Jorah's 80% Fat-Free Blog

Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill

2008-06-22T14:33:00.001-04:00

Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill

By Meredith F. Small
LiveScience's Human Nature Columnist
LiveScience.com Fri Jun 20, 9:45 AM ET

Humans are fundamentally social animals. Our social nature means that we interact with each other in positive, friendly ways, and it also means we know how to manipulate others in a very negative way.

Neurophysiologist Katherine Rankin at the University of California, San Francisco, has also recently discovered that sarcasm, which is both positively funny and negatively nasty, plays an important part in human social interaction.

So what?

I mean really, who cares? Oh for God's sake. Don't you have anything better to do that read this column?

According to Dr. Rankin, if you didn't get the sarcastic tone of the previous sentences you must have some damage to your parahippocampal gyrus which is located in the right brain. People with dementia, or head injuries in that area, often lose the ability to pick up on sarcasm, and so they don't respond in a socially appropriate ways.

Presumably, this is a pathology, which in turn suggests that sarcasm is part of human nature and probably an evolutionarily good thing.

How might something so, well, sarcastic as sarcasm, be part of the human social toolbox?

Evolutionary biologists claim that sociality is what has made humans such a successful species. We are masters at what anthropologists and others call "social intelligence." We recognize and keep track of hundreds of relationships, and we easily distinguish between enemies and friends.

More important, we run our lives by social calculation. A favor is mentally recorded and paid back, sometimes many years later. Likewise, insults are marked down on the mental score card in indelible ink. And we are constantly bickering and making up, even with people we love.

Sarcasm, then, is a verbal hammer that connects people in both a negative and positive way. We know that sense of humor is important to relationships; if someone doesn't get your jokes, they aren't likely to be your friend (or at least that's my bottom line about friendship). Sarcasm is simply humor's dark side, and it would be just as disconcerting if a friend didn't get your snide remarks.

It's also easy to imagine how sarcasm might be selected over time as evolutionarily crucial. Imagine two ancient humans running across the savannah with a hungry lion in pursuit. One guy says to the other, "Are we having fun yet?" and the other just looks blank and stops to figure out what in the world his pal meant by that remark. End of friendship, end of one guy's contribution to the future of the human gene pool.

Fast forward a few million years and the network of human relationships is wider and more complex, and just as important to survival. The corporate chairman throws out a sarcastic remark and those who "get" it laugh, smile, and gain favor. In the same way, if the chair never makes a remark, sarcastic people are making them behind his or her back, forming a clique by their mutually negative, but funny, comments. Either way, sarcasm plays a role in making and breaking alliances and friendship.

Thanks goodness, because life without out sarcasm would be a dull and way too nice place to be, if you ask me.
- - - - - - -

Meredith F. Small is an anthropologist at Cornell University. She is also the author of "Our Babies, Ourselves; How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent" and "The Culture of Our Discontent; Beyond the Medical Model of Mental Illness"

Men who knit

2008-01-06T18:54:00.000-05:00

I've officially become not only a Man Who Knits, but one who blogs about it...
see my knitting blog...

The Big Picture

2007-12-29T10:14:00.000-05:00

The Big Picture: "

Sometimes newspaper editors do their work mechanically, not paying any attention whatever to what they're printing -- even on the front page. And we have the photos to prove it. From True's 23 December 2007 issue:" (photos show man in distinctive shirt working on a sign... then another photo shows man in exact shirt stealing a purse... talk about bad decisions and bad luck...

Read More...

The Naked Cat

2007-12-23T10:16:00.000-05:00

Pinky does The Sphinx posture on The Naked Cat

fat in your diet? hmmm....

2007-10-21T08:40:00.001-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/science/09tier.html

October 9, 2007

Findings

Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus

By JOHN TIERNEY

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office's famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of "comparable" magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

He introduced his report with these words: "The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964."

That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, "Good Calories, Bad Calories" (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.

It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn't it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal "food pyramid" telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.

We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.

If the second person isn't sure of the answer, he's liable to go along with the first person's guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she's more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an "informational cascade" as one person after another assumes that the rest can't all be wrong.

Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group's members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.

Cascades are especially common in medicine as doctors take their cues from others, leading them to overdiagnose some faddish ailments (called bandwagon diseases) and overprescribe certain treatments (like the tonsillectomies once popular for children). Unable to keep up with the volume of research, doctors look for guidance from an expert — or at least someone who sounds confident.

In the case of fatty foods, that confident voice belonged to Ancel Keys, a prominent diet researcher a half-century ago (the K-rations in World War II were said to be named after him). He became convinced in the 1950s that Americans were suffering from a new epidemic of heart disease because they were eating more fat than their ancestors.

There were two glaring problems with this theory, as Mr. Taubes, a correspondent for Science magazine, explains in his book. First, it wasn't clear that traditional diets were especially lean. Nineteenth-century Americans consumed huge amounts of meat; the percentage of fat in the diet of ancient hunter-gatherers, according to the best estimate today, was as high or higher than the ratio in the modern Western diet.

Second, there wasn't really a new epidemic of heart disease. Yes, more cases were being reported, but not because people were in worse health. It was mainly because they were living longer and were more likely to see a doctor who diagnosed the symptoms.

To bolster his theory, Dr. Keys in 1953 compared diets and heart disease rates in the United States, Japan and four other countries. Sure enough, more fat correlated with more disease (America topped the list). But critics at the time noted that if Dr. Keys had analyzed all 22 countries for which data were available, he would not have found a correlation. (And, as Mr. Taubes notes, no one would have puzzled over the so-called French Paradox of foie-gras connoisseurs with healthy hearts.)

The evidence that dietary fat correlates with heart disease "does not stand up to critical examination," the American Heart Association concluded in 1957. But three years later the association changed position — not because of new data, Mr. Taubes writes, but because Dr. Keys and an ally were on the committee issuing the new report. It asserted that "the best scientific evidence of the time" warranted a lower-fat diet for people at high risk of heart disease.

The association's report was big news and put Dr. Keys, who died in 2004, on the cover of Time magazine. The magazine devoted four pages to the topic — and just one paragraph noting that Dr. Keys's diet advice was "still questioned by some researchers." That set the tone for decades of news media coverage. Journalists and their audiences were looking for clear guidance, not scientific ambiguity.

After the fat-is-bad theory became popular wisdom, the cascade accelerated in the 1970s when a committee led by Senator George McGovern issued a report advising Americans to lower their risk of heart disease by eating less fat. "McGovern's staff were virtually unaware of the existence of any scientific controversy," Mr. Taubes writes, and the committee's report was written by a nonscientist "relying almost exclusively on a single Harvard nutritionist, Mark Hegsted."

That report impressed another nonscientist, Carol Tucker Foreman, an assistant agriculture secretary, who hired Dr. Hegsted to draw up a set of national dietary guidelines. The Department of Agriculture's advice against eating too much fat was issued in 1980 and would later be incorporated in its "food pyramid."

Meanwhile, there still wasn't good evidence to warrant recommending a low-fat diet for all Americans, as the National Academy of Sciences noted in a report shortly after the U.S.D.A. guidelines were issued. But the report's authors were promptly excoriated on Capitol Hill and in the news media for denying a danger that had already been proclaimed by the American Heart Association, the McGovern committee and the U.S.D.A.

The scientists, despite their impressive credentials, were accused of bias because some of them had done research financed by the food industry. And so the informational cascade morphed into what the economist Timur Kuran calls a reputational cascade, in which it becomes a career risk for dissidents to question the popular wisdom.

With skeptical scientists ostracized, the public debate and research agenda became dominated by the fat-is-bad school. Later the National Institutes of Health would hold a "consensus conference" that concluded there was "no doubt" that low-fat diets "will afford significant protection against coronary heart disease" for every American over the age of 2. The American Cancer Society and the surgeon general recommended a low-fat diet to prevent cancer.

But when the theories were tested in clinical trials, the evidence kept turning up negative. As Mr. Taubes notes, the most rigorous meta-analysis of the clinical trials of low-fat diets, published in 2001 by the Cochrane Collaboration, concluded that they had no significant effect on mortality.

Mr. Taubes argues that the low-fat recommendations, besides being unjustified, may well have harmed Americans by encouraging them to switch to carbohydrates, which he believes cause obesity and disease. He acknowledges that that hypothesis is unproved, and that the low-carb diet fad could turn out to be another mistaken cascade. The problem, he says, is that the low-carb hypothesis hasn't been seriously studied because it couldn't be reconciled with the low-fat dogma.

Mr. Taubes told me he especially admired the iconoclasm of Dr. Edward H. Ahrens Jr., a lipids researcher who spoke out against the McGovern committee's report. Mr. McGovern subsequently asked him at a hearing to reconcile his skepticism with a survey showing that the low-fat recommendations were endorsed by 92 percent of "the world's leading doctors."

"Senator McGovern, I recognize the disadvantage of being in the minority," Dr. Ahrens replied. Then he pointed out that most of the doctors in the survey were relying on secondhand knowledge because they didn't work in this field themselves.

"This is a matter," he continued, "of such enormous social, economic and medical importance that it must be evaluated with our eyes completely open. Thus I would hate to see this issue settled by anything that smacks of a Gallup poll." Or a cascade.

--
---M.J. Lavin,
Cell: 980-428-0954
Indian Land, SC 29707 (Note New ZIP!)

A warning on the limits of multitasking

2007-03-25T11:07:00.000-04:00

By Steve Lohr

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Confident multitaskers of the world, could I have your attention?

Think you can juggle phone calls, e-mail, instant messages and computer work to get more done in a time-starved world? Read on, preferably shutting out the cacophony of digital devices for a while.

Several research reports, both recently published and not yet published, provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. The findings, according to neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors, suggest that many people would be wise to curb their multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car.

These experts have some basic advice. Check e-mail messages once an hour, at most. Listening to soothing background music while studying may improve concentration.

But other distractions - most songs with lyrics, instant messaging, television shows - hamper performance. Driving while talking on a cellphone, even with a hands-free headset, is a bad idea.

In short, the answer appears to lie in managing the technology, instead of merely yielding to its incessant tug.

"Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes," said David Mayer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. "Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information."

The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways.

"But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once," said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.

Marois and three other Vanderbilt researchers reported in an article last December in the journal Neuron that they had used magnetic resonance imaging to pinpoint the bottleneck in the brain and to measure how much efficiency is lost when trying to handle two tasks at once.

Study participants were given two tasks and were asked to respond to sounds and images. The first was to press the correct key on a computer keyboard after hearing one of eight sounds. The other task was to speak the correct vowel after seeing one of eight images.

The researchers said that they did not see a delay if the participants were given the tasks one at a time. But the researchers found that response to the second task was delayed by up to a second when the study participants were given the two tasks at about the same time.

In many daily tasks, of course, a lost second is unimportant. But one implication of the Vanderbilt research, Marois said, is that talking on a cellphone while driving a car is dangerous. A one-second delay in response time at 60 miles, or 100 kilometers, an hour could be fatal, he noted.

"We are under the impression that we have this brain that can do more than it often can," observed Marois, who said he turns off his cellphone when driving.

The young, according to conventional wisdom, are the most adept multitaskers. Just look at teenagers and young workers in their 20s, e-mailing, instant messaging and listening to iPods at once.

Recently completed research at the Institute for the Future of the Mind at Oxford University suggests that the popular perception is open to question. A group of 18- to 21-year-olds and a group of 35- to 39-year-olds were given 90 seconds to translate images into numbers, using a simple code.

The younger group did 10 percent better when not interrupted. But when both groups were interrupted by a phone call, a cellphone short-text message or an instant message, the older group matched the younger group in speed and accuracy.

"The older people think more slowly, but they have a faster fluid intelligence, so they are better able to block out interruptions and choose what to focus on," said Martin Westwell, deputy director of the institute.

Westwell is 36, and thus should be better able to cope with interruptions. But he has modified his work habits since completing the research project last month.

"I check my e-mail much less often," he said. "The interruptions really can throw you off-track."

In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.

"I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task," said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research scientist and the co-author, with Shamsi Iqbal of the University of Illinois, of a paper on the study that will be presented next month.

"If it's this bad at Microsoft," Horvitz added, "it has to be bad at other companies, too."

In the computer age, technology has been seen not only as a factor contributing to information overload but also as a tool for coping with it. Computers can help people juggle workloads, according a paper presented this month at a conference at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The researchers scrutinized the work at an unidentified executive recruiting firm, including projects and 125,000 e-mail messages. They also examined the firm's revenues, people's compensation and the use of information technology by the recruiters.

The recruiters who were the heaviest users of e-mail and the firm's specialized database were the most productive in completing projects.

"You can use the technology to supplement your brain and keep track of more things," said Erik Brynjolfsson of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-author of the paper, along with Sinan Aral of the Stern School of Business at New York University and Marshall Van Alstyne of Boston University.

But the paper also found that "beyond an optimum, more multitasking is associated with declining project completion rates and revenue generation."

For the executive recruiters, the optimum workload was four to six projects, taking two to five months each.

The productivity lost by overtaxed multitaskers cannot be measured precisely, but it is probably a lot. Jonathan Spira, chief analyst at Basex, a business-research firm, estimates the cost of interruptions to the U.S. economy at nearly $650 billion a year.

That total is an update of research published 18 months ago, based on surveys and interviews with professionals and office workers, which concluded that 28 percent of their time was spent on what they deemed interruptions and recovery time before they returned to their main tasks.

Spira said that the $650 billion figure was a rough estimate - an attempt to attach a number to a big problem. Work interruptions will never - and should not - be eliminated, he said, since they are often how work is done and ideas are shared. After all, one person's interruption is another's collaboration.

The information age is really only a decade or two old in the sense of most people working and communicating on digital devices all day, Spira said. In the industrial era, it took roughly a century until Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911 published his principles of "scientific management" for increasing worker productivity.

"We don't have any equivalent yet for the knowledge economy," Spira said.

But university and corporate researchers say they can help. Brain scans, social networking algorithms and other new tools should help provide a deeper understanding of the limits and the potential of the human brain, they said. That will teach workers in groups how to manage the overload of digital communications efficiently.

Further research could help create clever technology, like sensors or smart software that workers could instruct with their preferences and priorities to serve as a high-tech "time nanny" to ease the modern multitasker's plight.

That is what Horvitz of Microsoft is working on.

"We live in this Wild West of digital communications now," he said. "But I think there's a lot of hope for the future."

Read Original...

Vinegar and Bleach: Kill those nasty microbes!

2007-03-25T11:01:00.000-04:00

Contact: Jim Sliwa
jsliwa@asmusa.org
202-942-9297
American Society for Microbiology

Vinegar increases killing power of bleach

Adding white vinegar to diluted household bleach greatly increases the disinfecting power of the solution, making it strong enough to kill even bacterial spores. Researchers from MicroChem Lab, Inc. in Euless, Texas, report their findings today at the 2006 ASM Biodefense Research Meeting.

Sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl) in the form of laundry bleach is available in most households. The concentrate is about 5.25 to 6 percent NaOCl, and the pH value is about 12. Sodium hypochlorite is stable for many months at this high alkaline pH value.

"Laundry bleach is commonly diluted about 10 to 25-fold with tap water to about 2000 to 5000 parts per million of free available chlorine for use as an environmental surface disinfectant, without regard to the pH value of the diluted bleach. However, the pH value is very important for the antimicrobial effectiveness of bleach," says Norman Miner, a researcher on the study.

At alkaline pH values of about 8.5 or higher, more than 90 percent of the bleach is in the form of the chlorite ion (OCl-), which is relatively ineffective antimicrobially. At acidic pH values of about 6.8 or lower, more than 80 percent of the bleach is in the form of hypochlorite (HOCl). HOCl is about 80 to 200 times more antimicrobial than OCl-.

"Bleach is a much more effective antimicrobial chemical at an acidic pH value than at the alkaline Ph value at which bleach is manufactured and stored. A small amount of household vinegar is sufficient to lower the pH of bleach to an acidic range," says Miner.

Miner and his colleagues compared the ability of alkaline (pH 11) and acidified (pH 6) bleach dilutions to disinfect surfaces contaminated with dried bacterial spores, considered the most resistant to disinfectants of all microbes. The alkaline dilution was practically ineffective, killing all of the spores on only 2.5 percent of the surfaces after 20 minutes. During the same time period the acidified solution killed all of the spores on all of the surfaces.

"Diluted bleach at an alkaline pH is a relatively poor disinfectant, but acidified diluted bleach will virtually kill anything in 10 to 20 minutes," says Miner. "In the event of an emergency involving Bacillus anthracis spores contaminating such environmental surfaces as counter tops, desk and table tops, and floors, for example, virtually every household has a sporicidal sterilant available in the form of diluted, acidified bleach."

Miner recommends first diluting one cup of household bleach in one gallon of water and then adding one cup of white vinegar.

XKCD - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

2007-03-24T07:22:00.000-04:00

Very strange cartoon, very obtuse(?) nerdy, "science-y," with jokes that depend on things like knowing who famous scientists from decades ago were... I'll be reading this one again.

Read More...

Choice and constraint (at Rattlesnake.com)

2007-03-24T07:16:00.000-04:00

I just stumbled over this one... some sort of philosophy of politics based on science? I've only had a couple minutes to glance at it, but I don't want to forget to go back and look at it.

Read More...

Interesting article on exercise and aging from today's paper

2007-03-18T09:36:00.001-04:00

New research reveals surprising facts about our changing bodies.

You Can Stop ''Normal'' Aging

By Dr. Henry S. Lodge

Published: March 18, 2007 on Parade.com

From your body's point of view, "normal" aging isn't normal at all. It's a choice you make by the way you live your life. The other choice is to tell your cells to grow—to build a strong, vibrant body and mind.

Let's have a look at standard American aging. Barbara D. had a baby when she was 34, gave up exercise and gained 50 pounds. Exhausted and depressed, Barbara thought youth, energy and optimism were all in her rearview mirror. Jon M., 55, had fallen even farther down the slippery slope. He was stuck in the corporate world of stress, long hours and doughnuts. At 255 pounds, he had knees that hurt and a back that ached. He developed high blood pressure and eventually diabetes. Life was looking grim.

Jon and Barbara weren't getting old; they had let their bodies decay. Most aging is just the dry rot we program into our cells by sedentary living, junk food and stress. Yes, we do have to get old, and ultimately we do have to die. But our bodies are designed to age slowly and remarkably well. Most of what we see and fear is decay, and decay is only one choice. Growth is the other.

After two years of misery, Barbara started exercising and is now in the best shape of her life. She just finished a sprint triathlon and, at 37, feels like she is 20. Jon started eating better and exercising too—slowly at first, but he stuck with it. He has since lost 50 pounds, the pain in his knees and back has disappeared, and his diabetes is gone. Today, Jon is 60 and living his life in the body of a healthy 30-year-old. He will die one day, but he is likely to live like a young man until he gets there.

The hard reality of our biology is that we are built to move. Exercise is the master signaling system that tells our cells to grow instead of fade. When we exercise, that process of growth spreads throughout every cell in our bodies, making us functionally younger. Not a little bit younger—a lot younger. True biological aging is a surprisingly slow and graceful process. You can live out your life in a powerful, healthy body if you are willing to put in the work.

Let's take a step back to see how exercise works at the cellular level. Your body is made up of trillions of cells that live mostly for a few weeks or months, die and are replaced by new cells in an endless cycle. For example, your taste buds live only a few hours, white blood cells live 10 days, and your muscle cells live about three months. Even your bones dissolve and are replaced, over and over again. A few key stem cells in each organ and your brain cells are the only ones that stick around for the duration. All of your other cells are in a constant state of renewal.

You replace about 1% of your cells every day. That means 1% of your body is brand-new today, and you will get another 1% tomorrow. Think of it as getting a whole new body every three months. It's not entirely accurate, but it's pretty close. Viewed that way, you are walking around in a body that is brand-new since Christmas—new lungs, new liver, new muscles, new skin. Look down at your legs and realize that you are going to have new ones by the Fourth of July. Whether that body is functionally younger or older is a choice you make by how you live.

You choose whether those new cells come in stronger or weaker. You choose whether they grow or decay each day from then on. Your cells don't care which choice you make. They just follow the directions you send. Exercise, and your cells get stronger; sit down, and they decay.

This whole system evolved over billions of years out in nature, where all animals face two great cellular challenges: The first is to grow strong, fast and fit in the spring, when food abounds and there are calories to fuel hungry muscles, bones and brains. The second is to decay as fast as possible in the winter, when calories disappear and surviving starvation is the key to life. You would think that food is the controlling signal for this, but it's not. Motion controls your system.

Though we've moved indoors and left that life behind, our cells still think we're living out on the savannah, struggling to stay alive each day. There are no microwaves or supermarkets in nature. If you want to eat, you have to hunt or forage every single day. That movement is a signal that it's time to grow. So, when you exercise, your muscles release specific substances that travel throughout your bloodstream, telling your cells to grow. Sedentary muscles, on the other hand, let out a steady trickle of chemicals that whisper to every cell to decay, day after day after day.

Men like Jon, who go from sedentary to fit, cut their risk of dying from a heart attack by 75% over five years. Women cut their risk by 80%—and heart attacks are the largest single killer of women. Both men and women can double their leg strength with three months of exercise, and most of us can double it again in another three months. This is true whether you're in your 30s or your 90s. It's not a miracle or a mystery. It's your biology, and you're in charge.

The other master signal to our cells—equal and, in some respects, even more important than exercise—is emotion. One of the most fascinating revelations of the last decade is that emotions change our cells through the same molecular pathways as exercise. Anger, stress and loneliness are signals for "starvation" and chronic danger. They "melt" our bodies as surely as sedentary living. Optimism, love and community trigger the process of growth, building our bodies, hearts and minds.

Men who have a heart attack and come home to a family are four times less likely to die of a second heart attack. Women battling heart disease or cancer do better in direct proportion to the number of close friends and relatives they have. Babies in the ICU who are touched more often are more likely to survive. Everywhere you look, you see the role of emotion in our biology. Like exercise, it's a choice.

It's hard to exercise every day. And with our busy lives, it's even harder to find the time and energy to maintain relationships and build communities. But it's worth it when you consider the alternative. Go for a walk or a run, and think about it. Deep in our cells, down at the level of molecular genetics, we are wired to exercise and to care. We're beginning to wake up to that as a nation, but you might not want to wait. You might want to join Barbara, Jon and millions of others and change your life. Start today. Your cells are listening.

Dr. Henry S. Lodge is on the faculty of Columbia Medical School and is co-author of "Younger Next Year" (Workman).
http://www.parade.com/
http://www.parade.com/articles/editions/2007/edition_03-18-2007/Make_Body_Younger

checker shadow illusion

2007-02-12T17:53:00.000-05:00

I found this site via del.icio.us today, and couldn't believe what it showed until I experimented by placing a sheet of paper with two holes cut out over the screen.

I'm reproducing a tiny version of the image to lure you to the large version...

See the Illusion...

Gliffy the online "Visio" flowchart tool

2007-01-21T12:42:00.001-05:00

I just stumbled over this site. The interface is pretty amazing.

http://www.gliffy.com/

I've only played with it for a few minutes, but it feels very much
like a desktop interface.

Let me know if you try it out, and if you find it to be of any use.

-Jorah

--
-M.J. Lavin,
Indian Land, SC
"The fear of death is the beginning of slavery."
-R.A.W. (RIP 1932 - 2007 CE)

Pleo the robot dino

2007-01-04T21:18:00.000-05:00

It's Alive!

Say hello to Pleo.
From the guy who brought you Furby, it's a snuffling, stretching, oddly convincing robotic dinosaur. You are so going to want one.
By Clive Thompson

Read More... at Wired

PDF Pad... Free Graph Paper and Calendars

2006-12-23T07:28:00.001-05:00

What is PDF Pad?
PDF Pad is a comprehensive online destination where you can download and print the high quality documents you need for work, school and play, free of charge or registration hassles.

We make documents convenient.

Visit the site... http://www.pdfpad.com/

PGP ...again

2006-12-20T10:46:00.000-05:00

I have no idea how long it has been since I last wrote about my on-again off-again interest in PGP, but since I recently remembered my passwords for both PGP and my Gnu Privacy keys, I figured I'd post my public keys again, in case any of the non-existent readers of this blog want to send me an encrypted email someday...

This first one is my current "main" PGP key. The second one is my gnupg (Linux) key.
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: PGP Desktop 9.0.6 (Build 6060) - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com

mQENBEOK3PUBCADYRQ2TuoaL3IiulIy4ECHFtGFMcNGFXA3sg5DnaTn5+qIf/PXd
0YsRvyo0fOfhJsNQEd8NoYjin7WddpMf8Y0CQ5m2I35dczfMVvXDLEOhQEStB9tC
72C73Z/tCTh6eLaz+5UxgR2zaQuVwI1qS9QFmi0q1JVN/HFSkuuIeQepNngDPX2n
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core77.com

2006-12-13T18:39:00.000-05:00

I don't know if I ever linked to this site before... it is the kind of design-ee thing I like but lose track of after a while

View the site...

Diesel Boats Forever - Tommy Cox

2006-12-13T18:25:00.001-05:00


Tribute to all who have served aboard diesel submarines. (produced by friends and friends of friends of mine from back in my brief Navy days in the late 70s)

» Gmail adds POP3 accounts | from | ZDNet.com

2006-12-10T07:46:00.000-05:00

» Gmail adds POP3 accounts | Office Evolution | ZDNet.com: "Google is introducing a new feature, called MailFetcher, to Gmail that turns the webmail service into a full-blown POP3 client. Information on the update, which is being rolled out but has yet to grace my account, can be found in the Gmail FAQ. This is a sea change for web-based mail services. Google now provides the ability to send and receive e-mail from any account."

Liberate tasks from your inbox

2006-06-14T19:09:00.000-04:00

Michael Linenberger: Liberate tasks from your inbox | 43 Folders:
"When you see a requested action in an email, don't do it immediately. It might be one of the least important things for you to do that day. Instead, immediately identify what the action is and put the email in a task folder. Change the title so that it states what you need to do, and put a due date on it and a priority level. You can do that in 15 or 20 seconds. Then you move right on to the next email. Now you'll get through your to-do email remarkably fast. Drag all of your other emails into a process folder, so you now have an empty inbox, which is a really nice feeling. The next thing you do is go to your task list and ask, "What are the most important things I need to do today?? That's the stuff that would keep you from going home at the end of the day."

Dave Barry

2006-05-30T13:30:00.000-04:00

A tip for the hurricane season: Try to have some kind of a clue
by DAVE BARRY

The 2006 hurricane season is here, and if you're a resident of Florida, you know what that means: It means you have the IQ of bean dip. If you had any working brain cells, by now you'd have moved to some less risky place, such as Iraq. This is especially true after last hurricane season, which was so bad that we went all the way through the alphabet of official names and had to refer to the last batch of hurricanes by making primitive grunting sounds.

Unfortunately, it appears we're in for another bad season. The National Center for Making Everybody Nervous About Hurricanes is predicting that this season there will be 10 major hurricanes, defined as "hurricanes that cause Bryan Norcross to lose his voice." According to the center's computer simulations, at least four of those storms will hit the mainland United States, and at least one of those will come directly to your house and cause a tree branch, traveling at 150 mph, to impale you through your chest. (Bear in mind that these are only predictions. It could also be your skull.)

IMPORTANT TIPS

That's why it is so important that you be ready for hurricane season. Here are some tips to help you prepare:

When a hurricane is approaching South Florida, we get a LOT of advance warning. Usually for the entire week leading up to its arrival, the newspaper prints large headlines that say HURRICANE COMING, along with many stories reminding people to stock up on water, gas and food. All the radio stations announce roughly every 25 seconds that a hurricane is coming and people will need water, gas and food. On TV, Bryan spends hour after hour pointing at the oncoming radar blob and rasping, in the voice of an ailing seal, about the need to stock up on water, gas and food.

So what happens, EVERY SINGLE TIME? I'll tell you! Immediately after the hurricane passes, lines begin to form all over South Florida - lines of people, thousands of them, who are in desperate need of - water, gas and food! WHERE HAVE THESE PEOPLE BEEN? Did the hurricane winds just carry them here from Madagascar? Can they not function on their own for 24 hours without having to get into a line? How can they not even have WATER?? Were they not aware that, as the hurricane approached, they could have gotten all the water they needed MERELY BY TURNING ON THE FREAKING WATER FAUCET???

80% Fat Free Notebook

2006-05-17T08:37:00.000-04:00

I've added another item to the "80% Fat-Free" universe... the 80% Fat Free Notebook. This is built with the new "Google Notebook" technology. Not sure how I'll use it compared to how I use this blog or my del.icio.us site. I've heard this called "Google's del.icio.us killer" but I don't see it as the same thing. One is for noting sites, one is for noting fragments of content.

Four new search tools from Google...

2006-05-11T05:40:00.000-04:00

Official Google Blog: Yes, we are still all about search: "Yes, we are still all about search

5/10/2006 12:20:00 PM
Written by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, Google

We are often asked at Google what we are doing to improve regular web search. There's a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes, but today, at our press event, we announced four new products that will give you a better sense of how all this work becomes reality.

Our new products offer a pretty wide range of services and capabilities, but they have one thing in common: They all enhance and improve the search experience for our users.

- Google Co-op is a way for users to help us improve search. It lets people and organizations label web pages and create specialized links related to their unique expertise. Whether it's information about a hobby, a profession, or an unusual interest, everyone can contribute to making Google search more relevant and useful for the entire community.

- Google Desktop 4 gives you another way to improve search, by personalizing your desktop. New 'Google Gadgets' deliver an array of information--ranging from games and media players to weather updates and news--straight to your desktop.

- Google Notebook (which we'll be launching next week) is a personal browser tool that lets you clip text, images, and links from the pages you're searching, save clippings to an online notebook, and then share notebooks with others.

- Google Trends builds on the idea behind the Google Zeitgeist, allowing you to sort through several years of Google search queries from around the world to get a general idea of everything from user preferences on ice-cream flavors to the relative popularity of politicians in their respective cities or countries.

INDUHVIDUAL QUOTES from Dogbert

2006-05-09T20:52:00.000-04:00

From the DNRC newsletter http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/dnrc/html/newsletter63.html

Here are some more true quotes from Induhviduals as reported by DNRC field operatives.

"the cream of the corn."

"too many cooks in the broth."

"The short answer is 'Yes.' The long answer is 'No.'"

"Get your game faces on, because this is not a game!"

"Looks like I've spent the day chasing a wild herring! "

"We are the glue that keeps things moving. "

"Fits like a charm! Wait... fits like a shoe?"

"See me verbally."

"That guy is running around like a chicken with his legs cut off."

"It just like stealing teeth from a baby."

"It's like the rooster guarding the hen house."

"That guy doesn't have a spine to stand on."

"If we don't start shipping things sooner lead times will just get longer."

"I can tell you this, they are all sitting 2 inches higher in their seats, because they all just crapped their pants."

"You're barking up a dead tree."

"That's my sixth cents, for what it's worth."

"That's not his cup of cake."

"You don't want to shoot yourself in the foot because you might want to take a walk later."

"That raised a human cry."

(I admit, the last one stumped me until I said it out loud)

How to feel like an idiot for wasting ten minutes having fun

2006-05-07T08:54:00.000-04:00

If I wasn't so busy with school work, this would totally wreck my
morning (be strong... be STRONG...)

http://www.yarukinoki.net/flash/pendulumeca/

The game is, you are a robot with one tool... a "sticky rope" that you
can shoot up at the roof. You have to avoid swinging down into a row
of points at the bottom of the screen. Start by shooting the rope up
at a mid-distant point on the roof. Hold the mouse-button down. You'll
start swinging to the right. Before you go off-screen, when you are
still rising, let go of the mouse button.

You will arc up, then start down again. Shoot another rope into the
roof and repeat, seeing how far you can go before dying. I only got
about 800 meters on my 4th try. Since the game is in Japanese, I'm
just guessing at the rules I wrote above, they may be wrong. Let me
know if you have fun with this.

I'm a Little Unnerved by My eHarmony Profile.

2006-04-22T18:13:00.000-04:00

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: I'm a Little Unnerved by My eHarmony Profile.: "Your conduct and achievements are instructive to others. Parents tend to point to you as an example when cautioning their children. " -by Jim Stallard