This flowchart pretty much speaks for itself. (Click for a larger version.)

(Via Neatorama.)

Overheard at NYU:

Professor: What words do we get from the name Aphrodite?

Student #1: Hermaphrodite.

Professor: Yes — from the union of Aphrodite and Hermes. What else?

Student #2: Aphrodisiac!

Professor: Good! And what is an aphrodisiac?

Students: [Silence.]

Professor: Are you all Victorians? Come on… What’s it called when one uses something to arouse sexual appetite?

Student #3: Necrophiliac! [Class laughs.]

Professor: I have to advise you to invest in a dictionary, as it’s simply prudent to know the difference between a necrophiliac and an aphrodisiac. Hopefully, you won’t ever need to thank me for that.

Ah yes, true higher education in action! (I shouldn’t snark: In my Intro Phil class yesterday, the Paris Hilton South Park episode somehow came up while discussing various informal fallacies.) Here’s some more:

Political philosophy professor after oral surgery: I had a choice to make: I could have stayed home like a happy clam on Percocet, or I could teach class… I miss the Percocet.

–Hunter College

Professor: Don’t get too excited — I’m not putting you into groups. Yeah, I saw you all sitting there, looking around, thinking ‘Which of these fuckers is going to do all of the work?’

–Fordham University

Wow, I soooooo want an “Overheard on Campus.”

For a while, probably about a year and a half, I wasn’t doing much cooking. Mostly, I was feeling too busy. This summer, as I got into the habit of finishing all my work during the day rather than putting it off until the evening, I resumed cooking regularly. I’ve continued, even though my schedule has gotten busier.

I enjoy the process of cooking and the pleasure of eating even more than I remember doing in the past. Also, I’ve found that cooking basically eliminates my desire to eat out at restaurants. That’s not surprising, as my cooking is usually as good if not better than what I can order. Happily, that saves us time, money, and calories. (I almost always overeat when I eat out. Plus restaurant food is chock full of calories.)

As usual, I cook from Cook’s Illustrated (a.k.a. America’s Test Kitchen). Last night, I made their Carbonnade a la Flamande (i.e. Belgian beef, beer, and onion stew) served over Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes. It was fantastic!

Thank goodness for leftovers!

Journalist Michael Hanlon describes what it’s like to be on the wrong end of the US Army’s new nonlethal pain generator:

…It is a bit like touching a red-hot wire, but there is no heat, only the sensation of heat. There is no burn mark or blister.

…When turned on, it emits an invisible, focused beam of radiation — similar to the microwaves in a domestic cooker — that are tuned to a precise frequency to stimulate human nerve endings. It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile.

Because the beam penetrates skin only to a depth of 1/64th of an inch, it cannot, says Raytheon, cause visible, permanent injury. But anyone in the beam’s path will feel, over their entire body, the agonising sensation I’ve just felt on my fingertip. The prospect doesn’t bear thinking about.

“I have been in front of the full-sized system and, believe me, you just run. You don’t have time to think about it — you just run,” says George Svitak, a Raytheon executive.

For those who are science fiction fans, this sounds like a real-life version of the neural pain stimulator from Dune. And of course, there’s one more obvious application:

Perhaps the most alarming prospect is that such machines would make efficient torture instruments. They are quick, clean, cheap, easy to use and, most importantly, leave no marks. What would happen if they fell into the hands of unscrupulous nations where torture is not unknown?

The agony the Raytheon gun inflicts is probably equal to anything in a torture chamber — these waves are tuned to a frequency exactly designed to stimulate the pain nerves. I couldn’t hold my finger next to the device for more than a fraction of a second. I could make the pain stop, but what if my finger had been strapped to the machine?

The article includes a picture. (Via Boing Boing.)

In retrospect, it’s not surprising that volunteer-manned suicide hotlines are plagued by scary levels of incompetence:

The person manning the suicide hot line should have asked a follow-up question about the gun. Yes, the caller had said, he was despondent, and, yes, he mentioned he had considered using a gun to end his life. But that’s where that line of conversation ended – until the phone receiver exploded with the sound of a gunshot.

The caller had a rifle with a string tied to the trigger, rigged to point at his head. The bullet went wide, sparing the man, but a question or two more from the crisis-center representative – such as, do you have a gun with you now? – might have changed the course of events.

The journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior has published a remarkable series of articles on the effectiveness of suicide hot lines, opening a window into the world of desperate people and the volunteers who try to help them get through the night. Two of the unprecedented studies involved eavesdropping on suicide hot-line calls – in which the researchers heard things like that terrifying rifle shot – and two main conclusions came out of the work: One, many crisis-line callers are indeed in suicidal distress (and not just lonely or sad) and they are helped by talking to an empathetic fellow human being. And two, the call centers fail, with alarming regularity, to ask some very basic questions: Are you suicidal? Do you have a plan? Do you have the tools at hand to carry it off? Are you alone and drinking? …

In 723 of 1,431 calls, for example, the helper never got around to asking whether the caller was feeling suicidal.

And when suicidal thoughts were identified, the helpers asked about available means less than half the time. There were more egregious lapses, too: in 72 cases a caller was actually put on hold until he or she hung up. Seventy-six times the helper screamed at, or was rude to, the caller. Four were told they might as well kill themselves. (In one such case, the caller had admitted to compulsively molesting a child.)

There were 33 evident on-line suicide attempts, yet only six rescue efforts, sometimes because the caller ended the communication. In one case, a caller who’d overdosed passed out, yet the helper hung up.

I guess the suicidally depressed could try calling again, in the hopes of hitting on one of the better volunteers. (Apparently, they do exist.) That’s probably not going to happen though, horribly enough.