OK, I'll admit that I had wondered: why is it that blue light, of all the colors in the rainbow, is what you need to realize that it's morning? See, I had learned that the "cone" cells in the eye -- the ones responsible for color vision -- are tuned to three specific wavelengths; the "blue" cone is most sensitive to 430 nm. But the blue light ( Read more... )

Several of my friends have commented on my new avatars. They came from http://abi-station.com/ -- and they were free.

(Abi-station was the only avatar site I found that included a stethoscope as a possible prop in the drawing.)

It's just before two o'clock on the 73rd day of a non-leap year. In other words, it's 3/14 1:59.

How do you celebrate Pi day?

Interesting article in this month's Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine: "Religious Attendance: More Cost-Effective Than Lipitor?"

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Ah, the things we can dream about after shoveling 18+ inches of snow off the sidewalk -- on a corner lot. The neighborhood kid-with-a-shovel (doesn't every neighborhood have a few?) looked at the length of my sidewalk and shook his head. "I dunno, lady -- I usually get $20 for a driveway. Nobody's ever asked me to shovel a whole street before ( Read more... )

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I was listening to Patrick Stewart read A Christmas Carol a few nights ago. (It's a holiday tradition here at The Asylum.) It struck me, more than most years, that Dickens may have considered a personality trait that I already know is undervalued and "abnormal" to the US majority so malign that he mixed it in with all of the others as if it were ( Read more... )

I don't often repost news I've seen elsewhere, but this is an offense that people should know about:

"On the 9th of December 2005, a Denver woman is scheduled to be arraigned in U.S. District Court. Her crime: refusing to show ID on a public bus. At stake is nothing less than the right of Americans to travel freely in their own country.
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I'm not sure what the computer folks at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have been up to, but today I got an email: "Try the website again ( Read more... )

Today I received an email from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), aking me to fax over a form with contact information. This was info that I had already given them, but I suppose the government likes to have its forms in triplicate. One item of interest: HHS is describing a deployment "not to exceed 30 days, with the possibility ( Read more... )