It’s been a long while since I’ve given much credence to science headlines in most newspapers, but this look at science headlines justifying moral prejudice on the Bad Science blog had me open mouthed with incredulity for most of it.

It takes a good look at the reporting behind the cervical cancer vaccine and the “Twitter and Facebook give you cancer” headlines and calls bullshit. Loudly.

Definitely worth a read. You’ll never trust another science headline again.

Following on from Wednesday’s post about the Everyday Systems site, I wanted to mention the fantastic habit tracking system Reinhard’s developed: HabitCal.

It doesn’t matter what new behaviour you’re trying to introduce into your life (cutting out smoking, change of diet, reducing computer time), the simplest way of tracking how you are doing is to ask yourself each day: did I succeed, fail or was today exempt for some reason?

HabitCal tracks each of these states using the colour code of green for success, red for failure and yellow for exempt days. It’s easy to set up and you can update in seconds.

I’m finding its simplicity so useful. While I still feel I need to track something (it’s like being three years old and earning stickers all over again – there’s an incredible psychological urge not to slip up just so you don’t have to mark the entire day as a FAILURE), I’m also not over-tracking and ending up with a pile of irrelevant data.

For example, a list of the exact number of calories I ate every day for a month isn’t actually that useful if I end up not losing lost as much as I hoped. With HabitCal, though, I’m getting an immediate visual picture where I can see that Friday is a real problem day, or that there’s a huge bunch of reds the week I had a friend to stay.

You can use HabitCal to track anything you like, not just the systems outlined at Everyday Systems. One thing you do have to be aware of, though, is that your data is completely public. So don’t put anything on it that you wouldn’t want anyone else to know!

You can see my HabitCal tracker here. I’m currently tracking the No S Diet, Weekend Luddite, Glass Ceiling and Exercise (this last row is deliberately blank as it’s an established habit of mine so I’m only tracking failures). It’s currently a pleasant display of greens and yellows, but feel free to hassle me if any reds start appearing!

I have recently stumbled on a fantastic website called Everyday Systems. If you’re the sort of person who loves productivity hacks and self-improvement systems (like me) then Everyday Systems may well interest you, too.

Whereas most lifehack systems I’ve seen are at the micro-management level (how to keep to-do lists organised, how to keep your email inbox empty, etc) most of the systems on this site are at a macro, life-improving level. At first glance they seem overly simple, but that’s because they are simple – beautifully so – and that’s what makes them so effective.

There’s several different ideas there, some which may be more relevant to you than others. The one that jumped out at me most, though, was Weekend Luddite – mainly in an “I could never manage that” kind of way, followed by a “well if that’s the case, I really ought to be doing that”.

As I’ve mentioned before, I spend far too much time at my computer randomly surfing the net and wasting time. During the day, the computers are never off and the internet is always on. Even if I’m doing other stuff, I will pop back for a couple of minutes between chores or activities with the kids, just to see if anything interesting happened while I was away, check my email, read a few new posts on bulletin boards.

Add up all the time and it amounts to hours of wasted life.

I’ve tried to tackle it before with the occasional Screen Free days to counteract my excesses, but what I really need are better and regular life habits.

Reinhard’s Weekend Luddite system solves this problem by switching the computer off between breakfast and dinner, every Saturday and Sunday. He found that not only did end up doing more interesting things with his day, he became more productive with the more limited computer time at his disposal. A very effective form of “distraction management”. I’d like some of that.

However, I found the idea of that amount of time away a bit scary, so I’ve started out with the computer off between the hours of 10am and 12 noon every Saturday and Sunday. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but last weekend in the time I would otherwise have wasted website-hopping, I got some weeding done in the garden, cleaned out the fish tank earlier in the day, went for a long walk with my youngest son and even sat down with an actual book! It felt a much more relaxed AND productive weekend as a result.

So, I’m going to keep it up. I’m not including the children in the computer ban (I’ll even be sociable and play Mario Kart Wii with them if that’s what they want to do – just no internet enabled computer for me). Eventually, I hope to be able to increase the time away until I’m doing the full breakfast to dinner computer-break.

I couldn’t resist highlighting this wonderful talk by Adam Savage (one of the Mythbusters hosts who will also be at TAM London in October, YAY!).

While I have no intense personal interest in either the Dodo or the Maltese Falcon, his passion and enthusiasm brings these subjects to glorious technicolour which are fascinating in their own right. However, the theme of the talk isn’t the objects at all – it’s an amazing insight into the creative mind and, unusually, treating the obsessiveness as a positive strength rather than a weakness of character.

This I can completely relate to, although my preoccupations are on a much smaller scale and are usually of a much shorter duration. I will research something compulsively right up until the point where whatever it is that fascinated me is exhausted. Then it is dropped.

For a long time, I considered it to be my Achilles heel. The rest of the world has even less understanding of short-duration ‘infatuations’ than the lifetime ruling passion. The messages from family, friends and my inner nag all merge into one: “Jack of All Trades, Master of None”, “you’ll never succeed if you don’t stick with something”, “do you ever finish anything?”.

However, I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that this is who I am and working out how best to turn it to my advantage. I’m learning to run with my impulses more, explore the current idée fixe exhaustively but give myself permission to drop it the moment interest starts to wane without recriminations – as Adam says in his talk, “really, if we’re all going to be honest with ourselves, I have to admit that achieving the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise to begin with, was it?”

I do need to keep a better record of my fleeting compulsions – a scrapbook with all the weird and wonderful directions my brain takes me. You never know when it could be of use. I’ve also learned in the last few weeks that the quickest way to deal with my rebellious mind is to capture any daydreams that are distracting me onto paper. By exorcising them in this way, my brain is then happy to let me get back to doing whatever it was I was supposed to be doing in the first place.

And on the plus side, I’ve got two short story ideas out of the process already.

• 60ft phallus painted onto parent’s roof

  This is what happens if you don’t crack down on kids crayoning on the walls when they’re 2. Honest!

  It took them a year to notice – didn’t they wonder why helicopters were hovering overhead a lot?!

  tags: news, sillynews, painting, house, googleearth

• Let me Google that for you

  Fed up of daft questions that the questioner could have found for themselves in half a second on Google? Put the question they ask into “Let me Google that for you” and send them the resulting the link to demonstrate just how easy it is for them to do it themselves!

  tags: google, search, funny, questions

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Google’s Street View service in the UK was launched today and like thousands of other people this afternoon, I went on to see what you could see of my house. Only, they haven’t launched it in my town yet!

So instead, I had a lovely nostalgic time virtually wandering down streets of old addresses where the Google cars had been, following familiar routes round Croydon and Birmingham. I didn’t recognise any of the people photographed, but maybe that’s just as well.

Of course, there’s still a great many places that haven’t been mapped yet. None of the pedestrianised areas, for one, which (although obvious) is a shame as it would be nice to take a wander down familiar high streets just to see if it’s all as I remembered. I’m looking forward to it being launched in more rural areas – I lived all my childhood in villages so memory lane isn’t quite complete without some actual country lanes.

I appreciate the concerns about privacy that some people have, and it’s certainly a technology that will need some adjusting to. It’ll also be interesting to see over the next few days what quirky things people find, and not just Where’s Wally.

Overall, I am very excited about Google Street View, though – I am a visual learner, a photograph of a location sticks far more in my memory than words or a top-down map. It’s going to be great to know you’ve found the right place because you already know what the area looks like, to be able to scope out potential parking places before you even get there, or to see if there is a bus stop nearby (and maybe even read the bus numbers off the sign!), to check out what an area is really like before booking a B&B or narrowing down locations for your house hunting expeditions.

I wonder when the sat nav companies are going to find a way to bring in the street view data directly to their devices?

I love today’s xkcd:

This is so true, I still have a similar dream on a regular basis. (My variation of the nightmare is that of turning over the final exam paper that I hadn’t studied for, to find that unsurprisingly I can’t answer a single question).

I posted the link to the comic on Twitter and had whole host of “me too” replies. So it seems like I’m not the only one who still has the mental scars from years of exam pressure!

• Vintage Ads – a set on Flickr

  A rather scary (and often hilarious) selection of vintage advertisements.

  tags: advertising, flickr, photos, vintage, history

• Music Catch 2 – Ninja Games

  Awesome little flash game – highly addictive and beautiful to look at too. The idea is that you catch the musical notes, collect yellow notes to make your catcher bigger, if you hit a red note it makes your catcher smaller, purple notes give you a power up.

  tags: games, flash, music, notes, fun

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Force Safari to Open All Links in New Tabs – MacTips

  Have switched back to using Safari (for various reasons) and was getting fed up with sites that forced links into new windows – this fixes the problem nicely!

  tags: mac, macosx, safari, tips

• 5 Minute Chocolate Mug Cake

  I might just have to make this – chocolate cake that’s ready in 5 minutes? Sounds too good to be true…

  tags: microwave, cooking, baking, cake, chocolate, recipe

• Rare Aquatics – Hobbyist Aquatics Shop

  Have just had two snails delivered from this online store and I am very impressed. Friendly email communication, prompt delivery, securely packaged and good quality livestock.

  tags: aquatic, aquatics, snails, aquarium, friendly, shop

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Who Calls Me?

  A fantastic database of telephone numbers to identify telemarketers, scammers and other people who don’t leave a message when they phone. Worth checking before you call back that mystery 1471.

  tags: telephonenumbers, telemarketers, phone, telephone, scams

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.