Monday, May 31, 2010

Lack of sleep can kill you!

I have known for years that, when I run short of sleep for long enough, my resistance goes down, and I'm susceptible to colds. In fact, when I've been running short of sleep, I start to get annoyed with people who interfere with my sleep (like, say, calling me after my bed time, which is, granted, much earlier than most people's). When I'm at my grouchiest, I tend to think, "Do you want to make me sick? Do you hate me that much?"

To make things worse, there are those people who love to talk about how they get along on four hours' sleep a night, and how much more they get done in a day, and how those of us who lie slug-a-bed for a full eight hours a night must have some weakness in our moral fibre. I might even be suckered into their masochistic lifestyle, except for my own experience: if I don't a full eight hours' sleep, I'm grouchy the next day. Which explains why it is that I have been grouchy for months at a time. (The disease resistance thing takes longer to kick in: it seems to require at least two full weeks of shortened nights, with no chance to catch up on weekends.)

Now, science has come, if not to my rescue, then at least to my defence: according to a story by BBC News, "Getting less than six hours sleep a night can lead to an early grave". On the one hand, now I have even more reason to get snippy with people who interrupt my sleep. "Are you trying to kill me?" On the other hand, at least I have a ready answer for those four-hour-a-night zealots. On the other, other hand, worrying about whether I'm getting enough sleep is keeping me up at night.

As it that wasn't bad enough, the very next day, Reuters reported on a study studying the effects of sleeplessness and insulin resistance, and shared the cheering news that "people who slept less than six hours a night were 4.5 times more likely to develop abnormal blood sugar readings in six years compared with those who slept longer." In other words, one of the reasons that diabetes is so endemic is that people are inflicting it upon themselves by cheating their bodies of sleep.

Wow. Just thinking about this has me beat. I think I'm going to hit the sack.

(Thanks to BBC News and Reuters – whose reporters, I hope, are not quite as tireless as they seem – for the heads up.)

  Wednesday, May 26, 2010

The most obnoxiously mushy couple around

I work from home, and I keep Skype open all the time to keep in touch with my co-workers. And my sweetie. If she's not out running errands or whatever, she keeps Skype open, too, and we will chat before I start work, and while I'm on my lunch break. When I get to the end of my workday, I will switch to her chat, and type, "Hi, honey! I'm hooooooome!"

When I did that today (a little late, because when quitting time came, I was in the middle of a project, and I didn't want to leave it unfinished), she replied, "Sweetie muah muah muah muah"

Being greeted at the door that enthusiastically by my own personal beauty queen sounds good to me, so I said, "Ooh! I should come home more often. Hang on. I'll go out and come back in again."

She replied, "Go back out. I'm waiting. <ready to pounce> <exercising my lips>"

So I said, "Hi, honey! I'm hooooooome!"

She replied, "Sweetie!!!!! <jumps you> Huuuuuuuuuuugs smooooooooooooooooooooochies muah muah muah muah muah!!! All over your whole face!"

I am so going to love being married to this woman. But you know, we're going to do stuff like that in person, and people are going to look at us and go, "You guys are weird!"

So it should come as no surprise to anybody that we came up with this shirt design a few weeks ago.

  Monday, May 24, 2010

Partnership

One of the things which I have really enjoyed doing with my sweetie lately is come up with silly little slogans to go on T-shirts for my shops on CafePress (Bibliophile Zone, The Innocent Bystander Zone, Inspired By My Sweetie, The Nerdhood, The Nut Patrol, Reality Free Zone, Stoggled, and Suspect Zone). In fact, we've been having so much fun that I decided to open a new shop, The Shared Brain, for the designs we come up with together.

I enjoy working in partnership with my sweetie. She makes my work better.

  Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Having God's heart for others

I went to Bible school, and ever since then, some people have treated me like I'm a pastor, even though I'm not. (Actually, some people treat me like I'm a Catholic priest. With the stories some people tell me, I figure they should start out by crossing themselves and saying, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned." ) This doesn't just happen in reali life, but online, too. Sometimes, I'll pop by a chat room, just looking to goof around and have some fun, but someone who knows my training will start asking questions, and before I know it, I'm in pastor mode.

I don't mind doing it. I was trained that all Christians all called to be ministers of Christ. We shouldn't be blowing people off with "Come to church on Sunday and ask my pastor" (or whatever), we should be praying for people, and answering their questions about God, the church, the Bible, and whatever. I don't have a doctorate in theology, but I am the world's greatest expert on one subject: how God has dealt with me. In the same way, you are the world's greatest expert on how God has dealt with you.

In Acts 1:8, Jesus said:

But you will have power, when the Holy Spirit has come on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judaea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

Now, in a trial, people get called as witnesses, not because they're smart, or well-trained, but because they were there when whatever events the trial is about happened. If you're called as a witness in a traffic accident, you aren't expected to explain about the engineering of a car's braking system, you'd just need to know whether Car A ran through a red light before hitting Car B, or not. In the same way, you don't need to have a degree to minister to other people in a chat room. You just have to have a heart for people.

(Of course, that's not to say that training doesn't mean anything. I will always be grateful for the time I got to spend learning more about God. He is awesome, and you should never turn down a chance to learn more about Him. But as important as knowing more about God is, having His heart for other people is even more important.)

So when I came into shouts and ran into a woman who was demonstrating God's heart for other people: praying for them, talking to them, commiserating with them, and counselling them, you have to know that I was both impressed and interested. She's got a heart the size of Jupiter, and she is all about caring for others.

So, I asked her to marry me.

She said yes.

Thank you, God.

  Wednesday, May 12, 2010

I don't know what you're doing, but keep it up

Even as a kid, I heard about (and cared about) issues like pollution, but to be honest, they were kind of diffuse: smog was bad, but you couldn't point to one particular source and blame all of the pollution on that. Because every smokestack, chimney, and tailpipe on the planet contributes to the problem, we're all guilty, and all victims, too, so it's hard to work up a good sense of outrage. (That was then: now, it's so much easier just to blame people who drive SUVs, especially Hummers.)

But when it came to saving the whales, the picture was much clearer: some countries had already stopped whaling, and therefore those countries which still hadn't were the bad guys. Besides which, whales are inherently awesome, and anti-whaling protesters knew how to exploit that. Whales may not have the instant victimhoodnessiditydom that baby seals do, but they're majestic and beautiful and they come with their own soundtrack and you just want to be on their side.

Unfortunately,the moratorium on whaling seems to have been too little, too late, and has never been completely enforced anyways, so it seemed kind of inevitable that whales were doomed to extinction, no matter what we did, because the population of many species had been driven so low that the remaining individuals had vanishingly small chances of being able to find mates. So, as far as saving the whales went, it seemed to be a matter of, "Oh, too bad. But thank you for playing anyway."

But recent news seems to indicate that writing off our finny friends as a lost cause may have been somewhat premature. CBC News has been reporting sightings of grey whales in Howe Sound (near Vancouver), and even in False Creek (right next to downtown Vancouver, and surrounded by high-rise condos), if there's a less likely place to spot an endangered species, I don't know where it would be, except, oh, maybe, off the coast of Israel?)

I've seen orcas in the wild a couple of times. I never thought I'd see a grey whale, but now maybe there's a chance.

(Thanks to the CBC and the BBC for brightening my week.)

  Monday, May 10, 2010

Pedal faster, I'm hungry!

I have long thought that I should get one of those exercise bikes, and hook it up with a generator, so I couldn't go online unless I was pedalling. (That's not just a matter of trying to save electricity, either. I need more exercise.)

As it happens, there's a hotel in Copenhagen which goes that idea one better: instead of offering travellers a chance to go online if they pedal fast enough, the Crowne Plaza Copenhagen Towers promises energetic travellers a free meal in return for cranking out 10 watt-hours of electricity.

Now, food might even be more of a motivation for me than going online. These guys are geniuses.

(Thanks to Reuters and BBC News for the heads-up.)

  Friday, April 30, 2010

It's maddening

A year and a half ago, I decided to declare a personal moratorium on eating tuna, because tuna stocks in the Mediterranean and Eastern Atlantic are dangerously overfished. Since then, the situation has gotten worse: tuna stocks are falling, but the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) has failed to list the bluefin tuna as an endangered species. So the situation is going to get even worse.

But now, there's another reason not to eat tuna, and especially not bluefin tuna: according to CBC News, bluefin tuna (and big eye tuna) have higher levels of mercury than other species of fish. Because they're at (well, near) the top of the food chain, the mercury gets concentrated in their tissues. So, while you're dutifully eating tuna to prevent a heart attack, you're probably giving yourself mercury poisoning, and will end up mad as a hatter.

Sushi, anyone?

(Thanks to The Economist and CBC News for the leads.)

  Thursday, April 22, 2010

Leaving Facebook

A little while ago, Facebook announced their plans to pass on our Facebook information to other sites without our permission. Despite a storm of protests, they've gone ahead with it. But instead of announcing it first and giving us time to prepare, the new system is already live. Therefore, it is no longer safe to follow any link from Facebook, because you won't know until it's too late whether the site you're heading for already has Facebook's permission to grab all the information in your Facebook profile. As I have said before, I won't put up with this, so now I'm in the process of dismantling my Facebook presence, and moving all my content there over to my profile here.

For this reason, I am changing the name of my profile back to the way it used to be, since now there will be all kinds of other stuff mixed in with the blogs about my sweetie.

(Thanks to PC World, among others, for the heads up.)

  Monday, April 19, 2010

Focus on the Wallet

I have this love-hate thing going on with Focus on the Family. When they talk about U.S. domestic politics, then I just get mad and turn the radio off, or take a shower or something. But when they talk about something helpful, it can be great. This morning's show was the best I've heard in ages. I should have taken notes, except I'm not really very with it at 5:00...

  Thursday, April 15, 2010

Evil and Reason

So, in reading to my sweetie, the other night we were up to chapter thirteen in Premonition, by Randall Ingermanson. [ChristianBook.com/Amazon.ca/Amazon.com/Amazon.co.uk], where it says:

There was evil in this world – evil incomprehensible – and one could not answer it with any wisdom known to man. If evil had a reason, it would no longer be evil, but merely the natural course of things, like Brother Ari's electron. (p. 124)

After reading that, I said, "Let me just say, editorially..." at which point, my sweetie laughed. (We interrupt our reading regularly to put in this or that comment about what we're reading. It makes for excellent conversations. But my sweetie knows me well enough by now that she can tell – from my tone of voice, or pace, or something – when I'm reading something that's going to prompt me to interject a comment.)

The comment that I was about to make was this: in C.S. Lewis' Perelandra (aka Voyage to Venus) [Amazon.co.uk: hardcover/paperback; Amazon.ca: hardcover/paperback/audio CD/audio cassette; Amazon.com: hardcover/paperback/audio CD/audio cassette; ChristianBook.com: hardcover/paperback], the Satan character picks up logic like a weapon, but then lets it go and just acts randomly nasty when it suits him. If logic or reason are inherently good, then they must be attributes of God, not of Satan. Perfect evil is irrational.

We can see that in our own lives. I have long argued that, since God loves us, if He tells us to do one thing or forbids us to do another, it has to be because doing the one thing is good for us in the long run, and doing the other thing is bad for us in the long run, even if we can't see it at the time. Sure enough, when you reason out any sin forbidden in the Bible, it turns out to be self-destructive. Thus, sinning is illogical.

Which, alas, does not mean that Vulcans, if they existed in real life, would be sinless. It would be nice to think so, but Jon Acuff's blog on Believing in Logic (which just happened to be posted the day after I read chapter thirteen to my sweetie) demonstrates otherwise.

  Saturday, April 10, 2010

Let's make a deal

  Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Give me conformity or give me death!

If you listen to what people say, you would come away with the impression that freedom is the most important value in the world, bar none. From the sloganeering of the American revolution to folk songs like "Alice's Restaurant" to films like The Dead Poet's Society, it seems pretty clear that people value political and freedom extremely highly, and view conformity with something close to horror.

So it would seem.

But if you pay attention to the way people treat each other, then "fitting in" is the most important thing, and people who choose to march to different drummers are seen as crazy, or subversive. Certainly some kind of threat.

Think I'm overstating the case? I run into this kind of thing all the time.

I'm writing something by hand, and somebody says, "You're left handed!" (The exclamation point is quite deliberate. Nobody ever says that in an "oh, isn't that interesting?" kind of a tone. It's more akin to "Who let you in here?" ) Most of the time, I reply off-handedly, "It's a sign of superior intelligence." Sometimes, I'm tempted to say, "Oh, thank you for telling me! I could never have figured that out for myself!" But the appropriate answer is, "About one person in ten is left handed. Why is this an issue?" At least people don't burn left handers at the stake any more. Nor do parents and teachers try to force left handers to switch to using their right hands anymore, as used to be common practice not all that long ago. But even so, why is this an issue?

I'm working away happily on my Mac, and someone walks into the office and says, "You should get Windows!" Note: they don't ask me what I use a computer for, or whether I can find the software I need to do the job. Nor has the Mac been bought with their money. Nor are they in any position of authority over me. But they see no incongruity whatsoever in telling me that I have made "the wrong decision" on an issue that's none of their business.

I remember talking to a guy who designed sails for a living. He was using a TI-99-4a, which had been out of production for some years at that point. (Cue a moment of silence for all the interesting technologies which got steamrolled by the Wintel juggernaut in the 1980s because they weren't "IBM compatible." ) He told me that almost everyone who saw the TI told him that he should switch to Windows. But there was one problem with that advice: he used the TI to design sails, and had some really nice software to do that. At the time, there was no sail designing software for Windows. So getting a PC and Windows would entail a lot of expense and a learning curve, and at the end of it, he would be losing the functionality that he had with his TI. (Granted, he'd be gaining Minesweeper, which might make it an even trade in some people's minds.)

A co-worker is raving about last night's episode of some TV show, and asks me what I thought of it. "I didn't see it," reply I.

"What? You don't watch [Show X]?" he reacts in horror.

"I don't have a TV." I inform him.

"Well, yeah, but surely you at least watch [Show X]!" he insists.

"On what? What part of 'I don't have a TV' don't you understand?" (I've always wanted to be able to spin a line like that in real conversation. I don't normally get straight lines as wide open for rebuttal as that.)

"But how can you keep up with things?" he sputters.

My point isn't that left handers are better or smarter or whatever than right handers, nor is it that Macs (or TIs) are better than Windows, nor that [Show X] is (or isn't) worth watching. My point is that people do what works for them: write with this hand, use that computer, watch the other TV show (or not), listen to the music they like, wear the clothes that appeal to them, and so on. According to our society's mythology, they should be perfectly free to do so, but in reality, we judge one another all the time.

Essentially, we say "give me liberty or give me death" out of one side of our mouths, and "you should be just like me" out of the other. Apparently, "freedom" really means freely choosing mindless conformity.