Books read in December 2017

New:

1. Forensics and Fiction: Clever, Intriguing, and Downright Odd Questions from Crime Writers by
D. P. Lyle, MD
2.  Sugar Falls: A Residential School Story by David Alexander Robertson, Scott B. Henderson
3. Flint and Fire: The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) 
4. Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
5. A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
6. The F-word by Jesse Sheidlower

Reread:

1. Kindred in Death
2. Missing in Death

Horoscopes

Toronto Star:

IF TODAY IS YOUR BIRTHDAY: This year you present a strong personality. Others innately know that you are not a person to fool around with. You also have an offbeat quality that draws a diverse group of people toward you. If you are single, you could find several of your potential suitors to be overly possessive. While their neediness might not have bothered you a few years ago, today you have little tolerance for that behaviour. If you are attached, you and your significant other make a major purchase that you both have desired for a while. As a couple, you are emotional spenders. AQUARIUS knows how to present new ideas.

When I try to think of Aquariuses from whom I might get new ideas, I come up with Poodle and Eddie Izzard.  So it's probably going to be someone else.  (Baby Cousin 6.0 is scheduled to be an Aquarius, so maybe there's some surprise infant inspiration imminent.)

Globe and Mail:

IF TODAY IS YOUR BIRTHDAY

Some of your ideas may be outlandish, even outrageous, but they can be made to work for you over the coming 12 months. There is no such word as "cannot" in the Capricorn vocabulary, so dream your dreams, then turn them into realities.

Also, when I look back on last year's horoscopes, I see "If you are single, romance will knock on your door."  Recently, a strange man of my approximate demographic knocked on my door for no apparent reason. (He wasn't wearing the uniform of a building employee, and I didn't hear knocks on my neighbours' doors so I don't think he was canvassing.) I didn't answer the door because I don't answer the door to strangers.

Analogy for why preserving unwanted fertility isn't caring for the patient's health

This post is a restatement of a previous analogy that needed further refinement.  I just realized that it wasn't the analogy itself that needed refinement, but rather the title. So I'm restating the analogy under a more accurate title.

Imagine you have a big, ugly mole.  You hate it and wish it wasn't there.

However, you live in a society that thinks beauty marks are attractive.

You've made inquiries about the possibility of getting your big ugly mole removed, but you get a lot of push-back (and some doctors outright refuse to do it) because there are a lot of people in your society who put a lot of time and effort and resources and emotional drama into getting plastic surgeons to give them beauty marks.

On top of all this, your mole has all the characteristics of a cancerous mole.  Unfortunately, your society doesn't have the ability to detect cancer before it starts metastasizing so you have no way of proving or disproving that your big ugly mole is cancerous, but it does have all the characteristics.


Now, within this context, suppose you have to get surgery in the general vicinity of you big ugly mole.  You ask the doctors if they can remove the mole while they're doing surgery in that area, but they refuse.  You try to emphasize to them that you don't like the mole and don't want the mole, but they are not swayed.  You beg them to, at the very least, not prioritize saving the mole - to give you the most effective surgery without regard for whether the mole is lost, but they still take specific measures to save it despite your protests. And, perhaps, their efforts to save the mole result in a suboptimal approach to the surgery as a whole.

And when you complain about this, people tell you "He's just looking out for your health!"

What if they had completely separate hospitals for infectious and non-infectious patients?

One of the risks of going to a hospital is that you might pick up a hospital-acquired infection, like MRSA or C. Diff.

At the root, there are a lot of infections in hospitals because many patients are infectious.

But there are also many patients who aren't infectious at all. For example, if you're in the hospital for surgery or chemotherapy to have a broken bone set or to give birth, you don't present any risk of contagion to others - but contagion may present a greater-than-usual risk to you.

So what if they had completely separate hospitals for contagious and non-contagious patients?  Different buildings, different doctors and nurses, never the twain shall meet.

Apart from money, is there any reason for not doing this? The only thing I can think of is that a certain subset of patients may or may not be infectious, and we don't know yet.  (I can think of several potential ways to handle that, but that's probably something better left to medical professionals.)  However, at the same time, there are also patients who are definitely not contagious - the surgeries and broken bones and childbirth that I mentioned above.  Is there any medical or non-money-related logistical reason not to keep them separate?

Books read in November 2017

New:

1. À la recherche du bout du monde by Michel Noël
2. The Reason You Walk by Wab Kinew

Reread:

1. Promises in Death

Things They Should Invent: Stuff You've Already Tried filter

On my old computer, I had to do a clean reinstall of Firefox. A couple of issues subsequently cropped up, and when I googled around the new issues, I kept finding advice to do a clean reinstall. That's what caused the issues in the first place!  (With the combination of the new computer and the new version of Firefox, the issues are now moot.)

When my old computer died, it simply wouldn't power up. Pressing the power button had exactly the same result as not pressing the power button. The troubleshooting of first resort in this case is a power reset: unplug the computer, remove the battery, hold down the power button for about 30 seconds to drain any residual electrical charge, then plug in the power adapter only and try again.

I tried that several times, and it didn't work.

And my attempts to google for the next steps in troubleshooting were stymied by interference from instructions for a power reset. I found a single reference to replacing the CMOS battery (haven't tried that yet because the age of the computer and the low likelihood of success made me prioritize getting a new computer), but, even with my advanced google-fu (and trying other search engines as well), I couldn't get away from the pervasive suggestion of a power reset to the rest of whatever the appropriate troubleshooting protocol would be.

Our internet usage patterns are increasingly being spied on. Couldn't they at least make use of this data to give us the option of filtering out the stuff we've already tried.

The final score in the laptop battery management match-up

I bought my laptop in December 2010, and started indiscriminately plugging it in whenever possible, without regard for any battery management strategy. The battery stopped working in April 2013, for a total of 2 years and 4 months.

Then I started putting the laptop in airplane mode whenever it was plugged in, and completely draining and recharging the battery on the rare occasions when I needed to work from battery. The laptop lived until November 2017, for a total of 4 years and 7 months.

Shortly before the laptop died, the battery status said something to the effect that my battery wasn't working at top performance and it was time to get a new one, although I could keep using this one for as long as it lasted. (I don't have the exact message.) It didn't display this message before the previous battery suddenly stopped working. (I noticed there was a problem because the battery light was suddenly blinking orange.) I currently don't know whether the battery had anything to do with why the laptop stopped working.

Therefore, based on my one-person study, airplane mode is better for laptop batteries (at least the kinds of batteries computers used in 2010) than leaving it plugged in indiscriminately.

Note that this is the exact opposite of what all Dell online support said, but consistent with what every in-person tech said.