No more limbo

The Guardian reports that the Catholic church is nixing limbo. Limbo was a sort of antechamber, not heaven, not hell. The only problem is that "it" never "was". It was invented to allow theologians to state that Plato and others weren't in hell. No, they were in limbo. Theologians who came up with this afterlife filing system would have made good programmers or accountants, except that programmers and accountants are constrained by a more rigourous set of standards than were those who thought up limbo.

TV or not TV

Not TV. That is the answer. The kids go to bed at 8:30 or 8:45. I go to bed a bit after 11:00 (I sleep on the bus in the morning, I'm good at that). This leaves me with a bit more than 2 hours of time to get other things done in the evening such as do the dishes, tidy up, re-tile the washroom, etc. Also, I'm writing a web application to sell posters online. TV is a waste of my precious time. I'd rather be sitting at the kitchen table programming or playing Scrabble with Nancy than finding out who killed a woman with a hot glue gun or why what seemed to be an infection from an ingrown toenail has spiralled into what looks like rabies but really isn't but will probably end up being a micro tumour on the pituitary or adrenal gland.

Blue colour blindness

Blue color blindness. Blue color blindness, which is rare, is an inability to distinguish both blue and yellow. Blue and yellow are seen as white or grey. Although as many females as males have this deficiency, it usually appears in people who have physical disorders, such as liver disease or diabetes mellitus. However, it is not uncommon for young boys to have blue/green confusion that becomes less pronounced in adulthood.

also

Blue color blindness, also known as incomplete achromatopsia or blue-cone monochromatism, is an X-linked recessive disorder in which only the blue cones and the rods are functioning properly. A previously proposed theory states that signals from rods travel in the same pathways which carry signals from the blue-cones, making color vision in a blue-cone monochromat impossible. However, current research on blue-cone monochromats shows that signals from some rods and cones may be traveling by separate pathways to where wavelength discrimination takes place, making color vision possible in this type of monochromat, when both rods and blue cones are working simultaneously under twilight conditions.

Lewis often mixes up blues and greens.

Flu shot

Just got a flu shot. First time. Got two stickers that say "I'm Protected - The Flu. You can't afford it". That's a message for those listening to the business case for paying for someone to come to the workplace and do the injections, not for someone who just got a flu shot. What about "I just got a flu shot!". My kids will like the stickers, nonetheless.

Wikipedia libel controversy

There's a controversy at Wikipedia, an online collaboratively built and managed encyclopedia, over potentially libelous statements about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy. The statement suggested that Mr. Seigenthaler had been suspected of involvement in Kennedy's assasination and had subsequently moved to the Soviet Union for ten years. None of this is true.

What I find more interesting is that this incident has sparked a debate on the article's discussion page on whether anonymous editing should be disallowed in favour of editing by members with verified email addresses. Probably not a bad idea and a necessary one as Wikipedia becomes more of an authority and comes under pressure to enact policies and procedures to increase accountabililty.

I love Wikipedia. Where else can one read carefully constructed articles on such diverse topics as Namibia, Spider Man, the Greek civil war, and Babylon 5? It's great not having someone else decide what's valuable information and what's not.