Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Good-bye Amstrad!

As I've written here before, I have a soft spot for Amstrad the maker of the first PC I ever owned. Now Amstrad will bite the dust soon:

Amstrad, the British manufacturer of set-top boxes and other consumer electronics, is to vanish into the hide of BSkyB, the satellite TV firm to which it has been long-beholden. Sky is offering 150p for each share, making its total bid worth about $250m. Though now just another appliance maker, in the 1980s Amstrad was a serious contender in the 8-bit computer scene, its high-end CPC series part of a ruling triumvirate with Commodore's C64 and Sinclair's Spectrum (itself acquired by Amstrad.)

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Thursday, July 19, 2007

Fruit and Veggies Not So Preventative

Darn! Another easy answer to a complicated problem bites the dust. It turns out that eating lots and lots of fruit and vegetables will neither prevent cancer nor speed your recovery from cancer.

You would think people would be backing off from the 'healthful' eating craze by now. The main reason these things don't work is that while the body does need certain amounts of certain chemicals (for example: scurvy is a result of a lack vitamin c [Ascorbic acid]) there has been no study to date that shows an opposite (and positive effect) for packing in (eating extra amounts of) certain chemicals.

Just do like mother told you: eat a balanced diet and you'll do fine.