[links] Link salad flies away like a little bird

[jaylake]

My story "The Speed of Time" is up in podcast and Web reprint at Escape Pod

Darth Vader In A Kilt On A Unicycle Playing Bagpipes - This video will make your brain hurt, I promise. (Thanks to Scrivener's Error.)

How to piss off a frog - Hahahahahahah.

Examining His Own Body, Stanford Geneticist Stops Diabetes in Its Tracks (Via Emily Siskin.)

Comments

[la_marquise_de_]

That piece on US Immigration is sadly all too like my regular experience. I hate travelling to the US, because I know I will be subjected to rudeness, inappropriate or unnecessary questions and comments (really, immigration, what I'm wearing is not your business and there are, in fact, no rules about no cardigans or waistcoats on planes), huge amounts of suspicion and a lot of anxiety. And, sometimes, locals pushing past in the queue saying things like 'We go ahead of terrorists'. The UK is not ideal and our immigration people can behave appallingly, I know. It's not unique to the US.
The charge for the ESTA form, though... When we discovered it, the marquis and I looked at one another and said, 'I always knew it was really one big theme park.'

[madwriter]

>>'We go ahead of terrorists'.<<

And this is why I shouldn't travel much, because I'd automatically blurt back some stupid reply like "How do we know you're not just part of the local cell?"

[kuangning]

That article on the scientist's diabetes is both interesting and frustrating in that it shows a really pervasive and infuriating myth: the one that says if you're not overweight, you don't get diabetes. It causes thin people to not get tested for diabetes until the symptoms are pretty severe and they've ruled out everything else, while overweight people get tested again and again and again whether they have symptoms or not. It not only wastes time, effort, and money, but it skews the apparent incidence of the disease so that it seems to support the myth.

[mmegaera]

This, in spades. My sister has been a Type 1 diabetic for over forty years, since she was 21, and she's the only one of the four of us who never had a problem with her weight either before or after her diagnosis.

[kuangning]

Yep. My mother is the only diabetic in the family (type 2) and she's always been thin.

[madwriter]

Yep, my underweight grandfather had diabetes for decades.

[kshandra]

AotD: Why, yes...

[msconduct]

I will observe that in my experience entering the US is a more intimidating and unfriendly process than anywhere else I've been in my adult life, including various Communist countries.

And as an American citizen, you don't even get the best part - the fingerprinting! My own government has never asked me for my fingerprints, but I'm forced to surrender them repeatedly for the pleasure of spending my tourist dollars in the US. Welcome! We assume by default you are a criminal! This made me avoid US travel for more than a decade as I took my tourist dollars elsewhere.

I think you're right that it's the worst. Old-style USSR and modern China were a breeze in comparison (the Chinese, in particular, were incredibly nice). The most potentially intimidating was Zimbabwe as I was travelling with someone on a British passport, but they turned out to be really friendly.

[mmegaera]

AotD: Depends on your definition of emergency. I was once on nonstop flight from Seattle to Dallas forced to divert to Salt Lake City because a woman on board had had a heart attack.