A new study has found that vitamin supplements are all but useless, confirming what I already suspected. I have always thought that our bodies are systems which can't just have raw materials poured into them in concentrated forms like antifreeze into a car engine, but that we require our fuel in the form that we have adapted to the use of. By that line of reasoning, vitamin supplements should at best be very inefficiently used, compared to the same intake of vitamins in natural (ie fruit) form. There's never been any clear scientific evidence to confirm or contradict my intuition, but now this study provides some indirect evidence - vitamin supplements do not reduce users' risk of suffering from various conditions that they are supposed to help protect from.

I found the industry representatives' responses highly amusing. One says: 46% of households in the UK buys a vitamin supplement and they can't all be wrong, which has to be the most ludicrous argument usable in this context, but also says something about the way people live in this time and place. It seems like too much effort to buy fresh fruit and vegetables and cook them, so people try to cheat. There's almost a moral point here - you can't cheat biology - it's not a system of rules like human laws that you can find loopholes in, and why do people want to try anyway?

an aside: just after posting this I noticed that there's also a grammatical error in the health industry rep's statement. I suppose it's a bit of a sad reflection of how absorbed I am in artificial languages at the moment that I'm picking up on minor inconsistencies in peoples' use of natural language....

posted @ 8:35 AM -

Scamtastic

Having heard about the Nigerian money-laundering scam many times over the past few years, I finally had the honour of receiving such a mail today. It is such a work of art that I feel I have to repeat it here (apologies for the great length):

Dear sir,

REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP � STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL.

Firstly, I must solicit your strictest confidentiality in this transaction. This is by virtue of its nature as being utterly CONFIDENTIAL and �TOP SECRET.� Though I know that a transaction of this magnitude will make anyone apprehensive and worried, but I am assuring you that all will be well at the end of the day. We have decided to contact you first by your email due to the urgency of this transaction, as we have been reliably informed that it will take at least two to three weeks for a normal post to reach you. So we decided it is best using the email.

Let me start by first introducing myself properly to you. I am CHIEF. DANIEL OMENE, a senior official in the nigerian national petroluem corporation and I head a Three-man tender board in charge of Contracts Awards and payment Approvals. I came to know of you in my search for a reliable and reputable person to handle a very confidential business transaction which involves the transfer of a huge sum of money to a foreign account requiring maximum confidence. I and my colleagues are top officials of the Federal Government Contract Review Panel. Our duties include evaluation,vetting, approval for payment of contract jobs done for the NNPC, etc. In order to commence this business, we solicit for your assistance to enable us transfer into your account the said funds.

The source of this funds is as follows: During the last military regime here in Nigeria, this committee awarded a contract of US$400,000,000.00 (Four Hundred Million United States Dollars) to five construction firms on behalf of the Petroleum Ministry for the supply, construction and installation of Oil Pipeline from Warri to PortHarcourt. During this process my colleagues and I decided amongst ourselves to deliberately over-inflate the total contract sum to US$431,500,000.00 (Four Hundred and Thirty One Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars) with the main intention of sharing the remaining sum of US$31,500,000.00 (Thirty One Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars) amongst ourselves. The Federal Government of Nigeria has since approved the sum of US$431,500,000.00 (Four Hundred and Thirty One Million, Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars) for us as the contract sum, and the sum of US$400,000,000.00 (Four Hundred Million United States Dollars) has also been paid to the foreign contractors concerned as contract entitlements for the contract
done, but since each of the companies is entitled to US$80,000,000.00 only, we are now left with US$31,500,000.00 balance in the account which we intend to transfer abroad into a safe and reliable account to be disbursed amongst ourselves, but by virtue of our positions as civil servants and members of this panel, we cannot do this by ourselves, as we are prohibited by the �Code of Conduct Bureau� (Civil Service Laws) from opening / operating foreign accounts in our names, making it impossible for us to acquire the money in our names. I have, therefore, been mandated as a matter of trust by my colleagues in the panel to look for an overseas partner into whose account we would transfer the sum of US$31,500,000.00 (Thirty One Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars), hence we are writing you this letter.

My colleagues and I have agreed that if your company can act as the beneficiary of this funds on our behalf, you or your company will retain 30% of the total amount of US$31,500,000.00 (Thirty One Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars), while 60% will be for us (members of this panel) and the remaining 10% will be used in offsetting all debts/expenses incurred (both local and foreign) in the cause of this transfer. Needless to say, the trust reposed on you at this juncture is enormous. In return we demand your complete honesty and trust. You must however, NOTE that this transaction will be strictly based on the following terms and conditions as we have stated below, as we have heard confirmed cases of business associates running away with funds kept in their custody when it finally arrive their accounts. A very good and recent example is the one of Mr. Peter Hopwood, the President of Mileage Trading and Investment Company at Number 121, West 55th Street, 21st Floor, New York 10022, and former Chairman of OMPADEC (Mr. Patrick Opia), who we were reliably informed that after the agreement between both partners in which he was to take 15% of the money, while the remaining 85% for Nigerian Officials. With all the required documents signed, the money was duly transferred into his account, only to be disappointed on their arrival in New York and were informed that Mr. Peter Hopwood was no longer on that address, while his telephone and fax numbers have been re-allocated to somebody else. This was how they lost US$18.5 Million to Mr. Hopwood. This is a very recent story here in my country and everybody is aware of this, some of the officials decided to cry out and face the law, because they felt they had lost too much to a stranger, while the Chairman of OMPADEC (Mr. Patrick Opia) is hiding in a foreign country. So right now we are taking all precautionary measures to guard against re-occurrence of such act in our case. This is why we have decided that this transaction will be based completely on the following:

(a). Our conviction of your transparent honesty and diligence.

(b). That you would treat this transaction with utmost secrecy and confidentiality.

(c). That upon receipt of the funds, you will promptly release our share (60%) on demand after you have removed your 30% and all expenses have been settled.

(d). You must be ready to produce us with enough information about yourself to put our minds at rest.

Please, note that this transaction is 100% legal and risk free and we hope to conclude the business in Seven Bank working days from the date of receipt of the necessary information and requirement from you.

Please, acknowledge the receipt of this letter using my email address. I will bring you into the complete picture of the transaction when I have heard from you.

Your urgent response will be highly appreciated as we are already behind schedule for this financial quarter.

Thank you and God bless.

Yours faithfully,

Chief Daniel Omene

I know which cretinous company shared out my email address, because I use specific variants of it for each thing I sign up for, precisely to catch cretins like this when they share my address with spammers. Err, yes, that is a hint that I'd like a Google bomb as a petty way of getting back at 24fun for sharing my private data with cretinous spammers.

The thing I find really disturbing about all this is that a large number of cretins actually manage to fall for it, according to Jerry Pournelle's report. As I often find myself saying, there's no helping some people....

Later on in the same day I received another beautiful piece of spam; this being one I could more easily imagine people falling for (originally in glorious technicolour, but I really can't be bothered to format it):

TOTALLY CRAZY ABOUT YOU !!!
0909 965 1983
Someone has a secret crush on you

They asked us to send you this message.
This person is [madly in love] with you and has said:

- You are Charming
- You are Attractive
-You look Sweet
- You seem Intelligent
- You Excite them

If you want to know who this person is, then you must call one of the following numbers:

0909 965 1983

The call is totally anonymous for you.

All the best,
FLIRT LOVE-BOX

If you wish to unsubscribe, please send an email to: nothankyou@pinoymail.com

The call is charged as a long distance call - For UK the charge is 2.5 Pence/sec

The thing about this one is that (like the original iloveyou worm) it strikes at peoples' loneliness and insecurity, perhaps the only motivation more likely to make people fall for stupid things than pure greed. In the original version there was a long gap before the line about call charges, so I could imagine many people thinking well, it probably isn't real, but I may as well check it out just in case, without noticing the extortionate charges.

There's a sucker born every minute they say.

posted @ 6:50 PM -

Happy Independence Day, to those who would celebrate it. I do mean it, but here's some food for thought as well.

posted @ 6:47 PM -

Went to see Steve Tilston at the Albert Hole this evening. It was good, but I'm tired, so I'll write about it later.

As for my worries in the last post, well, my supervisor was very encouraging in some respects, while also making it clear that time is running out and I can't afford to waste any.

posted @ 7:54 PM -

Work work work

I'm half way through my placement at HP, and I'm a little worried. I'm meeting my supervisor today, which will make it clear whether I'm right to be concerned, but basically I feel like I haven't done enough yet. Certainly I could be more efficient while at work, and at the same time I could do with leaving earlier, so from now I am setting myself some rules, which I'm putting here in the hope that it will help me stick to them:

• get to sleep by midnight every schoolnight


• be at my desk by 10 every morning


• no blogging from work


• no private email before lunch, and no dialogues on private email until I get home in the evening


• leave work by 6:30 each afternoon, unless I'm really stuck into something that it would take a long time to get back into the next day

The other thing is that I'm just not adjusting very well to having one long deadline as opposed to a succession of close ones. I kind of new this would happen, but I hoped it wouldn't. I think I will suggest to my supervisor that we should have short meetings every couple of days. I feel childish requiring this short of petty short-termist motivation, but I think it will be easier for me to push distractions aside if I can tell myself that I need to have something to report tomorrow, rather than just having the long term goal of needing to have something to hand in on the 2^nd of September.

posted @ 2:50 AM -

Ted, just admit it

Right, own up: who has been searching for football nuclear on Google? What were you looking for? Do I really want to know?

posted @ 3:23 AM -

So much to do, so little time

On the weekend just past, I began the task of catching up with myself. My music is back in a rational order so I can find things again, my room is tidy enough that I'm neither stepping on CD cases nor wasting time looking for important pieces of paper. I've also acquired more wonderful music, partly from a record fair on the Saturday (where I picked up the following fairly eclectic mix: 2 Motown compilations, a folk compilation, 2 LPs by bands featuring Martin Carthy, 2 Simon & Garfunkel albums (one of which I already had on tape, but I found the real thing for a quid), a Miners' Strike benefit special and a Human League album), and partly by finally getting around to copying some of the pile of other peoples' CDs that I have been hogging for unacceptably long. Musical discovery of the week: Astor Piazzolla's tango nuevo.

I still have much catching up with myself to do. I must decide what I'm doing when I finish at HP (which happens at the end of August) as a matter of extreme urgency, because depending on where I go I may need vaccinations, malaria tablets, visas etc. I must also start looking at places to apply for PhD programs for next year, because I want to send applications off before I leave this country. I must also update my CV because that will be of general usefulness....

The last song on the first album by the Manic Street Preachers ends with the words:
There's nothing I wanna see
There's nowhere I wanna go
It sticks in my mind because it's quite a haunting end to an album, but I couldn't feel less like that just now.

posted @ 7:24 PM -