I don't have any objections to a pleasant milk-based coffee-flavoured drink – the drink in the picture is going to get drunk whilst I'm writing this.
But please don't call it coffee. If you top up a glass of wine with Irn-Bru, you wouldn't still call it wine would you? No, it becomes a wine cooler.
Crossing the road at a pedestrian crossing when you get 7 seconds every 70 seconds (I've just timed it) to cross the road is bad enough – we know pedestrians are second-class citizens who are supposed to tug their forelocks every time a car goes past.
But when you want to cross diagonally at a cross-roads, you are supposed to wait twice for the little green man to flash you. So a car driver on a major road has a not unreasonable chance of not having to stop at all whereas a pedestrian almost certainly has to stop and wait twice; and even if they are really lucky, they will definitely have to stop once.
Why?
Why can't the green light for pedestrians be long enough to allow us to cross diagonally? It's hardly an unreasonable request – unreasonable would be to ask for the little green man to be on for as long as the traffic light for cars was green.
No, of course it isn't. It's only mainstream media that is dumb enough to think so.
Pluto is a dwarf planet whose orbit averages about 39AU (i.e. about 39 times the distance between the Sun and the Earth) whereas the edge of the solar system is approximately 200AU.
An untested chemical that grows in the garden. Possibly not your garden.
It could be benificial – Aspirin is after all a cleaned up and tested version of what was previously a herbal remedy. It could be safe; at least it could be safe in the kind of doses suggested (everything is poisonous enough in high enough doses – even water).
But it has not been tested properly either for effectiveness, nor safety. And if it is effective, is it more effective than a placebo?
Another way of saying an empty bottle. If you shake your bottle and it rattles or gurgles, send it back as it's got chemicals in it.
Expensive water.
In fact if there were any positive value to homeopathy, there would be no complaints of joint pain in hard water regions (calcium carbonate is supposedly a treatment for joint pain). And guess what? I get both hard water through my taps, and joint pain.
… as opposed to "man-made". Both are a means of production and neither means of production has any implications as to the effectiveness of a product.
However evolution does not tend to produce something whose sole purpose is to cure headaches; the willow tree evolved to have a nasty bitter tasting bark to discourage animals from eating its bark not to cure headaches. That was an accident. To treat a headache "naturally", you will need to find a willow tree, pull off a chunk of bark, grind it up, and eat it. A man-made pill labelled "Aspirin" is more readily available, safer (it only contains the chemical for the headache treatment), and is less damaging to those poor willow trees.
So in this case, "natural" is actually a bad thing.
Asking an imaginary friend for help. Frankly asking a real friend is just as likely to work, and any effectiveness is due to the placebo effect.
If you want someone sticking pins in you to make a little wax figurine replica of you to say "Oww!" then by all means go ahead.
Around about where I live, they have been replacing "proper" pedestrian crossing lights with the silly little stealth ones you can see above.
I am sure those who designed the crossings and the height of these lights had some pretty good reasons for putting them where they are, but they might not have had the pedestrian in mind …
Firstly they are in an unnatural position forcing you to look away from the direction of travel. It is normal to look in the direction of travel, and when I do, I can miss the lights turning green.
Secondly, and far more irritatingly, becuase these lights are just at beer belly height, it is all too common for people to stand in front of them blocking the view of the lights. So even if you are looking in the right direction, you can miss the lights turning green.
So what is so bad about the old kind of pedestrian crossing lights?