Useful Thoughts

While it may seem like I'm giving the charity sector a short shrift lately, I can't help but feel that necessary criticisms are either absent or extremely muted on the internet, and when I can't find what I'm looking for I feel compelled to put it down myself.

So it's with considerable dismay that I must level a steely complaint at 'Anthony Nolan' (now formally, it appears, 'The Anthony Nolan Trust'). They've done what a lot of charities seem to do after a few years - become nervous about their visual identity. And so they've paid branding company Johnson Banks to come up with something new. The results are appalling.

Over the course of the last 6 or 7 years I've raised a fairly respectable amount for Anthony Nolan and plan to continue doing so in the Virgin London Marathon 2011 - the charity is a unique and critical service for those suffering from leukaemia and other blood and bone marrow diseases. If you're not aware of the charity, it maintains a large register of potential bone-marrow donors who, having been tissue-typed, sit on a register and may be called upon to donate bone marrow and potentially save a person's life. This is no small enterprise and they have a growing annual turnover that ranges into tens of millions of pounds.

One slight problem with the register is that it needs better subscription from young men, particularly those from ethnic minorities, and the charity is continuously driving initiatives to increase participation and ultimately provide a life-saving service to those that need it. In terms of its mandate and the work they do, I cannot fault it. The staff I've spoken with have all been lovely, friendly people and when I ran the London Marathon for them in 2008 I was humbled by the sincere gratitude and care that was expressed for their runners' efforts.

Previous Logo

With these noble intentions in mind, they've decided that a rebranding is the best way to help engage a younger crowd by having a logo that more readily 'speaks' to youth. The previous logo, seen here, was criticised for being a little 'old', with the flower being a point of confusion against those charities that also use flowers in their logos, and, of course, flowers not being very 'manly'. The charity provide branded running vests to all of their runners, and while I wasn't winning any awards for style I was happy to be distinctly identified with the charity in my bright blue vest covered with flowers.

It distresses me to think that people might align their support to a particular charity for reasons as vacuous as the colour and style of the logo. The charity industry is a bit of a marketting game and with so many people wanting your money it's a hard choice of who to support, but you would really hope that the primary consideration would be the background of the cause and the genuine need for support, rather than something that catches your eye and looks 'cool'.

But obviously someone thinks this is how to play the game, and the redesign has gone ahead. I have never, ever understood why anyone would pay an expensive company to come up with a new logo. I've seen it several times - the University of Manchester paid a huge amount for their dull, dreary, perpendicular logo that is both indistinct and very inflexible on publications, and given I was working in their PR office at the time they were tendering for designs, I can tell you they spent a ridiculous amount of money on it, 5 figure sums not beginning with a '1' or a '2'.

There is a very misguided perception that the the more you pay for a design, the more inherant value it must have. Certainly, it's your only defence against madness, because nobody in their right mind would hand over thousands of pounds for something that a teenager could knock together for £50 in photoshop, right? Sadly not, and you only need to look at the Tiswas abomination of the 2012 Olympic Logo to see how badly this perception is applied. £400,000 to brand the Olympics, and the result is a complete and utter nonsense, being both indistinct and downright ugly. Claims of it's 'dynamic' and 'fluid' nature are just words spouted by pretentious nobodies of the media design world striving to convince you that these things have some kind of marketable worth. Efficacy of design is an extremely subjective view and its value is claimed only as a result of the argument from authority fallacy.

My personal view is that logos are almost immaterial. You certainly need one - a small pocket of distinct identity, but the specific content of that doesn't need to be the subject of an expensive branding exercise. Most logos are awful to look at but are accepted due to their notoriety and omnipresence, which is more a function of the marketing than it is the actual nature of the logo. As long as it's easy to read and displayed in a consistent manner, people will eventually recognise it. If people recognise your brand but aren't sure what you do, then your marketing department has more work to do; you can't rely purely on the logo to get your entire message across for you and hope that'll be enough.

With these pertinent points in mind, I present the new 'improved' Anthony Nolan logo:

Ugh.

Immediate thoughts:

• It's black and white
• It has white lines criss-crossing it.
• It's BLACK AND WHITE.

This is the extent of the logo although not the complete visual identity. A few stylised variations, and the newly revised Anthony Nolan website, couple this logo with a kind of mottled green background that does absolutely nothing to enhance the central image.

After examining the logo to try to work it out (and already, we have failed, what good logo needs effort to understand?), we can see that the bizarre white lines are connecting pairs of letters together. Why? This is slightly more understood when you see the strapline that accompanies this image is 'Be a match, save a life', so we're seeing some thin 'matching' symbolism in there. Of course, just looking at the logo, I'm thinking, a match for what? Save whose life? Is there any particular significance to the specific letters being matched? I have no idea what they're trying to tell me, and did I mention it's in black and white? The typeface is oddly presented, with some letters appearing bolder than others, and the whole thing looks a complete mess.

Of course, I'm reminded of the argument I made moments ago about a logo being almost immaterial. In this instance, the emphasis is on the almost. You need some kind of distinction - black and white isn't that. You need some kind of clarity - a wonky typeface with lines across it doesn't provide it. The tagline is ambiguous. These flaws are compounded by the comparative distinction and clarity of the logo they've left behind.

It was blue, I like blue. It sits nicely with a consistent white typeface. The yellow centre of the flower offers a little colour variation but it remains a neat and tidy, simple message. The strapline says 'Taking back lives from leukaemia', which couldn't be more direct and comprehensible. It's not a logo that'll take the world by storm but blow me, it's a heck of a lot better than the confusing mess they've replaced it with.

Why did they do it? And why, having seen the pitiful effort generated by the branding company, why have they adopted it? You could speculate that having agreed to pay a sum of money, they were somehow obligated to follow through and adopt the end result, whatever it may be, on the assurance that it was everything they were looking for.

Early next year I'll receive my new Anthony Nolan running top in the post, but I worryingly wonder what it'll look like. Will it be black and white? I hope not - nobody will see me and nobody will know who I'm running for. My best hope is that they go with a green base with large black lettering to give supporters some thin chance of picking out the charity's runners. Of course, if it was down to me I'd happily revert back to the blue with the flowers - some things are worth more than a faint sense of effeminacy.

In my experience this error code occurs when Messenger tries to connect when a Wireless network is inactive. Since msn is stupid, it assumes that rather than the internet not being available, it thinks the service is down, and refuses to connect.

In a further example of stupidity, MSN will continue to report the error even when the network is reconnected and working perfectly. It continues to retardedly assume that the network is down.

The solution is easy albeit annoying - close and restart messager and shock, it then decides to start working. Can't believe that in 2010 an application can't differentiate between no connection available and service down, and then be unable to clear that assumption until the application is restarted. Ugggh!

I take back everything I said about Hewlett Packard having decent technical support.

After I reported on the error I've had on my replacement unit I rang HP support and spoke to a nice IT guy. We ran through all the troubleshooting problems and when they didn't work, they agreed to replace my unit.  They took all the details and assured me my replacement would be delivered within 5 working days. Great!

Except, not great. After receiving and hearing nothing for more than two weeks, I rang HP back. I foolishly assumed that giving my name and address would be sufficient to identify me, but they wanted the customer number and insisted it was impossible to find me any other way. I didn't have the number handy so I had to hang up and call back after I rooted around and found it.

So, I call back armed with my customer number, but it turns out this isn't enough to identify me either. Or rather, they know its me, but they don't have a record of the serial number of my printer (which I provided during my original tech call), and so cannot help me at all unless I provide that too. Unsurprisingly I don't have that to hand either, so I hang up yet again and call back when I've read the number from the printer.

Except this time when calling back to their delightful and barely comprehensible indian call centre, I find out that actually, no, I can't replace the printer because they have determined that its out of warranty. I can't remember the exact date I received the replacement but I'm pretty sure its been about a year, so if I'm not in warranty, it's only by a whisker.

But wait, hang on, the lady then tells me that my replacement unit only comes with a 3 month warranty from the date it's replaced. What? The original printer was covered for a year, and the replacement is only covered for 3 months? Given that my original printer fucked up only 6 months after getting it, this means my total warranty has been a mere 9 months. How the hell does that work?

Since they're not moving on the idea of replacing it, I ask what my options are now. I'm told that I can either get it repaired, or they'll give me a discount voucher to buy a replacement. So, I ask, 'How much to repair it?'. ' one three one pounds sir'. £131?! THE FUCKING PRINTER DOESN'T COST THAT MUCH TO BUY NEW.

With little other option, I then ask about the voucher. Turns out that'll grant me a mere 20% off an HP printer I can buy elsewhere. 20% off a printer that might fuck up within 6 months, only to have a replacement under warranty fuck up less than a year later? Fuck that.

I feel another letter coming on.

The BBC are running a show at the moment called "Who's Watching You?", hosted by Richard Bilton, about privacy concerns in the UK. Because it makes good TV, the show does its utmost to convince you that not only are you being watched right now, but you're also being watched the rest of the time too. Despite the fact that you, reader, are in no way interesting, significant, or unique, you're actively told that someone out there has a vested interest in what you are doing.

The idea that the BBC presents things in an impartial manner is just laughable - this show is completely skewed towards portraying all of the negative aspects of technology, making out like 'big brother' (and christ, how I hate that term) is watching you at all times. You're told that you're being tracked, that every use of your phone, your credit card, your tv, your movements by CCTV are all being monitored, building up a picture of your life.

See this camera? This camera doesn't give a shit about you. Unless you're raping a pensioner in a public place, perhaps.

I feel a powerful need to hold up a giant UTTER FUCKING BULLSHIT sign to help counteract this absurdly inaccurate portrayal. Yes, banks hold transaction data, phone companies store call data, your Sky box might anonymously transmit usage data, and CCTV might be in public streets and thoroughfares for a variety of, mostly security-related, reasons, but none of this means for a second that any of it will be nefariously used against you. Think about it - it's not like someone is sitting at a computer and all they need do is type 'Tell me everything about Bob Simmons', and boom, they know all about your life. The fact the data exists somewhere doesn't mean it can be easily analysed into a single, coherent profile. The fact that a myriad of different companies hold this information makes it near impossible to get it all together in one place, and even that would have to be after some kind of police warrant or demand that circumvents data protection legislation.

Assuming they went through this mammoth task just to get a look at all this information about you, what are they going to find? That you bought some salt & vinegar crisps at the station before getting on the bus to work? Horror! Privacy invaded! No, they're not going to do that. Unless they have some extreme reason for suspecting you of something seriously criminal, nobody is going to bother working out what you get up to on a daily basis. You are not important, and the suggestion that someone has already collated your personal data, and is sitting on a complete breakdown of your life and habits is just a complete fallacy. It's a well-used adage but true, "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear", mostly because it's too much fucking hassle to investigate you unless there's a seriously compelling reason.

The show also implies "Don't search on Google, they're watching you! They record all your searches and build up a profile of YOU!".

Ugh. It's just so stupid. Google might record the fact you've searched for 'dogs' and 'pet chocolate', and so you might get automatically generated ads for dog chocolate, but there isn't someone sitting there, looking at your search terms and working out what you'd like. It's a complicated and automated algorithm that applies itself anonymously to millions of people, purely for the purposes of showing relevant adverts. Since I never click on adverts, I don't really care what they show me or how they've worked out that information, because I know it's not really recording anything about 'me' at all. It's all metadata, stored, analysed, with results returned all without human intervention or prejudice.

This guy actually purposefully has secret cameras installed in his flat to show how terrible it would be to be filmed without knowing it. What? Yes. He had cameras installed with his knowledge, and then expresses his 'shock' later when he was shown images from those cameras. The ones he knew were there. The point he was trying to make, I think, is something about how if someone did put cameras in your house, you'd feel your privacy had been invaded. Thanks for that Richard, if you weren't here to tell me these things I'd never be able to realise them by myself. Remembering again that you're a boring, average individual, how likely is it that someone is going to install secret cameras in your house? Please try to scare us about things that have a remote possibility of actually happening. Squirrels could conceivably be trained by the government to knife me if I fail to renew my car tax, but I'm not going to make any tv shows warning against it yet.

The big problem this show has is that it muddies the distinction between the 'big brother (ugh) nanny state (double-ugh)', where the government is apparently interested in what you bought at Sainsburys this week or how long you spend pairing your socks, and personal surveillance and identity theft. These are two distinctly different concepts but its just all mish-mashed in together without any proper definition. They're too concerned with trying to scare your balls off about who is watching you, while failing to say 'these are public data collection methods, those allowed by law, aren’t they scary?', or later say 'Hey now, these are private data collection methods, some are legal but you might not know about them, and others are the illegal purview of criminals'.

The poorly formed message obscures what are the actually useful parts of the show - the bit where it reminds people that they're spack-faced morons who don't protect their own data properly, and so leave themselves open to identity theft or having their bank accounts compromised. If the producers stopped shoe-horning in the ominous 'sneaky' background music, and the constant and annoying cuts to pictures of cameras overlaid with lens-zooming sound effects, they might have thought to give you, the viewer, a few basic tips on how to better secure your personal data. But that doesn't fit in with the 'scare you shitless' message the show is about, and so is 'conspicuously' absent.

At best it'll give those groups who are surveillance-phobic something to hoot about and stand behind, while once again failing to properly convey the reality of mass data-collection. Most businesses have a hard time querying their own, small databases without cocking it up, so the idea that the government could effectively query huge amounts of information about you is pretty unlikely.

The part about criminals and phishing is interesting, although for some reason they call phishers 'blaggers' and while they give a small example of someone ringing up on the phone trying to 'blag' private information, they omit the widespread phising on the internet. The only nod they give to the internet is that it too is WATCHING YOU in some vague but omni-present manner, oh, and if you download illegal stuff you might actually get collared by the copyright owners who log your IP address with their evil and unscrupulous surveillance techniques.

It's just very poorly-done bit of 'investigative' tv, mostly because it's all over the place, presenting inaccurate, scaremongering information in a disorganised haphazard manner that'll just leave the average person feeling scared. Probably because the government now know they occasionally buy white bread instead of the healthier brown option, or that local CCTV shows you going into JJB Sports and coming out wearing a white shellsuit and chavcap. Admittedly, these are things to be ashamed of, but since nobody is actually paying attention I really wouldn't worry about it.

I  seem to be strangely alone in my intense dislike for the new Star Trek film. The critics have bafflingly given it an enthusiastic bumming, but I really can't see why.

The most important thing to realise is that this is not supposed to be Star Trek canon. While it is set in the time between 'Enterprise' and 'The Original Series', it features time travel and irrevocable changes to critical elements of the established trek universe, and so everything that happens must be considered an alternative reality, where all the events contained therein have no bearing on the integrity and continuety of the star trek we've always known. This is just as well - to attempt to rewrite nearly 50 years of established canon, where everything that's ever been written suddenly becomes non-applicable, would never be accepted by the fans.

That being the case, this isn't really Star Trek then, is it? It's a reimagining (or 'reboot' as the tedious nerds call it) of Star Trek from square one, that merely diverges into an alternate reality where everything happens differently. It has the advantage of being able to create a new and diverse plot without having to establish the underlying principles of the universe in which it is set, but conversely isn't something in which you can really invest yourself. Plenty of episodes of TNG dealt with alternate realities ('Yesterday's Enterprise' was particularly good), as well as the 'alternative universe' referenced in TOS and DS9.

Kelvin, both a USS starship and an angsty teen.

Those were good episodes that added a little spice now and then, but they were nothing more than an occasional curiousity that didn't really affect the overall core of the series.

So why do we care about an alternate reality where Kirk starts life as a bit of a reckless arsehole? Where is this going? Are we going to have a series of new films that go down this alternate path? When the producers tire of reinvented 'original series' cast, are we going to have some kind of absurd alternate TNG later on?

We'll ignore that for the moment and have a look at a few basic elements of the film itself. While a modernisation of the original design was a given, the Enterprise looks like it was made by Apple Mac. It's not technologically gritty (which, for all its failings, 'Enterprise' was), everything is a little too crystallic and clean, and in me doesn't engender a lot of familiary with the original. I could get used to it, I suppose, but as a long time and moderately faithful fan, I wasn't immediately drawn in by it.

Let's have a look at the characters. Kirk has gone from being a serious consideration to a rebellious dick with a superiority complex. The transition just doesn't fit - Kirk is a temeritous cadet and a late starter, but for some reason gets promoted to acting first officer by a captain that just happened to like his dad. That wouldn't happen, for fucks sake. Picard was breaking the mould when he made Weasily crusher an acting ensign in TNG, so the idea of making a cadet an acting, ranking officer is just not credible.

The United Federation of Planets has a fairly well established hierarchy of command that rewards performance and experience over the course of many years, so suddenly bumping someone up to a high rank is just absurd. Moreso the fact that this cadet somehow manages to wangle becoming the acting captain by pissing Spock off momentarily, and the biggest objection we get is from Uhura; "I hope you know what you're doing".

It just doesn't work, and in that vein Bones the cadet is suddenly Chief Medical Officer after the other one gets killed. Do these people have no hierarchical redundancy? Isn't there a Second Officer, a Deputy Medical Chief, someone slightly more senior than mere third year cadets?

The new Enterprise uses fast-moving swarms of fireflies to transport matter across space.

As I watched the film, hoping and trying to like it, a growing sense of bullshit came over me. Nothing I was seeing was believable, even if you take into account the alternate reality wonkiness of it all. I mean, Spock is banging Uhura.

I say again, Spock is banging Uhura. Where on earth (or Vulcan, for that matter) did this come from? It's like JJ Abrams was sitting around with dolls of all the major characters, idly musing about how he could shake things up for the purposes of the movie, and casually picks up the Spock and Uhura doll and pushes them together, making kissy-kissy noises. I can't fathom any other basis for these two characters suddenly being in a relationship.

I understand the crop of available characters was small, with very few female roles to choose from, but to create this utterly unlikely partnership just heaps another shoval of shit on my perception of this film. It's doing something for the sake of it, and it certainly doesn't add any value. Spock banging Uhura, by god.

I appreciated the attempts at interlinking previously established trek history with the emergent parts of the film. Sulu fencing made me chuckle, and Christopher Pike being the original captain, with his experience on the Romulan ship being the cause of the paraplegia seen in his appearance in TOS. Still, it doesn't feel natural. It smacks of a writer trying to link together things that were never intended to be linked. Explicitly shoe-horning in explanations of classic trek lore, because you happen to have the opportunity in a prequel film, detracts from their worth.

Take the Kobayashi Maru test that Kirk 'cheats' on. This is a well-referenced piece from what remains the best film of all time, The Wrath of Khan. Kirk cheating to win the unwinnable test was believable with Shatner, but seeing the new upstart eating an apple and chatting casually really ruins my original impression of what it was 'really' like.

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

We must remember this is an alternate reality, and so I have to hope that the original Kirk whose father didn't die was much less of an insufferable twat, and my precious ideals will be preserved.

Let me just skim over a summary of the plot before I finish up this piece, which is dragging on already.

In the future, at a point a few years after our last 'known' experience of the Trek univerise, Spock attempts to save Romulus from the supernova of a nearby star. To do this he uses a never-before-seen element called 'Red Matter', the physics behind which are not explained, except that it creates a singularity in order to absorb the energy.

Spock cocks up and the Sun goes Nova early, and destroys Romulus. For some reason a singularity is created anyway, and is now a convenient time-travel device that ships can travel through without being destroyed by the gravitational forces. Spock goes through along with a pissed off Romulan miner, whose ship is, for some reason, enormous beyond the scale of anything previously seen in your average alpha-quandrant species, along with powerful fragmentary weapons that beat the shit out of anything it feels like.

For some reason, this miner is entirely clued up on both Red Matter and how to use it, and despite the fact his passage through the singularity was accidental, is unpeturbed by the knowledge that he has gone back in time, and contentedly waits around somewhere in space for 25 years, awaiting the eventual appearance of Spock. Why he'd have any reason to think Spock would appear at all isn't explained, but suffice to say that 25 years later he's still just as motivated by anger and angst as he was before, and plans revenge.

To this end, when Spock appears, he captures him, and instead of killing or imprisoning him, merely chucks him on an ice planet so he can see the destruction of Vulcan (via another singularity, c/o the captured Red Matter) from a great distance.

Christ, this explanation is taking too long. Blahblahblah, Kirk and young Spock make another singularity and the miner ship goes in it and presumably explodes, THE END. Kirk, despite only being a cadet, is promoted to full captain of the Enterprise and Spock is perfectly content to sit under him as first officer.

The whole thing is just ridiculous, a million miles away from the realms of possibility. The writers have made up a load of non-sensical shit and thrown it together into a claptrap of plot macguffins and needless exposition in order to create a film that is essentially a lot of standard bang-bang explosion action. Phasers now apparently shoot in pulses instead of beams, by the way. Funny that.

Roddenberry, hopefully spinning fast enough in his grave to create a singularity that'll suck this bag of shite out of existance

One of the things that has always run through Star Trek like lifeblood is its awesome and instantly recognisable music ('Enterprise' as the major exception). James Horner and particularly the Star Trek II soundtrack is a feat of sheer brilliance. In that film when the Enterprise clears moorings (and has a theme track of the same name), my hair stands on end and I'm completely entranced in the majesty of the scene. It's just fucking awesome.

However, in the new film (and who thought to call it 'Star Trek' anyway? It's stupidly indistinct), the music just ran right off me. It was immemorable and insignificant, and fuck me if I didn't think I'd wandered into a repeat of Spiderman, so similar that it sounded. Throughout the entire film there was not one faithful melody to the original music, save for the end credits where they play a re-styled TOS theme, except by that point I'm already on my way out of the cinema cursing the film as a fucking joke.

The Romulans aren't well represented here, because to look at them they don't look like any kind of Romulan that's ever been seen in Star Trek before. Why they all needed to look like bald-headed, tattoed white guys was lost on me. Throughout the film I had trouble identifying captain Nero (famous on Romulus for his CD-burning skills) from any of his other cloned crew members. As a character he's badly explained, and to use the word again, not believable. The whole combination of the random plot elements is just stupid.

So there we go, my 'review', which its really not, sounds like a bit of a rant, but so confused as I am as to why this film has received almost universal critical acclaim has compelled me to set the record straight, at least in one tiny corner of the web. I can't see anything in the film that I'd want to see again in an alternate-reality sequel, and if you're the kind of drone who is impressed by fluffy nonsense like the new transporter effects, or the standard staple of 'special effects', then you're welcome to it, but I hope to christ I'm not the only fan who regards this as another trek installment that has flown far wide of the mark.

To my mind there are only two trek films worth watching. Wrath of Khan, obviously, and First Contact, although if the two were in a footrace, the latter would be far behind.

As the ostensibly best candidate gets fired from The Apprentice this week, anyone with a keen eye will have noticed that Philip Taylor was a crackingly proud Northerner.

Get aaaaaaught!

There have been a few of those over the course of the UK series of The Apprentice, and yet strangely they never seem to get very far no matter how well they do. Sugar always seems to find a reason to criticise their good work and takes every opportunity to heap scorn on any failings.

The only conclusion I can come up with is that Sugar, the 'allo laaandan geeeza, just doesn't like Northerners. There are plenty of people like that about, with the old North/South rivalry making people biased, and I'm surprised nobody has really called him up on it. He is, after all, just a man, just as flawed and fallible as anyone else.

A shame really, now that the most viable candidate has been fired the rest of the season is a bit academic. None of the rest have enough personality between them to be a worthy win, and we'll probably end up with an apprentice who is a superficial and pasty as Simon Ambrose was - a man whose profile since winning The Apprentice last year has been distinctly underwhelming. He wasn't a winner from the start, he was just what was left over when Sugar make bungle after bungle, firing all of the decent people one by one.

Like the man uttered as he walked out, it's a joke.

The interwebs tells me that the human body burns between 90-110 calories per hour when idle. We all know that actually getting off your fat fucking arse and exercising is the best way to burn calories, but I wonder why I can't find anything about how many calories are burned by thinking.

At a basic level I assume that a brain works like a CPU, when it's gunning at 100% usage it heats up and uses more power than it does when idle. Surely a brain is the same? Staring slackjawed at Gladiators on TV must burn less calories than solid concentration on mathematical problems.

Google is contaminated by thousands of websites that discuss 'thinking yourself thin' and the mental attitude required to lose weight, so I can't find anything that mentions any actual research that gives a clue as to what bearing sheer thought has on calorific burn. I managed to find a couple of Yahoo! questions, but all of the answers are unscientific opinions by individuals who don't quote sources. Those people say the effect of thinking is miniscule, but given the lack of evidence I'm not going to accept that as fact.

Is this why the archetypal nerd is thin and gangly? I read or watched something (can't remember where, it's very unscientific of me) which stated that a weight variation of half a stone can be affected by as little as 7 calories per day over the course of a year.  While that might sound a bit improbable, it could certainly explain why 'smarter' people who use their brains more are generally thinner, because the brain really wouldn't need to burn very many more calories per day in order to affect the weight of a person over a sufficiently long time period. Over the course of your life, the possible impact cannot be ignored.

Obviously there are limits to this theory. If your eating pattern is variable or you're just a fat git, working your brain won't make much visible difference because there are too many other factors in play. But, if you're an average person who eats a fairly consistent amount of food, it makes utter sense that someone who taxes their brain with complex and profound thoughts will weigh less than someone who, say, reads the Daily Mail.

Given the multitude of studies and news articles that bang on about weight loss factors, I wonder why this hasn't got a scientific footnote somewhere. Suffice to say if you, person reading this, have any idea or can quote me a study, I'd be very interested to read it.

Now I've written all that, I'm sure I've burned at least enough to justify a small ice cream.

Update: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=381608 - some answers!

Interesting reading, it looks like this is indeed the case, although most calories are burned when learning something new, rather than engaging mentally in something you already know.

I've been ill this week, which always pisses me off as I'm usually as fit as a fiddle. The only thing that really puts me down is tonsilitus which despite having had them removed, still seems to get me.

I pride myself on my general health, and while watching the awesome show Booze Britain, it occured to me how many risky things I don't do. This is not an exhaustive list and other things might occur to me later.

1. I don't smoke. I never have, and by that I mean I've never so much as taken a single drag from a cigarette in my life. This seems to be pretty rare. I attribute this to basic intelligence and also the fact that my father's mother died of lung cancer when I was 5. I was thence told that 'smoking kills you' which assimilated completely into my mind. Oddly, I don't even have any friends who smoke regularly, and prior to July 1st 2007 I avoided smokey pubs. Even now people flaunting the smoking laws (particularly on train stations, where there's no fucking attempt at enforcement) infuriate the shit out of me.
2. I've never taken drugs. Before you pedantic wankers start talking about prescription drugs then yes, obviously, I have taken legal, tested medication. Just this week I've been knocking back ibruprofen at least two or three times a day. This is on (historical) doctor's advice and has no detrimental effects (within reason, obv.). Obviously I've never smoked weed, or taken any other kind of pill or illegal stimulant of any kind. Again, the 'drugs can kill you' speech early on in life stuck pretty easily.
3. I don't lie around in the sun whenever it comes out. If I'm forced to be out in harsh sunlight for more than 30 minutes I'll wear high-factor protection. I don't really fancy skin cancer, or even if that's considered nominal, I know that burnt skin is a pretty crap alternative.
4. I'm clean. I shower thoroughly once a day. I clean my teeth, I floss. I wear clean clothes, I change my sheets. I hoover, tidy, and keep a reasonable standard of cleanliness where I live. I'm certainly not getting infected by anything from my house. I don't touch public toilet taps, door handles, etc. and I always wash my hands thoroughly. I've never had food poisoning.
   

   Risk: Not always a classic game of world domination.

5. I drive properly, pay attention, and I don't take any needless risks in the car just to get a further 50ft down the road, like a lot of people seem to. I don't rev the bollocks off my car. I've never been in a traffic accident.
6. I don't really drink. As a foolish student I used to drink a lot, although I can count the number of mind-spinningly-can't-move-can't-think drunk occasions on less than two hands. Since Uni finished I barely touch anything. I might have a couple of glasses of wine, or the odd pint. It's pretty rare and I'm really not the kind of person who 'gets beer in' on a weekly basis. The last time I bought a crate of stella (for a party) the leftovers remained in my cupboard for months. I've never had a urinary tract infection, kidney stones, or any significant waterwork problems.
7. I don't have any tattoos. Apart from considering them a symptom of self-esteem issues (sorry, tattoo friends, especially you Dim Dims), I'm not at risk of skin infections or looking stupid in 5 years time when I get bored of the whatever fanciful thing I decided to stain on myself for life.
8. I have no piercings. Much like #7, no infection/looking stupid risk. Each to their own, but it's not for me.

That's all I can think of at the moment. There are so many small things I don't do (and don't miss doing) that substantially reduce my risk of all kinds of health-related woes. I'm not especially paranoid about my health, I just generally avoid the things that are empirically shown to be bad, or risky.

This week I didn't even bother to approach my NHS doctor. It would have taken 2 days to get the appointment (they're shit around here), at which point I'd probably have been prescribed ibruprofen and some antibiotics. There was no point doing this, as after 2 days of tonsilitus flare-up, you're at the worst of it and it'll only start to get better from that point onwards whether you get drugs or not. You're also not supposed to take antibiotics regularly as it reduces their effectiveness.

I've decided to have a crack at applying to BUPA. Just experimentally, I wonder if my self-proclaimed healthy lifestyle is enough to make my membership an affordable affair. Like any kind of insurance it's based on risk, and my family is genetically healthy. Alright, a couple of grandparents have died of cancer (smoking-related) and there's one heart attack (lifelong chronic gambler), but otherwise I'm a pretty prime candidate.

The one thing I can't smugly dance about is my BMI. I'm sure they'll ask my height and weight which will punch out a BMI figure several points on the side of overweight. What with the whole 'obesity epidemic' and related risks (fatty liver, heart disease, etc.) that'll be a harsh blow against me, fat shit that I am.

So, I'll postpone this experimental application unless I can shed a few pounds (I'm already on the case) and I'll report on the results in a follow-up. How cheap is private healthcare to a person who is actually all-round healthy? I was given the idea by a (somewhat rich cunt of a ) mate of mine who leads a similarly healthy lifestyle and he pays £27 a month. He's also quoted awesome examples of the instant, professional service he's had on the occasions he actually needed help with something. Since I appear to be getting tonsilitus 2-3 times a year, is something I could do with.

£30 a month is certainly a lot less than other people spend on fags and booze, so the question really becomes how can you not afford it?