web analytics

Articles Here

Chocolate Is A Treat – It’s Not An ‘Antioxidant’ Or Anything Except Valentine’s Day Candy

Posted by on Feb 11, 2025 in Public Health | Comments Off on Chocolate Is A Treat – It’s Not An ‘Antioxidant’ Or Anything Except Valentine’s Day Candy

Ignore epidemiology claims that chocolate is healthy. It is not, claiming it is requires the same suspect correlation that "suggests" weedkillers causes human cancer and acupuncture prevents COVID-19. No science involved. Mars, Incorporated was funding the Chair in Nutrition at UC Davis when a lot of those claims came out and while it's not the case that academics are creating results-for-hire any more than industry scientists are, it is the case that government and companies only fund people whose work they like.

read more

Hims Telehealth Company Under Fire For Super Bowl Ad

Posted by on Feb 6, 2025 in Pharmacology | Comments Off on Hims Telehealth Company Under Fire For Super Bowl Ad

Hims Inc., rebranded as Hims  &  Hers Health, Inc. after they went public in 2020, began as a telehealth company for erectile dysfunction and hair loss products.

No real issue there, the products are well-established and a phone call or website consultation is more convenient and far faster than visiting a doctor's office in the modern Obamacare milieu. It's entering the compounded glucagon-like peptide 1 agonists (GLP-1) injections market that got them new scrutiny.

read more

Corporate Media – ‘Young People Are Dying’ But People Are Actually Healthier Than Ever

Posted by on Feb 3, 2025 in Public Health | Comments Off on Corporate Media – ‘Young People Are Dying’ But People Are Actually Healthier Than Ever

Are young people dying off en masse or are predatorts at environmental groups who prey on public gullibility rending their holistic shaman-blessed hemp garments because a wave of improving public health has spread across America?

read more

Are Infectious Diseases A Social Justice Issue? A History Of The World In Six Plagues Has Answers

Posted by on Feb 2, 2025 in Random Thoughts | Comments Off on Are Infectious Diseases A Social Justice Issue? A History Of The World In Six Plagues Has Answers

As we approach the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 lockdowns, there has been ample time to look at what went wrong, and perhaps how we didn't learn much from history.

There are many examples and while politicians ignored it, storytellers have not. In "The Division" game, for example, eco-terrorists spread their pathogen using cash. That made sense. If you are a zealot, disease can do what eugenics and population control efforts did not; get rid of a lot of poor and minority people without controversy, and no one can be blamed because disease is both egalitarian and exculpatory.

Unless it isn't.

read more

Chemical Looping Plastic And CO2: Science Even Environmental Groups Can’t Hate

Posted by on Jan 31, 2025 in Chemistry | Comments Off on Chemical Looping Plastic And CO2: Science Even Environmental Groups Can’t Hate

The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates about 35 million tons of plastics are generated just in America, and 12.% of that becomes is garbage like plastic containers and bags and even appliances.

Sorry folks, politicians in states like California who insist it's being recycled are lying to you, scientists know better. What really happens to plastic, even if your government is shipping it to China to be "recycled" is landfilling and incineration. A new study finds that measuring how much carbon dioxide a potential chemical looping system would pump out compared to conventional processes to produce synthesis gas could reduce emissions by up to 45.

read more

Gym Paradox: People Want To Get Healthier But Until They’re Healthier Don’t Feel Comfortable

Posted by on Jan 29, 2025 in Psychology | Comments Off on Gym Paradox: People Want To Get Healthier But Until They’re Healthier Don’t Feel Comfortable

Gym Bro, Curl Gurl, Gym Rat if you choose not to identify as any gender - everyone knows what it means, and it can be pretty intimidating if you walk into a fitness center as a new member. Imagine feeling like you have to get in shape before you can join a gym to get in shape.

Fitness executives don't want that but store managers know not to alienate their best customers for someone who will join on a special deal, go for a month, and then cancel the first time they download RocketMoney and remember they have a gym membership.

read more

Two Fewer Almonds: That’s All You Need To Prevent Weight Gain

Posted by on Jan 24, 2025 in Psychology | Comments Off on Two Fewer Almonds: That’s All You Need To Prevent Weight Gain

When people see labels or menus listing the calories in their food, it doesn't change their consumption in any way beyond what experts call "statistical wobble." About two fewer almonds worth of calories per meal. But two almonds over time can add up to a lot.

That's the conclusion in the data of a systematic review by The Cochrane Collaboration. The team of academics reviewed 25 papers which discussed the impact of calorie labeling on consumption and found a minute reduction in the foods selected - about 11 calories.

read more

Brits Associate Accents With Crime But Trust Scottish Accents Most

Posted by on Jan 23, 2025 in Psychology | Comments Off on Brits Associate Accents With Crime But Trust Scottish Accents Most

With Burns Night this weekend,  Scotland will celebrate its heritage. In the First Among Equals country to the south that controls them, Scottish accents used to mean trouble. Now, it is the sound of safety for both English men and women.

A new study finds that the English, even some Welsh and Scottish, associate a "working-class" accent with criminal behavior. In a jury trial, that could have serious ramifications, but it likely also matters before that. Arrests and voice identification, for example. You're more likely to be one of The Usual Suspects(1) if your accent is criminal.

read more

The Toxic Masculinity Of Disney Movies

Posted by on Nov 19, 2024 in Anthropology | Comments Off on The Toxic Masculinity Of Disney Movies

Once upon a time, stories were just stories. They were fantasies that took people to a new world. 

In the 21st century, cultural pundits insisted that books, films, video games and television shape our personalities. It began in the 1980s when Democrats wanted to censor lyrics in music, and then video games in the 1990s, and then smoking and guns out of films, and now they ban books by everyone from Hemingway to Chaucer to protect us from being poisoned by content not institutionally controlled.(1)

First they came for the Disney princesses, and I said nothing, because I am not a girl...

read more

AI And The Poetry Problem

Posted by on Nov 18, 2024 in Technology | Comments Off on AI And The Poetry Problem

Artificial Intelligence is artificial, but it is not intelligence. That could change some day but it isn't happening soon, Large Language Models are fine for a few things but limited in most. That is why Ben Affleck can talk in a hurry and assure fellow film creatives that their jobs are safe. LLMs can't write a great script.


read more