Interesting Links for 19-10-2015

[andrewducker]

• Nice Fire Phoenix Puppet
  • (tags: video fire puppets )
• Amazon sues1,114 fake reviewers
  • (tags: Amazon reviews fraud )
• Soldiers share fascinating (and frankly horrifying) stories about Afghanistan
  • (tags: afghanistan )
• There will be no second Scottish Independence referendum without a year of 60% support
  • (tags: Scotland independence referendum snp )
• MIT

Comments

[slemslempike]

I was about to order a looncup as quickly as my fingers would let me, but then read that the battery will last for 6 months only, and you can't recharge it or easily change it. And it has a smaller capacity than larger sizes, so is really not going to cope with it. Dammit, I was really excited about tracking menstruation with no effort on my part.

[andrewducker]

That's a shame.

Hopefully v2 (or v3) will be wirelessly chargeable.

[slemslempike]

Also the airport thing could be an issue - I absolutely would never remember to switch cups when flying, and I fly frequently enough that it would be likely to interfere with the data. But in general I think it's an ace idea and I hope that soon it's in a form that will be longerterm.

[andrewducker]

Could possibly do with your viewpoint in a discussion at the bottom of the page...

[kalimac]

Alex Power writes: "I despise Saudi Arabia. It’s a hideous, brutal, oil-rich theocracy that exports terrorism. But you know what? It really doesn’t really pretend to be anything else. You know where you stand with Saudi Arabia." Yes. This is why leftists criticize the failings of democracies more than those of dictatorships, something rightists don't get.

Ann Leckie offers ten SF books, four of which I've read, three of which I didn't like at all, the fourth of which is far from my favorite of its author's. Her tastes are not mine. But that's OK; I couldn't get into Leckie's own work either.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I wasn't a massive fan of Ancillary Justice. It wasn't _bad_, it just didn't do much for me. (Which was a shame, I was looking forward to it.)

And yes, criticizing people who want to be seen as The Good Guys can be a lot more productive than pointing out that North Korea is basically hell on earth.

[danieldwilliam]

I am neither surprised or shocked by the SNP having a guideline on when they might hold another referendum. There's no point having another one until you have a clear indication that the result will be independence.

The first one was all very exciting and novel and a bit of a shot to nothing. More of a warm up for the real event which is happening now as Scotland digests all the implications and information from the first referendum campaign.

Or putting it another way, the first one was held to discover is there was any appetite for indepedence, the second one will be held to ratify and formalise a desire for independence.

I'm with Curtiss, 60% for a year or so seems like a decent benchmark.

[andrewducker]

Yup, agreed on all points. The first one let them see if anyone was actually interested, and get everyone talking. Now it's a case of moving it all forward and seeing if they can convert people.

All they have to do is govern competently, with no massive scandals, while letting everyone make the alternatives look awful. That's going to be an interesting challenge for them...

[danieldwilliam]

I think it's going to be difficult for them. You can already see the build up of difficults with things like the Edinburgh West MP and Police Scotland and educational attainment

[skington]

There's a fourth: running out of ideas. This arguably did for the Jospin government in 2002.

[channelpenguin]

I can't understand what the point of the looncup is. Periods happen. So what.  Except that we have them WAY more often than we ever would before contraception and way way more than pre-agriculture - where less regular nutrition, later menarche,  shorter lifespans  and on demand breastfeeding meant periods were actually rather rare over a typical  woman's lifetime.

If you've got problems then, yeah maybe there's some interesting factor (I mean I've always been irregular but I don't care)  but if not, I frankly don't see the fascination. It's not that I have any ick factor, it's more that it's about as interesting to me as my snot. ie not very.

[andrewducker]

If my snot came in a time-based pattern, along with pain and mood changes, then I'd probably be interested in tracking it too, so that I'd know when it was happening next.

And if my mooncup might be 1/4 full or completely full, and the only way to find out was to go pull it out and take a look, I'd probably want something that told me whether I needed to go do messy things or not from the relative safety and cleanliness of my phone.

[slemslempike]

I think there are two bits for me - one is that I love graphs and would like to admire the data from my periods. There are lots of apps that can do this, but mean that you have to input the information manually, which I am far too lazy for. So having a mooncup that would do it automatically for me would be really cool. The other is that as I don't use the toilet all that often, if I am absorbed in something I forget to empty my mooncup frequently, and bleed onto my clothes.

I also imagine it could be useful for health purposes, and maybe for fertility checks? I have no interest in fertility, but could be an easy way to track cycles for people who are?

But there are too many issues with the current product for me to back it at the moment (I just posted about them on my own journal).

[channelpenguin]

Knowing what's going on in terms of flow in the 4-5 days of actual menstruation doesn't strike me as all that useful. And that's all it does. I get that if you use  a cup (have done in the past) it might be useful to tell how full it is - but I can pretty much tell from time plus from other internal feelings how heavy a flow is going on and make a judgement. In any case, you gotta empty sometime - I personally pee more often than that's necessary even on heavy and dehydrated days. I wear almost exclusively black cotton undies every day of my life because I am irregular and have some mid cycle bleed. So an unexpected spot or two is no disaster for me (I'll feel it and head to the look to take measures before there's any real issue). Others who do think loon cup is a cool idea may have utterly different experiences which I hope they'll explain in the interests of expanding my knowledge.

[a_pawson]

The reason the planning systems seems to take forever (in England/Wales) is because of the number of different appeals. Around here, we seem to be getting numerous applications and (to a non-expert) this seems to be how it works