I really wanted to try this out, because it reminded me of a free version of Ulysses, which I used to (before it became subscription-based) find helped me be very productive. Unfortunately, the latest release wouldn't install:
> "GhostMD" is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the trash.
I suspect this is a signing or notarization error.
Does the physical repair also help with the mental developmental effects? Children with spinal bifida often develop cognitive abilities much slower than children without it.
The main goal of physical repair of the defect in utero is actually to reduce the incidence of hydrocephalus and hindbrain herniation, which are very common in people with Spina Bifida. The existing fetal surgery reduces the incidence of hydrocephalus from about 80% to about 40%. The improvement in leg and bowel/bladder function is actually a secondary benefit.
My understanding is that the hindbrain herniation (aka Chiari Malformation Type II) is the main cause of cognitive trouble in people with SB. But it's worth noting that it's very far from universal in causing that. Most people with SB are basically normal cognitively assuming they get good early intervention (VP shunt, PT, OT, etc.). Some early cognitive development can be slower as a knock on effect of not being able to move around as much as a baby and toddler, and thus less able to explore the environment, etc.
Source: I'm the parent of a toddler with spina bifida. She's completely on track cognitively and with fine motor skills so far. She's way behind with gross motor skills due to her inability to move her legs very much.
Another sb parent here, my kid is seven now, she’s also on track intellectually. We got the decompression surgery for the Chiari II a few months after she was born, and the VP shunt even earlier than that. Aside from some stammering (which her non SB sister also has, so I suspect it’s hereditary), and weirdness with foods (OT has helped a lot) she’s totally on track intellectually.
Our daughter was a particularly severe case too, and these interventions seem to have helped a lot. For the first four years she’d hold her breath every time she was upset, and need CPR, but we got her breathing again every time, so we don’t think there’s any brain damage. If we’d missed once, maybe I’d be telling a different story now. Thank goodness her head grew!
I don't even use Google's regular search that often... but I'm addicted to Google Books, and nobody is offering to replace that. Google Scholar is also amazing. In those niche spaces, Google is a defacto monopoly.
Audio and video surveillance via robot vacuum is a feature: you can control the vacuum, see and hear the world from its perspective, and spy on your cats. I wish I were kidding.
> If everything is an emergency then nothing is, and that was clearly not congress' intention with those laws.
The state of exception is the true test of sovereignty, and powers that crave sovereignty therefore seek out states of exception. The PATRIOT act created new institutions and authorities like the TSA. Just a few years ago local health departments were making business-shuttering decisions that ruined life for a lot of people over the common cold. Ukrainian war funding provides the EU with opportunities for exports and new experiments in joint funding (Eurobonds). Emergencies and exceptions are how power grows, so everything can become an emergency if you look at it in the right way.
I mean, you're right that a lot of liberties are taken with what constitutes an "emergency" these days, but when every other country on the planet is declaring the same emergency there might be some substance there.
Before the time you mention, the common model for TV was, you bought a TV, and you got as many channels as your antenna could pick up, all for free. Advertisers fought over the privilege of having access to your living room so much so that they sponsored whole shows, as they had with radio before TV. From this revenue, every local station was able to put together a news broadcast, and national networks broadcast the national news every evening, all for free as far as the viewer was concerned. This was the golden age of journalism, back when people believed the journalists [0].
Somehow all the media advances, the democratizing influence of the internet, the rise of social media, and the ubiquity of constant streams of news in various forms has just made the news more expensive and less trusted.
And, frankly, anyone even remotely considering microtransactions needs to take into account that one third of the population distrusts the media and another third gives it no credibility whatsoever—and money in the form of microtransactions would have to follow credibility, because nobody pays for what he believes is a lie.
The big problem that the article glosses over is that "labrys" is neither Minoan (to our limited knowledge) nor Greek, but Lydian: the Roman-era author Plutarch in Ætia Romana et Græca tells us that the Lydians call the double-headed axe λάβρυν, and people have assumed that it must have a nominative λάβρυς. The Lydians lived in Anatolia, not Crete. The Carians, another Anatolian people neighboring the Lydians, had a place called Labraunda, and coins minted there in Roman times have a double-headed axe, but that's more than a thousand years after the Cretans. There's no good evidence that the Minoans knew the word "labrys" or connected it to axes or the labyrinth. Moreover, it's not clear that the axes we have were or could have been functional rather than votive or ornamental, as most are thin and weak, so assuming that they were used to kill bulls is a stretch.
That's what's taught in a lot of linguistics and language classes now: rules of spelling and grammar are power games designed to perpetuate one culture while repressing others, rather than tools for clarifying thought. It's fallout from the postmodern search for power dynamics in all things.
A friend recently brought up Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language" [0] and the Merriam Webster's Word Matters Podcast episode on it [1]. She had "read" without understanding the former and had listened with credulity to the latter. The podcast savages Orwell for not understanding "how language in general and English in particular actually works" and for his "absolutism" but especially for violating all of his precepts in his essay. Had either my friend or the podcasters bothered to read the essay carefully, they would have found that Orwell explains that he did so deliberately. When I asked my friend to summarize Orwell's essay and distill it to a single thesis, she replied that he was simply prescriptivist and wanted to tell people what to do. That's what the podcast got out of it too. For example, from the podcast:
> A big part of the conversations that we've all had with members of the public or strangers, people who correspond with a dictionary in one way or another, is some kind of membership of a club. "You care about language in the way that I do." There is absolutely a huge moral component that is imposed upon that. We always are judging others by their use of language. We are always judged by our use of language, by the way we spell, by the way we pronounce words. That's just a simple human fact. It's easier for us as professionals to separate that from culture.
The last sentence reminds me of a feedback loop: the "professionals" claim power based on the fact that they see the exercise of power in language rather than on how to use language for communicating clearly. This is how we get to a point where good grammar is a tool for "looking professional" rather than speaking and writing clearly.
I walked my friend back through the actual essay and asked her what Orwell wanted from each point, and she realized that it was, in fact, clarity, not power. Orwell wanted to challenge his readers to think about what they wanted to say before saying it, so that they could say what they meant rather than repeating what they heard commonly said (a note could be made here about large language models and probability).
The hardcore anti-prescriptivism among linguists does drive me a bit nuts as well.
Languages can and do alter because of peoples prescriptivist ideas. They're not just arbitrary rivers of sound changes that people cannot control. English is still full of Inkwell terms, for example. And in my own lifetime I have seen a lot of linguistic changes basically proscribed that everyone falls into line with (a less controversial/political one: no one in NZ called association football "football" at the turn of the century. We all called it "soccer". Then the sporting bodies and media changed what they called it and everyone around me changed it too. "football" used to unambiguously mean "rugby football").
> Languages can and do alter because of peoples prescriptivist ideas.
You are right, but that comes also from a descriptivist perspective. And a linguist would study what sort of prescriptions stick and what sort don't.
When linguists say they aren't prescriptivists, they don't say prescriptivism doesn't work, they just say their job is not about deciding whether to say football or soccer.
Right I am probably being sloppy with my terminology. It's more notions that there is no such thing as "good grammar" is just tiresome. We can argue the rules are somewhat arbitrary, but that does not change how people might perceive you.
I don't mean to sound like the old fart that I am, but you keep describing games in terms of "junk" and "as good as [junk]": maybe instead of giving a bundle of ad-free junk, none of which actually captures his attention and all of which amounts to "doomscrolling," you might consider finding something that does get his attention and occupies it more usefully.
Swift Playgrounds was (is?) ad-free and teaches programming. There are music studio apps that let him compose his own music. Plenty of apps let kids create things actively instead of just playing games. There are also all sorts of non-electronic activities that could occupy his time more fruitfully, but I'll skip over that.
> "GhostMD" is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the trash.
I suspect this is a signing or notarization error.
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