Category Archives: Uncategorized

Blinding Me With Marketing Science

defective yeti has me thinking about Google...

Way back when, in the before time, in the long long ago, I switched from using AltaVista to Google because, by comparison, AltaVista felt really cluttered and gimmicky and busy. AltaVista gave decent results, but I always got the feeling that I get when reading small local newspapers: there's some info in there, but really it's just a vehicle for crappy ads. On the other hand, Google's interface was almost as simple as could be: two buttons and a text box; the "Do You Feel Lucky?" button was the only clutter. And, when you clicked the Search button, Google just spit out a page of links and short excerpts. Nothing else.

So that means I am growing pretty dissatisfied with today's busy, cluttered, popup/animated, "no, I think I'll search for what I think you wanted to search for", ad platform, internet application host, portal, social media thingy, Google. Now, I get that Google has to eat, too; so I can tolerate the ads. It's all the other crap I wish they'd take away. When I go to Google.com, I'm there to search, not to envelop myself in a world of online productivity and social networking. I don't want every movement of my mouse to cause something to pop up or glow or change color. I don't want to recommend anything to other people. I don't want to see an unreadable preview of the page. I just want to click a link and see if it has the information what I wanted.

Get off my lawn, etc..

Pluck It For Jesus

Self-enucleation or oedipism (the act of destroying one or both eyes) has been described in psychotic patients [8], most frequently in schizophrenics [9]. Feldman and Feldman [10] reported that, after performing self-enucleation, patients were often found with a copy of Matthew's Gospel open at 5:29 where it is states "...if the right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish and not that thy whole body should cast into hell". Apparently, the enucleation enacts a literal interpretation of the text.

Apparently.

Pour Some NaCl On Me

Scientific American:

This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.

href, Ruhlman