Just a reminder!

since the theme for this month is relationships, i want to talk just a bit about my internet relationship. no i'm not talking about a relationship with someone via the internet. i'm talking about my personal relationship with the internet itself.

i am old enough to remember back when there was no internet. back before email. back when word processors were just beginning to reside on mainframe computers, provided you put in codes like .sk to skip a line. come to think of it, those early word processors were not unlike html is today, with all sorts of arcane codes like b and i.

i never felt the absence of the internet before it came into my life. my life didn't feel at all empty without it. but i was quick to adapt. by the early 90s i was online with prodigy and whatever the name was of the predecessor to prodigy.

America's health care system has been under some pressure for some time, now. Starting in the early 1980's, the phrase "cost containment" came into being in health care. What does that mean? It means trying to set a price on things.

On the face of it, it comes across as a plan to cut wasteful spending. The reasoning went that the United States spent more per capita on health care than any other nation and this was pitched as being out of step with the rest of the world. Personally as someone who has traveled in the "rest of the world," ever look at the health care in those countries? Apart from a very few, what I saw was not so good. Germany, BENELUX, and Scandinavia were pretty good - and I am not speak of the quality of personnel - many fine physicians and health care workers everywhere - it was their budgets and distribution.

From foetus to full term - without a mother's touch

Sorry to be a blog hog today but what do you all think about the potential development of fetuses developing in artificial wombs? An article from the Times today says:

ARTIFICIAL wombs, to bring a foetus of a human being to full term outside a woman s body, could become a reality within 20 years, scientists have predicted.

My initial reaction: as someone who wants children but is not eager to go through 9 months of pregnancy and horrendously painful childbirth, I'm rather excited about the possibility. Although I can definitely see that it raises a lot of other issues and questions. And I really can't imagine that such a technology could really be equal or superior to a natural womb. But who knows?

My very first computer, purchased in the mid 1980s, was an Apple IIC, but then I switched to PCs and the gothic torments of Windows. The day before yesterday, I bought an Apple iBook, and in some respects it was far easier to set up than the Zeos, Gateway and Dell desktops and Compaq laptop (total lemon!) that have filled the years between Apples. However, I clearly have become Windows 'path dependent'? and it is taking a little while to figure out how to do things on an Apple. For example, I spent a good twenty minutes (actually it was an *awful* twenty minutes) downloading Mozilla Firefox and trying to change the privacy preferences, because I prefer to have a few illusory shreds of privacy. Without having 'Internet Options'? as an, um, option under 'Tools,'? I was at a loss as to how to access the box that would facilitate this, and all the Mozilla help function did was show me a picture of the box, so I would know what it looked like in the seemingly unlikely event I was ever to stumble across the actual operative function. I tried all sorts of increasingly silly and/or complicated ways to access it, and then finally I asked myself: Could the Mac manner of doing things possibly be stupider or more counter intuitive than the Windows way? Took a deep breath, assumed the unfamiliar posture of a rational actor, years of Windows have sorely depleted my stores of common sense, clicked the word Firefox in the tool bar and found what I needed under 'Preferences.'? Doh.