Brewster Rockit by Tim Rickard for June 21, 2015

“I’m perfectly safe, it’s the people around me, who are in danger.” Brewster Rocket

“Even sitting can be the call to traction inaction!”

-Winky, The Human Injury Magnet

Though it’s funny how one week,it’s: “Studies show coffee is good for you”, then the next it’s "No, wait- we read it upside down- it is still “bad for you!”… – Though sitting is turning out to actually be a scary thing, according to this article, from CNN… * – (*or go to www.cnn.com/2015/01/21/health/sitting-will-kill-you/ )

Sorry ’bout that Chief!er, make it: Sorry ’bout that Ensign!

I love the ‘sproing’ and the spring sticking out of the seat. Truly high-tech.

“Ejector seat? You’re joking!”

^What do you expect from a station with the self destruct button placed between the up and down elevator buttons?

My favorites are the “study suggests….”

I always check to see who funded the study, but Brewster does seem to verify this one.

Well butter was bad for you so they came up with something different to pander to the Food Police. Then the Food Police said, OMG! Transfats! Now the replacement is bad for you. They laugh their butts off watching people run from one side of the boat to the other metaphorically speaking.

Coffee, good then bad now good again. Same for chocolate. And fried burgers were supposed to cause cancer. Etc. Etc. Etc.

So yeah… I’m just going to go ahead and call bullshit on the whole sitting thing right here.

They’ve been flip-flopping on nutrition for a long time. Check out the first 5 minutes of Woody Allen’s “Sleeper”.

How about sitting in zero gravity?

An article in yesterday’s paper about centenarians noted that one who recently turned 100 attributed her long life to NEVER eating her vegetables.

Brewster just scored a one in a hole.

He’s not sitting, he’s hanging…

The good-or-bad-for-you confusion isn’t really from scientists, it’s from the media who don’t know how to correctly and realistically report scientific findings.

Actual peer-reviewed scientific reports are very careful not to generalize conclusions beyond what was studied. But the media will take the most tentative or narrow finding and present it as certain and universal. When some report of a study really surprises me or massively conflicts with previous research, I will go look up the original published study (it’s a shame that most people can’t do that; you usually have to pay to read the articles if you don’t have academic library credentials). More often than not, I find that the researchers themselves said nothing at all like what was implied in the popular press article.

This drives me crazy, it’s totally irresponsible! It does actual harm in the world, not only be getting people to act on potential misinformation, but also by creating this impression that scientists “know nothing.” It lets people feel justified dismissing information from someone who’s spent their entire lifetime learning about and studying a phenomenon, in favor of what they read on facebook, or what “sounds right” to them.

I think it should be part of a basic high school curriculum to teach the skills necessary for understanding scientific results, including assessing the validity and appropriately interpreting reports of research. We are just bombarded with research findings and statistics these days, and there’s lots of useful information out there, but people don’t know how to find, evaluate, and use it for their benefit.