There's no time to lose...

I saw a public service announcement the other day, featuring Emily Deschanel (who stars in the television series Bones). In this announcement, if memory serves, she tells us that if only we'd all pay our credit card bills electronically, we could save $2 billion annually, and goes on to state that such an amount could pay off the credit card bills of some impressive number of people.

There's "could" and there's "would," and the claim made underscores the difference.

That aside, the PSA got me to thinking a couple of things: First, that kind of move would not be particularly good news for the Postal Service, since virtually all such payments are made using first-class mail, which is what subsidizes much of the other crap that's delivered to our mailboxes. Second, the type of thinking that went into that "that money could pay off the bills" line is almost identical (but in a reverse way) to the punch line of the joke that goes:

Jo: "In the world today, a woman gives birth to a child every 45 seconds!"
Mo: "There's no time to lose. We must find that woman and stop her!"

Cheers...

Considering going with the flow...

Everyone, it seems, has a disclaimer tacked onto the end of his or her email. Personally, I detest the things, as they are simply a waste of otherwise perfectly good bits, but the pressure to conform is becoming stifling.

I'm thinking of using the following email disclaimer:

This email may contain confidential information. If it does, and you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender of this error and destroy all copies in your possession. As a result, while your karma may or may not improve, it is almost certain that no endangered species will come to harm as a result of complying with this request. If you aren't reading this, then this disclaimer has done its job.

I would dare to make this a bit more "edgy," but as the one and only purpose of having such a device welded to the butt of every email is to give the appearance of professionalism—and as virtually everyone I correspond with has one of those dry, ugly disclaimers that take themselves all too seriously—I wonder if a really "out there" disclaimer might not entail some hostile (and worse, silent) blowback.

Your opinions, on any of this?

Cheers...

Interesting fact from yesterday...

I found a reference for the document I translated yesterday (said reference being Differences in Patterns of Mood States among Russian and American Space Station Crews, by Ritsher, et al.). The article's principal benefit was that it provided a third-party verification for "mental asthenization" as a translation of a term that played a central role in my document, "психическая астенизация").

What I found interesting, however, was the following:

The syndrome that Russian cosmonauts are watched for, “psikhicheskaya astenizatsiya” (mental asthenization), is considered a mild, reversible form of neurasthenia. Neurasthenia is considered a bona fide clinical syndrome in Russia, China and Europe, but it is viewed with great skepticism in America and does not appear in the American DSM-IV diagnostic system. Similarly, there is debate in Russia about whether American psychiatric models are accurate for Russians.

I am not surprised to learn that clinical syndromes differ among countries (because I knew that), but it's nice to have this data point in my "intellectual stockpile" for future discussions.

Cheers...