No, real ones. For now, it’s just medical records. But just wait for it… and attendant “issues”… such as,
[Patient who’s lost 40 pounds, creating a new “wrinkle” for the technology to parse] “Oh, dear, you died last week!” *heh*
Commit Forty Minutes a Once a Week for 10 Weeks to Citizenship
A whole hour would be nice, but around 40 minutes a day would enable you to “attend” an online overview of the Constitution. Now that the University of Chicago Press has changed access to its online version of The Founders’ Constitution*, this opportunity–beginning Monday, February 20, 2012, could be a useful tool to sharpen citizens’ views of issues this election year.
Pass it around, would you?
BTW, here’s an introductory video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=du_GfHlqZXg
h.t. and a big “Thank you!” to Lady Diane for binging this to my attention.
*Use this link to access it now. I’ll update the link in my sidebar soon.
The Parable of the Kosher Deli
Before I insert the meat of the post (you may groan now; you certainly will once the pun hits you :-)), a question: has anyone asked about the effect of HHS rulings about Obumascare requirements on Muslim health organizations? Or are they exempt? And who would care anyway?
The Parable of the Kosher Deli, as told by William Lori, the bishop of Bridgeport, CT, in testimony before the House Oversight Committee, February 16, 2012
Lost Treasures
Through the ages, many great treasures have been lost… and sometimes found. Unfortunately, some, like the libraries of Alexandria (yes, plural–for at least two reasons) were lost multiple times in different ways and stand no chance of rediscovery. Others were even lost within the lifetimes of their creators.
One such is François Villon’s Le romaunt du Pet au deable (The Romance of the Devil’s Fart). When I discovered Villon as a high school student, I read his statement dedicating the work to his mentor, Guillaume de Villon, and attempted to find this great masterpiece. Alas! It was not to be, as the work disappeared almost as soon as it was penned. Still, even today, in my dotage, I yearn in vain for the biting wit, the keen insight of Villon’s Le romaunt du Pet au deable.
Oh, well, at least I have the farts of the Devil’s favorite bastard children in Washington to keep me gassed.
“Fire”-ing on a Few More Cylinders
Just added an Android app to my Kindle Fire to enable access to 25GB of Skydrive storage I’ve barely touched. Who really needs all that much local storage on a tablet, anyway? If one were to need desktop/notebook levels of local storage on such a thing, that’d seem to indicate either
1. a need to do desktop/notebook kinds of tasks or
2. the need for a tablet more like this, or even this in order to… do desktop/notebook kinds of tasks.
Note: the link to TabletKiosk’s Sahara tablets at the article the second link above points to is malformed. Use the link provided in the preceding sentence if you want to check it out.
Impending Doom
Every day, I see evidence that those in our society who make their living by the written word are increasingly influencing the remaining few who bother to read at all with illiterate pronouncements, accelerating the slide into nonsense. Case in point (just one of many over the last few days alone):
“Clearly, the tablet and mobile worlds have begun to impact the desktop OS in a major way. This begs the question: Can the desktop survive?”
Methinks the writer has no idea what a petitio principii fallacy is.
Beg the question=”take for granted without basis or justification”
I just hate it when “mass man” semi-literacy (or should I say “cultural illiteracy”?–w/a tip o’ the tam to E.D. Hirsch, Jr.) debases writing this way. But that’s what happens when supposedly literate people have been trained–certainly not educated–via less than literate organs such as pubschools, contemporary “higher ed” and the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind. Ah, well, I suppose it’s just one more evidence of society’s slide into a Dark Age, when more and more people don’t even know much about what they don’t know… or care. And it is, of course, this increasingly self-enstupiated, self-deluded, autolobotomized group that seems to be guiding the course of our society. But then of course,
“In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”
Did You Ever Wonder…
What the “real world” would look like through “3-D glasses”?
“Whoa, dude, 4-D!”
*heh*
It’s a Problem…
How do “bottomless cups of coffee” work, anyway? I mean, if they’re bottomless, how could they be cups, and how could they hold coffee?
Somebody wasn’t thinking when they made that one up.
So, I Got An Email The Other Day About How to Stop Procrastinating
Haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. Maybe tomorrow.
Whitney Houston Died for the Grammys…
Color me unconcerned, unsurprised and untouched. Drugs and alcohol were such a large part of the celeb’ Houston life that this was a foregone conclusion. In fact, every time I heard news indicating she was still alive, I was a tad surprised.
The “Manufactured Music Industry”‘s hagiography of this pathetic celebrity’s self-waste of a life and talent is, frankly, revolting. The “Princess Di Phenomenon”? (That was another outpouring that gagged me–nearly as much as the Elvis and Michael Jackson crap.)
Just let it go.