I’ve started a new project, The Gwinnett Digest. This is a news site geared specifically to people living and working in Gwinnett County, Georgia. I’m working with news releases provided by various government agencies and organizations in Gwinnett County. My goal for this site is to use it to learn more about the news gathering process and to maybe make a little money in the process.
This gallery contains 11 photos.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.
I’m placing this here because I have more to say on it but no time to do so right now. I will say that we all use PsyOps in our dealing with other people some of us are just more adept with it than others. I’m not sure we can avoid doing so.
This past spring I had an acute attack of pancreatitis. To diagnose this I had to undergo a CT scan. Pancreatitis can often cause problems for months resulting in hospitalization and stays in ICU. I was lucky, my doctor sent me to the ER. I received treatment and was back to normal two days later.
However, the CAT scan found something else. I had a very large and unusual shaped bladder. My doctor was very insistent that I see a urologist and have this looked into. After she called me up a month after the pancreatitis attack to again insist that I see a urologist she made me understand that this was something I needed to see a specialist about so I made an appointment with Dr. Mukeesh Patel and let him have a look.
Dr. Patel found that I had an enlarged bladder. Not only was my bladder enlarged but the muscle wall of the bladder had herniated and allowed the inner lining of the bladder to escape forming two diverticulum. This isn’t a problem unless the diverticulum are retaining urine. Mine were. The cause stemmed from an enlarged prostate restricting flow and not allowing my bladder to empty. So I had a procedure called transurethral ablation to open up the urethra.
This worked but after six months my bladder is still retaining urine. The diverticulum are filling up now and not emptying. Yesterday the decision was made to operate again to remove the diverticulum. I suggested December 6 and he is suppose to get back with me by tomorrow to confirm that date or give me an alternate.
This will cause me to lose at least a week of work but it should give me time to heal over winter and get back to riding my bicycle by mid January. I will need to start back then because I have plans for April. I’ll tell you more about those as I fill in the details myself. Hopefully this will bring an end, at least for now, to my health issues that have plagued me this year.
UPDATE: Surgery has been scheduled for December 7th.
Women are NOT automatically more likely to develop breast cancer if a relative has the high-risk genes
Contradicts 2007 study that found women with family carrying faulty BRCA genes were up to five times more likely to develop breast cancer
Way too often people make irreversible life changing decisions based on a study reported on in the paper. A lot more needs to go into major decisions than just the outcome of the latest study reported on in the paper.
Harbins Park is one of Gwinnett Counties parks that offers a bit of wilderness close enough for spur of the moment hikes. Sammie (my dog) and I took this trail out Saturday morning for about an hour long hike. We saw one trail runner while on this section.
The weather got cool yesterday morning. It was cold this morning. Autumn is finally here in the South. I love this cold crisp mornings. The sun is lower and that makes things seem so much brighter. The leaves are now fully changing. I really feel alive this time of year but I also feel myself slowing down for to prepare for the winter. I also start craving calories.
I’ll be on my own this weekend, my wife is on a retreat, so maybe I should plan for a hike tomorrow morning with my dog and then spend the afternoon doing chores. That would burn off some of the calories I’ve been adding the past couple of days and I think it will be perfect weather in the morning for it.
I bought my wife the Original Nook earlier this year and she has allowed me to use it enough to know I wanted one of my own. I started looking at the Nook Touch which is now selling for the same price I paid for her Nook. The Original Nook is now $50 less. Last night I stopped in at Barnes & Noble with some cash in my pocket and was determined to walk out with one of those two Nooks. I just needed to decide if the Nook Touch was worth the extra $50.
The Nook Touch is much shorter than the original Nook but the screen is actually about the same size. This can be because the Original Nook had two screens, one small color LCD touch screen, used for navigation, and a larger e-ink screen for reading the book, the Nook Touch has only the e-ink screen but it is now a touch screen. This has greatly simplified navigation.
The Touch is much faster than the Original with little flicker at all when turning pages. The battery life is supposedly much longer also, lasting up to two months with Wi-Fi turned off. The guy at the store tells me they figure an hour and a half of use a day when coming up with battery life. That sounds like 90 hours of constant use.
I can’t say enough about th e-ink display. Reading the Nook is just like reading the printed page. There are no discernable pixels and the reason for this is that the display is literally ink. When a charge is placed on the matrix of the screen it causes the ink to migrate from underneath the screen to the top. I’ve seen microscopic images of the screen and it can’t be distinguished from ink on paper. This display requires no form of backlighting. The brighter the ambient light the easier it is to see the print. Of course that means you need a light on in the room to read, just like a book.
There have been some features taken away from the Nook Touch that were a part of the Original Nook. The Touch shed its browser and its ability to play music. That really isn’t a problem since the Original Nook’s browser was very limited and it having the ability to play music really just added another place for me to try to keep my music library synced. I find my cell phone is a very good MP3 player and it’s with me everywhere I’d carry the Nook away from home. When at home my stereo system has a much better sound to it.
Social features have been added to give you the ability to share your reading experience with Facebook and Twitter. The Touch will also import your contacts from your Gmail account. This is handy since you can also lend and borrow books with other Nook users. The Nook can tell you which ones have a Barnes and Noble account. Add these people to your “Nook Friends” and y’all can lend books back and forth.
Since I’ve only had my hands on this Nook Touch for less than 24 hours at this point that’s all I can say for now. In a couple of weeks I’ll share my impressions again.
This article was written back in July but I’m just now seeing it. I think it goes a long way toward explaining “Occupy Wall Street” and “The Tea Party Movement.” Both, by the way, I see as being motivated by the exact same thing and should be viewed as being on the exact same side. I personally believe the Federal Reserve should be constantly in a state of being audited and that their dealings should be as transparent as possible. Here’s what the audit found:
What was revealed in the audit was startling: $16,000,000,000,000.00 had been secretly given out to US banks and corporations and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland. From the period between December 2007 and June 2010, the Federal Reserve had secretly bailed out many of the world’s banks, corporations, and governments. The Federal Reserve likes to refer to these secret bailouts as an all-inclusive loan program, but virtually none of the money has been returned and it was loaned out at 0% interest. Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious — the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs.
To place $16 trillion into perspective, remember that GDP of the United States is only $14.12 trillion. The entire national debt of the United States government spanning its 200+ year history is “only” $14.5 trillion. The budget that is being debated so heavily in Congress and the Senate is “only” $3.5 trillion. Take all of the outrage and debate over the $1.5 trillion deficit into consideration, and swallow this Red pill: There was no debate about whether $16,000,000,000,000 would be given to failing banks and failing corporations around the world.
via Audit of the Federal Reserve Reveals $16 Trillion in Secret Bailouts | Unelected.org.
Now I know the Fed has the ability to create money but how in the world were they able to create that much money in three to four years time? I’m thinking it would take over ten years for the US government to plough through that much money. Where did it come from?
Update: (19-Oct-2011; 1600EDT) It appears that the $16 Trillion is an aggregate of all loans made between 2007 and 2010. The $16 Trillion isn’t necessarily outstanding, that’s just the total of all loans regardless of whether or not they were paid back. Someone borrowing $1 Billion dollars overnight for 30 days would be counted as borrowing $30 Billion rather than taking out a $1 Billion 30 day loan.
However, the audit did find many conflicts of interest where Fed members also held top positions in the companies receiving multibillion dollar loans.
Part of my morning routine is to peruse Google News. This morning an LA Times story, “In Defense of Circumcision”, grabbed my attention. I knew there had been some people trying to ban circumcision of boys under the age of consent in San Francisco. I figured this would be a political argument against that effort but was pleasantly surprised to find it was a medical defense of circumcision.
In the past few years it has been found that the health benefits of circumcision in the prevention of some diseases is significant. When my wife and I were deciding about circumcision for our sons over twenty years ago the degree of health benefits were questionable. Our decision to do so boiled down to my wife feeling that our sons needed to “look like me.” I was circumcised at birth because that was just what was done to boys at birth in American hospitals in the ’50s. I’m not relieved to know that I and my sons benefitted from the protection we received from circumcision even though we didn’t know it at the time.
However, me being the curious fellow that I am, that led me to wonder why was it routine to circumcise Gentile boys in American hospitals in the 50s and even back in the ’20s when my father, also circumcised, was born? So I Googled “history of circumcision in America” and was presented with a ton of information. What surprised me, and shouldn’t have, was there is even a website called www.HistoryOfCircumcision.net. The history is interesting. Enjoy the read. 
Dan passed along this article and I think it is something that every educator and every student ought to be required to read. This is why it is important to be allowed to fail and important to encourage people to continue trying when they do fail.
I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn’t know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn’t have the answer, nobody did.
That’s when it hit me: nobody did. That’s why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn’t really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.
When I was taking programming classes in college I would write programs watch them fail, figure out why they failed and after a dozen attempt succeed. There was a young lady in my introductory class who would spend a little more time up front fully understanding the problem than I did, write her program, watch it run and turn it in. She did this for half of the class and it use to really irritate me.
The programs we were assigned continued to get more complex each week until one day she did all her prep work, wrote her program and ….. it failed. At first I smiled because mine had run properly on the second iteration but then I realized she was in a real pickle because her successes had never prepared her for this failure and she had not developed the skills she needed to debug the program and understand why it broke.
I do think that education looks too hard at success on a test as being a good measure of learning. Personally, I think maybe failure on a test with a subsequent success might be the better path. How can one learn if one doesn’t first know what one doesn’t know?
Troy Davis was killed last night. Maybe he deserved it or maybe he didn’t but regardless of that there are now two people dead due to an act done twenty years ago. I can’t see that the world is any better off.
Some folks will tell you that Troy was innocent. I’ll tell you that while he might not have been guilty he was far from innocent. He was in the close vicinity of two separate gun shot incidents the night Officer McPhail was killed and at the trial witnesses placed him as the man pulling the trigger both times. He admitted to being in the vicinity of both shootings but he said he didn’t do either. Not guilty? Maybe but innocent, no.
But none of that really matters to me. What matters is that the state of Georgia put a man to death last night and you could say that they did it in my name along with the names of all the other citizens of Georgia. They could have locked Troy Davis up for the rest of his life and that would have kept him from being a danger to the public. It would probably have cost the state less money, also. But we live in a society that demands a pound of flesh when wronged so we killed him.
I really don’t want to live in a society so wrapped up in vengeance and punishment. I want to live in a more merciful society. I want to live in a society that removes dangers from society without killing them and that doesn’t lock someone up just because they find a need to alter their reality without placing the public in jeopardy.
I’m almost ready to become an activist over this.
Almost ten years ago I wrote this article about my take on why we didn’t have HBO delivered over the Internet. It was based on an article by Jack Valenti, then the president of the Motion Picture Association of America and now deceased. Well, we now have Internet streaming of movies through Netflix and some other services but there isn’t as complete a library as there should be and the reason is that the MPAA is still attempting to achieve relevance.
I am about ready to concede that the long form is dead. I’m just not ready to give up writing in the long form.
I was cleaning off my thumb drive and came across this image. I have forgotten where I got it but it is so striking I have to share it.
