In which we disbelieve vegan propaganda, and try food made of additives and nothing else
Published at 9:33 am on December 1st, 2008
Filed under: Dear Diary.
At the weekend: off we went to a vegetarian food event we’d seen advertised in The Spark, put on by vegan campaigning organisation Viva!. We were expecting it to be slightly biased, obviously, but even so the strength of the propaganda they gave was slightly surprising. They claim, according to a poster we saw there, that their “veggie roadshows” have saved the lives of 100 million animals so far, which sounds like, well, a rather large number. They claim that one person converting to the veganist religion will save “around 11,047 animals”. I love that figure, and, particularly, the “around” part. Around. A rough estimate: it might only be 11,046-and-a-half animal lives, or you might do well and manage a whole 11,047-and-an-eighth! Going by these numbers, that means they think they’ve converted 9,052.2314 people to veganism (don’t forget that almost-a-quarter of a person at the end there) – or about 650 a year, on average, since they started out. How they count those 11,000 – sorry, roughly 11,047 – animals, I’m not entirely sure. Do animals who will now not be born count as lives saved? Will all those 11,047 (roughly) animals live out their natural lives in some happy, predator-free elysium? Forever cute, as their propaganda posters show? Who knows?
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Keyword noise: additives, artificial flavouring, Bute, Bute Island Food, cheese, food, green, health, ingredients, propaganda, Rothesay, sheese, soya, statistics, vegan, vegetarian, Viva!.
In which we see how popular food is
Published at 10:41 pm on May 27th, 2008
Filed under: Meta, Photobloggery.
After posting pictures of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park last week, it got me looking at my Flickr account and wondering what pictures are the most popular. Flickr will, if you like, give you pages of tables and graphs to tell you how many people have been looking at each of your photos,* so I thought I’d see if there’s any general pattens in what sort of photos people like to view at full size.
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Keyword noise: cherry tomato, chicken, chicken breast, dinner, Flickr, food, pan-fried, parmesan, photography, salad dressing, statistics, tomato.
In which we think about flooding and chance
Published at 10:56 pm on January 21st, 2008
Filed under: Geekery, Political.
In the summer, we had big floods up here, worse floods than anyone in this village could remember. It was, apparently, a once in fifty years event.
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Keyword noise: climate change, flooding, Hull, probability, rain, statistics, weather.
In which we make some numbers up
Published at 5:46 pm on August 20th, 2007
Filed under: Geekery, Linkery.