More from Ambulance Land

A London emergency dispatcher blogs: So what can I call an ambulance for? (Chest pain, serious difficulty in breathing, uncontrollable bleeding, unconsciousness.) Australia's ambulance service adds "sudden collapse", traffic accidents, and fractured bones to the list.

Stupid Questions lends insight into what happens when a 999 call is made - help is being sent while the dispatcher is working through a list of standard questions to get crucial information. The Nee Naw blog describes numerous callers who hang up, or think the questions mean they're not going to get help - but also many callers who save lives by staying on the line, answering questions, and following instructions. The same procedure is followed in Australia when someone calls 000 for an ambulance.

I wonder if Australia could use a campaign like this one, also from the UK: posters in phone boxes reminding would-be hoax callers of the danger in which they'd be placing others, which hugely cut down on the fake calls.

(no subject)

For young women, here are some snappy retorts to use if you're pressured for sex. "BOY: Everyone else is doing it. GIRL: Well, you'd better go and have sex with everybody else then." (Where would we be without Kaz Cooke? 'A Modern Girl's Guide to Safe Sex is one of the best books I've ever owned.)

From the ever-useful snopes.com, the debunking of a chain email warning against the HPV vaccine Gardasil. (While I'm on the subject, condoms do reduce the risk of HPV transmission.)

Australian sexual assault victims will be given free legal help to stop their attackers using their medical and counselling records against them in court.

Grab bag

From Something Awful, useful phrases translated into Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, such as "There are crocodiles in my pants". (I can still read bits of this. Hee hee hee hee hee.)

From TV Tropes, Never Live It Down explains so much about fandom (Owen, Gwen, Spike, etc etc etc).

Christian beliefs still strong, says survey: "More than four in 10 Australians who do not consider themselves "born again"' still believe Jesus rose from the dead, while one in 10 does not believe he existed."

Sadly, the God Spot appears not to exist after all - rather, religious thoughts are distributed through the brain. Sez a researcher: "That suggests that religion is not a special case of a belief system, but evolved along with other belief and social cognitive abilities." I'm very interested by the mention of Theory of Mind. It makes sense that, if survival depends on working out what other people are thinking, you'd end up trying to work out what everything is thinking - much as you can't help seeing human faces everywhere.

Sleep problems linked to suicide

Chaffinch Map of Scotland