December 4th

Do not believe everything you read. This is something we in our daily lives have a tendency to forget, especially when what you hear corelatesto your own preconscieved ideas. These last few days I've read qt least to stories that are at least not entirely honest. The first story was on the front page of my local newspaper the headline reading: "4000 people use the training centers in Førde" Now this story gave me pause, Førde is a relatively small town with only a population of ca 12000 people. That would mean that about 1/3 of the goes to these gyms. Knowing that it was unlikely that 1/3 of the people living in Førde goes regularly to the gym I found this story very unlikely. There could however be that people from the larger region of Sunnfjord trained in førde. Sunnfjord ihas a population of ca 40 000. That would mean about 10%, or lets say 20% of people in Førde because they would presumably be overrepresented, regularly goes to the gym which is still pretty high.
Reading the story it said that the gyms in Førde has 4000 registered members. this made suddenly a lot more sense. Only a fraction of people who is a gym member regularly use the gym. 90% of members of a gym will have stopped going regularly 90 days after signing up (although, I couldn't find the original source for this). This taken into consideration shows that the story that 4000 people from Førde goes to the gym is at least a slight exaggeration.
This first story is quite easy to falsefy. the facts lying beneath the story was in the article so you could spot the weak points without much trouble. I also didn't have an invested interest in believing this story so it was easier for me to hold a critical eye to eit. This second article had a bit more trouble conected to it. I have a slight antagonistic relationship to Chinese Alternative Medicine (also known as Eastern Medicine or Traditional Chinese Medicine or TCM) so when I read that "Chinese eat human baby for health and sexual pleasure" I was inclined to believe it. TCM has a culture of eating some rather unhealthy things or endangered species because of some percieved benefit usually without any evidence to show for. The western black rhino went extinct beacause of poaching, a big reason for this was the price for rhinohorn as a TCM treatment for just about any disease you can think of. So my first reaction was "Wow TCM really is crazy. People need to know this!" but as my finger was hovering over the 'share' button on facebook i thought "wait a minute, do I know that this is real?" I gave myself 30 minutes on google and it seems that this article had grown out of a small newsreport about apparent selling of dried baby flesh, an art piece of the shock-artist Zhu Yu, some anti-abortionist propaganda, and a lot of hype and conjecture. I also found ouut that this story has been printed in many different online newspapers all around the world.
A good source for the whole story is this article here.
So to sum up "Think critically about what you read on the internet" I write whilst in the nude.

Daily Calendar

Todays calendar is one of my favourittest online Calendars of all time. QI is short for Quite Interesting. a program that talks about the weird things. Their stories usually hae real science behind them but arent necesarrily all true. In any case they do take knowledge seriously but with a good dose of humour.
They have made a fantastc calendar with some of their best clips.
PS. If you win the two tickets to the show I expect to be invited along.

Chrismas Mystery

"Peace be with you who walk on the narrow way along the Göta River. My name is Joshua the shepherd."
"Then you are one of us," said Ephiriel