COMMUNICATION CHAOS?
Hey, be careful with those e-mails or texts you send, in this day of instant communication--one mistake and there could be trouble:

"Faster communications are not necessarily better, especially when a machine is doing the interpreting. It can cause real panic for recipients.  When retirees Paul and Pauline Bjorkholm decided to go on a monthlong trek through Nepal, their daughter and son-in-law were not thrilled at the idea. The thought of the couple in their late 60s hiking through the mountains in a foreign country halfway around the world worried the younger couple."We asked them to keep in touch at tea houses (internet cafés) along the way, thinking it was the best way to ensure they were safe," said their daughter, Jill Easter.
But the very first e-mail from Paul Bjorkholm read: "Help. Visa bad. Can you send money to water? Autopsy not working."  "I freaked out," said Easter. "It took about $150, 16 hours and a number of calls to the U.S. Embassy. I even faxed the next hotel pictures of the two of them so that they could be on the lookout."  What the Bjorkholms meant was that they couldn't use their VISA credit card to pay the water bill and in their haste to send the e-mail, "auto pay" had been changed to "autopsy" by autocorrect.
"Once we figured it out, we could laugh about it. After that, my mom wouldn't let my dad e-mail the rest of the trip," Easter said.
But the Easters and the Bjorkholms are not the only ones who have had messages gone awry in this age of instant communications.  Close to 200,000 text messages were sent every second in 2010, according to the United Nations International Telecommunication Union. Add in more than 107 trillion e-mails in the year and you have a perfect environment for miscommunication.
"It's suddenly so easy to reach so many people and since it's text-based, it's much more permanent. You are on the hook, basically forever, for whatever you text or e-mail," said Eric Waller, co-founder of the website didijustsendthat.com. The site is devoted to message gaffes, whether it's autocorrect mistakes or sending a text to the wrong person.  Waller and his friends cooked up the idea for the website when one of them accidentally sent a text message to the wrong person and it became a source of chaos.
"Texting and e-mail definitely makes it harder to understand nuances and there's potential for lots of problems," he said."

Many of us in the Moebius community very much enjoy making contact with people electronically.  But be careful!

NAPS ARE GOOD FOR YOU
Especially for learning:

"A good night's sleep is crucial to storing knowledge learned earlier in the day — that much was known. Now, a new study finds that getting shut-eye before you learn is important, too.
Volunteers who took a 100-minute nap before launching into an evening memorization task scored an average of 20 percentage points higher on the memory test compared with people who did the memorization without snoozing first.
"It really seems to be the first evidence that we're aware of that indicates a proactive benefit of sleep," study co-author Matthew Walker, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience.
"It's not simply enough to sleep after learning," Walker said. "It turns out you also need to sleep before learning."

So don't be afraid to take one!!

SAD STORY
And finally, if any of you have not yet seen this horrible story--concerning terrible neglect of a child with Moebius Syndrome---here it is.  It's not fun to read.  But unfortunately it's important to remember sometimes that it's not just all sunshine and daffodils out there.  I hope help is found for this poor child...