Wait So?

I'm getting increasingly annoyed with 'studies' showing us how to live our lives, more over is the fact that said studies get reported as news before any conclusion is actually reached. It does raise a question over the nature of the institutions that release them and the journals that send out press releases, is it just the news papers bigging things up or are academics getting to keen on tooting their own trumpets in the pursuit of a few comlumb inches. Below we see how salt is simultaneously killing us and not making any difference to our lives.

Make your fucking minds up! Case in point comes from a third print you can read here at the Torygraph. Turns out that:

Prof Rod Taylor of Exeter University said the results of his team’s study published in the American Journal of Hypertension two weeks ago had been misinterpreted.
“We do not believe our results necessarily mean that asking people to reduce their intake of salt is not a good thing”, he said.

Someone here is dropping the ball, good and bad might be terms of moral ambiguity but life and death I feel has a little more certainty to it. Seems the crux is that Salt raises blood pressure, and high blood pressure is bad. Salt itself doesn't really matter at all. I propose the headline:

A HEALTHY AND BALANCED DIET & LIFE WITH NOT TOO MUCH OF ANYTHING IS DEFINITELY THE BEST WAY TO GO

And I didn't even have to do a study for that!

OH REALLY IS IT?

It's shocking the myriad of stupid things you come across, here is today's tiny little discrepancy:

The offending line is part of a much larger email signature about the planet and not printing things and how things people say are their own opinion. Redacted because I like my job, but I still really hate email signatures like this. It's like being given a lecture about things you don't care about... like most lectures.

Blind Black Man on the Bus

Yesterday, an ageing blind black man in a beret boarded my bus. I was reading a book and didn't see him at first (and he was never going to see me) which resulted in me being hit by his stick.

The driver asked him a lot of questions about where he was going to be getting off and told him to take as much time as he needed to find his bus pass. When he found his pass he was already sitting down, but waved the pass around in the air at nobody in particular anyway.

Then he sang the blues.

An Asian woman at the back of the bus was so moved by the attention that the driver gave this man that she leapt to her feet and ran to the front, proclaiming in broken Engrish: "Mr. Driver! You are the best! You are the best driver in the world. You tell your boss, I say you are the best!"

America is weird.

I LOVE PUNS...

... and when you see a character with a heart as steely as state prosecutor uses one, well you have to wonder if they meant to.

Magistrates banned her from driving for two years, and imposed a two year conditional discharge.
She was told: “This sentence is well outside of the guidelines, but we are imposing it in light of the mitigating circumstances, and hopefully you are now on the road to recovery.”

hehe: full story - Drunken Cornish fool drives pissed

Adverts in Bad Taste

You have to love the coincidences, not the best one of these ever seen but still made me feel bad uncontrollably amused.

American Malls

Today, I decided to go shopping in a mall. After careful consideration, I chose Valley Fair in San José, since it is on a convenient bus route.

It was... different.

Not only was it considerably bigger than a UK shopping centre, but it was also packed full of American clichés. Incredibly fat people and youths "hanging out at the mall" were everywhere, and shop staff kept asking me if I was okay every twenty seconds.

Several of the shops actually had fat display mannequins.

On the way home, a crazy man who sounded like Tom Waits (although I have now heard so many of these that I'm sure I'll be saying Tom Waits sounds like a crazy man before long) told me that he had a cellphone like mine in his plastic bag -- I did not believe him.

iPad 2 Vs. Eee Pad Transform - 5 mins down the pub

So work gave me a opportunity to play with these two tablets for about five minutes. They just got delivered before Friday lunch at work, so we grabbed one of each and took them to lunch.

Packing is very much the same, in fact down to the way the charger and documents sit in the package.

After turning both on and starting up the results where straitforward: the Eee pad was an attractive to use, quick to work out bit of kit, that as the image below shows looks great. Whereas the iPad was returned to its box, needing to be plugged into iTunes before we had any fun. We where already surfing on the Android tablet by then.

The matt patterned finish was great, keyboard and trackpad very usable. I would get one of these over a notebook any day I think. The iPad looked a bit regular and dull next to it. 

 Even if the interface between the tablet and dock is a bit on the fiddly side, we figured it was worth it to make sure the connection was secure, which it really seems to be.

So, after 5mins the Eee Pad all the way!