Back in the saddle, will AI take our jobs?, Aspartame cancer risk and more...
17th July 2023
Hi there
As some regular readers will have noticed, I’ve not been writing the newsletter over the past few weeks. Mark, Bronwyn, Katrina, and others have stood in for me, writing a great set of articles.
My wife and I have been away on holiday for a month, in the US for a little over a week (on two occasions - it’s complicated!), but mainly in Canada, so I’ve a few tales to tell from the trip.
Being away, and spending the last two weeks in an RV travelling through the Canadian Rockies meant very limited internet access. Most of the sites we stayed at had either no cell signal, or extremely weak signal, meaning surfing the internet was out of the question. Some might say that was a good thing! But it did mean that I had little opportunity to actually read the newsletter content that the team put out. So, I’ve had to skim what has been written in my absence to make sure I don’t cover anything already covered. Luckily, we also listened to the Yeah… Nah! podcast while on our trip, so could catch up with the goings on that way.
I was interested to read Katrina’s item about pain and its weirdness. One thing I’ve experienced over the past couple of months is the onset of some sciatic pain in my right leg. It wasn’t caused by the holiday, as I’d experienced it before we went away, but sitting on a plane for a long flight to the US wasn’t pleasant. I’m fortunate enough to have spent the majority of my life without any significant pain of any sort - I realise that this is a pretty privileged position to have given there are people close to me who deal with constant pain. Anyway, being in a sitting position for extended periods now causes me pain, which is pretty distracting and - well - painful. So, I’m looking at what I can do to alleviate this - and one of the considerations is swapping my desk, at which I sit for long periods each day, for an adjustable height desk, so I can work without having to be seated. Luckily, my wife has two of them, and she’s graciously offered to allow me to swap my desk for one of hers - at least temporarily. So, we’ll see whether the change of posture helps things. I’m also planning on consulting a physiotherapist and luckily that’s my daughter’s boyfriend’s occupation, so I’ve already had a bit of a cheeky free video consultation. One thing I won’t be doing though, is trying acupuncture! 🙂
Another thing about being away on holiday is the lack of access to streaming TV services. Before we left for our holiday, we were in the middle of the excellent sci-fi series Silo, so we’ve continued watching that since our return. I also caught up on the Prime TV series Shiny Happy People - a shocking look at the fundamentalist Christian Duggar family and the influence of Bill Gothard and his IBLP (Institute in Basic Life Principles), which Bronwyn reviewed in a previous newsletter. I also caught an episode of the latest season of Black Mirror, on Netflix, titled Joan is Awful, which I’ll comment on further down.
This week I’m also going to cover some of the highlights of my trip which are of skeptical relevance, and ask whether my consumption of Diet Coke, and its artificial sweetener - Aspartame - is going to give me cancer.
Bronwyn is also back with an item about Douglas Metcalf and the Full Gospel Mission.
Enjoy!
