Beyond your deepest fears...
For reasons we need not go into, I was looking up the term for "fear of change".
In fact, I found no fewer than four, which suggests a level of refined sadism I had not previously associated with the psychiatric profession. There's
- neophobia
- change phobia
- metathesiophobia
- kainotophobia
Logically, therefore, there must also be the condition of meta-metathesiophobia... the fear of going back to your therapist and finding that the name of your condition has been changed.
Personal hygiene and its implications
I've blogged a couple of times about the difficulty of using the fingerprint authentication option on my laptop after I accidentally removed part of my fingerprints while on holiday. There's also the problem that I can't log on after doing the washing up; what does this tell us about the lives of the people who design these things...?
A note to the US Immigration Service folks, then: you might want to update the green 'visa waiver' card for arriving visitors, so that it includes the following instruction: "Do not wash your hands thoroughly before entering the country, as this may delay your authentication".
There's a serious side to this, though: any proposals to strengthen authentication in hospital healthcare systems by using fingerprint biometrics should be very carefully examined. The investigation into clostridium difficile deaths in a UK hospital trust has found that, over a 2 1/2 year period, 90 deaths were directly attributable to clostridium, that it was definitely a contributing factor in another 124, and a probable factor in another 55 deaths. Under circumstances like those, the trade-off of higher security for worse personal hygiene just isn't worth the risk.
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