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?
According to the news this morning, the Welsh assembly is to prohibit vaping in enclosed public spaces in the same way that smoking is banned; a bit of cut&paste on the old law. You might expect a moron in a hurry to look at vaping, and say "It looks like smoking so it must be bad." but you should be able to expect that politicians would make a decision based on the available evidence.
However it appears that Welsh politicians have more in common with a moron in a hurry than an idealised poltician.
Before I carry on, let me explain that despite being a vaper (and ex-smoker), if I were to live in Wales, this ban would make practically no difference to me. I don't vape at work (in the office!), in pubs, shops, on trains, or anywhere you can expect the Welsh ban to take effect. I do sometimes wish there was a vaping lounge I could go to on occasions.
The main reason this is such a stupid ban is that it treats vaping as if it were as harmful to the health as smoking. There is not a single serious person who would claim that vaping is as dangerous as smoking. And treating it the same as smoking tells smokers (remember the moron in a hurry) that there's no point in switching to vaping instead because vaping is just as harmful.
There is an argument that whilst the risks are unknown for sure (there is no evidence that secondary vaping is harmful; and plenty of studies that show that secondary vaping is harmless [1], [2], [3]), that it would be nice to stop vaping in public enclosed spaces; just not on the same level as smoking. For example :-
The intention is to minimise a probably non-existent risk to non-vapers whilst letting vapers get away with just a bit more than smokers.
Amusingly enough, by consigning vapers to the same sin bin as the smokers, these dumb politicians open themselves up to a class action suit in the future – why should I have to endure the risk of secondary smoking?
There are two daft arguments that I heard used this morning which indicate that some of the Welsh politicians realise just how dumb they're being :-
Even if you were to disagree with my assessments of these two arguments, the fact they are being made at all indicates just how poor the argument for banning vaping in public really is.
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