less and ran several miles every morning. Weight contributes, sure. But I don’t have the problem in the first place because I’m a fat nasty slob. Presumably it’s a family thing, though since nobody had ever looked for a cause, it could be a sign that I’m going to drop dead any year now, I suppose.
Ugh. I should go back to bed. I’m cranky.
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Doctor Visits… Oh Yay
So this afternoon we have three appointments with the doctor, one for each of us. That includes Sadie’s four month autism inducements vaccinations.
We’ve been curious to know what she weighs, so we’re actually looking forward to one little aspect of the appointments.
More On Trackback Spam
Kathy has a post on the wave of trackback spam on WordPress, which also struck Movable Type, and preliminary advice on handling it. She’s working on more elegant solutions, but her initial thinking is the type of thing I suspected would help.
This post also is to help her test trackbacks incoming from various blogging software, in our case Expression Engine, to see if it all still works.
One of These Days…
I’ll do either a new ”100 things“ about me, or a series of essays, or both, that do more in one place to lay out what I believe and why than I have done clearly on the blogs before.
The why is the important thing. Many people have beliefs or things they support, or don’t, and perhaps they can go back a layer or two of because this leads to that, or not, but maybe they’ve never looked beyond that to core principles. I’d rather know I’m disagreeing with you because your core principles are alien than because you’re jumping to the “oughta be a law” variety of position. I believe most people come to their positions in exactly that way, or in the “it’s always been like that” or “I was raised that way” or “all my friends say so” or “I learned it in school” ways.
Of course, there are times when most of us will abandon the core for something that seems right at the time, or seems right under a different extrapolation from principles, or seems the best application of principles to reality as it is rather than we’d ideally like it to be. Even then, I figure it’s useful to know something’s there, underneath it all, like an anchor that lets you drift a little but never float aimlessly, any which way.
Ranty Rant
Acidman is right. This is scary. How can any family let their children get past the age of, say, twelve, without a working knowledge and appreciation of the First Amendment?
This is what we get for allowing the government to be involved in education. At all. Perhaps Horace Mann ought to start appearing on those lists people come up with now and then of people who did the most to ruin the country.
One of the best ways to bring out the libertarian in me is to pine for more spending, especially federal spending, on education, so the communist teachers union can waste even more to undereducate, indoctrinate, and fail to challenge our kids to think like the rational beings they start out as before being shipped off to government brain sausage factories. The foolish think they want more and more of that. The irresponsible are relieved they can step back from their kid’s lives. The controllingly clever know exactly the why and what of public education, better still accompanied by increasing federal bucks and mandates, and happily use the foolish and irresponsible to ensure things get worse and worse.
Augh.
Yet another reason to homeschool.
This is frightening.
Interestingly enough, the choice of issues and the tone of the article make it seem to me that they’re afraid of high-schoolers turning into right-wing fanatics, when their education has obviously been limited in the usual attempt to turn them into left-wing fanatics.
Funny how that works.
There’s Nothing Quite Like A Goofy Quiz
Josh created a quiz, so I went ahead and took it, because these things are amusing, even though I am unfamiliar with the show in question. How’d Joan get in there anyway?
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
You scored as Jack Malone. You are in charge, and everyone knows it. You are very intelligent, and you’re also very insightful. People you care about aren’t afraid to come to you, and people who try to lie to you don’t last long under your scrutiny. You love your family very much, even if you don’t get to see them much anymore. You also look a little like a bulldog, and you bear a striking resemblance to Detective Tony Giordino of the San Francisco Police Department.
Which member of the Without A Trace team are you? created with QuizFarm.com |
The description does sound plausibly like me, except the bulldog look.
Link Spammers: Less Evil Than E-Mail Spammers?
The Register has an interview with a link spammer. That is, a blog comment and trackback spammer. We hates him, yes we do. He makes us imagine vise grips, rusty knives, open flames and testicles in the same thought. And skyscraper defenestration as an afterthought.
Grand Rounds Is Up
This weeks Grand Rounds, a collection of posts on medical topics, is up at Capsules, which just happens to be a good example of business blogging.
The blog is brought to you by a specialized magazine called Medical Meetings. Not something of interest to me, but a great idea, and participation in a relevant meme like Grand Rounds helps get them more firmly on the blogosphere map, including among their target audience.
Your Daily Sadie
