Jenny McCarthy, a famous non-scientist who has toured the country warning that vaccines caused her son's autism, now says that her son doesn't actually have autism and that vaccines might not actually cause autism. You see, real science doesn't make things up. Real science is a self-critical activity . . . Now it's time for Kirk Cameron to see the light.
This is a post to complement Huffington's "sleep challenge." U.C. Berkeley reports this good news for afternoon nappers:
In the recent UC Berkeley sleep study, 39 healthy young adults were divided into two groups — nap and no-nap. At noon, all the participants were subjected to a rigorous learning task intended to tax the hippocampus, a region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Both groups performed at comparable levels.
At 2 p.m., the nap group took a 90-minute siesta while the no-nap group stayed awake. Later that day, at 6 p.m., participants performed a new round of learning exercises. Those who remained awake throughout the day became worse at learning. In contrast, those who napped did markedly better and actually improved in their capacity to learn. Matthew Walker, assistant psychology professor, has found that a nap clears the brain to absorb new information.
These findings reinforce the researchers' hypothesis that sleep is needed to clear the brain’s short-term memory storage and make room for new information . . .
Here is an interesting observation posted in a medical journal. It concludes:
Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticized the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.
So, do we really know if parachutes are better than a placebo for surviving skydiving? Alt-Med advocates are all over this one.
This may actually be more about problems in cross cultural communication. But it does appear to be a case of runaway Nanny-State-ism. I have come to accept with a chuckle the warning labels on toasters and VCR's to not use them in the bath or shower. I'm sure they are slippery when wet, and one might drop them on ones foot. This is a problem among electrocuted zombies, I'm sure.
But what am I to make of the warning on this product?
I need ANSI-Approved eye protection to open a drawer? Did an actual lawyer sign off on this?
This box is actually lower quality than a similar one that I'd bought at Target a couple of years earlier for the same price. Target doesn't have them any more, so I resort to Harbor Freight.
I've been mail-ordering from Harbor Freight since the 1980's, long before they had stores east of California. This is a cheap tools import house that now has an outlet a few blocks west of Crestwood Plaza Court. The prices are amazing, but you get what you pay for.
Jamie Oliver is a chef who wants to talk about people who are killing themselves by eating dangerous food. Obesity is killing us in huge numbers, though the media still would rather scare us about homicides, which are relatively rare. We have become so big that there is a significant market for double-sized coffins.
The system is rife with misinformation. We are a country where food manufacturers make prominent "no fat" labels when the food (including milk) is full of sugar. One of his messages is that we've got to stop trusting food manufacturers to properly label their food products. What we do to our children by feeding them crappy food is "child abuse." Our schools are complicit, along with food manufacturers.
Oliver's talk is an up front and personal look at the perpetrators and victims of the problem, and they are often the same people. But consider, also, that we now live is a system where accountants choose our food, not nutritionists.
The low-light of the video is at the 11-minute mark. How well do our kids recognize fruits and vegetables? Not well at all. We are failing miserably at educating our children about food.
We can do a lot better, and Jamie offers some promising solutions that all focus on educating our families and children. Oliver offers a positive energy and an urgency that we desperately need.
Here's Oliver's wish:
