• Julie Gomoll’s had it with twitter/facebook/social-media spam from people pitching their South by Southwest panel proposals.
• The best lessons on marketing from Second Life come from the people who are creating fashion, gadgets, and other things inworld. Learn from them.
• Your employees may be gender-switched in virtual worlds when representing the firm. I think, given IBM’s comfort with it, and Zha’s impeccable sense of fashion, that it should be a non-issue. But what do I know, as I’m a small brass robot while on company business.
• Budget cuts at the state-level in the US will force people with disabilities into nursing homes, where dehumanizing treatment, and risks to health and safety prevail.
• Here’s a couple of lighter chasers:
  • Each year at Worldcon, UK fan Steve Rogerson organizes a pre-convention pub crawl to visit places serving locally-made craft brewed beer. These are always a great evening out, even when you’re going on three hours of sleep. We didn’t make it to every place Rogerson listed on his Montreal outing, but I liked L’Amère à Boire.
  • Xach Beane has been making web toys in Common Lisp. His latest is a riff on a Super Mario Brothers cut scene.

Anita’s been active in weblogs and online-journals since the beginning, and she’s a keystone of the Seattle weblog community. I met her through Science Fiction fandom and Potlatch.

Please keep Anita and Jack in your thoughts.

Sorry to be joining a weblog chorus, but folks, this is what killed Ms. Schiavo. When she tried to lose weight by throwing up what she had for dinner, she set herself up for the heart attack that starved her brain of oxygen.

But the article, written by Hendrik Hertzberg (who ought to know better,) speaks in glowing terms about her drastic weight loss.

One of the comments describes what an eating disorder really does:

A friend of mine from high school was anorexic, and when she was down near a hundred pounds, she was not slim, she was not vivacious, she was pretty darned near skeletal.

• Roe v. Wade
• abortion

Link

I told him about a scary product my friend Evan, back in Madison, found at a Anything’s a Dollar store: microwave pork rinds. He gave little packages of them as gag gifts for several years.

Well, not only are pork rinds back, but yes, you can order gourmet, microwave pork rinds. Why, because “Store bought pork rinds can be greasy and stale.” Yeah, and they smell funny too.

Most European countries have liberalised their abortion laws since the 1970s, and in almost every case that was enough to settle the debate. Europeans went about legalisation through new legislation and, occasionally, referenda. This allowed abortion opponents to vent their objections and legislators to adjust the rules to local tastes.

…

America went down the alternative route of declaring abortion a constitutional right. This reliance on the Supreme Court rather than the usual legislative process left many anti-abortionists feeling that they had been denied their say.

Unfortunately, the Courts were the only avenue for establishing the right, since, as the Economist goes on to point out American religousity:

One result of America’s religiosity is its relative conservatism about sex. Thirteen states still have anti-sodomy laws. The Bush administration favors sex education based on abstinence. Many of the noisiest opponents of abortion also oppose easy access to contraception. Puritanical America has higher rates of both abortion and unwanted pregnancy than many European countries with more liberal attitudes to sex education.

The Economist, (Print, West Coast US Edition) January 18th 2003, p.25, col. 1

So, given that intransigence, its no wonder that the right to abortion had to be won in the courts. If left to politics, even birth control would most likely be illegal to this day.

Dubbed “Not-My-Problem-Based Learning”, the new curriculum approach confronts young doctors with clinical dilemmas, therapeutic conundrums, and ethical challenges, and then shows them how to weasel their way out of trouble by dumping the issues on colleagues.

He was put on blood-thinners in preparation for applying an electrical pulse to re-sync the rates of the upper and lower chambers. After two tries, the cardiologist got Dad’s heart in sync. Dad reports that he’s got more energy. Not bad for a guy who turns 80 next year.

Now, there’s research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, comparing the results of the two methods for treating atrial fibrillation: the common strategy used on my Dad, which is to resync via drugs and/or electrical defibrillation, and the non-obvious strategy of altering the rate of the other chamber using inexpensive drugs. Turns out that the non-obvious strategy may lead to better outcomes.

Treatment and prevention strategies started with low cost methods with great returns, such as insectide soaked bed nets to prevent bites by maleria carrying mosquitos, and electrolyte-rich rehydrating solutions for small children with diahrreha.

The methods appear to have improved the health of the people in the trial areas. More kids are surviving early childhood, and people are losing less time to maleria. The latter has improved the standard of living since not only do people striken with maleria not work, their families can’t work either since they are caring for their ill relatives.

Over at Electrolite, they’re discussing how it would take 80 cents per US Citizen per Year to prevent the deaths of 2.5 million children worldwide from waterborne illness. In the Tanzania study, the improvements to health care cost around an additional 80 cents per person served. So if you have the 80 cents, there’s some folks in Tanzania who know how to spend it effectively.

The investigation has linked FBI agents and scientists in a race to find who sent the letters. Federal scientists examining the anthrax used in the Florida and New York attacks have tentatively concluded that it is a domestic strain that bears no resemblance to strains that Russia and Iraq have turned into biological weapons.

It’s also worth noting that this article is different than the reports in the Mercury News and NPR, where Tom Ridge and others have been spinning things towards Iraq as the culprit (if you want to bomb Baghdad again, have the bloody integrity to say you want to bomb Baghdad and don’t fabricate excuses).

The news that it’s the Ames strain does not exhonorate Hussein and company, but reminds us not to jump to conclusions.