The oldest of my cousins (on my mother’s side) was always the standard by which the rest of us were measured. He was smart, athletic, and an overall well-behaved kid. Whenever one of us did something that disappointed our parents, we would be reminded of my cousin’s achievement and asked why we couldn’t be more like him. While some of…
I’ve long been a fan of Io9.com, a blog about science fiction and other things to do with science. The writers of that blog have been, for the most part, very reasonable in their approaches to things having to do with science. They’ve come out against antivaxxers and all their nonsense. But I guess the streak had to end at…
When I was ten years old, my mother and father decided that it was better for me to come go to school in El Paso, Texas, instead of Juarez, Mexico. They made arrangements with my aunt and uncle to go and live with them during the week and then go home to mom in Juarez on the weekends, and go…
How many of us, as children and even as adults, have called people names because they acted “weird”? I know I have. It’s one of those things about human interactions that anything outside the norm is to be labeled and made fun of, or shunned and kept away. What we often fail to recognize is that we either hurt people being labeled that way or take away from the seriousness of a mental condition by using the name of that condition as an adjective. Saying that someone is “totally OCD” because they like a clean desk at work takes away from the seriousness of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Here is a video that dives into this topic and explains what those disorders really are, and why we need to stop minimizing them.
When the chips are down, we’re all a bunch of primates following the herd. Or are we? And can we leverage this mentality to improve the public’s health?
Doing research for this biostats paper has taught me a few surprising things about suicide.
There was a stabbing last night in the town where I live. I don’t know the full details of it, but it happened downtown. The local newspaper has been adopting social media as a better way to get the news out. Not very many people buy the printed edition of the paper anymore. Anyway, the newspaper posted about the stabbing…
Men. We’re so strong and so weak at the same time. We laugh in the face of danger and yet cower away to the corner when life gets rough. We’re expected to live through things that make us sad and depressed and still put up a smile. Although we don’t have it as tough as women do — trust me,…
Addictions have always been interesting to me. Growing up, I lived among people who used and abused drugs (e.g. alcohol, marijuana, even heroin). The one thing they all had in common was the understanding in their heads that what they were doing was not good for them and that, in their minds, they could quit at any time. I shook…
