Psychology

Echochamber project puts up a flowchart of their proposed "New Media Ecology". Its very thought provoking...

Via David Weinberger.

The Recent Life Changes Questionnaire was developed to guage the amount of stress one is experiencing. Since I've been just a tad bit on edge (ah... sarcasm: the highest form of satire...), I decided to see where I scored.According to the scale, a 6-month score of 300 would indicate a high level of stress in my life, and an 80 percent increase in me contracting a serious illness. I scored a cool 654. Of course to be fair, about 80 percent of my score is the result of the past 45 days. So if you adjust the scale, I actually managed to score over a thousand! I wonder if there is a special secret society for people like me...

Update: I found a fabolous tidbit of news regarding my adjusted score of +1000

Research has shown that accumulating more than 150 LCUs on the SRRS within 6 months correlates with a high probability that a person will experience a negative health change. The nature of the health change cannot be predicted, only that one is likely to occur. Negative health changes include heart attacks, accidents, infectious diseases, worsening of a previous illness, injuries, and metabolic disease.

Let me be the first to thank the unfortunately named site "cancer source" for sharing that bit of info. Seriously, name your site "cancer info", or "cancer help"; perhaps even "cancer truth", but don't name it "cancer source"! Who could possibly let the fact that the site's name literally means "source of cancer" slide by?!

God, I need vacation...

One day there turned up at the hotel a young Italian who called himself a compositor. He was rather an ambiguous person, for he wore side whiskers, which are the mark either of an apache or an intellectual, and nobody was quite certain in which class to put him. Madame F. did not like the look of him, and made him pay a week’s rent in advance. The Italian paid the rent and stayed six nights at the

By George Orwell

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious—i.e. seriously intended—writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’—a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake’s ‘Tiger, Tiger’. At eleven, when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished ‘nature poems’ in the Georgian style. I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.

BY GEORGE ORWELL

Soon after I arrived at Crossgates (not immediately, but after a week or two, just when I seemed to be settling into routine of school life) I began wetting my bed. I was now aged eight, so that this was a reversion to a habit which I must have grown out of at least four years earlier.

Nowadays, I believe, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for granted. It is a normal reaction in children who have been removed from their homes to a strange place. In those days, however, it was looked on as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose and for which the proper cure was a beating. For my part I did not need to be told it was a crime. Night after night I prayed, with a fervor never previously attained in my prayers, ‘Please God, do not let me wet my bed! Oh, please God, do not let me wet my bed!’ but it made remarkably little difference. Some nights the thing happened, others not. There was no volition about it, no consciousness. You did not properly speaking do the deed: you were merely woke up in the morning and found that the sheets were wringing wet.