Cleaning/packing

Cleaning house can be really painful sometimes, because looking back on certain things bring back memories that I'd rather let sit on the shelves for a while.

But it can also be kind of amusing. In a dark way. Something I wrote in a notebook a long time ago while attending a conference:

"58% of intellectual capital around the globe comes from women"

A statistic I no doubt thought was cool at the time, but that I find completely non-nonsensical now (my less sophisticated response while reading it -- "WTF?!"). How do you even measure something as intangible as "intellectual capital," anyways? Doesn't each company define it differently? And even if you could create a common definition (which I guess does sort of exist), how could you quantify it? For the world, no less!

And what about survey biases? Blanket statements like the one above kind of bother me. Not that I'm a statistics snob, but I don't like people trying to make themselves sound progressive with strange statistics that don't really mean anything in the end. I guess that's politics, though.

This needs to stop, internet ad people.

Everywhere I go on the internet, I am hounded by flat stomach ads that go something like this:

1 SIMPLE RULE: OBEY AND YOU WILL HAVE A FLAT STOMACH IN 2 WEEKS LIKE ME.

I would click on one, but I don't want to give the ad any more hits than it deserves, which is none. It may very well be that many Americans are overweight, but promoting stupid and potentially unhealthy ads is not the solution. Obviously you can't get a perfectly flat stomach in two weeks if you're, say, 50 pounds overweight. "Celebrity" juice diets and unsupervised fasting are sketchy claims at best, starting routes to anorexia and other eating disorders at worst.

(Plus the pictures really gross me out and do nothing for my own body image)

2 common examples, because I can't stand it anymore --

And no, my search for "estomac" was not unintentional, though you'll find that no matter what word you search for, more than 5 minutes on wordreference.com yields this ad. Ironic, isn't it, that the Domino's Pizza is directly above it? And a bit inconsistent, n'est-ce pas, that the ad's title is "2 Rules to a Flat Stomach," while the description below the pictures reads "I cut out 2 lbs of stomach fat per week by obeying 1 Golden Rule." Yeah... if somebody who's trying to sell you something can't tell the difference between 1 and 2, I'd say you're better off declining the offer.




Oh, this is classic. An article about the deaths of anorexic Brazilian models framed by a banner ad about a get skinny quick "trick" called the "Golden Rule." And what would that be, "don't eat"?