Here’s a story of some fascinating research that shows that bedwetting may actually be caused by breathing problems.

Mahony says that of the kids referred to him at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney because of bed-wetting problems, eight out of 10 have a narrow palate. In these cases, orthodontic devices similar to a brace can be used to widen the palate.

Continue reading →

Blogging may be light as I head out of town on business. I’m finding it tough to leave Kelly and Hallie behind.

I wrote about it some on my Hallie page. For now, I’ll leave you with the lyrics to the song on my mind tonight, CCR’s Someday Never Comes. It sums up my mood this evening.

From Fark, I learned that researchers have discovered clues as to why yawning is contagious.

Self-aware or empathetic people are more likely to catch the yawns, say US researchers.

Contagious yawning is known to be more than coincidence. Studies have shown that 40-60% of people who watch videos or hear talk about yawning end up joining in.

Fascinating stuff. I think I yawned four times just writing this!

A lot has been made recently about the Terrorism Futures Market that recently got cancelled. It was a DARPA experiment attempting to let economic forces predict upheavals in the Middle East.

The Policy Analysis Market, which was set to begin signing up “investors� on Friday, was designed to let Middle East experts place bets on political and economic events in the Middle East, according to Charles Polk, president of Net Exchange, a small San Diego, Calif. company hired by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to set up the market.
[snip]

By placing thousands of individual bets, the thinking went, market participants would shape forecasts about future events. The value of the contracts would fluctuate based on market participants’ beliefs about the likelihood of specific events taking place — moving higher if they appeared likely and lower if unlikely. Contracts would expire quarterly and extend a year and a half into the future. Each contract would be fully valued at $1 — the payoff for an accurate prediction.

[snip]
“This isn’t really a terrorism market,� Polk said Monday. “What we’re trying to do is look forward a year into the future and try to glean some insight into political and economic and military currents in the Middle East.

Much of the criticism brands the scheme as “incentive to commit acts of terrorism” as Tom Dachale said. Horsepucky! This was a smart way to try unconventional methods against unconventional warfare: terrorism. The participants were Middle Eastern scholars, hardly the type to commit terrorism. Frankly, with their payoff being all of one dollar, I don’t think you have to worry about this program spawning new terrorists.

It’s a shame that smart, unconventional thinking like this gets distorted and blown totally out of proportion. I welcome new ways of predicting unrest. We cannot apply the old, rigid thinking that worked against our old enemies (the USSR, for instance) and expect it to work against the shadowy terrorists. Programs like PAM would likely glean intelligence that our current sources wouldn’t pick up.

Being typically skeptical of the government, I find myself defending it on this one. It’s a different world we live in now – one that plays by different rules. We must be flexible in our thinking if we are to survive in it.

I have ditched my patched-together weblog in favor of this nice, new package called Drupal. Drupal is very nice! It has trees, Ewoks, and barbecues, which is why I like Drupal more than America.

Err, where was I? Oh yes! Drupal is modularized, making it very configurable. You can even syndicate my website now! And expect to see some changes in the theme of the page: I haven’t yet had time to mess with all the settings.

For those of you looking for the old content, it will live for now at this link http://www.markturner.net/bplog, where you can find the old webpage.

Please feel free to leave comments letting me know what you think.

Ahem. I said “PLEASE FEEL FREE TO LEAVE COMMENTS!” 🙂

I don’t know why, but I’ve found myself daydreaming of building blimps. Call me strange (you certainly wouldn’t be the first), but for some reason this strikes me as a Good Thing To Do. I am interested in building hobby-size blimps, to do things like haul amateur radio antennas into the air, and maybe as an exercise in robotics – imagine having 3d cameras on a blimp and gliding it silently over the trees! I guess it also builds on my interest in sailing, too. Flying an airship is much like sailing the skies.

North Carolina has been home to an airship base for a number of years, Weeksville NAS in Elizabeth City. It is currently owned by a company called TCOM, which builds airships there. Now I read that a local company is set to build blimps in New Bern.

So there is a lot of blimp activity going on here in the state. With the centennial of the Wright Brothers first flight coming up in December, the time may be ripe to introduce a “new” means of air travel to the world.

We’re finishing up an action-packed weekend. Yesterday, we got an impromptu visit from Kelly’s parents, who drove 11 hours to spend 3 and a half hours with Hallie. Kelly and I are still shaking our heads over their whirlwind visit. I think they really love their granddaughter or something!

We’re off now to do a little Sunday driving. I hope to have some time to write later today since there is a lot I can blather on about.

We’re finishing up an action-packed weekend. Yesterday, we got an impromptu visit from Kelly’s parents, who drove 11 hours to spend 3 and a half hours with Hallie. Kelly and I are still shaking our heads over their whirlwind visit. I think they really love their granddaughter or something!

We’re off now to do a little Sunday driving. I hope to have some time to write later today since there is a lot I can blather on about.

A friend asked me to transfer an old interview of his grandfather from a reel-to-reel audiotape to CD. I finished this task last night, creating a wonderful-sounding MP3 to email to him while I got the CDs ready.

I discovered this morning that the note I sent him with the MP3 information got filtered somehow by his “ISP”, Bellsouth.Net. Most of the message’s content made it through fine, but the link I sent him to his MP3 was completely removed! After two messages sent to him, I determined that Bellsouth must be altering the content of messages to its users.

I find this disturbing at the least and downright scandalous at the worst. I’ve never had much faith in Bellsouth as an ISP, having dealt with them before at a client site. I’ll agree that Bellsouth the phone company knows what they’re doing in hooking up Internet connections, but their Internet group has always seemed absolutely clueless when it came to being an ISP.

I should be fair and say I don’t know whether Alan is using mail-filtering software on his own PC and whether that might explain the filtered link. My “evil detector” – the gut instinct with which I place a lot of trust – points the finger at Bellsouth.

I hope I’m wrong about this, because if I’m right, it serves as a chilling indication of what the Internet can become – a filtered, censored wasteland controlled at the whim of corporate interests.

Update 25 Jul 1 PM: A test email sent through a different mailserver seemed to work. I’m not sure if its a problem with my home mailserver or what. Guess I need more testing to be sure, but at any rate, it looks less like a Bellsouth issue at this point.