Good Advice

18 Things My Dad Was Right About

Fifteen years ago, when I was a freshman in high school, my English teacher gave my class a homework assignment entitled, “Advice for a Younger Generation.” The concept of the assignment was simple: Each student had to interview a person who was over the age of 25, gather enough information to write a basic biography of their life and find out what their top tips are for a younger generation. I chose to interview my dad. He was 53 at the time and he gave me 18 pieces of advice.

I had completely forgotten about all this until last week when I was visiting my parents. My mom had me clean out a few old boxes she had stored in the attic. In one of these boxes I found the original “Advice for a Younger Generation” assignment dated April 22nd, 1996. I read through it and was totally blown away.

Even though my dad’s advice is relevant to a person of any age, my 29-year-old self can relate to it in a way my 14-year-old self didn’t quite grasp at the time. In fact, the first thought that went through my head was, “My dad was right.”

Here are his 18 pieces of advice for a younger generation, transcribed with his permission.

1.  Your 30’s, 40’s and 50’s won’t feel like your 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. – Adults are just older children. When you get older you won’t feel as old as you imagine you will. For the most part, you still feel exactly the way you feel right now, just a little wiser and more confident. You’ve had time to establish your place in the world and figure out what’s important to you. Don’t fear growing up. Look forward to it. It’s awesome.

2.  Bad things will happen to you and your friends. – Part of living and growing up is experiencing unexpected troubles in life. People lose jobs, get in car accidents and sometimes die. When you are younger, and things are going pretty well, this harsh reality can be hard to visualize. The smartest, and oftentimes hardest, thing we can do in these kinds of situations is to be tempered in our reactions. To want to scream obscenities, but to wiser and more disciplined than that. To remember that emotional rage only makes matters worse. And to remember that tragedies are rarely as bad as they seem, and even when they are, they give us an opportunity to grow stronger.

Grow Old With Me

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Laughing Through the Pain

Other countries use nitrous oxide in the delivery room. Why don't we?

by Libby Copeland

In the polarized landscape of parenting, it often seems there's no such thing as a middle ground. Parenting books and blogs portray parenthood as a minefield of divisive choices: Breast vs. bottle, cloth vs. disposable, sling vs. stroller. The first of many fraught decisions a mother faces—one she makes before she's even a mom—is the choice between "natural" (unmedicated) and pain-free (anesthetized) childbirth. As expectant women quickly learn, either choice comes with a caricature: You can forgo the drugs and be a smug, crunchy masochist, or you can accept them and be a selfish, epidural-dependent wimp.

But part of the reason the childbirth debate has become so polarized is the dearth of any middle ground between full-on epidural anesthesia and nothing at all. (Unless you count breathing exercises as a pain-control measure.) Lately, though, a number of midwives have been pushing for a third way. They are advocating that more delivery rooms offer nitrous oxide, the inhaled anesthetic more commonly known as laughing gas, familiar to many of us from dental procedures (and, perhaps, ill-advised experiments with Reddi-wip cans).Why are midwives—a group that in this country is usually associated with natural childbirth—leading the charge to bring a new drug to laboring women?

Nitrous oxide has a lot going for it. Unlike the epidural, which offers complete pain relief but renders a woman immobile from the waist down, nitrous oxide merely blunts pain. But it also lets a laboring woman walk, perch on a birthing ball, whatever. It's comparatively cheap, and it's fast-acting, offering relief in less than a minute. Perhaps most key from midwives' point of view, it is easily administered by the laboring woman herself. She grabs the mask when she knows a contraction is coming. She stops as the contraction ends. In other words, she is empowered to manage her own pain.

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Fish Tacos

Adding beer to the batter will help the fish for these tacos fry up golden brown.

1 1⁄2 cups shredded green
 cabbage
2 limes (1 cut into wedges)
1 1⁄2 tbsp. kosher salt,
   plus more to taste
2 cups flour
1⁄2  cup cornstarch
1 12-oz. bottle dark beer
1 egg
Canola oil, for frying
1 lb. boneless, skinless red snapper,
   cut into 1 1⁄2" strips
2 tsp. chili powder
16  corn tortillas
1⁄4 red onion, thinly sliced
4 sprigs cilantro, chopped
1 tomato, cored and chopped
Sour cream or crema
Mexican hot sauce
      
1. In a bowl, combine cabbage and juice of 1 lime; season with salt, to taste; chill. In another bowl, whisk together 1 1⁄2 tbsp. salt, 1 1⁄2 cups flour, cornstarch, beer, and egg to make a batter.

2. Pour oil into a 5-qt. Dutch oven to a depth of 2"; heat until a thermometer reads 375˚. Sprinkle fish with chili powder and salt. Put remaining flour on a plate. Dredge fish in flour; shake off excess. Working in batches, dip fish in batter and fry until crisp, about 3 minutes. Transfer to a rack set inside a sheet pan; keep warm in 200˚ oven.

3. Heat a skillet over medium-high heat. Working in batches, add tortillas; cook, flipping, until warmed. To serve, layer 2 tortillas together, fill with some of the fish and cabbage, squeeze with a lime wedge, and garnish with onion, cilantro, tomato, sour cream, and hot sauce. Repeat.

SERVES 4

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The Influencing Machine

[ed.  Engaging concept and dead on analysis.  Please take the time to check out the storyboard after the jump, you will learn a lot.]

by  Brooke Gladstone

It takes me an absurdly long time to form an opinion. It took me some 20 years of writing about the media to coalesce a view coherent enough to call my own. The fact that I chose a comic-book format to present that view might seem a little peculiar to those who know me from the radio. After all, radio is the medium without pictures. But it's not really.

More than television, more than newspapers, radio creates a sense of intimacy—the illusion of a one-to-one relationship—because the listener relies on the reporter's voice to paint pictures. Voices are very personal. I thought that I could re-create radio's intimacy if I had the ability to look readers in the eye while guiding them through my media manifesto, The Influencing Machine, which starts with the invention of writing and ends in the year 2045.

Another reason for using comics: The world is full of media books with competing predictions of cyber-utopia or annihilating chaos. I steer between those shoals, and sometimes bump up against both of them. My argument (don't rejoice, don't panic) is built on many small, historical moments. I want those moments to stick with the reader. Pictures, especially the sly, evocative pictures drawn here by Josh Neufeld, are sticky.

The first excerpt, called "Objectivity," challenges two common assumptions about objectivity: that it is essential to good journalism and that it is real. It is neither. The second excerpt is a cautionary tale about numbers. There are quite a few such tales in the book about how humans are wired to absorb information that confirms their worldview, and to repel information that disputes it. The quality of that information is immaterial.

The point of the book is that the media are not the "influencing machine" of popular imagination, but rather a mirror. We can change the reflection, but it's very hard to do.

The following comes from Brooke Gladstone's new book, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media, illustrated by Josh Neufeld.

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Liquid Gold

The Booming Market for Human Breast Milk.

by Judy Dutton

It started with a bleary-eyed Google search: “Sell breast milk.” Desiree Espinoza had a 2-month-old baby girl but was pumping out enough milk to feed triplets. Ziplock baggies full of the stuff were crammed in her freezer, and unpaid bills crowded her kitchen table. She wasn’t sure there was a market for her overflow or whether selling it was even legal. A few clicks later, she found herself on a website called Only the Breast.

The site looks a lot like craigslist, except instead of selling used cars and like-new Ikea furniture, Only the Breast deals in human breast milk. There are hundreds of posts from new mothers eager to turn their surplus into profits. Many kick off with a chirpy headline (“Chubby baby milk machine!”), then follow with a snapshot of their own robust infant and lush descriptions (“rich, creamy breast milk!” “fresh and fatty!”), making a primal source of nutrition sound like a New York cheesecake. The posts are additionally categorized to appeal to a variety of milk seekers, based on a baby’s age (from 0 to 12 months), say, or special dietary restrictions (dairy- and gluten-free). There’s also a sort of “anything goes” section for women willing to sell to men. Some ship coolers of frozen milk packed in dry ice. Others deal locally, meeting in cafés to exchange cash for commodity. The asking price on Only the Breast runs $1 to $2.50 an ounce. (A 6-month-old baby consumes about 30 ounces a day.)

Intrigued, Espinoza tapped out her sales pitch: “Mostly organic raised breast milk. I have over 500 oz saved and I need to get rid of it. During the week I only eat organic.” A few days later, she was in business, selling the milk at $2 an ounce to a couple of customers in the Phoenix area where she lives, including a mother with a newborn and a man who claimed breast milk helped his immune disorder. “There’s no way I could get a job with an infant, so this helps pay for diapers and clothes,” she says. In three months, the 19-year-old college student earned enough to buy a new laptop and the dress she wore to her wedding to the baby’s 22-year-old father, a recent college grad. She plans to continue selling for a year, and if she can pump a steady 30 ounces a day, she could take in about $20,000.

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DCA in Context

[ed.  This is a followup to an earlier post on DCA.  It describes how cancer treatment drugs typically advance through clinical research trials, and why all the hoopla about DCA is somewhat premature.]

by  Maggie Koerth-Baker

You know the game, Telephone? You line up a bunch of people and the person on one end whispers something to their neighbor, who repeats it to the next person in line, and so on. At the other end, the last player says the secret out loud, and then everybody gets a nice chuckle from how distorted the secret has become as it was passed along the line. I rather like Telephone the game. But, lord, how I hate when it happens in real life.

So, this week on the Internet, there's a story circulating that claims scientists have discovered a foolproof, side-effect free cure for cancer ... but They (you know, "THEY") are preventing you from getting access to it. This story is like the end of a game of Telephone. There's some real (and interesting!) science going on, but by the time the story made it to Facebook the reality of a promising chemical compound that could be a good treatment for some types of cancer (maybe, scientists aren't sure yet) had become a first-rate conspiracy theory.

The compound in question is dichloroacetate (or DCA), and it's not really anything new. In fact, research into this compound has been going on long enough—and with enough attention from within the field of people who closely follow basic, laboratory chemical research—that I could almost do this entire debunking using only excerpts from four-year-old posts made by Orac, a surgeon and scientist who blogs about this kind of stuff in a much more specialized way than I do.

Here is something fundamental that you need to remember: Every moment of every day, there is tons of research happening that is centered around chemical compounds that might be useful in some medical application. New compounds are discovered. Existing compounds are tested in new ways. Sometimes, one of these compounds looks particularly interesting to a researcher. They'll publish on it, and their school or institution will put out a press release. Basic chemistry isn't much of a news hook, so these press releases tend to speculate about what the compound could be used for, how it might benefit us someday.

There are so many of these sort of press releases floating around at any given time that journalists who focus on medical science talk about them as a separate category. But, just because a compound is interesting in a chemistry sense, or just because it has shown promise in some in vitro laboratory tests, doesn't mean that it will ever be useful in a practical application. It is very common for a compound to kill cancer in a test tube, but not actually do anything in a human body. Sometimes, a compound successfully fights cancer, but isn't actually safe for humans. And, most importantly, "cancer" isn't really one disease. Different cancers have different causes and require different kinds of treatment—even the same cancer at different stages might not be able to be treated the same. A compound could be effective against stage 2 leukemia, but not do a damn thing to treat stage 4 breast cancer.

The Great Switch by the Super Rich

by Robert Reich

Forty years ago, wealthy Americans financed the U.S. government mainly through their tax payments. Today wealthy Americans finance the government mainly by lending it money. While foreigners own most of our national debt, over 40 percent is owned by Americans – mostly the very wealthy.

This great switch by the super rich – from paying the government taxes to lending the government money — has gone almost unnoticed. But it’s critical for understanding the budget predicament we’re now in. And for getting out of it.

Over that four decades, tax rates on the very rich have plummeted. Between the end of World War II and 1980, the top tax bracket remained over 70 percent — and even after deductions and credits was well over 50 percent. Now it’s 36 percent. As recently as the late 1980s, the capital gains rate was 35 percent. Now it’s 15 percent.

Not only are rates lower now, but loopholes are bigger. 18,000 households earning more than a half-million dollars last year paid no income taxes at all. In recent years, according to the IRS, the richest 400 Americans have paid only 18 percent of their total incomes in federal income taxes. Billionaire hedge-fund and private-equity managers are allowed to treat much of their incomes as capital gains (again, at 15 percent).

Some Advice for Young Grads

by Mike Barthel

It's college graduation season, and with the blooming of the cherry trees comes that cherished annual journalistic tradition: telling new graduates they're screwed in a way that no one else in the history of the world has ever been screwed. When it's actual recent graduates doing this fretting, I can understand, since being forcibly thrown into a job search is always a scary situation. But for their elders to be doing this worrying—elders who presumably have found some success as they got on in life—it strikes me as petty, self-serving fearmongering. So from someone back in academia after a decade at an office job, here's some real talk.

Your first job is probably going to suck.

That’s OK! Having a shitty job that’s not good for your career is going to disappoint your parents, sure. But you know what? It gives you more money than you’ve had before, money which, if you don’t care about your job, can be used for having just tons and tons of fun. You are now an adult, which means it’s OK to be naughty! Get drunk, take drugs, sleep with strangers! Having a shitty job means you don’t have to worry about the ramifications to your career if you show up at the office still drunk from the night before and vomit in a trash can, or bang the hot intern at the Christmas party, or do coke off your boss’s desk. Go nuts!

The point of an undergraduate degree is not to get you a job.

Sorry! We would’ve told you this before, but teenagers are kind of stupid and have a hard time grasping nebulous goals like “improving your character and/or life skills” so we have to give you concrete economic reasons to do stuff. Don’t get me wrong—statistically speaking, you will get paid lots more with an undergrad degree than without it. But did you really think all those psych classes were job training? Look, if we wanted to train you to do things, we would give public universities enough funding so that students aren't forced to spend all their time in 450-person lecture classes. Your undergraduate degree wasn't about learning how to do a specific job. It was about learning how to do a job in general, and how to be a decent human being. Beyond that, don’t expect anything.

A Father's Love

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Looking for Love in All the Right Places

In the run-up to the 2012 election, Republicans are behaving like, well, Democrats. Blind to the road-tested charms of Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty, the G.O.P. base is lusting for an upstart savior—the likes of Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, or the tantalizingly elusive Ms. Palin.

by James Wolcott

‘Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line” has been an article of political faith and a staple of punditry since the notion was popularized by Bill Clinton, who barbecued Kennedy charisma into a hunka hunka burnin’ love. Like so many political truisms, the conceit that Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus has a slick, pop-psych plausibility. Republicans: steely, rational, paternalistic, respectful of authority, easy to herd, the party of No. Democrats: sugary, emotional, idealistic, yearning for novelty, hard to marshal, the party of Oh Yeah, Baby, Make Mama Feel Good. In 2008, Barack Obama did get Democrats hyperventilating, whipped up to a creamy froth, while John McCain creaked ahead like a cranky granddad whom Republicans let move to the front of the buffet line, deferring to seniority, as they had in 1996, when Bob Dole turtled to the top of the ticket. But this may have been the last hurrah for the Republican’s hierarchal heirdom. In the Tea Party era, it is the restless conservative Republican who has become passion’s plaything, the toy of impetuous romance, an erotomania only intensified by the lusting for an upstart savior. (No elected Democrat gets his or her fans as Justin Bieber-frenzied as that Republican derringer Ron Paul, whose son Rand, freshman senator from Kentucky, has become the new curly darling.) Republicans grudgingly fell into line behind McCain not because subservience is downloaded into their lockstep brains, but because their hearts’ desires pulled up lame, scratched themselves from the race.

It’s difficult now to recall the improbable excitement that Fred Thompson aroused when he pawed the earth and parked a kingpin cigar in his mouth, indicating his inclination to run. He got off to a slow start that led to an even slower finish, though for a few tantalizing moments he showed signs of animation. At the conservative National Review Online’s group blog, The Corner, Peter Robinson, the author of a book about Ronald Reagan (every contributor to National Review Online has authored a book on Reagan), heard tell that Thompson was starting to tear up the turf in a key southern primary:

Earlier today I talked with an old friend who’s close to the Thompson campaign. At every Thompson campaign stop in South Carolina, he told me, there is something new: real excitement The state troopers are showing that special deference and respect they reserve for candidates whom they actually suspect will soon become the commander in chief. And Thompson himself is pointed, energetic, combative. In other words, the campaign feels as though its achieving liftoff.

An optical illusion fueled by wishful thinking, it turned out. It wasn’t the first stage of liftoff but the final stage of poop-out. Rudolph Giuliani, Mr. 9/11, didn’t even enjoy that brief tingle of false hope. In 2007 he had been trouncing his rivals in the polls of likely candidates. He looked so good on paper, so forceful, so dynamic, so command-ready, but when he delivered himself in person, it was as if the wrong date had shown up at the door. The door closed before he could retract his scary grin. Mitt Romney—he had a Rock Hudson thing going, shoeblack hair and a well-hung résumé, but even for a shameless, position-shifting phony he seemed a trifle insincere. It wasn’t until McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate that the flaming desire of the far right found its Red Queen. But as of this writing, Palin is undeclared, leaving all that love with nowhere and everywhere to go.

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DCA

by  Natalie Wolchover

On April 12, 1955, the first successful polio vaccine was administered to almost 2 million schoolchildren around the country. Its discoverer, University of Pittsburgh medical researcher Jonas Salk, was interviewed on CBS Radio that evening.

"Who owns the patent on this vaccine?" radio host Edward R. Murrow asked him.

It was a reasonable question, considering that immunity to a deadly disease that afflicted 300,000 Americans annually ought to be worth something.

"Well, the people, I would say," Salk famously replied. "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"

In a world where the cancer drug Avastin — patented by the pharmaceutical company Genentech/Roche — costs patients about $80,000 per year without having been proven to extend lives, Salk's selflessness has made him the hero of many medical researchers today.

One of Salk's admirers is Evangelos Michelakis, a cancer researcher at the University of Alberta who, three years ago, discovered that a common, nontoxic chemical known as DCA, short for dichloroacetate, seems to inhibit the growth of cancerous tumors in mice. Michelakis' initial findings garnered much fanfare at the time and have recirculated on the Web again this week, in large part because of a blog post ("Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice") that ignited fresh debate with people wondering if it was true.

The mechanism by which DCA works in mice is remarkably simple: It killed most types of cancer cells by disrupting the way they metabolize sugar, causing them to self-destruct without adversely affecting normal tissues.

Following the animal trials, Michelakis and his colleagues did tests of DCA on human cancer cells in a Petri dish, then conducted human clinical trials using $1.5 million in privately raised funds. His encouraging results — DCA treatment appeared to extend the lives of four of the five study participants — were published last year in Science Translational Medicine.

The preliminary work in rodents, cell cultures, and small trials on humans points to DCA as being a powerful cancer treatment. That doesn't mean it's the long-awaited cure — many other compounds have seemed similarly promising in the early stages of research without later living up to that promise — but nonetheless, Michelakis believes larger human trials on DCA are warranted.

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Ketterer Continental

Your Fleetwood not cutting it?

This monster motor home features a Mercedes-Benz truck chassis, a massive, luxurious cabin that includes a real kitchen, dining with seating for five, a master bedroom with a king bed plus a shower, toilet and sky light. Actually, the main bedroom features a bath tub, too, so you can soak after a hard day of… whatever it is that the wealthy do when they’re “camping.”

And if you fancy a quick jaunt through the country, a Smart car lives in its butt.

 

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Abbottabad

Raul Gutierrez

If you are interested in how news starts to follow a narrative especially when facts and boots on the ground are sparse, study the details of the reports on Abbottabad. I happen to have been through Abbottabad as it's on the tail end (or beginning, depending on your direction) of the Karakoram Highway and have a sense of the place. The media has repeatedly defined the city as a suburb of Islamabad (the Pakistani capital) and as a military garrison. Also, interesting, is the description of the house as a mansion/luxury compound and a fortress.

Abbottabad was founded as a British Hill Station, a place where English military officers and officials would escape the heat of cities like Peshawar, Rawalpindi, or Lahore (Islamabad, the Pakistani equivalent of Brazillia, didn't exist yet). The city is a popular tourist destination, weekend getaway, and honeymoon spot for middle and upperclass Pakistanis. THE honeymoon spot is another town called Murree which is higher in the mountains, Abbottabad is sort of a second tier spot.

The city is about 100 km from Islamabad over a road that takes roughly two hours to drive if the traffic isn't terrible which it often is. Many news organizations are reporting the distance between Islamabad and Abbottabad by drawing a straight line on a map without looking at topography. The straight line from Islamabad to Abbottabad crosses very high mountains. The road that actual people travel takes a more circuitous route.

A big prestigious military academy sits on the north side of the town and lots of military folks build retirement and vacation homes there. This is mainly because the Pakistani brass have the the type of money/sway to build houses in popular vacation spots. If you show up in the town center you wouldn't think of the town as being any more or less of military town than any other town in the region (the military has a heavy presence throughout the area). All the cities here have a large number of tribal people and the central government needs the military to reign them in.

Stay Connected

 

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The Tao of Travel

by  Rolf Potts

If there were an "A-List" of living American travel writers, Paul Theroux's name would be at the top. He revitalized the travel writing genre with his 1975 book The Great Railway Bazaar, and since then the prolific author has written more than a dozen travel books (and 28 novels or story collections) from regions as far-flung as Britain, Patagonia, the South Pacific, the Mediterranean, Central Asia, and Africa. His reflection on the joys of Maine in the wintertime, "The Wicked Coast," appears in the June issue of The Atlantic.

Theroux's newest book, The Tao of Travel, is not a narrative account of a single journey, but what the author calls "a distillation of travelers' visions and pleasures, observations from my work and others'...based on many decades of reading travel books and traveling the earth." Excerpting travel insights from writers like Mark Twain, Evelyn Waugh, Freya Stark, Charles Dickens, Graham Greene, Pico Iyer, and Susan Sontag, The Tao of Travel is "intended as a guidebook, a how-to, a miscellany, a vade mecum, a reading list, [and] a reminiscence." Theroux spoke to The Atlantic by phone from his home in Hawaii.

Your one-time mentor V. S. Naipaul once told you, "A book needs a reason for being written." Why did you write The Tao of Travel?

Over the past 40 or so years people have asked me what my favorite travel book is, and there's no simple answer. The fact is that I have hundreds of favorites, and so I wrote this book, which is a personal anthology. It's not just a listing of the books I like; it's an explanation of why I like them. It's an elaborate reading list, you might say, to get people interested in those books.

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Dive

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Chess For Three

[ed.  Looks kind of like a pizza to me, each piece poised to capture a pepperoni.]

Finally, a Chess variant board has been developed that accommodates three players, without compromising of the rules, strategies, or competitive challenges that make Chess the best board game in the world.

The only changes from conventional chess are some protocol issues that must be followed to maintain order where the teams border each other, which is simple and necessary. Also, please notice that the trajectory lines orienting from the outer rank, are simply visual aids to help guide diagonal moves passing through the center.

If the path is clear, a diagonal move starting from the outer rank can pass through the center and sweep back around to where it originated.

The complexities of the third player are infinite. Your threatened piece may be allowed to maintain occupancy as your position is beneficial to the threatening player. But how long can it last?

This scenario may exist all over the board. There are multiple trust and doubt situations between all players. An unexpected move might well result in a cascading massacre. Defense is crucial since a diagonal move through the center, or a horizontal move around the center can sneak up behind you. A player can be checkmated by a combination of both other players or ultimately one player can checkmate both other players at the same time.

Description and Rules:

Five Free Scientific Calculators

by Richard Byrne

In my school we've occasionally had a problem with scientific graphing calculators growing legs and walking away for good. I'm sure we're not the only school to have that problem. One possible solution to the problem of disappearing calculators is to have students use calculators on their laptops, netbooks, or tablets. Here are five free calculators that you can either use online or install on your computer.

Microsoft offers scientific calculator that you can download for free (Windows only). Microsoft Mathematics 4.0 is a graphing calculator that plots in 2D and 3D. Of course, the calculator does many other functions such as solving inequalities, converting units of measure, and performing matrix and vector operations.

Encalc is a free online scientific calculator. Encalc describes itself on its homepage as follows, "Encalc is an online scientific calculator. Its strength lies in its ability handle units and dimensional analysis, to define variables and its large database of constants. Parenthesis and scientific formulas are also supported." One of the features that I really like about Encalc are the explanations of how different variables and constants function within an equation or formula.

Web2.0calc is a free online scientific calculator. While it won't replace the TI-84 Plus, it can do what your average high school student needs it to do. The best part is, you don't have to use it on the Web2.0calc site because they offer three widgets that you can use to embed the calculator into your own blog or website.

Speed Crunch is a free scientific calculator application for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. Speed Crunch performs all of the functions necessary for high school Algebra and Geometry courses except graphing. In addition to performing all of these functions, Speed Crunch has a "math book" containing commonly used equations and formulas. One Speed Crunch feature that appealed to me from a design standpoint is the color coding of equations to differentiate between constants and variables.

Graph.tk is a free online graphing utility that I found in the Google Chrome Web Store. Graph.tk allows you to plot multiple functions through its dynamically resizing grid. To graph an equation on Graph.tk just click the "+" symbol to enter a new equation. Click here to watch a short video of Graph.tk in use. One thing that the video doesn't show and isn't clear the first time you use Graph.tk is that you need to delete the existing default equations before you start.

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Mommy Hates Daddy, and You Should Too

by Dahlia Lithwick

The competition to get your favorite disease recognized in the bible of mental health, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, can be as fierce as the talent contest in the Little Miss St. Paul Contest. The American Psychiatric Association is contemplating adding something called "parental alienation syndrome" (PAS) to the new edition of the DSM, scheduled to be published in May 2013, and the question has launched a national lobbying and letter-writing campaign on both sides. That angry letters and editorials might play any part in a debate about mental health and custody disputes probably tells you most of what you need to know about the validity of PAS.

What is parental alienation syndrome? William Bernet, a professor of psychiatry at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and an advocate for its inclusion in the DSM-5, describes it as "a mental condition in which a child, usually one whose parents are engaged in a high conflict divorce, allies himself or herself strongly with one parent, and rejects a relationship with the other parent, without legitimate justification."* There is no doubt that an ugly divorce can affect kids' relationship with their parents or cause children to choose sides, often in anger. In fact, that probably happens more often than not. But Bernet and others who argue for adding PAS to the Sears, Roebuck catalogue of mental health want to see it recognized as a legitimate mental health disorder in order to "spur insurance coverage, stimulate more systematic research, lend credence to [the] charge of parental alienation in court, and raise the odds that children would get timely treatment."

They want, in other words, to affix a name, some blame, and also a price tag on a broad range of child responses to a custody fight—some perfectly justified and some not—in the hopes of expanding its use in court.

And what's the downside to including PAS in the DSM? Well, for one thing, with a minimum of three participants needed to diagnose it, PAS starts to look less like a mental health disorder than an epidemic. It assumes that one crazy person (the mother) brainwashes a second crazy person (the child) into telling lies about a third person (the father). Just because a lot of parents have experienced blocked visitation and unreturned phone calls doesn't make every instance of that conduct the result of a medical "syndrome." Joan S. Meier, a professor of clinical law at George Washington University School of Law, has explained it this way: "PAS is a label that offers a particular explanation for a breach in relationship between a child and parent, but insofar as that breach could be explained in other ways, it is not in itself a medical or psychological diagnosis so much as a particular legal hypothesis."

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