While I appreciate the idea behind the new site iTherapy it does have a few issues with actual human interaction, for example take this exchange between me and the bot:

Human: I knows eh!
TARA at iTherapy.com: Are you Canadian? I am learning more about you all the time.: said knows.

Human: I already said I wasn’t Canadian
TARA at iTherapy.com: Perhaps I misunderstood. What were you?

Human: Well at one point I was a ball of cells called a gastrula
TARA at iTherapy.com: Well that’s okay. Do you often use a computer there?

Human: Well yes, we’re so advanced in New Zealand we’ve made uterus based computing the future
TARA at iTherapy.com: How about that. How much time do you spend online? Do you think I am advanced in New Zealand we made uterus based computing the future too?

Well, at least it gives it a go I guess. But it’s not going to be an adequate replacement for a human being any time soon I’m afraid.

It’s either that I fail at blogging or that I’m so busy with my work to write regular updates.

I’d like to think it’s that I am busy.

I heard this on the morning news and thought I just had to bring it up here as the Pope has added a whole bunch of new sins that will send you to hell. Some of these I can somewhat understand, but a couple are just a little narrow-sighted in their intention:

“You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbour’s wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos,” he said.

Morally debatable experiments? Does that mean anything you disagree with? The part about genetic manipulations of embryos could be understood from the point of view of making humanity into some sort of “perfect” vision of some deranged group or individual, but there are many valid reasons to manipulate the genome of an embryo such as in the case of hereditary genetic diseases. These sorts of blanket rulings are not going to be conductive to bringing people back to the Catholic church or convincing anyone that the church isn’t still sticking itself firmly in the dark ages.

Edit: Dr. Myers has some more commentary here.

So it seems that Bush and company have decided that they are no longer forcing much of their AIDs money to go into abstinence only campaigns. Instead they now require ‘justification’ if less than 50% of money doesn’t go into abstinence or faithfulness campaigns, which may sound reasonable but it will depend in my view on how stringent they are (and what conditions they stick on that). The ABC (Abstinence, Be faithful and use Condoms) campaign in Nigeria showed this can be a very effective approach, but preaching abstinence and faithfulness alone is utterly worthless for doing much of anything. If this is just another way of enforcing more money into going into campaigns that clearly don’t work well rather than sensible sexual education and prevention campaign (and that means encouraging things like condom use) then it’s just going to make things worse.

Crazy woman and her dog that goes nuts in the park. I believe the explanation she gives about the dogs behaviour is not only funny, it’s just making everything worse than it already was.

Very busy at the moment so no updates for today. Hopefully more science this week and next week once I get things sorted.

We all have our hobbies, mine is assembling and painting plastic models such as these Imperial Guard, which are still a WIP as I’m not decided on if I like the colour scheme or not. It’s supposed to be a kind of urban camo, but I’m not sure how well it comes off. Click for the full sized image.

The Imperial Guard have always appealed to me, partly because they are just regular people armed with a pretty average weapon who rely on sheer numbers and weight of firepower to overcome all sorts of horrible things.

It seems that one of our hospitals once again makes a grievous mistake and everyday New Zealanders pay the price for it:

Dr Roman Hasil botched eight of 32 32 tubal ligations (sterilisation procedures), resulting in six pregnancies.

In his report Commissioner Ron Paterson censures the doctor and the DHB for “serious failings in the care of women at the hospital.”

A new report blames the health board for not making background checks which would have revealed the Czech trained doctor had spent time in jail overseas before coming to New Zealand from Australia.

Really, I don’t believe further commentary is really required but it does make me wonder if we should be making a stronger attempt here in New Zealand to hold onto our own doctors that we train (many of whom disappear overseas immediately themselves due to better wages and working conditions).

I disagree with the practice in some places of banning books, which I view as a generally stupid and anti-educational practice (there would be certain exceptions of course, borderline pornographic romance novels would be one example I could think of, but even then…). Thankfully, there are groups that seem to want to fight back against this sort of thing, which is something I highly approve of and should be clearly encouraged. Something that does peak my interest is some of the weird choices in books people have campaigned to ban are. Some of them have at least some reasonably logical basis, such as having considerably racist language as they were written during periods when social inequality was the norm such as Huckleberry Finn. This doesn’t mean I agree with doing so however, as these books in context can be perfectly useful in an educational context. Consider banning the study of the Holocaust in WW2 or the American Civil Rights movement because students might be exposed to anti-semitic or racist ideas during the course of studying the events.

Some of the choices include:

Handford, Martin, Where’s Waldo, 1988 for having a picture of a woman who is lying topless on the beach. Now, I’m probably going to guess that there isn’t actually any breast involved here and that’s she’s probably face down (I’m not certain) and if that’s the case, it’s truly a weird thing to ban the book for.

Lewis, C S, The lion, the witch and the wardrobe for being overly violent and filled with people getting killed. Now, I’ll grant you that in my old age I can’t stomach this book as it literally beats you over the head with poorly disguised Christian allegory and morality (and in my opinion, horrifically mangles the message as well with a terrible deus ex machina plot twist), but when I read it at the age of 9 or so, I thought it was great. Apparently the book got banned as it doesn’t ascribe to “Good Christian values”*, which could be argued as the books are fairly bloody but then again you’d have to wonder if they had read the bible while making this complaint? I think that’s fairly ridiculous and whatever I may think of the book now, it’s good reading for children and at least can encourage them to start reading, itself fairly difficult.

Paterson, Katherine, Bridge to Terabithia, 1977 gets banned for having concepts like secular humanism and similar values. I imagine, though TVNZs article doesn’t list them, that you’d also find the “His Dark Materials” trilogy of books (which include the Golden Compass, recently made into a movie) in there as well for similar reasons. Again though, there are some weird reasons for banning the book, like “death being a part of the plot”, which just makes me scratch my head as to why that is so objectionable considering many of the best stories, myths and such involve death in some way (Frankenstein, the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Lord of the Rings to name a few of my favorites).

Seuss, Dr, The Lorax, 1971 generates a series WTF from me. The book was banned for being political commentary on the state of the logging industry?!? Shall we ban the Butter Battle Book as potential political commentary on the war in Iraq? The Cat in the Hat for encouraging socially unacceptable behavior with household pets? This is just stupidity.

Frank, Anne, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, is apparently banned because it’s depressing in one case and has sexually explicit passages in another. I recall, back in the days of 3rd form English being forced to read through this book and thinking that it should have been studied in a better context in history, because as a novel it’s really not that engaging (not regarding that the history and situation they found themselves in is incredibly tragic, of which the diary Anne kept provides important insight into what it was like to be hiding from the gestapo, but it’s not a good book on its own). But again, I can’t fathom why someone would ban a book simply because it lacks the standard Hollywood happy ending that people seem to love and the sexually explicit passages, from what I remember are particularly tame (but natural for someone in that situation with only one young fellow around her).

The list of banned books is larger than this, I just picked these out as they either seemed particularly silly or the reasons for their banning were just ridiculous. Ideally books wouldn’t be banned and instead, in the case of examples like Huckleberry Finn, their historical context and reasons for the language they use should be explained- not just banned.

*Whatever this is supposed to mean anyway

I really can’t fathom this murder case going on in Australia terribly well:

His de facto wife, Angela Wells, 29, of Blacktown, was a long-time friend of Ms Mayfield and introduced the pair.

All three bonded with each other over a shared interest in the supernatural, and Shepherd persuaded Ms Mayfield to sleep with him by promising he could exorcise her demons with his psychic sexual powers.

Seriously, what in the hell were either of these women thinking to begin with?