Daily Archives: Wed, 6 June, 2007

Brave New Age and wi-fi

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The wifi panic looks set for a long run, by the standards of modern technofear terrors. Ben Goldacre’s column more or less says everything worth saying, between the text and the comments. I am going to stick in a couple of links to the Register and even to Powerwatch – the opposite side.

So there. That’s a flourish of even-handedness, before I do exactly what Ben Goldacre says not to, somewhere on the Bad Science site, and slag off the people with the electro-sensitivity symptoms.

These symptoms aren’t things like bleeding from the ears or collapsing or losing control of their bladders. i.e., symptoms that would get you past an ER triage nurse. They are the sort of symptoms that might drive you to take a paracetemol.

Sleep disturbances. Or headaches? Well, I doubt there’s a person alive that doesn’t get these. At the risk of seeming completely compassionless, maybe these symptoms are just part of the human condition. Continue reading →

Slight Misunderstanding

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Now, normally, I wouldn’t bat an eyelid at a site taking offence over something which was posted here. Normally though, offence is intended and it actually cheers me up to see the recipient has realised and taken the required offence 🙂

The flip side, and possibly an off shoot of an over-developed Atheistic moral code, is that when no offence was intended, yet some one took offence, I feel the need to say sorry. Bah.

It is in this light, that I should point out that Heathers’ recent post (Technorati Links Mystery) was not written with the aim of offending Parabiodox and it certainly was not meant to be snide about the fact that he was still showing up. Heather responded with a comment, but as I am aware, not all of you read the comments (bad people), so this is what she wrote:

Blast. I must have explained this so badly. I dont dare mention today’s Technorati nonsense…….
(a) Parabiodox took my bracketed (ffs) after his name as “snide” when he referred to it in his blog. Sorry,  Parabiodox, it was supposed to be ironic that we were getting loads of links from a christian and none from the atheist blogroll. (By the way, I wasn’t complaining that Technorati wasn’t indexing our posts. It is. It’s taking links in our text as links)
(b) My issues don’t have to do with getting authority off the Blogroll. It is to do with Technorati not seeing the Blogroll, when it’s in the form of a script. Whether it’s on our site or anybody else’s, Technorati just doesn’t see any links on it and hasn’t for weeks.

This is about as close to apology as I can get, so I hope it clears matters up 😀 .

[tags]Parabiodox, Site Admin, General, Comments[/tags]

Dangers from fat increasing by the year?

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The BBC website “science” pages have text on obesity and a quiz about it. I am always interested in trying to find any real science basis behind our current obsession with obesity and diet. I still remain to be convinced by more than a scraping of it. (See old post about child obesity/anorexia scares. )

While I was scoring poorly on the quiz- I failed the first question on how many years of life obesity can cost – I saw this,:

Obesity can shorten your life by 9 years. 18 million days of work are lost through sickness due to obesity, and it costs the NHS £500 million a year.

I always have a problem with health rants that discuss how much problem x or y costs the Health Service. We get used to seeing things that put arbitrary cost figures on health. Unfortunately, no source is quoted, so it’s hard to argue with the data. But, an absence of facts never stops me making an argument.

Is every illness suffered by an obese person to be blamed on their weight? Don’t they get the same range of health problems as everybody else? So, any extra cost calculation would surely have to deduct a baseline standard level of health costs.

Continue reading →