You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2013.
The more I hear about math post schooling, the more interesting it becomes. As a teacher, I’m a bit perplexed as throughout my checkered math learning career all of this cool stuff remained unmentioned. All I remember is the misery and frustration of learning largely esoteric shite, that once ‘mastered’ was quickly purged once test time was over. Anyhow, latent math anxiety aside, enjoy this clip about the weirdness of fractals. :)
One of my responsibilities in my part time job is to ensure that the bathrooms are reasonably clean and stocked, this equates roughly to once a shift boogieing around the building with a cart full of TP and paper towel (or many times during the most dreaded of all times on campus, dance festival season, but that is a different post). I’m not sure if behaviour in bathrooms are a psychological goldmine for understanding the human psyche, but a couple of interesting behaviours come to mind when it comes to maintaining the Water-closets where I work.
1. The amazing stupidity of people who think that wetting a bit of paper towel or TP and putting it on the roll of TP; thus ruining an entire roll of toilet paper. For what? What brave crusade are you fighting here dudes (and it is always dudes, not once in my 10 years working have I seen women be this stupid)? Your brave ‘fuck the system’ stance starts with destroying 45 cents worth of TP? Your cherished radical narchism has no room for bumfluff? The fuq? I just don’t get it.
2. For point two we have pictorial evidence. Observe.
Aww, you don’t want to catch anything from the nasty toilet seat, amiright? Your fine sense of hygiene is protecting your valued tuckus by laying down that half-micron thick patina of toilet paper protection. You are good now, “golden” even. You can do your business confidently and securely. Your commitment to cleanliness and hygiene should be applauded.
So, hyper hygiene freaks, why do you leave the TP on the seat? What is your reasoning behind this? Is pushing the TP the two centimeters into the bowl some sort Everest K2 type of task? Is Atlas pounding on the door demanding that you save some of that world-lifting action for him? If you’re all squicky about touching the TP your ass was just on could you not use your foot and nudge the now “toxic” paper straight into the loo (it is what I do after shaking my head for having to deal with your idiocy)?
Here is my hypothesis – and this applies to both dudes and dudettes – you are worried about your hygiene, but in your cravenly small self centered universe you really don’t care about the next person who has to deal with now adorned porcelain you’ve left behind. You exhibit a glaringly pathetic of empathy and consideration for the next person by not taking the two seconds to move your butt-shield into the loo. Concomitantly you are also slavishly embracing the foolhardy notion of the world revolving around your special-snowflake axis of posterior protection; and that positively pisses me off.
And thus, you too my toilet dressing friend are lumped into the same opprobrium deserving category as the brave anarchists sticking it to the Man by wetting toilet paper rolls.
Do you do this? If you do, please consider reforming your behaviour as I am sure it is furrowing brows everywhere for those who have to look after restrooms and puzzle why people do such inane things on such a regular basis.
Gaah!
I’m happy that other people have the knowledge and courage(!) to demonstrate scientific fact.
Home run…’nuff said.
“FreeXXXpics”.
It’s a search I get all the time, and each and every time it pops up on sitemeter
I want to scream at the top of my lungs.
A few weeks ago I was sitting at my desk sipping gingerly on my hot cup of coffee. I popped into sitemeter to log the searches and there it was again, “FreeXXXpics” my hand trembled and my smile turned into a frown of wrath and fury. What was it about this particular phrase that sent shockwaves through me?
I very nearly threw my coffee cup at the wall that day, so enraged was I by the search. Clearly, this shit was getting to me. Several days later, I took my burnout time but now I’m back again and the phrase is still haunting me. So, this morning amidst the chaos of homeschooling, networking for the rape campaign, researching and so on…
View original post 2,313 more words
“When we point out that there is a rape every three minutes, that a woman is beaten every eighteen seconds in this country, that’s very bad for women because it makes them feel victimized. And we’re not supposed to be bad and make women feel bad. This is the ultimate mind fuck. It takes away all the ground that we can stand on to say: “We have a political problem. We are going to find a political solution. And we are going to have to change the society that we live in to find it.” If you take a bunch of people and suddenly you find out that one is being beaten every eighteen seconds, that one is being raped every three minutes, that ten billion dollars a year now is being spent on watching them being raped for fun, watching them being exploited and objectified and violated for fun, and you don’t feel a little bit put upon, I mean a little bit frazzled around the edges by that, it seems to me that one would be not only a victim but half dead, totally numb, and a true fool.”
— Andrea Dworkin – Woman Hating, Right and Left
This is a signal boost/handy reference that enumerates the risks women face when pregnant. It is a useful tool in dispelling the motherhood myths that surround what pregnancy is like for women and awesome it is for them. The Liz Library is a great website, but slow loading, thus its duplication here for easier access.
And that’s just talking about the immediate physical repercussions.
Below is a partial list of the physical effects and risks of pregnancy. This list does not include the many non-physical effects and risks a woman faces in reproducing, such as the economic investment of work interruptions from pregnancy and breastfeeding, or time lost from career and other opportunity costs involved in pregnancy and later child rearing (mothers comprise 90+% of primary parents), or the emotional trauma of problem pregnancies, or the numerous economic and lifestyle repercussions that pregnancy and motherhood will have on the remainder of a mother’s life.
This page was written in response to the popular, but mother-denigrating and nonsensical notion that, absent a substantial investment of some other sort, i.e. absent committed emotional and financial support of the mother of his child through pregnancy and beyond, and a familial relationship with both of them in fact, a “father” is, without anything more, a father, let alone an “equal parent.”
We have been culturally conditioned to accept some incredible and false ideas. But it is offensive to assert that pregnancy impacts men in any way equivalent to its impact on women; that fathers and mothers have comparable experiences or feelings in connection with pregnancy or their babies; that nonresident unwed fathers, based on DNA, ipso facto “should” have “rights;” that, from the standpoint of family laws or women’s choices regarding abortion, pregnancy should be viewed as nothing more than an “inconvenience”; or that the riskiest “jobs” in this world all are performed by men. (Compare the percentages of women carrying the scars of pregnancy with the percentages of men who carry the scars of battle.)
Normal, frequent or expectable temporary side effects of pregnancy:
- exhaustion (weariness common from first weeks)
- altered appetite and senses of taste and smell
- nausea and vomiting (50% of women, first trimester)
- heartburn and indigestion
- constipation
- weight gain
- dizziness and light-headedness
- bloating, swelling, fluid retention
- hemmorhoids
- abdominal cramps
- yeast infections
- congested, bloody nose
- acne and mild skin disorders
- skin discoloration (chloasma, face and abdomen)
- mild to severe backache and strain
- increased headaches
- difficulty sleeping, and discomfort while sleeping
- increased urination and incontinence
- bleeding gums
- pica
- breast pain and discharge
- swelling of joints, leg cramps, joint pain
- difficulty sitting, standing in later pregnancy
- inability to take regular medications
- shortness of breath
- higher blood pressure
- hair loss
- tendency to anemia
- curtailment of ability to participate in some sports and activities
- infection including from serious and potentially fatal disease
(pregnant women are immune suppressed compared with non-pregnant women, and are more susceptible to fungal and certain other diseases)- extreme pain on delivery
- hormonal mood changes, including normal post-partum depression
- continued post-partum exhaustion and recovery period (exacerbated if a c-section — major surgery — is required, sometimes taking up to a full year to fully recover)
Normal, expectable, or frequent PERMANENT side effects of pregnancy:
- stretch marks (worse in younger women)
- loose skin
- permanent weight gain or redistribution
- abdominal and vaginal muscle weakness
- pelvic floor disorder (occurring in as many as 35% of middle-aged former child-bearers and 50% of elderly former child-bearers, associated with urinary and rectal incontinence, discomfort and reduced quality of life — aka prolapsed utuerus, the malady sometimes badly fixed by the transvaginal mesh)
- changes to breasts
- varicose veins
- scarring from episiotomy or c-section
- other permanent aesthetic changes to the body (all of these are downplayed by women, because the culture values youth and beauty)
- increased proclivity for hemmorhoids
- loss of dental and bone calcium (cavities and osteoporosis)
- higher lifetime risk of developing Altzheimer’s
- newer research indicates microchimeric cells, other bi-directional exchanges of DNA, chromosomes, and other bodily material between fetus and mother (including with “unrelated” gestational surrogates)
Occasional complications and side effects:
- complications of episiotomy
- spousal/partner abuse
- hyperemesis gravidarum
- temporary and permanent injury to back
- severe scarring requiring later surgery
(especially after additional pregnancies)- dropped (prolapsed) uterus (especially after additional pregnancies, and other pelvic floor weaknesses — 11% of women, including cystocele, rectocele, and enterocele)
- pre-eclampsia (edema and hypertension, the most common complication of pregnancy, associated with eclampsia, and affecting 7 – 10% of pregnancies)
- eclampsia (convulsions, coma during pregnancy or labor, high risk of death)
- gestational diabetes
- placenta previa
- anemia (which can be life-threatening)
- thrombocytopenic purpura
- severe cramping
- embolism (blood clots)
- medical disability requiring full bed rest (frequently ordered during part of many pregnancies varying from days to months for health of either mother or baby)
- diastasis recti, also torn abdominal muscles
- mitral valve stenosis (most common cardiac complication)
- serious infection and disease (e.g. increased risk of tuberculosis)
- hormonal imbalance
- ectopic pregnancy (risk of death)
- broken bones (ribcage, “tail bone”)
- hemorrhage and
- numerous other complications of delivery
- refractory gastroesophageal reflux disease
- aggravation of pre-pregnancy diseases and conditions (e.g. epilepsy is present in .5% of pregnant women, and the pregnancy alters drug metabolism and treatment prospects all the while it increases the number and frequency of seizures)
- severe post-partum depression and psychosis
- research now indicates a possible link between ovarian cancer and female fertility treatments, including “egg harvesting” from infertile women and donors
- research also now indicates correlations between lower breast cancer survival rates and proximity in time to onset of cancer of last pregnancy
- research also indicates a correlation between having six or more pregnancies and a risk of coronary and cardiovascular disease
Less common (but serious) complications:
- peripartum cardiomyopathy
- cardiopulmonary arrest
- magnesium toxicity
- severe hypoxemia/acidosis
- massive embolism
- increased intracranial pressure, brainstem infarction
- molar pregnancy, gestational trophoblastic disease
(like a pregnancy-induced cancer)- malignant arrhythmia
- circulatory collapse
- placental abruption
- obstetric fistula
More permanent side effects:
-
future infertility
-
permanent disability
-
death.
I just learned the simple way of transferring photos from my phone to the blog. Here is one picture I took of a particularly nice tree framed from the stairwell of the where I work on campus.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…