Fiber for Your Diet

I also found out, from another document, that "friable asbestos" is a real term, and it doesn't mean asbestos fit for consumption after a round of deep-fat frying (mmmmmm, fried carcinogens . . . a side of cigarettes and a 16-oz. formaldehyde and we have a gimmick). Friable, it turns out, means "crumbly" (points for Lisa, dictionary queen). So I guess you could have "friable cake" and "friable cookies," too. But not "friable fried chicken."

Fun word-seen-in-a-document of the day:

"arrearages"

Its meaning isn't nearly as cool as the way it sounds.

Labels: proofreading

Alignments

Five un-stars shimmer
And take to the evening sky
To dance in twilight

Pledging

There's a new case before the Supreme Court involving that pesky "under God" phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance, which has been simmering for awhile on the West Coast. It's a remarkably volatile case for only two words, but that's what messing with people's beliefs does. As an atheist, obviously I'm in support of the words being removed (I don't say the Pledge on principle, but it's not usually worth making a scene about it; I can only imagine the amount of hate mail this guy has received). Realistically, I don't expect it to happen. Most likely the Court will sidestep the case (because the father bringing suit doesn't have full custody of the girl at the center of the case) and will simply dismiss it (in which case, correct me if I'm wrong, the 9th Circuit Court's ruling on the West Coast stands for that district while the rest of the country remains under the current Pledge).

The frustration with the Pledge for people like myself is two-fold: the reference to this particular "God" isn't the issue so much as the fact that the government is taking a stand on which belief system (any belief system) is valid, and it's doing so in a patriotic stanza, thereby tying support for a subjective belief system to patriotism. To people who believe in a monotheistic deity, seeing a government reference to "God" is no big deal ("it's just tradition"). To people who don't (not only the non-religious, but followers of polytheistic belief systems - the U.S.'s one million Buddhists, one million Hindus, etc.), it's a message that "we'll tolerate your presence here but there's a favored system and you're an outsider." Even the author of the Yahoo article automatically spoke of "God" in the capitalized, personal sense (by which he/she meant "the Judeo-Christian God," not the Muslim god or the Zoroastrian god, to be sure). Endorsing one belief system automatically marginalizes all other belief systems. This is especially relevant if the Pledge is being taught to and required from children. To a six-year-old mind, how can the Hindu faith be relevant if the government has already stated that there is only one god?

The patriotism issue is separate, but worth examining. It's no secret that the majority of Americans are Christians and most of them think that their god protects the U.S. They're entitled to that belief. Not all Americans believe that (again not only the non-religious but also a great many American Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and other assorted minority religions), and most of us are no less proud and supportive of our country than the average American. We just don't have the same theological beliefs. We're coming off several decades of a Cold War-mentality where "godless" was equated with Communism and "Muslim" is now connotated with "terrorist," which are unfortunate stereotypes that need to be erased. Teaching children that the government endorses "one God" doesn't help that. My dad and I once had a discussion on liberal vs. conservative ideology and he reluctantly agreed with me when I said "You can love your country without endorsing the policies and practices of the current administration." The same is true of religion. You can be a good American without believing in the Judeo-Christian god.

As a postscript, for the religious who think I'm whining about nothing, consider these alternative versions of the Pledge:

". . . one nation, united in the knowledge that there are no gods, with liberty and justice for all."
or, one more likely to have people up in arms
". . . one nation, under Allah, with liberty and justice for all."

I would never suggest actually putting anything like that in the Pledge. I'm not interested in making other people acknowledge my beliefs. But it illustrates that what appears innocuous to one who agrees with the sentiment of the message may not be innocuous to people who disagree with it.

Mining for Trouble

This is the funniest Foxtrot I've seen this year. I'm still laughing. :)

Singing the Blues

I like music (anyone who knows me well knows about my Sarah McLachlan addiction), but music has been frustrating me for the last couple of days. Or rather, not music itself but the tangled mess that the music industry has become. I don't download music (I consider it unethical, but that's an entirely different topic); I've always purchased the CDs and ripped them to my computer. But there are a lot of songs that I like that by themselves don't justify the purchase price for an entire CD (I'm not buying a CD for one song). So I was actually interested in the latest industry attempts at legal downloadable music. Pay by the song, the song is instantly transferred to your computer, everything is billed directly to your credit card, voila. Sounds like a great setup.

Wrong.

I signed up for iTunes on Sunday. iTunes is the Apple version of downloadable music, but they've expanded to Windows. I really liked the iTunes setup and the way you could search for music, hear clips, see related music, etc. So I bought a song and moved it into my music folder. Problem. The song I downloaded is in some funky format I haven't seen before and Windows Media Player won't play it (technophobes will recognize the format as ACC or .m4p). I go through the settings on the program and find one that selects for MP3 encoding (the format I want) and try again. Now I have two copies of the same song in the same format. Grrr. So I have my main music collection that I can listen to in one program, and two songs I can listen to in another program. :P Cris mentioned that Mike and Jen use iTunes, so I catch Mike online on Monday night. He thought they were downloading in MP3, but on closer inspection he found that their files, too, are in the funky format and they just hadn't noticed because Jen uses an iPod, which reads that format. According to Apple, that format is a superior audio format. Maybe so, but I don't have anything that can play it. :P Mike spent 20 minutes looking for a way to convert ACC to MP3, but couldn't find an easy way (and we were in agreement that we shouldn't have to do that; its our music, we should be able to put it in whatever format we want).

After that I decided to resign from iTunes. Next problem. I couldn't find a "cancel account" option anywhere (even after 20 minutes of searching through help files), so I finally e-mailed them. Their reply included this: "At present, it is not possible to cancel an account." along with instructions for removing my credit card information from the account that I can't close. What kind of a service doesn't allow you to cancel an account?

Today I looked at buymusic.com (the most serious competitor to iTunes), but it only took me a few minutes to decide to pass on them. Their files aren't in MP3 either (they use WMV, which Windows Media Player will play, but they're still not MP3s; MP3 is the standard for car stereos and the like), and they have some sort of digital encryption that prevents them from being converted or from being transferred to another computer. So if I buy a big collection of music from them and then buy a new computer (which I'm planning on doing soon), the music doesn't come along with me. Yeah, right.

Mike and I agreed that all of these sites are missing the big picture. They're making it very difficult for people who actually want to download music legally. I could go download all the songs I want for free; instead, I'm willing to pay for them, but all of these hoops make it very difficult. I want to pay for my music, put it all in one folder in one format and be able to burn it to CD to play in my car and at work. None of these systems allow that. When it's possible to download all of the songs for free, the industry really shouldn't be making it difficult for people who are willing to pay for it.

Mike suggested I pay for the songs through iTunes and then download the MP3s, which seems like the best solution at the moment (it satisfies my ethical objections, since I've paid for the right to use that piece of music). Cris suggested I just pay him and he'll download the MP3s for me . . .

Sweets for the Sweet

Humorous anecdote of the day: I realized on Friday that the large sugar container in the kitchen at work (the mate to the creamer container next to the coffee machine) actually has directions for use. Something to the effect of "Directions: Put in coffee to sweeten to taste." Come on. It's sugar! Were they afraid someone was going to be confused and use it as floor wax or fuel for a nuclear bomb?

I remember a game we played once in one of my high school English classes. We had to write an instruction manual for making a peanut butter sandwich. Then the teacher collected them and gave them to one student, who read them one at a time while the teacher followed the instructions exactly. Most of the instructions manuals didn't work because students left out steps that were assumed. For example, the first one began "1. Spread peanut butter on bread." Problem? The jar is closed. Another opened the jar, then said "2. Spread peanut butter on bread." Alas, with no mention of a butter knife, the teacher halted the operation before being forced to use her hands to spread the peanut butter. So on. Only four or five people out of a class of 24 actually succeeded in making a sandwich. It was a fun and very visual lesson about writing clearly, and I'm reminded of it whenever I see poorly designed instructions on a product.

. . . "Directions: Step 1. Pick up sugar container. Step 2. Open spout on top of sugar container. Step 3. Turn container to a sloped negative angle until sugar is pulled by gravity into the coffee cup. Step 4. Wait until desired amount of sugar has been dispensed. Step 5. Return sugar container to upright position. Step 6. Put container on counter." . . .

Lazy Weekends

Another of my uber-productive weekends (I am so not Type A). I did do laundry, though! And grocery shopping! And cloning Sarah McLachlan! (Well, okay, I only did two of those three. Guess which two.) I did go out with some friends on Sunday evening (Chinese and board games). Good times were had. Police were not called. Bail money was not raised.

An old friend, someone with whom I hadn't spoken for a couple of years, called after catching a snippet about "emergency rooms" on my Web log, just to see what was up and if I was okay, which was nice of her (probably why she's in the "friend" category, as opposed to the "bite me" category). We chatted for awhile about college and "glory days," which was a nice way to spend an hour on a Sunday night (since I haven't kept in contact with any of my college friends). It gave me a chance to further reflect on how much I've changed in the last six years and to take stock of my own little war against my pride/arrogance/egotism/"I'm right so why are you even arguing with me?" traits. I'm maturing, ever so slowly. Those of you who know me well understand. ;)

Friday Eyes

I hope everyone has a great weekend. Just remember, you're being watched . . .

Happy St. Patty's Day, Revisted

I hope everyone had a great day o' green. My office experienced madness and stark terror as Cthulhu passed out cookies.

Happy St. Patty's Day. :)

No accompanying recipe page, I'm afraid, but I did make cookies. ;) I guess I don't have a shamrock cookie cutter, though (I thought I did). Oh well.

Moving Out

It snowed again. Supposedly it's a farewell-kiss-from-Old-Man-Winter sort of flurry that jumped out of the bushes for one last hurrah before frumping off to Canada to sit in a bar and drink for the next seven months. We'll see. It snowed pretty hard for a day or so (big, wet, heavy flakes), but the concrete has retained enough heat to turn it all into a nice grey watery soup on the streets (so traffic has been fine, although the perpetual spray of mist from the cars has been enough to make the owners of the local car washes smile). It's supposed to be in the fifties over the weekend, so I don't expect it to last long. It was enough to cover all the lawns and driveways, though, which meant I got to see the bunny tracks on my lawn, right next to the Firestone tracks from a Chevy 4x4 pickup . . . Turns out two of the geniuses in my apartment decided to move out of my apartment complex during the last major snow storm of the year, at midnight, and they were too lazy to carry their stuff an extra 20 feet to the parking lot. So as I'm standing on the sidewalk trying to determine if it was vandals or joyriders who tore up the lawn, the culprit vehicle returns for another load, driving up over the sidewalk, around the light pole and across the lawn to a point roughly two-and-a-half feet from my front window. They then provided my amusement for the night as I sat in my computer chair in my dark apartment and watched them carry all of their worldly possessions to the waiting vehicle and cursed at each other a lot. Suffice it to say I was not impressed. I wouldn't be surprised if a vehicle of that size damaged a lawn that was soaked from a day of wet snowfall, and even if it didn't, they didn't carry out anything heavier than a small bookcase (and the majority of the items were boxes and fans and suitcases and the like, nothing that couldn't have been carried another 20 feet - especially with the hand truck they brought but didn't use). I was waiting for one of them to smack one of my birdfeeders.

Morbid Curiosity

Seen in a document tonight: "mortality or morbidity contingencies"
I don't know what it means legally, but it's my new catch phrase.

Labels: proofreading

There Can Be Only One

It appears another Immortal has been spotted in Omaha.

Cattle Rustling

This ad has been running in my hometown paper for three weeks now. It's over man. I don't think they're coming home . . .

House Hunting

I had a marvelously unproductive weekend, with my only major excursion to look at a couple of houses. There was an open house for house that Lisa spotted on a real estate Web site. I took a look at that one and drove by a couple of others. The first one was a nice house, but the neighborhood was not so nice and it sat on a semi-major thoroughfare (next to a used-car lot), which kind of limited its appeal. The second house was in a much nicer neighborhood. I only drove by, but I'd like to take a closer look some time. I need to stop by the bank and get pre-approved first, though. Hopefully in the near future. For anyone out there looking to buy a house for me, I'd like a brick house with a fireplace, hardwood floors and an attached garage, preferably in a nice neighborhood. I saw some really nice houses while trying to find those two. I'm sure if you wrote a big enough check the occupants would move.

Is It Thursday or Friday?

My schedule is so odd that sometimes it's hard to tell. For me it's still Thursday, but the clock says Friday (albeit very early Friday). When I'm on my normal (non-driving-impaired) schedule, I don't actually get off work until just into the next day, but alas they still only pay me for one day at a time. Speaking of work, it was busy tonight, far busier than normal (which I actually don't mind - job security and all that, you know). It did keep me from catching up on my reading like I did last night. I finished off my latest Discover magazine, which had some really good articles this month. One in particular on amorphous metals that I found absolutely fascinating (amorphous metals are alloys that lack a crystalline structure and as a consequence can be twice as strong as titanium and possess a variety of other interesting traits, such as being made into a "foam" that's 99% air).

Another on the blossoming field of neuroethics, or the science of brain biology's effects on ethical decisions. One of the main points in that article was the concept that the way our neural pathways form makes it very difficult for us to "look outside the box" regarding an opinion that we have already formed. As a result, in a debate or argument, we automatically think that the person with the opposing viewpoint is stupid or willfully ignorant of what we view as an obvious truth, but in reality the other person actually may not be capable of stepping outside his/her viewpoint due to neurological reasons (and the same for us). Humans will rationalize out flaws and holes in our arguments to absurd lengths rather than abandon a strongly held opinion, due to, according to the authors, our brain structure. The study's authors backed it up with MRI scans and test data, but the field is in its infancy so I'm going to withhold judgment. Although, in my debates with other opinionated people, I've seen people deadlock the way the article describes (which is why there are certain people with whom I simply will not debate), I also know that my own personal opinions changed almost 180 degrees during and right after college, to the point where I want to go back and smack my 20-year-old self for defending a point of view that I now find distasteful (and in retrospect I can clearly see the flaws in the arguments that my 20-year-old self offered, but my 20-year-old self couldn't). So maybe the theory needs more work, or maybe I'm just one of the rare people who can "look outside the box" and change viewpoints after adulthood. In any case, I really enjoyed the issue. Of course, I also enjoyed the article on the ekpyrotic theory of the Universe and its relation with quantum mechanics. Yes, I'm a science geek.

Labels: quantum mechanics, science

Looking at the Chart

For those of you who know about my recent excursions into the world of brain disorders, a quick update. It's been almost two months and I'm completely seizure-free. The medication I'm taking seems to do a kick-ass job. I'd almost say that life has returned to the chaotic semblance of reality that I call "normality," except for the annoying bits that still hover about me. In particular, I'm still not allowed to drive, which has really been the biggest pain. Omaha has virtually no public transportation (and certainly nothing that accommodates a job that gets out at midnight), so I've been relying entirely on friends and coworkers (and I owe them a lot for their patience). In the meantime the battery on my car has gone dead. :P The other major hassle has been the medical bills (as I'm sure anyone who has had any significant hospital visit can attest). Luckily I'm solvent enough to handle the bills, but it's still depressing to see your bank account shrivel and cringe in fear before every visit to the mailbox. But, in the grand scheme of things I've come out pretty lucky and I've accepted it and moved on (to the point where I can make fun of it, even if some of my friends/coworkers find it morbid). Nothing like a good foaming at the mouth reference to freak Lisa out (in her defense, she actually saw me foaming at the mouth and it scared her). As soon as I can drive again and the medical bills dwindle, life will pretty much have returned to normal. Once again, thanks to everyone for your care and concern. :)

Warning: Graphic Images ahead. Don't click if you're squeamish.
If you're curious, here is what your face looks like after a grand mal seizure. My neurologist said that a 3-minute grand mal seizure is equivalent to running a marathon (as every muscle in the body fires simultaneously and intensely), which would explain why I hurt like hell after it. It also breaks the blood vessels in the skin and leaves a nice rash pattern, and in my case the clenching of my jaw caused a tooth ache. So, if you're having dizzy spells, go see a doctor before this happens. :P

Unveilings

Okay, after years and years (okay, months and months . . . fine, fine, weeks and weeks . . . okay, well, two weeks anyway) of late nights and caffeine, the new site design is up and running. It has a much lighter feel than the old black version, with geometric patterns and an architectural theme. I've decided I like it (I wasn't sure for awhile). I finally moved all the files over tonight and everything should be good now. But . . . since this is basically its beta test, if you find any errors let me know (I'm sure they're there and I just haven't seen them yet). All comments are welcome.

Happy International Women's Day! :)

Constitutional Ruminations

An opinion piece in today's paper that I enjoyed.