Are children really unfamiliar with pregnancy?

I was very surprised to see that some people thought the word "pregnant" shouldn't be used in an elementary school yearbook for fear that the kids might ask what it means.  My experience was that children were familiar with pregnancy essentially because they were children.

When you are born, your parents are, by definition, part of the cohort that's getting pregnant and having babies.  It's therefore very likely that many of the adults around you - your parents' friends and siblings and cousins - are also at this stage of life.  This means that there's a good chance that within the first few years of your life, one or more babies will be born to the people around you.  It might even be your own younger sibling!

And it's most likely that your parents will explain the concept of the new baby to you.  They won't just one day go "Hey, look, a baby!"  They'll probably tell you that Mommy or Auntie Em is pregnant, which means she's going to have a baby.  And they'll probably even tell you the baby is growing in her belly so that's why her belly is getting fat.

And if this doesn't happen to you, it will probably happen to one of your friends, who will then announce to you "I'm going to have a baby brother and he's growing in my mommy's tummy!"

Myself, I don't remember a time when I didn't know what the word "pregnant" meant.  My first cousin was born when I was 1.5, and my sister was born when I was a few months short of 3. I have memories of the cousin being a baby and I have memories where I knew that my mother was going to have a baby, but I don't ever remember actually learning what "pregnant" means.  For as long as I've known, it's just meant that a baby is growing in a mommy's belly.  It didn't seem sexual or adult (because I didn't know what sex was), it was just a point of fact.

So I'm very surprised that parents would think that elementary school children need to be protected from the concept of pregnancy.  In my corner of the world, children were familiar with pregnancy by virtue of the demographic realities of being children.

Laptop batteries: WTF?

I'm very frustrated by the mixed messages I'm getting about laptop batteries.

My recent computer troubles turned out to be due to my battery being dead (which involved a weird and roundabout diagnosis!).  All three Dell techs I spoke to in the process told me that you shouldn't keep your laptop plugged in all the time (which I normally do because most of the time I'm using it at my desk), you should instead allow your battery to discharge fully and then recharge it.

However, Dell's laptop battery FAQ says this is unnecessary and the battery will behave nicely even if you leave it plugged in all the time.  But their Alienware battery FAQ says the opposite. 

I did start charging and discharging the battery once I got my new battery, but I find it very inconvenient. I also noticed that there's a "Disable Battery Charging" setting, so I was wondering if using this setting and leaving my computer plugged in would save my battery from any negative effects of having it fully charged and still plugged in.  I asked Dell's twitter account, but they directed me back to the FAQ that said this was unnecessary.  And this right after they posted the Alienware FAQ that said the opposite.  (My computer isn't an Alienware, but I believe it has the same kind of battery.)

I also had the idea of just taking the battery out completely and using the laptop on AC power only until I need to move it.  One of the Dell techs I talked to told me this would work, another told me it wouldn't work.

The internet contains arguments supporting and opposing every possible approach, including things like "maintain a battery charge of 70% at all times" or "take your battery completely out of your laptop for normal operations, but discharge and recharge it once a month." All of these arguments can be found from credible sources and backed up by scientific explanations.  I could write a paper with quality citations in support of any possible approach to battery management.

And I still haven't the slightest idea which approach is actually correct.

My intention when writing this blog post was to put the question out to my readership, but that will just be more sensible people giving soundly-reasoned explanations on the internet.  I seriously don't know what to do.

Opinions are welcome, even though I'm tired of opinions.  I'm particularly interested in:

- What is your own battery management approach, and what kind of battery lifespan do you get?  (By "battery lifespan" I don't mean "how long until your battery drains and you have to recharge it?", I mean "how long until you have to buy a new battery?")

- Would using the "disable battery charging" function while leaving the battery in the computer and the AC adapter plugged in eliminate whatever harm might potentially be caused by leaving the AC adapter plugged in when the battery is fully charged?

- Any experience with just taking the battery out?

Update:  I have since learned that the "disable battery charging" function gets better battery lifespan.

More information please

Mentioned in passing in an article about the 65th anniversary of Israel:

Nor will many of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews participate in the celebrations. They regard the establishment of the Jewish state ahead of the advent of the Messiah, who alone can and will redeem his people, as an affront to God.

So if they think it's an affront to God, why do they live there?

Why is a single provider for chaplaincy even an option?

Headline in the Globe and Mail: Corrections Canada seeks a single provider for prison chaplaincy services.

Why is this even an option?  By which I mean, before we get into matters of religion or philosophy or principle, does an organization that's capable of serving as a single provider for nationwide prison chaplaincy services even exist?  If so, why?  Given that Corrections just started doing this, who are their other clients?

They'd essentially have to be a multidenominational temp agency for clergy. Is there such thing?  Or is someone going to scramble to put one together as the result of this announcement?

Why don't you get the bends when you ride the subway?

From an article about digging the tunnel for the Eglinton LRT:

The tunneling crews that built New York City’s subways and sewers around the turn of the last century only spent part of their shifts digging tunnels.

Half their workday was devoted to decompression, so the urban miners working beneath the earth wouldn’t die from “the bends,” the atmospheric pressure-related illness that afflicts deep sea divers if they surface too quickly. It meant that every shift had to have two crews on at once — one digging, one decompressing.

So why don't people have to go through decompression to ride the subway?

"It's just gas."

There exists the idea that newborn babies don't really smile to show that they're happy, it's just their face happens to land in that position sometimes.  A common explanation is "It's just gas."

I can't tell you if this is true or not.  There are people on the internet who confirm this statement and saying that it's a common misconception that babies really smile, and there are people on the internet saying it's a common misconception that babies don't smile and they totally really do.

But the pervasiveness of this idea that babies don't smile means that once upon a time someone discovered it or thought they discovered it, and then they - and many other people - perpetuated the idea.

Why would someone do this??

If you, as the adult, think the baby has smiled at you, you're happier.  You feel "Awww, she likes me!" and that brightens your day.  Your happiness may make the baby feel happier, safer, or more relaxed, or it may be neutral, depending on how well the baby can read your moods and how much they affect her moods.

If you think the baby likes you in general, you're more likely to want to engage with her, and more often, so you can see her smile again.  Engaging with the baby is good for her social development and her language development, and will probably help her get to know you better and build trust with a loving adult.  Plus, if you genuinely feel that the baby likes you, you're more likely to respond sympathetically to her.  When she's crying, you're more likely to go "Awww, poor baby!" rather than "Shut up, you ungrateful little brat!"  This will make her feel safe and secure and loved, which is good for her long-term social and psychological development.

In short, thinking that the baby has smiled at you makes life a little happier for everyone and, even if it's not true, there's no downside. Conversely, if you think any sign of affection from the baby is just instinct or fluke or gas, the best possible outcome is neutral, and the worst is neglect.

So why would someone do science with the goal of proving that the baby doesn't really like you?  Or, if they discovered this by accident, why would people work so hard to perpetuate it?  Even if the truth is that the baby doesn't actually like you because she's too young to like you, there's nothing lost and a certain amount gained by being deluded into thinking she likes you.

Why would you write a newspaper article if you don't have enough to say?

Recently in the news: school board director Chris Spence plagiarized parts of an article he wrote for the Toronto Star.

Here's what I don't get: if he had to resort to plagiarism, why was he writing a newspaper article in the first place?  Unlike students who plagiarize, he didn't have to write an article.  It wasn't an assignment.  He wouldn't flunk if he didn't do it.  Unlike Margaret Wente, it wasn't his job.  He has a whole job that, I'm sure, keeps him fully occupied. How did it even occur to him to write an article if he had so little to say that he had to plagiarize?

I'm pretty sure that people have to proactively submit op-eds to newspapers rather than the newspaper soliciting them, so he could have just not done it and no one would have noticed.  Even if the paper did solicit an article from him, he could have just said "I'm terribly sorry, but I'm afraid I'm just too busy with my duties as director of TDSB to write an article.  However, I'd be happy to give an interview."

So why did he do it?

Teach me about optican economics

Optical stores, at least large chains, often have major discounts that only apply if you buy a complete pair of glasses (i.e. frames and lenses).  They won't ever give you a discount if you just have new lenses installed in a pair of frames that you already own.

As a result, there are times, with major sales and less expensive frames, when  you could get a complete pair of glasses for less than it would cost for just the lenses.  For example, using numbers that make the math easy, if the frames cost $100, the lenses cost $200, and there's a 50% discount happening, you could get a complete pair for $150 where they would charge you $200 to put exactly the same lenses in a pair of your own frames. 

I understand that the lenses are custom-made and frames are mass-produced, so the margins are far greater on frames.  But what do they gain by charging me less for buying more things?

Why does it take businesses so long to answer email?

I've noticed a disturbing pattern: whenever I send an email to a business, it takes them ages to respond.  I sent two emails - simple inquiries, the sort of questions they should expect to be asked every day - last Wednesday.  One was the equivalent of "Do you have widgets in stock, and, if so, how much do they cost?"  The other was "I bought a widget and it was missing a part. What should I do?" Still no reply.  One was sent to a general email address listed on their Contact page, the other was sent through a form on their website.

This is hardly the first time.  It has happened dozens of times in my life, including nearly every time I email Rogers. 

When I email very small businesses, they reply within a day or two.  So why on earth can't larger businesses?  If you don't have enough staff to reply to or escalate every email you receive within one business day, you're understaffed!

Why do paper grocery bags exist?

Picture a paper grocery bag:

They're terribly inconvenient, aren't they?

You can carry a maximum of two, and you'd have to put them down every time you want to do up your coat, open a door, swipe your metropass, answer your phone, or get your keys out of your purse.  If a bottle leaks or it's rainy or snowy out, a paper bag disintegrates. (And, again, if you have more than one bag, you don't have the option of carrying an umbrella.)  It's extremely difficult to do another errand after groceries, because you'd have to put down your bags to select something off a store shelf or reach for your wallet.  Because you're limited to two bags, the likelihood of your peaches getting squished increases.

And yet, they persist.  Someone invented them, someone approved the idea, and the idea is common enough that if you do a google image search for "groceries", a good number of the images are paper bags so brimming full that, in real life, some of your produce would end up on the subway floor.

The first day after paper bags displaced plastic at my the LCBO, I wasn't able to leave the store with my purchase.  I was already carrying several shopping bags which were too full for me to add bottles.  The LCBO cashier handed me my purchase in a paper bag, and I couldn't carry it along with all my other shopping.  There just wasn't room in my hands and arms.  I had to have them do a return on my purchase and give me my money back, because it wasn't physically possible for me to get my purchase home that day.

And yet, enough people think these things are a reasonable replacement for plastic bags that they got all the way through whatever approval process the LCBO has.  And now people are acting as though they're reasonable replacements for all plastic bags when the short-sighted, ill-conceived city-wide ban on plastic bags goes into effect.  (The most frustrating thing was when I wrote to elected representatives encouraging them to vote against the ban and telling them about my idea of using biodegradable plastic bags, which will make environmentally optimal behaviour effortless for citizens, and they wrote back "reassuring" me that paper bags would still be permitted.)

What are these people doing that they find paper useful for anything other than ripening fruit?

How does the driver of the last GO bus of the day get home?

When a GO bus is full and there are still people waiting in line, sometimes they run another bus.  And sometimes they do this with the last bus of the night.

So when they do run an extra bus on the last run of the night, how does the driver of the extra bus get home?  Unless they have an extra driver around who's going to the destination city anyway, the driver of the extra bus ends their day in a completely different city than they expected to, and this well after midnight.  Even if they drove to work, their car is in a completely different city than they are and transit has stopped for the night.

So how do they get home?

Plot hole in my childhood

I've blogged before about my most vivid memory from the single year I did at Montessori school.  I wanted to play with these beads, but the teacher told me I couldn't because I couldn't count to ten.  This confused and frightened me.  I genuinely thought I knew how to count to 100, so I didn't understand why this teacher was telling me I didn't know how to count to 10.  How could I be so wrong about my own ability to count? 

Looking at it with adult hindsight, I see that she expected me to respond by showing her I could count to 10 by counting to 10 then and there.  However, as a 3 or 4 year old child, I wasn't able to draw that conclusion.  I thought she was telling me that my counting wasn't good enough.  Which baffled me - I got to 10 every time, I used the same numbers every time, I could carry on past 10 all the way to a hundred, the numbers followed the same pattern all the way through, how could I be wrong?

In my previous tellings of this story, I criticized the teacher for not being able to make it clear to me what she expected.  If you're an adult in a conversation with a 3 year old, it's primarily incumbent on you to communicate in a way that the kid can understand.  Especially if you're an early childhood educator!

However, there's another, even more egregious problem here: why didn't she take this opportunity to teach me how to count to 10?

You're an adult and a teacher.  You're faced with a small child who needs to be able to count to 10 to play with the toy she really really wants to play with.  You believe this child does not know how to count to 10.  So why not take 30 seconds of your life and teach the child how to count to 10?

What kind of teacher says "Oh, you don't know that" in a blamey tone of voice and walks away rather than teaching???

Plot hole in the 6th season of How I Met Your Mother

I've just finished catching up with Season 6 of How I Met Your Mother, and there's a major plot hole in the whole season.

In Season 6, Episode 5, Architect of Destruction, Ted develops a crush on Zoey, who is protesting the new building he's designing because it will require tearing down the Arcadian.  So Ted comes up with a design that incorporates the Arcadian's facade.  Then, when he learns Zoey is married, he throws out the design that incorporates the facade.

However, Zoey continues to cause trouble for Ted's client throughout the season, getting them bad press and putting the completion of the building at risk.

So why doesn't Ted ever offer his client the design that incorporates the facade?

Were adults more boring in the 80s?

A For Better or For Worse strip that recently appeared in the paper, originally published in the early 1980s.




This is a common trope I saw in media when I was a kid. The protagonist (often, but not always, a child) does something mildly wacky (in this case, running through some guy's sprinkler) and the bystanders - nearly always adults - would be baffled and bemused. This seemed like the natural order of things to me at the time.

But now I'm looking at it from an adult perspective, and I realize that, as adults, we understand why people would run through sprinklers. We did it when we were kids, it's hot out for us too, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who runs through the sprinklers I pass on hot days when my schedule and my outfit allow me to get wet. I've even seen an elderly lady in a walker deliberately walk closer to the grass so that the sprinkler would sprinkle her.

But in this comic strip, the homeowner is scratching his head as though he's utterly baffled that someone would run through his sprinkler. Why doesn't he get it? Were adults in the 80s more boring than adults now?

On one hand, the author of the comic strip was an adult when she wrote it, so she must understand why people would run through sprinklers. On the other hand, she also wrote the idea that the homeowner would be baffled, which means that it seemed like a plausible reaction to her. FBoFW was far from the only medium of my childhood that portrayed adults baffled by childish whimsy that my adult self (and the creator's adult self) would totally understand. What was going on there?

How did networking even become a thing anyway?

I've blogged before about how annoying networking is from the point of view of a job seeker. I recently experienced it from the other side, and it's just as irritating.

I'm not involved in hiring, but I still got a request from a student of my acquaintance for what I as a lifelong job seeker recognize to be an informational interview with the hopes of talking their way into a job. I treated their request as reasonable because I recognize that most job-seeking advice acts as though this is standard operating procedure. But it's an irritant. It takes up my time and doesn't offer me anything in return. I already know this person exists and wants a job, I have a sense of their abilities, but I (and my employer) don't have any jobs to offer. I'd very much prefer that this dance didn't exist.

This makes me wonder why this whole networking/informational interview thing became commonplace in the first place.

The person who was trying to network with me was very good at it and not at all pushy, but I still found it a bit irritating. If it weren't already a standard form, I wouldn't have permitted it to happen. But once upon a time it wasn't a standard form. Which means that, once upon a time, some employer got contacted by some job-seeker with an offer of coffee, an imposition on their time, and a barrage of questions, desperately not saying "Please give me a job, please please please!" This was completely unprecedented at the time, and the job-seeker didn't have the excuse that they're following standard form. But, for reasons I can't fathom, this employer responded by giving the job-seeker a job. And this happened often enough that it's become a standard part of advice to job-seekers.

Who are these employers? Why did it work on them? If circumventing their standard hiring procedures worked on them, why did they make their standard hiring procedures what they are? I just cannot imagine why a person who imposes upon your time and tries to circumvent your procedures would be considered a better candidate than someone who takes you at your word and respects your time?

Insecurity in one's own humanity?

A lot of people seem very invested in the idea of a clear divide between humans and animals.

Once upon a time, I came up with a theory that humans are actually the least advanced species, because we need to modify our environment so much, and the most advanced species must be something like lichen that survive and thrive on some desolate piece of rock. I thought it was an interesting way to look at things differently. I never would have expected the reaction I got - quite a number of people were outright offended that I'd suggest that we weren't the most advanced species!

I've recently been reading a book about how veterinary knowledge might be applicable to human medicine (Zoobiquity by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers), and it keeps talking about how conventional wisdom used to be that animals don't have emotions, or don't feel pain, or don't engage in non-procreative sexual behaviours - or whatever the topic of the chapter is - and conventional wisdom always seemed to assert that these things were uniquely human and served to distinguish us from the animals. As though they're really invested in distinguishing us from the animals.

But why is this? It doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't your internal self-awareness of yourself as human be sufficient? When I first learned about the theory of evolution, I found it reassuring. Being an animal who evolved out of other animals made so much more sense than humans being special. It makes me feel like we might actually belong on this planet. Why does this need to be more special than the other creatures rather than part of the ecosystem exist in the first place?

Why do they make panties in so many different prints?

I have, unfortunately, been shopping for underwear lately. One thing that surprises me is, especially at stores like La Senza and Victoria's Secret, how many different prints they make panties in. I'm seeing well over a dozen prints available, often with three or more colours in the print, and sometimes a different set of prints for each different style of panties! And sometimes, despite the many many prints available, these panties are available in very few if any solid colours, and quite often not even in the expected prints like leopard print or zebra stripes or plaid or hearts. They're random splotches of multiple colours, or multicoloured variations on the brand's logo.

I wonder why they do this?

Some people, including me, care about the colour of their panties. We want them to achieve a particular look, ranging from blending discreetly under clothes to looking sexy without clothes. If you have a particular colour in mind, a print may or may not work. If you're going for discreet blending or an exact match of your bra, a print is useless. If you want something that looks good with your red bra, the red and white print of the brand's logo with bizarre blue accents might work, but certainly isn't the first choice that comes to mind.

The market for prints is people who don't have specific criteria for what they want their panties to look like, but also care enough about what their panties look like that they don't want plain panties like you buy in a multipack. They must also think prints are significantly superior to solids, for reasons I can't begin to speculate on. And these people must significantly outnumber those who have specific criteria combined with those who don't care at all and are willing to buy multipacks.

Apart from the prevalence of prints over solids, I'm also surprised at the sheer number of different prints available. If a store had maybe half a dozen prints (in addition to a reasonable range of colours), no one would be thinking "Why are there so few prints?" But instead they have dozens and dozens. Each new print needs to be designed by someone, which adds to production costs (albeit marginally).

So why do they do it? Why is it worthwhile to them? And why does it come at the expense of solids?

Soybean and/or canola oil

I recently found out that someone I know is allergic to soy, and apparently soy is in many many things. So, out of curiosity, I started reading labels myself, and it turns out soy is in many many things. But the most annoying thing I discovered was "soybean and/or canola oil". I've seen this on multiple products, and it must be so annoying for people with allergies! Basically they're saying "this product may or may not contain the thing you're allergic to."

But how does this even happen? How does it even occur to someone to not use the same ingredients every time when mass-producing food? And what circumstances lead them to have to change oils so frequently and unpredictably that they can't change labels at the same time?

Why is Google encouraging people to move away from Web and towards apps?

I was rather disappointed that Google is discontinuing iGoogle, but outright shocked that they're suggesting using a selection of apps to replace it.

I use iGoogle to get an at-a-glance overview of what has updated since I last checked. I can see the subject lines of any new emails in my inbox, the titles of new articles in my Google Reader, the headlines of news articles on topics for which I have google alerts set up, the current weather and whether there's a thunderstorm alert, plus a few fun things like word of the day and joke of the day and daily puppy. Checking whether anything needs my attention takes about 5 seconds and can be done anywhere with internet access (at home, at work, at a friend's or relative's house, and on my ipod anywhere where there's open wifi).

To do this without iGoogle, I'd have to log into Gmail and Google Reader separately, scroll through Google Reader (and mark anything I wanted to read later as unread), get my news alerts delivered to my email and open each email separately - it would probably take at least 5 minutes to verify whether there's anything that needs my attention.

Using apps would not only be less effective, but it would also be detrimental to Google's primary mandate of indexing and making accessible the world's information because, as I've blogged about before, information contained in apps is ungoogleable. It seems to me that goggle would want information to be on the web and accessed through browsers, because then it can be indexed and searched. Information on a website accessible through a browser can easily be accessed by people with mobile devices, but information in an app is in a silo and can only be accessed by people with specific devices.

I can't imagine what Google is thinking with this decision. It seems like blind trend-following, and I can't see any benefit to them or to us.

Journalism wanted: who are these people who throw plastic bags away and what are their motivations?

People who are opposed to plastic bags claim two different problems:

1. They fill up landfills.
2. They litter the streets.

Both these alleged problems baffle me, because I cannot fathom how they could possibly happen in any appreciable quantities.

1. Everyone I know uses their plastic shopping bags as garbage bags, or to clean up after their pets. If they didn't use plastic shopping bags for this purpose, they'd have to purchase garbage bags for the same purpose, and the total amount of plastic that ends up in the landfill would be the same. (Some people have stopped getting plastic shopping bags since they introduced the five cent fee, but they buy plastic garbage bags instead so the total landfill plastic they are generating is still the same.)

But since people keep complaining about plastic bags in landfills, that would suggest that a significant number of people are bringing their purchases home in plastic bags, throwing the bags straight into the garbage, and presumably buying separate garbage bags for garbage and to clean up after their pets.

Who are these people? Why do they do it this way? Why do they not find plastic shopping bags suitable for their garbage and pet clean-up needs?

2. When you have a plastic shopping bag, it's because you've just purchased something and need a bag in which to carry it home. You need your plastic shopping bag the entire time you are outdoors, because it is being used to carry your purchase. Your need for the plastic bag doesn't stop until you get home. So how on earth does a plastic bag turn into litter?

I understand how litter happens - you cease to need one of the things you are carrying for whatever reason, it's more trouble than it's worth to carry a specific thing around until you encounter an appropriate receptacle. But I cannot picture any situation in which this might happen with a plastic bag. I cannot envision how you might cease to need the plastic bag that contains your shopping. Throwing a plastic bag on the ground makes as much sense as emptying your purse of its contents and throwing the purse on the ground. That just...doesn't happen.

But enough people to reach my ears are complaining about plastic bags being litter. So who are these people littering with plastic bags, and what kind of situations are they in that they're carrying a plastic bag but don't need it? Or does this mean our landfills don't work?

I'd really like to see some actual answers from the people who do these things, because I just cannot picture how they happen. It would also be interesting to know what percentage of the population does these things.