Mostly Harmless…
Schneier linked to a pretty cool video today.
Basically, the pigs are fed by a system that reads an RFID tag on the pig’s collar. The tag is read, the gate opens and the pig gets some food. The system tracks which tags have been read that day, so the pig should only get one meal. But some pigs don’t like wearing the collars and scratch them off, leaving them on the ground for a clever pig to pick up. If the clever pig has picked up an unread tag, it gets more food, if not it tries again.
Dr Ben Goldacre writes the Bad Science blog, which manages to be both funny and depressing (In a how-can-people-be-so-stupid sort of way) at the same time.
He is/was on the Radio 4’s The Now Show this week, which is also very funny.
If you have access to the BBC iPlayer thing, you might be able to listen to it (again).
Working in an ice-cream factory over the summer will always be pretty busy, but the last couple of weeks have been especially hectic. As a result, I haven’t had much time to be particularly sociable lately.
I’ve got the weekend off, and the weather seems to be cooling down a bit, so I’m going to make an attempt to reply to the stack of emails and text messages and the like that I’ve missed while I was working. If you’ve been trying to get hold of me, hang on, I’ll get back to you!
I’ve also just seen this on the BBC website.
About 200 children in east London were given pedometers to automatically count how many steps they walked and ran.
Mile End Centre for Sports and Exercise Medicine was surprised by the activity levels recorded in some obese children.
Professor Nicola Maffulli said: “Then we realised they were attaching the pedometers to their dogs’ collars.”
I’m sure there’s a serious issue about scientific method and the validity of results in there somewhere, but I’m far too tired to see it just now. At the moment, it just amuses me!
