Expanding on my aborted comments regarding Planned Parenthood
The other day I provided some “facts” about Planned Parenthood in my rant about Newt Gingrich’s platform. I made two errors in that post. This post is my correction and will also contain just a bit of my personal opinions.
First, I neglected to source the facts I listed. I relied on the Wikipedia: Planned Parenthood page.
The second mistake was accepting at face value one of those facts as provided by Planned Parenthood itself.
Here’s the facts from my original post:
- Opened in 1916 as the first birth control clinic in the United States.
- In 1970 President Richard M. Nixon (Republican) signed the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act. This provided government funding to Planned Parenthood. The act had bipartisan support by liberals (who saw it as giving families greater control over their lives) and conservatives (who saw it as a way to keep people off welfare).
- Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of abortions in the United States, which constitutes about 3% of the health care services it provides.
- Receives about one-third of its funding from the government.
- By law does not use any federal funding for abortions.
These facts were prompted by Gingrich’s platform including an item about defunding Planned Parenthood. I shared my opinion that this isn’t exactly one of the leading issues on the minds of voters. Additionally it seeks to undo an Act that was signed by a Republican president with bipartisan support. For that sort of thing I think you should have an argument stronger than, “I wish to use abortion as a divisive issue to make political hay.” Continue reading →
I have a voice: Twittering whispers to myself
I added an app to my iPod Touch called “Dragon Dictation.” It’s free so at least I know I didn’t overpay. This app converts speech to text. So now I can talk to my iPod (which feels a little weird), have my voice converted to text, then easily send that text as a tweet.
The other night I was at a restaurant and decided to take it for a spin. Let’s see how it did.
Tweet: Hey Twitter this is my voice converted to text. How exciting
Analysis: Not too shabby. That’s what I said, although I’m pretty sure I implied a period at the end of the sentence.
Tweet: Hi text max’s voice tweet from a rest salon marvel at my greatness
Analysis: This is so mangled I can’t remember my exact words. But I do know that “rest salon” was supposed to be “restaurant.”
Tweet: There’s a guy here at the restaurant with the laptop will ask for his e-mail address so I can tweet
Analysis: This one is almost decipherable. It was actually: “There’s a guy here at the restaurant with a laptop. I will ask for his e-mail address so I can tweet him.” I was feeling pretty damn high tech and social at the time.
Test: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Nailed it.
Test: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country
Nailed it again.
Tweet: I sure hope you’ll enjoy the best tweets to you by dragon dictation. Peace out
Analysis: This was the end of my test. It think it was “you’ve enjoyed” but I’m not sure.
Conclusion: The app worked fairly well. I noticed that it works by recording audio then processing it. The longer you talk, the more you record, and the longer the processing time. It was a bit annoying it didn’t keep up in real time.
Overall, I recommend this app at the price of free. It’s a good value for making your tweets look like they came from someone with English as a second language and/or an elementary school dropout.
Shouts from the Abyss 
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