Sarah, #8: I think big protein-heavy meals helped me with panic attacks. Eggs, beans, and spinach for breakfast, in my case. I don't know if I needed protein, or iron, or if it replaced sugar and starch, or what.
Nor did it fix everything, but it did seem to help, and it was pleasant.
Oh, I hadn't heard that the cross and star were also banned in French schools. Still not the tossed-salad approach I prefer, but much fairer than banning only one.
I'm often amused by the Western horror at the scarf and veil because I'm only, what, three generations from respectable women needing to cover their hair in public in the West. I'm pretty sure there were real risks to walking around looking disreputable, too.
#61: Wireless connectivity, like being a theremin. Dancing would be even more fun.
I was an IT worker for my last career and was in several jobs that could have used union support -- for one thing, I might have a lot less RSI if there was a standard of physical support that lived up to half what the physical therapists' recommendations are.
Of course, if work is a competition of all against all, the young, childless and temporarily able will claw their way up the ladder by pulling longer hours than everyone else, hoping to have some defensible skill or fiefdom by the time they're worn out. But IT jobs, if well-run, do not lend themselves to defensible fiefdoms or static skillsets, so eventually we're stiff and scared. At this point I thought: "I was so played", cashed out, and left for different trouble.
Adding numbers on science production to the numbers linked on small business, and suggested for authors:
"During the 1990s, in the midst of a significant increase in world scientific output, the EU15 overcame the US in paper production and is catching up in visibility and impact, as measured by citations." This one analyzes trends by field.
and a worried, but overall positive, analysis by the NSF that affirms the scientific dominance of the US but states: "In an unexpected development in the early 1990s, the absolute number of science and engineering (S&E) articles published by U.S.-based authors in the world's major peer-reviewed journals plateaued. [...] The increase in collaboration across national, institutional, and sectoral boundaries, which is most fully documented in academic sector data, was perhaps the most striking trend in S&E research and publication during this period."
One should add that we know* language and fame-of-affiliation affect a scientific article's publication and citation, and both of those will help US scientists more than most scientists outside the US.
*Occasional truly-anonymous-submission studies.
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I just reread _The Gone-Away World_, so the problem of 'humans aren't amoral, corporations are, but a human willing to succeed in an amoral coporation is equivalent to a human willing to drive while drunk' is at the top of my mind. My, I love that novel.
Boston marriages!
The odd reaction I have to the appropriation of 'wife' for a relation that we are taking to mean 'close female friend' is: to these women, does 'wife' equal 'the person who will listen to you and is always on your side and doesn't boss you around'? Making it distinct from 'husband' and, as very old copies of Ms Magazine used to joke, something everyone would like to have?
(And, late, I agree that it's worth pointing out to the friends. Asking them what it means, at the very least.)
I also like Arcimboldo; and I get something like goofy synaesthesia when overcome by love and lust together, as though all my internal editors were off. So, er, I actually rather like the paragraphs quoted.
Otters. Damn straight.
Or perhaps managers could behave like an actual profession, with an oath (parallel to the Hippocratic Oath) that outlines their standards and responsibilities, one of those being to debar members who don't live up to their oath.
Unionizing might actually be easier.
#433, JESR: Don't you lose the animal stock anyway, if it's infected? Plus the additional animals that catch whatever it is? (Or are there significant 'Typhoid Bessie' non-symptomatic carriers?) I see that losing a herd or fraction thereof is terrible, but why would one, national, should-be-the-last-time culling be worse than endemic disease?
I was just going to posit that zombies are simultaneously mindless consumption and the ecological disaster we expect it to cause, too: but I will roll the class-mass axis into it, by saying that zombies are the desperate poor (China, India, anyone who has to commute farther than I do in a less efficient vehicle) who we fear we will be driven to become. And then there's the year we eat theseed-cornneighbors, and nothing the year after that.
Isn't there an only-mildly-rare Euro-American custom of throwing shoes at the married couple departing for their honeymoon? Which, given the other things we do then, would make it very weakly insulting.
Yes, the railroad land ownership in the West was definitive. BLM maybe matches it for area, but the railroads went through the places with water.
There have been several business-as-usual legal scandals about how badly Amtrak has been treated on the rails; several of the comissioners (title?) who were theoretically looking after its interests walked into plum jobs for the freight lines, and at least one of them was caught fining Amtrak for malfeasance committed by a freight line.
Public rail might need to be justified as a public good, but we don't know yet, it hasn't had a fair shake. Also, anecdotally, the lines that are mostly managed by one or a few states are much healthier and less crazy-inefficient, suggesting that passenger rail isn't impossible.
Road travel is also subsidized by zoning laws; anything that gets built, and a lot of what's rebuilt, has to provide extravagant roads. If we required new subdivisions to build rail or trolley access, or even allowed them to build to 1920s road standards, building would be cheaper--especially building densely--and driving less attractive.
Again, maybe driving would beat other systems in a free market, but we really haven't tried to find out.
#56: Recapturing CO2 and turning it back into fuel has to take energy (fuel has energy in it by definition). So you'd have to carry fuel to capture the CO2... and then the CO2 from that fuel would have to be captured so you'd have to carry more fuel... so, alas, no.
Maybe something that captured CO2 but didn't reform it, maybe.
We don't often listen to radical truths spoken by those who do live lives of saintly renunciation, either; they get dismissed as wierdos, or people for whom it's easy, or the scapegoats who make up for everyone else's sins.
Jaque, #84: I see the laser booths advertised regularly in _Threads_, which is aimed (mostly) at custom seamstresses and amateurs who would like to be that good. I think the problem is that the laser booths are A-OK, but the robot factories aren't up to it. Maybe even sweatshop factories aren't up to it; you can't change `just a few measurements' in most patterns, and sweatshops may need a couple (dozen) runs through a pattern before they work out the order of operations.
The two things that bother me about 'white trash' are, first, that you oughtn't call people trash; and, second, that it's too often treated as an inherited and incurable state. Disadvantaged classes are bad enough, but possibly unavoidable this side of the Veil; consigning newborns to a disadvantaged class is -- well, it's one of this country's original sins. This is where 'white trash' meets n***** for me.
Andy, #6: and what that novel is *actually about* is some late-twenties romance, with Vast Events punching up the angst. We're stage dressing.
belatedly nodding into the evergreen American Civil War discussion, obsf: Barbara Hambly's _The Emancipator's Wife_, about Mary Todd Lincoln, is excellent. One of the interesting things is how good it is with a unreliable and fairly unsympathetic central character; SF has, I would say, a kneejerk tendency to try and justify unsympathetic behavior -- one of the lingering adolescent things about the genre -- instead of just loving the character anyway. Hambly doesn't.
I was at a marine science lab on the north coast of Jamaica one summer, and we had a largish storm or very small hurricane that knocked out the grid power. The Milky Way, in the washed tropical sky over a black sea and black hills, looked like a shelly road.
Then the resort across the way got their generator going and all was ska.
A couple things worried me about that lab, when I got there. The radioactivity hood had been cleaned, though not re-labeled, so the rats running in and out were OK; but the seemingly innocuous little concrete pier bugged me a lot, with the little boat tied up snug.
After a couple days I realized that my childhood at 45N expected the boat to drown or strangle in much higher tides. The pier didn't float and didn't need to.
Suzanne M @306; I know I've seen a well-reviewed pattern for taking in too-big T-shirts, or making them more female-fitted; it was probably on www.patternreview.com; but I can't find it now. Hm. Well, so, you can make experiments...
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