Walsingham

I agree that it's not that you get depressed purely because of bad sleep, eating etc. But as I say I think it would be worthwhile trying to leverage those factors to combat depression. Case in point: I'm sleeping well, eating relatively well, and exercising, but I realised today that my new girl is hiding something from me. This makes me sad. Doing pushups won't fix that.

I realised a while back that I have to accept fights will happen. Mainly because a) I'm pretty insensitive b) I date fiery women c) I enjoy a good fight

It is indeed interesting. I didn't know that about prions. However I was already of teh opinion that replicators evolve and due to my reading on evolutionary algorithms and so on.

Sorry to jump on you, steve, but NEAR elimination of diseases? Nuclear non-proliferation when Iran is doing what it's doing? You've chosen perfect examples of why we don't work, haven't you?

No, because faith has never provided any observable, measurable results. Science has. Faith moves men. End of.

I have to say, after having studied and interviewed the militias that they would be as successful in going up against US Army regulars or even staties as the girl scouts.

Surely doing exorcisms would raise more money?

Im 100% with Krezzie. Assuming that correlation has noting to do with causation is as bad as always assuming it does mean causation. In this case as he put more eloquently than I would have, there are subsidiary reasons to believe causation due to the role of serotonin in depression and the way serotonin appears to be regulated by sleep. Actually I've been thinking for a while that we should try a depression therapy that consists entirely of aerobic exercise, good healthy food, and good sleep.

I'm certainly down with the notion of good overcoming evil. I'm a solid war is inevitable in certain cases, guy; but I'm also of the opinion that war is totally unnecessary in a lot of cases. Kindness can bridge the gap, and reduce the number of wars you fight. Less wars means more concentration of effort, means more wars won. Being raised in a small village I got the small c christian values of vicarage sunday school. Kindness above all.

Our local campaign which I am refereeing has come to a halt due partly to problems reconciling one of teh characters. He is a dwarf who has hooked up with some youngish elves, and they are adventuring in the Border Princes of the Warhammer universe. Problem is that he is a secret devotee of Khaine, god of murder. I have no clue how to play this. Looking for some inspiration I rolled up some starting mutations using the Chaos codexes, and he got 'evil eye' which means he can kill anyone by looking them in the eye. This is kind of cool, and I intend to work it into his story as we go along, with him getting the images of those innocents he kills trapped in his eye. Probably the effects will get stronger the more innocents he kills (not with his eye) growing from unease, to fear, to terror , and finaly insta-death. Now the basic plot is planned around bandit hunting, moving up to couriering, to fighting an orc horde, to fighting zombies etc etc, and maybe some grand political movements. But I don't see how having a murderer on board is going to do anything other than arse things up.

Well, exactly. I've jsut been reading the book Nemesis, which describes the final year of the war against Japan, and I can't imagine anything less evocative of the nobility of the samurai code (besides the prison camps) than that fatal moronic dash to doom, without fighter cover. "In Yamato's gunroom, at sea on the night of 6 April, an ironic voice demanded ' Which country showed the world what aircraft could do by sinking the Prince of Wales?' Her gunnery, never good, failed to down more than a handful of the planes which attacked her. A total waste.

In light of the recent attack on the Danish cartoonist behind one of the 'controversial' Muhammed cartoons, I thought it might be kind on younger members to recap the issue. Offensive to God, according to Al Qaeda Not offensive to God, according to Al Qaeda My own feeling is that being insensitive to strongly held beliefs is unwise, but murdering people who offend you is ****ing childish. I don't care whether it's because you think you're a shaheed, or a gangster, or the Marquis of bloody Saint Germaine. Man up.

I think Copenhagen proves a far more important 'fact' than any proof of global warming. Specifically that human cannot/will not collaborate to solve collective problems. Follow my reasoning: 1. Assume global warming is a result of human collective activity 2. Halting global warming will require an unnatural (that is counterto our normal behaviour) change in that activity 3. Being an unnatural change we would need to implement a control mechanism over our collective activity I assert 4. Such a control mechanism is so utterly inconsistent with current geopolitical realities as to be effictively impossible. Therefore 5. Optimal national/bloc policy must default to a self-interested focus on surviving the impact of global warming, not wasting resources on trying to pre-empt it.

I'm not saying I agree, but I can definitely see why you might feel that way. I probably mentioned this already but I actually met and was tutored for a while by one of the founders of Oxfam. He quit because publicly many years ago saying the charity existed purely to make the financiers feel better. To put his original statement perhaps more clearly he felt Oxfam existed to feed people, not to make sure they were fed. Anyway, that's another matter really. So what have you decided, Tigs?

I think effiiciency needn't be the be all and end all. Sometimes transnational effects are required. For example with child abuse images. A local effort isn't going to deliver on an international trade.

As I understand it teh body needs 'cool down' time to get to stages 3 and 4 of sleep which do you the most good. I'd have thought 2 hours was too short to do any good. The army insist we have a minimum of 4 in an unbroken stretch. But then, with respect for your misfortunes, you do suffer from depression.

Maybe so, but the members may not be aware of it. Personally I found that sleep deprivation and stress/depression coexist in a spiral pattern.

You basically filled in the blanks for me, Pids. Yes it has to be carefully managed. This is the problem. Years ago I did some volunteer work with kids who had cerebal palsy, and later at an orphanage. I found it drawing me in, and I knew I had to make a decision to either throw my entire life that way or continue as planned with my own pre-existing talents. I just couldn't give to people that close to me at weekends and then ignore them all week. Conversely my brother shows another problem, which is that if you help people who are very close then they can come to hate you for seeing them and knowing them at their weakest. A factor I've seen with a couple of people I've helped out of suicidal urges. They're really greatful but they can't bear being near you.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8435955.stm

I see what you're saying, but giving to people close to you can be very messy. Look at me and my brother.

"If you couldn't buy something, it's probably because it wasn't available due to poor trade relations with the United States or low supply." Yeah. He's a freaking Albert Einstein, alright.

Welll it would be if that's how you spend it!

The Medecine Sans Frontiers guys are very cool as people in my experience. Plus they don't give a **** if a situation is in the news or not, they just go.

I dunno tho. I suspect that while crudely executed it would have been the most surreal experience of my entire life. And my life is pretty surreal. I actually hugely enjoyed my trip to the US. Much more so than in years past. But that's because this time I treated it like a foreign adventure. We share a language, but we are so different in many ways. I think the thing I liked least was the docile acceptance of corporate bum-tadgering in every aspect of life. But I couldn't help admiring the spirit of personal independence in every other way. Weird. Also, everything seemed to be far more shiny and better presented than over here. I awoke about ten minutes ago and was startled to discover I'd been asleep for 13 hours. This is a great sign that the holdiay helped my stress levels.

I've been a supporter of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children for about twenty years. They take a broad and layered approach to reducing child abuse, and I think they do a fair amount of good.