Cheap Therapy

If you want me to put money into your bank, you should make sure that your ATM that says it accepts deposits actually accepts deposits on any Saturday in the past fortnight. As it is I have to walk to the nice BankWest ATM and give them my money instead.

If you’d like to make any submissions to the Australian tax system review, the submissions period closes on the 17th October. Perhaps mentioning that requiring salary packaged cars to drive a certain number of kilometres for greater discounts isn’t the most climate friendly idea.

If you’ve read Neal Stephenson’s “Snowcrash” you may remember YT’s airbag collar which stops her from breaking her head/neck when she comes off her skateboard. Well, it seems a Japanese company has come up with an airbag vest which inflates as the wearer falls over, aimed at the elderly market. At around $1000 it’s cheaper than a stay in hospital…

Meanwhile the US moves closer to FedWorld…

Over the last week I’ve ploughed through Michael Pollan’s book about the rise of Nutritionism, and why, despite so much dietary research, people eating the “Western diet” are less healthy than ever.

The book is “In Defense of Food”, where ‘food’ is actual stuff that is grown, rather than produced in a factory.

Perhaps the major revelations for me were

• how lobbying allowed manufacturers to avoid having to put the word ‘imitation’ on their product labels. And how lobbying lead to Nutritionism. Because it’s not something produced by cattle ranchers (who vote) that’s bad, it’s saturated fat, or other non-industry-specific components
• that optimising a food for a long shelf life means removing nutrients from it, which means that people need to eat more of it to get the same nutritional effect
• roller milling of flour (as opposed to grinding between a traditional mill’s grindstones) results in the nice white flour that doesn’t go rancid. Of course the problem with this is that it also removes the nutrients! Thus there was a sudden outbreak of dietary deficiency related illnesses and they had to fortify the flour. But have have food scientists missed out anything that has long term effects. Who knows?
• you are what what you eat eats - intensive agricultural methods using synthetic fertilizers are reducing the micronutrients in the soil, and thus in the food

Pollan’s a journalist, and his style is very approachable. Definitely worth a read if you are the sort of person who eats!

I so want one of these combined bottle opener and usb drives. Via the most interesting brewing site Fermentarium.

The Subprime Primer is an excellent summaryof how the broken financial state in the US came about.

• The evil yellow grapefruit tree is in flower
• The lemon is in flower, and green fruit
• The plum has come into blossom this week. So has the ‘other’ plum.
• The mango has some new growth
• Two leaves on the fig! Maybe it will survive this season
• There are lots of mulberrys. Perhaps a combination of Puggle pee and trace elements agrees with it. Pie tonight hopefully Nice photo op if only I could remember where the battery charger is.
• The apple is still not dead.
• The nectarine probably is dead.
• There are white creeper roses, probably from the rootstock
• Weeds
• More trace elements watered in

Qantas have some A380 desktop pictures and Mac and Windows screen savers up on their site. I suspect the hand of Photoshop though, I don’t think one’s flown over Perth, all the shots are from the same angle and I’m still pretty sure it can’t land on the current runway.

In Austria and a Fiat dealership in a small town in Brazil.

via PhotoshopDisasters

In case anyone missed it, Google, in partnership with the US Department of Defence, launched its own (spy) satellite with 40cm black and white resolution (less in colour). And they have plans for their own LEO satellite constellation to provide net access. via Valleywag