06 Mar 2003
Death is Not a Stranger Anymore

Well, I got a call from Mom tonight - my aunt is in ICU in a Florida hospital following heart surgery. No idea if she'll make it or not - but she is 84....

The older I get the more it seems that death is all around. I know it's just a question of point of view (I'm older, and so are a lot of the people I know ....) but nonetheless, it sure does set one thinking.

One of the main functions of any religion is explaining the afterlife (or lack thereof) and death itself. I have started towards that in the context of my own faith (see the Meditations in the Asatru category of this web log - there are 4 so far) but I really need to expand and tie them all together into some sort of coherent thread.

This calls for a longer essay than I have time for this morning - I just finished up coding some power management revisions to USB driver for Windows and I'm pretty beat. Kris'll be gone this weekend though - up to Michigan to check out some Icelandic sheep, so perhaps I'll have the time to sit and write a bit more.

If I don't have to take a long trip south.

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Drug'em All

Stimulant treatment of children with ADHD reduces subsequent substance abuse [Science Blog]

Ye gads! 'Meta-data analysis' ...??? Sounds suspiciously like the old quote from Mark Twain:

There are three kids of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.

Note the source of the funding for this particular waste of time and money. I wonder what the original grant proposal looked like?

If anybodys willing to throw enough money at me, I'll be glad to prove, statistically, that children who stuffed monkey turds up their nose before age 6 were much more likely to marry red heads.....

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Public Protests or Ploy

For anyone who's interested, here's a link to the relevent police reports on the mall incident that has been the subject of much discussion.

If you notice, the complaints state that the pair with the shirts had been stopping and harassing other shoppers - which goes well beyond the 'I was just wearing this tee shirt I just bought and they kicked me out, the facist bastards!' line that the media has been spouting.

I think this was a ploy to ratchet up the debate - and it's working, too.

Regardless of your particluar position on the upcoming events in Iraq, I think this is a pretty clear cut example of exactly what position the major news media holds: any reporter could have gotten access to these reports before filing their stories....

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