Express Editing Writing and Research

Sky Deutschland has developed technology to transfer adverts from train windows directly and silently into commuters’ heads. Passengers leaning their head against the window will “hear” adverts “coming from inside the user’s head”, urging them to download the Sky Go app. The proposal involves using bone conduction technology, which is used in hearing aids, headphones and Google’s Glass headset, to pass sound to the inner ear via vibrations through the skull.

(The Telegraph, 8/7/2013)

On reflection I think this story smacks more of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than George Orwell’s 1984, in that the aim is to encourage commuters to consume rather than to control their thoughts or behaviour. Nevertheless, the concept is certainly sinister and disturbing – not to mention annoying. Picture the tired commuter who attempts to snatch a few seconds of sleep; her drooping head touches the train’s window and the advertisement begins in her head. She starts, loses contact with the window but gradually nods off again, and the cycle repeats. Advertising, or torture?

The American Medical Association has voted to designate obesity a disease. As Richard Gunderman wrote in The Atlantic this week, this decision has some interesting implications for the way overweight people are perceived and treated, not to mention identified. For one thing, the clinical definitions of overweight (a BMI of 25 to 30) and obese (a BMI of over 30) are seriously flawed.

Defining overweight and obesity using BMI means many athletes, super-fit and with extremely low body fat percentages, are clinically overweight. Jobe Watson, the 2012 Brownlow medallist, is 1.91 metres tall and weighs 95 kilograms, giving him a BMI of 26. In his bodybuilding prime, Arnold Schwarzenegger had a BMI of over 30 (at 6′ 2″, 235-plus lbs), making him clinically obese. The definitions clearly need some refinement.

In his address on the 22nd of April 2013 the Pope said (among other things):

 The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.

Hard to argue with the sentiment of that – except if you’re a Vatican official named Father Rosica, who in his Explanatory Note on the Meaning of ‘Salvation’ in Francis’ Daily Homily of May 22, ‘clarified’ the Pope’s statement as follows:

… all salvation comes from Christ, the Head, through the Church which is his body. Hence they cannot be saved who, knowing the Church as founded by Christ and necessary for salvation, would refuse to enter her or remain in her.

and added:

Catholics do not adopt the attitude of religious relativism which
regards all religions as on the whole equally justifiable, and the
confusion and disorder among them as relatively unimportant.  God truly and effectively wills all people to be saved. Catholics believe that it is only in Jesus Christ that this salvation is conferred, and through Christianity and the one Church that it must be mediated to all people.

So – as Hendrik Hertzberg (whom I thank for alerting me to this fascinating material) blogged – am I going to Hell or not? I’ll stick with the Pope on this one (he’s supposed to be infallible, after all).

Until recently the Germans used a 63-letter long word to refer to a law about the delegation of monitoring beef labelling:

Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz

Unfortunately, it has officially ceased to exist.

You and I are only 10 percent human: for every human cell in your body you have about 10 resident microbes — harmless freeloaders, mutually beneficial organisms, and a few pathogens. More than 99 percent of the genetic information we hold is microbial.

The gigantic number of microbes we harbour make it hardly surprising that their health is essential to our own. Problems with our internal ecosystem — such as an oversupply of one microbe, or a loss of species diversity — are now recognised as associated with or causes of obesity, other chronic health conditions, and various infections. This is why faecal transplants from a healthy person into a sick person’s gut can treat antibiotic-resistant intestinal pathogens; they re-establish a fully functional microbial community. Similarly, babies born by caesarean section have higher rates of allergy, asthma and autoimmune problems than babies who are colonised by their mothers’ secretions during vaginal delivery.

Most Western diets lead to the development of a microbiome less diverse and less resilient than those of people enjoying more traditional diets; moreover, our intake of antibiotics has a profoundly negative effect. We prune our internal microflora at our own peril.

Read more from Michael Pollan’s article ‘Some of My Best Friends Are Germs’ (The New York Times) here.

Imagine travelling to Asia, 13,000 years BC, and saying to the local hunter-gatherers in any one of hundreds of modern languages:

• No spitting in the ashes!
• You, hear me!
• Give this fire to that old man.
• Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother.

Why you would say some of these things isn’t immediately obvious, but at least they would understand some of what you were saying. New research (published in the Washington Post, 7th May 2013) shows that the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in these sentences have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out around the end of the last Ice Age. They mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then. I find that pretty amazing.

A mockup of the famous Man in the Ice. OK, he’s only 5,500 or so years old, but he’s the best I could do.

This excellent article by Maria Bustillos (The Awl, 29th March 2013) succinctly makes the case for using an editor, no matter how good a writer you are.

Plagiarism is very easily avoided: don’t present the work of others as your own. To elaborate, if you discuss ideas or reproduce words that you’ve seen in the work of others, you must clearly attribute those ideas or words to their original author.

A simple citation and a few quotation marks can save you a whole of academic pain. Witness the furore over the allegations of plagiarism levelled against Germany’s former Education Minister (The Independent, 9 February 2013), who strongly denies the accusations but resigned anyway.

Every year my family spends one or two post-Xmas weeks at the beach, most often at Anglesea (on the Great Ocean Road, Victoria) or somewhere on the south coast of New South Wales. The NSW south coast has a lot going for it: beautiful beaches set off by tall eucalypts, warmer water than in Victoria (great if you’re a girly-man), and loads of holiday hamlets and small towns in which to rent houses, often a short walk from the beach. But I like Anglesea; it’s less than two hours from home, it’s got two particularly lovely beaches (Urquhart Bluff and Point Addis) within a short drive of the town, the water is refreshing, the shops are great (the supermarket stocks Irrewarra bread – just about the best sourdough in the universe), and most importantly I can hoon around in the bush on my mountain bike.

Most mornings over the past couple of weeks I shovelled down some cereal and got out of the house by seven-thirty or eight, before most of the extended family offspring and all of the adults were up. My routine was to:

• head north up Camp Rd to the Anglesea bike park (really a BMX track) to do a few mildly terrifying warm-up laps;
• take the dirt road that skirts the riverside park to a sandy track winding through the bushland and up the biggest, steepest hill in sight;
• loop across Harvey Rd, down through the heath to the GOR and back to the hill;
• fly down, successfully avoiding the deeply eroded drains crossing the slope;
• hoon onto a fast, narrow downhill track towards the river, enjoying some natural berms, little drop-offs over tree roots, and an excellent jump (on which I had an excellent stack and lost some excellent skin);
• do a few more loops of the BMX track, and back to the house. An hour of sweaty and slightly dangerous fun.

I doubt I’ve done so much exercise on a beach holiday before. It meant I could easily stuff in a second breakfast (coffee, fruit toast with butter and cheese, sourdough toast with butter and Vegemite) and still be hungry for lunch. And snacks. Dinner and dessert. Chocolate. Mountain bikes – they’re eating machines.

Daughter #2 and her band The Aquabirds (nine- and ten-year-olds) won Brunswick South Primary School’s 2012 talent show with this performance …

http://youtu.be/k06qzYmeVgU