Slimming With Cold Water

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Like 10 million others around the world, I like to watch Judge Judy. In Australia it is preceded by another American programme in which a panel of doctors advise a live audience on medical matters. I think it’s mainly a vehicle for promoting health-related products, but I’ve only ever seen the last couple of minutes so I can’t be sure.

In those closing minutes the chairman always offers a tip. The last one I heard intrigued me: Drink 5 glasses of cold water daily and lose up to 5lbs annually. In principle it makes sense. Anything cold that we ingest absorbs heat energy from our bodies to bring it up to the core body temperature of 37°C. But 5lbs (2.3kg) per year?

I made my own calculation:

  • 5 x 250ml = 1,250ml = 1,250cc
  • Assume that ‘cold’ means 5°C
  • By definition, heating 1,250cc of water through 32 degrees requires 1,250 x 32 = 40,000 calories (or 40 kilocalories) of energy.
  • 40 x 365 = 14,600kcal per year.
  • Fat stores energy at the rate of 9,000kcal/kg.
  • Therefore 14,600kcal is equivalent to 1.6kg of fat.

So 2.3kg seems a bit high, but it’s the right order of magnitude. And even at the rate of 1.6kg per year, starting at age 20, most people would disappear altogether before they get to 65. So there would be a big saving in pensions.

Murdering Atheists in Bangladesh

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I just read an alarming article in the Guardian Weekly. It was about a series of murders of Bangladeshi atheists by Muslim fundamentalists. Mrs SG and I met and married in Bangladesh (or East Pakistan as it then was) so we have a soft spot for the country.

We also have some understanding of Bengali cultural traditions, which are characterised by love of learning and literature, intellectual inquiry, openness to ideas. It is especially painful, therefore, to read that intellectual fascism is gaining ascendancy in that land.

Horrible though the murders are, the effect of intimidation on others is just as serious. People emigrate, stay silent or pretend belief they do not hold, to protect themselves and their families.

Edmund Burke said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” This is an eternal truth. All of us, whether writers, politicians, judges, police officers or teachers, have responsibility to resist evil wherever we find it.

This is easy for me to say, of course. I live in a leafy suburb in Adelaide. I do not meet terrorists, murderers or drug-dealers on my way to the post office. The only religious fundamentalist I know is Peter, the Jehovah’s Witness who comes to chat to me once a month in the dim hope that I will one day see the light.

But I hope that, if confronted by raw evil such as now afflicts Bangladesh, I will find a kind of courage that I have never had to call on before.

Subtitles

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Yesterday Mrs SG and I went to see a filmed telecast of a performance of Peter Grimes by the ENO (English National Opera). The tickets were much pricier than for an ordinary film, even though the production cost must be much lower – after all, the live audience is paying to see the show and the telecast just involved setting up a few cameras.

The singing, acting and staging were superb, as one would expect from the ENO. But we could understand no more than one word in twenty. They might as well have been singing in Swahili.

Opera singers are trained to use their voices like musical instruments, to produce beautiful sounds and express emotion. This apparently precludes clear enunciation of words. So I will contact the cinema and suggest that in future they ask for copies of such films that have English subtitling.

In fact Mrs SG and I often turn on the subtitles when we’re watching TV, especially during American shows which have more shooting than singing. So I reckon operas should always, always have subtitles or surtitles. Does anyone agree with me?

Begging the Question

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All languages evolve and we English-speakers claim to be proud of the speed and agility with which our language does it. We have a word for almost everything, usually half-a-dozen at least. If we lack a word we pinch one from someone else – pied-à-terre, schadenfreude and bimbo come to mind.

But sometimes something that’s just plain wrong gets used so often that, through usage, it becomes right. That’s not useful evolution. That’s just plain ignorance working hand-in-glove with sloppiness. I’m thinking of two egregious examples at the moment.

The first is ‘begging the question’, which means ‘including the conclusion of an argument in the premise’. Nowadays it is much more commonly used to mean ‘causing the question to be asked’. According to Wikipedia (to whom I urge all users to donate money from time to time) the misuse arises from a change in the meaning of the Latin word petitio over time.

The second is harder to understand. People are saying ‘one cannot underestimate…’ when they mean ‘one cannot overestimate’ and vice versa. I’m not sure how this has crept into the language, like a mischievously misplaced apostrophe, but I suspect people think they’re saying ‘one should not underestimate’.

One cannot overestimate the harm that is done to clarity of thought and expression by the misuse of language. I beg my readers not to join the ignorant herd of misusers.

Muslim Takeover of Australia?

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I get a lot of emails expressing fear that Australia, or the Western world in general, will be taken over by Muslims because of a) immigration from predominantly Muslim countries, b) Muslims’ high fertility rate or c) both.

Obviously, if Muslims do breed faster then non-Muslims they will inevitably achieve a majority one day. But is it imminent? I constructed a small Excel model and put in some simple assumptions for Australia. Here they are:

  1. Muslims represent 3% of the Australian population now.
  2. Muslims’ natural rate of increase is 1.5%pa while that of non-Muslims is 0.5%pa.
  3. Annual net immigration is equivalent to 1% of the population.
  4. Muslims represent 30% of net immigration.
  5. Anyone born to Muslim parents adopts their faith.
  6. Nobody converts to or from Islam.

This set of assumptions produces a Muslim majority in the year 2289, at which time the total population of Australia will be 3.6 billion.

I’d be happy to receive evidence-based data to replace my crude assumptions; or to send out my little model to be played with by you or anyone else.

As an atheist myself I earnestly hope that nobody follows any religion at all by 2289, rendering this a pointless exercise. Fun, though.

Buying a New Car

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Mrs SG and I just bought a new car – the first new car we’ve ever bought. My first car cost GBP60. My first car with 4 wheels cost GBP220. This new car cost AUD25,500!

At least, that’s what we thought it cost when we’d finished negotiating with the salesman. Then a young lady with a lovely smile and a strange title came to talk to us. She explained that if we wanted the really important ‘extras’ – that we might have supposed were already built into the car, what with it being a new car and everything – we’d have to pay another AUD1,700.

So beware, dear reader! Before your sign anything in a car showroom, ask if that’s the lot. I think we’ll go back to buying second-hand… except that at our age this new car is probably going to last longer than we do.

Poster Children

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The photo of a drowned 3-year-old lying face-down on a Turkish beach suddenly became visual shorthand for the miserable situation in Syria and the desperation of people seeking refuge.

It is an admirable human trait that our sympathy is aroused by the sight of a child in distress. Indeed, if we did not react that way very few children would make it into adulthood. But I am uneasy about the kneejerk-ism that such sympathy provokes. Complex issues should be addressed thoughtfully and with full understanding of causes and effects.

At the moment nothing is more complex than the tangle of superstition, competition and ancient hatred that characterises the Arab world. I want my government and other governments to behave rationally. I do not want them to be pressured by compassionate electors to take heart-warming, headline-grabbing decisions that buy short-term popularity at the expense of actions that could, perhaps, lead to long-term solutions.

Self-Flagellation

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I feel terribly guilty. I am hanging my head in shame and exposing myself to public humiliation.  It’s almost a year since I set up this blog and I haven’t posted anything for 5 months.

So I hereby vow that I will post at least weekly for the rest of my life, or at least while I still remember that I have a blog site.

Capital Punishment for Drug Traffickers

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People engaged in drug trafficking take risks, which include the risk of being caught in a country whose laws provide for the death penalty for what they do.  The bad guys weigh this huge risk against the huge profits they make when they don’t get caught.

Two Australian citizens have been convicted of drug trafficking and are now on Death Row in Indonesia.  The Australian Government, which is strongly opposed to the capital punishment on principle, understandably appealed to the Indonesian Government to spare their lives.  The Indonesians, equally understandably, said, “No. Sorry. This is our country, our law and our decision.”

A friendly, respectful neighbour would have accepted that answer.  One can express disagreement – dismay even – but in the end one should accept that different countries have different laws and different ways of punishing the people who break them.  Indonesians may disagree with some of Australia’s laws and practices, but they are polite enough and smart enough to keep silent.

As well as making a bonfire of its political capital and alienating its most important neighbour, the Australian Government – backed up by Sir Richard Branson and a host of other celebrities – has make me extremely stroppy.

Male Fashion

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I know, I know.  Male fashion is an oxymoron.  But there are people who are trying to persuade men to jump onto the merry-go-round of waste and vanity that women have been riding for centuries.

Most of the time I can ignore this sad fact, thereby avoiding the onset of stroppiness.  But here in Armenia I have cable television and one of my 41 channels is FTV.  That stands for Fashion Television and it broadcasts wall-to-wall fashion parades.  Worse, some of those parades are for male models wearing… well, I suppose I have to call them clothes but they bear no resemblance to what real men really wear in the real world.

Have you ever seen a male fashion parade?  The poor blokes look as if they’re on drugs to dull the emotional pain of being made to look like twerps.  Is this a global feminist conspiracy to make men ridiculous?  Somebody out there must know something.  It’s time to blow the whistle!