Is big brother watching?

It's a beautiful day outside. The sun is shining, and the temperature is right around 50°F. It's a perfect day for a bike ride, if only the roads were somewhat dry. But just like last Thursday, the roads are soaking wet from last nights rain, and I refuse to subject myself to those conditions. So here I sit, bored to death (so wanting to be out on the bike) composing one of my meaningless posts, this time about Facebook.

I don't get the fascination with Facebook. Sure it's a great way to stay in contact with old friends from high school and elsewhere, who may be light years away, but what else is it good for? And what's this new craze of friends pointing out where they are at every given moment in their life? Who cares when someone checks in at the grocery store?

Anyways, yesterday we went to my niece's house in Granada Hills for Christmas dinner, and for whatever reason we were discussing the "places" app on Facebook, and I ended up "checking in at Kim's house". (Which I couldn't delete.)

What was even more surprising, when I checked my Facebook page this morning, I discovered someone actually liked it. Now I could understand someone liking it, if I had checked in at some fabulous resort in Tahiti or other exotic location, but this was just my nieces house. Why did they like that? Or did they think I was doing something more sinister? :) But I digress.

More importantly though, I have another app on my Droid which I downloaded from the "Market", also called "Places", and was testing it out as well. And what surprised me here was, it knew exactly where I was. Not just a longitude and latitude, or a general vicinity, like Granada Hills, it knew the EXACT street address?

How did it know that? And who has the ability to write the programs to accomplish this? Can you imagine how much time that must have taken? Think about it. That can't have been easy. And should I delete it? Will it do any good?

And what is really the point? Is this just some government plot to track our every move and thought. Was George Orwell just ahead of his time?

This is scary!

Fatigue! Part II - Maybe it is real?

Or it's actually Motivational Deficiency Disorder, MoDeD (pronounced Mo-Dee-Dee) for short. In a report this week by Roy Moynihan who reports for the British Medical Journal Austrailian scientists may have come across the reason for extreme laziness . The condition is claimed to affect up to one in five Australians and is characterised by overwhelming and debilitating apathy. Neuroscientists at the University of Newcastle in Australia say that in severe cases motivational deficiency disorder can be fatal, because the condition reduces the motivation to breathe. Neurologist Leth Argos is part of the team that has identified the disorder, which can be diagnosed using a combination of positron emission tomography and low scores on a motivation rating scale, previously validated in elite athletes. "This disorder is poorly understood," Professor Argos told the BMJ. "It is underdiagnosed and undertreated." Who knew? Maybe I have MoDeD, from my attempts to become a...

My concerns reaffirmed today

When I was first diagnosed with MCL, I pretty much read just about everything I could get my hands on, I attended various conferences, and I talked to anyone who would listen. One of the most important lessons I learned, and which I've mentioned numerous times before was No one cares more about you than you. But in addition to that, I learned to fear the drug Doxorubicin , AKA Adriamycin, Doxil, Hydroxydoxorubicin, or more affectionately the Red Devil. Besides being a deadly chemical, as is the case with most chemotherapy drugs, it is one of the few chemotherapy drugs known to cause permanent heart damage. I even heard Dr. Sandra Horning , a noted Stanford lymphoma specialist, state at the first lymphoma conference I attended in LA, there was no evidence Doxorubicin provided any added benefit to chemotherapy protocols. This was music to my ears, since Doxorubicin is very common in most lymphoma treatment protocols. And even though Dr. Horning has since changed her tune [which my sk...

Tacitly condoning racism?

I learned something very discouraging in my current events class yesterday, there are a lot more racists and bigots out there then you may think. They may not admit it, or they'll claim otherwise, but when someone says they place the blame for what happened in Charlottesville on both sides, or better yet, they don't know where the blame lays, then they are condoning the action of the white supremacists groups, and in my book that is a racist/bigot. The truth is, there should be no doubt where blame for Charlottesville lays. It lays with the white supremacists, neo-Nazi's, KKK, etc, plain and simple! The hatred, bigotry, and misogyny displayed and espoused by these groups, coupled with the tacit approval of President Trump needs to be confronted at all cost, and history tells us so. If only the Jews, in pre-WWII Germany, had confronted the Nazi's in the same manner, Hitler might never have risen to power, and we would not be looking at the prospect of a third anti...

LIVING WITH MCL

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