They have pills for lactose already, so it's only a matter of time.
- Micah Wittman
Why? It's a self selecting show of stupidity. For the majority of people, at this point in the time, all a computer is is an internet terminal, if you want to argue over something it's not so much the OS as it is the browser.
- Jimminy
Probably just tonight. I'm babysitting my cousin, because my there was a death in my aunt's boyfriends family.
- Jimminy
Well not great circumstances, but good to see you "Go Online" (Rochelle's terminology).
- Micah Wittman
Sorry Johnny, totally disagree with you on the amount of ballsack chompage *shudders* that occurs in relation to Star Trek. Loved it. :p
- Bette Cooper
As for OS intolerance... some folks just can't handle the truth. :D Each OS has its merits and its downsides. The more you know, the more useful you can find each one. And the more useful you can be.
- Bette Cooper
Feeling tense and aggravated. The best part is, my week isn't even over yet. :P
Although there are some that say our universities know how to make smarter crooks. (I like the line also from "The Shawshank Redemption" : I needed to come to prison to learn how to be a crook" or close thereto) ;) I'm not sure the amount of money is the answer but an overhaul of the system and what better time, though painful, eh?
- Melanie Reed
The UC Regents have a point. This is Schwarzenegger's fault. He is basically destroying the aspirations of a generation, the dreams of people who are willing to better themselves. They will no longer have the option. This is basically a big middle finger, a brazen confirmation that there is no such thing as meritocracy. I find it quite demoralizing.
- Victor Ganata
We have the information to do this: degrees especially have archaic requirements to meet or rather the system for choosing the requirements to meet degrees is archaic. Everyone in the university can not have their hand out (or should I say in) the student's pocket (or their parents) There are some depts that need to stay out of some student's degree requirements and we need to focus the...
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- Melanie Reed
A few years ago, a delegation from Ireland came to Indiana to speak with our Governor about this issue. One of the reasons for the exchange is that Indiana and Ireland are similar in land mass. And we were interested in their educational model which is slanted towards the vocational rather than the academic. Nothing much came of it since I think it met a lot of academic resistance. Some...
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- Melanie Reed
There was a time when the UC system could honestly claim they had the best public university system in the world. I think those days are long over.
- Victor Ganata
Breaking: Purdue to Cut $30 Million Facing Projected $70 Million Hole Purdue University says it is facing a shortfall of $70 million over the next three years if state appropriations and general education fees do not increase. As part of a proactive approach to deal with that projection, President France Córdova has announced the institution wants to cut $30 million before the state's...
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- Melanie Reed
Ok, above is where the rubber meets the road. Someone reads that figure and so we really have a break down? If the system got cleaned up as it should, would Purdue be $70 million in the hole?! I hate to say it, but the U systems many are surviving on the back breaking effort of grad students and underpaid staff who get no insurance and are often pressured to "hang from the ceiling" to get their jobs done so no overtime or weekend pay is reported.
- Melanie Reed
The more I hear about it and read about it, the more I'm appalled by the decision of the UC Regents to raise fees by 32%. This is like telling students who don't come from well-to-do families that there's no point in excelling in school, since you won't be able to afford to go to college anyway.
It's fucking our future, plain and simple. If they were just raising tuition to avoid other cuts, that would be one thing. But they are raising tuition *and* cutting positions and services *and* adding expensive new administrator positions. Had they not been handing out bonuses to administrators and bumping up their salaries over the past year or two, they would be doing just fine.
- Wirehead
That's what I was thinking when I heard this this morning. Why even bother? Or if you are going to go to college go somewhere else. Every year they raise the fees..and now this. And the Regents are going to do it again if they don't get ..what was it? 90 million dollars from the CA government...:(
- Anna Lynn M.
If you can't afford to go to a UC, there's no way you're going to afford to go to a private university, though. It would be fine, I suppose, if the CSU system wasn't jacked up as well--from what I hear, it's impossible to finish in less than 7 years now, because of how impacted required classes are. So there are the community colleges--but this move guarantees that there will be even...
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- Victor Ganata
@Wirehead, that is *exactly* what I was screaming at my radio last night when I heard Yudoff's smarmy voice talking about raising fees AGAIN next year. They need to take a 32% pay cut (at least) before they raise fees and cut classes and services again.
- vicster
It's especially bad as it becomes harder for adults to get jobs without a college degree. There used to be more options for high school grads, but those jobs have been shipped elsewhere.
- John (a.k.a. dendroica)
Yudoff is on a 5 yr contract, in his first year, and plans to retire after his term is up. There's no fiscal incentive for him to care.
- Wirehead
I totally agree. UC schools really helped prepare and educate people and have historically outshined their CSU counterparts (and I did my UG at SDSU). I don't know what people are going to do. That's a THIRD increase. I'm pissed too.
- Derrick
The last few days of 2009 don't feel as momentous to me as the last few days of 1999 or 1989 did. I almost forgot it was the end of the decade. Maybe I'm just getting older.
Heh, yeah, I was thinking about how the century and millenium technically ended on December 31st, 2000, but the way we refer to decades seems different. The '80's usually means 1980-1989. I suppose this decade is the aughts?
- Victor Ganata
Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though. - http://x0.tumblr.com/post...
Sheesh. It took me a while to actually verify it, but apparently, yes, Chrome OS runs on top of X running on top of a Linux kernel. http://www.chromium.org/chromiu...
Heh, it actually isn't the fact that Frist tried to diagnose someone on video that's the problem. Neurologists actually use video all the time for help with diagnosing epilepsy and movement disorders. The problem is (1) he's never met the patient before (2) he's not a neurologist (3) he was totally wrong.
- Victor Ganata
You'll never make it to congress, then. (ETA: oops, Anika kind of beat me to it LOL!)
- vicster
I never adopted cats from the animal shelter for the purpose of dissecting them for an experiment either, though. That's two strikes already!
- Victor Ganata
It is useful in some cases. It helps show that you just aren't making a bold statement without backing it up. 'Here's Why' implies that I have facts or opinions to support my original statement.
- Johnny Worthington
Heh, fine, editing to remove unnecessary words ;)
- Victor Ganata
Yes. Yes it is. And here's why - Because. Nuff said!
- Morgan Haley
Johnny, doesn't including a link imply the same things?
- Victor Ganata
There is a difference. If I say 'Here's why', it implies that I am the one doing the explaining. Providing a link makes me unsure if it's you telling me or you are sending me to a third party site
- Johnny Worthington
I'm not sure about that, I've seen it used in both contexts (the poster himself/herself explaining something vs the poster redirecting someone to another source for the explanation.) It doesn't resolve the ambiguity for me.
- Victor Ganata
All my clocks tick, even on my computer and phone I can make them tick. I don't see it going away soon.
- Anika
this is one of my favorite cultural shifts to witness, the unmarked category becoming the marked category! here's an old blog post about it: http://orgmonkey.net/?p=280
- Marie is organized.
Fair enough. So will the word "tick" cease to describe a sound, and only exist as an abstraction?
- Victor Ganata
So much of the language we currently use is based on things we no longer use. I'm pretty sure that will continue.
- Rahsheen ™, Coach of FF
We talk about driving a car even though car(riage)s no longer have horses pulling them.
- Spidra Webster
Heh, which I've always found an odd usage, since doesn't "drive" mean to push from behind?
- Victor Ganata
to drive has more than one meaning in English, now but God "drove" Adam & Eve from the Garden of Eden, for example. He pushed them from behind, is the image. A carriage's driver drives the horses with the use of a whip.
- Spidra Webster
tick - "1440, "light touch or tap," probably cognate with Du. tik, M.H.G. zic, and perhaps echoic. Meaning "sound made by a clock" is probably first recorded 1549; tick-tock is recorded from 1848. To tick (someone) off is recorded from 1915, originally "to reprimand, scold;" meaning "to annoy" is recorded from 1975." http://www.etymonline.com/index...
- Micah Wittman
Yeah, so it makes sense to me to "drive the horses" by whipping them, but to "drive the carriage" means the horses are pulling on them :) But yeah, it looks like the meaning had already shifted even before automobiles existed.
- Victor Ganata
drive - "O.E. drifan (class I strong verb; past tense draf, pp. drifen), from P.Gmc. *dribanan (cf. O.N. drifa, Goth. dreiban), not found outside Gmc. Original sense of "pushing from behind," altered in Mod.Eng. by application to automobiles. Golfing sense of "forcible blow" is from 1836. Meaning "organized effort to raise money" is 1889, Amer.Eng. The noun, in the computing sense,...
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- Micah Wittman
friendfeed - "No matching terms found."
- Micah Wittman
I'm bloody sick of everyone friggin sucking up to tick. What a hack that guy is. He'd be nothing with tock. Tock deserves time in the sun too... Bloody typical bunch of anti-tockists
- Johnny Worthington
from iPhone
I am sure some of us will keep it alive. I can't remember the last time I bought vinyl but I still use the words album and record when I talk about music.
- J. Abdul-Qahhar
Actually, "album" is a perfect example of a word that survived after the technology changed. It referred to 78rpm albums which were truly albums - binders that contained 2 or more 78 rpm discs. Even after Long Playing records were developed and you could fit many songs on one disc, we still called them albums.
- Spidra Webster
hmm, unlikely. 1) There are still plenty of ticking clocks. 2) We have tons of phrases that survive in English after the phenomena that spawned them no longer exist.
- Chieze Okoye
Yeah, I'll have to backpedal on this one. It's probably never going to actually disappear. But the process of a phenomenon becoming dissociated from its physical reality fascinates me. I just realized that I own no time telling devices that actually tick, and it's been a long time since I've actually heard ticking.
- Victor Ganata
Oh, I see. Yeah, I can see the fascination there.
- Chieze Okoye
Maybe you hear the ticking and it's just another background noise. I know my clocks tick, but rarely "hear" them unless it's super-quiet in our house. Even at the public services places; gov't buildings, hospitals, schools, etc, the clocks tick, but they've always made noises so people are used to them.
- Anika
I don't have a watch--I pretty much use my cel phone and my iPod to tell time if I need to. At work, I check my computer or the telephone for the time. At home, beside my computers, all I have is a digital alarm clock/radio. You're right about the hospitals though--they all have analog clocks that probably do tick, I've just never heard them over the noise.
- Victor Ganata
Songs that feature chimes/tubular bells: does it usually make you think of Christmas? Or of demonically possessed little girls projectile vomiting and spinning their heads around 360 degrees?
Mine didn't improve until AFTER I got out of high school.
- Jason Huebel
++ Jason I found out 20 years LATER that a cute girl in HS crushed on me. I never spoke to her.
- Gunny Just Gunny
I suppose I should've just lied and said I was seeing somebody instead of going into a whole ethics discussion :D
- Victor Ganata
Yeah, I was pretty clueless in high school. I had one girlfriend, but in retrospect the girl I was crushing on most of high school was actually interested in me too. Strange to think how different my life might be if I wasn't such a dork. :-D
- Jason Huebel
Heh, Anika, a patient's grandmother wants to set me up with her daughter.
- Victor Ganata
We of the socially awkward set would stand together but, you know, we're not that good with people and stuff.
- Slippy "Threadsbane" Lane
from Android
Aw, that's nice of her, but yeah...have you even seen the granddaughter? <<--Nevermind. I read that as the patient being the grandmother.
- Anika
Well, if the daughter is nice, you can tell the granddaughter to go see another doctor ;)
- Rodfather
Actually, what is the standard there? Can you date the daughter of a patient? Or is that a no-no as well?
- Jason Huebel
From my interpretation of The Rules, I can't do it.
- Victor Ganata
Jason, if a doctor was to marry a patient's daughter, wouldn't they have an uncomfortable amount of personal information about the mother- or father-in-law? I think it'd be a little icky.
- Kamilah Gill
Good man. What type of medicine do you practice?
- Jason Huebel
The good parts of high school end when you grad. The bad parts are open-ended.
- Micah Wittman
from iPhone
It certainly doesn't help that I went to an all-guys Catholic high school. On the other hand, the more socially well-adjusted of my classmates in med school informed me that the first two years of med school basically replicate the whole high school experience. :)
- Victor Ganata
Downwardly Mobile: The Accidental Cost of Being Uninsured. Trauma patients without health insurance are much more likely to die. http://archsurg.ama-assn.org/cgi...
Would the 1918 influenza virus have been just as deadly if they had ventilators, ICUs, and antibiotics back in the day? How bad would today's H1N1 influenza be if we didn't?
I suspect ventilators, antivirals, better knowledge about how the flu spreads, and better communication would have made a difference.
- Ha3rvey (Free hugs!)
I think we are better off now if for no other reason then hygiene
- J. Abdul-Qahhar
This would never have happened if we would have just set Canada on fire when I said to.
- Akiva Moskovitz
Given the number of dead, I don't think the supply of ventilators would have been enough. Antibiotics wouldn't have helped except with opportunistic infections, IIRC, most deadly thing about 1918 was the cytokine storms. I think antivirals and better hygiene would have helped, on the other hand, in 1918, people couldn't travel around the world in hours, population density was lower,...
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- Ray Cromwell
The reason the flu kills you is (1) you get bacterial pneumonia on top of the flu (2) you get ARDS from the flu itself (3) your chronic medical condition gets exacerbated by the flu. Antibiotics improves (1), ventilators and ICUs help you survive (2) (although it's still pretty bleak, mortality is just under 50% if you have ARDS or sepsis)
- Victor Ganata
Cytokine storms basically causes a sepsis-like condition, which, with critical care and with mechanical ventilators, is actually survivable, although it's still grim.
- Victor Ganata
I do agree, the less technologically-intensive probably would make a bigger difference, though. In 1918, the germ theory of disease had only been formalized less than 30 years ago, about the same time viruses were first discovered. I do wonder how much impact antibiotics would have had--co-infection with bacteria probably made a significant contribution to the mortality rate.
- Victor Ganata
Victor, I'm glad antibiotics were not introduced any sooner than they were since they worked with mainly wide-spectrum in the beginning without realizing they should be targeting. As a result of this short-sighted thinking from science and medicine, there developed two more problems: a generation of people with compromised immune systems (especially women) from the use of wide spectrum...
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- Melanie Reed
While overuse and misuse are serious problems with antibiotics, the introduction of penicillin has certainly saved millions of lives. It's not for nothing that it was touted as a literal miracle drug. While MRSA and other antibiotic-resistant bacteria are big problems, surprisingly, despite 50 years of heavy use, most Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae--two of the major...
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- Victor Ganata
Alternate but related question: has the rise of drug-resistant bacteria made hospitals more dangerous today than they were in 1918?
- Kevin Pedraja
One of my microbial-expert friends has mentioned that resistance isn't ending the usefulness of all antibiotics. Alternating between multiple front-line antibiotics is enough to ensure that bacteria don't develop resistance. It also turns out that bacteria will lose resistance after a while - it's energy-inefficient (thanks evolution!) to keep up a resistance when it isn't needed.
- Matt Mastracci
Victor, yes, its not the disease itself that does the killing. It's a war of attrition in which you and I may lose because our system gets weakened. Then opportunistic invaders normally thrown off by the body everyday become deadly. Most elderly that have survived past the heart attack and stroke and outright killers usually die of the pneumonia following some prolonged illness. And...
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- Melanie Reed
Kevin, yeah, while drug-resistant bacteria are definitely not to be taken lightly, the mortality of untreated bacterial illness is far higher.
- Victor Ganata
There is a group (following the Bell curve) in our population (and I happen to be one of that group) that is predisposed to chronic illness. When my immune system got compromised by a massive commercial pesticide exposure I developed what they call systemic candida overgrowth. I took Nystatin for awhile but I refused Nyzerol because of its liver contraindications. It has been a long haul to rebuild my immune system to some decent functionality.
- Melanie Reed
Victor, I would contest those figures as they are not accounting for secondary infection (which does occur frequently) and leads to early death.
- Melanie Reed
If you leave a major bacterial infection untreated for more than 48 hours, death is one of the likely outcomes. I imagine before penicillin, all you could really do is try to keep someone comfortable in their last day or two.
- Victor Ganata
Victor, the figures of death reports from outbreak.
- Melanie Reed
Victor, during the wars (WW2 and on) when they ran out of penicillin they used other preparations, one of which was oddly successful and that was simple garlic because it has anti-bacterial properties. It leads one to believe that there are a number of options that just haven't been examined in light of dependence on the drug companies
- Melanie Reed
Melanie, which outbreak? 1918, or now?
- Victor Ganata
Victor, to be closer to accuracy, in any outbreak,(1918 included) the figures need to account for deaths from secondary infections which may occur immediately or later on. The point being: what does the initial exposure do to that individual? How much does it weaken them? Some of these secondary things don't show up till years later.
- Melanie Reed
Melanie, I think mostly they do include secondary causes. A lot of deaths attributed to influenza are people who succumb from underlying medical conditions, like asthma, heart attack, stroke. Many deaths are due to co-infection with influenza and bacterial pathogens. I'm not an epidemiologist, though, so I don't know exactly how they tally all of that up.
- Victor Ganata
The 1918 flu was estimated to have killed between 50 and 100 million people. What was the worldwide supply of ventilators then, was it even 1% of this number? Maybe antibiotics would have helped, but again, in a rapidly spreading pandemic, there's likely to be supply problems with those too. We may fare better these days because of the near omnipresence of antibiotics everywhere.
- Ray Cromwell
In 1918? No ventilators. The iron lung wasn't invented until 1928. Positive pressure ventilators didn't exist until WWII. In terms of efficacy of preventing death during a flu epidemic, I would probably say antibiotics > ventilators > vasopressors > ECMO. In general, your chances of surviving are much better if you can stay off the ventilator. But when ventilators didn't exist, your...
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- Victor Ganata
It's funny watching these people think they can take you on, Victor. Don't they know you RULE at this stuff? :)
- Rochelle
And what have we learned here? NEVER GO IN AGAINST DOCTOR GANATA WHEN DEATH IS ON THE LINE! AH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA! AHAHAHA -- *dead*
- tinypants - Hagitha of FF
There are worse things than this death. If it's my time, then I'm ready. Death has an enemy too!
- Melanie Reed
First of all, I'm not trying to "take anyone on", he asked a question, I have my thoughts on the matter. Whether they had ventilators in 1918 or not is besides the point, the question is not one of medicine, but one of logistics: is the supply of ventilators we currently have enough to handle a pandemic. Medically, I can't answer the question, I'm not a doctor, but I do question as to...
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- Ray Cromwell
LOL. I certainly don't know everything there is to know about medicine. What I know is a bare sliver of a fraction of a fraction. It kind of boggles the mind. Back in 1918, if my professors are to be believed, it was probably still possible for a single person to actually know everything there was to know in the entire field.
- Victor Ganata
And Ray, that is just exactly the reason a round table is good: the right questions come out. And no, we are not ready: http://www.charlierose.com/view... This was the consensus of the leading experts
- Melanie Reed
Ray, yeah, I agree about the logistics. We really don't know how bad things might get--already, many ERs are strained, and a lot of ICU beds are occupied. And we certainly wouldn't have enough ventilators if, say, weaponized anthrax were ever deployed by terrorists. But the point I was trying to make is that people always bring up the fact of how horrible the 1918 pandemic was, and how...
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- Victor Ganata
I think sometimes it's better to just throw in the towel, than to let yourself get pummeled until you're bleeding all over yourself, with no hope of winning.
I thought so too but everyone says it's a pride thing just to say he lasted 12 rounds. Also: epic thread is epic.
- richie edquid
Just found out someone I haven't seen in a while but I've known for a few years has died. I have this little ache in my chest thinking about her and all the people she was close to who are probably suffering right now.
This weekend left me thinking about the nature of courage: To stay in the fight, even without any hope of winning, and let yourself be destroyed ingloriously? Or to look at the darkness with both eyes wide open, and realize, it's time to let go, there's no point in hanging on and tearing the whole thing down with me? Each to their own, I guess.