My recent review of the Emoji Movie was going to include some stuff about me, but I decided to give more words to another communication.
People I chat to are largely around my age. Which is pretty much old. I’m more than likely in the second half of my life.
I have ways of communicating with these friends which could be proper phonecalls, twitter, text, this website and Whatsapp. Different friends use different communication methods. That’s just how it is. I don’t really have rules about things but I can tell you this:
I Don’t Use Emojis.
I can sometimes stretch to an emoticon. I reckon this is mostly to do with the fact that I don’t understand what the emojis mean. They are too small and I can’t be bothered to learn. Therefore I don’t use them.
If I do use an emoji then it’s normally a wink or smile. Many of the others are useless for my conversation. Grumpy and old, that’s me.
No, I don’t mean Bluebirds of the Clan Campbell variety, they are entirely different and not covered in this communication. This communication deals with the rare communication device of the Second World War where the country listened to a female sing propaganda about the White Cliffs. This is the sort of jingoistic bullshit we see our country faced with at the moment. All this Brexit shit. Anyway, here are some photographs of a recent trip to Dover to see the port.
Handbrake Turn
It was foggy and so a wonderfully bad day to visit the cliffs. I was hoping to see France but, at times, I couldn’t see my hand!
HM Coastguard
Now for a view of some calcium carbonate.
White Cliffs
While in the area I also went to see the Louis Blériot Memorial. I didn’t get a photo of it, but I did take this one of the castle in the mist.
Dover Castle and Bora Horza Gobuchul
Finally, here’s a photo of some collected chalk pieces. It’s quite a satisfying photo but I am unsure why.
I recently ordered a day-sack cover from a company using Amazon. It arrived and I was somewhat shocked.
Packaging!
The rest of the box had that paper-stuff in it to hold the rain cover in place. I have written about this before in this communication.
While this sort of packaging excess does seem a waste I’ve got some other ideas. Fuel use for transporting goods is largely dependent on the mass of the object. So although the box added something to the mass it was still reasonably light and so not a huge carbon drain. If the box is recycled then it doesn’t really matter about how much cardboard there was. There’s probably more carbon used in making the plastic wrapper of the item than in the box, as long as the box comes from a sustainable source.
So, upon reflection this excessive packaging may not be as bad a first thought.
I do think that eventually everything will be labelled with a “carbon factor” to make people aware of just how much carbon they emit and how well we are fucking the planet. Because we are. It is fucked. Utterly fucked. I am glad I will be dead in one hundred years. There are going to be wars over water, food and power. I am just very sorry that my children, or potential grandchildren, will be involved in that and the people to blame will all be dead. My parents’ generation and mine have screwed this planet over.
I could be calmed, I guess, by fluffy cat or dog pictures. But they don’t distract me from the bullshit. They reinforce our collective ability to ignore all that is going on.
Saw a lovely part of London today when I walked along the Regent’s Canal today. I was learning some maths in town and I had to walk from St Pancras to the venue and rather than walk along the main roads I took the tow path. I’m glad I did.
Part Of The Canal
I also saw this exquisite book shop. There was music playing from loud speakers as I walked past and plenty of vinyl on display.
Bookshop
I also saw a lovely old industrial building that, if I had loads of money and the relevant experience I would turn this into a music venue.
It’s a shame I don’t have money, the contacts, the experience or any industry knowledge at all!
My Future Venue
When I got back home I went for a run and jogged past this quality piece of Kent countryside. I think this is the second burnt out car to grace these pages!
They cut out the VIN
But, there is good news: This lovely view over the Medway and Tonbridge and Malling Borough.
While taking a jog from SMP near junction 12 of the M20 here in Kent I noticed the gorgeous curves of a water tower. I like this design because it clearly is a DESIGN and not a “let’s build it as strong as possible” clump of bricks. Most water towers are inelegant, this one is gorgeous.
Curves
I have a suspicion that these curves are catenaries, Gaudí uses them a lot in his cathedral.
Along with the lovely curves of that delicious monster the sun was rising over the sea. Here’s a view.
I’m quite proud of that last picture. I do think I’d be quite happy living is this home:
In part of the O2 arena complex there is an exhibition at the moment entitled Star Wars Identities. I went to see it today. The Millenium Dome as people my age remember it, the white elephant of bullshit that cost nearly a BILLION pounds for a year’s worth of exhibition about stuff at the turn of the millennium [although they got the wrong year, it should have been 2001 obviously]. I went to the dome in 2000 and it was shit. Then it lay empty as far as I know and at some point O2 coughed up money and it seems to be a half decent venue. I’ve not seen a band there but I have seen tennis and it was OK for that. The outer part of the arena seems to consist solely of places to buy food.
The exhibition was a little underwhelming. I knew there were going to be outfits, models and robots but I didn’t realise just how much “identity” was going to be in it. It was very nice to see the stuff from the films and I really enjoyed that but I’m not a fan enough to want to see developmental sketches and stuff like that. Just show me the real stuff.
C3PO – with silver leg
The opening video section was about how Anakin and Luke were both heroes. How the choices they made changed them. And then there was more stuff but I had stopped listening. I just wasn’t interested in trying to shoehorn a reason for this exhibition into the exhibition. It wasn’t necessary. This sort of thing would have been good just by itself.
THE Falcon
The best bit was being given a wrist RFID thing that meant I could create my own Star Wars character as I went around. By answering questions and making choices about my fictional life I would end up with a character.
I chose to be a wookie. There were nine other question stations and in the final hall area I could see the chosen character on the wall. I also got an emailed version which will appear below.
Slave 1
Snowspeeder
Storm Trooper
Bobba Fett
AT-AT
Luke’s Kit
Chewie
Anakin’s Speederbike
THE Vader
THE Falcon
C3PO
Tuskan Raider
There was an expensive lot of tat being sold in the regulation shop at the end of the exhibition. I bought a few things including these glasses.
Expensive Tat
So, here is my character:
My Star Wars Identity
Here is my biography:
I was raised on the gas planet Bespin, where members of my community made their living working as engineers in Cloud City’s reactor core. On holidays my friends and I would traditionally relax in the luxurious floating spas.
My parents raised me with a mix of independence and support, and I inherited my natural abilities from them. Later on I spent some time with the wise Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, whose guidance left me with knowledge I still use every day in my job as a fighter pilot.
I remember this one time when I crash-landed on a strange planet. I didn’t let this affect me too much, though; instead I became a successful trader of scrap metal and found a home among the Jawas.
People often tell me I’m a generally organised and prepared person, I also tend to be adventurous and curious. But the most important thing to me is universalism: after all, as they say, equal rights for all and special privileges for none.
I have only a low sensitivity to the Force, but the Emperor saw potential in me. When he offered me limitless power in exchange for my allegiance, I fought the urge to join him and his evil minions and rejected his offer.
Overall it was expensive for what it was, although I expected that. I remember seeing a Lord Of The Rings exhibition at the Science Museum years ago and that was great. I’m glad I went as I love the photo I took of the Tusken Raider and the view from the cable car.
I also took a trip over the Thames in the cable cars sponsored by Emirates.
This morning I went for a run through some of the Kent countryside. I would embed a map of the route from my running app but it crashed after about two miles. So, here’s a map from Google Earth.
It was a good run through a gentle fluttering of snow. I enjoyed it and listened to the Cognitive Dissonance podcast from Chicago. The paths were particularly pretty at times and I took two photos.
Sorry people and Fooyah fans. I’m not going to make my target for January 2017. I had hoped to publish more communications this month than in any other previous month and I thought the total I had to beat was 32 [August 2011].
My current aim is to write more communications for Fooyah this month that I have in any past month. Quality may be affected.
I had a nice day in London on Thursday past. I was attending a course which should give me decent information to help people at work. It was interesting and also quite difficult at the same time. It was good to be challenged and made to do new things. I had to walk down Marylebone High Street to get to the venue and it looked quite a nice place with small independent shops that were selling stuff way more expensive than I could afford.
I had a spare ninety minutes in the day before meeting Smith and so I went for a walk, mostly to help work off the flap jacks I had eaten. London is nice and calm, as long as you stay away from the main tourist routes. Don’t walk down Oxford Street use Wigmore Street instead.
This gives you an idea of my activity through the day. The red bars are when I was doing maths. The other bits show me walking around. I walked 20km that day compared to an average 12.4km.
This chart shows total steps per month over the last year. Quite clearly we can see that when the weather is warmer and daylight lasts longer I walk more. That’s not really a surprise.
Here we go again. Another BBC News Headline and Fooyah goes off on one to deride the state of news. But first let me tell you where my biases lie.
I have recently decided to stop scanning my general Twitter feed. I follow about a thousand feeds on that account and a lot of them revolve around my interests of religion, airplanes aeroplanes, science and politics. Given what Donald Trump says and could possibly do after the 20th along with how that affects my interests you can imagine that my twitter feed is filled with horror. Even last year during the post-Brexit week I found that twitter was feeding the news I wanted while the traditional BBC site and radio news wasn’t giving me the detail I wanted. I felt I wanted to know everything that happened when it happened.
I have started to recognise that this was becoming an obsession. Constantly wanting to check Twitter. Missing parts of TV shows programmes because I was looking at my feed. I was starting to miss out on peace, on enjoying concentrating. I have now stopped looking at that particular feed. I use my normal account highlighted down the right hand side of this site because that feed has only friends and twitter is one of the methods I stay in touch with some friends. I don’t officially do Faceshit so that doesn’t really matter.
From now on I am going to get my news in manageable chunks by listening to the radio and occasionally browsing the BBC website. I gave up TV news a long time ago as I couldn’t cope with the forced human interest narrative they assigned to every story. The human interest of news didn’t affect me, I want to know the news behind the story, not the “this made Chloe from Bakersfield miss her train”.
I watched this video after my decision, it was sent to me by a friend and while I have some criticisms of the things said in the video I felt some of it applied to me and I am far from a millennial.
I do have some issues with some of the things he says and I am definitely not convinced he is right about everything but it is very interesting. I could see some of these behaviours in myself and so decided to change my behaviour to be more positive to my life. One of my current issues was feeling anger at all the Trump tweets or news items and being powerless to affect them in any way. By ignoring them I hope to gain some sense of control and happiness over those parts of my life. I can get on with my life largely as it is and just calmly wait for the end-times.
I have become largely convinced that mobile devices need to be banned in schools. Not because I am a nasty bastard but because we have a SOCIAL DUTY to teach children to concentrate on tasks that last longer than a few minutes. The young need to learn to be able to delay reward. They are in a system where I want them to learn during all my lessons in a week and the pay off is years away in their examination results, in their choice on university and in the pay of their future careers. I don’t have a science study to back this up but I do think we are doing a disservice to the young because they expect reward constantly.
Oh, but they can play computer games and concentrate for hours.
Yes and no. They are constantly rewarded while playing computer games. The tasks are short term and the rewards are built in regularly to make the kids feel good. This is the equivalent of checking an answer in the back of a maths text book and seeing that you got it right. That little hit of success. One of these is “fun” and the other takes place in a structured lesson where the ultimate pay off is years away.
A student I taught a few years ago who, in the run up to his exams, took his phone, turned it off and placed it in a plastic bag which he kept on him for emergency purposes. He did this for three months. He recognised the distraction that his phone is. It doesn’t matter if you find out something has happened 2 minutes after the event or 5 hours after the event. It’s the same thing that has happened. That kid got As and A* at A Level and now studies at a top university.
Look, I love my phone and I like my console and this computer where I am currently typing. I don’t want to throw them away. But I do think there are serious sociological problems that need to be faced. We are failing the youth by not preparing them to concentrate persistently at a task with a delayed reward.
This was the headline on the BBC News website, I heard about the article from listening to the radio 4 article. I also found the same “news” item in the Daily Fucking Piece Of Shit Mail.
Now, I’m not very good at reading science papers. I have tried and find the language very dense and deliberately obscure. Given my interest in REAL THINGS learning how to read science papers is probably a good thing. I found the original paper from where these headlines derive. It is linked here. The PDF can be found here, or below.
I just want to cover some of my observations from reading the paper before writing about the news articles.
A Large-Scale Test of the Goldilocks Hypothesis: Quantifying the Relations Between Digital-Screen Use and the Mental Well-Being of Adolescents
This paper was a test of the Goldilocks Hypothesis [bullshit name making it seem acceptable or a good thing even though it’s a happy story about a fucking thief]. This paper is to test the happiness-screen time hypothesis. It doesn’t set out to find out if screen time makes teenagers happier than not having screen time. It doesn’t have a control group. All it does is see whether the youngsters have an ideal happiness-screen time relationship. It could have found out that 20 hours a a day was the ultimate happiness value.
Most of the paper talks about the regression curve they decided would fit and how they tested that. Essentially they found an upper limit in the curve.
The number of students used in the study was large. All the data was self-reported and that can cause issues of under-reporting of negative trends. This paper didn’t seek to find out how much happier students were before and after. All they looked into was the happiness of students compared to how much screen time they have. There’s no before and after. There’s no analysis of how increasing or decreasing screen time affects individuals. It could be imagined that deliberately affecting the well being of teenagers negatively would be immoral.
This study sought to confirm a previous hypothesis that a quadratic curve could be used to fit to the data and that from that there would be a maximum [inflexion in the paper]. It didn’t seek to find out anything else.
This study seeks to inform future studies and has nothing to do with optimum time to get students the most well-being. It just modelled that. There were no controls. We do NOT know from this study what happens if a student stops using their phone and does other stuff. This study wasn’t about that. It’s not a before and after study. It’s a study about now.
Interesting, but also obvious, was that different digital activities had different effects on well-being. Being on a phone has a lower time than watching TV. They are very different activities.
The study also says that they did not look into whether academic work was affected or what the possible outcomes are with high or low digital device usage. This study JUST looked at modelling the Goldilocks Hypothesis. My instinct is that the Goldilocks Hypothesis probably exists for most things. Want to eat chocolate? Have a certain amount to get most well-being feeling. Want to exercise? A certain amount will maximise your well-being score, and so on.
So, now a few quotes from the BBC article.
Moderate screen use ‘boosts teen wellbeing’
NOT what the paper says. The paper did NOT compare before and after, just what exists now. They are very different things.
They found a “Goldilocks effect” where a few hours of device-use seemed to boost mental wellbeing.
They were testing for the Goldilocks effect. They didn’t discover it. Their aim was to model it mathematically. Again, BOOST, no it doesn’t say that. Boost implies a before and after effect which was not measured by this study.
In addition, the first hour or two of screen time was actually associated with an increase in mental wellbeing for those using computers, smartphones, video games and watching TV or films.
FFS, not an increase just what is. IF I HAVE THIS WRONG PLEASE LET ME KNOW. I am not expert in reading science papers. Have a look yourself and tell me.
The BBC article is pretty bad but there are redeeming features to the article and even they explain that this paper confirms the hypothesis. It’s good to have some science about these things but the NEWS can’t report it very well. And we wonder why there are issues with fake-news and this being a post-truth world.
I need a few deep breaths now as I take some quotes from the Daily Shit article. I can’t read the whole thing without encountering a rage so I will rely on the bullet points at the top of the article.
Researchers found there is little evidence screen time damages teenagers
NOT what they were looking for. The study was to confirm the Goldilocks Effect. We would need a CONTROL group to decide if damage is done.
The found that, in fact, 257 minutes on a computer is beneficial for them
No, it didn’t. See above.
It is the ‘sweet spot’ when teens have had enough time to develop online skills
No, it doesn’t say that. For fucks sake. If we trained teenagers in developing internet skills properly they would soon realise that the DM website is full of shit.
I’m done. If I tried I expect I could take the whole DM article and pull nearly every sentence apart. The main problem is I don’t want to. I don’t want to read that shit. It’s misleading. The BBC article was misleading but not as bad. It was still misleading.
No wonder we have problems with people trusting the news and sources. No wonder they want to listen to “news” that agrees with their own narrative about how the world works rather than challenge their own understanding. I try to be unbiased in my understanding of the world. I try to give weight to things that disagree with my perception of the world because it challenges me and because, as a human, I am incredibly unable to decide what it correct or true. That’s why science developed. It’s why there are true investigative reporters. The world should be able to cope with REALITY even if they fundamentally oppose what that reality is. We should be accepting of things that challenge us and make us think but ultimately make us more aware of what is really going on.
After all, isn’t the truth what we seek?
Addendum
Let’s have another look at that graph:
I don’t know about you but a peak happiness going from 47 to 48.5 or so doesn’t seem impressive. Also, we don’t know how many students were at each level, so we don’t know how many students were at the zero hours per day level [I was sure I read this in the paper but can’t now see it].
Also, 20% of students reported more than 12 hours a day engagement.
it was clear that many participants had reported
simultaneous screen use; approximately 20% of the sample
reported a sum of more than 12 hr of engagement on
weekdays, and 35% of the sample reported a total of
more than 12 hr on weekend days
Fuck! These poor kids. We need some serious intervention so we are able to help these people in society as a whole, so they can develop friendships, so they can function.
I got a proper christmas present from Jo and this is the first part of it. It’s a model of the Millennium Falcon coming in at about 75mm long and 50mm wide. I have R2 and an X-Wing to make yet. This was pretty fiddly! There were about thirty pieces of metal sheet to pop out and then fit together. My eyes are possibly slightly too old for this shit! But it does look good.
Millennium Falcon
If you want to see a 360 degree version, and who wouldn’t, then click here. One more view:
Millennium Falcon
Yes, I know the word “christmas” should be spelt with a capital letter. But I don’t care.
The title of this communication does not refer to the more frequent sea passage in the Northwest of the globe. The fact that this passage is becoming a more regular occurrence should scare the fuck out of all of you. Anthropogenic Global Climate change is happening and the speed is increasing. The biggest problem is that all the damage has been done already. Because the effects are long term and not pleasant and will cost a fucking fortune to sort out it’s not the sort of thing politicians really want to talk about. As far as I can tell this planet is fucked. It isn’t going to get solved and our grandchildren will be suffering as a result of this. Fuck the self-interested assholes who “govern” the countries. Fuck them and the short-termism of politics.
Bridges
The bit in the middle of the map, bounded by the river, the A229 and the two motorways is a lovely area to live in. I have written about it before see this communication. To get to Snodland, which the Post Office thinks is the best place to take my parcels, is a 9 or 12 mile journey ONE WAY. This is largely because of the river and the location of bridges over the river.
A new village is being built on brownfield site in the three villages area. There will soon be four in the valley. While I understand the need for more housing I do think the character of the valley villages is going to be ruined. Currently the villages are largely working class Victorian homes built for the workers of Burham Brick Works. There’s a certain look and feel to the villages. The brand new village will be large, expensive homes. My chip on my shoulder is back! I have found myself getting annoyed recently at the stratification of society and the problems that causes. Anyway, back to the journey to the post office lest this writing become another rant about the uselessness of politicians and the social engineering they mess with [along with fucking the planet].
Part of the deal for these new houses was a new bridge to be built. This will allow most of the traffic of the new village to not go past the junction to my village. But in reality that’s bullshit. What may happen is that the local country roads become over run with people cutting through along the bottom of the Downs. We shall see. My village is already planning a zebra crossing because of the expected extra traffic.
New Bridge
The new bridge is in place and opened recently. I drove over it this evening and took a photo. Already the road seems busier [anecdote and confirmation bias]. I will run that way tomorrow. Normally running along that stretch I would be passed by about 3-4 cars during the mile I am on that road. It will be interesting to see what happens. While I like the idea of the bridge I am not happy about what it means for those who live around here.
The New Bridge
So I now have to spend the next few months behind non locals who think the road [at the split] is two way because they haven’t paid attention. My patience could be tested.
I will keep you chaps updated about what happens. I predict a serious crash at the Bull Lane / Pilgrims Way junction within a year and then traffic lights or a mini roundabout will be installed.
I have been to the Lake District a few times and every time it stuns me as I drive from Penrith to Keswick. I went to see a friend of mine and he said he had a good activity for us on the Friday!
Our task was to walk around the Keswick end of Derwent Water and find the locations where three of the four clips were filmed. They cheated a bit in the film because one of the backdrops was filmed from the Lodore Falls end of the lake and then made up to be from the north end of the lake [naughty!], this is the location we didn’t try to find.
The first scene backdrop we looked for was filmed near the transmission tower to the edge of Keswick. It’s labelled in the clip as “Flying Southwest from Castlerigg over Great Wood”, TS00:21. The screenclip below shows the approximate position of the filming location as it was taken from a helicopter.
The second filming position occurs at TS00:41 and is labelled “Looking Northeast Near Brandelhow Point”. This one was filmed from a static camera and so was easier to pin point from where it was filmed.
The last filming location we looked for was the attack on the pub-by-the-lake. Its labelled in the clip as “Looking Northwest from the Shorline West of Crow Park”, TS01:13. We found this spot on the shores of Derwent Water.
Fortunately for us, Marc had a good knowledge of the area and also an iPad with the Star Wars film and the YouTube clip. Also, his dad is a Lake District expert, being on his third time around all the Wainwrights.
The next morning I had a run and much like two years ago my aim was to run up a mountain. Clearly I chose one of the smaller ones and I toodled up Latrigg.
I did enjoy it although I headed around the town afterwards as an extra as although the climb was hard work I had rested plenty by the time I was down. Here’s a panorama I took once at the summit of Latrigg.
Shortly after the run I drove back home. My plan was to cross the Pennines, turn at Scotch Corner and follow the A1(M), but I missed that last turning and so did most of the M1, Oh well!
POTUS departed for Germany. I feel quite privileged to be in a position where I was able to be there and see everything.
28000
It was interesting. The airport was quiet for about the hour that I was there. No flights in or out, I wonder if that played havoc with the airlines’ schedules? The photos taken here are from the closest I could get without being shot by the snipers on top of the buildings or the Met Police Helicopter constantly circling around above us.
Stansted Map
This map has three numbers drawn on it. Number 1 was the position of the C-17 parked, I didn’t see that move. Number 2 is where Air Force One was parked and number 3 was the closest I could get. Fortunately I was reasonably aware of the layout of the old side of the airport.
VH-3D
Ospreys
Boeing C-32
Air Force One
Air Force One taxiing
C-32 Departure
28000
Marine One
Osprey
Met Police
Arrivals
It was quite exciting knowing I had seen the President but in all honesty all we saw were figures go up the stairs. It was also pretty damn cold and we had hail/snow at one point! I believe Stansted was chosen because it is the go-to airport for hostages and hijacking along with having plenty of space to put important planes.
I will note that events from the film London Has Fallen did not occur.
I’m going to try and explain my position on data mining and data collection and profiling. The government wants to collect lots of data on all of us to help fight terrorism. This won’t work. The amount of data they want to collect is immense. They want to find terrorists using sophisticated computer programs and mining this data for connections.
Problem 1
If I was a terrorist I wouldn’t use social media for communication. I would use face to face meetings, dead letter drops and PAYG mobiles using them for a week and then dumping them. I would never directly contact anyone in charge and all organisation would be off the internet. It’s no use searching these data for patterns. Terrorists don’t use communication methods we can tap into.
Problem 2
The laws of probability. Let us suppose that the software can recognise a terrorist, by using their behaviour traits, 99% of the time and it incorrectly states an innocent person is a terrorist 1% of the time. Let’s suppose we are monitoring a million people and that there are 100 terrorists in that population. This would extrapolate to around 7000 terrorists in the UK. It would seem likely/reasonable that there are that many people within our borders willing to cause damage to the state.
The Sums
Of the 100 terrorists the software finds 99% of them so 99 terrorists are taken into custody. 1 terrorist remains at large.
The software also falsely accuses 1% of the population as it is only correct 99% of the time. This means that 9999 honest members of the public are wrongly accused of being terrorists.
So we have taken 10098 people into custody. The chances of you being accused but innocent is 9999/10098 which is about 99%.
The chance of you being guilty if taken into custody is 99/10098 or about 1%
This is a bad situation.
Data mining isn’t going to work. Neither is profiling or algorithms about people’s behaviour. The numbers don’t make sense. This measure won’t work.
To give you an idea of the scope of this problem I will now expand this to those people who enter this country each year. Let’s assume that the domestic population of the UK is perfectly happy with the State and not partaking in naughty behaviour (a false assumption). According to this BBC report there are 200 million people who enter and leave the country each year. So that means 100 million coming into the country each year. This profiling method assumes we have access to all of the data about every person who enters the country. Let’s look at the numbers and just for niceness let’s increase our software detection accuracy to 99.9%.
99.9% at selecting a terrorist correctly.
0.1% at selecting an innocent person.
Let’s also increase the number of terrorists to 10,000 (although this seems remarkably high to me).
9990 terrorists will be correctly detained. This means that 10 will go free.
99990 innocent people will be detained.
The probability of a detained person being guilty is: 9%. This is slightly better but not a system I want to be a part of.
I’ve been doing something at weekends to keep me busy and outdoors seeing parts of the countryside!I first heard about geocaching at work where I had helped a colleague solve some puzzles. I hadn’t really thought much about it until recently when I was persuaded to have a go with Sally.
We started geocaching around Rugby, just to see what it was like and what we could expect. We have since done quite a bit and seen some lovely places around the country, mostly with the excuse of going there to find some caches.
Current places we have been to just for the cache:
Dunchurch
Ryton Waters
Baginton
Buttermere
Herne Bay
Mote Park
The Fosse Way
Claybrooke Magna and Claybrooke Parva
Coombe Abbey
As you won’t know as I think my status picture will update, I am currently on 99 finds. I’d like the next one to be special but I doubt it is going to be that, probably a boring cache.
Anyway, it’s good fun and a good reason to get out and about.
Spot the difference between these two pictures [the lights being on is not the one I’m after]. The top picture indicates a very bad way to leave the car.
The following picture shows the correct way to leave a car. There is NEVER any excuse for leaving the wipers in any position other than STOP.
This communication is much unlike Ronseal products. This IS Essex fog but Ronseal products don’t do what they say on the tin [great marketing though!].
Only a minor rant today about how effective advertising is and how our views of the world are shaped by what we are told rather than what we try to find out for ourselves using sceptical thinking tools.
Special K is a breakfast cereal made by Kellogg’s. The adverts on television promote Special K as a healthy alternative to other breakfasts and good for losing weight. Most of the adverts have a good looking woman in a red swimming suit enjoying life to the full. The message is clear:
Eat Special K and lose weight, be healthy and live a wonderful life.
As far as I can tell, Kellogg’s are perfectly able to make these claims because they all mean ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. The adverts make no particular claims that would require evidence, so I [grumpily] admit that the adverts themselves are perfectly ok to broadcast.
If you want to find out more about the sexual views and (non) medical ideas of the man who invented Corn Flakes then please look here. I am going to look solely at the information I can find about Kellogg’s cereals.
If you want to lose weight then you need to follow this principle:
Calories in should be lower than calories out.
I’ve explained this before in this communication. Therefore you would expect that Special K has significantly lower energy content that other cereals made by Kellogg’s. Let’s see.
Special K Nutrition Panel
As you can see here, 100 grams of Special K contains 375 kcal. To burn that much energy off you would have to walk/run around 4 kilometres. Now, let’s see what Kellogg’s Original Corn Flakes contains:
Corn Flakes Nutrition
I’m sorry this isn’t the actual panel from Kellogg’s but their website wasn’t working properly and I couldn’t get the information. Let’s read what this information tells us.
CORN FLAKES HAS FEWER CALORIES THAN SPECIAL K
Holy Cow! How does that happen? The adverts tell us one thing but in reality the truth is completely the reverse. I’m pretty sure that Special K tastes like cardboard too, so perhaps everyone should just swap to standard Corn Flakes. In fact when we look at the energy content of other Kellogg’s products we can see that there isn’t a great deal of difference in energy terms.
Crunchy Nut NutritionSpecial K with extra crap
So, 100 grams of these cereals are all around 380 kcal. It doesn’t make a great deal of difference which one you eat. However, I am not sure of 100g of Corn Flakes LOOKS the same amount in a bowl compared to 100g of flakes with extra sugar coating. It could be that you will fill the bowl to the same level but end up eating many more calories because the coated flakes are more massive. This is a test I might do one day.
Also, I am not commenting on the extra sugars you will eat if you have sugar coated cereal. This is not a communication about how healthy a particular cereal is, it’s about the energy content and the impression given by advertising.
So, what should we learn from this? I think this shows clearly that advertising works extremely well at forming opinions about certain products and their effects on us in terms of health. ALL advertising claims should be taken sceptically until you have investigated them for yourself. Don’t dismiss or accept things straight away. It is perfectly OK for you to think or say:
That sounds interesting but I’ll form my own opinion once I’ve investigated it a little more.
In fact, that is generally a good approach to life itself.
One more thing. Anti-aging creams can legally ONLY advertise themselves as anti-aging if and only if they contain a form of UV sun protection. There is little evidence that any of the other stuff they put in creams will protect your skin from the 3/5/7 signs of aging.
