The things that happen when I’m not concentrating…
Visual working memory is used to keep tabs on what we are seeing while we process it. Apparently the key to surviving in the information age is to ignore stuff that's not important. All well and good, but how do we know what's irrelevant until we need to recall it?
Peanut allergies, ever present in the public conciousness due to litigation-shy food labelling policies, are a pretty dangerous condition to suffer from.
I have a mild allergy to some nuts, as well as to bananas, bits of avocado that have been near the stone and some seeded fruit. If I do eat them, my lips swell up like I've been stung and I get dizzy or faint. Once, I collapsed at dinner while eating guacamole.
My sister can't eat strawberries for the same reasons. Having been advised by doctors that repeated exposure to whatever part of those foods I'm allergic to could increase my sensitivity, I try to avoid eating them though I don't go so far as to read food labels or avoid Peanut M&Ms. However for some people, even complete avoidance is not enough to shield them from danger, simply kissing someone who's eaten peanuts recently can kill.
This kind of allergy is on the increase, and exposure at an early age seems to be the catalyst. As technology permits increasingly esoteric combinations of molecules to be admitted into our bodies, are we reducing our tolerance to the environment we have created for ourselves?
As I was saying before… Tags Sort Out Music Mess
Someone once told me that London water was the cleanest in the world because it had been filtered by at least 16 sets of kidneys before it reaches your kitchen – which is a pleasant thought…
After testing the Thames to see how much of London's cocaine makes it back into the water supply, the results are shocking. Nearly 4% of Londoners are candying their noses, amounting to over 150,000 lines being consumed per day.
Even after treatment in the sewage plants, the water still contains a concentration of around 80,000 lines that have been passed back into circulation! That's amazing on several levels. From a public health perspective, I'd be interested how much of that coke makes it back into the actual drinking water. It could be a self sustaining addiction cycle for London's population, and it would certainly explain why they all act the way they do…
On the cost side of things, I wonder if consumers realise that they're pissing away about 20 quid's worth every time they buy a gram? It's only a matter of time until some enterprising cockney starts evaporating it back out of the Thames for resale to the be-burberryed chomping chav hordes, who'll be only too pleased to find a discount source that doesn't smell of semi-digested latex… ;-)
Tidy surfaces are a beautiful, calming sight. Katazukue, the Tidy Table is a bit like the cleaning lady we had at university. Every day she would go into the kitchen, take the piles of dirty plates, pans and cutlery and dump them en masse into the sink. Then leave them there to stagnate until we got back from lectures.
I think she expected one of us to see the greasy, food-speckled mountain overflowing from the double sink and drainer, feel guilty and wash everything up. Maybe, she thought we'd take turns and perhaps even draw up a rota, thus becoming great housemates and better citizens of the world. Anyone who has been within 40 metres of a student kitchen will know that this is not the likely outcome.