Far from being mere excess,
fat
is an organ, which
Far from being mere excess,
fat
is an organ, which
plays an important role in protecting bones and organs, regulating hormones and the immune system and managing women's reproductive systems.
Linda Winer offers some
perspective
on the latest round of attacks on art and entertainment:
Certainly, adults should be worried about children being desensitized to the difference between reality and fantasy.[this link may not work after 20 September; sorry]But adults are being sold a fantasy, too. I can't believe I'm quoting Joe Eszterhas, of all moral paragons, but here goes. As the screenwriter and novelist has said repeatedly in his challenge to Joe Lieberman's morality squad, Hollywood exports its violent products to most of the rest of the world.
If violent entertainment causes violent behavior, why are Americans the only ones watching their children shoot up the playgrounds? Because we're the only ones with the guns, that's why....
And, if violent imagery desensitizes kids, what about the sight of homeless people sleeping on church steps? Can Hollywood be blamed for that?
Living in the future, part 95:
prosthetic
legs have been improved to the point that their users can
not only walk, but run and climb. The new prosthetics have carbon
fiber materials to add spring to the step, and clever new
silicon material so they don't irritate the stump they're attached
to. For above-the-knee amputees, there are prosthetics with
artificial knees that can sense and adjust to movement as the
person walks.
Researchers are working on "smart sockets" to improve the attachment between the prosthetic and the human body, and "osseointegration," which involves surgically attaching the prosthetic so bone grows around it. [link good only through 18 September; sorry]
Women
do
better on math tests when there are no men in the
test room. The presence or absence of women had no effect
on men's test scores, and the effect is limited to math tests.
The authors note that their
study results are limited because the research looked only at small groups in a very controlled setting.
Is Google artificially,
and surreptitiously,
inflating
the rankings of Yahoo sites at the expense of other Web directories
that are more relevant to the search in question?
[via Robot Wisdom]
You've
probably heard that Amazon.com was
charging
different prices if you changed browsers. From a discussion on
a mailing list, my thoughts on the subject:
I understand the idea of differential pricing. I see why it makes sense for an airline to offer a better price for a ticket bought a month in advance, with restrictions on changes. I have no problem with the fact that a box of tea that costs $2.10 in Brooklyn costs $2.95 in midtown Manhattan. (I may or may not decide it's worth going to the place it costs less--but I make that decision.)
But that isn't what Amazon is doing.
I doubt you would find many people prepared to defend a store that raised, or lowered, the price of tea based on the color of my shirt, or an airline that offered the best prices only to people with two-syllable names.
If Amazon wants to offer DVD specials on Tuesdays, or even for the first 13 customers every 19 hours, it's weird, but won't bother people. Setting price based on choice of browser or ISP--and not advertising that fact--feels unfair, in part because it's hard to find a justification in normal business terms. Even the "draw customers" argument fails, because for that they would need to advertise "Discount for Netscape users" or "Special rates for people with .edu accounts," or whatever. Of course, if they did that I'd make sure to use the appropriate browser when visiting their site, or at least when I was ready to make a purchase. A store that offers a senior citizen discount for vitamins will attract more senior citizens--and discourage them from asking their children to do their vitamin shopping.
Jon Carroll
explains
the Higgs boson: what it is (assuming it exists at
all) and why anyone cares.
Remember the Unified Field Theory? Well, forget it. Physicists have pretty much thrown in the towel on unifying gravity with the other elemental forces, so now we have the Standard Model, which says that everything works together in intricate harmony except gravity, which is on holiday in Tasmania and need not concern us further.
Some really cool Java simulations of
odd but
possible orbital dynamics, including some that have been observed
in the real world. The programmer
kindly warns that a few of them will
produce strobe effects.
A major
Mayan
archeological site was essentially ignored for almost a century
because it's far from other Mayan ruins, and has no temples nearby.
Cancuén appears to have gained influence by control of
trade, not by war, and was successful enough that the craftsmen as
well as the rulers were clearly well-off.
The fact that Cancuén appears to have prospered for hundreds of years without warfare and that commerce appeared to play a far more important role in everyday life than religion contradicts the widespread view among scholars that religion and warfare were the sources of power for Maya kings, particularly toward the end of their dominance, after about 600 A.D."I have a book in press that I'll have to revise," says Demarest. "It just goes to show that you can't believe everything you read on one dynasty's monuments."
If you eat a man-eating shark, does that make you a cannibal?
Ah,
for just one time, I would take a Northwest Passage, and find
the land of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea...
The trip that took Amundsen three years in 1903 took a Royal Canadian Mounted Police research boat one month this year. At least two other vessels have made the crossing this summer, an ice-cutter and a sailboat. What's noteworthy is that "the boat traversed all of Canada's Arctic without encountering pack ice," though they did navigate around some old, fragmented ice floes. The skipper isn't recommending the Northwest Passage as a commercial route, though, noting that
We don't know enough about the Arctic to know if this is global warming, climate change, or maybe we were just plain lucky.
You can
find almost anything on the Web, much to the relief of the
company that rashly agreed to a new employee's demand that
they get him a
LEGO
desk and then realized that they had to find one.
Mindpixel is
an attempt to create artificial intelligence by consensus, sort of:
put in lots of assertions, then ask people whether they're true.
I'm not convinced that it will work, even if people stop entering
things like "what is a cumulus cloud?" as yes/no questions, but
it's fun to play with.
Usually, the weirdest thing about carnivorous plants is
that they are carnivorous. In Central Florida, there's a
carnivorous
snapdragon whose leaves are entirely underground.
It was discovered when field botanists noticed its yellow flower,
the only visible part of the plant. The plants live in a white quartz
sand ridge, which lets enough light through to support photosynthesis.
[via the Guardian's
Weblog.]
Never mind the Dilantin, never mind the alleged wife-beating:
Anthony Summers's biography of Nixon presents evidence of
far
worse things, from bribery and arms smuggling to treason.
Charles Taylor's review summarizes the real crimes, and speculates
on why most of the discussions of the book have ignored
huge payoffs from Howard Hughes, the laundering of the profits of a Bahamian casino, illegal campaign contributions from the likes of Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and the military junta that took over Greece in 1967, access to U.S. arms given to the Shah of Iran without the consultation of the American government, the illegal derailing of the Paris peace talks, and, of course, the host of crimes contained under the umbrella of Watergateto focus on matters that, however scandalous, are minor in comparison.
Copyright 1999, 2000 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.