h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It is a great comfort at the moment to associate with people who can actually have an intelligent conversation.

Thank you.

::bookmarking::

Tonsil Revenge; t's weird how many folk believe being born somewhere, which is totally accidental, confers on them some wondrous achievement.
I like where I live, for sure. However this refers to just a couple of counties or so that I think of as local, or spend a lot of time in. I am not proud of being from Warwickshire, it doesn't make me the spiritual heir of the Bard or owt daft like that. As for the country as a whole, suits me fine, as much as I've seen of it. Was it Zoomer who brought up the UKGold adverts, that's the kind of Brit patriotism it should be.
re. spelling; no way was I boasting about not needing the spellchecker. I don't think it's a great acheivement and I'd argue that no one *needs* one since I've found them to be more trouble than they're worth.
I think there is a place for spelling in education, at a certain level. Not at the expense of overall language ability, but it is a skill which can be improved and tested.
In real life, who cares?

On the whole, I would have liked to have been born and raised on property that was actually deeded to my family.
Unfortunately, with the exception of my mother's father, the farmer, we seem to be a race of tenants.

It was my experience where I was a child and a teenager and a young adult (oo, another oxymoron!) that it Takes A Village To Ignore A Child...

I think that spelling in real life can have a greater importance than in education, which I think of as kind of a caged-animal thing, anyway.
I think it does a great disservice to public health and safety to have medications and automobiles named in such a way that confusion results when a person, rational or irrational, attempts to make sense of them.

With regard to chemicals, medicines and pills, I think the aggravation that the use of similar sounding but differently spelled (by one vowel, in some cases, or with just an anagramic interchange, in others) products causes for Medical Personnel and patients is wholly unjustified.

The law calls for clear and unambiguous marking of inflammables and explosives and corrosives (though the marketing names of many of these products are very, um, arty, too) and it should do the same and more for medicines.

The case with automobiles involves safety because it is difficult unless you are a car nut to keep track of the various models and brands on the road these days. The variant spellings and the mostly undifferentiated designs (one melted soap bar looks pretty much like another) do not help at all. It would be nice for someone who had an accident, and the other party drove off, to be able to indentify the offending craft with something other than "it was a grey sedan, uh, Japanese, I believe" when in fact it was a silver BMW estate wagon...

I guess a lot of people don't have roots, but I do, even when I'm a tenant on my own land. I just stubbornly consider the tenancy a pointless aberration of certain human societies that'll go away sooner or later.

As for spelling, it's funny what you can do without. Like I read about some people in the Northwest United States, Seattle or Portland I think, who were trying to keep track of the local history. Problem was somebody had put it in a computer thinking it would be safer and a lot more convenient, which was true at the time of course.

Paper more or less oxidizes over time, sometimes in a very short time, so they really thought this would help because they reasoned that little magnets on plastic or metal would last for thousands of years.

Then somebody else changed the computers so the little magnets on plastic or metal where the stuff was stored couldn't be read anymore and that didn't take a thousand years but less than a generation. The magnets were still there, all neatly arranged on the plastic or metal so far as anybody knew, just like when the documents were created, but they couldn't translate the patterns.

So what do you suppose they decided to do about that?

If you guessed oral tradition, yep! Elders in the community now tell the histories to selected members of the younger generations so they can tell them to their grandchildren and so on based on the theory that the human memory isn't going to be subject to leaps in technology that render it obsolete and therefore unreadable. And it turns out that if you cultivate it it gets better with use and is probably just as reliable as somebody's notes most of the time.

It helps of course to have some sort of filing system that's supported by something tangible like a calendar stick or cartoon or a landscape. So when you look at any of these things your memory is jogged to the appropriate story or history. I'm not sure they've figured that out yet but I bet they will sooner or later.

It kind of illustrates how vulnerable a society becomes when it relies on literacy, whether computer or not, while forsaking the stuff human beings are born with and can nurture or cultivate without a huge infrastructure investment. Of course, in a society that seems to value gadgetry above everything, that's not going to play usually, but it's maybe a thought worth pursuing by the few that can appreciate it.

"it's weird how many folk believe being born somewhere, which is totally accidental, confers on them some wondrous achievement"

I have thought the same of a persons physical beauty. It is no wonderous achievement or failure.

"it Takes A Village To Ignore A Child..."
Brillant TR!

Another important one:
It IS in the interest of safety that medications be labeled differently. It is ridiculous between names, notoriosly bad handwriting and prescribing mistakes it is a nightmare. Computers are helping with the handwriting and known allergies and dosage by orders going directly to the pharmacy in some cases. There are enough medication problems without the computer solvable ones getting in the way!Kaiser has palm pilots (? not sure that is what U call them,small hand held for data entries?)that they do orders on in front of the patient. If there are questions or safety concerns they catch them before the patient gets the RX.

I'm curious to know, Abbi, who maintains the databases these little palm thingies search to determine if there ought to be questions or concerns? Or are they just used like wordprocessors with a medical dictionary for a spellchecker?

I am not techno savy! Sorry I cannot answer that question.

The hospitals have huge data bases. Kaiser the org I spoke of is a National HMO regulated within the states. The security is fairly tight. Hospitals have always had computers. I first worked with punchcard programing doing angiography studies in the 70's. Currently one Dr. cannot get the results of a test ordered by another on the same patient, within most systems. So there are many privacy guards as far as results. Kaiser the HMO has been around the longest and unofficially sets the pace for medical standards in other HMO's.

Actually, Analiese, as I was taking a shower yesterday afternoon, my mind was wondering and I was thinking about oral traditions versus literacy. That you don't care how anything is spelled if you learned it aurally.

(of course, this leaves the deaf at a bit of an advantage and I'd like to think that Sequoyah didn't toil in vain when he brought literacy to his people...)

It is said that an Anglo-Saxon named Caedmon, a minstrel, was responsible for the spreading of the Gospel and other Biblical stories in the form of verse in a time when literacy was rare.

Thus, in a perverse way, audio books are actually a reversion to the original form, the vocal performance before everybody became so concerned with the "authorized" text and all that.

Memorization was once very highly prized. Now, it is only used as an aid to find the appropriate text or the Palm Piglet.

abbi, the databases are not necessarily reliable because the medical profession has an occasionally fatal tendency to take the drug companies or the drug rep's word for the usefulness, application, or safety of a drug.
In many cases, as with the library at Scott & White, the local Hospital and Health Care octupus, the drug companies support an "independent research firm" that compiles the CD roms that are loaded onto the hospital's intranet.

A simple perusal of the PDR will show that confusion reigns.
I have often looked up a medication to find that even the manufacturer is not sure how the drug works within the body, while there is a page and a half list of known and possible side effects.

References to contra-indicated mixtures with other medications are often obscure and I do not know how knowledgeable pharmacists are or how much time doctors have to research such things.

Drugs, like shoes and clothes, run in fashion cycles.
Unless there is a major scandal and the FDA finally does something, the best a Doctor can know is that the substance hasn't killed anyone he knew... recently.
I don't know how thorough tox or drug screens are when autopsies are performed, but I do know that autopsies are not performed as often as the TV would like us to believe.
In fact, the local coroner sends off to Austin to have them done.

Gee whiz, punch cards? IBM or Remington Rand or Control Data Corp?

::bookmarking::

Analiese, I'm with you referring to oral history; I'm very glad that I grew up in a family who knew much about where they came from (back to the Thirty Years' War) and who told their children lots of things.

Even a nation like the Icelandic, who were one of the first to write down as much as they could (and , 1000 years ago, had more people able to read than as far as I know every other country in Europe - even peasants were able to read at a time when in the rest of Europe only priests and monks were, by some luck), had most of their history handed down as oral history - most of the Sagas were written down decades or centuries after.

I love reading old books, and I know about the severe problems with especially books from 19th/beginning of 20th century - they will become dust soon, too much acid. I think a very similar problem will arise with computers, not now, but it will.

There may be not *more* need of oral history than ever - but there will be as much need...

That's very cool, Skugga.

Didn't people have to recite the law in the Althing every year too? If that was so, it meant everyone knew what the law said which was also different from the rest of Europe.

It was one of them, having to recide one third in one summer... then the next year the next third had to be recited. But, as I said, I hope so much that ismarah will be here again - she is icelandic, and I'm a poor tourist having been there to often and got addicted...

But, btw, somebody had the idea better ask before you add somebody to your friends... my I? I'd like very much to do it

*is looking at her fingers* This should have been: May I add you to my friends' list?

My answer is "Yes." I support the President in going to war against Iraq, hoping to liberate the iraquis living under the tyrant saddam hussien. (I can never spell that dude's name right! did I get it this time?)

America is, and always has been a Christian nation. I think the stupid people who want to change the Pledge to say "one nation, many faiths" don't seem to realize that ONLY in a Christian nation are we free to HAVE many faiths, so if they want to retain that freedom, they'd better shut the hell up before the whole thing goes crashing down from that kind of talk.

Nerd42

Sure.

I didn't know you weren't supposed to do it without asking. I've just been adding anybody who interested me. Oh well..

Well, just in case you forgot, Nerd, America was free to have many faiths before it was called America. If it had been left up to American Christians, there wouldn't be freedom to have many faiths now, and now there's a few doing their best to get rid of that freedom too.

"One nation under God! Say it!"

What do you need a pledge for anyways?