Electric sheep

Last night I hosted a toy library working bee at my house. Early this morning I was part of a futuristic SWAT team with Barack Obama, Sigourney Weaver and some other tall thin famous people. In our shuttle we donned helmets and leather superhero suits as we prepared to take on someone with seriously overdue toys.

The consumption and development of brains

School holidays has overtaken my life but it is ok:
45%
Yesterday as a 4 year-old chatted to me about playing Halo 2 (which is R16) on the xbox in his bedroom I was struck by the wide variety of options we have as parents. I expect he is better prepared than H & K for surviving a zombie apocalypse.

Winter whining

Where have I been? What have I been doing? Well mostly I haven't been posting because D has commandeered my lovely little laptop and turned it into a thing that is plugged into a huge screen I can't sit far enough away from which makes a horrible high pitched whining noise. And we all had awful 'flu. And I have new lenses in my glasses and I think they are not quite right.

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As we drove back from the library today H listed all the things she thought of in order from most to least liked:

1. Mummy [:-)]
   
2. lego
3. Pony [Kay's new toy]
   
4. star [??]
   
5. doing sudoku with Daddy
6. Big Pig
   
7. Fimble [her buddy]
   
8. pink
9. chocolate [to eat]
   
10. yellow
11. purple
12. indigo
13. orange
14. blue
15. black
16. grey
17. brown
18. clear
19. ice cream
20. bananas
21. mosquitoes
22. planes
23. sun [because it makes her too hot]

The Adventures of Pooh

I am in bed with my computer, taking it easy after a nasty tummy bug, not yet 100% but improving.

H is wanly watching a DVD clutching a container. She threw up last night, I'm not sure if it was the start of the tummy bug or just too much mucous from her cold but she is very pale.

D is looking after our nieces, H' & I, at their house. H' is not at school because she is convalescing after her own tummy bug.

S, H' & I's mum, is at school doing my parent helper duty.

Parenting is all about logistics.

Expecting someone taller

H & K don't like to compete with each other. They like to be first equal. If we offer a reward they like to receive it simultaneously even if one of them earned it first. This is particularly true of K who likes everything to be fair so long as she's first. I think that I needed a caesarian because K was so upset that H was being born first, if they could have come out simultaneously, or K first, they both would have been fine.

We don't have a height chart, marks on a doorway or whatever. Largely this is because I was too caught up in the present for the first year or more to look to the future and partly it is because having not started one it never seemed like the right time to start. Now I realise that for our family, for H & K, it is the right thing to do. Currently, despite information to the contrary K believes she is taller than H and H believes that she is the same height as K and everyone is happy. Who needs objectivity?

Wrongo, zombie lips!

For a few years I have been telling people that it is now legal to park on the wrong side of the road here (facing in the opposite direction to the flow of traffic). I thought I'd read something about a law change to this effect in the paper. I was wrong, it is still illegal and you can be ticketed for it.

Now I know that one of my failings as a human being is an overdeveloped attachment to being right, so I hereby give you, my gentle reader, a chance to tell me what I've got wrong and I'll 'fess up or at least try very hard to understand your point of view and agree to differ.

P.S. Does anyone know where the quote "Wrongo, zombie lips!" is from? Trusty Google is letting me down.

If you don't eat your meat

We've decided to eat vegetarian at least one day a week. I was inspired by a snippet in New Scientist which said:

How to eat green

If you are serious about reducing your carbon footprint, going vegetarian for one day a week will make a big difference, says Christopher Weber of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who has audited the greenhouse gas emissions of our meals. "The differences between eating habits are very, very striking," he says.

Writing this I've done some more research. There is an article on New Scientist Environment which references Environmental Science and Technology (DOI: 10.1021/es702969f). The research is American and the detail would be slightly different here because we don't keep our cows in barns and transport grain to them but that doesn't stop them farting a staggering amount of methane.

If that is all too sane for you try this leaflet which was delivered to our "No Junk Mail" snail-mailbox just the other day. My favourite part is the second question on the second page:

QUESTION: Yes. Thank you, Master.

I am very happy to take questions like that.

Topical treatment

Vasu Iyengar has been in the news recently for failing to diagnose a complication after surgery in time to stop it killing Moina Simcock. Vasu is busy hitting back, she is quoted on www.stuff.co.nz from a letter to the Health and Disability Commissioner: "I apologised to the Simcock family several times and did my very best to pay retribution ... It was not enough for any of you". Then as more complaints come to light Vasu is quoted saying to the Dominion Post: "patients will say these things to get publicity in the wake of what I have endured."

I find it offensive that she appears to think that apologies and a payment might be "enough" and that she is undermining all her patients' credibility. (Although I do realise that these quotes may have been deliberately selected to make her look bad.)

Vasu Iyengar was my gynaecologist until she:

a) diagnosed an incurable condition missing that I actually had eczema (optional gynaecological detail),
b) referred me to the person who specialises in that condition in Wellington without telling me that the person's role was as a counsellor,
c) wanted to treat my PCOS following a recipe that ignored my particular symptoms.

Thanks to Vasu I endured months of unnecessary discomfort. I would not recommend her to anyone.

Do not try this at home

Warning: the following post may put you off your food.

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Every morning this week I have taken dried apricots out of the container and put them in H & K's lunch boxes. Some mornings I've eaten some too. This morning I put in three apricots, picked up the fourth "ready to eat" "moist & juicy" apricot and noticed it had a brown think on it. "Stalk," I thought. Then I looked closer... and closer... and said to D, remarkably calmly as I took the first three apricots, out of the school lunches "Can you come and look at this and see if you think it is what I think it is?"

There, nestled in the fourth apricot, was a moist and juicy rat poo. I used to have rats so I know a rat poo when I see one.

Fortunately I had a holiday job once as telephonist/receptionist for the Wellington Health Development Unit which at that time dealt with such complaints so I knew what to do. I put the apricot with poo in a clear plastic bag, found the packet the apricots came in and rang the Public Health Service. They came and collected the evidence this afternoon.

The apricots were imported ones packed in New Zealand. Is it strange to be hoping that it was a New Zealand rat poo? Somehow it seems slightly less disgusting than an overseas one importing who knows what foreign diseases.

I am thankful to my morbid sense of humour which is helping me enjoy the sheer awfulness of finding a ready to eat poo.

You can't make me talk

New Scientist published an interview with, Darius Rejali, a researcher who studies torture which got me thinking. The preview of the interview is on the New Scientist site, the full article is on a blog over here.

The bits which particularly grabbed me were:

Where do [methods for clean torture] come from?

The techniques migrate. Every time Americans have been involved in a war where there has been torture, those techniques have come back to local or private policing, since that is where military policemen get jobs. There is migration the other way too: techniques used by US military policemen in Iraq had been recorded in immigration and naturalisation prisons in Miami in the 1990s. Most often, torture techniques originate not in some deep vault in the CIA but in dark parts of our society where they are tolerated. They live in barracks and fraternities and university pranks and movies. Hence most torture is not sophisticated: electricity is about as sophisticated as it gets.

...

How often do interrogators obtain useful information or truthful confessions using torture?

The few statistical studies on this suggest the return is incredibly poor. There are several reasons. How do you know you have the right person? And even if you do, how do you know they're telling the truth? Third, torture can damage the brain, and anything that affects the brain's capacity to withhold information also affects its capacity to retrieve it.

If it doesn't work, why does it persist?

Myths and rumours. There is a perception that democracy makes us weak and only "real men" know how to do this stuff. People think torture worked for the Gestapo, for example. It didn't. What made the Gestapo so scarily efficient was its dependence on public cooperation. Informers betrayed the resistance repeatedly in Europe, and everyone knew this, but it was more convenient to say the Gestapo got the truth by beating it out of us. Public cooperation is the best way to gather information. After the failed bomb attacks in London in 2005, the British police found every one of the gang within a week. One was caught after his parents turned him in. They would not have done that if they'd thought he'd be tortured.

This left me thinking about how torture is portrayed and propagated by the movies and TV shows that I watch. 24, for example, actively propagates the myth that torture works. What can I do about that? Not much. I don't write movies, books or TV shows that propagate the myth that torture works but I do roleplay and I've been thinking what the implications of the article are for that. Maybe I should campaign for an effective torture free Kapcon. What do you think?