Category Archives: Thoughtful

Important: Compare the Candidates on Health Care Policy

The general election campaign has commenced, spotlighting President Biden and former President Trump as the presumptive nominees for their respective parties and the currently viable contenders for the presidency. While this is not an election like in the past where health care reform is a central issue being debated, health care is an important issue for voters and Biden and Trump have sharply divergent records and positions. This side-by-side analysis serves as a quick resource for understanding each candidate’s record as president, positions, public statements, and proposed policies. It will be continuously updated as new information and policy details emerge throughout the campaign.

https://www.kff.org/compare-2024-candidates-health-care-policy/

Apple Vision Pro Game Changer for Disabled

The headset is already changing disabled users’ lives.

In her childhood bedroom, Maxine Collard had a PC connected to a cathode-ray tube monitor so massive it bowed her desk into a smile that grew deeper every year. Collard has oculocutaneous albinism, which means that her hair is naturally bleach white, her complexion maximally fair, and she has uncorrectably low visual acuity with limited depth perception. In order to see the screen, she had to crane her neck until her face was two inches from the monitor.

When Collard was in middle school, her mother bought an iMac for the family. Collard spent hours messing around on the new machine, her nose pressed almost to the glass. One day, deep in the computer’s accessibility settings, she discovered that if she held down the control key while spinning the mouse’s scroll wheel, she could instantaneously zoom the entire screen to whatever magnification level she wanted. There was a rudimentary magnifier app on her Windows computer, but she found the interface difficult to use, and the low-res image on the zoomed-in PC screen, she said, was pixelated, hard to read, “disgusting.” Her experience on the iMac, which allowed her to magnify the entire screen into a much clearer image, came as a revelation.

Earlier this year, Collard had a similar aha moment when she tried the Apple Vision Pro for the first time. Some critics of the AVP were skeptical of a device that pressed two high-resolution micro-OLED screens within millimeters of one’s eyes for hours at a time. But to Collard, the ability to (as she put it) “strap an iPad to my face” was instantly appealing.

See Link for more:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/apple-vision-pro-disabled-users.html

Prosopometamorphopsia

Rare Disorder also called “Demon Face Syndrome”

I Have a Rare Disease That Makes Me See Demon Faces Everywhere. It’s, Uh, Not Fun.

Maggie McCart…suffers from an extremely rare disease called prosopometamorphopsia, which inflicts patients with a variety of wild hallucinations when they look at someone’s face.

If you were to look through McCart’s eyes, you’d experience a world where faces appear to be made of tree bark, or are unnaturally contorted, or, perhaps, completely swapped out with a mythical creature. We asked McCart how she manages to live life while looking through a fun-house mirror.

Prosopometamorphopsia is sometimes referred to as “demon face syndrome.” Nobody knows what causes it—generally the disorder is linked with various brain traumas—and for a long time, I couldn’t get a diagnosis myself. My early interactions with doctors weren’t helpful. Years ago, I explained my symptoms to a neurologist. I reported what I was seeing, and they scanned my brain and didn’t find anything suspicious. The neurologist said something like, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your brain.” And I thought, “I beg to differ.” But again, it’s not like they can see through my eyes. It’s not a simple situation, like asking a doctor to investigate a rash on your skin.

So for most of my life, I did my best to ignore the symptoms and go about my day. I learned to recognize people by their shoes, or their clothes, or the way they walked.

https://slate.com/life/2024/05/demon-face-syndrome-what-is-prosopometamorphopsia-rare-disease.html

What a Powerful and Wonderful Poem ❤️

THE WILD IRIS
by Nobel and 12th US Poet Laureate Louise Glück

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.

https://youtu.be/8waoQWf9aL8
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/04/29/louse-gluck-wild-iris/

More on Louise Glück here

“Very few writers share her talent for turning water into blood.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/louise-gluck