Thursday, October 14, 2004

Stand A Chance

(My favourite track from the Big O soundtrack, heh). I have some good news: Enter the Net shall be returning soon. I can't guarantee how soon exactly, but I'm working through a couple of the chapters again now and things seem to be going okay. I have a habit of being incredibly unreliable when it comes to things like this though (and I can't apologise enough to people who are still waiting for stuff from me- I promise I'm doing everything I can at the moment >.>). Keep your eyes peeled and I'll give another notice a few days in advance, heh. Subjective Realities I've always been brought up to question the information handed to me. In some cases I do it better than others- usually when it comes to TV adverts and scientific research. And sometimes when I receive a big piece of news (good or bad), I'll sometimes be sceptical about it. There's this really fun programme on SkyOne called Braniac: Science Abuse, and basically it's all the stuff that made science interesting- excuses to blow up as much stuff as possible and the experiments that have relevance or interest to every day life, or some that are just... well, that you didn't know you wanted to know. Or didn't, perhaps. Some things are just incredibly pointless, mind. Like finding a million different ways to stop a cassette player from working, including plowing it up with TNT, firing a 2-bore shotgun at it and setting it on fire. Why? Because they can. One of their experiments today was to try and see how a sportsman's performance was altered by having a distracting crowd right behind them, in sports where there's usually dead quiet everywhere; namely tennis, golf and bowls. The conclusion was that while golf suffered as a result of having a crowd of maniacs behind you, tennis and bowls' accuracy increased. It's flawed as a true experiment though, because there were no repeat performances and no average taken for better results. Noise doesn't always aid concentration, and it would depend greatly on the person. Sometimes noise can create a feeling of discomfort which throws you off, but at other times it might intice you into focussing more clearly on what you have to do while trying to completely blank outside influences. They looked at one person per sport, which isn't a great representation, heh. But even though it had its faults, it was a pretty interesting experiment. It would have been nice to see whether different kinds and levels of noise made a difference- like rock music compared to a yelling crowd and some roadworks, for example. But it's only an hour-long show and there's a lot of other stuff they need to get in, so it's not really viable to do it over and over again. But this is why I rarely believe the research I'm handed on adverts. 90% of cat owners prefer Whiskas, eh? They probably stood next to the Whiskas section and asked people who chose it whether it was what they prefereed to buy or not. And even if they did say yes, it means absolutey nothing. The research is probably funded by that very company to get the results they want. And you even have to be careful with bits of information that aren't necessarily research, but are cleverly-crafted phrases to make you think what you're getting is assuredly safe. There's a new range of foods created by Bird's Eye for kids, which is 'nutritionally balanced'. 'Nutritionally balanced' is one of the most innately deceptive things you could use to describe food. All it's saying is that there's as much good stuff as there is bad. For convenience food, all you're getting is trash anyway. Don't expect premium fresh free-range food bursting with vitamins and goodies. But even the foods that advertise themselves as 'low-fat' aren't as healthy as they appear to be. Yeah, the fat's low, but that usually leads to a compromise in taste value, so they have to pump other stuff inside it to make it palateable. Check the salt and sugar contents, for instance. I won't go into everything else in food that's bad for you cause I'd be here all night, but it's disgusting stuff. [I was sure I'd written something about this already somewhere o_o; Maybe I'm only thinking I did...] There was this documentary about what parents let their kids eat a couple of days ago and what it showed was disgusting. The documentary created their own brand of kids' yoghurt specially for this experiment, called 'Fit N Fruity', which actually contained about as much nutritional content as a bag of sugar. And they played kids an advert of it during their normal TV programmes, then sent the parents and the kids off to the supermarket. A lot of the kids immediately went for the stuff they'd seen on TV and most were allowed to have it, despite the fact that it was one of the unhealthiest things available there. When someone from the food industry was confronted about hos misleading the yoghurt was, he said it was absolutely fine, even though there was nothing 'Fit' or 'Fruity' about it. And I won't even think about how much I loathe McDonald's. I'm not saying 'be suspicious about everything given to you', but you certainly need to make sure you know what you're letting yourself in for. Not everything is as clear cut as it might seem, heh. Sleep well ^_~

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