Graeme

Thank you The only thing I'd disagree with is your categorisation of one father "giving up in grief". It could certainly be viewed that way, but I think that's too simplistic. I would say he was coping with that grief in his own way. There's no really good way to deal with what he had gone through....

Thank you ~hug~ Too many people don't realise that what they say and do affect those around them - sometimes more than they know. It's just so easy to hurt others without realising

I still remember what I was thinking when I originally wrote that story -- that suicide has a much wider impact than just on the person who dies. If there's even a chance that it'll make someone think twice by wondering what the impact will be on those around them, then it's worthwhile.

Oh, wow!!! *blush* Thank you

Penny Weston was sitting on the lounge room floor when her husband found her. Her arms were wrapped around her knees and she was rocking slowly back and forth. Streaks through the makeup on her cheeks showed that she had been crying, but the tears had stopped sometime earlier. A blue ribbon dangled from her clenched fist. Robert Weston dropped down next to her and put an arm around her. “What is it, honey?” Penny opened her hand to show a small golden disk. “I found Steve’s premiership medal w

A mother becomes obsessed after the death of her only son

Thank you! I'm planning on posting most of short stories over the next couple of weeks, and then posting some of my novels (they're all in GA stories at the moment, but as external links, so I'll post them as novels here)

Thanks everyone for the reminiscing, but can we keep this on topic, please? A.J. is looking for suggestions on new member ranks and reputation levels

Flashbacks: Friends or Foe? The answer is, of course, both. It's like seasoning. Used appropriately, they can enhance a story. Used inappropriately, they ruin the taste. When and how to use them? Again, like seasoning, it depends on story in which they're bring used. Different stories have different requirements. The example in the original post about the woman in the coffee shop talks about a flashback to explain something that would be incomprehensible to the reader otherwise. That's a good example, but it's also a specific case, and it didn't require a flashback. It could've been handled in a different way by having the woman and her new husband reminiscing about that particular date. It would depend on the story context, though, as to whether that would have been appropriate. Sometimes the flashback is the story, and the scene that lead to the flashback is just to build tension. Trebs's example of Sunset Blvd is such a situation. I did that with one chapter of my first novel. The chapter started with the main character outside of a hospital, but didn't indicate who was inside. The entire chapter was then about the events that lead to that situation. The opening lead a tension to the chapter because the reader knew what was coming up, but didn't know any real details. Everything is subjective. Flashbacks are a tool in a writer's skillset and sometimes they can be used and sometimes they shouldn't be used. How they get used also depends on the context within the story, so trying to assign rules to how to use them is just plain wrong. Guidelines, certainly, but not rules.

Dear God, I know that I've already said my prayers to you tonight when Mummy put me to bed, but Miss Sally at Sunday School said that I'm allowed to pray whenever I want. I hope you don't mind. I have something really special I need to ask you. You don't have to do anything else for me, but can you please do this one? Can you please bring my big brother back? Tommy went away today, and I miss him terribly. Mummy told me that Tommy had been a bad boy and he had to go stay with Uncle Greg. We

A little girl prays for the return of her big brother

Wondering what to do, John McMaster sat down on the park bench. Up until then, work had been the centre of his life, but retirement had ended that. He still had years of life in front of him and he needed to decide how to spend them. Unlike his colleagues, he didn’t have children or grandchildren to occupy his time. The gentle breeze blowing across the man-made lake brought with it the hint of apple blossom. Smiling the smile of someone enjoying the newness that Spring brings, he pulled out his

Snapshots of lives as a young boy grows up, a young couple age, and an old man goes through his retirement.

Thanks, Lisa Yes, I told my wife soon after the birth of our second son. Sadly, that hurt her so much that I never want to see anyone else go through that much pain. However, we worked through that and we're still together and happy. This year will be our 23rd wedding anniversary.

I lay on the operating table, trying to calm myself down as I waited for the anaesthetist to come in and knock me out. This was a nightmare that I wished I could just wake up from, but real life doesn’t work that way. All I could do was pray that everything would work out in the end. The one question that was constantly running through my mind was whether I was doing this out of love... or guilt? ~*~ “I hate you! You’ve ruined my life and I wish you were dead!” I sighed as I heard my daughte

The father of a young man becomes desperate when his son ends up in a life-threatening situation

I had the impression from the original post that the jokes are from after the outing, not before. The legal situation will depend on which country this occurred in. However, I think it would be difficult to take legal action unless you could demonstrate maliciousness. I got the impression that it wasn't malicious - unthinking, maybe, but not malicious. My suggestion, assuming you normally have a good relationship with your boss, is to tell him privately that you're upset about what he did and how you felt it was disrespectful. As long as you go about it in a professional manner, that might help. Being abusive in any way, though, would be counter-productive.

As per that quote in hh5's post above, a bill to protect the Apollo landing sites (which I think would be a good thing to do) would fall afoul of the 1968 Outer Space Treaty. The USA does not have the legal power to declare part of the moon as a protected area.

From when I was a blood donor, I seem to recall being told that the majority of blood donations have a lifetime of about 28 days. That is, the blood needs to be used within that time. If the HIV tests are only accurate after 28 days, then that means that they still can't reliably pick up new infections in that period. As an aside, I'm no longer a blood donor because I'm now in the illegible list - I lived in the UK for more than six months during the Mad Cow Disease scare (I still remember the day when McDonalds didn't sell hamburgers because of that scare). The Australian Red Cross sent out a letter to all affected members and said that until the cause of vCJD was identified, they had to way up the risk of infecting a blood recipient against the loss of donors. They determined that they would lose approximately 5% of their donors due to the ban, and that was worth it to safeguard their blood supply. They also said that it had to be a blanket ban - they wouldn't make exceptions for vegetarians, for example. The HIV bans in place are analogous to those for vCJD. Like the UK, they're a ban on anyone who has had male-male sex in the last 12 months, or had sex with someone who has male-male sex in the last 12 months (and before anyone asks what's the difference, consider the female partner of a bisexual male). They never gave out figures, but I suspect they're probably excluding around 5% of donors - about the same amount they're excluding due to the vCJD ban. Now, I agree that the mechanics of the ban should be revisited, but unless they're willing to audit the sexual practises of their potential donors, I'm not sure how. They could ask a question about safe-sex practises, but then they'd have to define what that meant in detail, because there are always cases on the borderline. That's why blanket bans are easier to manage - much less subjective decision making to be made. As long as they don't threaten the blood supply by excluding too many donors, the Red Cross will generally use blanket bans to exclude potential high-risk donors. Their priority is the safety of the blood supply and that's something I strongly support.

My boys are often playing minecraft on their laptops. One of their friends brings his laptop over sometimes and they set up worlds for the three of them to play in. Mods are definitely the way to go, though. The latest mods/updates include adding horses to the game, so my boys are trying to work out how to setup a minecraft video to the tune of America's A Horse With No Name Having said that, Minecraft has serious competition with my youngest son from the Kerbal Space Program. After all, how doesn't enjoy building (and blowing up) their own rockets?

Just a word of warning - don't confuse the Antarctic Peninsula with Antarctica. The first is a small part of the continent whose climate appears to be largely affected by the surrounding ocean currents. The continent itself has a different climatic pattern (the cover image on Nature a couple of years ago not withstanding - a subsequent paper showed that the approach taken in the earlier paper had artificially distributed the known warming of the peninsula across the rest of the continent to produce the result shown in that cover image). I also had to raise eyebrows at the very first statement quoted above. I didn't realised we had detailed satellite records going back 600 years... because we certainly don't have any other sort of detailed records on Antarctica. Even our ground level temperature record is very spotty - with only a handful of stations and even they don't have continuous coverage due to the temperature sensors getting buried in snow from time to time. Now, if they made that claim based on some sort of proxy method of determining ice melt rates from 600 years ago, then we have to look at what sort of accuracy and resolution that proxy has, and is it able to be compared to current records? As an example, the Vostok ice cores (taken from the ice above Lake Vostok) are well known for providing a detailed temperature (though the proxy of oxygen isotope ratios) and CO2 (by direct measurement of trapped carbon dioxide) record going back thousands of years. However, the way those ice cores resulted indicates a problem on resolution. The snow falls on the ice and is slowly compacted until it forms another layer of ice. The problem is that that compaction time isn't quick, and until the ice forms, the atmosphere between the individual flakes of snow can intermingle with the atmosphere above. This means that while we have a detail record, the atmospheric data (oxygen and CO2) is effectively averaged over a period of time - it's not an instantaneous record. The exact amount of averaging is variable, but it can be quite significant. From the Ice Core entry at Wikipedia: To understand the issue of resolution, suppose the ice core gas age difference is 200 years. That means that the atmospheric sample trapped in the ice is averaged over a period of up to 200 years (I say up to because it's uncertain how freely the gas can mix with layers above before the ice seals it off). Now, if you look at the modern temperature record and apply a 100 year averaging (as an example), the current warming is visible, but hardly significant (following on from the Little Ice Age). This raises the question of whether there was similar warming in the period covered by the ice cores, but it's not considered significant because it's been averaged out over a hundred years (or more)? The amount of averaging is unknown. You can see from the Wikipedia article quote above that some people make the assumption that there is no averaging, and that the atmosphere at the time of the ice sealing is the same as the atmosphere that is above the snow at that time (ie. there is no delay in the atmosphere travelling through the snow and firn to down to where the firn is about to turn into ice), but since it's known that people can suffocate under snow, the rate of gas flow through snow is clearly fairly slow. To the best of my knowledge, there are no detailed studies on this to determine if the rate of gas mixing will significantly affect the mixture being recorded in the ice. From what I've read, various experts in the area have differing opinions. So, going back to the quote that I raised eyebrows at, they've taken an ice core sample from the Antarctic Peninsula (known to be warming at a much higher rate than the rest of continent) and made claims about ice melt rates across the entire continent. Since the scientists who work in the area know about the differences between the peninsula and the rest of the continent, I'm guess it was the reporter who made the mistake. I've been looking into this sort of thing for the last couple of years. I've been finding it quite interesting, though the maths can be challenging at times

No idea. Most of Australia has been a desert for millennia, so I presume you're referring to farming practices that influenced the water table. To the best of my knowledge, practises have been changed to address that problem, but naturally it takes a long time for the water table to recover.

Hi, Zombie, 1. I'm not posting as a moderator. If you think my post crossed a line, just let the forum moderation team know. My posts have been moderated before, and that's fine. I'm not above the rules I was aware that this is a potentially political topic, but I'm trying to stick to the science, not the politics. 2. I agree with you, which is why I put the word normal in double quotes. I was actually backing up your comment on the same subject earlier. Some people like to think that conditions from the baseline 1961-1990 period is "normal", and I was pointing out that if I use a different baseline, I get a different "normal". 3. Agreed, that was slopping phrasing on my behalf. I meant to say that a slightly warmer Earth would be beneficial for humanity overall. The planet, as you've said, doesn't care Now, speaking of sticking to the science, there was a comment above about sea ice retreating at both poles. Here's the current graph of global sea ice from Cyrosphere Today (University of Illinios): The long term trend shown is downwards, but the current situation is actually slight above the baseline average. Arctic only - a steady downward trend: Antarctic only - that's a small upward trend, not downward: There's been lots of reports on the situation with the Arctic, but not much about how there doesn't appear to be an issue in the Antarctic....

If a "normal" climate is defined as the long term average, then Earth's "normal" climate is an Ice Age. Personally, I prefer to live in a climate that's not "normal". The Roman Warm Period in history had temperatures that were probably warmer than today (though there's a lot of uncertainty - it's based on things like they used to grow grapes further north in England than is currently possible, implying that the average temperature in northern England was warmer than it is today) - that sounds nice to me Studies indicate that warming the Earth a couple of degrees from the baseline 1961-1990 most climate organisations use would actually be beneficial for the planet - cold is a big killer, as well as having a negative impact on agriculture. It's only if the temperature starts to get over that does it potentially become a net negative impact.

Given that we're talking about thousands of years into the future, I suspect we'll have colonised Antarctica well before the ice all melts. How quickly we colonise it will depend on the mineral resources that are discovered in those mountains. If there's valuable ore found there, I think we'll have thriving communities in Antarctica before the end of this century. There is approximately 25,000,000 km3 of ice on Antarctica. The current rate of ice loss is uncertain, but it has been estimated from the GRACE satellites to be about 152 km3 per year. If we get conservative and assume that the average rate of ice loss will, over time, average 2500 km3 per year (more than 10 times the current rate), then it will take 10,000 years for all of that ice to melt. There's a good chance that we'll have a new ice age before then A more realistic reason for Antarctica to become ice free is the same reason why it used to be ice free - tectonic plate shifts. Apparently, some scientists believe that Antarctica used to be tropical in the not too distant (geologically speaking) past - only 52 million years ago.