Bad - Source of my recent grumpiness detected: cold/flu/generic virus. Blah. Good - Lego vending machines on the streets of Japan! Fantastic.

I’m worrying a lot this week, despite my arms working properly again, despite being stitch-free and healed, despite being numbed for over six months. Today I’ve even managed to worry about The Singularity, which really is a daft thing to worry about.

Link: The Singularity

Well, now we know what happens to people who behead statues. But what happens to people who molest them?

I’ve been wondering if green tea could replace dark chocolate as my evening stimulant of choice. Worth a try, so I’ll buy some tomorrow.

Of course, the research mentioned in the article below may only mean that green tea is good for rats :-)

Link: Green tea could cut arthritis risk

Plodding on for a couple of hours every night now, and enjoying it immensely. Somehow, refactoring code is a nice way to spend an evening. Not the nicest, I hasten to add. I’m learning a lot, and Hippo is looking good inside and out.

Hippo isn’t quite a Content Management System (CMS). It’s more about meta-content than content, but it’s inspired by great software such as those listed on the sites below:

CMSInfo - a site listing many Open Source CMS systems. Open Source CMS - another OSS CMS portal

In particular Hippo is influenced by the sadly relicensed Metadot and the absolutely wonderful WebGUI. It’ll do things rather differently though - Hippo has a different role. In fact, I’m wondering if I can get it to work alongside WebGUI…

How most “news” stories are born:

1) Organisation writes “controversial” press release and sends it to journalists 2) Journalist cuts and pastes, does a bit of editing, maybe adds the word “claim” 3) Mainstream media story is published.

In a previous job I occassionally edited and released press releases for my employer. I was suprised to see them lightly re-written and printed by newspapers as reports, with nothing to indicate that it was actually a press release. I’d expected them to contact us for more information, or contact other people involved, or just do some actual work. I’ve since learned that this is quite normal, in fact, much of the mainstream news media simply reformats events sent them by “interested parties” - people with an agenda - and publishes. If we’re lucky the report originates with a news agency: one story sent to many papers and edited a bit. The true investigative reporter is a rare and wonderful creature.

It’s therefore rather amusing that the BBC have published an article attacking Google and blogs (in which they claim that old media is more reliable and trustworthy) by simply basing it on a website run by people trying to discredit Google for their own gain. Tom Coates has a good article and discussion on this.

Link: Stupid lazy article by some hack at the BBC

How should an RSS aggregator that integrates into a browser behave? Should it act like a web spider or a browser? How should it identify itself? I’m going to have to deal with this for Hippo, and the solution isn’t clear.

Link: “NewsMonster cometh”

It’s common knowledge among rat owners that tofu is bad for rats. Soy protein itself or very cooked tofu isn’t too bad, but raw tofu should be avoided. As rats are used for experiments, a lot of work has been done in studying rats’ responses to various factors. Just as chocolate and aspirin are very bad for dogs, tofu is bad for rats. It’s not news, and it’s easy to prove with a few unpleasant experiments on poor rats.

Tofu is rather good for humans. Vast amounts of it are consumed by people in countries with healthy populations. Vast amounts of soymilk are also consumed. Vegans in the west have also been consuming a lot of soy for many years. Large scale studies have uncovered no adverse effects of soy consumption in humans, although vegan kids do tend to be lighter, slimmer and slightly shorter as they’ve not consumed the extra hormones in cow milk.

A recent press release news story appeared in many papers and websites, under a shock headline warning pregnant women to avoid soya. A team of scientists had discovered that soy makes rats infertile! They warned women to avoid soy products until further study. Some of the articles mentioned that China wasn’t exactly known for infertility, but still ran under a scary headline. A UK government committee has taken this warning to heart, and gave the story greater weight.

The story had about as much strength as a claim that chocolate is deadly poison to humans.It’s almost certainly just an attempt to get funding by whipping up a scare story, but some believe the meat and dairy industry are desperate to find something unhealthy about plant based diets. People who feel guilty eating meat but who don’t want to give it up also find consolation in these scare stories.

The soy “estrogen” scare is even in a database of known email hoaxes.

There’s a vast amount of evidence that meat and dairy foods are the biggest causes of death and illness after smoking, particularly via heart disease and cancer. Dairy products are contain (amongst other things) natural but non-human hormones. Children eating western diets are showing far greater signs of sex hormone problems than children on eastern diets. Are the press and government advising people to avoid meat? A little bit.*

If there is a risk in tofu, it’s very, very small, far less obvious than the many clear, proven benefits. If a problem doesn’t show up in a sample like the Chinese population, it’s not exactly major.

The link below is to a decent and quite balanced document by the UK’s Vegan Society. It looks like soy isn’t good for parrots either.

*Government warnings about the dangers of eating fish are rather worrying, and I don’t even eat fish. Our seas are seriously polluted.

Link: Phytoestrogens

Hey hey hey kids! Eat pigs! They don’t mind! It’s cool!

vs

Hey hey hey girls! Eat cows! They don’t mind! It’s cool!

I’ve learned that “Real girls” eat beef, and that small pigs are very happy, but Pork Board websites don’t really work.

Somewhere better.

In ‘The Matrix’, Thomas Anderson has a short and neat, if rather cliched online name. Which was fortunate.

“Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability. That is the sound of your death. Goodbye, Mr. Anderson.”

“My… name… is… chunkylover53!”

I really enjoyed The Matrix. I can forgive its vast, gaping plot holes. While I’m looking forward to seeing the next one, I really hope the sequel isn’t just a remix of the original. Watching the recent trailer, one scene looked a little too much like the original’s foyer fight. Also, Neo’s new outfit reminds me of Father Ted.