Month: June 2005

Delinquents

potential delinquents
Many computer scientists are delinquents. They have committed sex crimes or are responsible for blood baths in their families. In my opinion, their brain got out of control with all the technology. As is generally known, computer scientists use cocaine. This increases imagination, and they can program more efficiently and creatively. No wonder when people with access to the world’s information on the Internet go crazy. I am convinced that we need surveillance organs for computer scientist who can take suspects out of commission.

Reproducible Setups

this is the second time in less than 6 months that i have to migrate my work environment from one laptop to another. i bought a new T42, probably one of the best deals out there. the 7200 RPM and the 1400 x 1000 screen make all the difference. just for comparison, this packs the same screen real estate you get with the 17 inch powerbook into 15 inch, you get 7200 RPM instead of 5400 RPM, and it sets you back $1800 instead of $2700. no wonder apple is changing their hardware platform 😉

as always, moving is a huge pain. this time, i have to deal with my 3GB, 250K file eclipse workspace, with countless settings across applications, logins etc. fortunately, there is freesshd for windows, which makes scp an option and allows me to sidestep all the SMB nonsense.

sekrit message

this morning, when returning to my laptop, it had the following in a fullscreen editor window:

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being native

There are 100s of examples of the digital immigrant accent. They include printing out your email (or having your secretary print it out for you – an even “thicker” accent); needing to print out a document written on the computer in order to edit it (rather than just editing on the screen); and bringing people physically into your office to see an interesting website (rather than just sending them the URL). I’m sure you can think of 1 or 2 examples of your own without much effort. My own favorite example is the “Did you get my email?” phone call.

excellent. (via rich bowen)

Solar sails

From the planetary society comes word that Cosmos 1, the first private solar sail craft is ready for launch on June 21, 2005. Solar sails have some very poetic capabilities. That is a remarkable 0.003c.

Ultimate space-manufactured solar sails will allow the possibility of Earth-Mars round trips with durations measured in months rather than years. The same technology may allow visits to the nearer stars at solar-system exit velocities higher than 1000 km /sec. The 1-way travel time to the Sun’s nearest interstellar neighbors (Proxima Centauri) will be ~1 ka for such spacecraft. Advances in laser and maser power-beaming technologies may eventually substantially reduce interstellar-voyage durations.

2020-01-10: Plans for 0.2c

$100m has been put into the Breakthrough Starshot project to push a sail up to 20% the speed of light and send an unmanned probe to Proxima Centauri in 20 years. There is progress on a stabilizing design for a sail to ride the laser beam

2020-06-26: Metamaterial sails

Extreme metamaterial solar sails as proposed here have the potential to shift the paradigm of space exploration enabling numerous low cost and high-speed missions to be launched anytime and anywhere. Such sails could gain accelerations over 60AU/yr when coupled to low mass spacecraft and dive to extreme proximity to the sun (just 2-5 solar radii). This velocity is 20x more than Voyager 1

Obesity

Riding on the metro in DC, I was informed that the 69M obese in the US are hype. I’m glad the food industry is looking out for me and even providing me with helpful cartoons.
2007-03-31: The obesity gas connection

US citizens are burning 3.7B liters of gas a year more than they did in 1960, because they are much heavier. That’s about $2.2B worth of fuel, and a lot of greenhouse gas emissions.

2007-04-27: Congress promotes obesity through agricultural subsidies. Ever heard of HFCS?
2007-09-11: plus the reduction in burger and fries consumption would cause less brazilian forest to be burned, further reducing emissions.

$1 in real gasoline prices would reduce obesity in the US by 15% after 5 years.

2007-09-18: No comment necessary.

Many 5-passenger vehicles are rated 385 kg, maxing out if their 5 occupants weigh more than 77 kg each. 6 90 kg people would overload the 7-passenger Dodge Grand Caravan minivan.

2008-03-29: More fatties are found, unsurprisingly.

More than 50% of American adults considered to have normal body weight have high body fat percentages — greater than 20% for men and 30% for women — as well as heart and metabolic disturbances. The finding conflicts with the widely held belief that maintaining a normal weight automatically guards against disorders such as high levels of circulating blood fats and a tendency to develop metabolic syndrome, which often leads to type 2 diabetes.

2008-12-22: The war against fat people has begun.
2010-06-08: Fighting obesity with that other staple, security. brilliant!

27% of all Americans ages 17 to 24 are too overweight to join the military. Now, the group of retired military officers that prepared the report is asking Congress to pass a nutrition bill that would make school lunches healthier.

2011-03-25: Obesity deaths

Since 2001, premature death from obesity has exceeded death from malnutrition.

2015-07-27: a large part of the decline is due to people drinking fewer sodas.

Calories consumed daily by the typical American adult, which peaked around 2003, are in the midst of their first sustained decline since federal statistics began to track the subject, more than 40 years ago.

2015-08-11: There are few public health interventions as beneficial as destroying the soft drinks industry.

Coca-Cola, the world’s largest producer of sugary beverages, is backing a new “science-based” solution to the obesity crisis: To maintain a healthy weight, get more exercise and worry less about cutting calories.

The beverage giant has teamed up with influential scientists who are advancing this message in medical journals, at conferences and through social media. To help the scientists get the word out, Coke has provided financial and logistical support to a new nonprofit organization called the Global Energy Balance Network, which promotes the argument that weight-conscious Americans are overly fixated on how much they eat and drink while not paying enough attention to exercise.

2016-03-23: soda taxes are very odd:

Why not just target the output, rather than some random subset of inputs? We could tax obesity if we wanted to. Or if we want to seem less punitive, we could award tax credits to obese people who lose weight. A tax directly pegged to reduced obesity would certainly be a much more efficient way to achieve the stated policy goal of reducing obesity. We are unwilling to humiliate the obese by taxing them directly, and so our chosen policies do less to help…the obese.

2016-12-31: Viral components of obesity?

During the experiment, both groups of chickens consumed the same amount of food. By the end of the experiment, only the chickens infected with the SMAM-1 virus had become fat. However, even though the infected chickens were fatter, they had lower cholesterol and triglyceride levels in their blood than the uninfected birds. “It was quite paradoxical,because if you have a fatter chicken, you would expect them to have greater cholesterol and circulating triglycerides, but instead those levels went in the wrong direction.” Though Dhurandhar and Atkinson have conducted several strong studies showing the contribution of Ad-36 to fatness, skepticism remains. “I remember giving a talk at a conference where I presented 15 different studies in which Ad-36 either caused or was correlated to fatness. At the end of it, a good friend said to me, ‘I just don’t believe it.’ He didn’t give a reason; he just didn’t believe it. People are really stuck on eating and exercise as the only contributors to fatness. But there is more to it.”

2018-08-16: Sugar is everywhere

Yes, we ate more in 1976, but differently. Today, we buy 50% as much fresh milk per person, but 5x more yoghurt, 3x more ice cream and – wait for it – 39x as many dairy desserts. We buy 50% as many eggs as in 1976, but a 33% more breakfast cereals and 2x the cereal snacks; 50% the total potatoes, but 3x the crisps. While our direct purchases of sugar have sharply declined, the sugar we consume in drinks and confectionery is likely to have rocketed (there are purchase numbers only from 1992, at which point they were rising rapidly. Perhaps, as we consumed just 9kcal a day in the form of drinks in 1976, no one thought the numbers were worth collecting.) In other words, the opportunities to load our food with sugar have boomed. As some experts have long proposed, this seems to be the issue.

2022-01-29: The energy balance theory is bogus

“People get fat because they take in more calories than they expend” is wrong. “Consider using the identical logic to describe, say, why people get wealthy. Economists would be embarrassed by a money-balance theory of wealth: People get rich because they take in more money than they spend. Clearly wealthy people did. We know that because they’re wealthy. The increase in wealth is the positive money balance. But this says nothing about how or why they accumulate such wealth. In obesity research, this tautological logic — saying the same thing in two different ways but offering no explanation for either — was allowed to become the central dogmatic truth.“ Then what does cause obesity? “People don’t get fat because they eat too much, consuming more calories than they expend, but because the carbohydrates in their diets — both the quantity of carbohydrates and their quality — establish a hormonal milieu that fosters the accumulation of excess fat.“

2022-08-14: Wegovy uses a hormone to regulate hunger. It’s wildly effective.

Once it becomes obese, the human body tends to push itself to rebound to its previous highest weight. Scientists don’t fully understand why, or how to stop it. Many speculate that our brains have not adjusted to living in a time of plenty. “There’s been a selection bias towards those people who could better protect body weight during times of famine. But now we don’t have a shortage of food.” When a patient stops taking Wegovy, their appetite returns within weeks and they pack on weight. Patients who came off the drug regained 7% of their body weight. “We used to think that behavior causes the weight state, but now we think the weight state actually causes the behavior”.