Friday, October 16, 2015

Weekend Reading: The Great Week, Great Links Edition

This has been an eventful week for me. I found out that I do indeed have a contract that will pay me some money next year, allowing me to continue my weird collage approach to my career for at least one more year. Hooray!

Okay, So Look came out Wednesday, and it has been doing great. Thank you to all who bought it and helped spread the word. It is currently the #1 bestseller in the Religious Humor category, which downright delights me.



See, I told you that people really like this book once they try it! 

It also got a nice review in The Friendly Atheist, so now there is a good review from a rabbi (quoted on the Annorlunda Books page) and an atheist, which is also pretty awesome.

I wish I could say that Unspotted was doing as well, but it hasn't found its audience yet. There are some ads I'd like to run for it, but they require at least 5 reviews on Amazon, and Unspotted is stuck at 3. If you've read it and would be willing to review it on Amazon, that would be a big help.

Finally, enrollment in my Better Projects Through Better Planning class closes Monday. If you've been procrastinating on signing up, now is the time to do it! I spent 1.5 hours today listening to the recording of the first class from last time and while that helped me make some improvements to my slides for this time, it also made me squirm to listen to my own voice for that long. Ugh.

Anyhow, how about some links?

This is an amazing story- Matt Bors and Martin Shkreli.

This rewriting of famous quotes into the type of language women have to use to avoid being seen as "aggressive" or "angry" in meetings is exagerrated but not by much. The "Let my people go" one in particular made me lolsob.

Speaking of lolsobbing:

 

Here is a horrifying story about how women's pain is taken less seriously. Given that we also know that we also know that Black children are less likely to get pain medication, I can only assume that pain felt by women of color is taken even less seriously than pain felt by white women. 

Horrifying in a different way: this story about Ancestry.com data being used to implicate a man in an unsolved crime (he was later exonerated). Here's another worrying story about someone using the 23andMe API to create an app that could restrict access to websites based on race. Note that this seems to have been a "white hat" demonstation project, but still... it gives you pause, doesn't it? And just when they seemed to be moving past their troubles with the FDA.



I caught up with the History of the English Language podcast and have had to go looking for new podcasts to keep my commutes happy while I wait for new episodes. I have two new favorite podcasts:


And your chuckle to end with: pirate cat.

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous7:25 PM

    The awful ER story reminds me of what happened to my grandfather several years ago. He'd been discharged after abdominal surgery, but a complication developed that sent him back to the hospital in severe pain. The experience of spending hours and hours trying to get people to take his pain seriously (he ended up needing an emergency second surgery) gave him acute stress disorder (essentially short-term PTSD).

    If that can happen to a white, male, retired MD, I can only imagine how much worse it can be for women and POC.

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  2. Amazon review added! Just need 1 more :)

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  3. Two stories: First, when I had Baguette, my ideal was to take no painkillers. I didn't completely eliminate them from my thinking, but I wanted to avoid them unless I just couldn't. As it turned out, my labor went on so long that I took everything they offered me and none of it really worked, not even the epidural. Afterward, I saw an article about a study in Finland: Apparently natural redheads are up to 40% more resistant to anesthesia than the general population. I wish I'd known about that before, but I wish even more that my lousy anesthesiologist had known about it.

    Second story: I've had an awful couple of weeks (there's so much it's at least another blog post). On the way to a scheduled doctor's appointment, I started to have chest pains. I told the receptionist about them, and she made sure I got into an exam room right away. Except that then no one examined me for a long time. I did a lot of waiting, and it took a fair amount of pushing to get an EKG. Everything turned out fine (my doctor said it was stress, which even at the time seemed like the most likely answer), but I don't care how understaffed they were due to lunch--I was having symptoms that matched those of heart attacks in women, and it took way too much time and effort to get that checked out.

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    1. Yikes! You have had some really tough weeks, just from what I could see on Twitter and your blog. I hope you're feeling better soon. And I'm glad that the chest pains weren't anything serious.

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