Saturday, June 28, 2008

Hands Free?

What about Eyes Free? With respect to cell phones (called mobile phones everywhere in the world except the USA), as usual, the law are an ass: With all the wonderful convergence these devices have, merely addressing the talky part of the mobile handset is pathetic. When all those drivers are reading messages, watching film clips, looking at the GPS map...
Of course, you can do all this now with the newer cars touchscreen LCD, you no longer even need a mobile phone.
Fortunately, drivers will soon be too broke to be able to both own a car and buy gas for it, so this problem is about to become self-limiting.

Thursday, June 05, 2008

Wine Wine Wine,

Red Wine, That sallow cheek o'hers t'incarnadine (Omar Khayyam)
There are so many reports these days in the health pages of newspapers about the wonders of drinking wine, (like this one: "Red Wine May Slow Aging";) one more cynical than I might well wonder if the headline writer can anticipate some reward from, oh, say, The Wine Institute. Especially given that the actual article doesn't indicate that wine is particularly good for you at all. The article is about resveratrol, and other sirtuins.
A simple Google Search gives us the following numbers (Note: your mileage may vary):
"Wine AND Health": 12,800,000 hits;
"Wine AND Alcoholism": 405,000 hits;
"Wine AND Wino": 732,000 hits.
The Results Are Clear!
Any competent statistician can conclude from these numbers that wine is more than ten times more healthy for you than it is unhealthy for you.
Since I used the word wine not once, but three times in my headline, I expectantly await my (probably modest) payola from the above mentioned Wine Institute. Actually, any payment from any grateful winemaker / winemarketer will be gratefully accepted.
Adding the terms alcoholism and wino probably blew my chances though.