Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

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Read this. Now. Especially if you’re a parent.

The Instinctive Drowning Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D.,  is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water.  And it does not look like most people expect.  There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind.  To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this:  It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under just behind vehicle accidents – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult.  In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening source: CDC. 

Read the rest at Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning.

Hat tip to Pam for pointing it out.

Movie time!

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One of the side-effects of doing most of my web surfing from mobile devices is that I don’t spend a lot of time watching videos. On the other hand, when I do, and I want to share them, it’s a real pain in the ass to copy the embed code into WordPress on the phone.

Which leads us to this — a day where I post a whole pile of videos.

AT-AT Day Afternoon makes us see these gentle giants as mere puppies.

Now a bit to freak you out — here’s a giant spider crab molting. All I can think is that this thing must have one heck of a headache right before it crawls out of that shell.

Animal the Muppet has a staring contest with one of the band members from OK Go

Inspiration

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The Velluvial Matrix is the commencement speech Atul Gawande gave Stanford’s School of Medicine.

Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has combatted our ignorance. It has enumerated and identified, according to the international disease-classification system, more than 13,600 diagnoses—13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies—remedies that can reduce suffering, extend lives, and sometimes stop a disease altogether. But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.

It’s worth a read.

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Also worth the read, but in a totally different way: some folks write one of the most interesting Facebook updates I’ve ever seen.

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This article from Donna Spencer got me out of a major funk last week.

The more design work I do the more I realise that there is no such thing – there is no right answer to a design problem. […] There are only bad, good and better answers for the current situation. Each of the potential solutions sits within a particular context.

 

Gender Studies

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I don’t know if I’m just attuned to gender-related articles right now or if there are just lots of them. But I found these interesting:

My Brief Life as a Woman is an article by a man who, thanks to treatment for prostate cancer, got to go on the emotional rollercoaster that women experience as menopause.

I liked the article above better than this one: The Penis Pant, an article in which a man suddenly realizes that PMS and cramps hurt like hell. Thank you for joining the rest of us.

OK, this one is just odd, but I had to share. This is a picture of Batman pregnant with Superman’s baby. Remember before you click: you can’t un-see things.

Speaking of things you can’t un-see, here’s an iPad cover I won’t be buying.

Dreams: I hate ’em.

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Everything you need to know about how well I slept and how I feel now can be summed up like this:

It turns out that Worf and Picard were deeply in love, but their love was unrequited in their home universe. Here, they discovered they wouldn’t be judged for their actions.

Their passion wasn’t what saved the universe — that was done when the grape/eggs were implanted into one of the characters in my comic (Marin – again – poor girl). We were all assured when she gave birth the multiverse would gain new power and we’d see a rebirth of civilization on this post-apocolyptic moon world.

But the love Picard and Worf shared was so deeply touching it was a great way to end the episode. I mean, dream.

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God, I need a soda.

Comics that teach, and other interesting items

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OK, that’s good for now.