Mom’s Soap Box

Gamers have largely gotten a bad rep for being lazy, slothful people who spend their hours mindlessly pressing buttons. The Wii changed that a bit by getting kids (and their parents… and their parents) up off the couch, but what about giving their brains a workout too? For your family’s little mind freak to-be Mattel is introducing the Mind Flex.

Mattel has inked an exclusive multi-year partnership with NeuroSky, the “consumer brain-computer interface technologies” company that birthed Mattel’s much publicized Mindflex game, to develop a new category of games and toys that operate using the power of concentration.

The partnership includes exclusivity within numerous toys and games categories, all using headsets featuring NeuroSky’s ThinkGear technology. ThinkGear technology is based on a headset that recognizes a user’s brainwave activity during varying levels of concentration, processes the information into digital signals and then transmits the signals to the base unit as commands.

The first fruit of the partnership, Mattel’s Mindflex game, debuted at Toy Fair this past February. The game ($79.99) challenges players to levitate and guide a small foam ball around a customizable obstacle course using a mix of concentration to change the ball’s height and a hand dial to move the ball horizontally. It will be available at retail this fall.

“Using NeuroSky’s innovative technology, our engineers have created a product in Mindflex that takes gaming to an entirely new level,” said Geoff Walker, Senior Vice President of Wheels, Games and Radica, for Mattel. “Our partnership will undoubtedly lead to future innovations in the toy and game categories in the years ahead.”

By Tracy

He’s bouncin’ off walls, a super ball gone insane,

He runs through your world like an off-rail freight train,

Interruptions are constant, tantrums galore,

When it’s time to do homework, he’s gone, out the door.

The drama is constant; oh his foot fell asleep,

He moans and he wails, the theatrics run deep,

School is a nightmare, the teachers are lost,

If they only could see, he is worth the cost.

He is brighter than most, as most kids are,

And with patience and love, I know he’ll go far,

But what I must take from well meaning friends

Don’t let him do that. Oh these rules that he bends.

You’re not a good parent. Your child’s really rude.

His temper’s Outrageous. He has hands in his food.

He hears this and wonders, just what’s wrong with me?

I tell him, You’re special, you have A.D.H.D.

Now A.D.H.D. is a gift from above,

It teaches us grown-ups how to strengthen our love.

It helps to teach your teachers, no two kids are the same.

You have awesome energy that could bring you great fame.

You don’t need much sleep, you never wear down.

You’re silly and funny, when you act like a clown.

You’ve felt lots of pain from what people have said,

But you pray for those people when you go to bed.

So you try every day to make a fresh start,

For God gifted you with an extra big heart.

As I look at my child, he sees through my soul,

My heart feels like busting, as I realize my goal.

I know this boy like no one else could,

He’s a blessing to me, he’s strong and he’s good.

So I’ll love him and guide him through the worst of the worst,

And he’ll make a great man (if I don’t kill him first).

I’m kidding of course ’cause I know what’s to be,

When I look in his eyes, I see a reflection of me.

I loved this, even though my ADHD child is a girl, many of the situations she describes are exactly like ours. The constant motion and drama are an apparently inescapable part of life when you have an ADHD child, boy or girl. One of the few things that help is seeing things like this poem and realizing that you are not alone out there.

The occasional Susan Smith or Andrea Yates who kills her kids has given way to the weekly child, sibling, parent, grandparent, spouse and all-of-the-above killer.

In the Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates, D’Andre Howard is accused of killing his girlfriend’s sister, father and grandfather and leaving her mother in critical condition.

The same day in Middletown, Md., Christopher Alan Wood killed his wife and three children. A few days later in Towson, Md., William Parente killed his wife and two daughters.

Kerby Revelus killed two of his sisters in Milton, Mass., — decapitating his younger sister in front of her birthday cake while police watched in horror. In Orting, Wash., James Harrison killed his five children. Devan Kalathat killed his two children and three other relatives in Santa Clara, Calif., and left his wife in critical condition, where she clings to life. And Michael McLendon slaughtered his mother and grandparents in southeast Alabama, along with many others.

The press quickly blames the monthly and even weekly family killings on economic stresses and lack of jobs. Psychologists say a bad economy can create a family annihilator like Bob Dylan’s Hollis Brown, who “looked for work and money … and walked a rugged mile” and whose “children are so hungry that they don’t know how to smile,” until he kills his wife and five children in a mercy massacre.

Some have even blamed Binghamton, N.Y., killer Jiverly Voong’s spree on his poor English, and Revelus’ spree on his lack of job skills after prison.

What is conveniently forgotten in all the psychobabble is: When people lost their jobs or wives in the past, they didn’t kill their entire families in a fit of irrational rage. Not every week.

Behind the deeds of Howard, Wood, Parente, Revelus, Harrison, Kalathat, McLendon, et al. — who are almost always called “depressed” and “bipolar” — are some health care professionals thinking, “Maybe I shouldn’t have prescribed that psychoactive med,” and hoping no one thinks to question them.

Certainly Middletown’s Wood was prescribed the violence-linked Cymbalta and Paxil, along with two other psychiatric drugs before his deeds. His suicide notes even confirm he felt he was getting worse, not better, on the medication, say police.

Who can forget that Andrea Yates was on a double dose of Effexor when she drowned her five children in 2001?

At a time of heightened concerns about waste, climate change and the need for cleaner energy, it is worth pointing out that not all the news is bad. Technologies are redressing the balance — and one of these is Advanced Anaerobic Digestion (AAD).

AAD will not turn muck into brass, or gold, but it does offer the potential to transform the sewage treatment process from a simple clean-up to one that recovers significant quantities of energy.

These technologies harness natural oxygen-free decomposition by which organic materials break down to produce biogas – roughly made up of 65% methane and 35% carbon dioxide – along with a much reduced residue of stabilized organic material. The latter can be safely deployed as fertilizer. In fact, by returning it to the soil in this way, nutrient and organic matter cycles that occur naturally are completed.

Advanced Anaerobic Digestion significantly enhances the benefits of anaerobic digestion by separating and optimizing the key process stages used in more conventional digestion systems. The result is a far greater conversion of organic matter into biogas when the material is transferred into the anaerobic digestion phase. Following this digestion phase, there is a 50% reduction in sludge volumes, combined with the additional biogas/CHP- derived energy being produced, and ultimately a better quality bio-solids fertilizer.

One of the major benefits of this, of course, is that energy from biomass, including sewage sludge, are classed as renewable and therefore contribute to meeting international commitments to address climate change.

But it does more than that too.

Using AAD reduces the mass of material that is required to be transported off-site and offers the benefit of nutrient recovery from materials that are presently wasted. Indeed, some particularly difficult materials, such as food wastes, need the conditions of AAD to render them safe.

One other benefit that is not to be sniffed at, AAD results in reduced odor.

The digested sludge cake remaining after the process will be a Class A biosolid – a safe and low odor product containing no detectable levels of pathogens, such as E. coli, and may be used as a valuable agricultural fertilizer.

The energy recovered from the sewage sludge goes a long way towards making the entire wastewater treatment process energy self-sufficient.

Source

I’m not sure where this list originated, but it’s funny.

YOU KNOW YOU ARE LIVING IN 2009 when…

1. You accidentally enter your PIN on the microwave.

2. You haven’t played solitaire with real cards in years..

3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.

4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.

5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they
don’t have e-mail addresses.

6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries.

7. Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen.

8. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn’t even have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you
turn around to go and get it.

10. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee.

11. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. : )

12. You’re reading this and nodding and laughing.

13. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this
message.

14. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.

15. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn’t a #9 on this
list.

I did, indeed scroll back up to see if there was a #9 or not.

Were you wondering how to keep on top of your budget, stay in shape and keep up your hectic schedule without damaging the interior of your home?

Everyone knows that, for the sake of health and well-being, they should try and work out most days. A home gym makes daily exercise a little easier but who wants to fill up their house with bulky, unsightly exercise equipment? It is now possible, thanks to a most extraordinary piece of fitness equipment, The Fitness Cub.

The Fitness Cube is an ultra-compact exercise unit for people who prefer their home to be clutter-free. Inside the cube is everything you need for a complete workout session. You simply pull the handle and within seconds you have your very own weights machine. The resistance intensity can be adjusted to your fitness level, using the eight-position adjustable switch.

There are 30 different exercises you can perform with this piece of equipment and all the necessary accessories are packed into the cube. An exercise poster details how you can use the various accessories to tone all the muscles in your body. You may also opt to purchase a DVD that shows you how to perform the various exercises.

The Fitness Cube is manufactured by Domyos, a French fitness company. It is very compact – about 20inches by 20 inches by, of course, 20 inches (50×50x50cm). It’s a cube! It weighs just 33 pounds (15kg), so you can easily move it from room to room. If you’re really keen, you can even take it with you on vacation. Its stylish compact design means it will blend in with most decors or can just as easily be packed away.

The Fitness Cube retails for about USD$145 (GBP99), which seems reasonable compared to a yearly gym membership.

For more details, including a video, see Fitness Cube.

Now I just need to find a local retailer. I don’t think I want to pay to have this shipped from the UK, it does weigh 33 pounds!