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In response to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mactavish's (friends-locked) discussion of names and internet anonymity:
A heads-up to people who think they're not visible online: there are at least two people of my exact name in the United States.
I know this because I heard from the other one, after a friend asked her if she was the $our_name who had done x, y, and z, and had thus-and-such stuff online. And all of it was me.
Neither she nor I is anonymous in that sense. Yes, if someone goes as far as asking us "Are you the…?" she can honestly say no, but some percentage of people who google to find out about new acquaintances or job applicants won't ask.
In response to a post about depression and illness byxiphias:
"My disease is worse than yours/theirs" is problematic in any number of ways. At the same time, "this flu is/isn't as bad as the time I had X" can be useful, and I suspect that the comparison you offer here may help someone think about this question from a different angle.
Those are global/long-term comparisons: it makes entire sense to me and my loved ones for me to say that right now, I'm in better shape, so you decide whether we're going straight home, stopping for groceries, or sitting down somewhere and having tea while you recover.
If you (collectively) have reached a reasonable (for you) emotional balance on this, it's also useful to be able to think about okay, A needs days of doing nothing physical on a regular basis, B sometimes has zir back go out and will need time to recover, C's balance isn't so good and so zie shouldn't be asked to do certain things, and so on. That works for us, most of the time, because it's closer to dividing tasks and scheduling than to any sort of well-ordering of strength, health, or need for care.
In response to a post byjenett about libraries and collection development (friends-locked, part of a series):
I have a sneaking suspicion that people are missing the distinctions between archive and library; between "we've been collecing stuff for two or three centuries, and have lots of room to store the oddities that someone will want every twenty years" and "this is a branch library, one of many"; and between things that, if my local library doesn't have them, I can find cheap used copies of, and things that aren't going to be available that way.
I was delighted, when in college, to be able to come down to New York on my Spring break and read copies of speeches from an 1876 city mayoral campaign, which the NY Public Library (Astor, Lenox, and Tilden [1] Foundations, the place with the lions) had probably had sitting there since 1876 or '77, knowing it might be wanted every 20 years. I would have been astounded had my university, in another state, had those documents. And if they'd somehow been at Columbia and not the NYPL, I'd have looked into ILL.
If they don't have a particular Nero Wolfe novel, I can read copies when visiting the friend who recommended them, go to a used book store, or try ABEbooks. It's a different kind of need.
[1] What did Rutherford B. Hayes ever do for library science?
In a![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
metaquotes thread on tools, responding to someone asserting that screwdrivers are nongendered because everyone uses them:
Tools that everyone uses:
Knives. (Forks and spoons, for that matter.) Containers. Pens.
Clothing. At this point we're getting into stuff that many people don't even recognize as tools, they're so much part of our lives and cultures: clothing and tables and books.
In a discussion inbisexual that started with books, I said something about genre, and then ann_amalie replied "Of course, in real life there are all those issues of jealousy and mistrust, not to mention the fact that it's probably impossible to love two people equally, so one partner is always going to feel like s/he's getting the short end."
The relevant part of my answer:
Out here in real life, I don't know what it would mean to love two or three people "equally", because they're different people, and the relationships are different, and I'm not good at quantifying emotion, nor particularly concerned with doing so. Done right--and I think we're doing it right--the question of whether I love them all the same amount doesn't matter, because they each get enough of my love, and time, and attention, and understanding, as do I from each of them (my partners also have other partners). And if it wasn't enough for one of them, knowing that I didn't love anyone more wouldn't make it so: it still wouldn't be what that person needed.
In response to
mactavish's (friends-locked) discussion of names and internet anonymity:A heads-up to people who think they're not visible online: there are at least two people of my exact name in the United States.
I know this because I heard from the other one, after a friend asked her if she was the $our_name who had done x, y, and z, and had thus-and-such stuff online. And all of it was me.
Neither she nor I is anonymous in that sense. Yes, if someone goes as far as asking us "Are you the…?" she can honestly say no, but some percentage of people who google to find out about new acquaintances or job applicants won't ask.
In response to a post about depression and illness by
xiphias:"My disease is worse than yours/theirs" is problematic in any number of ways. At the same time, "this flu is/isn't as bad as the time I had X" can be useful, and I suspect that the comparison you offer here may help someone think about this question from a different angle.
Those are global/long-term comparisons: it makes entire sense to me and my loved ones for me to say that right now, I'm in better shape, so you decide whether we're going straight home, stopping for groceries, or sitting down somewhere and having tea while you recover.
If you (collectively) have reached a reasonable (for you) emotional balance on this, it's also useful to be able to think about okay, A needs days of doing nothing physical on a regular basis, B sometimes has zir back go out and will need time to recover, C's balance isn't so good and so zie shouldn't be asked to do certain things, and so on. That works for us, most of the time, because it's closer to dividing tasks and scheduling than to any sort of well-ordering of strength, health, or need for care.
In response to a post by
jenett about libraries and collection development (friends-locked, part of a series):I have a sneaking suspicion that people are missing the distinctions between archive and library; between "we've been collecing stuff for two or three centuries, and have lots of room to store the oddities that someone will want every twenty years" and "this is a branch library, one of many"; and between things that, if my local library doesn't have them, I can find cheap used copies of, and things that aren't going to be available that way.
I was delighted, when in college, to be able to come down to New York on my Spring break and read copies of speeches from an 1876 city mayoral campaign, which the NY Public Library (Astor, Lenox, and Tilden [1] Foundations, the place with the lions) had probably had sitting there since 1876 or '77, knowing it might be wanted every 20 years. I would have been astounded had my university, in another state, had those documents. And if they'd somehow been at Columbia and not the NYPL, I'd have looked into ILL.
If they don't have a particular Nero Wolfe novel, I can read copies when visiting the friend who recommended them, go to a used book store, or try ABEbooks. It's a different kind of need.
[1] What did Rutherford B. Hayes ever do for library science?
In a
metaquotes thread on tools, responding to someone asserting that screwdrivers are nongendered because everyone uses them:Tools that everyone uses:
Knives. (Forks and spoons, for that matter.) Containers. Pens.
Clothing. At this point we're getting into stuff that many people don't even recognize as tools, they're so much part of our lives and cultures: clothing and tables and books.
In a discussion in
bisexual that started with books, I said something about genre, and then ann_amalie replied "Of course, in real life there are all those issues of jealousy and mistrust, not to mention the fact that it's probably impossible to love two people equally, so one partner is always going to feel like s/he's getting the short end."The relevant part of my answer:
Out here in real life, I don't know what it would mean to love two or three people "equally", because they're different people, and the relationships are different, and I'm not good at quantifying emotion, nor particularly concerned with doing so. Done right--and I think we're doing it right--the question of whether I love them all the same amount doesn't matter, because they each get enough of my love, and time, and attention, and understanding, as do I from each of them (my partners also have other partners). And if it wasn't enough for one of them, knowing that I didn't love anyone more wouldn't make it so: it still wouldn't be what that person needed.
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With just a change of nouns, that could be used almost verbatim in regard to parenting. People seem to have an easier time understanding it in regard to one's children than one's partners.
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It's not that I can't wrap my mind around polyamory; it's just not a thing that works for me.
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Similarly, I have no problem wrapping my mind around the idea of parenthood, but it's not something I ever wanted for myself.
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The same is true for me; therefore, I wasn't talking about you or me. ;-)
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Did I tell you about the time that, purely by accident, I found my own name on a tombstone?
I don't know of anyone else living with my first-last name combination, but it's unusual enough that if there were, it would cause great confusion. The advantage of being named John Smith is that people believe you (or at least I hope they do) when you say that was somebody else with the same name.
There's a book about Gabriel Faure (the composer) by Gabriel Faure (no relation).
At the same time, "this flu is/isn't as bad as the time I had X" can be useful
I'm completely flummoxed when doctors say, "On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad is the pain?" Where are the calibration marks on this scale? I have no idea where they are.
people are missing the distinctions between archive and library
[librarian hat here] It's more the presence or absence of archival function. An archive, as distinct from a library, is purely a storage facility. Some libraries have archival functions and some don't, and some for some things and not for others. An ordinary public library should be archival for material of any value that no other library will get: local history, basically. Regular old books, when they get old and no longer useful: discard them. Old books that they keep usually have reference functions. Of course NYPL is not an ordinary public library, and defines itself as having many other archival functions.
What did Rutherford B. Hayes ever do library science?
Well, he was the first President to have a presidential library.
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You may prefer not to say this in front of an archivist, though. Unless you want to be lectured about the goals of archives.
Purely a storage facility, indeed - it looks like the archivists have failed, at least in your country, to make themselves heard.
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Archivists do a lot more than store things, but an archive is not a library.
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I think that's part of the purpose: not to tie you in to someone else's description, but to get your subjective measure. I think that "how much does it hurt" is not a particularly useful diagnostic tool in any case, but that it's helpful to the doctor to know how much distress you feel about the pain.
For kids, though, they sometimes show a chart with little smiley-face heads (though only the zero character is smiling!). My kids generally found this unhelpful.
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It can also be used in treatment goals. "What level on the scale, for you, is annoying-but-bearable pain? Can we adjust your meds to get you at least to that point?" [Yes, ideally, we'd aim for no pain, but the side-effects of most of our analgesics make that impossible in many circumstances.]
At least when I was taught to use this scale, we were taught to define the end points for the patient (...where 0 is no pain and 10 is the worst pain you can imagine) and that the scale was completely subjective and the end points would be different for each patient.
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So consequently I have no way of knowing where 10 is, and consequently can't say where 6 is either. "Less than before" and "more than before", which is what your comparisons are actually saying, I can say.
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I thought that was so impressive that I wanted a copy, but never thought to ask.
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Having a proper name to look up helped me find something like the one I saw:
Take a look at http://www.anes.ucla.edu/pain/FacesScale.jpg
More info @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_scale
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You might find the descriptions on this scale (http://shsskip.swan.ac.uk/Information/Mankoski%20Pain%20Scale.htm) helpful.
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