Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Books read in September 2015

New:

1. The Long Hello: Memory, My Mother and Me by Cathie Borrie
2. Muse by Jonathan Galassi
3. Little Elvises by Timothy Hallinan
4. Serving Victoria: Live in the Royal Household by Kate Hubbard
5. Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari
6. Somewhere in France by Jennifer Robson
7. Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton

Reread:

1. Conspiracy in Death
2. Loyalty in Death
3. Witness in Death
4. Thankless in Death
5. Judgment in Death
6. Betrayal in Death
7. Interlude in Death

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

How to Vote

This post is part of my Voters' Resources post.

1. Of the parties running candidates in your riding, decide which one has the best platform that comes closest to meeting your needs and your vision of Canada (hereinafter the Best Party). Then decide which one has the worst platform that is furthest from meeting your needs and deviates the most from your vision of Canada (hereinafter the Worst Party). You are judging the parties as a whole, not the individual candidates in your riding. Assess each party individually without regard to possible strategic voting - that comes later.

2. Based on your own needs and your own vision for Canada, decide whether it is more important to you that the Best Party win, or that the Worst Party does not win.

3. If it is more important to you that the Best Party wins, vote for the Best Party. If not, continue to the next step.

4. If it is more important to you that the Worst Party does not win, assess the Worst Party's chances of winning in your riding. Not in the country as a whole, just in your riding. If you feel that there's too great a risk of the Worst Party winning in your riding, vote for the party most likely to defeat the Worst Party. If you feel the risk of the Worst Party winning in your riding is acceptably low, vote for the Best Party.

Remember: do NOT use national polls to inform any strategic voting you might choose to do. Your vote is only effective in your riding. No matter how earnestly you vote, you cannot cancel out votes in another riding. Vote strategically only if the situation in your very own riding demands it, regardless of what the rest of the country is doing.

Links to party platforms will be provided in the upcoming Voter's Resources post. Further information on how to assess parties' chances in your riding and other aspects of effective strategic voting are provided in the How To Vote Strategically post.

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Things They Should Invent: reconcile Vote Compass and Political Compass

When I took the Vote Compass quiz, I was surprised to see that the relative positions of the Green Party, Liberal Party and NDP were different from their relative positions on Political Compass.

I want to make it clear: I'm not complaining that one of the axes is inverted (although it is) or that the scales are different (although they are).  I'm saying that the positions of the parties relative to each other are different on the two tools.

On Vote Compass, the Green Party was the furthest left economically.  In other words, if you drew a line of best fit through the plot of all the parties, their order, from left to right, would be Green, NDP, Liberal and Conservative

On Political Compass, NDP was furthest left economically.  In other words, if you drew a line of best fit through the plot of all the parties, their order, from left to right, would be NDP, Green, Liberal and Conservative.

They can't both be right. Someone, somewhere, must be missing something.  And it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, for an ordinary voter to figure out who might be missing what.

I'd love to see the Vote Compass people and the Political Compass people get together, discuss their interpretations of the platforms, and arrive at a consensus about the relative positions of the parties.

Both tools are trying to achieve the same thing - trying to give voters objective information about which parties best align with their own political views. They could better achieve this, and appear more objective and more credible, by pooling their respective expertise and arriving at a consensus.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

The first jokes

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: To get to the other side!
That was the first joke I ever learned, when I was maybe 3 or 4 years old.  Before I learned that joke, I had never even heard of the concept of a joke. While googling to learn about its age and origin, I was surprised to discover that it is in fact an anti-joke. Expectations at the time were that the answer would be a humorous punchline, not a simple, practical statement of cause and effect.

But, just like "to get to the other side" was once novel and revolutionary, the basic riddle/joke format of asking a person a question to which you expect an answer so you can give a humorous answer instead was also once new and revolutionary.  Someone, somewhere in history, was the very first person to do it.  And someone was the very first person to think of it!  They not only wrote the joke (and it must have been a good joke for the format to persist), they also thought of the whole format.

I wonder how that very first joke went?  Since it was unprecedented, the person being told the joke probably gave a serious answer to the question, having no way of knowing that anything else might be expected.  Did they get the joke?  Did they think it was funny?  They might not have since it was so unprecedented (and they might feel a bit perplexed or made a fool of because they thought they were being asked for actual information and acted accordingly), but enough people thought it was funny that it stuck.

Q: Knock knock!
A: Who's there?
Q: Boo!
A: Boo who?
Q: Don't cry, it's only a joke!

That was the first knock-knock joke I remember ever being told, also when I was around 3 or 4 years old (probably the same day I learned about the chicken - I have fuzzy memories of a revelatory day when I learned all about jokes), and I didn't get it because I didn't know that "boo hoo" was meant to be onomatopoeia for crying.

Knock-knock jokes also require precedent to function, since they require audience participation. I don't remember being explicitly taught the script, but I must have either been taught it or seen it repeated on TV.

But someone thought of the knock-knock joke, and taught someone else the script so it would function (or, like, wrote it into a play or something).  And, somehow, it stuck!


Someone made the first pun.  Someone was the first to use sarcasm. (And, possibly, someone else was the first person to use it successfully.) Someone was the first to fake farting on the grounds that they thought it was funny.  Someone thought of and carried out the first practical joke.  (It may even have been one of our primate ancestors - I'm sure at some point a monkey has slipped on a banana peel!)  And all of these stuck, and got perpetuated.

What's even more interesting is that an unknowable number of other types of jokes that we've never heard of must have been thought of and attempted throughout human history, but they didn't stick because they weren't funny enough.

And this is still going on!  It's quite possible that right this minute, somewhere in the world, someone is thinking of and attempting an all new type of joke that no one has ever thought of before, only to fail utterly.

It's also quite possible that right this minute, somewhere in the world, someone is thinking of and attempting an all new type of joke that no one has ever thought of before, and it will succeed and spread!  Memes (in the sense of pictures with words on them that circulate on the internet) were developed within my adult life.  Those videos where people caption a Hitler movie to reflect current events started after YouTube was invented, so that's within the last 10 years (and quite possibly much more recently).  Someone might, this very minute, be inventing the next knock-knock joke, which, decades or centuries from now, will be retold by a preschooler who has just learned of the very concept of jokes.

Sunday, September 13, 2015

Things They Should Invent: different heating/air-conditioning by-laws for different kinds of buildings

My apartment retains heat.  It holds onto the heat generated by appliances and electronics and me, and heats up as the morning sun shines through the windows.  In the summer, temperature gets warm enough for the thermostat to turn on the air conditioning turns every single day when there's morning sun (and many days when there isn't).

However, because it retains heat so well, in the winter the temperature gets cool enough for the thermostat to turn on the heating an average of one day per year.  Last year it was zero days.  And it only gets that cool if we have the confluence of two sunless mornings plus strong easterly wind plus I don't use the stove during those days.

Because of this, I feel quite strongly that air conditioning is far more important than heating, and would like residential tenancy by-laws to be rewritten so that they don't prioritize heat over air conditioning.

However, not everyone feels this way.  Quite often when I mention it on the internet, someone complains most vehemently that heating is clearly far more important than air conditioning! People would freeze to death if they had to be in a building with no heat, they argue.  I've never been in such a building myself, but they must exist to lead people to feel that way.  If everyone was warm, it wouldn't occur to them that could could be a problem

I previously blogged that they should study whether heat or cold is a problem for more buildings.  But now that I think about it some more, that's actually a red herring.

What they should really do is give buildings a rating for how likely it is to get too warm vs. too cold, and have different by-laws for buildings with different ratings.  Ratings would be determined by an inspection of the building in the summer and in the winter, or some other similarly reliable method. Repeat inspections may be required every X years if buildings evolve or deteriorate enough to justify this.

It could be a simple system with only two ratings ("air conditioning priority building" vs. "heat priority building"), or three ratings ("air conditioning priority building" vs. "heat priority building" vs. "neutral building"), or there could be a more nuanced scale where buildings are given a rating between 1-5 or 1-100 or whatever makes sense.

Using an extremely simple example, suppose buildings are rated "air conditioning priority" or "heat priority", and suppose they continue to use the current calendar-based by-law system rather than switching to a temperature-based system as some recommend.  Heat priority buildings would continue with the current system where the landlord is required to provide heat between September 15 and June 1.  But in air conditioning priority buildings, the landlord would only be required to provide heat between, say, November 1 and April 1.  Or, perhaps, the landlord would be explicitly required to provide air conditioning between May 1 and September 15 (with no explicit requirement of heat, as an analogue to the current lack of explicit requirement of air conditioning).

Basically, the by-laws should be flexible enough to take into account the fact that different buildings of different construction may require different courses of action to provide a comfortable home for tenants.  A one size fits all rule won't work in a city that ranges from Victorian detached houses to glass highrises.

Friday, September 11, 2015

Parental influence is terrifyingly persistent

Once upon a time, when I was a little girl, I asked my mother why the word "university" has the word "universe" in it.  She told me that it's related to the word "universal", meaning "for everyone".  (Which is fairly accurate, according to the OED entry. There are more nuances, but it's a perfectly reasonable explanation if your audience is a small child.)

So I thought about this, and about what I knew about universities.  I'd been on a university campus before, and I knew there were a wide range of people there.  There were old people with beards and white hair, people like my father who worked there, grownups who were younger than my parents walking around in crowds and sometimes doing silly things, and kids like me who took swimming lessons and gymnastics classes on campus. When my parents talked about their time as university students, they mentioned having classmates and professors from all kinds of different places all around the world. And my parents themselves sometimes took continuing education classes at the university.

In short, all kinds of different people from all kinds of different places of all kinds of different ages doing all kinds of different things.  My mother's explanation seemed accurate: universities are for everyone.

What's interesting is the lifelong impact that this little conversation had on my thinking.

Once upon a time, a friend of mine had to kill some time between appointments and was trying to figure out what to do. She was near a university campus, so I suggested that she go on campus and find a coffee shop or a library or a quiet corner with a seat and some wifi.  She was reluctant to do that because she was older than the typical university student and felt like she'd be out of place. But I was completely baffled that anyone could ever feel this way - universities are for everyone!

In my own university classes, we had our fair share of mature students.  I didn't think to question it, because universities are for everyone. I later heard some classmates talk about being weirded out by the presence of older students, and I was shocked into speechlessness that anyone would feel that way. How is it not glaringly obvious that universities are for everyone?

And even now, as an adult who is older than the "older" students whose presence weirded out my undergrad classmates, even knowing that there are undergrad students who feel that way, I wouldn't hesitate to go back to school if I should ever find myself in a situation where it's the correct decision for me.  Because I know, intrinsically and instinctively, that university is for everyone.

I'm quite certain my mother wasn't intentionally trying to instill in me a sense of comfort and belonging at institutions of higher education.  I wouldn't even be surprised if she didn't actually know that the word "university" was in fact derived from the word "universal", and was just saying something that sounded plausible to get me to shut up because that was the 4738th question I'd asked her that day.

But, nevertheless, I internalized this passing remark to the extent that my brain doesn't even question it, even though I know full well that it's just a passing remark that I unduly internalized and that many people in the world believe it to be untrue.

Isn't that terrifying?

Monday, September 07, 2015

The first beauticians

Someone, at some point in human history, was the first person to cut hair.  Maybe they didn't even cut it - maybe they they just broke it off by hand, and later had the idea of applying blades or sharp stones or whatever.

And then, someone was the first person to cut hair for aesthetic reasons (rather than just because it got in the way or "Hey, let's see what happens!").  And someone was the first person to figure out that if you cut it a certain way it will fall a certain way. Someone invented bangs.  Someone invented layers.

Someone invented braiding.  I don't know if they first did it with human hair or to make rope.  The idea of weaving strands together so they'll stay put in a single, cohesive whole had never before occurred to any human being, but someone not only thought of it, but also figured out how to do it.

Someone invented the idea of tying or clipping hair back.  It seems glaringly obvious, but someone must have been the first (even if it was just the first human being who also had their hair get in the way.)  Someone figured out the idea of a hair tie. Someone figured out the idea of a hair clip. Someone figured out a bun, and someone figured out that if you stick a stick through a bun it will stay.

Someone invented shaving. They came up with the idea of scraping the sharp thing along the skin to remove all the hair rather than cutting the hair further from the skin or pulling it out at the root.  Some came up with the paradigm-shifting idea that not having hair where hair naturally grows might be aesthetically superior to one's natural state.  Someone came up with the idea that if you apply stinky gunk to body hair and press a piece of cloth on it and pull the cloth out, the hair will come out.  Someone came up with the idea of inventing chemicals that would cause the hair to just fall out.  Someone though of zapping the hair with electricity and with lasers.

Someone was the first to think of dyeing hair.  Actually, someone was the first to think of dyeing anything. Before that, it never occurred to anyone that you could change the colour of stuff!  Or maybe they stumbled upon it by accident - fell into a vat of blueberry soup or something.

Someone invented piercings.  "So what I'm going to do is stick a sharp thing through your flesh to make a hole. Then you can put shiny things in the hole. It will be pretty!"

For that matter, someone invented jewellery. Someone was the first person to think that wearing shiny things is pretty, and everyone agreed!

Someone invented tattoos.  Someone thought of the idea of drawing something on their body permanently, and someone figured out that if you stick ink in your skin with a needle it will do just that.  Or maybe they didn't intend it to be permanent and it was all an accident! (Although that wouldn't explain why they were sticking ink-covered needles in skin in the first place.)

Friday, September 04, 2015

When the blinking stops

On the front of my cable box is a digital clock, displaying the time in big green letters with the colon between the hours and the minutes blinking once per second.

Every once in a while, I happen to glance at the clock and the colon appears not to be blinking.

I find this hypnotic. 

My eyes are drawn to it like magnets. I cannot blink, cannot move, cannot look away. I stare and stare, mesmerized, until my eyes are about to begin to water.  Then, just as I reach the point where I can no longer fight off the urge to blink my eyes, the clock starts blinking again.


I've always said that one thing I'd wish for if I had a genie was a remote control that can control the passage of time.  I'm sure we've all had that kind of day where we'd love to press the pause button and take a nap.

Maybe these moments where the clock appears to stop blinking is a clue that someone already has one...

Monday, August 31, 2015

Books read in August 2015

New:

1. Thrown by Kerry Howley
2. Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900 by Annmarie Adams
3. Rides (French translation, by Carole Ratcliff, of Arrugas by Paco Roca.  Weirdly, my library didn't have the original Spanish or the English translation, but it did have the French translation.)
4. The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
5. Studio Grace: The Making of a Record by Eric Siblin

Reread:

1. Vengeance in Death
2. Holiday in Death
3. Midnight in Death

Sunday, August 30, 2015

Ivory

From The Ethicist:
When my mother passed away, I inherited an antique necklace made of carved ivory beads. I love the look of — and am sentimentally tied to — this necklace, but I am also a supporter of anti-poaching programs and organizations. I have avoided wearing the necklace because I don’t want to appear to support the ivory trade. On the other hand, I hate not being able to wear one of the few pieces of jewelry that I have from my mother. What should I do with the necklace?
 One thing that occurred to me while reading this: would people actually recognize it as ivory?

When I do a google image search for ivory necklaces, they look like plastic costume jewellery to me. I have no idea if they'd look non-plastic in person, but based on the image search I seriously doubt that I'd look at them and automatically think "Clearly, that must be made from dead elephant tusks!"

I have a few pieces of jewellery from my late grandmother, and one of the necklaces has a few white beads on it.  The only reason why I know for certain they aren't ivory is because my grandmother wasn't anywhere near wealthy enough be able to afford ivory, even as small beads in a necklace made of many other things, even if it were a special, one-time luxury. 

One of the lines of discussion in the column is whether wearing ivory jewellery promotes the notion of ivory as a glamorous luxury item that is beautiful and should be coveted. But I question whether anyone who isn't enough of an expert to already have their own well-established opinion on the matter would even recognize it as ivory.

And, if LW is asked about the composition or origin of the necklace, she could simply and truthfully respond by talking about how it was her mother's and has great sentimental value.

Friday, August 28, 2015

How working from home affects my subconscious

One side-effect of working from home is that my subconscious seems to be less active.  I don't notice the lack of subconscious activity itself, but when I have a now-unusual) high-interaction day, I notice that I'm predreaming a lot more as I wait to fall asleep.  And the content of the predreaming is most often directly related to the interaction of the day - I can hear the voices and cadences of the people I interacted with echoing in the background, like you would if you were nodding off in a crowded room.

I don't specifically remember the influence of the people I interacted with in my subconscious before I started working from home, but it's quite possible I didn't notice it because it was baseline. 

If asked to think about my dreams or predreams in isolation, I would never say that I feel they're not what they should be on a regular work-at-home day. But, nevertheless, they are far more vibrant on high-interaction days, with content directly related to the interactions of the day.

Teach me about the economics of ATMs

A tiny family-owned convenience store in my neighbourhood has a Royal Bank ATM in it. Since the bank account from which I most often withdraw cash is with Royal Bank, I sometimes pop into this store to use the ATM.

However, I never buy anything from this store, because it doesn't have anything I need that can't be obtained at a significantly better price elsewhere in the immediate neighbourhood.

Am I making this store money by using the Royal Bank ATM located inside it? Or am I costing them money?

My googling tells me that no-name ATMs - the one that you often find in bars and restaurants and charge exorbitant fees - make money for the business in which they are located.  But do bank-branded ATMs also do that?  Even though they don't charge a transaction fee if you're a customer of that bank?  Or do the banks charge businesses to host the ATMs on the grounds that the ATM might attract people who will then become paying customers?  (I haven't been able to google up anything suggesting that they do, but it sounds like the kind of thing a bank would come up with.  Nor have I been able to google up anything suggesting that businesses make money from hosting bank-branded ATMs)

If it costs this little convenience store money for me to use their ATM, I'll get off my lazy ass and walk a block to the actual bank branch.  But if it's revenue neutral, I want to use it sometimes because it's more convenient for me on some of the routes that I take for various errands. And if it actually generates revenue for them, maybe I should use it systematically, rather than that revenue going to the bank or to Shoppers Drug Mart.

Anyone have any insight about how this works?

Sunday, August 23, 2015

The time I failed to do surgery on a Sleeptracker watch

I've blogged before about my various successful attempts to repair various malfunctioning household objects, so it's only fair if I write about my failed attempt.

I'd been using a Sleeptracker watch for years without incident, when one day the battery died.  The little hole-in-the-wall jewellery store where I'd previously gotten the battery replaced had closed and I happened to be at the Bay store at Yonge & Bloor, so I decided to see if their jewellery department did watch batteries. They did, and appeared to change the battery successfully.

Unfortunately, after a couple of days' use, I determined that the watch wasn't beeping any more.  It was telling time properly, but not beeping when the alarm was supposed to go off. Which makes it useless, since the whole point of a Sleeptracker is to wake you up!

 I did some googling, and found some other people on the internet who had had the same problem with digital watches (although never Sleeptrackers specifically), including instructions that were supposed to fix the problem. (I can no longer google up the specific instructions I found.)  So I bought a tiny screwdriver and opened up the watch to follow the instructions.

I managed to open it up reasonably easily, followed the instructions, replaced the battery, but it didn't beep. And, to add insult to injury, I couldn't get the watched closed again.  The band kind of overlaps the piece on the back of the watcht hat needs to come off, and I just don't have the physical dexterity to get that piece back on and tucked under the band on both the top and bottom and get the screw-holes to line up so I can put the screws back in.

So I put all the parts in a ziploc bag, and ended up buying a new Sleeptracker watch on eBay. (They seem to have discontinued the watches and replaced them with an iphone app, which is useless to me given how often I throw everything in bed with me out of bed in my sleep!)

Now the battery of that new Sleeptracker is running low, and I'm worried about whether it will be a complete write-off too.

Friday, August 21, 2015

Why is defecting allowed?

With the news that some Cuban Pan Am athletes defected, I find myself wondering why defecting is allowed from the perspective of the receiving country.

The results of my googling talk about the fact that defecting is prohibited by the country of origin and measures that countries might take to prevent people from defecting away.  But they take for granted that the receiving country will be happy to welcome the defectors.

Does the receiving country always in fact welcome defectors?  If so, why?  Do they ever turn them away?  Or can people automatically get in by announcing that they're defecting?

The definition of "defecting" as opposed to "emigrating" is that the country of origin doesn't want to let you out.  So, given recent stinginess towards refugees in various parts of the world, maybe people who have to pay smugglers to get them across the border so they can claim refugee status should instead announce that they're defecting?

Thursday, August 20, 2015

A better approach to ethical objection by doctors

I've blogged before about the mystery of doctors who choose to practise in a certain field of medicine even though they morally object to an integral part of that field of medicine.  Surely they should have seen it coming that they'd be called upon to do the thing to which they morally object (in the case that inspired that blog post, prescribing contraception when working in a walk-in clinic) and surely they should have chosen a different field of medicine if they objected to this.

But with the eventual legalization of physician-assisted dying (as they seem to be calling it now) in the news, I see a situation where the doctors literally didn't sign up for this.  It's quite possible for someone to have become a doctor without having seen it coming that they could be called upon to deliberately end a life. 

So in the shower, I thought of a simple guideline that balances physicians' ethics, patients' rights, the "they should have seen it coming" factor, and the "they couldn't have seen it coming factor."

Doctors should be required to provide all procedures and services that were usual and customary in their field and their jurisdiction at the time when they begin practising.  However, doctors can be permitted to opt out of only those procedures or services introduced after they began practising. The time when they "began practising" can be defined as either the time when they began their medical training as a whole, when they began their training in that specialization, when they graduated, when they began (or completed) their internship or residency - whatever the medical profession considers the optimal point in time.

So if you became a general practitioner in 1951, you can opt out of prescribing birth control pills on moral grounds. If you became a general practitioner in 2015, you had fair warning that you'd be called upon to prescribe birth control pills, so if you'd find that prospect morally objectionable, you had plenty of time to plan your career in a different direction.

If you became a doctor in 2007, you can opt out of physician-assisted dying on moral grounds.  If you become a doctor in 2020, you'll have fair warning that you might be called upon to help people die in whatever specialties end up providing that service, so if you don't want to provide that service you can specialize in podiatry or obstetrics or something.

If a doctor changes specialization or changes jurisdictions, they're required to provide all the usual and customary procedures and services at the time of their transfer. The reasoning here is they have an opportunity to research what they're getting into and plan accordingly.

This will also make it easier for patients not to get stuck with doctors who won't provide the service they need.  Patients can simply look up the doctor in CPSO or their jurisdiction's equivalent, and see when they began practising.

This way, the proportion of doctors providing a potentially-controversial service or treatment will always increase and never decrease. The acceptance of services among doctors (and therefore their availability) should mirror the acceptance of services among society (and therefore demand).  After a transitional period, patients won't ever find themselves stuck with a doctor who is morally opposed to a usual and customary service or treatment in their field. But, at the same time, no doctor is required to provide any service or treatment that they didn't know they were getting into.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Excellent customer service from Rexall (but, unfortunately, subpar umbrellas)

I grabbed a black umbrella at Rexall because they were calling for rain the day we scattered my grandmother's ashes, and I thought my usual coloured umbrellas would be inappropriate for a cemetery. But when I went to open it at the cemetery, it refused to open and the handle just came off in my hand. Multiple people all tried to open it, and no one succeeded. Fortunately I was able to borrow an umbrella, or I would have gotten wet!

I took it back to Rexall (fortunately I still had the receipt and the label with the barcode, although the label was torn.)  The cashier tried to open it, had the same problem, and then promptly and cheerfully gave me a full refund, all while expressing concern that she hoped I hadn't gotten too wet.

Unfortunately, I've had problems with every umbrella I've ever bought from Rexall. They used to have these cheerful yellow ones that I adored, but they'd always break within just a couple of months - and not even from blowing inside out, just from opening and closing and being in my purse.  I've never once been satisfied with the quality and longevity of an umbrella I bought there.

However, I am very satisfied with their customer service, so I will send more of my non-umbrella business their way.


Sunday, August 16, 2015

Why is there acetaminophen in everything?

This summer cold has used up my stock of Nyquil, so I went to the store to buy more.  They've changed their product line since I last bought any, and now there are two kind: Nyquil Cold & Flu and Nyquil Sinus.  I wasn't sure which one was "normal" Nyquil, so I read the labels, and was surprised to see that there's acetaminophen in both.

There's probably always been acetaminophen in Nyquil, but I noticed it this time because some random internet person recently told me that the freakish dreams I had when I tried Tylenol Cold & Flu a while back might have been due to the acetaminophen.  So I looked at the similar cold medicines on the shelf, and all of them had acetaminophen, except for the Advil-branded medicines which had ibuprofen. I could not find one single decongestant that doesn't contain acetaminophen or ibuprofen.

Why do they do this?

Acetaminophen is a painkiller and fever reducer.  The vast majority of my colds don't come with pain or a fever and, when I do have aches and pain or a fever caused by a virus, I don't always want to suppress it so I can accurately monitor the evolution of my condition.

I use decongestants so I can stop sniffling long enough to fall asleep.  I want my nose to stop running, and I wouldn't say no to a sedative. Fevers and aches and pains don't prevent me from sleeping (in fact, they make me want to lie down and close my eyes), so the acetaminophen simply doesn't help.


This cold also brought me a productive cough, so I decided to take an expectorant to make it pass faster.  Last time I had a cough, I learned that the very effective but very disgusting Buckley's cough syrup comes in pill form, so I bought some called Buckley's Complete Plus Mucous Relief.  I took this out of my medicine cabinet, read the label, and discovered that not only does it contain acetaminophen too, it also contains a cough suppressant in addition to the expectorant!  (And a decongestant, but I don't object to that.)  It seems that the cough suppressant and the expectorant would work at cross-purposes, and, since I'm at home, I don't want to suppress the cough! I want to spend the day coughing my lungs up and be done with it rather than having it stretch out over days and weeks.

So I went to the drug store and looked at the cough medicines and, once again, all of the cough medicines that come in pill form had acetaminophen and a cough suppressant. (There was a liquid expectorant, but liquid cough medicines are disgusting so I really hope to avoid them.)


I don't understand why they do this.  I very, very rarely need acetaminophen at the same time as I need a decongestant or cough medicine, and if I do have a fever or aches and pains that I do want to treat, it's no effort to take a Tylenol in addition to my cold or cough medicine.  There are also people for whom acetaminophen is contraindicated. What is gained by shutting them out of the cold medicine market?

On top of that, there have been concerns recently about people inadvertently taking risky levels of acetaminophen. Surely an easy and unobjectionable first step would be to remove acetaminophen from medications whose primary purpose is not pain management or fever management!

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

itunes deleted all the music off my ipod

The ipod: a 4th generation ipod touch running iOS 6.0
The itunes: itunes 11.0
The computer: PC running Windows 7


I added some new music to my itunes library, then synced my ipod (like I've done many, many times before) to add that music to my ipod.  But, to my shock, itunes instead deleted all the music off my ipod!

I tried to sync it again, but this didn't add any music to it. And, unfortunately, the second attempt to sync overwrote the backup of my ipod (itunes only keeps one backup and there's no way to keep others!), so I couldn't just restore the backup.

I went through all the usual disconnecting, reconnecting, turning stuff on and off, pressing both buttons to reset the ipod, but I still couldn't convince my music to go back on my ipod.  At one point about 400 songs (out of over 8000) went on the ipod, but when I tried to add more they went away.

Some parts of the internet suggested that this was a copyright thing, and music that wasn't purchased through the itunes store was being deleted, but that wasn't the case here.  I've never purchased any music through itunes, and the 400 songs that did end up on my ipod were from a mixture of CDs and downloads.

This discussion thread had some people experiencing the same problem. Some people suggested that this was a known issue and if you went to the Apple store they'd fix it, but they never specified what the Apple store did to fix it. I was slightly reluctant to do that, because the Apple store would probably update my iOS, and whenever my iOS is updated something goes wrong with one of my apps.  Also, since my computer is a PC, the Apple store won't even look at it, even if part of the problem is in the itunes that is on my computer.  So all I could see them doing was restoring my ipod, thereby forcing me to upgrade my iOS, and sending me on my merry way.

During the course of my research, I learned about the Manually Manage Music option in itunes, which allows you to drag and drop music onto your ipod rather than using the sync function. I tried to put my playlist on the ipod using this function, and it transferred about 500 songs (again with no discernible pattern) which is better than before but still only a small fraction of my 8000+ playlist.

Someone on the internet who was having the same problem mentioned transferring their songs album by album, so I decided to try to transfer the songs from an album that didn't get transferred.  I typed the name of the album into the search box in itunes, selected all, and dragged them over to the ipod.  It sat on the first step of the process (something like "preparing for transfer" - I'm not about to try it again just to get the exact name of the step!) for a really long time, leading me to believe it wasn't going to work.  Resigned, I contemplated whether to update and restore the iOS, update or reinstall itunes, go to the Apple store, or any number of time-consuming and no doubt fruitless steps that happen next in the troubleshooting process.

At some point during this contemplation, I idly backspaced the album name that I'd typed in the search box of itunes, so itunes once again displayed all the songs.  And, at some point during this contemplation, itunes started transferring the remaining ~7500 songs to my ipod!!

I have no idea if backspacing the album name out of the search box is what caused all the songs to transfer.  I have no idea if it was caused by something else I failed to notice.  But I haven't been that happy since the day my computer finally came back from the Dell depot!

So now I'm keeping my ipod in Manually Manage Music mode, so I don't have to do a full sync the next time I want to put more music on it. If I have trouble again, I'll try transferring just a few songs isolated by searching in itunes, then backspace the search out of the search box.  (I have no idea if that will work, but that's where I am in my testing.) However, I'm dreading what will happen when I have to sync the ipod again to update apps or something.

Friday, August 07, 2015

The time I did surgery on a remote control

A few days ago, I turned on my TV, pressed the AV button on the remote to switch it to my Wii, and discovered that the AV button didn't work.  I pressed some other buttons, and they didn't work either.  I replaced the batteries, and they didn't fix the problem.

My cable remote could be convinced to control everything on the TV except switching it to AV, so I figured I'd have to either try a universal remote (might not work, since my TV is not a common brand) or maybe even buy a new TV.

Since the remote was dead anyway, I decided to see if I could take it apart to find out why it wasn't working. I saw some little screws, so I unscrewed them.  Then I pulled the casing apart, and could clearly see how the inside worked.  There was a rubber layer that constituted the buttons, with a small dot of what I assume is conductive material corresponding with the appropriate point on the conveniently-labelled circuit board.  I couldn't see any flaws or signs of wear and tear, so I sprayed compressed air at everything and put it back together, noting with interest that the various parts seem to be deliberately shaped in a way that makes it impossible to put it back together incorrectly. 

I screwed the screws back in, put the batteries back in...and it worked!!!

I have no idea why it worked - I didn't do anything to cause it to worked - but nevertheless I took it apart, put it back together, and it worked.

That's one impossible thing before breakfast!

***

I've blogged before about positive physical changes that correlate with getting older.  I think I now have a positive mental change that correlates with getting older: better ability to take things apart and put them back together.

I've blogged about my experiences with a chair and a lamp.  In both cases, and in the case of the remote control, I don't think I could have done it in my 20s without clearly-illustrated written instructions.  My brain just didn't see how things worked the same way.

I have no idea why this is. I've never done anything to work on it deliberately.  There's nothing in my day-to-day life that should improve my ability to take things apart and figure out how they work.

Understand, I'm still not objectively good at taking things apart or figuring out how things work.  I'm still very much hindered by my clumsiness and poor physical skills of all types. But I do seem to be better at it than I was before, and I do seem to be improving, for reasons I cannot fathom.