Category: Uncategorized

Sigh. Weeks go by where I can’t quite figure out where the time went. So I thought I’d start noting down what I accomplished at the end of the day, and this might help me realize I’m not actually sitting around counting my toes all the time after all.

So… today, I
1) Ran the last two subjects for the Vital Signs study and had a debriefing with the team afterwords. (Hooray! Hopefully that’s an item scratched off my to-do list at least for a while!)
2) Had a brainstorming meeting with a grad student about study design for a study he wants to run in my clinic (generated a long to-do list for the rest of the week, sigh)
3) Read 51 abstracts submitted for the T&L conference and rated each one on a 9-item evaluation scale (content, design, use of language, etc)
4) Edited the asthma manuscript and did the major formatting for the journal – and sent a nice report back to the other author with a list of things he needs to re-write…

Um… that’s about it.

So tomorrow starts with an all-morning meeting to discuss these abstracts with the committee, so I suppose that’ll simplify my scheduling…

I think I’ve successfully traded my lackluster grad student for one of much shiner, more sparkly qualities (in terms of intelligence and work ethic; skin tones aren’t actually a lot different…) so that’s an upside to my day. And the day’s work could conceivably result in two paper submissions of papers which are primarily written by other people. Also good.

With those cheery thoughts, I’ll try sleeping and see how the world looks in the morning.

Cat-haters say they’re selfish little creatures who just use you for the creature comforts you provide. For example, the cat who wants to snuggle on your lap is just looking for your shared body heat.

I have trouble believing this because my cat will abandon her “spot of warm” (heating pad set to low heat/similar to body temp) to come perch uncomfortably on my lap even if I otherwise ignore her.

She’ll also ignore food if she can have snuggling.

This enthusiasm for personal contact is not universal – Keith’s Mom once commented she was rather miffed that the cat obviously wants to be with me, Keith, Keith’s Dad (who is so similar to Keith she might not recognize him as a stranger…), but never with her. She seemed to think I should train my cat to be more egalitarian –

Which rather makes me think the cat actually likes me. This has been my experience with all the feline pets I’ve had over the years. Have I just been outrageously lucky, or do cats get a bad rap?

had this Johari window thing which looked really sort of interesting.  Click here and tell me what you think of me (boy, that sounds self-centered!) and then make your own window and let me know and I’ll return the favor! 

On my way home today, heard the screech of tires against the road; glanced in my rear-view mirror just in time to see a large pickup truck do a faceplant into a utility pole, hard enough to bend the pole. Was considering whether I should double back to see if anyone was hurt when the truck roared back to life, backed away from the now-crooked pole, and went tearing off in the other direction.

So guess he wasn’t hurt. Unbelievably stupid, possibly drunk, incredibly lucky, but not hurt. Life is interesting.

So proceeded on to experience the incredible sociological adventure that is the grocery store on Valentine’s day. Felt a little pathetic with my measly pack of mushrooms and block of cream cheese, in a line with all the folks buying chocolate, champagne, exotic fruits, etc…

It looks like K. will be asking for tonight’s culinary adventure again, so I better write down what I did so I’ll remember it again:

Hm… involved a skillet, a slow-cooker, and a pasta pot. In the skillet, I browned a pack of sliced mushrooms, a bag of chopped onion, and a bunch (maybe 5?) of boneless chicken thighs that were sliced and pounded until they were about a half-inch thick or less. Used olive oil for browning. The chicken had garlic powder, salt and pepper sprinkled on it before browning. After each of these was fully cooked it got tossed into the slowcooker which was set on medium. Then put a cup of chicken broth into the pan, brought to a boil to get all the nice browned chicken stuff off the pan, then put in 8 oz cream cheese. Once cream cheese melted, tossed in a bag of chopped spinach, stirred until this was all creamy, and poured over the chicken, mushrooms, and onion in the slowcooker. This simmered for a while while I cooked up some linguini (mushroom flavored, but that’s not really noticable. Egg noodles would probably work fine) and then the mess was ladled over the noodles to serve. bread and sweet potato on the side… tastes pretty good. For myself I’d have added some cooking sherry but that would be a downer for K, who doesn’t like wine of any sort.

There, now when he asks for that chicken spinach cheese thing again I’ll know what to do!

Hmmm… apparently I have enough time to read and post to this thing approximately once a week. Oh, well.

Events: Smallest nephew broke his leg. Mother-in-sin developed spot in other breast. Finally cleaned out part of garage (which has been loaded with crap since the hurricane last fall). Saw garage storage stuff I liked at Target – and wasn’t able to find it cheaper on the web. What are the chances of that? Found a book I like for learning Java – assumes I know basic programming logic but doesn’t assume I already know C++. Ate brunch today at a place whose chef seems to think mayo is a Good Thing and found only one thing on the menu that looked edible. That’s about it…. Overworked.

Life goes on.

Watching superbowl.  Two teams, one blue, the other black/yellow.

Can’t help thinking it’s a Ravenclaw vs. Hufflepuff match…

More inspiration from , who has written a story that is a series of letters from Lucius Malfoy to Draco, while Lucius is in prison.  They read like Machiavelli (with a dash of Heinlein thrown in), and have led to a philosophical thought (I’ll just type this and then go get some advil).

I struggle with understanding the boundary between things I choose to believe because of my personal ethics versus those I’m willing to say everyone should follow.  The former should be kept as my own code of behavior, and not enforced on anyone else.  The latter, I’m willing to see laws and policing to compel others to follow them.

Examples?  Well, several of my friends are vegetarian (Hi, !) and I respect their choice but wouldn’t want it enforced on me.  I believe you should take care of your body, so I would not choose to smoke.  But I’m opposed to making smoking (of anything, really) illegal.  I believe that harming another person solely because of that person’s race or religion is wrong, and that belief is sufficiently global that I think going to war against Hitler was the right thing to do.

There’s a whole other range of things in there where I believe they’re right, but note they’re also sufficiently practical that even ethically defunct people may find value in doing them.  Makes me suspect most ethics are, at their core, pragmatic rules of thumb.  Shiv gives us an example in her story: 

If you can do someone a favour at little cost to yourself, then it should be done. Later, they may return the favour, in which case you have gained an ally. If they do not return the favour then you have discovered something whose value exceeds the cost of learning it – they are not to be trusted. It is better to learn this over a trifle, than when your life or your liberty is at stake.

Now, my ethic tells me the first line should be the truth, without having to be justified.  But, the following lines make a valuable point and could convince someone far less kind than I that gratuitous kindnesses are a Good Thing. 

The point of all this is that I’m coming to realize that the words of people I dislike can be a good measuring stick for what is personal ethic, and what should be universal.  Machievelli appears to have been an amoral putz, but he was an amoral putz who knew how to get by in the world.  If something he said also fits with my gut instinct about how people should behave, that’s probably one of those universals I was talking about…

Um… I’m unhappy with this because I think it’s missing a lot of subtle shadings of thought here, but I think the basic core is there.  I’ll go take that painkiller now…

comments on the controversy over the Danish paper publishing cartoons of Muhommed, which gets me thinking about the influence of free press, and the role of the internet.

The thing is, if no one had made a fuss, the audience reading a Danish newspaper would be rather small.  Because of the protests, the article and cartoons have been reproduced all over the world, and everyone’s been notified there’s something to look at.  There’s even a Wikipedia entry about it.

Putting it on the web pretty much guarantees the pictures can’t be suppressed at this point.  There’s always someone who will keep a cached copy and make it available in the name of freedom of the press – it’s really hard to expurgate stuff from the web, as the intellectual property lawyers have discovered.

China’s discovering the same thing with the censored search engines.  Google (and Yahoo, and MSN, and everyone else, but Google got all the sh*t for it) created censored search engines for the Chinese gov’t in which images and sites showing China in a bad light were screened or pushed to the back of the search findings.  Unfortunately, the Chinese govt’s censoring sites are so ineptly designed that I understand it’s actually easier to access Google.com than it is to access the Chinese Version in some of the big cities in China.

Because really, the internet’s pretty huge and impossible to control.  If the US gov’t hasn’t made any progress with their efforts to control things like child pornography on the web, how does China think they’ll keep subtly seditious material under control?

The alternative would be to try to block web access altogether.  But it’s pretty much impossible to be productive in today’s world of business and science without the web, so blocking the web is volunteering to be a third-world, backwards nation.

Historically, controlling the press has been an integral part of the recipe for maintaining tight control on a population.  The internet makes that much more difficult to do.  Will this change the face of global politics (slowly) over time?

I have a new scanner, which is keeping me quite amused.

Am working on compressing a stack of instruction manuals into a single neat CD of PDF files. Nice theory, hmm? We’ll see if I really finish the project, but just the half-dozen I scanned so far has made a nice dent in the huge muddled pile o’ crap that was my instructions “file”.

And of course it’s a nice excuse to sit around and surf the web in five-second intervals as each page scans…