Perfume and scents - Please stop bathing in them

I am sensitive to perfumes, they make my nose run and give me a headache. I work with several other people who are even more sensitive to scents, they get migraines. Meanwhile we have several people in our building that absolutely reek of perfume or other scents. People who have an extreme habit of putting on so much perfume that it makes my eyes water just to be near them.

Please stop.

Bathing in perfume will not make you pretty, it makes you reek. A shower every day makes you clean. Some unscented deodorant will keep you from smelling bad after you have sweated a bit. That is all you need. Dumping a ton of perfume on afterward just makes you smell bad in a different way.

I have several friends that use light scents and that doesn't bother me, so it isn't that I am just hyper-sensitive to perfume. I have spoken to them about this topic and they agree it isn't just me being sensitive, the people in question reek of perfume. I wonder what causes people to do this? Insecurity about themselves or have they just lost all sense of smell?

Knowledge isn't absolute

Every once in a while I meet somebody who believes that they know everything there is to know about a subject and that what they know is all that will ever be known about the subject. It is nice to be sure of yourself but come on! It is silly to think that what is known now is absolute truth and that this is all that will ever be known about a subject. We are constantly learning new things about old subjects and finding out that what we used to know about something isn't true. But no, these people are absolutely certain and cannot be swayed by logic.

What would lead somebody to this viewpoint? Why would anybody believe that what they know is absolute and no new knowledge is possible?

I have considered this question at length and have come to the conclusion that this is a form of wishful thinking. These people want to believe they know everything because they want to believe they are in control of their lives and there are no more surprises coming.

I like learning so the fact that no knowledge is absolute isn't a problem for me. But I think I can see why some people would want it otherwise because of a desire to be in control. I can sort of see it. But I wouldn't want to live in that world.

Been ill for a while but am doing better now

For the last couple of years my life has been getting progressively more painful. After a recent "we tried everything else" test gave a possible clue to an autoimmune problem they gave me Prednisone as a temporary test to see if it helps. It helps a lot. I hope this leads to better things.

Meanwhile I have been reading because that is about all I could do. I am currently reading Xenocide, the third book in the Ender's Game series. One of the worlds settled in this book is one totally settled by Chinese. They follow the old gods and the traditional Chinese philosophy. The closest they have to royalty is the god touched. Those who can sense the gods. Since the gods are perfect people who are god touched feel they are filthy. The early sign of a god touched is a person who compulsively washes their hands until they bleed. To test if they are truly god touched they put the person in a special room, dip their hands in dirty grease and leave them alone. If they try to kill themselves rather than live with the dirty hands then they are truly god touched.

I wish most of the religions people followed made even half that much sense. I mean this was freaky to read but compared to the popemobile it made a lot of sense!

A minor achievement

For a large part of my life I have been trying to understand electronics. I could figure it out well enough to build a flashlight, but anything beyond that point was a mystery. I bought and read several books that were supposed to explain electronics in a simple manner, but always got lost once they went past the simple flashlight stage. So about 15 years ago I bought a book called "There are no electrons: Electronics for Earthlings" which explained electronics a totally different way. And it was a great book but I always got lost part way through. Every couple of years I would try reading the book again but always got confused.

This weekend I finally made it all the way through the book and actually understood it. It is the first time in my life I can actually understand the formulas that apply to electronics. I even have some idea what some of the components do and how they work. It is amazing that I finally after all these years have grasped the concepts in the book. Of course there are still things I don't understand, things that were not covered in the book, but at least I have learned.

Yay for me!

I have an owie

I can boil my life down to this - I have an owie and nobody to kiss it to make it better.

Being single stinks. There is nobody to share your troubles with, which makes them even worse.

Being the proud parent of a 17 year old mildly autistic child doesn't help much either, he only cares about sports and stops listening to me after the fifth word. I am not sure if that is the teenager part or the mildly autistic part. Either way it means he isn't any help.

Being single stinks. It has been 10 years now and not one woman has asked me to marry her. Or even asked me out.

Goodbye Roger

My oldest living brother passed away this week. Since he was 11 years older than me I didn't really know him as well as I should have. He was a quiet person who listened more than he spoke, and our age difference meant he was almost out of the house by the time I was grown enough to have any sort of meaningful discussion with him.

His death this close to my mom's has been depressing. As you get older death of a friend or relative becomes more commonplace, but never easy to deal with.

Meeting aliens

In the movies and on TV all of the aliens we meet somehow speak English and look remarkably like us. If we ever meet an alien species things won't be this simple.

Will aliens even be able to breath the same air as us? Could we breath theirs? It seems unlikely that the air mixture of Earth is the only breathable one. It is possible that our air would be fatal to aliens, or theirs to us. Allergens and microbes in the air would further complicate this problem.

Would aliens be able to eat our food? It seems unlikely that aliens would be able to digest our food. It may in fact be deadly for them to even try. Some element common in our food may be poisonous to them.

Would we be able to communicate? We communicate mainly be vibrating the air but also with visual signals. Aliens might communicate with radio waves, generated light pulses, or chemical signals. They may not even use the linear pattern we use and instead communicate by using multiple channels at once.

Would we even recognize them as intelligent? If an alien landed a spaceship we would probably guess that it was intelligent. But if we landed on another planet would we even be able to recognize which creatures were intelligent and which weren't?

Meeting an alien species isn't as simple as they show on TV. I wonder how bad we will mess it up when we have the chance?