NYPD shred kids' paper hearts commemorating Occupy arrestees before their very eyes

By Cory Doctorow at 12:33 pm Monday, Dec 12

Occupy protesters and their kids made 5,000 paper hearts, one for each of the arrests at the Occupy Wall Street protests. They made a mosaic of these at the gates of New York's City Hall, only to have the police literally rip down and shred them.

Parents for Occupy Wall St. March against police brutality. Children created 5,000 paper hearts one for every peaceful protestor arrested on behalf of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the three month period leading up to the march. The children delivered them to New York City Hall for Mayor Bloomberg only for the NYPD to aggressively tear them down and apart in front of the children. Children cried and the NYPD did yet another action against peaceful protestors. We as a country should not stand for this, get involved, speak up, do something for our children's futures.

It's predictable but weird how many of the YouTube commenters criticize the parents for involving their kids with a protest. I grew up on protest marches and demonstrations with my parents, and I take my daughter to them, because I think that parenting is (partly) about imparting values to your children. Growing up amid a critical discourse about issues of social justice and freedom helped make me who I was, and my parents were always available to debate these subjects with me, encouraging me to listen to arguments on either side without hiding which side they were on.

NYPD and NYC City Hall Break Kids Hearts (via Beth Pratt) Tags: authoritarianiam, happy mutants, Kids, occupy, ows, police, protest, video, youtube

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Why are more people opting for legal name-changes than ever before?

By Cory Doctorow at 4:27 pm Tuesday, Oct 18

The BBC reports that record numbers of Britons are legally changing their name by deed-poll, and speculates on the factors that account for this (escaping your past, reverting to maiden names after divorce, merging names for marriage), but they miss the big one: the fact that you can't just change what you call yourself anymore. My grandparents all had fistfulls of names -- the names they were born with, their Hebrew names, their Yiddish names, their anglicized names, their nicknames -- and their ID, papers and records use a mishmash of all of them.

I've had several passports without my middle name ("Efram") which I've never used (though I'm not embarrassed by it or anything); however all the identity documents I've received in the past decade had insisted that all my names be present and identical on every piece, thanks to the growing use of databases and the growth of the Zuckerberg doctrine that every person should have exactly one name and that name should be identical in every context.

So while Britons might earlier have gone by names of their choosing with little trouble, today, officialdom requires that what you call yourself be what the state calls you, hence all the formal name-changing.

And it looks like this could be a record year, with an estimated 58,000 people changing their name by the end of 2011 - an increase of 4,000 on the previous year. A decade ago, only 5,000 people changed their names.

Many have been inspired by celebrities or their sporting heroes. In the past few years, the UK Deed Poll Service has welcomed 15 new Wayne Rooneys into the world, five Amy Winehouses and 30 Michael Jacksons.

And nearly 200 people can now say that "Danger" is officially their middle name.

However, 300 people opted for the solid but less glamorous John Smith, which indicates that people change their names for reasons other than just fun.

Why are more people changing their name? [bbc.co.uk] Tags: identity, nym wars, uk, web theory

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How To: Remove a bladder stone in the days before anesthesia

The Chirurgeon's Apprentice is an entire blog dedicated to eye-witness accounts of surgery in the days before anesthesia. Oh, Internet. Thou art wonderful and horrible.

Collected by University of London medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris, the stories come from well-documented sources, from the 17th century onward. Part of the goal here is to follow the path of surgery as it really started to become its own profession ... separate from that of barber. Yes, this is going to be every bit as gory as you imagine. I'll start looking for a unicorn now.

If you visit the Gordon Museum at Guy’s Hospital in London, you will see a small bladder stone—no bigger than 3 centimetres across. Besides the fact that it has been sliced open to reveal concentric circles within, it is entirely unremarkable in appearance. Yet, this tiny stone was the source of enormous pain for 53-year-old Stephen Pollard, who agreed to undergo surgery to remove it in 1828.

Although the operation itself lasted only a matter of minutes, lithotomic procedures were painful, dangerous and humiliating. The patient—naked from the waist down—was bound in such a way as to ensure an unobstructed view of his genitals and anus [see illustration]. Afterwards, the surgeon passed a curved, metal tube up the patient’s penis and into the bladder. He then slid a finger into the man’s rectum, feeling for the stone. Once he had located it, his assistant removed the metal tube and replaced it with a wooden staff. This staff acted as a guide so that the surgeon did not fatally rupture the patient’s rectum or intestines as he began cutting deeper into the bladder. Once the staff was in place, the surgeon cut diagonally through the fibrous muscle of the scrotum until he reached the wooden staff. Next, he used a probe to widen the hole, ripping open the prostrate gland in the process. At this point, the wooden staff was removed and the surgeon used forceps to extract the stone from the bladder.

Unfortunately for Stephen Pollard, what should have lasted 5 minutes ended up lasting 55 minutes under the gaze of 200 spectators.

Via Ed Yong

Image: Ouch, again., a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from rberteig's photostream

Image shows a kidney stone. Kidney stones and bladder stones are basically the same thing, though. Their names signify where the stone formed. Either way, they're made of the same stuff. And more people post images of their kidney stones to Flickr.

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