I never take off my glasses
Jan. 24th, 2018 11:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyWell, unless I'm sleeping, showering, crying, or, sometimes, reading.
So I'm occasionally surprised by how bad my uncorrected vision actually is. Thing I learned today: If I take a glance at somebody very far away without my glasses, their bodies will blur so much that they'll look like a headless blob instead of a vaguely person-shaped blob. What is this? Is this the astigmatism?
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So I'm occasionally surprised by how bad my uncorrected vision actually is. Thing I learned today: If I take a glance at somebody very far away without my glasses, their bodies will blur so much that they'll look like a headless blob instead of a vaguely person-shaped blob. What is this? Is this the astigmatism?
Why Is Blue So Rare In Nature? (Video)
The timeless allure of ruins
This Couple Who Met On Neopets As Children Fell In Love And Got Married As Adults (Aww.)
Even During Deep Sleep, Mouse Pupils Filter the Outside World
How to upset Gene Roddenberry (I deeply want this to be true.)
Israel's Indian Jews and their lives in the 'promised land'
Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea
Raising a Social-Media Star
Hospital groups creating company to make cheap generic drugs
Cancer blood test ‘enormously exciting’
U.S. to dismiss charges against 129 people in Trump inaugural protests
What America can learn from cities with super-low unemployment
How Americans of the 1960s Really Felt About Nuclear Fallout Shelters
The Shot That Echoes Still
When the Army Planned for a Fight in U.S. Cities
Why does it cost $32,093 just to give birth in America?
Haitians face hurdles after protected-status renewal delays
U.S. Freezes More Than Half Of Aid To U.N. Agency For Palestinian Refugees
4 years on, ancient heart of Homs still abandoned ruins
It's not concussions that cause CTE. It's repeated hits, a study finds
Denial of abortion leads to economic hardship for low-income women
UN chief and rights groups raise concerns over Rohingya deal
no subject
Date: 2018-01-19 07:11 am (UTC)The fallout shelter one was interesting to me. I remember my parents discussing it. We had a neighbor who had one (I got to go into it to hang out). As a 6th grader I had nightmares about nuclear war and fallout. (We had just moved to Florida where it was a bigger deal than in Kentucky where my parents first discussed the idea.)
I remember my mother telling me the story of The Beach. (She and my father saw it.)
As an adult, with all those memories, and understanding much more fully what it all means, I wouldn't want to be in a shelter. I wouldn't survive long without medications. (Alas, Babylon and the diabetics who died almost immediately? I'm not diabetic, so my death would be slower, with disability coming first.)
Yeah, people who daydream about a world after nuclear war, or any form of dystopia are just nuts.
no subject
Date: 2018-01-19 07:56 am (UTC)You misread. They don't spend 65% of their time, their waking time, or even their free time on YT. They spend 65% of their screen time - that is, time spent on the TV, the computer, the phone, and any gaming systems.
And they don't generally spend it on Kardashians. The kids I know personally spend a lot of time on Minecraft videos. *shrug*
Alas, Babylon and the diabetics who died almost immediately? I'm not diabetic
There's a fascinating story about a woman who saved a couple dozen diabetics in Shanghai during WWII by extracting her own insulin from whatever scraps of pancreas she could beg from slaughterhouses.
Yeah, people who daydream about a world after nuclear war, or any form of dystopia are just nuts.
There is something vaguely appealing about the idea of starting over with a clean slate. Of course, statistically speaking, you wouldn't be one of the big winners.
Re: Dystopia Daydreams
Date: 2018-01-19 08:45 am (UTC)Yee haw!
“… Anyone wanna play Risk™?”
no subject
Date: 2018-01-19 03:23 pm (UTC)That is interesting about the woman who save the diabetics. DAMN.
Yeah, I really hate being referred to as a statistic because of my health. Years ago I had to have emergency surgery because of a complication after another surgery. I remember afterwards being "comforted" by the doc's rep saying she was "sorry I was one of the statistics." I blew up at her. (I'm not angry at you, it just reminded me of this incidence.)
It's never comforting to be told you're a "number." So I told the woman not to ever use that phrase again with someone who'd had complications from surgery. That it's dehumanizing, not comforting.
“New Yorker’ cartoon, 1930s
Date: 2018-01-19 05:51 pm (UTC)The cosmetologist says to the customer, “You're one of the lucky few women with normal skin.”
no subject
Date: 2018-01-19 08:21 am (UTC)The problem was, Nevil Shute was a playwright, not a physicist, and either he couldn't be bothered to fact-check or discarded the facts as inconvenient. Fact 1: Fallout decays to harmlessness in about two weeks. No globe-spanning death cloud lasting years. Fact 2: Heavier fallout, actual metals &c. that might retain induced radioactivity longer, literally fall out close to the impact, producing a ‘nuclear footprint’ that may be large on a human scale but trivial on a planetary scale.
What planetary effects might be seen, then? Climate change, and not much of that on the other hemisphere. Because ‘nuclear winter’ had not yet been cooked up * , ol' Nevil didn't think of that at all - the USS Scorpion encountered no weather anomalies whatever. [Neither, for that matter, did L Niven and J Pournelle think of it for their vastly better-researched 1977 book, Lucifer's Hammer. Impact winter was not a thing then. Fashions change with advancing knowledge.
But when facts obscure the message, ignore them!
* Comrade Sagan of Cornell understood that principle. Did you know that the Earth is just like Mars, a bone-dry, utterly featureless billiard-ball in space? Well, it was by the time Comrade Sagan finished tweaking his computer model to get the “nuclear winter” scare propaganda he wanted. He was, quite simply, a bad scientist whose Leftist political beliefs overrode every other consideration.
Meanwhile, the plain fact is that between Johnson Island and Novaya Zemlya, the US and USSR fought an atomic war for years - and guess what, we survived!
no subject
Date: 2018-01-19 03:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-19 09:04 am (UTC)Serious kudos for having read Alas Babylon, by the way. Have you read Streiber & Kunetka’s Warday? Despite being blurbed by the likes of Senator-for-Life Ever-Redward Kennedy and Dr Helen Caldicott, it’s actually a fairly interesting book, somewhat the antithesis of Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising - it makes the point he avoids, that “weapons systems” that are only meant to be expensive, not to actually work… might not actually work when called upon! The only reason Western civilization survived the titular events is because our command-structure house-of-cards held up fractionally better than did theirs, before both collapsed and “the war blew out like a misstruck match.”
The consequences are depicted realistically; it would be interesting to see how matters might stand by now.
no subject
Date: 2018-01-19 03:27 pm (UTC)