Almost at 100%...

Whoever schedules telecons at my client's office indirectly smiled at me yesterday when they assigned my relief to a three-and-a-half hour marathon telecon that covered issues faced by the "Multilateral Increment Operations Control Board" as well by a group with the unlikely name of "Team Zero." The telecon delayed my relief's arrival, so I was freed only after I had spent 11 hours on my shift. By the time I got home and settled down, it was nearly 1 pm, so I checked my e-mail and watched an old episode of The Saint, starring Roger Moore, and then went to bed at 3 pm.

For the first time since the beginning of the month, I lost consciousness for a block of time that exceeded 3 hours in length. (I probably could have slept longer, too, as I had to struggle to get up, but duty called, and here I am.)

I was gratified to note, upon waking up, that my health is almost back at 100%. My cough is almost completely gone (two coughs noted over the past 3 hours), and other life-support systems appear to be operating nominally. :^)

My client left a message while I was asleep asking if I'd check the behavior of a Perl script I'd written for them when I was an employee. The script takes a string, expressed in English or any of three Cyrillic mappings and input via a Web page, and outputs glossary entries containing that string to a formatted Web page. The client suggested the page doesn't work if you input strings in Cyrillic, but testing it from my work place in the MSR shows that the script works properly with Cyrillic input from my computer. (Indeed, you'd figure that a bug that obvious would've been noticed before; the page has been up for only four or five years.)

I do not seem to have gotten the final word about what I'll be doing next week, but I have been told that I'll be doing this shift (in the MSR) for two more nights/mornings (Saturday and Sunday), and then on Monday I'll start work at 7 am for a shift doing space-to-ground simultaneous interpretation until about 3:30 pm. No news was available as to what I'm to be doing on Tuesday or later. I hope my stint doing space-to-ground isn't just to give someone a day off from that shift...

For now, I'm going to go do some background research on fire protection while waiting for something to start bubbling here in the MSR. Maybe I'll go visit the space-to-ground interpreters to find out if they know more than I do about next week's schedule.

Cheers...

While researching 'synthetic fluorine foaming agent'...

I've written a number of letters to the editor in my time, starting when I was in college in New York and continuing through the time I lived in Jacksonville, Florida. One of the first letters I wrote that was published was addressed to the editor of the New York Daily News, and it concerned fluoridation.

This was way before I'd gotten anything published with my name on it outside of Locust Valley, and I must admit, I was pretty jazzed about having my letter printed. That lasted about as long as it took for someone I knew to find the letter and then look me up and castigate me as a right-wing nut job.

I didn't understand the criticism. In my letter, I argued the libertarian position: that it was not right to tax people and use the money to add medication to drinking water, literally forcing it down the throat of the citizenry. I also raised the issue of there possibly being other than purely disinterested, public-spirited motives at work behind the push to fluoridate.

In the end, I don't think this or any of my letters had any effect - except, perhaps, to stroke my ego - so I gave up the practice some time ago. (Getting paid for what you write is ever more satisfying, even without a byline, but I digress...)

In doing a little 'net research on synthetic fluorine foam firefighting agents, I managed to stumble across this page at the web site of the Fluoride Action Network.

If the information presented can be trusted, it turns out that:

• Cavities have declined at impressive rates throughout the entire western, industrialized world over the past half century. This includes Western Europe, 98% of which drinks unfluoridated water.
  
• Fluoride used to fluoridate water is actually a phosphate fertilizer industry waste product.
  
• The chemicals used to fluoridate over 90% of U.S. drinking water have never been tested for safety or effectiveness.
  
• The largest dental survey ever conducted in the US found virtually no difference in dental decay between children living in fluoridated vs. unfluoridated areas.

The Network's page suggests that the real "oral health crisis" in the U.S. today is not lack of fluoride in the water, but the lack of private dental insurance among the poor and "underinvestment" in Medicaid by the government, which is not exactly a position one associates with "right-wing nut jobs."

Wandering ever further away from the topic of my research, I also stumbled across this reasonably balanced GoodTimes article by Rob Pratt on the struggle for and against fluoridation in Santa Cruz, California.

Still haven't found what I'm looking for, though.

Cheers...