April 2006 Archives

Susan discovered a new addition to our balcony recently:

When I saw it, I thought "Oh, how sad. An abandoned egg." But a few minutes later, we came back to see this instead:

We have a new roommate! And actually, since I took those pictures, another egg appeared. I wonder how many little ones we'll have outside our window when she's all done? Hopefully she doesn't get freaked out by Murphy, though. She flew away when he came over to say 'hi' a couple hours ago. I haven't seen her since. But really, how can anything be afraid of this:

?

I don't watch a lot of television, at least as something more than background noise. The shows that I pay attention to are very carefully selected. I usually gravitate toward the animated - this could be my inner 12 year old having way too much control over my personality - and the witty/hilarious. Now I recently discovered The Loop, which I was surprised to find extremely hilarious. And then I saw that the T.V. critics out there more or less hate it. What the heck? I almost always agree with "critical acclaim" (or lack of it), even when apparently nobody else does. I know that the chances are slim that more than a handful of people will read this, but does anyone out there agree with me? Is The Loop the greatest television comedy since Scrubs?

Lately I've been trying to place my finger on the pulse of the online autism advocacy community, and in the process I came across this blog: Hating Autism. The author is not someone who hates people with autism - he just really really hates the disorder. And he seems to be convinced to the greatest extent possible that the cause of autism is mercury poisoning. And of course, there are others who blog in the opposite direction, such as in Autism - Natural Variation and the aptly-named Not Mercury.

If you're not familiar with this issue, it's one of the hot topics in the "what causes autism?" debate. And by "hot," I mean "riot-inducing and lynch-mob-forming." Essentially, some people believe that the MMR vaccine that children are given early in life acts as the catalyst for autism. It can be a relatively easy conclusion to reach. Some may point out similarities between autism and a few of the neurological traits of mercury poisoning, and there is that correlation between the timing of the vaccine and the typical onset of autism symptoms. But of course we all know that correlation does not imply causation. That leaves the burden of proof on the research community.

There is a lot of literature out there in academic journals that suggests evidence pointing in both directions, although it seems that the more legitimate work tends to lean in the "it's not mercury" direction. If mercury does play a part, it's not very cut and dry. One of the complications to the "it is mercury" argument is that in places where the metal was removed from vaccines, the autism rates are continuing their upward trajectories. The question is a baffling one, and I'm going to try to peruse through as much of the research as I can to figure out what the current situation really looks like.

The problem of looking to others to summarize research is that so many people are moderately of heavily biased in one direction or another. Most of the time, you'll get one side of the story, and even if you get more than one side, you don't know whether both sides are being given full attention. But I like to do this kind of dirty work. It's fun stuff!

So it appears that comps begin tomorrow. I think I can say that I feel much more confident about the exam this time than I did before the last go-around. (Did I ever write about that? I don't think I did.) Although there is that inevitable uncertainty and anxiety that will continue to rise through tonight until 1:00pm tomorrow, at which time it should slowly decrease, only to rise again to maximum levels just before I'm informed of the results. That'll be a fun time.

I just want this whole thing to be over, to have my life back again. I want to be able to participate in non-academic-related conversations, go to the store, update my web site, or walk the dog without having to feel guilty about it.

Speaking of guilt, my palms are beginning to sweat, so it seems that I've been spending too much time writing this. I should probably get back to studying. Or "cramming," as I suppose it should be called at this point. Or in more optimistic terms, "the procrastinator's moment to shine."

For those who keep up with the world of technology, and especially the world of Apple Computer, you probably share my sentiments about the following product that was announced today: Apple lets Macs do Windows. WHAAAA?

I...don't know what to think about this. Was Dvorak right? What the heck is going on here??

I was browsing through the Daily Vidette today, which is the student newspaper for Illinois State University, and realized why I stopped reading it on a regular basis, at least as a source of legitimate information. In the past, I was a little thrown off by Associated Press articles that were simply cut off 3/4 of the way through. This seemingly happened so that room could be made for advertisements of drinking establishments. This type of thing makes the publication seem not so much a newspaper funded by ads, but an adpaper that fills empty space with news snippets.

And then every once in a while, an amusing typo would find itself onto the pages. A major headline on the front page a while back, for example, referred to "opinoins" of students. Today, I found three typoed headlines in the first six pages! (If you're curious, they referred to the university "libaray," an issue concerning "identy" theft, and something about President Bush's "cheif" of staff.) What kind of editorial staff lets these kinds of things just slip by? How can they expect anyone to take them seriously when they truncate articles in meaningless ways, misspell headlines, and of course hire columnists who seem to summon most of their insight from beer commercials and MTV?

Student papers tend to take a lot of abuse from critics, but the Vidette I imagine is playng in a whole different ballpark. In a way, the paper represents the university's student body, and if its staff is going to be sloppy and misguided in the ways that it presents news and opinion, then really, what good is it?