Sizes of countries at varying latitudes
90 year’s of the Queen’s fashion
We’re not all beautiful (no matter what the adverts say) – and that’s ok
How to misbehave at a Christian festival
Someone has translated the Lion King intro from Zulu to English
The horrible stories behind Don’t Tell The Bride
Do you have correct restaurant preferences?
Farage massively tripped up on needing to speak the language of the land
How you can help traffiking victims by taking photos of your hotel room
A friend of mine put up a theory that because she’s vegetarian, and therefore has “greater respect for animals”, she doesn’t get bitten by insects. It seemed an interesting idea so I decided to test it!
She jokingly requested a report, and so I found an old template for GCSE Science write-ups and below is what we found out!
Aim
To determine whether a person’s choice to eat meat has any effect as to how much they may get bitten by insects.
Factors which will affect the results
We won’t have quantitative data to analyse as a person is not generally aware of precisely how frequently they are bitten, so this data collection will need to be qualitative.
Preliminary Work
We asked two or three people around the office to see if this is the sort of study that could be run. All subjects asked were able to give an answer, and interestingly all support our hypothesis.
Prediction
I don’t think we will see a strong correlation, but hope to see a positive one to some degree.
Method
A survey will be conducted over Facebook and Twitter to ask people to answer two simple questions:
1) Do you tend to get bitten by insects or not?
2) Are you vegetarian?
Measurements/Variables
Results will simply be tallied from both social networks. There is a chance some people could be vague about their answer to question one, so some of those may need to be considered for validity.
We may get answers from pescatarians; these would need to be treated as a third group.
Equipment
Facebook
Twitter
Computer
Internet Connection
Diagrams
Tables of Results
Conclusion
Other than the obvious conclusion that I know an awful lot more meat eaters than I do vegetarians (or at least, ones that will respond to surveys), there is a clear difference in results between vegetarians and omnivores.
80% of vegetarians surveyed do not tend to get bitten by insects, whereas for meat-eaters this was only 45.1%
Obviously it would be advantageous to have a larger sample data size, particularly of vegetarians, but the results I have obtained clearly support the hypothesis.
Graphs
Evaluating Evidence
One person was a bit unclear in their answer and said “not often” in response to the first question, which I treated as a no, but could easily have been a yes. If more people had responded like this I would probably have split them across the categories. Fortunately it was only the one.
For a future extension to this project I know some people who have had phases of their lives in which they have been vegetarians and phases where they have not. It would be interesting to hear anecdotal evidence as to whether this change in diet had an effect on them being bitten by insects.s
It would also be interesting to see what other dietary options had an effect on being bitten. For example, one test subject asked if a high intake of sugar would affect the likelihood. This would be particularly interesting given the current fashion of cutting sugar out of diets.
David Cameron on the Going Home Song
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I love a book that’s a bit different, and this definitely is.
If I tell you it’s a book about a woman who was kidnapped at 19, was raped, and now has a five year old boy who lives with her in a locked room, and their captor visits each night – it sounds pretty miserable.
If I tell you that the entire book is narrated by the five year old, in the language of a five year old, completely how he sees the world, it’s completely different!
So we have a story being told by a little boy who thinks the entire universe is the 11 foot square room he lives in, and everything else either “real” and in the room, like Bed or Shelf or Table (all objects in Room are referred to as proper nouns and have genders), or else it’s “TV”, like trees, dogs and houses.
It’s such an interesting perspective to take, and makes it far less sinister in a way, almost innocent.
He’s an incredibly clever boy, exceptional vocabulary and reading skills, as I guess that’s one way they’ve filled time, but on the other hand, he would never know how to handle grass, or a flight of stairs!
Of course, there is an attempt at escape and there’s a whole new world to learn about, but adjusting to that isn’t easy. Forgetting about the media attention, the infection risks for a child that’s never met other people, and seeing family for the first time, we also have to deal with the fact that people who look tiny are just far away, and rain doesn’t hurt.
It really is a fascinating concept, as well as a gripping story.
When I finished the book this evening I put the film on, and I don’t know if I watched it too soon after reading the book, but I didn’t like it anywhere near as much. Of course films have far less detail in, but it skipped some fairly major sections of the book. You also completely lost the child narrative – if anything it felt more like it was about the mum than the boy. I’m sure it’s a great film in its own right, but don’t watch it right after reading the book!
This is the first time in years if not ever, that I’ve given up on a book and not finished it. That’s not a good opening is it?
Before I start on what went wrong, I totally LOVE the concept of this book. It’s 1962 in what was the USA, except that the Nazis won the war and now control the East of the USA, and the Japanese run the Pacific States, with a neutral zone between them. They’ve drained the Mediterranean and exterminated the people of Africa – but there’s a book someone’s written going round, banned in the Nazi controlled area, about what the world would have been like if the Allies had won!
Recently there’s been an Amazon TV Series made of it which people seemed to love, which is what made me decide to try out the book. Tonight I decided to watch the first episode and it was ok, but didn’t cover half the characters from the book yet, and most of it was set before the book started, so probably wasn’t a good measure.
The first hurdle I had was just finding the writing style odd – at the beginning I thought the author must not have had English as his first language, but then I realised he was trying to write as a Japanese person speaking English when it was a Japanese person speaking or thinking.
They also get really obsessed with a fortune telling method which uses a book called the I Ching – all very odd and I had no idea what was going on with that.
There were a whole load of initially unlinked characters and it jumps around a lot, which made it hard to follow, and took ages to work out who you were reading about and what was going on each time you picked the book back up. Even with that, it still felt like it went really slowly, and so little happened.
So after getting 2/3 of the way through the (relatively thin) book in about 5 weeks I’ve given up and moved onto something else.
Maybe it would have picked up, who knows, but I just couldn’t keep going when I have so much else I’d rather be reading1
Weeks and weeks ago I promised myself I’d do proper research for this hugely important decision. I started to bookmark and favourite and like all sorts of links, facebook posts and tweets, meaning to sit down and read it all up properly. So in my best student impression, here I am, the night before the election and finally sifting through it.
I know what my gut says, and the way I will probably vote, but it’s important to me that it’s also an educated vote.
Hopefully I’m not the only one cramming tonight, so below are some of the links I’m using and things I’m reading and watching. There is a definite bias, and you can definitely see what my gut says, but certainly some of the articles are balanced, and a couple of links come in pairs to balance each other.
I sincerely hope that no matter the outcome, there won’t be too much upset or uproar from the side that doesn’t succeed.
If I find other useful bits between now and the end of tomorrow I’ll try to add them to the bottom of the list.
I hope you find this useful.
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