Hi ya'll! Yes, it's been a week from Hades. First, my son got sick, then I did, then the baby did, and finally that rascally rhinovirus attacked my husband (who supposedly never gets sick). Of course, when everyone's sick, who's the one that nurses everyone else back to health? Mommy! But at least I didn't have to cook much, since no one felt like eating much besides soup or chili. But I shouldn't complain. Colds are temporary beasts and just a part of being human. But I look forward to the day that I can squirt a drug up my nose at the first sign of trouble, and avoid the endless boxes of tissues and drowsy side effects of cold medicine.
But that's not all, my friends, no. We also had some minor flooding in our house due to the abundant Texas rains last week. So much vacuuming and carpet cleaning and ventilating has been done.
And to top it all off, our computer has issues. We're using Microsoft Vista (please no booing!) and sure enough, one update later and all hell has broken loose. The computer won't turn off properly, won't load Outlook or Internet Explorer right, and crashes continually. The update (SP1) that's supposed to fix all this won't install on the computer, so I'll probably have to wipe the hard drive and reinstall everything. Argh! Curse you, Microsoft!
I was hoping to do some science blogging (on fruit flies too!), but that will have to wait until I can sort out the computer problems. So in the meantime, my friends, enjoy the bizarre sideshow that is our Presidential election.
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5 comments:
Sorry everything is going so lousy for you lately, I hate murphy's law. It seems to all hit at the same time. My husband is a big computer geek, has his Microsoft certifications up to date and is a faithful PC guy, Apple isn't even allowed in our home, except I still download off i-tunes then convert those to mp3's, but I think we are still running XP on our machines. Vista hasn't impressed him. I'd try and go back if I were you. forget the "fixes".
Hey, Doc,
I seem to have lost your email address, so am throwing this in as a comment.
Did you see this post called "Do Fruit Flies Have Free Will?"
http://brembs.net/spontaneous/
I saw it and thought of you.
Glad you're back and posting, challenging as it may be.
John Governale
Exceedingly Curious
Thanks for the well wishes ya'll. My two computers are both almost ready to go, but my husband is still working on backing up everything so this problem never happens again. Anyway, I should be able to start posting more regularly by Monday, provided I can keep my 9 month old away from the mouse (it's red and flashy).
As for whether fruit flies have free will, I do remember this paper coming out last year. I think they have some amount of it proportional to the size and abilities of their tiny little brains. For example, if one smells a ripe, tasty banana it may choose to fly in a direct bee-line or a lazy, loopy path to the fruit depending on its past experiences (i.e. did he just eat a meal) and its genetic makeup (what one might classify as a primitive type of personality). I don't think that flies feel complex emotions like we do. At least, I hope all those thousands of flies I used in my experiments didn't suffer too much. :-)
deleting your spouse's comments? tsk tsk tsk. Censorship! Censorship! Help help I'm being repressed! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!
I didn't delete your comments, my sweet. I had "moderate comments" turned on and hadn't published them yet. I turned the moderate option off since it's a pain and so far no wacko truthers have showed up to spam the blog. Just no one say 9-11 or Ron Paul. Oops.
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