Goofing off at work posting to Slashdot.

Publicist faces stunned fans and tells them, "Calm down everybody. That was the "evil Captain Kirk" from Episode 5."

(Fans restart their chatter and demand for autographs as if nothing has happened.

The "word on the street" is that statins, medicines that lower bad cholesterol although I think it is hope over experience that they raise "good" (HDL) cholesterol, don't do much of anything for people who haven't had a heart attack. Once you have had a heart attack, their benefit to living longer is unmistakable.

Someone point me to a source saying this is wrong.

cardiac patients are being treated differently than when the original trials were done.

The time a ball takes to drop off the Leaning Tower in Pisa, not as much.

I am prescribed metoprolol even though my ejection volume was measured at 60% during the hospital stay, at 55% two years later when I reported an episode of chest pain.

I was once taking an ACE inhibitor for blood pressure control 30 years prior and went to the ER when my upper lip puffed out making me look like a duck. They told me this was angioedema, but at the time, no one thought the ACE inhibitor was the cause. Since then, ACE inhibitors are said to be the leading cause of patients going to the ER with angioedema.

I rather like my metoprolol. Combined with following the cardiac rehab instructions for 30 minutes vigorous walking each day, I am getting both reduced resting heart rate and lower blood pressure. I fall asleep at night much easier. On the other hand, I get sleepy mid afternoon and would take a nap if I didn't have to work. I also feel like the moving truck I once rented that had a governor on the motor in that I max out in my exertion for heavier activities than the fast walking.

Back on the day, someone commenting on Slashdot would make the pendantic reminder that it is properly called "GNU/Linux."

Oops, I guess I just did. And you kids, get off my lawn!

BMW charges a sub to not have functioning turn signals.

I know it is a little bit more complicated than that as is the case with every natural language, but I thought the characters in written Chinese are highly stylized drawings of physical objects.

Why don't we standardize on the Chinese character for these different functions and operations instead of inventing a writing system and then changing it with every hardware release?

PN junction?

Forget it, he's rolling.

I not only never like the smell of smoke, I always found it noxious and I blamed getting colds and sinus infections on exposure to smoke that irritated my nasal passages something fierce.

But I remember once getting a real snootful from someone holding a cigarette close to me, and there was an unusual feeling of "Ah!" that contradicted my aversion to the smoke. Oh, so that's why people breathe this stuff in.

A family member has a geek sense of humor and offered that if there were a spray that made dog poo disappear, you certainly wouldn't want to use it.

Suppose the dog left a "present" on the carpet and you took a spray can to remove it, where did it go? Into the only place it could go, which is the air. Do you want to breathe in aerosolized dog excrement?

You had to have extracurricular activities to list on your college application since forever, and among other things, I attended Medical Club. I guess it attracted would be doctors, which was me in my parents' eye but I always wanted to be an engineer.

It was a fantastic experience on account of practicing medical doctors in specialized fields taking time out of their busy schedules to give an after-school talk to would be doctors. I vividly remember the Scared Straight lecture on VD that was accompanied with slides of male and female pudenda wracked with syphilitic sores, but somehow I think this was wasted on the type of earnest student attending Medical Club who was an ambitious grind with head down in the books instead of taking time to catch those diseases.

The other talk I remember was of a doctor who was in on the early use of coronary bypass surgery--this was in the early 1970s. What ran counter to all of the received wisdom on smoking was him saying, "Everyone talks about smoking will give you lung cancer, but that is not a certainty. What people don't tell you about cigarettes is that it is a certainty that you will get cardiovascular disease."

Oh, and the talk had many graphic slides of the lungs of dead cigarette smokers.

Think of it, President Eisenhower had his heart attacks and that is where we got the thing that we should be eating seed oils instead of animal fats and butter. But what no one talk about was Ike, at least in his war years, was a heavy smoker.

Mind you, Robert Noyce of the Fairchild Planar Process fame, the invention that to this day powers the microelectronics revolution, died in his early 60's of a heart attack. Sure shootin', his Wikipedia page mentions him to be a heavy smoker.

If you can answer 20 of these questions, your IQ is higher than 140.

On the other hand, if you click on the link, that pretty much puts your IQ well below that value.

Yeah, I read it 400 million years ago instead of 400 million years after the solar system formation, aligning it with the catastrophism theories of Tom Van Flandern.

that I didn't simply engage the first person from India I know and expect them to give me detailed information about the sacred writings in their religion.

I recall this was in the 1980s, and my informant was an Engineering professor who invited people he knew to join him in seeing a recent movie reenacting accounts in Hindu scriptures. This movie, by the way, had West Indian rather than Asian Indian actors playing those roles, if this helps identify it, but it was definitely a niche "art cinema work" than product of a large, commercial studio.

This is the context in which I asked him about Oppenheimer's "I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds" to which I was reassured that this must have been a very loose translation, which it could have been because it was Oppenheimer's. He was "cosmopolitan" enough to be aware of the Oppenheimer quote yet grounded in his native culture enough to offer an opinion about its accuracy.

An Evangelical Christian inviting their friends to an Easter play may not have a scholar's in-depth reading and knowledge of the Bible, but that person likely had what their religious denomination regards as key passages read to them, both in church services and in Sunday School along with those passages interpreted for them by their pastor or Sunday School teacher. My friend wasn't seeking to convert me to being a Hindu, rather, he wanted to share an important aspect of his culture and upbringing, so in asking him about Oppenheimer, I thought his knowledge of Hindu scripture was at least on the level of a church-going Christian.