Saturday, October 21, 2006

internet insomnia

I have rebound insomnia. I've just finished 12 days in a row at work (3 of which were 24hour on-calls, including last night) and now I can't sleep. Bugger!

So how about a few thoughts for 2 in the morning.

Muslim women and veils. Who cares? Let them wear what they want. I work with the public and I would NEVER ask a muslim woman to remove her veil unless I had a specific (medical) reason to do so. Would Jack Straw ask someone not to dye their hair green or pierce their nose before he would talk to them? Would he ask them to take off sunglasses? I might be missing the point here but it just seems a bit rude to me.

I recently recieved an invitation to play with a medical news review site. It is basically designed to sift through medical journals and highlight information that you would find useful. Thousands of medical journals are published every month and most of the content is crap. Filtering it can be useful but you have to be able to trust your filter (do you believe everything you read in the Sun or everything you see on Sky News?). I guess the main risk in a medical filter is that drug companies might use it to make their products appear more useful. This one is still being developed. Go to http://labs.onexamination.com and check it out.

For more light-hearted relief of boredom I get my weekly fix of lies and scandal from Popbitch. Go to http://www.popbitch.com/ and subscribe. It's pure sleaze.

For a weirder range of distractions click on the Warren Ellis link at the side of the page. He's a comic book writer (check out transmetropolitan and nextwave - they fucking rock) who searches the internet for unusual stuff.

Hope I fall asleep soon

funk

1 comment:

labs.onexamination.com said...

Hi Funk

thanks for the mention! What did you think of the site? I can assure you, pharmaceutical companies will not be influencing the filter!

Ben