'Bots are My Life

first of all: wheeeeew, over two months without a post! i think i forgot how to write, even remedially.

now that that’s out of the way, i’ll share my newest distraction: The ’Bot of the Day.

BOTD started with me sharing Tiny Art Director with my editor. editors are a lot like art directors in that they’re supposed to be helping but a lot of the time you kind of WTF?

i should know, i’ve been an art director.

so it started with an email reply to that link stating “I want to see more mousies in robot tummies.”

and so the Daily Bot begins...

idiots!

jenny mccarthy is an idiot.

first of all, she’s a lame-ass excuse for an ‘actress,’ but i can often forgive that for the sake of our delicious american pop culture. the real reason she sucks is that she’s a (minor) celebrity fueling the anti-vaccination movement.

i’ve been pretty much PRO-vaccination my whole life. i tend to trust science, and doctors, even though scientists and doctors are not Gods and are quite fallible. i don’t think science threatens our morality or religious faith, unless your morality and faith are on shaky ground already. i’m most certainly not a conspiracy theorist (though it is tempting), not because i believe in the inherent good of our government or secret societies or something, but more because i think any large group of people, particularly those involved in government, wouldn’t be able to conspire past the tips of their noses for very long.

er, anyway, so here we have vaccinations, science-recommended, government-supported. statistically, they keep kids from dying or suffering from a host of illnesses. who doesn’t want to prevent illness if it’s possible? well, the anti-vax folks. there are numerous reasons why they believe what they believe, but the latest movement is that vaccinations cause autism in kids.

now, exactly why would the government want children to be autistic?

i feel bad for the parents of autistic children. i feel bad for the parents of any child who will have difficulty in life because of a difference in their brain that society can’t quite deal with. there’s a lot of scary things that make me not want to ever be a parent. a lot of parents find it difficult to deal with. a lot of parents find courage and strength and do the best they can. that’s pretty cool, when you think about it. i think it says a lot about the good in modern mankind.

so back to the locus of my wrath. there is no science, no study (let alone plural) to uphold the idea that vaccinations cause autism. there are plenty of anecdotes, and angry parents, who can’t accept an unlucky fate for their child, but no facts to support stopping vaccinations. there are actually studies to show that these selfish, misguided people, egged on by jenny mccarthy, are hurting OTHER children. that because they will get whooping cough, they will expose other children, who, even though they are vaccinated, still have a small chance of contracting whooping cough (or measles, etc.). and these are childhood diseases that can be fatal.

so because anti-vax parents are ignorant, they have made the choice for other families that another child might die of a COMPLETELY PREVENTABLE DISEASE.

sure, some people say ‘gee, i got whooping cough when i was a kid and i survived.‘ the kids who don’t survive it aren’t around to tell us about it.

purty cakes!

well, the Robots managed to surprise me on the day before my birthday... and the cake they got was classic. i won’t go into details but i will let the pictures speak for themselves.

I KNEW IT! but it still doesn’t make me feel less angry.

news today:

Bad drivers? Blame their genes
Published October 29, 2009

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - No need to curse that bad driver weaving in and out of the lane in front of you -- he cannot help it, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

They found that people with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people with a different DNA sequence.

The study may explain why there are so many bad drivers out there -- about 30 percent of Americans have the variant, the team at the University of California Irvine found.

"These people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away," Dr. Steven Cramer, who led the study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, said in a statement.

Cramer and his team tested 29 people -- 22 without the gene variant and seven who had it -- asking them to drive 15 laps on a simulator and then repeat the task a week later.

To their surprise, they found that those with the mutant gene did worse, consistently.

The gene controls a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which affects memory.

The team was not really looking for insights into driving but chose the driving test because it uses common skills.

"I'd be curious to know the genetics of people who get into car crashes," Cramer said. "I wonder if the accident rate is higher for drivers with the variant."

girls just wanna have noms

Pants has nominated November be changed to Nomvember in honour of the holiday, and i second the motion!

and you thought punctuation wasn’t important

there is a cold war waging on the interwebs, between the grammatically precise and the laissez-faire conversationalists. the precise long to see the honour of English grammar preserved everywhere, from formal business pages to juvenile YouTube comment insults (it’s “You’re a gaywad,” not “Your a gaywad.”). the conversationalists counter this with the arguments of “u no wat i ment” and “ur gay.”

and generally, i fall between the two extremes. i enjoy, nay, cherish grammar in all its delicious nonsensical contradictions. but i do think some slack might be let out to comprehensible, if not completely correct, writings. if i understand the object of the statement, is it so necessary the sentence not end with a preposition?

mind you, this does not exclude formal writing, including formal e-mails, from the laws of English. it just keeps me from freaking out in my special obsessive-compulsive way over grammar. i will dissect everything, from adverts to captions, if i feel compelled, tearing apart any syntax error with glee, particularly if i already have a bias against the author. yes, i have been known to knit-pick a song or two.

i’m also a firm believer of knowing the rules before you break them. i’m much more likely to avoid rolling my eyes internally when an afficiando of grammar breaks a rule. any poet worth his or her salt will tell you that it is the fine structure of English grammar and punctuation that makes it so delightful and powerful to write with poor grammar and punctuation.

as such, it delights me that a single period sent crashing the internet for an entire country.

why can’t we be friends?

there’s been a bit of research, perhaps you’ve heard tell, on how having overweight friends can actually make oneself overweight. if i understand correctly, the idea is that seeing heavy people makes you tend to think it’s ok to put on a few pounds.

now there is a study saying thin friends make you fat.

participants had a ‘movie night’ with a researcher; either the researcher showed up as her lil’ ol’ self (barely breaking 100 lbs.), or she wore a fat suit. when she wore the fat suit, participants ate considerably less than she did. when she was thin, they ate less than the researcher but more than the fat suit groups.

the theory is people think “well, if she’s thin and can eat that much, so can i.”

so we can’t have fat friends, and now we can’t have thin friends.

good thing i’m anti-social.