I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence
And so the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're goin' through

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Linkee-poo thinks librarians rock

Back to busy beyond belief. So a short one for today as I don't have much time to play on the internets today.

Of potential to inform an upcoming panel, ion on military Sf. There's some about how the past philosophies inform the present within a culture. (Grokked from Karl Schroeder)

Since the peeps surgery links is getting kinda long in the tooth, how about geeky peep dioramas? (Grokked from Tor.com)

New Arizona anti-abortion law defines the age of the fetus to begin at the end of the woman's menses. Which settles the question. Yes, Arizona is going for "Most Crazy State Involvement in Personal Lives Evar!" in the Guiness Book of World Records. Two weeks before actual "conception"? So, with that "potential" is it "abortion" for a woman to not have sex? Are women now mandated to have unprotected sex so that all those unborn children have a chance? The crazy just gets deeper and deeper. (Grokked from Cat Valente)

Tweet of my heart:
@GeorgeTakei: 20% of adults now favor e-books over paper. The Trees agree to continue moratorium on random skiing accidents involving celebrities.

2 comments:

Julie said...

That is actually the standard medical convention for measuring the start of a pregnancy, since conception was always pretty hard to target, and LMP was usually a known quantity. Not as much the case these days, since you can test or track for ovulation a number of ways, but many OBs don't seem to trust women any more than Republican politicians apparently do. It's got it's own issues on the other end, as women are assigned due dates based on LMP, and women are often pushed to induce or schedule sections early based on the LMP generated due date, which may not be as long as the baby needs to cook, since all women don't follow the 14 day post LMP ovulation average or have really long cycyles. Some women who do track their cycles will give a false LMP so that they don't get an inaccurate due date.

Steve Buchheit said...

Hey Julie, thanks for letting me know. Although I think there's a big difference between using that date as a medical determination and as a legal definition. The medical side can be a bit sloppy (that may be frightening to hear, but most medical things are dealt with as they present themselves, not from any real surveillance in the patients life). One is saying, " okay, we need to set a date here to begin calculations" in a way that is proactive. The law defines this to be precise, as in "just the facts, ma'am."

So when you set this into law, it creates a whole host of other issues. THis is like the argument on the word "marriage" and if that should apply to same sex couples (my take is yes, because marriage has a legal definition of rights and obligations that "civil union" does not carry). As I put in the post, with this as a legal definition, it could be seen as any woman, post menses, should be considered "pregnant" in the eyes of the law. While it may seem absurd on it's face that failure to become pregnant would become a legal issue, the people who enacted the "stand your ground" laws never thought they would be used in such a case as the Tryvon Martin shooting. That's one of the problems with writing laws (and why people get upset about "technicalities") sloppy language can cause a lot of unforeseen problems.