I have described myself as a "lapsed agnostic", to which one response was "What do 'lapsed agnostics' believe in? Or do they just become UU's?"
My reply: Lapsed agnostics not only don't know, they don't spend any time thinking about not knowing.
Randolph: The archiving issue can be easily finessed by burning an audio CD. (Recompressing from that will lose quality, of course, but it's better than not having it at all.)
Bruce: Granting the peeve, it's sadly possible for a medication or type of medication to be both over-prescribed (given to folks it won't help or will actually harm, often because they saw commercials for it) and under-prescribed (not getting to the folks who actually need it) at the same time.
Vioxx, for example, is apparently less risky overall than other painkillers for people who are prone to bleeding on the others. But hey, instead of having that small market, let's advertise the heck out of it so people will "ask your doctor about" the medication, and some number of doctors will prescribe it out of ignorance or just to shut up the patient...and we get a situation where it goes from way overprescribed to banned (and therefore underprescribed for the folks who need it) overnight.
(Sorry, that's my rant. Teresa, please tell me if I'm taking this too far afield.)
Paula Helm Murray: still, my condolences. Losing a tool, even one that can be replaced and is backed up, is a PITA. Last time my Palm broke, I limped along half-brained for a day until I could find the old one and get back to 3/4-brained (the old one didn't have all the functionality I've become dependent on).
Paula Lieberman: noooooooooooooooooooooooo! I just finished digging out from the last batch!
Epacris: panix I think came from "public access network *ix", inasmuch as most Unix variants of the time were called something ending in -ix (Ultrix, AIX, etc) and were generically called *ix.
Graydon: that may work in X11 apps, but won't normally work in native Mac apps. Many mouse vendors ship Mac software that lets you program the buttons, though, so you can always set it to send Cmd-V.
Graydon: Mac OS X natively supports right-clicking for mice that have a second button, as well as the scroll wheel for mice that have one.
Since the Mac mini doesn't include a mouse, you don't even have to throw it away....
Chloe: it's an interesting area, which really couldn't be researched very effectively until sequencing technology got good enough to sequence many genomes very accurately and very quickly. (The latest capillary sequencers are far better than the stuff we were using 6 years ago.) Add to that the good ol' Moore's Law increases in computer power and the work being done with microarrays for genotyping, and you have the recipe for some real progress. The initial efforts will be aimed at finding markers for disease susceptibility, but I think we'll see more pharmacogenetics work happening too. (The pharma companies will do or fund a bunch of it once it gets to a point where they think it will help cut side-effects or increase effectiveness, because that may help them "rescue" drugs that currently don't seem to have enough benefits for their risks. Note what the Vioxx situation cost Merck.)
I think we'll get some very interesting results in the next few years, but I can't predict when it'll get to the general use stage. I wouldn't be surprised to see a scan of the "top 250" markers done as part of routine bloodwork by 2015, though.
Lucy Kemnitzer: exactly. One of the up and coming post-Human Genome Project areas of research is pharmacogenetics, figuring out why drugs work differently for different people.
With some work, I hope we'll wind up with the ability to take a quick blood sample, test it on a microarray for known markers, and be told "take this one, don't take that one, take half as much as usual of this" rather than having to find these things out the hard way.
(The previous comment was written before I reloaded and saw Teresa's Chinese takeout comment, or it would have been worded somewhat differently.)
Mustard, or in extreme cases wasabi, also work to clear out sinuses...but do you really want it all out at once?
Again, I hope you feel better soon.
My usual sovereign remedy is a good hot bowl of hot & sour soup (Royal East or Mary Chung's, as available, in Cambridge; I hear NYC has a Chinese restaurant or two).
Get well soon, both of you.
And isn't that just a perfect Nicoll quote?
Linkmeister: as did I, with the same apparent effect (to wit, none).
There are certain products for which I joke that the "for Dummies" book is missing the word "is" in the title.
It was raining in the City By The Bay, a hard rain. Hard enough to wash the slime out of the streets and back into the holes they crawled out of.
She walked in. Her clothes had once been fine; it seemed that she'd once been proud, before she was reduced to scrounging for her next meal.
"How does it feel?", he wondered.
Teresa: well, there was that LiveJournal sitcom thing that cast you as Alyson Hannigan and Patrick as Mark Hamill...and Pamela Dean as James Doohan. (I got Danny Glover.)
Teresa's comment reminds me of something I read once, in a book of "common misconceptions debunked" or some such.
It explained that the Encyclopedia Britannica was misnamed because it was originally published in Scotland.
My reaction (since Scotland was still part of Great Britain last time I checked) was to take the rest of the book with even more skepticism than I had already been doing. (At least it was a freebie I acquired, rather than something I'd actually paid for.)
Bill: Mac user since 1986, Unix user since 1988, Unix sysadmin since 1991. I love having a Mac running a Unix-based OS. (My home network's a mix of Mac and FreeBSD.)
Bill: indeed. For its faults, I really liked OSF/1 aka Digital Unix aka Compaq Tru64 Unix, now "hp Tru64 Unix"...but HP put it (and the Alpha) on the chopping block, and now backed off on their promises to port AdvFS and TruCluster to HockeyPux.
AIX has its moments. The way that SMIT ("smit happens") in GUI mode has the little running man, and if the command succeeds he raises his hands, but if it fails he falls down...you wouldn't expect that level of humor from IBM, normally.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 13 |
| 2004 | 126 |
| 2003 | 1 |
| 2002 | 1 |
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