Some people will have you believe that some vaccines can cause health problems.

Some people will tell you that the combined Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine in particular is to blame for the apparent increase in the number of Autism diagnoses in the last two decades, with little regard for the fact that after 15 years of searching, no link has ever been found. They may fail to mention that the original study was carried out with no control group, studied a population of 12, pre-selected individuals who were known to have neurological problems and that even with all of this bad study design he still had to fake the results or that the man who carried out the study, did so at the behest of lawyers who were seeking a crank to back up their a priori assumption that vaccines caused their clients' developmental problems. They commonly also fail to mention that 9 months before he published his research, the researcher, Andrew Wakefield, applied for a string of patents for medical products that could only be commercially succesful if the MMR vaccine was shown to be not-safe. Andrew Wakefield is now living in America and charging parents of autistic children a lot of money to give them unproven and in some cases dangerous quack treatments to 'cure' them.

Some will tell you that vaccines are a moral issue, and that refusing to vaccinate your daughter against a virus that is the cause of 90% of all cases of cervical cancer is a good and moral act. They will tell you it is a good thing to leave your daughter at risk of HPV infection because she shouldn't be having sex anyway and playing russian roulette with her life makes you a good person.

With these people in mind, I present the following images:

Polio

Smallpox

I've been trying to figure out why EXACTLY this is so creepy. Is it the overacting by the little kids involved, who are trying bravely to contain their excitement about the wonderful world of yoga, and succeeding. Or is it "Okie-dokie, the yoga yogi's" stupid name? Or his crazily wrinkled fizzog? Or the stultifying pauses in the stupid dialog as his awful sidekicks ('Rasta the Rooster', seriously?) try and remember their lines and how to make them sound like they are being uttered by people who aren't permanently stoned out of their minds.

Sadly, I think it is mostly down to my creep meter beind pegged in the red-zone as Okie-dokie gingerly adjusting the poses of his charges and his visible wincing as he realises his great idea to teach kids about the wonders of yoga (which he obviously loves) leaves absolutely no way for him not be mistaken as a child molester with a TV show.

As Buy Nothing Day (28th Nov US, 29th Nov the rest) rolls around again its message will no doubt polarise opinion more than ever in these times of impending economic crisis.

Should we not be doing our part by being Good Consumers? Fuelling the growth of economies - this is a good thing, isn't it? Or is it time to re-evaluate what really is valuable in our lives? Embracing steady-state economics, breaking out of the work-to-shop, shop-to-work cycle? If we saw this coming in 1972, is it too late to take action now?

Yow. Nearly a year since my last entry. Got an email reminder form my hosts reminding me that I was still paying for this domain name and webspace and that's spurred me on to upgrade my DasBlog install (now fortified with .Net 2.0 framework) and start blogging again.

Started a new job in January at VioCorp. Some exciting projects on the go there: foremost is the Viostream portal which has been so well received that we've already got 3 clients (rabbitohs, dragons and ivy.tv) using our alpha version.

Features include:

1. Ajax based UI that allows video to keep playing as users 'navigate' around the site.
2. Leverages the YUI (Yahoo User Interface) Library for cross-platform DHTML effects and other UI goodness - most notably the Browser History Manager library, allowing users to use their browser history functions (back and forward buttons) to navigate via Ajax.
3. Playlist functionality: users create/edit playlists of videos (on the fly) that can be shared.
   
4. (semi-)Modular approach (yet to be implemented as self-contained asp.net user controls) that allows for quick configuration of sites to enable/disable the following functions:
1. A branded Poll (with nice DHTML results animation if I say so myself)
2. User registration/login/password reminder (nicely animated too)
   
3. Commenting on videos (anonymous/registered/confirmed users) + moderation via user flagging
4. User rating of videos (anonymous/registered/confirmed users)
5. Separate/integrated picture album support - using M.I Jackson's excellent Shadowbox.js media-viewer. I've added in an inline gallery thumbnail viewer as well. When I'm satisfied that it's robust enough I'll release my 'extension' to it under the GNU licence as per the terms of use.

I am becoming a big fan of YUI and have lost some of my disdain for JS. It's still a tricky and pretty arcane subject, but using a cross-browser library like YUI really simplifies the process - knowing that you can rely on some really smart people to have sorted out most of the cross-browser quirks for you already.

Stumbled across this video on google video

I've played with compressed air/water bottle rockets before, but it never occurred to me that I could use a rack of these to actually FLY!

This guy deserves some sort of medal, and possibly a new pair of board-shorts - preferrably brown coloured