Trust you because you are a doctor? I don't think so.

With my mother having had a fall last weekend I have found myself in a couple of doctors surgeries with her over the week. Largely due to her concern that she had not had a bowel movement in six days - a legacy of codeine based pain killers.

Two quite bizarre statements from two doctors.

1. Food takes fourteen days to pass through the intestines.

The guy has obviously never eaten sweet corn. Or figs.

2. Bananas have no fibre in them. You are better off eating an apple.

Both are good but, weight for weight, a banana has more fibre than an apple.

Really makes you worry about their medical advice but then it is not uncommon to see people who are quite talented in one area being interviewed as experts in another. And being believed in the second for no reason other than they are capable in the first.

But it is still depressing in this case. I would expect doctors to know better.

Pull the other one.

.

Was at a 21st birthday party last week and someone asked me if I had heard that aluminium can ring pulls have an appreciable amount of titanium in them and that it can be recovered to make prosthetic joints for orphans in third world countries? That these ring pulls are incredibly valuable and should be saved separately from the can?

No, I hadn't.

And, perhaps sadly, no they don't.

Snopes, ever my guardian from internet rumours, has an item on it here.

Why do people fall for these things when a few simple questions would show them to be false?

A few useful questions:

1. Is it mentioned on Snopes.com? Does what they say make sense? (Always my first question.)
2. Have you heard the story from a legitimate source or from your grandmother's neighbour's butcher's half uncle?
3. Are people stealing ring pulls from the shops because they are so valuable?
4. If the ring pull is so valuable, why do you only get 80¢/kg for the whole can? (= abt 1.6¢ a can)
5. For the technically minded: what purpose would titanium serve in a ring pull anyway?

*sigh*
...

Shedding some light. Maybe.

.

I thought I had left this urban myth behind long ago. I first met it in 1983 and re-met it over the weekend.

It goes like this: I don't turn lights off because it uses more power to turn them on and off than they use when on.

Really? I don't think so.

How much more? Lets say 100 times, for the argument. It's generous.

How long does it take to turn a light on? Let's say half a second, for the argument. It's generous.

100 times a half =50. It's generous. Squared.

So if you turn a light off for anything over a minute you will be saving more power than if you left it on. So turn it off, already.

And take that myth and bury it. Somewhere dark.

◊◊

But a different question, same topic: It was suggested that the turning on and off of a power-saving fluorescent bulb shortens it's life and that, if you include the cost of the bulb, the economics can favour leaving it on. That complicates the calculation. I still don't like it though.

Anyone know about this?
...

Maybe not.

I have a very good friend used to bring rum balls in to work at Christmas. "Look out" she would warn us, "Just one will put you on your ear."

The average rum ball is 10-15% rum. (Except for Aunty Vera's which were 0.001%)

The average shot of rum is 30ml, one standard drink.

It takes 5 standard drinks to get you to the legal maximum blood alcohol level, 0.05%.

That means you need to eat two kilograms, or nearly four and a half pounds, of rum balls to reach the the point where you are considered unsafe to drive.

Maybe not.
...

Snow Job

It has been a popular belief that Eskimos have 200 words for snow.

Well, let's have a look...

In 1911, Franz Boas recorded that Eskimos had four words for snow: Aput 'snow on the ground', qana 'falling snow', piqsirpoq 'drifting snow', and qimuqsuq 'a snow drift'.

In a popular 1940 article on the subject, Whorf referred to Eskimo languages having seven distinct words for snow. Later writers inflated the figure: by 1978, the number quoted had reached 50, on February 9, 1984 an editorial in The New York Times gave the number as 100, and, also in 1984, television station WEWS Cleveland quoted 200.

The idea that Eskimos had hundreds of words for snow has given rise to the idea that Eskimos viewed snow very differently from people of other cultures.

Certainly Eskimo languages have more than one word to describe snow. For example, Yupik has been estimated to have around 24 — but English has at least 40 words that describe frozen water, including "berg", "frost", "glacier", "hail", "ice", "slush", "flurry", and "sleet".

But not 200.
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Exploding the egg myth.

I was asked yesterday by Hann whether I had heard of the story going around the internet regarding using two mobile/cell phones to cook and egg.

As luck would have it, I head read about the issue only last Saturday. It gets written up and debunked here and started life as a satirical article here.

So, on behalf of the curate and his egg, I will give you a summary.

The essence is that if you place two mobile phone, facing each other, on either side of an egg and start a call between the two then nothing will happen for 15min, the egg will be warm after 25min, hot after 45 minutes and cooked after 65min. (I hope you have free call time).



The implicit and explicit question is, if it will do this to an egg, what will it do to your brain?


Well, that’s the story. Now for some facts.

1. Power.
A mobile phone puts out, on average, 0.002 - 0.25 watts. It will vary with distance from the phone tower.

If the two phones were broadcasting at maximum power and if all ( a big call) of this power was being absorbed by the egg, it would take 10 hours to cook an egg. In reality the egg would absorb much less than 10% of the power from the phone.

By comparison, a microwave oven normally emits 600 – 1000 watts.

2. Location, location, location.
Mobile or cell phones do not transmit to each other so putting the two phones on opposite sides of the egg serves no purpose. Mobile phones transmit to and from phone relay towers. To heat an egg you should put it between the phone and the tower, not sandwiched between two phones.

The British TV show, Brainiac, put 100 phones around an egg and got no heating at all.

There are reasons why mobile phones are a health problem (and many reasons why my brain may be poached, scrambled or coddled) but the microwave output is not one of them.



...