Mr. Rogers sounded as if he'd had a mystical experience with this child as opposed to his others, and that made me nervous too.

Simply said, compared with raising a child without a disability, it is a vastly different path (I am on both). Some people find taking a different path a mystical experience.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 11:08 AM on October 2, 2008

Some users believe I should have posted this MeTa thread within this thread. Since I chose not to address the aspects of this discussion related to morality, abortion, or costs, I do not believe it belongs here. I believe cross-linking is a fair concession.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 7:36 PM on September 16, 2008

Choosing to bring a person into the world and force them to live with a debilitating terminal genetic disease like Down is, pretty straightforwardly, a sick perversion of 'family values.'

Good for you for looking up health issues common to Down syndrome. Now that you've done that, let's look at some of those things in more detail (I'm looking at the ones that aren't morphological) -
Heart defects are fairly common: 45% - Here is an... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 9:41 AM on September 17, 2008

Ha - I came in with a link to Catherine Chalmers but for Food Chain!
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 6:03 PM on September 8, 2008

I can't help but be appalled by the horrible security implementations in RFID.

As the link to a previous comment says, when I was working on RFID, security was a big deal and when we were courting large credit card companies (I won't say which, but let's just call it Crapital Bun), security in the transaction was a big, big deal. We made sure that transactions required an RFID with a unique ID, a reader with a unique ID and a user PIN. Basically, the ID in the chip was... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 8:06 AM on September 2, 2008

It doesn't help that there has been a huge decline in new antibiotics...
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 10:22 AM on August 10, 2008

It's easy to dismiss this rant by substituting 'interracial' for 'homosexual/gay'. *shrug*
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 5:41 AM on July 30, 2008

I particularly hated the knotted hemp ropes suspended from the gym rafters our PhysEd teachers encouraged us to climb in gym class.
They had those in my grade school but only one rope was knotted. As an incentive to climb to the beams (some 20+ ft off the ground), you could bring up a pen and sign your name on the girder. I was scared stiff of the fall, but by 6th grade made it up to the top.

The school also had a fairly awesome merry... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 7:19 AM on July 22, 2008

Seeing the BSL was freaky for me. I sign PSE1 with my kids (older has Down Syndrome) and caught several signs but was perplexed by most, especially the finger spelling. Oddly enough, the BSL sign for angel is the ASL sign for butterfly.

My kids have home name signs, which are functional but not true name signs. I'm hoping some day that they will have real name signs, but that's not in my control. Home name signs are necessary to provide a quicker way to express a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 6:11 AM on July 8, 2008

¹Pidgin Signed English - ASL signs with English word order but none of the clumsy SEE endings. More like a kinesthetic highlighter to the spoken word for us.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 6:17 AM on July 8, 2008

Nelson and lekvar (and others) - you really need to read Talking Hands which is a study of a unique sign language and asks bigger picture questions of what makes a language a language. It is an utterly fascinating read from an intellectual standpoint.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 12:48 PM on July 8, 2008

As a little side note, Mark is quite the coder as well and wrote a pretty nice free ray tracer.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 7:56 AM on June 6, 2008

I was listening to the NPR story yesterday and was thinking about the Donger character and the other characters in the movie. Let's face it: nearly every character in that movie who had a speaking role was more caricature than character. Long Duc Dong is clearly more of a culturally damaging stereotype, but each character is an exaggeration of what Hughes thought was a prototype from a high school kid's point of view: scrawny geek, privileged jock, binge-drinking cheerleader, bridezilla, dork... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 8:00 AM on March 25, 2008

Self Defense Against Fresh Fruit
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 7:50 PM on February 25, 2008

Salad is interesting, but I prefer the work of Arcimboldo (upon whose work this was based) for my vegetable portraits.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 7:46 AM on January 21, 2008

Incompetent Design.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 2:20 PM on November 3, 2007

I'm glad that it's saddening and infuriating - that's an indication of how society as a whole has changed in terms of the hive attitude towards disabilities.

At the time of Daniel's birth it was considered status quo to institutionalize babies with Down syndrome. It would've been out of the ordinary for parents to choose to raise a child with Down syndrome.

Status quo was determined to be not so good when studies showed what Langdon Down had... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 10:38 AM on August 20, 2007

Just to add a piece of timeline trivia, up until 1961, trisomy 21 was still referred to clinically as Mongoloid Idiocy.

The special needs trust issue is very interesting. It's good to have well-informed parents, but parents need to go one step further and make sure that everybody else gets on the bandwagon. In the case of my family, I've have to have several long discussions with otherwise bright people to convince them to not leave a single penny to my daughter but to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 11:59 AM on August 20, 2007

Infanticide is a common behavior throughout the animal kingdom, including humanity, up to and including this very day and it's still argument by weak analogy, no matter how you dress it. Because some animals do it and some humans do it is no justification for infanticide.

Here's an example: if a male lion takes over a pride, he will often kill all the cubs from the previous male. Should it then be acceptable for a man who marries a widow to kill all... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 4:24 PM on August 20, 2007

I play in a brass quintet in the Pioneer Valley - we received payment from a church gig that I was told came from a trust fund that was set up for brass bands when the towns were to be flooded.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 8:34 AM on August 20, 2007

Reminds me of the time I pissed off my high school English teacher by choosing to write a summaries of Oedipus Rex ad Antigone in limerick form. She was unimpressed at the effort it took to accurately represent an entire Greek tragedy in 5 lines.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 6:17 AM on July 23, 2007

James Burke was responsible for me not closing my mind to history. He presents it in a way that is palatable and works with my logical mind. When I was teaching, I used sections of it for backdrop in a technology course.

Interestingly enough, Burke does not have a huge science background. He was primarily a Latin scholar, but like so many of the accidental boons in his series, someone thought he was right for the job. It also shows what a well-educated mind can do.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 1:06 PM on June 11, 2007

I had a friend who found 3 broken CO₂ lasers in the trash at Bell Labs. He went to his physics professor traded them for 1 working laser of the same type, which he turned into a cigarette lighter on his coffee table.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 7:01 AM on March 27, 2007

For what it's worth, the deep vein thrombosis I suffered was the absolute worst pain I've ever experienced in my life, bar none. It put me into screaming fits and shock that demerol and morphine could barely touch.

The course of treatment? Blood thinners, pain killers, and three weeks of bed rest followed by a month of time on disability. If he had half the pain I did, he's gotten quite the dose. If he has the same course as me, that's 1/12 of the remaining term out... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 4:33 PM on March 5, 2007

I don't know, has that yield curve ever applied to anything else? Yes - LEDs. The efficiency has been going up at a nice curve while the cost has been going down.

I was reading up about putting in solar panels where I live and found a few interesting articles about solar cost effectiveness. One article made the claim that PV cells have the capability of generating more than enough energy over their lifespan to manufacture their replacements and then... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 1:01 PM on February 19, 2007

Compare "Spotted Dick, S'il Vous Plait", British cuisine taken to Lyons, France.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 7:58 AM on February 7, 2007

Selling a used item as new is fraud. If he'd acted a little more carefully in terms of filming, he'd probably have a nice case against WalMart on his hands.

Fry's used to be one of the worst offenders of that kind of fraud. You had to be really careful with what you purchased. This was compounded by people working in returns who either didn't care or were ignorant of what they were doing, because people routinely purchased a big ticket upgrade (say, like a new 3D... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 1:18 PM on January 30, 2007

Don't forget the Judy's "How's Gary".
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 6:54 AM on January 17, 2007

"It's a miracle to see him/her work." (have used this to describe students)
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 9:02 AM on January 4, 2007

I love that Molly Ivins wrote the obit for Elvis Presley for the New York Times and was later fired for referring to a chicken plucking competition as a "gang pluck."
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 2:35 PM on December 29, 2006

Actually - with regard to pushing technique over musicality, Harry James used to push that would play something with double or triple tonguing, and frankly, he wasn't that good a player.

Sometimes a show needs a showman.

Obligatory guitar masturbation: Jeff Watson playing an out-in-the-front solo with many taps. It's impressive as long as you don't think about Spinal Tap too much.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 7:37 AM on December 22, 2006

So, if I know the cell # of someone who depends on SMS and can't simply turn it off, I can drive up their bill by flooding them with messages? Nice. Teleflip offers to block your number on request so you can't be a recipient from their service. The question is, how much money can you run up in messages before the victim figures that out and Teleflip responds? On the basic cingular plan, it's $0.10 per message. I'm thinking that it's possible to hit someone for a couple hundred bucks before... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 7:55 PM on December 3, 2006

As an interesting aside, I always thought the quality on legs was very high until my spouse grabbed a handful of bricks and taught me what to look for. IIRC, most of the issues were from inconsistent or incorrect temperatures, probably sacrificed to increase total throughput.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 1:52 PM on November 29, 2006

I'm pretty disappointed, honestly. It says a great deal about the over demographic when it is overrun with hand turkeys as opposed what turkeys really look like.

I did an exercise as part of a class in invention wherein we were instructed to draw a grasshopper from memory. Then we were given a verbal description and asked to try again. The point of the exercise was one in communication and awareness. Everyone in the room knew what a grasshopper was, everyone could... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 10:54 AM on November 22, 2006

Molly Ivins wrote a very nice obituary for her.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 8:05 AM on September 15, 2006

Compare the Tufts Beelzebubs version of Mr. Roboto: more minimalist and faithful interpretation.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 7:43 AM on September 15, 2006

The school in Massachusetts where I used to teach removed its shop classes and replaced them with "technology", which I taught. The state had yet to create any kind of reasonable guidelines for the class and from the certification exam, which could also be called "Obsolete Drafting Terminology", it looked like it was a discipline created for shop teachers who had their body-maiming, lawsuit-generating power tools taken away from them. After I met some of the other... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 6:07 AM on September 8, 2006

How is this different from graph reduction as an approach to expression evaluation? Simon Peyton Jones did some interesting work in creating techniques for 'executing' functional programs by reducing the graph to a single node using parallelism. While nobody in their right mind would want to writing any code of significance in Miranda (a functional language), it turns out to be reasonable to compile lisp/scheme into Miranda and then graph reduce the program. Further, the compiler to compile... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 5:33 AM on September 8, 2006

I knew Andrei tangentially, as he was a UI designed for PhotoShop and consulted with other groups as well. His words have a better chance of being heard by Warnock, but from a bottom line point of view are not likely to happen.

The business model of fonts at Adobe has traditionally been one of making them decently priced and easy to buy. This really started with the Type On Call program in the pre-web world. This was a highly successful source of revenue and if the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 7:12 AM on August 31, 2006

bonaldi - pssst - yes you can, as long as the font subset in the document matches the subset you need.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 10:14 AM on August 31, 2006

Obligatory meta-self-link: if you are inclined you can play "Suicide!" (incorrectly listed as "Suicide"), which only has three things going for it:

1. It was the first arcade-type game with punctuation in its title.
2. I wrote the bulk of it when I was 13.
3. The splat sounds when the guys hit the ground are pretty good.

posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 1:54 PM on August 29, 2006

Having taken more than two dozen stings from these chitinous bastards, let me just say that I would spend very little time around these sites.

I recall a picnic area in Santa Cruz, CA that was surrounded by yellow jacket traps and the traps were full and there was still no shortage of the little fuckers. They quickly made a covered deli tray inaccessible as several dozen turned it into another yellow jacket trap and many others continued to up that ante.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 10:29 AM on August 24, 2006

They don't publish what material is used in these pajamas. If it's not a flame-retarding material, these are certainly not in compliance with federal standards.

Here's a guide for practical fire/clothing safety.

Here's the federal requirements summary (PDF).
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 8:59 AM on August 22, 2006

If Chris Elliot is odd, his dad, Bob, is odderererrr. Bob and Ray were way ahead of their time.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 7:27 PM on August 21, 2006

FYI - they don't say that the country of origin of the passport is detectable, just that it may be detectable.

As an aside, carrying a passport in a way that it can fall open a half an inch usually implies a passport that can be easily stolen (ie, if the pocket is loose enough, it's a pickpocket target. If the passport is in a bag, it means a bag can be stolen), and that's just plain bad news from the start.
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 6:14 AM on August 3, 2006

a trigger device that passively scans for a unique response
It's not, nor can it be passive scan without having a power source in the passport or direct contact (at which point it doesn't have to be RFID, now does it?).
The core technology for RFID of this type is induction. If the ID doesn't have power, it will get power from the reader via induction. The reader drives current through a coil and other coils in range will respond. Door frames are... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 12:31 PM on August 3, 2006

A friend of mine from college, Tracy Alpert has been training in Aikido since 1988 and is now a sensei. When I last had the opportunity to speak with her, I asked her a number of very pointed questions, since I was around when she first began her training and got to see how she was turned into quite the bag of bruises and was curious what the reality was.

I asked her about authentic application and she said that "run-kido' is still the best defense. Just run.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 9:02 PM on July 26, 2006

Maybe the bigger problem is that most people still see him as a kid with Down syndrome and not just a kid.

With the backstory the work is larger than the borders of the frame. Take most works of art out of the context of the society that raised the artist and the work loses meaning. This painting has extra meaning for those whose children are born into a world and society that often actively shuns them and if, as a work, it helps create a more accepting culture, then... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 11:58 AM on July 18, 2006

Because you NEED the backstory to appreciate it on those terms.
That's horseshit. Without the backstory handed to you, the title, the subject, and rest of the imagery give you more than enough to appreciate it on a social level. The significance of a boy who is immediately identifiable for having a genetic defect not fitting into the perfect world that most of us are born into is absolutely apparent.

Your sweeping statement about... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 1:04 PM on July 18, 2006

jack_mo -
I understand what you say about ghettoisation from a different prespective, but I don't agree with you. The generation of people with Down syndrome who were first labelled 'special' instead of 'disabled' have flourished. I can't wait to see what happens with the next generation that's benefitting from inclusion.

With regards to the rest, I just deleted several paragraphs of response when I figured I could sum it up more succinctly: lay off the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by plinth at 6:49 PM on July 18, 2006