Mangela Lansbury

are you lying to yourself or just the rest of us

You know what Quiet looks like, right? I would probably skip it if the thought of the camera lingering on her cleavage and her ass makes you uncomfortable. It is going to happen, and it will probably happen a lot.

I was going to say that she had a name and her name was Microsoft Mary, but apparently they killed Microsoft Mary and replaced her with Microsoft Anna, then killed Microsoft Anna and replaced her with Microsoft Zira. I'm afraid for Microsoft Zira's life.

Faxes are being phased out in Healthcare in America due to HIPAA. Having loose sheets of paper with patient information that just kind of collects in an area that's usually not well observed or often checked... not the most compliant setup in history.

Look, he's over there declaring Bukowski to not be middlebrow so you can pretty much just ignore him and let him throw his little tantrum in peace.

I am an unabashed fan of Miley's music so I am excited to listen to this.

In a conversation with my French friend this weekend, he said that racism in France is mostly just a poor people thing and certainly not a thing he ever does, and also that immigrants should learn French or go back to their own damn countries.

This year will be different, though. This year they'll be good. I can feel it in my bones.

Okay, so I'll talk about two weird internal problems at UK hospitals that I've been talked at about -- charting and clinical guidelines. Clinical guidelines are pretty much exactly what they sound like. They're guidelines on how to best treat something -- how often to check the sensitivity on a diabetic's foot or how to best figure out what kind of inhaler device works best for someone with a chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, questions that are kind of common but you might not remember as a doctor. Every doctor judges these things differently -- maybe Dr. Sumi wants to check his diabetic patients for neuropathy every 6 weeks, but Dr. White wants to check every 12 -- so the guidelines provide a nice baseline for an institution to have a standard of care. The NHS was a great source of these guidelines, but they've stopped or slowed down in updating a lot of them because of some institutional restructuring or something. So now there's just a lot of fragmentation in quality of care, and there's less consistency across the health system. There was always variance -- doctors aren't machines and guidelines aren't a 100% reliable ruleset -- but it's a lot more pronounced now because there's not as reliable a set of helpful instructions, or you have the Scottish version and the English version and the Welsh version and who the fuck cares I'll just do what I want. The guidelines should be publicly available too -- if you want to see how your government wants to treat you medically, have at it! Some of them are very old and not very good. And charting. Basically, the NHS uses different types of coding in their charts, ICD-10 and SNOMED. They're both good systems, but they don't directly correlate and the system that's in place to translate between the two isn't that great so some specifics of diseases can get lost -- your "diabetic with complications" coding goes through for two patients, but the sub-codes might not so now your diabetic who only has periodontal disease looks the same as the patient who has necrosis and retinopathy with macular edema and chronic kidney disease and etc etc etc. Even though ICD-10 has a lot of different ways to track diabetes, they aren't always used because of some problems with translating from one code set to another. This means that the same things end up needing to be re-diagnosed over and over and over and over and over again if a patient goes between two institutions, which is really inefficient and has a pretty heavy impact on quality of care. That is the short version of what it took some blowhard like two hours to say.

I tried my foolproof method of talking about Israel/Palestine to burn a bridge tonight. I think this is the first time I've convinced someone their thinking on the subject was wrong, so now I just have a French ex who's rethinking his attitude towards people from the middle east and south Asia on my hands. It is difficult to like someone a lot and know that they can't commit to you.

I sat in on a meeting earlier this week that's kind of related to the decline of efficiency in the NHS. I guess if anyone is interested in insights that an American hospital's attempts to increase efficiency have gotten by using recent (last 5-10 year) NHS moves as examples of what not to do, I guess I can type something up later. But be forewarned -- they're a little inside baseball.

I think Sean announced the announcement was coming, but didn't give a date in his announcement of the announcement.

It's going to be hard and it's not going to feel good. I'm sorry you're in this position. It's not a good place to be.

I don't think that's a good idea, for your sake. It sounds like this girl is being kind of selfish and doing what she thinks she wants to do in any given moment without much regard for other people's emotions. It's an awkward position to be in, and it might feel like you're blind-siding her if you're the one to say you don't think it's a good idea, but I think that's what you should do. It would suck to get even closer and more attached to this person who's committed to someone else, or at the very least doesn't seem to be able to commit to you. She's been doing what she thinks is best for her in the short term for a while. I think it's okay for you to do what you think is best for you in the long term now. If you think going to Italy with her is a good idea for you, then by all means go ahead and do that. But from what you've said, I just don't think it would be. You've gotten really attached to someone who seems unable to let herself become attached to you, and -- speaking from hella experience here -- that's not a healthy relationship to be in.

Finally, all those hours of listening to poorly recorded office meetings paid off in my private life. I'm picturing Jake as the guy who showed up late and awkwardly stood against the back wall and shouted his contributions across the room while stepping out intermittently to take calls, bobbing his head and moving slightly to the side when he realized the projector is right behind where he's been standing so that thing at the bottom of the screen is his head.

I had a friend in his mid-20s who was confused that a girl needed time to handle things. He thought that once a month, you just had to uh... deposit everything in a toilet, like it was a massive vagina blood poop. Cramps and all that were just because you "held it in" too long with tampons and pads, like when your stomach hurts from constipation. Or one guy who thought girls could only get pregnant while they were menstruating, which (to give you an idea of age) came out when a mutual friend said him and his wife were trying to get pregnant. There are a lot of very weird misconceptions out there.

I guess if you don't hate the idea of Michigan, I can keep an eye out in my sleepy little college town! I think they're considering expanding their digitization efforts to the medieval archives, which is maybe a thing you could dig.

But you see, those were about various other things and all for different reasons, not just because of race. They couldn't be because of race because race is a solved problem in France. These were INCREDIBLY frustrating conversations that reminded me a lot of conversations with left-leaning Americans who can't get behind the Black Lives Matter movement because white people have it hard too, y'know, it's obviously just a class thing????? I guess it's not a uniquely European mindset. That entire way of thinking just baffles me -- how you can sit right at the edge of understanding, just a little baby step away, and just be like, nah, here is fine with me.

In the time I spent with a French guy who had recently moved to America, I had to explain that French society was deeply racist several times. He would bring up how Americans seem to be having all these race problems these days, but at least they were past all that in France -- but, like, no they're super not????? It was extremely frustrating. I don't understand that part of the European mindset.

I would say 40 qualifies more as a copse of trees. 100 trees of sufficient size with a canopy covering an area of at least three quarters of an acre qualify as a forest, in my mind. Unless they're planted in rows and grown for harvesting, in which case they're a tree farm. I don't think I have rigid standards for what makes a video game. It was just a thought that popped in my head while I was at work playing something that might be a video game! I don't like to think of computer Go as a video game though, because if I do then I feel like a super huge slacker for playing video games at work.

I'm consistently shocked by how much more I know about menstruation than a lot of my straight friends just from growing up with two sisters, especially since I'm acutely aware of the fact that I don't know very much.

The other 5% is obviously Twitch chat, after you adjust for copy+pasted comments.

I won my sitting in front of a piece of overpriced wood simulator today.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/3igo4m/how_did_anyone_miss_this/ I really wish people would not do things like this. It's the kind of thing that makes me happy I'm not deeper into the "scene" or "community" than I am. Should there be a thread for women in professional gaming?

What makes playing chess by email functionally distinguishable from playing chess by regular mail, though? Is the presence of a computer in the process enough to make something a video game, and would that make Simon a video game?