Television People

One day in our LoDo office back in the dotcom days Kelly and Tim were talking, and Kelly asked if Tim had seen a episode of Northern Exposure. Tim said he didn't own a television, which floored Kelly. He said "You've just eliminated almost everything we can talk about."

Which was very funny to me. Tim lived up in the mountains and was very much a Boulderite/multi-advanced-science-degree/MFA/installation artist/kill-your-television sort of guy so I wasn't surprised. But then he said "I have no willpower. If I had a TV in my house I'd never leave the couch. I would be totally mesmerized."

I'm not that bad, but I am easily distracted if a TV is on in the room and I'm trying to have a conversation. Like with my wife. Who gets very annoyed by this. Often. And I often think about the people I know who grew up in households with very restrictive rules on television watching. Almost every one of us is highly susceptible to the idiot box.

In my house, the television was only allowed to be turned on during prime time. 8pm-bedtime. 7pm on Sundays for the Wonderful World of Disney. Creating a false scarcity made it all the more desirable as any good economist would tell you. I planned my LIFE around television up through high school.

My best friend, Brian, on the other hand couldn't care less about TV. The TV was on most of the time in their house (a very hippie house, so that seems odd in retrospect) and he just wasn't all that interested in it.

In our house we are somewhere between the extremes of Tim's house now and Brian's childhood house. The TV isn't on all the time, but it's on a fair amount. And the kids don't really care that much. The toddlers will watch for maybe 15 minutes before going off to do something else. Boo will watch longer if there's a plot and characters that interest her.

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Commencing countdown engines on

It was 40 years ago today that man first walked on the moon. I was going to delve into all the moon-landing-hoax conspiracy theories but so many better writers than I have already done so..

Far more interesting than those, however, are the pictures from The Big Picture. A select collection of stunning pictures from various stages of planning, training, and executing the mission.

Starts with a bang has a nice post on How to Fake Your Own Moon Landing.

Matt Springer explains yet another set of evidence the moon landing hoax conspiracy theory proponents will have to try to explain away.

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I count my money and I rehearse what I'm gonna say:

Recently there was an event near our house that hired a Ronald McDonald to direct traffic (I'm not entirely sure of why that was his assigned task, but whatever). I said "Hey, I'll take the girls over and they'll get a kick out of meeting him." They were very blase about the whole thing and were more interested in picking up rocks from the ground than in meeting the iconic fast food mascot. I asked our oldest if she wanted to go over and have her picture taken with him. She said "Who is he?"

My kids have no idea who Ronald McDonald is, nor do they particularly care to. I'm so proud of them.

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If you can just get your mind together

Added a few quotes to the fortune bar up in the header there:

People often say stuff on the Internets that they would never say to your face. You are strongly urged to get over it. - PZ Myers

Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window. - Steve Wozniak

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard Feynman

Some people might wonder if I'm being pedantic. Well, some people are imprecise retards. - Razib on scienceblogs.com

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. - Eric Hoffer

I don't think I want to go to the restaurant where portion size is the signifier of value. - Mr_Human on Consumerist

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

I read Slashdot because it's a place where a comment about the British rule for placement of punctuation relative to quotation marks is modded 'informative.' ...in a discussion about using SSL for for an email service. - colourmyeyes on /.

If your whole position on a particular issue can be summed up in a bumper sticker then it's time to worry. - Jeremiah Jenne

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Yes he was a fish head, as stable as a waterbed

There was an ad on the other morning for a new kids juice drink that claims to boost brain power and immunity through the magic of DHA. I've heard plenty of marketing about how great DHA is but have not looked into it myself. The commercial tripped my skeptidar* , in particular vague claims to 'boost immunity' which are always a massive blinged out red flag with accompanying air raid siren and drum corps, and so I decided to do some cursory reading up. Not that we'll be buying it anyway. I'm sure it's very spendy relative to the alleged benefits and we don't give our kids juice with any great regularity anyway, preferring water or milk instead.
Finding actual recent research turned out to be harder than I thought. Things like "DHA and intelligence" or "DHA and babies" or "DHA immunity" mostly led to either 'natural health' websites, faux-newsletters/blogs selling supplements or baby/toddler food sites selling their merch. As a side note, I'm always amused at how the anti-big-pharma/anti-corporate people are perfectly happy to pay more money to just as shady operations who present a more-anti-establishment-than-thou sensibility as a marketing technique and yet are most often actually owned by the same big pharma/big corps. I trust no one who is trying to sell me something. They may well be telling the truth, but I don't simply trust that they are. I find out for myself.
Even on pubmed there is a bothersome amount of unsupported assertion of the benefits as a premise, though as I tweaked my queries I was encouraged to find a large number of well designed studies demonstrating that there is at least some qualifiable benefit to DHA under specific sets of circumstances. And more importantly those studies generated results that later studies were able to duplicate.
All of this of course says nothing about the efficacy of any specific product delivering DHA but at least it's a plausible claim they are making. I suspect that the juice drink that was being promoted that started this line of inquiry is not the most cost-effective delivery mechanism for DHA.
Also as a note I've been criticized in the past for ignoring claims from self-interested parties (supplement vendors, pharmaceutical companies) or articles from general media sources (about.com, USA Today, etc). I view academic research as the best sources for science and health data. Yes a lot of them get funding from Big Pharma, but as long as the methodology is sound and the outcomes are reproducible then funding sources don't enter the picture. Peer review is of course important and publication in a respected journal doesn't hurt. Studies by government agencies are actually quite good on the whole until the report of the scientists gets rewritten by political hacks to serve an ideological purpose. Pilot studies are less useful than in depth studies, surveys and meta-analyses are highly suspect and not to be trusted any more than a tv commercial ...

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Every day create your history

rev: from idolator: "A little respect, please. The man did write a song about masturbation AND convinced Eddie Van Halen to play the climactic guitar solo. So he’s like the shemale Cyndi Lauper. Which is…something, right?"
grizzly:I'm happy to say that unless the song referred to is thriller I don't really have any idea what that quote refers to. But it is still amusing.
rev: The song in question is, of course, Beat It
rev: Or Billie Jean. One of those mid 80's ones.
rev: I've clearly failed my Michael Jackson HIStory course.
rev: (see that's a pun, because he had an album of greatest hits back in the early 90's when he was last relevant titled HIStory. I'll show myself out.)
grizzly: the mere fact that you can make a michael jackson album title related pun is something to be very very ashamed of.

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Leaving on a jet plane

My lovely wife has flown off to L.A. TV Fest to work on getting another deal, hopefully this one will go further than the previous one. Check out her sizzle reels, vote for Mutha Mae on Stickam, vote for Mutha Mae on Nickelodeon. And of course, wish her the best on her adventure!

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