Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

On Thursday his wife released a statement that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease and was in the early stages, it's a nasty degenerative neuro/motor problem that makes any physical activity increasingly difficult. Michal J. Foxx has it, I remember one story where he was being taken to an awards show in a limo and had the driver circle the block several times because he couldn't stop his shaking, this was before he made his condition public.

I have a similar problem called Essential Tremors where my body (mainly my back, sometimes my head/hands/arms) sometimes shake uncontrollably and had an idiot of a doctor who said I probably had Parkinson's in an off-cuff comment as he was leaving the exam room, I never saw him again. The main source of the problem was hyperparathyroidism which was fixed surgically, but it persists even though my parathyroid is back to normal. Normally my tremors are a telegraph/warning that I'm getting sick, but it can also be stress-related (and my cataract surgery has been hugely stressful!)

So for me, a Parkinson's diagnosis is never far from my mind. The sad thing is that Parkinson's is bad, but it's not fatal. But there's usually more than one dimension when someone takes their own life, and Robin Williams was obviously a very complex character.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/08/14/340416214/robin-williams-sober-in-early-stages-of-parkinsons-widow-says


My wife and I have occasional conversations about the right to die, especially given a terminal diagnosis. It's definitely a 'no easy answers' scenario.


This item I did not know, my wife told me about it a couple of days ago and it never hit my normal news sources: a bunch of people started essentially tormenting his daughter Zelda on Twitter, so much that she has closed her account for now and Twitter has banned a number of people for their actions. It never ceases to amaze me the level of rectal haberdashery that people can descend to online in the very thin guise of pseudo-anonymity. Would these people walk up to her on the street and mock her pain, shoving Photoshopped pictures of her dad's suicide in her face? Some of them, the true sociopaths, yes. Most would not. But online no can can see that you're a dog, and they take that as a license to be asses.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/08/14/twitter-to-review-policies-after-zelda-williams-harassment-scandal/

"Global Warming? Did you catch our debate at 6:15 ET? There are smart people on both sides who cite evidence of their positions, yet come up with wildly different conclusions. So which is it -- is the Earth getting warmer or not? Please try to offer some evidence of your theory, rather than just your 'hunch.' K?"
— Fox & Friends blog

I think the big mistake that Al Gore made was referring to it as global warming rather than global climate change. I think seeing the arctic shrinking, the northwest passage reopen, the frequent calving of icebergs from the antarctic, that it's pretty much a fact. I've heard that it's only about 5% of climate scientists who don't believe in this, so I guess if you cherry-pick your audience carefully enough that you can appear to have a balanced discussion.

And on that note, I offer this web comic: http://www.calamitiesofnature.com/archive/?c=479

In the movie Man of the Hour, one of President Robin Williams' speech writers (Lewis Black) says: "TV scares me. It makes everything seem credible. ... If everything seems credible then nothing seems credible. You know, TV puts everybody in those boxes, side-by-side. On one side, there's this certifiable lunatic who says the Holocaust never happened. And next to him is this noted, honored historian who knows all about the Holocaust. And now, there they sit, side-by-side, they look like equals! Everything they say seems to be credible. And so, as it goes on, nothing seems credible anymore! We just stopped listening!

The man is so thoroughly insane. ;-)