Categories: Book Link, Cybersecurity, Disasters, Funny, Health, Introvert, News, Phenology, Women.
Obligatory Book Link
This is a book I've been reading, at home, with the Spanish vocabulary on the computer; I've had to suspend reading it while the electricity's disconnected. At least I stopped in between some short lyrics (she wrote lots of a sort of carols that were sung in church services, called villancicos) and not in the middle of a play!
Cybersecurity
Are e-mails "abandoned" after they've sat on your computer without being deleted for six months? Should a special warrant be necessary to open them for law enforcement purposes? Team Popvox shared this link to what may be the most popular bill in the U.S. House of Representatives this year. (If your Representative didn't co-sponsor it, s/he was probably thinking it didn't need help.)
Disasters
Breaking news shared via Twitter:
Fox News still has a correspondent here:
Funny
So the man's in Texas, the write-up's in a British paper, and the link is (re)shared by Dave Barry in Florida?
Health
I read this and thought, "Ferrer and Cummins are really preaching to the choir. I was reading some of these fun facts in Mother's Prevention magazine when I was six." But some Portal Paper readers haven't read them, so here's a nice, vague explanation of...some basics, really. (No, I'm not about to go "fragrance-free." But I am about to suggest that, if you don't want to dig up your own weeds, you hire a deserving U.S. citizen--yes, I would--to dig them up for you, instead of poisoning the whole neighborhood.) Who knows how many marriages Ferrer and Cummins can save.
...And here's one of the stories about the details. (Trust me, there've been thousands.) People who want chlorpyrifos to have one blatantly deadly effect on humans so they can ban it; people who want to be unable to identify its effects so they can dump it on their lawns. What's wrong with this picture? The detail that's being covered up is that all pesticides actually encourage overpopulation of pest species! Don't worry about which poisons are deadlier to humans than others. Human reactions vary. Glyphosate may be quietly giving you cancer instead of making your nose run when you're within half a mile of a recently sprayed field, or making your bowels bleed when you eat sprayed food, the way it does me. Something else may be quietly giving me cancer instead of making my head ache, the way it does you. Why wait until all the facts are in? The bottom line is, everybody's better off if you just don't poison! One year, after you stop trying to poison insects, you have to swat a lot of flies. Next year, natural predators move in, and you see fewer flies than you saw when you were spraying poison.
Introvert
How plastic is the brain? To what extent does bombarding infants with constant outside stimulation inhibit the development of a complete, healthy introvert brain?
News
Faithful FOX viewers should ace this quiz.
Phenology
Cool nights...definitely seem to be more noticeable with altitude this year. At the Cat Sanctuary iris leaves are visible, but flower stalks are not. In town I'm seeing iris flowers blooming already.
Here's a link to an iris photo that appeals to me. The flowers come in almost every color of the rainbow; I like the violet-blue ones and yellow ones best, probably because they're the ones I grew up with.
Women
Still unfortunately true for some of my generation. (And also: we don't need jobs, we just need to remarry, not that participants in this delusion have any idea where to find a heterosexual man over age 40 or 50 who can afford to support a wife...) Here I stand to testify that for a significant number of baby-boomers, there may be no consensus as to whether an individual in her 40's, 50's, 60's is still a "girl" or already a geriatric case. (I've watched this in the older generation for years; some of them still think it's cute to pretend they think Grandma Bonnie Peters, age 80, is a fluffy little chick who just wants to flirt.) But there does seem to be a mental block about admitting that she's a competent, experienced woman in the prime of life.
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