Omega Point

Who is Catherine Winters?

That’s a good ques­tion.

Blogathon 2009: Dinnertime

The arrival of din­ner and the 12-hour mark of Blo­gathon forces the point home that I’m some­what behind on my post­ing. I’m work­ing on it!

In the mean­time, more cof­fee and more pizza means more blog­ging energy. Or I’ll totally crash in an hour. But before then, posts!

I’m also pleased to report that we’re now up to $153 in pledges for the Cana­dian Can­cer Society.

(Remem­ber, dona­tions to the Cana­dian Can­cer Soci­ety buy you a post on the topic of your choice!)

Blogathon 2009: Things you didn’t know about grapefruit.

While look­ing up exam­ples I felt were “typ­i­cal” of Digg (and thus, not ran­dom in any way, which prob­a­bly dilutes my point), I found this highly ques­tion­able post: Grape­fruit diet almost cost woman her leg.

It sug­gests a cor­re­la­tion between grape­fruit con­sump­tion and DVT, deep vein throm­bo­sis, the clot­ting dis­or­der known to be trig­gered by sit­ting for extended peri­ods of time:

Grape­fruit juice is known to block the action of an enzyme called CYP3A4 which breaks down the con­tra­cep­tive hor­mone oestro­gen. This in turn boosts lev­els of coag­u­la­bil­ity — the ten­dency of blood to clot.

How­ever, it also men­tions this detail:

The physi­cians found she had taken a rel­a­tively long car jour­ney, of about an hour and a half, the day before; took a daily dose of oestro­gen oral con­tra­cep­tives; and had a genetic vari­ant, called the fac­tor V Lei­den muta­tion, which is linked to a blood-clot disorder.

Yeah, sorry, I’m not con­vinced it played a huge role. Sure, given all those other risk fac­tors, she def­i­nitely shouldn’t have been eat­ing them, but I’m still skeptical.

So. What the heck? Why am I talk­ing about this, any­way? Curi­ously enough,

This came in handy when I saw a post on Twit­ter by fel­low C/Kate and inter­net mar­keter, Kate Trgo­vac:

@CatherineWinters Just donated $35 to CCS on behalf of your #blo­gathon efforts! Request­ing post on Lit­tle Known Facts about Grapefruit :)

Which was for­tu­itous, because I’m @CatherineOmega on Twit­ter._[1]

And now, Lit­tle Known Facts about Grape­fruit:

Believed to be a hybrid of the orange and the pomelo, the grape­fruit was dis­cov­ered by West­ern sci­ence in Bar­ba­dos in the 18th Century.

Because of its recent cul­ti­va­tion and expo­sure to the world, it’s known by a range of com­pletely unre­lated names, even in closely-related lan­guages: grape­fruit, toronja, pam­ple­mousse. (Com­pare this to the ety­mol­ogy of the word (and colour!) “orange”:

Orange
c.1300, from O.Fr. orenge (12c.), from M.L. pomum de orenge, from It. aran­cia, orig­i­nally naran­cia (Venet­ian naranza), alt. of Ara­bic naranj, from Pers. narang, from Skt. naranga-s “orange tree,” of uncer­tain origin.

At least one study has indi­cated grape­fruit scent may make women seem more appeal­ing to men. (You said little-known, not help­ful, Kate.)

This 1931 arti­cle in the Vic­to­ria Advo­cate, a paper from Texas, indi­cated that the grape­fruit was met with sig­nif­i­cant skep­ti­cism when intro­duced to con­sumers in France.

The arti­cle notes that grape­fruit are famil­iar to Amer­i­cans and will surely become a sta­ple of the French diet. I can’t com­ment on the lat­ter, but the grape­fruit was as well-known in 1931 as to be fea­tured in this famous (and vio­lent!) scene with James Cagney in The Pub­lic Enemy:

And that may actu­ally be every­thing I know/remember/can Google about grape­fruit. Hope­fully it was informative!

So, as promised, a dona­tion to Canada Can­cer Soci­ety gets you a post on a topic of your choice. Some­times they don’t start out all com­plain­ing about the accu­racy of pop-science articles.

Thanks for your dona­tion, Kate!

[1] Now I’m both.

Blogathon 2009: First look at the new CBC News

Tod Maf­fin just posted some­thing that’s help­fully top­i­cal, given a con­ver­sa­tion I was hav­ing this morn­ing after my “why the CBC sucks at info­graph­ics” post.

As part of their depress­ing cost-cutting mea­sures, the CBC news­rooms are con­sol­i­dat­ing news oper­a­tions. As Tod describes:

Rather than hav­ing sep­a­rate news­rooms, assign­ment desks, and reporters for TV, radio, and web, CBC will now have a sin­gle source for its oper­a­tions. CBC Van­cou­ver just opened its inte­grated newsroom.

Go watch Behind the Scenes at CBC Vancouver’s new “inte­grated news­room” at Tod’s site now!

Blogathon 2009 — Manny gets a wrong number

So yeah, this hap­pened to me the other day:

Set phasers on ‘stalk’!

Google is handy, no? In ret­ro­spect, respond­ing with his name and address a minute later is pretty much the worst pos­si­ble response next to, “we have your wife.”

I was really won­der­ing, though — how do you even text some­one at ran­dom? Don’t you gen­er­ally select the per­son you’d like to talk to from a list in your con­tacts? My guess was that it was either typed in wrong or that some­one bor­rowed the guy’s phone as a prank.

Of course, maybe he was just try­ing to get the word out.