Delusion

I am doing a Mental Health First Aid course at work ATM - yeah I know: blind giving map directions to the blind :-P Actually, as a mental health disorder sufferer myself, I seem to have a far better grasp on how to help others than one or two other people in the course who seem incapable of comprehending how any way of seeing the world other than their own way is even possible - and get uncomfortably aggressive about it! Most of my colleagues there are great though.

Anyway, this week we covered (amongst several other things) disorders that manifest symptoms including delusion. The teacher was very careful (and the class too mindful of political correctness requirements) to skirt around the fact that all the attributes of delusion apply rather neatly to most religeous figures in human culture.

Anyway, this got me thinking...

Where do we draw the line between delusion and not? Is someone who believes aliens are sending them messages really any more delusional than someone who thinks breeding samples of the entire animal biota of the Earth circa 4000 years ago could fit on a boat? We snigger behind our hands at people who are adamant that Elvis is still alive but not at people who believe a roman political agitator with decidedly communist views on social roles and the distribution of wealth came back from the dead are "normal"?

What, really, is the difference between someone who writes letters to Science magazine "proving" that the laws of thermodynamics are false, and someone using the same level of faulty maths+logic to argue that population growth is necessary for economic growth (an idea that has been soundly and repeatedly debunked by internationally reputable economists for decades). Other than that we vote for the latter because we haven't the wits or basic education to know better?

I think it comes down to a numbers games - delusion is when the belief is a minority, particularly a tiny minority. If a lot of people believe in the Great Sky Fairy, or in psudo-economics, they are not "delusional". Or if they are rich and powerful. To paraphrase the antagonist from the movie Speed, "The poor/powerless are crazy, the rich/powerful/influencial are eccentric!"

Transending Graffiti

Snapped on my way to work (new job, so different route to the bee tree):



I think this is clever (and meta) enough to transcend graffiti and be art.

Far more interesting than some meaningless scrawl of an unknown tagger, anyway.

My new MoFo - Nokia 6760 slide

After months of agonising, I ended up getting one of these. Unlocked they were going for $480 on the street, so I got one online for $260 (plus $15 postage) and with a 2G memory card bundled in.

I thought about getting a touch-screen but I just don't have that much use for one. An Android or iPhone? Apps are of limited interest to me, bar one.

I rarely use the keypad as I almost never call outside my contacts list, so a slider made sense to get rid of the keypad when not needed (ie: almost always). On the other hand, while I don't text much, on the rare occasions that I do, I absolutely HATE thumbing in text, so the full keyboard was a nice, if not really essential, bonus.

On the downside, the built-in music player doesn't support my preferred music format. From reading around and between the lines, it appears that the sole reason is that the big media companies don't like a format that doesn't inherently support crippling with Digital Restrictions Management crap. While a vorbis codec is available for the S60 OS, Nokia have gone to some trouble to make sure you can't plug 'non approved' codecs into their latest version. So screw them: I installed folderplay. It doesn't muck around with playlists or other such junk, you just point it at a folder on the memory card and it will walk the files/folders inside and play what it finds, in sequence or randomly. My folder structure is my playlist, so it is just what I needed.

It is annoying that the paying customer has to jump through so many hoops just to get proper functionality though. Of course the whole industry relies on the fact that most of their customers wouldn't know a decent-quality, open-standard audio codec from the crappy case-study-in-how-not-to-do-it pay-a-royalty-to-use MP3 format that they have been told is 'the modern thing' (can anyone say 'so last century'?). It is the price for having to live amongst the mind-killed drones, I guess.

So other than the above case of big faceless corporations screwing over their customers' choices and shipping an unnecessarily sub-standard product all in the name of pandering to their big business buddies, I am happy enough and hope to get a good several years out of this device.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Finally got around to watching this movie. The reviews were a little harsh. Unjustifiably so, I thought: 'Klaatu is played as a very unhuman character.' Well duh!
I thought it was a very well done update of a classic, one of very few remakes that can claim that! Other than the disappointing, but understandable considering the audience, ending (spoiler - humanity survives). Though to be fair even on that, the movie managed to present the only coherent justification for humanity being allowed to survive I have ever encountered. In Klaatu's place I may well have changed my mind too.

All up, I'd say this one is a keeper - worth pulling out and re-watching multiple times in the future.

Colourful USB hub

I treated myself to this lovely thing to compensate of the lack of any decent mobile phones to replace my ailing Nokia 6230.

All I want is Vorbis codec support!

Things that make you go "Ewwwwww".

Browsing the paper catalogues from the mailbox this week and last.

Baggy, poorly-cut, shapeless or miss-shaped. Even the models who are carefully selected to fit the horrendous stuff look awful.

Fashion it might be, but it's going to be one UGLY summer down here in Aus. :-(

I'll stick to mix-n-match generics this summer, thanx!

Dear bank account phishers

Dear bank account phishers,

Please desist sending me your spam:

1) I am not stupid enough to fall for such an obvious phishing scam.

2) I am not stupid enough to keep my money in a bank.

LaeMi

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be!

Stuck at home with a bad back, I'm feeling lonely and bored.

Went digging through my old files for emails and stuff about my first husband. I had completely forgotten just how horribly he had treated me over the 2 years of that marriage :-(

Nothing like good historical records to kill of nostalgia.