Doris O'Brien is a retired college Speech teacher and banker. She has published two books of humor (Up or Down With Women's Liberation and Humor Me a Little) and for many years contributed light verse to the Pepper 'n Salt column of the Wall Street Journal. She is an avid writer of letters to the editors.
Doris celebrated her 50th wedding anniversary in the same year she welcomed her first grandchild. She now lives in Pasadena with a great view of the San Gabriel mountains — and the annual Tournament of Roses Parade.
She can be reached by e-mail: witsendob at (@) gmail.com
The Strong Museum: Home to International Center for the History of Electronic Games, the National Toy Hall of Fame, the World Video Game Hall of Fame
Editor's note ... We stumbled upon this essay while preparing the post for SeniorWomen.com: Nicolas Ricketts, a Curator at The Strong, asks: "What makes a game classic? Part of the answer is longevity. Most people consider chess classic; we've played it for centuries. What about playing cards? Woodblock-printed cards appeared during China's Tang dynasty (618–907), while written rules for card games were first seen in 15th-century Europe. Games such as Monopoly in the 1930s and Scrabble during the 1950s broke sales records at first... Like chess and playing cards, these games are now available in electronic formats, but people still enjoy the tabletop versions. In the spirit of those other famous games, I’d like to propose the tile game Mahjong as a potential classic." more »
"Robots Can Learn a Range of Visual Object Manipulation Skills Entirely on Their Own"
"Humans learn object manipulation skills without any teacher through millions of interactions with a variety of objects during their lifetime. We have shown that it possible to build a robotic system that also leverages large amounts of autonomously collected data to learn widely applicable manipulation skills, specifically 'object pushing skills,' said Frederik Ebert, a graduate student in Sergey Levine's lab who worked on the project. more »
A Family Inheritance: More Than 'Things' ... Emblems of Our Lives
Joan Cannon wrote: In a corner stood a small Louis XVI vitrine. It contained a blown ostrich egg, a small opalescent flask made of Roman glass that had a strange bloom on the surface like that on a grape still on the vine, and several other small objects collected from the family’s travels. On the mantelpiece in the living room hung a tiny brass lamp. On the lid covering the oil chamber sits a tiny crudely cast mouse. It now hangs on my mantel. In my living room is an Empire table of mahogany veneer in fairly deplorable condition. Desperate to recover some of its good looks, I took a steam iron to the blistered and cracked veneer on the top, stripped its clouded finish off, and refinished it. It's the only piece of furniture from my father’s Memphis forbears remaining after the Civil War. As one advances in years, one accumulates possessions the way a caddis fly larva accumulates grit. The glue that makes us carry it all along with us is in a way self-secreted as well. However, it's psychic rather than physical — emotional rather than material. more »
Kaiser Health News: Doing More Harm Than Good? Epidemic of Screening Burdens Nation’s Older Patients
Nearly 1 in 5 women with severe cognitive impairment — including older patients like Elena Altemus — are still getting regular mammograms, according to the American Journal of Public Health — even though they're not recommended for people with a limited life expectancy. And 55 percent of older men with a high risk of death over the next decade still get PSA tests for prostate cancer. Among people in their 70s and 80s, cancer screenings often detect slow-growing tumors that are unlikely to cause problems in patients' lifetimes. These patients often die of something else — from dementia to heart disease or pneumonia — long before their cancers would ever have become a threat. Prostate cancers, in particular, are often harmless. more »
