the flu, food math, and sunscreen
Ok, I started reading the news again because it's usually pretty harmless on weekends, so here we go with three offerings from CNN:
1. Flu experts said that you can't blame little kids for spreading the flu around. The flu spreads following adult work patterns, and we should blame California. (The article said the flu starts in California more often than any other state, and it tends to start about a week earlier there.)
Side note: I spoke over the phone with a little kid, my niece, the other day, who is bringing home all the day-care diseases, and she very cheerfully told me what the sheep says and what the cow says, although her cow says "bvvvvvvv!" which, if you think about it, is probably close enough.
2. There's an interactive 'look how huge our portion sizes are these days' thingy (down low on the right side of the front page) that says a six-inch diameter bagel is twice as big as a three inch bagel, which was a common size twenty years ago.
That kind of statement makes me itch because when you're talking diameters, it just doesn't work like that, and on top of that, it's really a volume comparison, but let's just stick to the diameter problem. (If they'd simply weighed the things, we wouldn't be having this discussion.) So, I'm going to work with the area of a cross section, and since I haven't seen a big hole in a bagel in years, I'll ignore the holes, too, so we just have circles. Bagel 1 (call it b1) has a radius r, bagel 2 (b2) has a radius of 2r, and the area of a circle = πr2.
Ready? (area of b2)/(area of b1) = π(2r)2/πr2 = 4πr2/πr2 = 4
So, going by diameter alone, modern-day bagels are roughly 4 times bigger than twenty-year-old bagels, and we're hogs, yada, yada, yada, and I can't believe the reporters at CNN didn't leap on that 4x thing, and algebra turned out to be good for something.
3. A law firm that goes after industries has filed a suit against sunscreen makers because they say words like 'sunblock,' 'waterproof,' and 'all-day protection' on the packaging are misleading.
Ok, I know I'm not your average American, but I thought (this is true) sunblock was a synonym for sunscreen, waterproof meant it didn't wash off right away but you had to be vigilant, and all-day protection meant that if you applied it every two hours, you got all-day protection. I could understand someone who'd never seen sunscreen before screwing that up, and this is a country where you have to tell people not to use the lawn mower in the bathtub, but yeesh.
1. Flu experts said that you can't blame little kids for spreading the flu around. The flu spreads following adult work patterns, and we should blame California. (The article said the flu starts in California more often than any other state, and it tends to start about a week earlier there.)
Side note: I spoke over the phone with a little kid, my niece, the other day, who is bringing home all the day-care diseases, and she very cheerfully told me what the sheep says and what the cow says, although her cow says "bvvvvvvv!" which, if you think about it, is probably close enough.
2. There's an interactive 'look how huge our portion sizes are these days' thingy (down low on the right side of the front page) that says a six-inch diameter bagel is twice as big as a three inch bagel, which was a common size twenty years ago.
That kind of statement makes me itch because when you're talking diameters, it just doesn't work like that, and on top of that, it's really a volume comparison, but let's just stick to the diameter problem. (If they'd simply weighed the things, we wouldn't be having this discussion.) So, I'm going to work with the area of a cross section, and since I haven't seen a big hole in a bagel in years, I'll ignore the holes, too, so we just have circles. Bagel 1 (call it b1) has a radius r, bagel 2 (b2) has a radius of 2r, and the area of a circle = πr2.
Ready? (area of b2)/(area of b1) = π(2r)2/πr2 = 4πr2/πr2 = 4
So, going by diameter alone, modern-day bagels are roughly 4 times bigger than twenty-year-old bagels, and we're hogs, yada, yada, yada, and I can't believe the reporters at CNN didn't leap on that 4x thing, and algebra turned out to be good for something.
3. A law firm that goes after industries has filed a suit against sunscreen makers because they say words like 'sunblock,' 'waterproof,' and 'all-day protection' on the packaging are misleading.
Ok, I know I'm not your average American, but I thought (this is true) sunblock was a synonym for sunscreen, waterproof meant it didn't wash off right away but you had to be vigilant, and all-day protection meant that if you applied it every two hours, you got all-day protection. I could understand someone who'd never seen sunscreen before screwing that up, and this is a country where you have to tell people not to use the lawn mower in the bathtub, but yeesh.
posted by missmolly at 10:32 AM
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