Thirsty?

I just saw Aquafina's new TV commercial last night - they show how wonderful and pure Aquafina water is by sticking some instrument into it that measures total dissolved solids and comes up with some very small number. [Now that I think about it - was it a number greater than zero? What were the units? I'll have to watch more closely next time]

Interesting since total dissolved solids are related mostly to palatability and their absence does not necessarily imply safety or absence of pollutants.

Aquafina water probably doesn't contain bacteria or other pollutants - I don't really know, and this TV commercial does nothing to convince me one way or the other.

I wonder if the implication is that taste is the most important consideration for consumers of bottled water, or if it's that Aquafina assumes that although water safety is important to the public, we are easily duped into believing that water purity and safety can be determined by some arbitrary scientific-sounding test.

Allow me to brag for a moment

I sing in a women's choir in Toronto called Cantores Celestes and we have just released a new CD (it's actually the choir's fourth). It's called "The Circle Never Ends" and it's a combination of choral/bluegrass - we collaborated with an excellent bluegrass band called the Foggy Hogtown Boys. Sounds wierd but actually we sound pretty damn good.

Anyway, cuts from the CD have now been played on the radio in every province in Canada as well as in California. And Toronto's CBC 99.1 chose it as their disc of the month for May.

Yee-haw!!

Creepy crawlies

Scientists have developed small robots that can fool cockroaches into thinking they are part of the gang. The "robo-roaches" have pheremone molecules on the them and are programmed to interact with real cockroaches. I gather the researchers think we'll soon we'll be able to have our own pied piper of cockroach-land, rounding up all of these horrible buggies so that we can finally go ahead and get rid of them.

I'm all for getting rid of roaches - they Really. Are. Gross. And they can carry diseases all over your nice clean counters in the middle of the night without you knowing.

To me, the creepiness of this announcement has nothing to do with the insect aspect and everything to do with the controlling communities of animals thing. One of the researchers was quoted as saying:

"It would be interesting to build our own intelligent societies of animals"

Yeah. And then - I know, we could build our own intelligent societies of people. And they would be modelled after MY vision of the way the world should be - MINE, Mwahahahahaha...

Besides, these animals already have "collective intellingence" - it's what the researchers are modelling and without it, this project would never have worked. I don't really get why us taking control of the collective action of the animal group makes it more "intelligent".

It just makes us more in control - and that is not the same thing. [KEYWORD in above quote: "our". Oh, now I'm getting all militant about how we want to control the earth and everything in it. Better stop typing NOW before this really goes off the rails]

Honestly. Just eat the sugar and go fly a kite.

So aspartame doesn't cause cancer after all - so say a group of European scientists who also seem to think that they have been so thorough and are so smart that their conclusions should put this issue to bed.

The problem is that just last year there was a study released showing that aspartame produced lymphomas in rats.

ASPARTAME

I dunno - I'd have to go and read all the studies myself to figure out what I believe, and I'm just not that committed to this topic. I'm sure every study has issues: number of animals tested, doses selected, extrapolation of results to humans, extrapolation to low doses... That's sort of the nature of trying to do animal research and then saying it applies to humans.

All I know is that if we could all just take control of our own lives and figure out that really, all most of us need to do is eat healthily and get a bit of exercise, then the stuff wouldn't be such a hot item to begin with.

Stereotype, begone!

I thought the stereotype was that men didn't really discuss relationships with each other; that it wasn't really very macho. After today though, I've cancelled my subscription to that belief.

This morning, in the gym, I overheard two guys discussing a friend's breakup with a girl and whether or not it was the right decision... all while they were lifting some nice big weights.

Later, I passed two guys on the crosswalk, and one was saying to the other:
"...I mean, I wonder what that relationship is actually like, between those two..."

And later, one guy to another as they walked down the sidewalk behind me:
"... a relationship can't (fu**in') be all about sex, you know? There's gotta be more to it than that..."

So guys do actually think about this relationship stuff after all. Aw, that's nice.

Ah, we didn't need that science stuff anyway...

Apparently in Britain, universities are closing all sorts of science courses. Not just science courses actually, entire science departments - and not wierd, random, non-mainstream departments, very mainstream ones like chemistry and physics.

That can't be good.

Apparently members of the Commons Science and Technology Committee said that "This is the logical outcome of introducing a market in higher education". Well, then, obviously the market isn't very good at figuring out what might be beneficial to us all in the long term. Doesn't this vague, "market thing" know anything about the economic potential in industries like: pharmaceutical, aerospace, electronics...

I guess that they've allowed the universities to be autonomous - basically because they're allowing them to get their funding from outside the government - and now they have no control over what happens there and can't 'make the universities keep these departments going.

If losing entire science depatments is the logical result of this approach, the obvious question seem to be:

"WTF were they thinking?"

Thanks to Amazon.com for the Beaker plush toy image

It's my birthday...

Well, not quite yet. I'm a June baby. Which, according to some guy from the New Scientist who does their science blog, means I'm (statistically) more likely to commit suicide, have anorexia, become an alcoholic, or develop Alzheimer's disease. Oh joy.

(Uh, let's be clear - I'm happy with life. This is just me reporting on information that results purely from someone's statistical analysis. And we all know that statistics is pretty much capable of demonstrating any relationship we'd like it to, as long as we omit a teeny bit of context here and there)

The only (statistical) bonus associated with being born in June - according to this guy's summary anyway - is that I'm more likely to have been a medical student.

Oops, I guess I missed that boat.

Oho! Fun with Words III...

I found this website today that makes me feel so relieved. It's a list of all sorts of common spelling and language mistakes that people make in English. It stresses me out when people write things like ,

"... it was a mute point"

See this earlier post of mine ...and also this one)

Knowing that this stuff drives other people bananas and seeing all these errors in one big list somehow makes me feel a little bit more at peace with this (ungrammatical) world.

Bears and hippos, oh my!

Polar Bears and Hippos are now classified as threatened species. This makes me so angry, and very sad - both are huge, amazing, majestic animals that we have no right to be affecting. The main threat to polar bears is reduced habitat because of climate change, and hippos are being hunted without restriction in the Congo.

The World Conservation Union, or IUCN, says that 16,000 species of animals and plants are at risk of disappearing, including one in four mammals and one in eight birds.


Why do us humans think we're at the top of the food chain? We seem to have the impression that we're in charge of the earth. Too bad for us that the earth's ecosystems are more like a web than a chain. We are eventually going to tip ecology's balance so far off-kilter that it will be beyond redemption. And I wouldn't be surprised if the one strand of the web that could have saved us will be some tiny bacterium or some insect we classify as a pest.

We have no clue what we're doing.

My yearly treeplanting nostalgia

Ahhh, spring. A few years ago, I would have been preparing to head up to Northern Ontario to plant some trees. The smell of thawing earth and new vegetation always reminds me of the trek up there. I miss being so constantly in the forest - far away from the city and cars and noise. There's something really great about hard physical work outdoors - feeling truly tired is part of it, but I think that it allowed me to make a real connection with nature - hokey as that sounds.

Aside from learning how to really work hard, physically (something that I thought I knew how to do but really didn't - I'd say that I kept getting better at driving myself each year) - I also met and became very close to a lot of people I would never have otherwise spoken to.

And it was one of the few situations in my life where I was frequantly the lone woman in a group of men - and feeling comfortable and equal in that setting has probably empowered me immensely.

Ok, I'll stop being all warm and fuzzy about it now and pine for my treeplanting days on my own.

Pine for my treeplanting days. Haha.

Thanks to New North Greenhouses for the photo of baby jackpines

Early onset dementia??

I was in a concert last night and one of my friends who came handed me a $20 to cover the cost of her ticket when I saw her after the show. Not even 30 minutes later, I was helping to clean up... I pulled everything out of my pockets and tossed it into a garbage bag. It wasn't until about an hour later that I realized that I probably threw out twenty bucks. And since the tickets were actually only $15, I owe this friend $5 - so I'm out $25 now.

Then today I completely forgot about a social event I was supposed to go to - and was looking forward to - and I have no idea why. It's not even like I was caught up in doing something important...

What is happening to my brain cells???

What? - I agree with Wente??

This almost never happens. Margaret Wente is a columnist at the Globe and Mail who usually gets me all riled up with her Saturday columns. But today... I find myself agreeing with her.

She wrote about Wendy Mesley's recent TV show - where Wendy, a breast cancer survivor, talked about how there's a cancer epidemic and blamed it entirely on all the chemicals we are exposed to through products we buy or industrial emissions. I saw the show and it made me mad too.

The problem was, she really misrepresented the facts. Sure, the absolute numbers of cancer cases are going up in Canada - quite a bit. But so is the number of older people. And cancer usually happens to older people. If you look at cancer rates over the past years - they have actually been pretty stable, and some of the rates for specific cancers have actually decreased.

I'm willing to buy the argument that being exposed to more chemicals and mixtures of chemicals probably doesn't exactly benefit our health. But many chemicals we worry about are also produced in nature. How can we avoid those? And some of the doses we're exposed to are so very small - they are unlikely to pose much risk.

In any case, it is certainly not possible to say that most cancer cases today are due to environmental exposures. Some clear risk factors for cancer (like smoking, and even eating enough vegetables and getting exercise) are a result of personal choices that people make.

We all take risks on a daily basis - and we are so often much more willing to accept even a high risk if we percieve it as having been our choice. So - while it is often worthwhile to try and reduce risks that are beyond our control, in this case it was out of proportion to blame "cancer in today's world" entirely on environmental exposures.

Chinese Chests

Apparently the average cup size in China is increasing. It used to be that most bras sold in China were cup size A or B - but now manufacturers are making more of the bigger cup sizes.

On Inkycircus, where I found this, they think that the "explanation" provided by the Shanghai Daily - that Chinese women are becoming bigger-breasted due to increases in nutritious eating and participation in physical activity - is a load of hooey. They propose that increases in McDonald's consumption might be the real culprit. Some of the commentary from the peanut gallery suggests that it might actually be related to more hormonal birth control intake.

To me, either of the latter two explanations sounds plausible... but either way, I bet the Chinese MEN aren't complaining... ha!

Green bricks?

Apparently someone has figured out how to take fly ash - which is produced as a pollutant byproduct by coal-fired power plants - and turn it into bricks.

This sounds great becuase normally fly ash has to be disposed of in special landfills. Not only that - but the technique uses a high-pressure system that doesn't cause the air pollutant emissions you typically get with "traditionl brick" - making techniques.

(Oooh, I can just see it: the brick-people-association, or whoever represents brick-makers, will be getting upset if this idea gains momentum)

My only question: fly ash contains mercury, lead and other toxic chemicals. I'd want to be pretty sure that my exposure was going to be verrry low if these bricks were going to be a part of any building where I spend a lot of time...

Graduate research I'm glad isn't mine

I already find that scheduling meetings with graduate supervisors and committee members can be tedious - especially if you're trying to gather more than one of them at a time! Sometimes it feels like it's holding up my progress (although I'm actually pretty sure that my progress is mostly hampered by my own procrastination).

But thank goodness my research doesn't depend on NASA launching a satellite! Apparently some grad students at Hampton Univeristy are doing research that is all about corroborating the findings of CALIPSO, an earth-observing satellite.

Whose launch has been canceled repeatedly for over a year! Ouch. That would be so frustrating!

Apparently the advisors on this type of research usually have an alternative research project ideas lined up for their students though... juist in case they can't wait on NASA any longer!!

I am woman, hear me ROAR!

PHOTO FROM... A JAR WEBSITE(!)

I know that nowadays, in Canada anyway, women can pretty much do whatever they want... but we can all identify what the stereotypical female idea was (dainty, claen and well-groomed, good good, great housekeeper) and probably would still identify traits such as being more emotional, more interested in clothing and baby animals and generally physically less strong as being more (generally) "female" than "male".

So maybe it's not so surprising that doing any of the things that fit into the traditional female stereotype well makes me feel merely competent, whereas doing anything more physically demanding or that required tools makes me feel tough.

I just came back from a run in the rain. I got absolutely soaked, looked more like drowned rat than dainty housekeeper... but I felt (still feel) great. Strong. Tough.

RAWR.

Maybe I'll go lift some heavy stuff and turn on some power tools now.

Awwwwwww.....

Well, my tough-girl no-nonsense side thinks this sort of stuff is silly. Yes, that's definitely it. A waste of good, potentially productive time. Completely frivolous.

But... these guys are so good at what they do.

You'll just have to click on the link to find out what has reduced my entire vocabulary to one word - "Awwwwwwwwwwwwww" - for extended periods of time.

Mulroney? Really?!

Last night former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was declared the "greenest" Prime Ministed that Canada has ever had. The award was voted on by environmentalists and a few others including former Liberal environment minister Sheila Copps, was handed out by an environmental magazine called Corporate Knights.

Wierd. I never would have predicted Mulroney for this award, but admit I haven't a clue about what most governments in recent years have actually done about the environment ... and although I do know that Muroney was in on Meech Lake and Free Trade, I was still in my early teens when he was in office and probably not paying much attention to anything that wasn't big news.

I do know that Canada used to be percieved internationally as a leader in environmental action - now, according to the David Suzuki Foundation, we are ranked 28th out of 30 OEDC nations on our environmental record. Which I find shocking.

Apparently none of the prime ministers since Mulroney (there have been four: Kim Campbell, Jean Chretien, Paul Martin, and Stephen Harper) got even a single vote.

Maybe it's time for Canada to be a leader again.

PAT USES PEDAL POWER TO GET A LOOK AT ONTARIO'S ELECTRICITY GRID

Etiquette I never learned

I was at one of those social gatherings yesterday where everyone stands around chatting, there are hors d'oeuvres circulating, and platters of fruit and veggies, crackers and cheese...

I can NEVER figure out how you're supposed to manage it: I'm chatting, drink in hand, and someone comes around with a tray of spring rolls and sushi. Yum. So I take the proffered napkin. NOW what am I supposed to do - how to pick up the food - since both hands are now occupied? And then, even more complicated, how do you eat it? I can sort of manage this if I only pick up one item, by mashing the napkin against my glass while I pick up the food (yesterday, this resulted in a soggy napkin since I was having a cold drink and the glass was "sweating").

It's even worse if I stop at a table and load up my napkin with a selection of things and then pick up my drink and move away from the table.

Hmmm. Maybe you're not really supposed to "load up your napkin". Ah well, I'm not exactly the rep for "Dainty R Us".

(PHOTO: A RESTAURANT IN MICHIGAN CALLED BJ'S. NEVER HEARD OF IT. LOOKS GOOD.)

A taxing endeavour

I've just realized that I should do my taxes. I know that this should have been obvious from the time I got my first 2005 T4 in the mail, but the end of April has somehow snuck up on me.

Every year I'm amazed that the general public is (in theory) supposed to be able to figure out this tax thing themselves. I guess the tax software that's available now does simplify things, but anyone who has ever perused the tax guide and navigated the forms by hand knows that they are anything but straightforward. It seems like no matter which page you start with, you're supposed to have filled out some other schedule or form already. It's a never-ending circle of form-filling hell.

Tax software and online filing makes everything much simpler - but still - every year it seems like someone publishes a comparison of the return you'd get if you, your tax software, or an accountant does your return. And every year, the best way to go is with the accountant.

It hardly seems reasonable that in most cases, only a professional can really do your taxes properly, since every Canadian is required to submit them every year.