up or down vote
This has to be one of the dumbest redundant phrases I’ve heard in awhile. There has to be a better way to communicate what people are trying to communicate when they use this phrase. Its sounds like something a 3rd grader would say.
In any case, this phrase must DIE. Thank you.
Via Jess:
You know, I don’t try to answer the questions in a way to get these results, it just happens.
Last Friday, Sarah and I went to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry to see the Body Worlds and Game On exhibits. Read about Game On in Part II
—
Body Worlds was pretty interesting. There have been some pretty in-depth discussions about Body Worlds on some of the mailing lists I’m on. There were people who questioned the ethics of such a display as well as the taste. Now that I’ve experienced it and had a few days to reflect, I think I can comment on it.
I have to say it was one of the most educational things, outside of my profession, that I’ve done in years. I found the side by side displays of healthy organs next to diseased/cancered/etc to be informative. Also, after looking at the black lungs on some of the pieces, I don’t know why you’d continue to smoke. The other thing is that all the bodies used in the display either donated their bodies or had them donated by their next of kin with a very good release form that asks many reasonable questions including “Why are you doing this?” It looks like they would reject donations if they felt the people weren’t fully understanding or believing in what they were doing.
For the most part, I thought all the displays were tasteful and put in positions that emphasized a part of physiology they were trying to show. There was only one or two that I turned me off. For example, there is a piece called “the wingman” where the bodies muscles are fanned out, but I forget now what it was demonstrating. I think maybe it was the thickness of muscles in certain parts of the body. That part was fine, but he was wearing a straw hat with the caption of the display saying something akin to “He’s wearing a hate to further blur the line between life and death.” In any case, that kinda turned me off and made it less educational and more silly. Sarah pointed out that maybe it was a request of the person who donated their body or a reflection of someone he was known for.
One section of the display that was difficult for me to view was separated off in a curtained area, probably for just that reason. It was displays of mothers and fetuses in various stages of pregnancy. Previous to having a daughter, I don’t think it would have affected me, but I know that’s why it bothered me now. I couldn’t help but think of how sad it was for them to have lost the baby and/or for a husband/father to lose his wife and potential child. One of the things about the display is that they don’t share with you the reason for death of the donated bodies, they say its to focus on the body and their life and not to dwell on their deaths. I agree and understand why they did it, but for this section I wanted to know, if only for selfish reasons of feeling lucky about how well everything went for us. That being said, I think I also got more out of this part of the display post-fatherhood as I had more of an interest and could remember back to how we were and what we were thinking about at that time.
Another interesting part of the display was they had a horse they had put through the plastination process and displayed with a man. They invited you to compare and contrast between the human body and the horses and really examine how we were similar and different. For most of the display I had only been thinking about myself or people I knew when looking at the bodies. The horse display forced me to put humans in context with the rest of the animal kingdom and I liked its inclusion for that. However, part of me knows that this piece was there for the sensationalism of it that its size brought to it.
In the Tempo section of the Chicago Tribune was a story titled “How e-mail is transforming our behavior.” It was a good article, and I’ll get to it in a minute, but first a gripe.
I went looking for this article so I could provide a link to it. Naturally, I went to the tribune site and typed in the headline from the paper. Well, it appears that the on-line edition and the dead tree edition have different titles. Highly annoying, and hopefully not a standard practice. Makes it very hard to point out content to other people. It also appears that the content is slightly different as well. However, most of what I liked about the article is still there.
In any case, the on-line version of the article is titled E-mail evolution: Everyday life is being transformed with each click of the send button. The first two paragraphs caught my eye and lead me to read the rest of the article.
In the Stone Age of Internet technology, roughly seven to 10 years ago, computer users would reel off e-mail replies as fast as their fingers could tap-dance across keyboards. The daunting task often devoured the evening until finally the last e-mail was sent or exhaustion took over.
But today, nearly two-thirds of experienced computer users delay returning personal e-mails from one to three days. Sometimes, it’s even up to a week, and all, in perhaps an ultimately vain attempt, to reclaim their personal lives. Meanwhile, e-mail novices usually constantly fire back replies.
I really found myself described pretty well in those two paragraphs. I know I am definitely taking longer to respond to some e-mail then I would have in the past. There is still e-mail that needs to be answered now, but its not nearly as much as the stuff I let go. Especially the stuff I need to think about.
However, I was trying to decide if it was being experienced with the net or just that my life is completely different from where I was 7 to 10 years ago. I was single, in college or just graduated, I didn’t have a kid. All factors that have taken time away from my time on the net and with e-mail. However, even when I have time, I find myself ignoring those e-mails, so maybe it is a factor of experience.
A second wave of research is delving deeper into the psychology of e-mail. Closer attention is being paid to what e-mail does to personality. Staring at a computer screen, usually alone, can lower inhibitions, argues psychologist Patricia Wallace. As such, e-mail users are often more aggressive, even more intimate, than they should be…
Much of the confusion associated with personal e-mail is simply the result of not having an established etiquette on the frontier of cyberspace.
I have had people send me stuff that came across as really snotty or very snobbish when not intended. In fact, that can be a chronic problem with some people. Even little things make a difference. For example, full sentences go a long way to not coming across as a total prick. Even if your grammar or spelling isn’t the best, most people will let that go, but sentence fragments tell me that I’m not worth the effort to type more.
As stated above, people take internet based communications as something different than how they would interact with someone in real life. Maybe the problem is me, where I try to keep my “public face” consistent in e-mail as well as face-to-face or verbal communication. In any case, though, you should be aware of the way people expect to be treated and want to be treated. I can’t figure out why people just assume that when you can’t see someone you can drop the golden rule. I suppose its the same thing that makes “gossip” happen.
As an example, I’ve gotten into fights with people when trying to correct them on a particular mailing lists etiquette. This was an actual comment made by someone: “Its on the net, I can do anything I want!” My paraphrased response: “You’re on a list I run, consider yourself not on it anymore if you can’t listen to the etiquette I’m trying to tell you about.” Of course, this was an extreme example of someone who didn’t always understand etiquette in real life either.
In any case, the rest of the article was pretty good, and its something I find fairly interesting. More so because I can see it in myself, my friends, and my family.
Looks like wordpress has an off-by-one-date bug regarding Rewrite rules for the /feed URLs. I’m not sure what it is, nor am I going to track it down, but it is present.
Without this post, the rss feed fails. With this post, it works. It has to do with today’s date and how wordpress does a Rewrite rules, as going straight against the PHP script works, using the mod_rewrite action does not.
Weird.
[Update 6/1: Looks like I had hand patched a bug that should have brought me up to 1.5.1.1 but there was still a lingering feed problem. In any case, I just upgraded to 1.5.1.2 and the feed appears to be back and working properly.]
Here are two observations from last night based on the phrase: “Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?”
“I’m not going to buy the cow if I can’t at least sample the milk to make sure its okay.”
“I’m not going to buy the cow if its FUCKING CRAZY”
The mat under the urinal, which goes by the name of “hygoMat by hygolet“, appeared in the men’s bathroom on our floor this week. I’ll spare you from what the hygoMat does, its marketing page can help you with that.
However, it makes me wonder, do the men on my floor have aiming issues or something? How hard is it to take a leak? It scares me a little bit.
My friend Joe is San Francisco County’s Bike Commuter of the Year. He wrote about it on Google’s blog.
Congrats, Joe!
However, I still think you’re insane due to the following:
I ride 40 miles from San Francisco to Mountain View (and back!) twice a week.
There is a fight this Saturday night at the United Center: Brewster vs. Golota. Supposedly its the first professional fight in Chicago in some long amount of time.
So, I’m sitting around coding and we’re hearing some screaming from out on Michigan Ave. We hear stuff like that all the time being located where we are. Finally, my curiousity got the best of me, so I went to look out the window and see what it was. “Oh, dude, its Don King.” So we went down to what was the official weigh-in for the fight.
Sadly, all I had was the crappy camera in my Hiptop2/Sidekick2.
Also, here’s a meta-photo of Rachelle taking pictures of the event.
That’s her hands and camera on the left. I suggest checking out her much better photos in this post on chicagoist
