Three pieces of Slate

Three stories from Slate last week:

* Yay! A complaint about Word leads to hundreds of comments, amongst which, if you go down far enough, are ones by the hidden secret devotees (and users) of Wordperfect. This is a secret cabal to which I belong too; although I must say that I have found the latest version of Word to be much better than earlier versions for some things.

Many people in that thread mention the wonders of Reveal Codes - a Wordperfect feature that does often let you work out a formatting issue, and which Word has never implemented.

I am often amazed when I have had young people out of university, and who have never known anything other than Word, still can't solve some formatting mystery problem in the program that I assumed I couldn't fix simply due to lack of familiarity.

Long may Wordperfect live (it's still updated every 2nd year or so, you know.)

* A complaint about tattoos also makes claims close to my heart (and is rather brave. Mentioning strong dislike of this trend is usually met with some very rabid insults about how us clean skins just don't understand.)

But what is most interesting is that part - a link to an article about research on the possible health consequences of some of the stuff in tattoo inks. I mentioned this before here. Doesn't sound so hot.

* American teenage birthrate is down, and it seems due to increased use of contraception.

I put it down to the decline of the influence of Sex and the City too. Maybe the second movie was so bad that it convinced teenagers who saw it that the show never got sex and relationships right.