bad science

My birthday was a little odd this year - it fell really close to the whole Monaco trip, so for one thing I couldn't really afford to do anything spectacular, but for another it meant the presents from my family members were much delayed.

What I got from my Dad has been really interesting - he bought me a bread maker and a steamer. With the weather having been so hot recently I can't say I've really had a chance to use the steamer yet, but it looks like a really good model. Hopefully I'll give it a whirl with cooking some rice this weekend, which is a pretty basic thing admittedly, but it'll at least give me the chance to try it out.

The bread maker is really great and I've been having lots of fun making loafs of bread. I've not ventured too far from the traditional white bread, but even with that there are different variations - sandwich or more traditional, different sizes and whether you want light or dark crust.

The least successful side of it for me is the sizes - small loafs work really well and are manageable, but the larger loaves are not so easily used. I mean, they're great, it's just they're difficult to cut up, especially for sandwiches, which is what I mainly use bread for, because of the shape they come out in.

But most recipes appear to have smaller versions, so it's not so much of a problem. My next big venture will be into bread rolls I think - they're slightly more complex in that the bread maker only does half the job and you have to do the last bit.

Anyway, the thing I wanted to mainly mention was what my sister got me. She got me a couple of DVDs, but also a book called "bad science" by Ben Goldacre.

It's an interesting read. It covers quite a few subjects, including CAM ("Conventional and Alternative Medicine") and the MMR hoax. I'd always known CAM was pure bullshit and that the MMR hoax was, at best misplaced good intention and at worst, outright lies, so it wasn't these that's got me thinking the most.

What got me thinking was the section on Nutritionists.

It turns out that nutritionism is little more than extension of the hocus-pocus of CAM. The practitioners (or bullshit peddlers is probably a better phrase) of this pseudo-science are little better than the crystal-healers and homeopathic experts of CAM.

This really surprised me, because where homeopathy seems fairly ignored by the news, nutritionist stuff does seem to be in the main stream. Think of all those "diet doctor" type programs any you'll see what I mean. Plus, even the BBC has news articles when the latest stuff about miracle foods emerges.

But the reality is that most of these are nearly total bullshit. The problem seems to come from the fact that proper science is done, but it's miss-reported and miss-represented. Also, there's lots of really bad science done.

The books well worth reading, although I have to admit to a little bit of a dislike for Goldacre's style. It's kind of an odd one, because the people he talks about are clearly contemptible and the bad science conducted is clearly worthy of some scorn. The problem I'm having is he doesn't pull back on the contempt and scorn in the way he writes.

So while I've no problem with him fundamentally doing that, it can read like a personal attack, rather than an evidence-based dissection, which is what it actually is.

it's my birthday

Well, actually tomorrow it's my birthday, but I'll be taking a much needed day off, so I'm posting here basically just to say that.

Yeah, that's about it really: a day off tomorrow and a bank holiday on Monday, so I'll see you on the flip-side.

big food

This last Saturday a good friend of mine was having a mini birthday celebration.

She's not been very well for a while now, but seems to have been doing better recently. Anyway, she seemed in relatively good spirits at least and it was a good day. I hope she didn't tire herself out, though.

It was also a long day for me - I set off about 9:30am and got back about 9:30pm - and a very filling day. She'd made a lovely lunch, but the portions were a little on the large size, even for me. The cake actually defeated me - tasty though it was, I was just too full to finish.

Anyway, Sunday I just crashed out. I was knackered anyway because of all the work we've got on at the moment and Saturday just finished me off and I watched telly all day. About the only thing I achieved was doing the ironing, which is pretty much a necessity or I don't have anything to wear at work.

Still, it meant that I cleared huge swathes of the PVR madness. All I had left was that Red Riding drama I mentioned a while back. If things go to plan, I should be able to start watching DVDs again soon, which is good as I've been a bit silly and bought loads more.

*yawn*

Pretty good weekend, but I'm really quite knackered.

I went down to Devon to visit my Dad and we gave him his birthday present. It was a digital camera. It was only a compact model, but we also got him lots of gubbins to go with it - a stand-alone printer, and inks and paper for it.

He's a bit of a photography fan and he's mentioned digital cameras to me several times before. I'd therefore initially wanted to get him a full-on digital SLR camera, but my sister convinced me that it would be better to get a compact.

She was quite right - this gives him a 'taste' of the digital world and a chance to play and investigate. Plus SLR's are not cheap. Well, good digital compacts aren't really 'cheap' either, but you know what I mean.

His actual birthday isn't until October, but we wanted to get it him now because of the whole trip to Monaco. It'll give him a chance to play with it before-hand and then he can use it there too.

I'm knackered because it was quite an intense weekend. It was actually one of my scheduled cleaning weekends and while I could have left it, with the ant problems I've been having I really wanted to at least have a wipe around.

I therefore had to cram all that into Friday morning and then drive down in the afternoon. Unfortunately, the trip down was horrible - I got stuck around Stonehenge and it meant the whole journey took five-and-a-half hours. I normally reckon on it being up to about 4 hours (which is what it took me on Monday). So that was tiring.

Then, on Saturday there was all the present stuff, which was fairly tiring as I had to explain everything to Dad. In the afternoon we then went for this huge long walk at Braunton Burrows, which is this area of sand-dunes.

I really need to get used to walking distances again for the Monaco trip, so it was good from that point of view, but it was still pretty tiring. On top of that on Sunday we went for another walk and that pretty much finished me off - Sunday afternoon I almost couldn't walk and had to take painkillers on Monday. I'm still aching in my calves now.

Monday was the drive back - I had to head off really early as I need to get back so that I could do all the other stuff I needed to, like ironing, etc.

So as you can see, it was a really rather busy and active weekend. I could almost do with a holiday to recover from my holiday!

coming and going

It's going to be a confusing and rather busy weekend, I can tell.

There unfortunately seems to have come together a whole bunch of stuff that I need to do or want to get out of the way. It's all rather bit and all over the place, and what's worrying is I've tried to do some organising-type lists and each time they kinda break down or end up impossible to actually achieve.

For example, next weekend is Easter and me and my sister are going to be visiting our dad in order to give him his birthday present. Okay, so that's fine, but it means that the entire Easter weekend is basically a right off, so I need to get everything done now.

That includes buying the last part of Dad's present, wrapping all the bits (I'll need some paper) and buying him a birthday card as the more obvious stuff. However, it also includes less obvious stuff like making sure I'm fuelled up for the weekend and remembering to adjust my trip to the laundrette so that it ties in better.

So in other words, even the simple stuff involves multiple parts and multiple days.

And that's one of the simpler things. You also need to factor in I've got e-bay stuff to send, because people took a long time to pay, plus one of them is a cheque so I'll need to pay that in at the bank. Then you've got the fact that it's also my sister's birthday and I want to give her her present at Easter too.

Plus I've still got the scanning to finish off (new megami turned up - should I do that as well, or leave it until later). Then I've got the last few anime shows of last year to watch.

And mentioning them, the new anime season has started. Fansubs won't appear for about a week, I'd guesss, but the hard-drive I stor fansubs on is nearly full, so I need to burn them all to DVD.

Then it's the second F1 GP of the season, but it's on at a weird time in the morning :/. and of course I've got all that PVR'd stuff to catch up on still.

See - it's all little things that aren't int themselves, porblems, but they're all stacking up into a mighty confusing weekend.

*sigh*

My car's in for its service today. Fingers crossed there's nothign spectacularly wrong with it. I was afraid the tyres might need doing, and that won't be cheap. We will have to see.

return of the tris

Well now, it's been a while since I posted on here. As mentioned that's because I've been away on holiday--I went down to Devon to visit my Dad, as it was his birthday last week.

It was a pretty expensive w/end all things considered. My new car has really great fuel economy. I can get around 50 miles per gallon if I "eco-drive" it, but of course if you're having to do around 400 miles, that still means you're going to use about 8 gallons, which is a full tank of petrol and so costs the best part of £40 or so :/.

Then there's eating on the road - unless you pack a lunch, which I can never be arsed to do, you'll inevitably have to get something to eat (the journey is the best part of 4 hours) and prices in rest stops are never cheap - I must have spent about £10, total.

Then there's the fact it's his birthday, so I spent about £35 or so on gifts. Plus I paid for a meal at the local restauranty-pub place, which was about £40.

So, all things considered that's about £125. Not the cheapest of week-ends :/.

And speaking of expensive, I've come back and seen some annoying news this morning. I've been buying the individual volumes for ADV's releases of Welcome to NHK and Red Garden.

However, a few months back, ADV essentially went tits-up. They've not actually folded, but, from what I've read, what happened was they made a dodgy move with a backer/investor in Japan. That all fell through and (for some reason) they lost all of the titles they'd licensed during that period.

Which included NHK and Red Garden.

But then, Funimation swooped to the rescue, picking up the licenses. Now it's taken them a while to catch up with stuff (they also picked up distribution of all the Geneon titles) and the announcement they've made is that they're releasing both series as collected volumes.

I must admit I was kinda expecting that as most all of the stuff they've released that they picked up has been in the form of collected volumes (sometimes as "part 1" and "part 2" sometimes as the full series) but it doesn't make it any less annoying.

I wouldn't mind so much if either series had only been at the 1 or 2 volume stage, but both were 1 volume away from completion. Factor into that the fact that the number of eps per disk always starts higher and then reduces and it means that in order to get the last 3 or 4 eps I have to not only buy several disks I've already got, but I have to pay a huge whack for just those last few eps.

It's pretty annoying, and pretty expensive too.

birthdays and long week-end

It's my Dad's birthday tomorrow, so I'm going down to visit him this w/end.

He lives in Devon and I live in Hampshire, so it's a good trek--about 3 or 4 hours, traffic depending.

I'm actually going down on Saturday and coming back on Monday, but I'm taking Thursday and Friday off as well so that I can get some personal stuff done as well.

It probably means the bloggage won't get any updates for a while, as I tend to write these first thing at work. So I'll see you next week (I dunno who I'm talking too--nobody actually reads this :/).