From the Evening Standard:
The system of measuring alcoholic drinks in units could be scrapped under plans unveiled by the Conservatives today.
They say units are widely misunderstood and fail to take account adequately of differing strengths of drinks, such as beers and wines.
Unveiling a raft of public health reforms, shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said units would be replaced by the actual number of centilitres of pure alcohol contained in each drink.
From Wikipedia:
In the United Kingdom, a unit of alcohol is defined as 10 millilitres (or approximately 8 grams) of ethanol (ethyl alcohol).
Problem solved!
George Monbiot on why the link between green issues and alternative medicine must be broken:
This doesn’t mean that we have to be motivated by the science. My environmentalism arises from both a deep love of the natural world and a strong sense of the injustices done to vulnerable people: it’s an emotional impulse, in other words.
But we must at all times be informed by it. There is no room for wishful thinking. What is the point of dedicating your life to campaigning, only to discover that you have wasted it because the facts don’t support you? There is a subtle difference between sticking to your principles – justice for the living and the unborn, the defence of a healthy biosphere, for example – and sticking to your beliefs. We must doubt everything, question everything, believe nothing until it has been demonstrated, and even then subject it to continued scepticism and enquiry. Above all, we must never allow ourselves to imagine that we are finally and definitively right about anything.
Everybody’s putting the boot into Prince Charles’s brand of wishy-washy alternative nonsense at the moment; I couldn’t be more pleased.
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You occasionally have to wonder: what the hell is wrong with the Telegraph? Today’s evidence is an article called Snow, the Unlikeliest Superfood:
Before the great thaw begins, save as much snow as you can – eating it can be good for you.
The evidence? An article from Psychologies Magazine (“the women’s well-being magazine”), which reports:
Rainwater’s “slightly acidic chemistry may assist kidney function and remove toxins, alleviating arthritis and gallstones”. It also suggests it can protect us from stomach upsets, citing a University of Western Australia study that found children who drank rainwater were less likely to contract gastroenteritis.
It does sound pretty damned unlikely to me.
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Harry Frankfurt talking about bullshit (and On Bullshit, for that matter):
It [bullshit] consists in a lack of concern for the difference between truth and falsity. The motivation of the bullshitter is not to say things that are true or even to say things that are false, but serving some other purpose, and the question of whether what he says is true or false is really irrelevant to his pursuit of that ambition.
The link to the full video is at the bottom of the page.
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