I will never ask if you don't ever tell me

Currently Playing: Taking Back Sunday - Cute Without the 'E' (Cut from the Team)

Apparently, sleep is now bad for you. In fact, too much of it will kill you.

Or so says the results of a six-year long study of more than a million adults, coincidentally conducted by psychiatry professor Daniel Kripke of UCSD (I did not even know we had a psychiatry major). Someone who sleeps an average of 6-7 hours a night supposedly will have a lower death rate than a person who sleeps an average of 8 hours a night.

Now, being the scientific-minded, sleep-loving person that I am, my first instinct is to immediately question the validity of such an experiment. I mean, using people in an experiment is hard enough to control. But using over a million people?! There is just a staggering amount of variability there, with no way to control for it. The differences in sleep could be due to a number of reasons: emotional state, physical state, age, sex, and everything else that is different from one person to another. All this experiment really proves is that there is a link between people who sleep slightly less and a lower mortality rate. Which really amounts to nothing.

Think about it. If a person that normally slept 8 hours a night read this study and decided to sleep an hour or two less a night, would that person automatically reduce their mortality rate? Probably not. I am more inclined to believe that the chance of that person dying has more to do with their emotional and physical health, but maybe that's just me. But you know what? THAT might actually be a worthwhile experiment to carry out. THIS experiment does not prove anything except to be an atrocious waste of time and my tuition money.

You're always so right

Currently Playing: Simple Plan - Shut Up

The "bird flu" panic has gotten way out of hand. I have been seeing at least one to two top headlines about it every day. What really got to me was the most recent one: Bird Flu Could Appear in U.S. in Months. Attention grabbing, yes. This headline was obviously written to catch your attention by inciting panic. For months now we've been hearing that the bird flu could be the first pandemic of the 21st century. It has been likened to the plague that ran through Europe. How could you ignore this frightening possibility?!

Quite easily, in fact. What many people do not seem to realize is that all of this is theoretical. Yes, there is a bird flu virus strain known as H5N1 that currently can infect and spread from bird to bird. And yes, in theory, there is a possiblilty that this virus could mutate and become infectious to humans. And yes, in theory, that could possibly mutate and become contagious and spread from person to person. And yes, in theory, there is a chance the virus could become deadly.

But remember: In theory, communism works. In theory. Risks should be assessed, and precautions should be taken, but all with a grain of salt. The virus has taken eight years to spread from East Asia to Europe. As this article says, "Short of eating infected bird feces, humans seem close to immune." And honestly, if you eat bird crap, maybe it's your own fault you got sick.

So to sum up, this whole bird flu scare is stupid. OMFGWTFBBQ! One cat died from infection! Kill all birds! Kill all cats! Sigh. Anyway, moral of the story is: Don't eat bird shit.