Minecraft model with Steve and two zombies. Even more of the March collection!
Before:
After:
Lego 29 Model 60090
Undersea explorer set, another of the March collection.
Lego 28 Model 60114
V8 Speedboat, part of the March collection.
Lego 27 Model 42031
Here’s the first Technic Lego model created in the house. It’s a cherry picker. Model number 42031.
Disaster Area 11 March 2016
XM655
Wellesbourne Airfield in Warwickshire. Home to a flying school, a Saturday market and an AVRO VULCAN: XM655.
This Vulcan is the most complete of all the Vulcans remaining. Although XH558 was the last airworthy Vulcan they had to remove stuff from it to get the airworthiness certificate. Hence, XM655 is more complete and still does high speed taxi runs.
I wrote about XH558 here when I saw her perform for the last time over Coventry airport.
I think the most amusing thing about XM655 is that when it was bought from the RAF it landed at Wellesbourne, but the runway isn’t long enough for it to take off again. That does seem a touch short sighted.
If you get the chance on a Saturday to visit you most definitely should. For a donation the members of the preservation society will give you a tour of the cockpit and tell you wonderful stories about the Vulcan and her history. Did you know that all the money went into the airframe and so the navigation equipment was pretty much the same as the Lancaster? For long flights the crew had a sextant.
With a crew of five, but only two ejector seats there were “design” issues I guess. The three crew facing backwards had to jump out through the entrance door in the floor. That was probably an issue when flying low!
So, the Vulcan is a beautiful plane. It’s very loud and imposing. I am curious as to how good it was compared to other planes of its generation. We Brits love to imagine that our stuff is the best. I just wonder how much that is true.
This beast is graceful and wonderful. I am glad she never was used for her intended mission.
Bad Traffic
Not sure this counts as the worst traffic ever, but it does look pretty bad.
I think there must be a site out there with historic traffic data. Will search.
Summer Choices
Met with Smith last night and we chatted about which music festival to attend this year. You may have read about M’era Luna from last year. It was a very good time but this year there’s more choice!
Our preferred choice was to head to Munich for the Dark Festival, but this has been cancelled which is a shame. There were a lot of good bands that we would have liked to see there.
So now there are two choices. M’era Luna at Hildesheim again or Amphi Festival in Cologne. Here’s the line up for M’era Luna:
Of the bands in the above list I would really like to see VNV Nation, Eisbrecher, Combichrist, Hocico and Suicide Commando. But there are more:
This list has a few tasty treats: [:SITD:], Noisuf-X and Centhron. So, M’era Luna has a good selection, worth travelling the 500 miles for!
Next up we have the selection from Amphi Festival.
The list of bands to definitely see at Amphi is: Aesthetic Perfection, Covenant, Faderhead, Frontline Assembly, Mono Inc, Suicide Commando, Unzucht and [X-RX].
It’s a tough choice. The current preference is M’era Luna. Wait and see.
Hmmm. Snoring Cure?
So, stumbled across a snoring cure. You can see the website here. Now, I’m gonna call bullshit on this right now, but that would seem rather unfair to the company so let’s look a little closer at what they claim.
I have screen clipped their website and I will discuss each section. The main page looks like this:
This says that you wear the ring on your little finger and that it is a snoring treatment that is guaranteed to work. Apparently it’s also been clinically tested! They have made a very specific claim here that wearing this ring on your little finger will make you stop snoring. What else do they have to say?
This explains how it works. Or rather it doesn’t. All it says is that there are Acu-activators on the ring. A quick google shows that this isn’t a real term and isn’t used anywhere apart from the stop snoring website.
It’s not looking too good for this product and we’ve not even really started. I think they may be trying to imply that the things on the ring activate acupuncture points? This is irrelevant as acupuncture is clearly bullshit.
Next bit from the www.goodnightsnoring.com website:
Testimonials amount to nothing. The plural of anecdote is NOT data. I don’t care. 3500 years of history can’t be wrong can it? Of course it can. We now use medicine with evidence not rubbish about Chi and acupuncture points. Also, being mentioned in the Daily Fail is not necessarily a good thing. In fact if a medical “cure” is mentioned in the Mail or Express you can pretty much assume it’s bullshit.
Now, the website covers this with the following page:
They claim that a good clinical trial was performed and the results were almost a miracle. This is good because if there is good evidence then I would be prepared to change my mind. The goodnightsnoring.com website doesn’t have a link to the clinical trial. I want to be able to read it and then change my mind. It seems that these are extraordinary claims and so it would be prudent to examine the evidence.
I searched PubMed. There was nothing about the Snoring Ring as being sold here. So I tried searching Google Scholar. Nothing again, just a paper about breast cancer. This was troublesome, my two main sources for scientific papers were showing nada. I decided to look using plain old Google. I searched for “snoring ring clinical trial”.
From these results I wasn’t interested in the Snoring Ring website, there’s nothing on there. I also couldn’t care for a news article in the Daily Fail [they don’t know how to report science]. The other links were mostly places that sell the product and so have probably just got the blurb from a product information release. What interested me originally was the ASA link.
In 2012 a complaint was made to the ASA about the evidence for the claims that the Snoring Ring company were making. The complaint was upheld and the company were told not to make claims about the snoring ring. The so called medical trial was completed after this ruling by the ASA!
Also in the search results was a link to ANTISNOR, a company who produce anti snoring rings. Now, this company mentioned on this page a French company who had done the clinical trials.
In 2012, a French scientific research organisation, Proclaim (www.proclaim.fr), studied the effect of AntiSnor Acupressure Ring . . . .
The Proclaim website doesn’t exist. Even though ANTISNOR link to it. Oh dear, the trail has gone cold.
There are a number of RED FLAGS on the original website. The mention of the following aspects all cause concern. They don’t mean it doesn’t work, they just mean we should be sceptical until we have seen the evidence.
- Money back guarentees
- Testimonials
- No links to the evidence
- Publicity from the Daily Mail
- Anecdotes
- Non invasive and side effect free
- Appeal to antiquity on the acupressure part of the site
- No email address to ask for a copy of the clinical trial
So far, I’ve had some people say they think this work and no actual medical trials even though one is claimed. Back to Google.
Another link from Google heads towards Princeton Consumer Research. It appears that this company will undertake clinical trials for you and then allow you to use the results in your publicity. Here’s a Princeton Brochure with their claims. After finding this I found a company called Aspen Clinical Research. They had a pdf linked here and also Aspen-Clinical-Anti-Snoring-Ring-Media-Coverage1 from my site. This PDF essentially claims that the publicity they managed to produce for the Anti Snoring ring was brilliant. They seem to be more of a PR firm than a clinical trial firm. This makes me very wary.
Aspen Clinical Research even went so far as to persuade the press that there was a National Stop Snoring Week in 2014. This is depressing reading.
I hadn’t realised there would be companies that are willing to be paid to undertake some form of research to legitimise PR claims and also produce media puff.
Both Aspen Clinical Research and Princeton Consumer Research do not seem concerned with legitimate medical trials, rather they concentrate on PR friendly trials to produce media results. Neither of the websites were searchable from their homepages. Also, both companies seem to be offering to pay participants. This can’t be a good thing, it would bias the results. All I want is a copy of the clinical trial for the Anti Snoring Ring and I can’t find it. What I have found are companies who provide easy results for PR.
It seems to me that these companies offer to do science the wrong way around and therefore they don’t offer science. It looks like the cycle goes:
- You have a product and want to make specific claims
- You will be banned from advertising if you can’t substantiate these claims
- You PAY one of these companies to do a trial for you so you can then substantiate your claim
- You then advertise claiming scientific proof.
The correct cycle should be:
- Scientific research indicates that a specific product could work
- The product is developed
- A trial is designed and the details published before being conducted
- The product is tested rigorously
- The product is deemed to work, the product can be advertised with specific claims
- The product is deemed not to work, the product can’t be advertised
I feel utterly depressed at the state of media manipulation and that there are companies that do this as their raison d’etre. Everything we see and hear is manipulated to sell products. I started this communication as a simple investigation into the evidence for a product as they claim. What I found was a collection of companies willing to provide you the evidence you want so you can claim what you want for your product that (probably) does nothing.
Anyway, I can’t get to the evidence for the Snoring Ring. I haven’t found the paper with details of the trial and so I am going to complain to the ASA about their website claims. Watch this space.
Burn It
So, the xmas break, which requires food and alcohol, along with a significant drop in exercise has resulted in what I would call a considerable gain of mass. I have written about mass loss before and I wrote more here also. To lose mass you have to burn more energy than you consume. It’s that simple [and no, you don’t have a gland problem!]. Not a lot else to it, it’s the psychology of it all that will fuck you over. I like eating and I comfort eat. It’s the self discipline that hurts. I know that when I am a healthy mass and exercise I can maintain that mass and still have blow-outs now and then.
So, before I get to my numbers, here are some facts about fat and exercise.
- One pound of fat is roughly 3500 kcalories.
- 10 metres walked or ran is roughly one kcalorie burnt.
- Daily intake for a man should roughly be 2500 kcalories.
So, my ideal mass would be <80Kg. However, I’ve not been that for a long time and I would be happy with <82.5Kg which comes in at 13 stone in old money. I am currently hovering around +90Kg. This upsets me greatly, but it is my own fault. Now is the time for action. Let’s just assume I want to lose 10Kg just to make the numbers easy. It’s worth knowing how long this will take and what effort I will face. I think many people are unrealistic about mass loss.
Some maths:
10Kg is approximately 22 pounds of fat to be lost.
22 pounds of fat is roughly 77 000 kcalories extra that needs to be burnt.
If I reduce my daily intake by 500 kcalories then this would take 22 weeks, as I would lose one pound per week. This is nearly half a year, which is a depressing amount of time to be on a restricted calorie diet.
If I maintain 2500 kcalories per day and run to burn the excess I will need to run 770 kilometres. Given that my average run is probably around 10km this means 77 runs. If I manage to run twice a week, on average, then this is over 35 weeks which is again an intolerable amount of time.
What I need to do is reduce my calorific intake while at the same time exercising to produce the desired results in a shorter (but sensible) length of time. I aim to be a healthy mass again by the end of March. This gives me three months or twelve weeks. I need to lose around 2 pounds per week. I can do it. I am determined to do it as some of the health issues that I have mentioned previously are back.
My progress isn’t going to be public. I am not going to start tweeting about this all the time. I probably won’t even mention it if I do or do not get down to the target mass.