The best solution: Foam earplugs, the kind you can buy at a drugstore that are rated for 29 decibels (or something similar), that you wad up and stick well into your ear canal. Combined with a decent pair of headphones (ideally wireless) playing the sounds of a rainstorm.

Actually any white-noise-like sound will work, including actual white noise, a radio tuned to static, crashing waves, etc. For a month or two, I used the Fripp/Eno ambient tune "Wind On Water" playing on an endless loop. Watch your decibel levels-- it doesn't need to be played loud to work.

This setup will drown out the fucking zombie apocalypse.

I've met only a few patients who I thought were true psychopaths, and trust me, I was *very* diplomatic... doesn't pay to ruffle the feathers of a psychopath.

Yeah, there are a lot of these euphemisms and secret acronyms. Some are insulting, and you can theoretically get in trouble for using them, like "FLK"="Funny Looking Kid". Others are merely tactful. "Elevated BMI"=obese. "Supratentorial"=the problem is in the patient's head.

This whole debate about whether patients should see their records-- it's bullshit. Of course they should see their records. Usually if you don't want the patient to see what you're writing, it's either because a) you think the patient's symptoms are psychogenic, and/or b) you think the patient is lying to you, or some combination of the two. But in either of these cases you really ought to tell the patient what you're thinking, diplomatically of course.

Polish jokes were a staple of my childhood, and I like to think it's because they were considered inoffensive-- we didn't really think that being anti-Polish was a thing (we'd never encountered anyone who really hated Poles), so we figured no one was hurt by them. It was like making fun of Belgians, or something.

I'm not proposing that fencing be scrapped. It's a sport with centuries (if not millenia) of tradition and it obviously has its devotees. I was suggesting that it would be fun to come up with variants on the sport, much as one might come up with variants on chess.

Also, I don't quite buy your argument from realism ("you stop on the point because the opponent would be too wounded to carry on"). There are plenty of point-scoring blows (particularly in epee and saber) which might not be instantly debilitating if they occurred in a "real" swordfight. I'm not as expert on the history of swordsmanship as some are here, but I would imagine that traditional duels did not always end with a single killing stroke. (And why is it realistic to discount ripostes which are delivered a split-second after a successful lunge?)

(I'm just going to reply to the parts of your argument which are worth replying to, and ignore the ad-hominem bits).

More boring than current Olympic fencing, you mean? That's hard to imagine. And I'm speaking as someone who fenced a bit in high school (so I'm more predisposed to find fencing interesting than the average American).

Last time around, IIRC, the fencing bouts weren't even televised in the US. The best I could find were some 8-second-long "highlight clips" of epee fencers grunting loudly. (When did epee fencers start this "grunting" affectation, anyway?).

I wish that someone would come up with a variant form of Western fencing that wasn't so dull to watch. You could, for example, change the rules so that the action doesn't stop every time a point is scored-- make it a bit more like boxing or MMA. (Yes, I know that would change the nature of the sport quite a lot).

From the summary: "One of Mitra's main points is that given resources and a question to ponder, children will learn on their own. Interference and too much direction gets in the way of that."

Well, great. Nobody explained that to the inner-city teenagers I deal with in my clinic. Just about all of them have access to the full resources of the Internet, either at home or down the street at the library. And they are wonderfully free from the evils of "interference and too much direction".

Their general fund of knowledge is shockingly limited. Many of them can't find Europe on a map. A remarkable number of them can't name a single city outside of the United States/Mexico. They struggle with basic arithmetic and reading comprehension.

If you want to see how well-educated a child becomes when you give him "resources" and no direction, just look around you.

"He went to a tiny village in India and put a computer there with software about DNA replication (in English, even though they did not speak or read English). When he came back months later, a group of young children said, 'We don't understand anything — except that mistakes in DNA replication cause diseases.'"

And this is supposed to prove WHAT, exactly? Am I supposed to be impressed by the depth of knowledge that the Indian children achieved?

There's a famous quote by someone-- "If most of us had to sit through a movie of our lives, our main emotions would be boredom and embarassment". That's the first thing I think of whenever this topic is brought up.

The second thing I think of is-- how did I spend my time yesterday, and how would that look on a video? Boredom and embarassment, yes, that seems pretty accurate. (Especially since I'm getting over a cold, and spent most of yesterday blowing my nose and watching Season Five of The Shield).

Which raises an interesting question. How would I have spent yesterday if I knew I was filming it? Would I have goofed off less, and spent more time doing things that are exciting, productive and/or admirable? I don't know. It's hard to believe that knowledge of being filmed wouldn't have had *some* effect on my behavior.

Mod this up! Really, is there anything more to be said?

They are. (In medical research at least, don't know about astrophysics.)

You're correct to say that in a world without professional musicians, there would still be a lot of music to listen to-- and some of it would indeed be great. But let's consider for a moment what else this would mean.

Do you like listening to classical music? Kiss it goodbye. It's simply not possible to play classical music at a world-class level without dedicating yourself to it full time. Itzhak Perlman once remarked that when he misses a day of practice, he can tell that he's not playing as well; when he misses two days, his fellow musicians can tell; and when he misses three days, everyone in the audience can tell.

Got any records at home? How many of them do you think would have been brought into existence if the musicians on them were doing it merely "for fun, without pay, because they enjoyed doing it?"

You mention the Amanda Palmer incident; you may want to read her own comments on the matter, which are more thought-out than your own. Palmer didn't specifically solicit "amateur musicians" for her shows. Instead, she posted ads for musicians (who were expected to perform at a professional level) and offered them "beer and hugs" instead of pay. Her rationale was that-- well, sometimes professional musicians are willing to play for little or no money in return for commercial exposure, she'd done it herself early in her career, and occasionally still did. But she also admitted that she was wrong. She apologized for not thinking things through and promised to compensate her sidemen in the future.

(Part of what irritated everyone about the Palmer incident, of course, was that she has become a well-known and well-compensated artist, who had in fact boasted on her blog about "raising $1,000,000 on Kickstarter faster than any musician in history", and so forth. She's not a struggling artist any more.)

The labor market for musicians has always been tight-- so tight, in fact, that 99% of aspiring musicians will not succeed in paying their rent. The issue here is that in a tight labor market, it's especially important to make sure that the boss is treating you fairly and that there are no middlemen in suits ripping off the modest wages that you are able to command. Read up a bit on the history of record labels.

Neckbeard, it would have been one thing if the poster had written "Most cellists are going to have a tough time making a living... deal with it and stop complaining". Instead the poster wrote "I didn't know that you COULD make a living as a cellist". Which is such a provocatively stupid remark that I'm still not sure he wasn't trolling. (Is it really possible that the OP is unaware of the existence of professional orchestras, quartets, and so on?)

So, in other words, you would prefer to live in a world in which there are no professional musicians whatsoever? Have you stopped to think for a moment about what such a world might be like?

I wonder what it is that *you* do for a living that is so damn valuable in comparison?

(Sorry, I realize I'm probably being trolled here... but I have a horrible suspicion that perhaps the parent meant what he said.)