Melinda Owens › Comments

"Children with autism have unexplainable breakdowns -- their outbursts are often loud, aggressive and disturbing. Julian slams himself against the ground or wall while he screams, flailing his limbs. Julian's younger brother, Marcus, 3, squirms away from his parents and runs into the street to oncoming cars because he is fascinated by them. He also screams with such ferocity that his face turns purple and mucus bubbles from his nostrils. Their youngest brother, Aric, also has autism and just turned 1 year old. Photo gallery from iReporters about autism. » Heather Moores remembers that the stares in the waiting room were full of contempt. Onlookers shook their head in disgust and glared, making her feel like the "world's worst mother." This happens every time they go out to the doctor's office, the barber shop or anywhere in public. "You'll hear people talking, 'If it was my kid, he wouldn't behave like that. These parents don't know how to discipline their children. Why don't you shut... more... - April Buchheit from Bookmarklet

I think that normal children behaving in a loud or violent fashion isn't acceptable either. If I see a child break down in a public space, I try to see if the parents are trying to do anything about it, and then I judge. It doesn't really matter if the child is autistic or not. @Kamilah: If you were supervising the crafts area and the child was going to be in there for any length of... more... - Melinda Owens

"Eye color is a fascinating topic that mystified researchers for centuries until science provided us with a better understanding of eye color and how it is inherited. When it comes to predicting a baby’s eye color, one can almost be sure the baby will be born with blue eyes. Newborns often have blue eyes, which generally darken with increased exposure to sunlight. By the age of three, a child’s eyes will usually settle into their permanent, adult color – be it blue, green, hazel, amber, grey, dark brown or even blood red." - Cristo from Bookmarklet

@Cristo: Albinos have pink or reddish eyes. - Melinda Owens

Are you talking about "Big Trouble in Little China"? - April Buchheit

This eye color chart is interesting: http://friendfeed.com/cristob... - Cristo

Isn't Settlers kind of old hat? - Piaw Na

Well, it's kinda new compared to golf, I guess - Larry Hosken

I just played it at a wedding in Hong Kong, with people who live there. Right next to a lively game of mah jong. - Melinda Owens

Article here: http://www.plosone.org/article... - Melinda Owens

This was the first time I've felt disgusted when reading something while eating food. - niniane

The abstract is here: http://www.cell.com/abstrac... - Melinda Owens

depressed - Rob Shillingsburg

Lyrics are depressed, tone is cheerful. I like in incongruity. - Melinda Owens

What they're protecting and providing comfort for deserves nothing but the best. - Andrew Trinh from iPhone

A special audience can be as important as a big audience. - Andrew C

ahem - j1m

wait, this is a bad thing? - Neha Narula

To further reduce the risk, consider out-crossing. - Melinda Owens

I got the full version at a discount price. My ex-roommate is an employee and got me in a special friends rate. - niniane

Charles forwarded this. It's interesting how the writer got so much flack for saying she loves her spouse more than her children, whereas her husband got very little flack for saying the same thing. Anyway, it seems like we should live and let live. If they want to love each other more than the children, that seems fine. - niniane from Bookmarklet

Parents divorce each other all the time, but it's considered horrible to disown your children (even grown children). Their love for each other may be more intense but people seem to expect their love for their children to be more enduring and reliable. - ⓞnor from Android

"Scientists have used gene therapy to achieve full color vision in two squirrel monkeys that were born unable to tell red from green. The technique could someday be used on people with colorblindness or other vision problems. All Male Squirrel Monkeys Are Colorblind" - j1m from Bookmarklet

Well it depends on where the 4th type of cones are most sensitive. If it's near the red cones, then the difference would not be so great. But there are tales of human tetrachromats with the 4th come in between red and green, and they can certainly see much more colors than us trichromats. - Pandu ● IT Optimizer from fftogo

I seriously thought Google Street View bot was going to lose it at the end, when he was overwhelmed with takedown/censor requests and just shut the whole project down. "You don't deserve Street View!" - Andrew C

Google should have Google Japan make the videos for all their products. - Melinda Owens

very good!!!!! - Otorino Arcadipane

I've long wanted a pneumatic tube system for deliveries. Huge infrastructure cost, but it'd make a huge impact on commerce (replacing FedEx). But a friend convinced me that the world is moving towards wireless infrastructure, which avoids many of the last mile issues. So we need little blimps or catapults for deliveries. - Amit Patel

This will really come in handy in the year 2050 when we will be too fat to leave our houses. - ௸ (k2g)

Hell is freezing over if the American consumer actually saves money. Me, I'll believe it when people stop spending on $70/month cell phone plans. - Piaw Na

I have a $40/month plan that with taxes and fees is actually more like $48-49/month. I can't find a nationwide plan that's cheaper (for which I'm eligible). Switching to prepaid doesn't seem like it would save me money. No landline. $49/month is not all that different from $70/month- $70/month is not a Cadillac plan. Also, if you're locked in a plan, it's very expensive to switch; given... more... - Melinda Owens

And only maybe 1GB you can actually trust. Way to go! - Akiva Moskovitz

Well, Britannica only recently started offering free access in exchange for contribution if I recall, so they may be worried about what Ian said. - Richard ¿digame? Walker

Um, people tend to lose their eyebrow hair as they age. Did she thicken your eyebrows? - Ruchira S. Datta

mmm... then you would look ten~? - Goofy2

@Ruchira: It seems to me as one ages, the eyebrow hairs tend to get curly, which makes the eyebrows seem thicker and bushier. Or maybe only young people get their eyebrows waxed? - Melinda Owens

"Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check." - Larry Hosken

I found a great primary care physician after talking to people who knew the doctors for a long time. He gets me same day appointments, and even calls in prescriptions over the phone to my pharmacy for me if I need it. One of my friends has nagging knee problems, but every time she went to Kaiser she got the runaround. She asked me for my recommendation for an orthopedic/knee doctor, and... more... - Piaw Na

San fran? Did it suddenly become cool to call it that? - j1m

? - Melinda Owens

"There is an island located between Greenland and the North Pole called Spitsbergen... ...one of the best places to do astronomical, meteorological or climate research. Hence, the remote and pristine landscape is marked by installations of technological and scientific equipment." Christian Houge goes there and photographs the equipment. - Larry Hosken

The Norwegians in our lab have been there. They were given rifles to shoo away polar bears. - Melinda Owens

Wow, I feel sorry for your little boys. - Melinda Owens

[Simpsons] Skinner: [pours tea] I think we both know the answer to that ... a lucky boy. - Andrew C

But skin itself is (somewhat) conductive. I wonder if one could lay down some sort of insulating layer first, or if you just have to design circuits taking a large amount of leakage into account. - ⓞnor

++Larry - Andrew C

interesting. i disagree with discouraging "self-belitting" discourse (i think you're already framing the subject right there) -- there is nothing wrong with admitting weakness, and it's often a form of bonding. - Neha Narula

So confidence is like a drug in that sense. It has positive effects, but it can be abused. And it often is. Sometimes I even do it, but less often as I've become more personally secure. - Daniel Dulitz

Airlines and supermarkets have been offering this functionality for years.... - Stephen Mack

I feel like this could be a really potent idea if it did something more ambitious than uniform random selection of participants... like if it learned features to predict whether a chat will last for more than a few minutes -- for example, word pairs from the users' chat histories -- and then biased the selection toward higher-expected-length sessions. - Doug

Competitiveness? :-) - Daniel Dulitz

I like where people suggested to split up the potential stomache-inducing ingredients of a mocha and make separate experiments... =P (cough cough) - Andrew C

... am I allowed to have a debit card? - ⓞnor

yes. - Parth Awasthi

props to whoever suggested that! someone at yahoo? - niniane

Hooray for me! =) - Andrew C

crack houses have a lot of bugs? you'd think the crack fumes would be, like, nature's insecticide. - ⓞnor

Maybe crackheads don't care about hygiene, or maybe the saying is more about the phantom bugs symptoms that some drug users have. - Andrew C

I'm not sure if the argument is right; many people die from heart disease, but I don't think we can say that better diet and exercise would have prevented 100% of these deaths. - Nikita Borisov

Economically I think we'd want to allocate each dollar (or minute of effort, or whatever) toward the purpose that will bring the largest reduction in risk for that cost, i.e. equalize the marginal utility of investment in every form of prevention. I'm sure someone out there has done a cost/benefit analysis. - Jim Norris

why does there need to be a word? You got this done in less than 140 characters already... - Andrew C

was it really necessary to write them in Greek, though? That was totally ironic. <-- (ducks and runs) - Andrew C