BH Bad Article Dissection: Aspartame

I have a tendency to over-react to posts about pseudoscience on the internet.  I know, not the best idea, seeing as we're all swimming in a veritable primordial soup of pseudoscience and false claims from everywhere.

My latest rant stems from Facebook, as it often does, when I saw a post circulating about aspartame.  Don't get me wrong; I don't like that stuff myself.  It tastes very strange to me, nowhere close to sugar, and I avoid it whenever possible.  Naturally, some people don't have that luxury if they can't or don't want to consume real sugar, so I completely have no problem with other people consuming it.  Like MSG, people just love to dump the hate on aspartame, and perhaps some of the claims are warranted, and all the studies done with it have not revealed its true nature within the human body.  Though with the number of people I know who consume endless quantities of diet sodas and energy drinks, I feel like I should have noticed something going wrong by now...

Anyhow, I get annoyed when people circulate an obviously poorly written, illogical piece of writing, even if it isn't about how aspartame is the worse thing since wedgies.  It's possible that too much aspartame consumption in certain people can cause problems, but your reasons for jumping on the hate-aspartame bandwagon should be at least reasonable.

Well, I should've known better than to expect that.  So I had to post something about it, and you can check my rant out here as a guest post on the awesome Snarky Scientist blog!

http://www.snarkyscientist.com/2013/11/18/bad-article-dissection-dont-hate-e-coli-poop/

Trafficmaster Allure Ultra Planking: A Year Later

Greetings, folks!  

It's now well over a year since I've installed Trafficmaster Allure Ultra in my home, DIY style.

I hope that my post about our adventure installing the flooring was helpful to some of you in making your own flooring decisions.  If there are tips and advice you'd like to share, please post!

Since I continue to receive interest in the state of my floor, I recently took some a few more photos, and am making a quick video.

For those of you who may be wondering, I have not had any separation of any of my planks thus far, and there are absolutely no signs of that happening anywhere.  No corners have raised up, no seams opened up. Cleaning has been a breeze with a simple vaccum/sweeping and Swiffering.  No noxious fumes have appeared.  The foot-feel of the planking remains great.

If you have any other questions or requests that would help answer your questions about this Allure Ultra flooring, please feel free to ask in the comments!  I'm not a flooring specialist, but I have had a good amount of time living on this floor and handling the planking now, so I am happy to help out if I can!