The Telegraph:
Britain’s traditional stiff upper lip may be a better strategy for dealing with shock than letting your feelings spill out, a new study claims.
The popular assumption is that talking about a terrifying experience, such as a terrorist attack or natural disaster, can be therapeutic and helpful.
But new evidence suggests “getting it off your chest” may not be the right thing to do.
Being the emotional retard that I am, being unable to talk about my emotions and keeping everything bottled up, it sounds like I have the taken teh correct path to mental stability (although Mrs -O might say different).
Via Mental Nurse
Dr Crippen:
I refer to David Kirby. You have never heard of him. You are about to. He is an American who has “reservations” about immunisations. Reservations that are not scientifically sustainable. In fairness, I should say he is not wicked. It would be much easier if he were. He is far more dangerous than “wicked”. He is sincere, articulate and persuasive. He writes well, he speaks well, he believes what he says (I assume) and he is on a mission. He is utterly, totally wrong. He deserves as much credence as a representative of the Flat Earth Society. Yes, the society really does exist. You can join here if you wish. Safer to join them than JABS. But, as a member of the Flat Earth Society, do not expect to be asked to speak in the Houses of Parliament.
This story in Technology section of the Guardian Unlimited regarding the new biometric passports reveals that secure, hard to defraud biometric ID cards/passports are either a lot harder to make or, and I suspect this may be the case, the government has not thought it through properly.
…the UK had just begun to issue new, ultra-secure passports, incorporating tiny microchips to store the holder’s details and a digital description of their physical features (known in the jargon as biometrics). These, the argument went, would make identity theft much more difficult and pave the way for the government’s proposed ID cards in 2008 or 2009.
Today, some three million such passports have been issued, and they don’t look so secure. I am sitting with my scary computer man and we have just sucked out all the supposedly secure data and biometric information from three new passports and displayed it all on a laptop computer.
The UK Identity and Passport Service website says the new documents are protected by “an advanced digital encryption technique”. So how come we have the information? What could criminals or terrorists do with it? And what could it mean for the passports and the ID cards that are meant to follow?
And we’re expected to trust these jokers with private, confidential medical information on one big database…?
