This article from Discover News reminded me that there is a big community of frozen people in the U.S. Apparently not alive nor dead; more than 90 people are cryogenically frozen. Fascinating FAQ at the freezing company's website. I wonder whether any of the frozen people has ever asserted the right to vote by proxy or by absentee ballot. [Question] "Please explain why you are unable to vote in person in this election." [Answer] "Because I am frozen."
Today, I spotted a link to Mary Ann Sorrentino's Blog on Salon.com. Sorrentino reports about a woman who decided to Twitter her RU486 abortion in real-time.
27-year-old Angie Jackson decided to use Twitter as a public stage for her private decision to terminate a pregnancy using RU486, the miscarriage-inducing drug legally available in the US for a decade. Jackson, who has a 4-year-old son with special needs, says that that difficult pregnancy and outcome made her decide long ago not to have another child. She was committed to aborting future pregnancies that might occur.Sorrentino strongly disapproves of Jackson's public display of abortion. She considers it "self-serving, exhibitionistic, and selfish: at best, it has "Bad Judgment" written all over it." I agree with Sorrentino's characterization of Jackson's craving for the limelight. Before going further, however, I should make clear that I fully support a woman's right to abort a pregnancy in the early months of the pregnancy. Although I consider an early term embryo/fetus to to be both human and alive, I don't consider a human organism lacking a reasonably-developed brain to be entitled to the legal rights of personhood. As the pregnancy gets to be further along, the argument gets correspondingly stronger (in my mind) that the fetus is a person--I thus consider the idea of an elective abortion of a healthy fetus at 8 or 9 months (e.g., for sex selection) to be the ghastly equivalent of murder. Here's more on my analysis of abortion and my rejection of the religious concept of the "soul," an ancient concept that inspires many people who are anti-abortion. As I read Sorrentino's post, I thought about a question posed to me by a good friend who is anti-abortion. I mentioned to him that I believe in a woman's right to abort for any reason in the early months of pregnancy. As we discussed the issue further, I indicated that it was too bad that some women had multiple abortions--too bad there isn't fool-proof birth control--shouldn't the invention of 100% reliable birth control be a priority for our government, so that there would be fewer accidental pregnancies, and hence, abortions? My friend stopped me and asked me why I would care about large numbers of early term abortions, given my position that an early term abortion is not tantamount to murder. He asked, "If it's not murder, why do you care that a woman uses abortion repeatedly - - 10 or 12 times in her life, to end pregnancies? You're claiming that an early term abortion is only as morally significant as trapping a mouse in a mousetrap, right? . . ." [More . . . ]
How much machinery does it take to transport 100 people by car, bus or bicycle? Check out this poster.
I'm not writing about gadgets here, but about the information that makes the gadgets useful: Software. This video is nominally about web design consulting. But I've lived these situations back before the web, as well as with web clients. One problem is that the buyer of information has no idea what it's worth until he has it. And once he has it, why should he pay someone for it? Therefore, it isn't valuable. This dovetails neatly into other copyright issues, but I'm not going there. I have a few websites, most of which are loaded with free information that I painstakingly collected and developed. The sites are also built from scratch, mostly with a simple text editor. Some people see value in this; I receive donations. Some years as much as the low three figures. People used to ask me if HTML was easy. I'd say, "Yes, you just need to remember how a few hundred easy commands interact." Most developers don't bother to make sure their site even meets official web standards (as published and tested for free by W3C.org). Even WordPress, the engine on which this site is built, shows errors in the validator. Google? Thousands of errors on every page. I've had clients who understand what I do, and were happy to pay. Unfortunately, usually their superiors had to be cajoled. Eventually, these situations melt down and leave me out of work. The "Just a small change" problem comes up often. After I've been reporting and demonstrating every step of the way, and finally a web site is finished, then do they bother to look and notice that it isn't what they need. They make "little" requests comparable to having a builder simply move a bathroom from the first floor to the second as the keys to a house are handed over. This video made me cringe.
A few weeks ago, my daughters (aged 9 and 11) convinced me to go dumpster diving out in the alley behind our house in the City of St. Louis. We've gone dumpster diving a few times over the years. Based on the prior expeditions, my daughters fully expect that if they look through a few dozen dumpsters, they'll find something valuable. You see, this is America, where people through away perfectly usable toys and games, as well as furniture, appliances and clothing. And even when you don't find usable merchandise, you'll see literally tons of single-use paper and plastic being thrown out. When you see the incredible piles of discarded usable things with your own eyes, it is all-the-more astounding. Even more surprising, if you're looking the highest ratio of usable stuff, look in the dumpsters behind apartment-dwellers rather than the dumpsters behind expensive single-family homes.
Perhaps it sounds disgusting to go dumpster diving. If so, get over it, because it can be far more than an anthropological field trip--it can be like winning a mini-lottery. My kids and I have found several extremely nice coats, for instance (we washed them and gave them away to friends). We once found a working DVD player. We've taken home shelves and other items of furniture. We've found dozens of toys, which merely need to be cleaned up to become usable. As I'm finding these sorts of things, I keep thinking "Why wouldn't someone take the time to donate this to Good Will of Salvation Army?" When people throw a valuable thing into the landfill, it's gone forever--what were they thinking?
Here's what we found on our recent expedition. First of all, I must digress. The City of St. Louis provides special separate dumpsters for Yard Waste Only and other dumpsters for general rubbish. On our recent expedition, I looked into 20 of of those yard-waste-only dumpsters. About half of them contained non-yard waste. This astounds me too. Why would someone screw up this incredibly sensible system for recycling vegetation by throwing plastic, food and paper into a yard waste dumpster?
And here's a typical example of what you often find in a yard-waste-only dumpster:
[caption id="attachment_11660" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Contents found in a yard-waste only dumpster"]
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As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, people throw away massive amounts of single-use paper and plastic. Probably the biggest single category is cardboard pizza boxes. In our one-hour expedition, I probably saw 500 used pizza boxes.
But we also saw huge amounts of clearly recyclable goods that were not being recycled. Hundreds of glass jars, metal cans and plastics and immense amounts of paper, all of it headed for the landfill. We also saw hundreds of pounds of colorfully-inked food packaging. All of it carefully designed to catch your eye at the store, and then you toss it into the landfill. But, it's not like you really toss it in--instead, a huge fleet of city trucks carts this packaging far away from the city in order to dump it into the landfill. It makes me wonder how many toxic chemicals were released into the environment in order to produce all of this food packaging.
We found several toys and many items of clothing that had been saturated in pasta sauce, meat grease or who-knows what kind of fluid. We decided to keep looking. What my girls ended up taking home for a quick clean-up was a little toy dog that they found inside of a woman's big purse. You'll see his photo below. My girls named him "Oscar" (after Sesame Street's Oscar), and he now lives with us .
[caption id="attachment_11661" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Oscar"]
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