Health Good News/Bad News (Plus, Using Blockquotes)

Hi folks -- here are two health news links from the BBC News that I saw in my morning  perusals (as is glaringly obvious, I'm a little behind today) -- I present them in good news/bad news style:

* Weightlifting:
- Good News: Lifting weights on a regular basis has many proven benefits, including strengthening muscles, increasing bone density and boosting your metabolism.
- Bad News: It may also increase the risk of glaucoma.

From the article:

"Brazilian researchers found lifting heavy weights was linked to a temporary increase in pressure within the eye - especially when holding the breath.

They say that this could increase the risk of glaucoma, as the condition is more common in people subjected to frequent changes in eye pressure."

Bonus quote:

"Mr Wright said glaucoma had also been linked to trumpet playing, and to wearing neckties too tightly."

So, like they say, always remember to breathe.

(This is a theoretical danger for me at this point, since I haven't been to the gym in about a month.)

* Bicycle Helmets:
- Good News: Wearing a helmet while cycling protects your head and reduces the likelihood of head and brain injuries in a crash.
- Bad News: A study suggests that cyclists who wear helmets are more likely to be struck by vehicles.

The study's author suggests that drivers see helmet-wearing riders as being more predictable, and thus don't give them as much space, leading to more collisions. So I guess the moral of the story is to wear a helmet, but be unpredictable.

- Bonus Quote:

"To test another theory, Dr Walker donned a long wig to see whether there was any difference in passing distance when drivers thought they were overtaking what appeared to be a female cyclist.

While wearing the wig, drivers gave him an average of 14cm more space when passing."

As always with these kinds of things, they're just single studies, so take them with the appropriate amount of salt.

Incidentally, here's an HTML formatting tip: for a bunch of text that you want to indent, like a quotation or other block of text, try using the blockquote tag.

I use blockquotes pretty frequently -- it formats a paragraph with leading and trailing indents, like so:

This is blockquoted text. As you can see, it's indented on both sides. It's kind of an old-school HTML tag. Here is my entry that lists more HTML tags that you can use in your entries.

To use blockquotes, make sure you're in HTML editing mode: you'll need to change the pulldown menu in the formatting toolbar to say "View as HTML" instead of "View as Text":

Here, I've changed the pulldown so I'm in HTML view.

This will put you in HTML editing view, where you can type in HTML tags to help control the layout, formatting and behavior of your blog entry (as well as show you any existing HTML or CSS tags that would normally be invisible):

Above, I've enclosed the sentence "Here is a block of indented text" within the blockquote tags --  <blockquote> starts it, </blockquote> (see the slash?) ends it -- it just means "treat the stuff in-between these tags as a block quote", just like <b></b> means "make the stuff between these tags bold")

When you toggle to text view, it will hide the tags, but you can see that the quoted text is indented; blanks lines have also been added before and after the quoted text:

Blockquote is a handy way to do simple indented text, to help organize or set apart particular bits of text.

If you want to experiment with blockquote tags, just paste the following HTML code into your Journal (or a test Journal) and play around with it (make sure you're in HTML mode when you do this):

<blockquote>Here is a block of indented text.</blockquote>

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: blockquote, aol journals, HTML tips, glaucoma, weightlifting, bicycle helmets, journals tips