Garcinia cambogia

September 19, 2013

I have been growing portlier over the last few years. I don’t weigh myself, so this happened without my being consciously aware of it, although I did notice twinges in the joints as they protested against having to bear stresses for which they had not been intended.

But it was when I realised that I was having more and more trouble bending down far enough to put my socks on that I decided to do something about it. Coincidentally, I received an email at about the same time extolling a substance called Garcinia cambogia as a ‘miracle’ weight-loss medication. Needless to say, I was quite excited by this potentially easy way to lose weight, but as I read, red flags started popping up.
garcinia
The first of these was that the stuff had been recommended by Dr Oz. Now, Dr Oz has seemingly impeccable qualifications: graduated from Harvard, then received his MD from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from Wharton. He is a professor at Columbia University. Yet he has a record of recommending quack remedies on his ridiculous TV show. Do they not teach anything about the scientific method at those prestigious institutions he attended?
Read the rest of this entry »


Future Perfect

September 4, 2013

The presenter of the morning early breakfast show on Cape Talk radio was commenting about the predictions made by Isaac Asimov on the occasion of the World’s Fair in New York in 1964. Asimov was musing on what the World’s Fair of 2014–fifty years later–would look like. “He really is incredibly accurate!” enthused the host, “It’s uncanny how he could have known then what our world looks like now!”

12448302asim_20010626_20131.jpg
I hadn’t read Asimov’s predictions, so I looked them up to see for myself just how prescient he really was. Not, it turns out, as much as the breathless radio presenter would have us believe. I enumerated 24 specific predictions made in the article, and found that 10 were accurate within reasonable bounds, 12 were inaccurate, 2 were partially accurate.

Some of the predictions that were right on the money were:–
Read the rest of this entry »