10:09:22 AM: 40 Mac Classics for $799, free shipping. You could build a wall or something. Half tempted to buy these but I'm pretty sure they'd just sit in the garage for years.
10:17:14 AM: An anonymous reader writes about our draft kitchen plan:
Is that a cook-top on the island? Oh...re-think that one. You'll end up eating every meal in the middle of pots, pans and other cooking utensils and paraphernalia.
Good point... we thought about that. It's one of the appliance moves being considered. Not so much for the clutter issue however (our sink is always a lot more cluttered and mucky than our cooktop)... more for the safety issue of having Ava at the island around the heating elements. The issue is that we have a window over the sink right now. We can't replace the sink with the oven so we end up with a random window next to the refrig. Anyhow... thanks for the thoughts... I'll forward on to Terp as a vote against the cooktop in the island. I really only have marginal kitchen planning privileges and have used up most of my "input points" trading up to an HDTV.
10:34:59 AM: The whole astronaut/kidnapping thing has been on the news for a few days now. And then I read:
NASA says it will re-evaluate the psychological screening it does for its astronauts, after Shuttle pilot Lisa Nowak was arrested this week on charges of attempted murder, attempted kidnapping, and battery.
Why? The goal of a psych evaluation process is risk reduction, not risk elimination. Yet NASA has to make such a statement to placate the U.S. public. Insane. The U.S. public's expectations are way out of wack on so many fronts... but I'll try to keep my comments to this situation. In a misguided attempt to get NASA to "learn its lesson" the U.S. public defeats itself. Ask yourself, how would you actually remove risk (as opposed to just reducing it)? You'd take away the personal liberties of all astronauts... monitor them 24/7... screen them for drugs daily... prevent them from falling in love. Which, of course, would be equally unacceptable to the U.S. public. We can't have it both ways. Either we own up to the reality that even with very good psych screening processes some wacky stuff can go down... or we own up to a world without personal freedoms. Ok, rant over... I'm just amazed at how irrational organizations have to act to placate the U.S. public these days. NASA has a perfectly good psych screening program and as a result astronauts are a much more solid group of people than, say, news reporters. NASA should be able to write a blog post and say what they're really thinking: "wow, that chick went freakin' nuts... didn't see that one comin'." Ok, so the rant isn't quite over yet. The U.S. public would say that NASA should have seen it coming because they did the psych eval... asked her 5000 questions, had her put blocks together in the shape of a butterfly, found out whether her parents spanked her and whether or not she's ever followed The Grateful Dead around the country. To assume that NASA should have known this was coming is to assume that NASA can predict free will. To me this notion is utterly insulting. Humans are vastly complex beings and don't act in perfectly predictable ways... even astronauts. Ok, and another thing that pisses me off is that NASA is even brought up in this thing. Why is NASA doing psych evals? Because they want to reduce risk *in space*. They're a professional organization. They test for professional qualifications and risks. While some of these involve personality and interpersonal skills, they're not testing for love triangle skills. And they shouldn't be. So why are we dragging them into it? It's a personal freakout by a person who happened to be an astronaut. If she was a check-out person at A&P how would we respond? I guess the next step for the U.S. public is to blame the alleged target... she provoked the astronaut so we should invest in better public-to-astronaut relations programs. Whatever. If I believed for a second that the public/media response was genuinely intended to get NASA to improve I'd be OK with it. But the media and public are just out to point the finger and create drama. For shame. For shame.
10:41:22 AM: Wow... that's a really big paragraph. And not very coherent. Oh well... it's a rant... I'm not actually trying to prove my case. I feel somewhat better now.
07:59:49 PM: I tend to get those restless legs at night after long workouts. I saw this at scienceblog.com:
Compulsive gambling with extreme losses -- in two cases, greater than $100,000 -- by people without a prior history of gambling problems has been linked to a class of drugs commonly used to treat the neurological disorder restless legs syndrome (RLS). A new Mayo Clinic study is the first to describe this compulsive gambling in RLS patients who are being treated with medications that stimulate dopamine receptors in the brain.
What do you want to bet it doesn't happen to me?
08:23:51 PM: Thanks to the anonymous reader we've removed the cook top from the island and put the sink and dishwasher in its place.
Post-Ironman Melancholy