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Yes, sugar is treated by the brain a bit like cocaine. That's part of the issue, but its not the whole story. High GI foods give you the quick hit of cocaine which wears off quickly. Low GI foods give you a slow burn that keeps you satisfied longer.

I very much disagree that baked potatoes are a weight loss food. You can eat anything if in moderation, but any kind of potatoes is not a great choice in the weight loss stakes.

The potato only diet is an extreme example but definitely shows that potatoes can cause weight loss.

I feel like Gary Taubes and his junk science has gotten a lot of people wrongly obsessed with GI. Protein also has a pretty decent GI load, and a lot of evidence suggests that high protein diets are even more successful than low-carb diets. You're working off the assumption that the body has almost no ability to regulate its own metabolism. But the blood sugar spike is followed by the insulin spike because the body is regulating the metabolism. GI is only a concern for diabetics because they've lost the ability to regulate blood sugar.

The palatability hypothesis explains both pieces of evidence beautifully. It explains why carbs, and particularly sugar, can be very fattening and trigger more cravings. But at the same time why a simple baked potato keeps you satisfied with far fewer calories.

Other interesting and scientifically sound approaches are limping along on pitiful drips of venture money e.g. General Fusion.

And while some public money goes into Polywell research, it's produced on a dime when compared to ITER.

Don't mean to knock the work that's done to advance the Tokamak design, but it shouldn't be the only game in town.

You are blind. Google has scanned email content for the purpose of serving adds for years. It's also no secret that they have a vast database of picture sigs/hashse for examples of known child porn, for the purpose of keeping the stuff off their search engine. It's really not that much of a stretch to think they combine the two if it furthers a well-documented company goal/policy...

http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/...

http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/...

This is hardly a new company stance or anything, but it looks to me like the program started up last year and is only now starting to "come online" for email scanning. Maybe we'll see more cases like this. Or maybe they've been sending tips to police for years, and the police have simply been able to nab the guy without having to request access to his email first. Anyway, I think it's weird that people are all freaked out something that's been in place for a year, officially, and has been a company focus for at least 8.

Prices are rising.

Prices would be rising much faster of-course if the foreigners weren't absorbing the inflation (taking US dollars in exchange for their production). What do you think 20 years of 500 Billion USD / year trade deficit means? It means that the money that is printed in the USA is transferred to companies that provide the USA with the products it consumes. The foreigners then take the US dollars to the foreign banks, the foreign banks buy the US dollars (exchange to the local currencies). The foreign central banks are just as responsible in this case, they also print money in response to the USA printing, so they take in the US dollars and either hold those dollars or buy US bonds with them.

Not only the USA was and still is benefiting from foreign productivity with all this money printing, it is also benefiting from foreigners buying up its debt, financing USA government spending.

In the short run (and I am talking about a few decades this has been happening) this gave Americans a boosted standard of living they couldn't pay for (they weren't producing themselves).

In the long run this destroyed productivity in the USA, because with all this debt financed consumption and growing government the only economy that USA is left with is taxes. USA lives off of other people's productivity and it's economy is tax and borrow and spend type of economy and this economy produced enough government, enough regulations, enough costs that manufacturing sector left the country.

So in the long term, what this created is a situation where Americans have no productive capacity of their own, the population is no longer able to produce, there are almost no factories, there are almost no skilled workers, able to work in factories, there is no real capital, only printed money, thus the real interest rates are sky high, which is why there is now more business destruction (starting in 2014) than new business creation in the States. More businesses shut down and/or left the country than were started in 2014.

That's the long term damage of inflation, that and also of-course all of the pensioners, who have to come out of their retirement, because they can no longer have any return on their life savings, there is no return on the money that is saved, the savers in USA are destroyed, the debtors are favoured. This policy is the government policy, the policy of the biggest debtor - the government.

The government will pretend that inflation doesn't exist because the wages aren't going up, well, the labour costs are going up, the wages are not, that's not a paradox, that's stagflation and depression, that's expected unlike the Keynesians believe it to be an impossibility.

The reality is that USA has no productivity gains, very few people in USA are more productive than before, the share buy back programs the socialists in the media and government are touting as an example of greedy corporations, hiding their money is another example of this problem, since vast majority of that cash that is on hold by companies is borrowed. The money is borrowed, the large companies that actually have large assets and thus can get the loans (based on newly created fiat) from the banks (unlike new businesses), believe that the future value of money is lower than relative value of their shares, so they borrow money at these artificial rates and use it to buy back their stock, thus also artificially boosting the stock prices. But hey, I would do that too if I could get my hands on cheap money from government, why not? That seems to be a much simpler way to 'boost earnings' in USA now than actually growing sales, which is impossible at this point, consumers are out of money, out of credit, the new housing bubble that the Fed was inflating is bursting already, so the 'wealth effect' will work in reverse now.

In any case, I am sure you will be just fine, so don't worry about it. What do you care what I think?

Agreed, there is no need to push for any particular subject beyond ability to read, write and do basic arithmetic. Once those are covered, the kids should no longer be required to be in school. Should be able to go into trades (probably for most), trade schools, should let those, who are truly interested to continue education by removing huge artificial demand created with all the government subsidised debt (student loans) and should get rid of the minimum wage laws and laws that prevent 15 year olds from being hired.

In Germany there is a separation into different type of schooling, where most kids end up in Hauptschule and may actually start working from around age 15 (vocational training, training at work).

The next level of schooling is called Realschule, this one allows you to move to the next level if you can (Gymnasium) or to do vocational training. Gymnasium is your preparation for further education in a university.

What would make much more sense in USA would be to get rid of minimum wage laws, allow people to work for small compensation and train at work. If my company was based in USA I would hire 15 year olds in a heartbeat. I would train them for a couple of months if I wasn't forced to pay anybody anything more than they are worth if there were no laws that would make this arrangement prohibitively expensive. A 15 year old, who is interested in learning a profession and is willing to be an apprentice is not in any way worse than a 21 year old, who finished university with a worthless degree in women studies and is now unemployable, because the debt prevents him or her from taking a low paying job, while at the same time they have 0 skills (no more than a 15 year old without such 'education' would).

Of-course USA job numbers came out for July 2014

* 205,000 jobs added to the economy
* U3 unemployment rate rose from 6.1% to 6.2%
* Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now: up 144,000 to 6.259 million
* Employment/population ratio ages 25-54: down from 76.7% to 76.6%

* the overall employment to population ratio for all ages 16 and above rose 0.1% from 58.9 to 59.0%, and has risen by +0.3% YoY. The labor force participation rate rose from 62.8% to 62.9, and has fallen by -0.5% YoY (but remember, this includes droves of retiring Boomers).

25-54 year olds lost net 142,000 jobs.

16-19 year olds gained 44,000 jobs.
20-24 year olds gained 43,000 jobs.
55-69 year olds gained159,000 jobs.

So teenagers are finding part time jobs in the economy (summer), the so called 'retired' are coming out of retirement, because they can't afford to be retired in this economy anymore and the people in the main working age bracket have fewer permanent jobs and out of the 205,000 jobs created, that's just the delta, it doesn't show how many good, well paying permanent jobs were actually lost and how many part time jobs were created.

While the net jobs created are 205,000, most of the jobs created are part time, lower paying jobs, while jobs that are lost are full time, better paying jobs.

So what is going on with the job market exactly? Well, the same thing that is going on with the economy. The numbers can be demonstrated to be 'good' if you do not pay attention to the details. The reality is the opposite, the numbers are not good.

I would say that the USA economy needs fewer people in the universities and more people in trade, more people picking up skills as apprentices, skills that would make them employable without getting into gigantic debt with all the student loans.

It is expensive to hire people in USA, while the wages are not very high, the actual labour cost to the employees is high due to various laws, regulations, taxes, litigati

Only you could come up with underground idea?

http://ufosightingshotspot.blo...

Underground living idea is probably decades old. The difficulty comes with either finding a proper underground cave (difficult task, mapping said save is not easy), or building a cave with tunnel boring machine. Here the problem is getting such a machine there *and* a nuclear reactor to power it. Once you build the first few km of tunnel, the situation is self-sustaining as you have a habitable environment there already.

Getting an underground foothold is the difficult thing. First 100+ inhabitants is the key. Overhangs and such are great ideas, but without ability to dig and construct caves, like ants do, colonization of hostile places like Mars or the Moon does not make sense. Surface colony survival is out of the question.

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogs...

Is there any way to retrieve my Google Health data from Google?

For approximately a 6 month period prior to the deletion date, people could download their data in a whole whack of formats. See the original announcement. Say what you will about Google, but they are good about giving lead time and tools to extract your information prior to a service shutdown.

That being said, being able to download your information and being able to do anything with it is a whole other thing. In the case of Google Reader, at least the output format was a standard format (OPML), so migrating elsewhere was relatively trivial (and Feedly pretty much turned it into a one-click experience). I'm not sure any competitors bothered to handle the Google Health formats.

• should contain a variety of flexible primitives so that the core features of all known languages can be supported in principle
• should be high-performance, like Google NaCl. Some people need high performance, there's no doubt about it or way around it.
• should use a bytecode that is designed for optimization (LLVM bitcode seems like a reasonable starting point), but is non-obfuscated (fully decompilable) by default.
• should allow and support garbage collection (but not *require* GC-based memory management)
• should allow multiple threads
• should be designed to allow code from different languages to communicate easily
• should have a standard library of data types to promote interoperability between programming languages, and avoid the need to download a large standard library from server to client

Some people believe that the web has become a kind of operating system, but I think this reflects more the way people want to use it rather than the technological reality. Right now a browser is sort of a gimpy operating system that supports only one language and one thread per page. Real OSs support any programming language. Why not the web browser?

Yet nVidia expects us to believe that AMD is not disadvantaged by now being unable to see source code. It's your typical nVidia anti-competitive bullshit. nVidia's new agreements forbid AMD from seeing code that has GameWorks shit integrated. So AMD gets screwed over because nVidia has the larger market share and the optimization stage is typically the last part of development. Devs are under the wire and don't have time to fork/merge/redact code all over the place in order to expose a GameWorks-sanitized path for AMD's review.

nVidia really pisses me off with this bullshit. They have great performance and features, but it's ultimately to the detriment of the industry as a whole because they lock shit up so hard that it becomes a novelty that it underutilized in a fractured market (see PhysX).

Actually, the problem is nVidia has engineers to spare, and they willingly share them around to game devs. AMD doesn't have the resources to do that, so they don't have as much chances to do the optimizations that nVidia GameWorks can do.

And those nVidia engineers know their stuff inside and out - they can rewrite shaders and calls they know result in performance improvements... on nVidia cards. They don't care about non-nVidia cards, and will not debug problems in other vendor drivers.

Source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story... Original Source: http://richg42.blogspot.ca/201...

In short, AMD can quote you word by word the OpenGL specs, while nVidia knows some of the specs don't make sense and try to figure out a more "what the OpenGL guys REALLY meant" API.

Of course, this also means that other vendor's drivers don't work too well.

Of course, AMD needs to do a GameWorks thing of their own, and to do so they need to know their drivers inside and out and cards inside and out to do it so the code flow through the driver are optimized.

Slashdot is always remarkably helpful.

There are a variety of eye trackers on the market, but those might be tiring to use. There are also some EEG devices coming out that might help you, with a bit of hacking.

Quick google search turns up:

http://mindflexgames.com/ - game from Mattel

http://interaxon.ca/products.h... - input device, doesn't look like it's available yet

http://emotiv.com/store/headse... - this one looks like the most developed. A bit expensive, of course, but nothing like a clinical EEG.

http://www.transparentcorp.com... - Some software and another device (NeuroSky).

http://harteware.blogspot.ca/2... - DIY

Wrong. Unions are a massive part of the problem, right next to the so-called "Department of Education".

Not according to this chart

That first link is quite amusing, because it explains nothing in what the data actually is. His single graph, which he summarizes as "global temperature", is actually the monthly anomalies of the lower troposphere global mean, ie. by how many degrees was that month differing from the average of that month's records. It's also funny to be using a simplistic linear approximation when the data is this noisy; it means nothing.

The troposphere isn't what most people think of when they talk about temperature. If you look at the very site he uses, WoodForTrees.org, pretty much every other graph, again using the simple linear approximation at play here, shows an increase. He pretty much cherry-picked the graph that confirmed his biases. This isn't to say that the graph is wrong or that my analysis is right. It just means that, as so many people have said already, you just CAN'T summarize the whole enormous complex machine that is the climate by a single measurement. What does that graph mean in relation to everything else? I'm not a climatologist, I don't know. From what I can tell, he's not much more recognized in the topic than I am. I won't claim that credentials are all that matters, but I will trust an actual scientific organization (or even just a single researcher in the field) before a random guy using a fake name on WordPress. Again, not because I'm doing an appeal to authority, but because this whole thing is way too complicated to start doing armchair climatology.

Did a quick check: There are several games on GOG with DLC.

Yeah, but too be fair, I think that's a fairly recent feature for GoG.

I know "AI: War" also uses (used?) a serial key to differentiate between the demo and full version, which was another sticking point with GoG. (Although they allow multiplayer keys for NWN etc... so there's that...)

By this point though, I don't think Arcen is ~that~ concerned. By far the majority of the revenue is from steam. They wrote that steam is 91% of the income, 3% was direct sales, and 5.9% is gamersgate and impulse. Leaving 0.1% for 'others'

http://christophermpark.blogsp...

That's a while back and still predates bionic dues being released, etc but at the time GoG and other distributors amounted to less than a 10th of a percent. (Although he candidly admits both that at the time of that writing gog was a very new distributor for them, and that gog didn't have ai war -- which is far and away their most popular game so the low numbers are entirely expected.)

Still, it suggests that its not really worth arcen's time to jump through any major hoops or obstacles to put ai-war on gog.

"but "the man" holding you down is usually yourself."

I cant' hear you through all that bailout money...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Or the protectionism for the business community and elites:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

And the plutonomy memo...

http://politicalgates.blogspot...

You guys will never understand the RCMP. They're probably one of the last competent police forces on the planet, and the vast majority of Canadians respects them.

You gotta be kidding.

There was the incident of 4 armed RCMP officers who tasered some poor unarmed schlub FIVE times and killed him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

And they lied about it and tried to cover it up by refusing to release the video.

Then there was the RCMP officer who kicked Buddy Tavares in the face. Tavares was complying with the police, he was unarmed, and had his hands on the pavement. Oh, and it was recorded on video.

http://thescottross.blogspot.c...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com...

There was the time the RCMP pepper-sprayed hapless protesters who were legally & peacefully protesting so that Suharto, the dictator of Indonesia wouldn't have to see them:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

And many many more.

This story actually really interested me - On its face, the idea of a website that does these things: Poses user-submitted predictive questions, with user profiles so you can track the most successful predictors, and probably some sort of range voting system for the actual voting process, seems like a really swell idea.

Unfortunately, I've not nearly the technical skills or capability to jump into making a website that aggregates questions, votes, user statistics, graphs, profiles and so on. I went ahead and did the next best thing I could think of: http://psychohis7ory.blogspot....

In other news, Germany is now scrambling to cap "renewable energy costs" before it becomes so expensive that no-one can afford it. A link to BCF just incase you don't have a sub to WSJ's paywalled article.

This Robert Duncan character seems to have all the earmarks of a misinformation agent.

He has flaky credentials, flaky personal associations, flaky manner. He can't even write an email response without sounding 'off' and socially broken. He is very similar in manner to others who have gone on to embarrass and muddy the waters of their respective fields. The personality type seems to have a similar and noticeable flavor, I find, and I am always amazed that such damaged people are somehow able to write whole books with compelling content and which display evidence of well honed communication skills when clearly the author is barely functional.

Anyway, there's a bit of exploration into who Robert Duncan is with some of his responses here: http://exposinginfragard.blogs...

Typically, with these sorts, the subject matter they are presenting is based on a lot of mostly accurate and therefore valuable information, even including new insights nobody has heard before and which excite readers and thus polarize and move the public research of that subject forward in significant ways, -but in a manner controlled by the disinfo agency.

The information is skewed on purpose and includes nuggets of outright falsehood designed to be found and ridiculed/dismissed by debunkers and skeptics at a later date. This makes it easy to discredit everything under the subject banner regardless of the general validity of similar sources trying to be genuinely objective, because the debunked author is so clearly broken and his/her work embarrassingly inaccurate. This is an informational tar ball approach to counter intelligence.

The method seems to work. People with weak minds get confused and disturbed and/or offended, and afterwards tend to categorize everything not endowed with the aura of official approval in the, "Fake Moon Landing Tin Foil Crazy" file and thus remain docile followers of the "official story".

----

Now, in terms of where I think the technology for mind control really is:

I think individuals and regions can be affected by EM signals so that they are more likely to react with certain responses than not. Free will cannot be abridged per se, but most people have no concept of reality and thus when they react to artificially created states of anxiety or confusion or other impulses, tend to move only in the directions planned out for them. They think they're acting out of free will, but really, they just have their buttons pushed and their options for movement predetermined.

I think that voices can be beamed directly into people's skulls from a distance using today's technology. Richard Sauder, an author who strikes me as being a great deal more genuine and nonflakey, described a bit about that.

And depending on the originating source, I'd say that some 'people' can be almost entirely remote controlled. Like flesh bots, I suppose.

Though, reading thoughts and imaging dreams and such...? I'd assume that might be possible at higher levels, but I'd be skeptical if human military structures are really there yet. Maybe some of them, depending on who they're working in association with, but that sounds like soul matrix manipulation of a sort, which I've never seen any evidence is within the grasp of human tech.

My blog has an article, one of my most popular ones, on the topic of economics in Star Trek. It contains some relevant facts from Star Trek's "future history," debunks claims that such an economy is either fascist or communist, and sugges ts that it has similarities to Major C.H. Douglas's Social Credit theory.

-Gareth

French law and government is just simply fucked. There really isn't a better word to describe it.

They try to legislate all kinds of stupidity and it nearly always backfires on them. Just take a look at all the laws they've passed to improve employment in their country. Laws that fine employers for layoffs (guess how that turned out? Hint: all sane companies just laid off a bunch of people before the law came into effect and have less desire to hire anyone else), price fixing of books in a futile attempt to save bookstores, taxing the shit out of any company in an effort to fund a spendthrift government, it goes on and on.

http://globaleconomicanalysis....

The constant meddling has driven so many companies from their country, it just puts them in the hole even further. Speak out against any of the stupidity and rather than attempting to smarten up, they'll try to fine you. What a disaster. It's no surprise they came up with this dreadful verdict.

Plus, I don't know if I would *want* people to know the Feds considered my music so horrendous that it would induce severe mental stress.

You know, if you play anything loud enough and long enough, you will induce severe mental distress.

And, before you get all smug, here's the playlist they used outside of Manuel Noriega's compound to drive him crazy:

(You've Got) Another Thing Coming - Judas Priest
Blue Collar Man - Styx
Danger Zone - Kenny Loggins
Dead Man's Party - Oingo Boingo
Don't Look Back - Boston
Electric Spanking of War Babies - Funkadelic
Heaven's On Fire - Kiss
If I Had A Rocket Launcher - Bruce Cockburn
In My Time of Dying - Led Zeppelin
Iron Man - Black Sabbath
Judgment Day - Whitesnake
Jungle Love - Steve Miller
No More Mister Nice Guy - Alice Cooper
Paradise City - Guns & Roses
Panama - Van Halen
Paranoid - Black Sabbath
Refugee - Tom Petty
Renegade - Styx
Run Like Hell - Pink Floyd
The Party's Over - Journey
This Means War - Joan Jett
Wanted Dead or Alive - Bon Jovi
Wanted Man - Ratt
War Pigs - Black Sabbath
We're Not Gonna Take It - Twisted Sister
You Shook Me All Night Long - AC/DC
Your Time is Gonna Come - Led Zeppelin

If you like any of those bands, get over yourself.

Oh nothing at all. http://fredw-catharsisours.blo...

YoGrark

I made a diagram (derived from a diagram in an earlier publication) that presents this data (and metadata) loss really well: Research Data and Metadata at Risk: Degradation over Time as part of a paper I co-authored on this subject, Facilitating Data Sharing in the Behavioral Sciences.

Now if we can only determine the connection between Zuckerberg and Verizon, we can blow this CryptoLocker thing wide open.
http://verizonmath.blogspot.ca/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html

Its amazing that this is the only comment that mentioned Verizon math. Maybe I'm not on the right site. This is Slashdot correct?

Yes, it does defeat the purpose, but sometimes we need to know the current state of something in order to issue a new command. So you might not know what radio station your tuner is currently set to so you'd have to look down at the radio. Or you want to adjust the temperature/fan/defogger settings so you'd have to look down to see what the current settings are. I suppose you could have something like, "Car, what is the current vent setting?", reply, "The current vent setting is open for the driver side foot and torso.", "Car, open foot and windshield vents", "Acknowledged, opening driver side door.", "What? No don't do that.", "Acknowledged, unlatching safty restraint.", "Are you trying to kill me?", "Acknowledged, killing driver."

Ok, I got a little carried away, but something I'd like to see is the use of smart glass to display interfaces on the users windshield in a sort of out of the way place, but where the driver doesn't have to take their eyes off the road. The top left or bottom left corner for countries where the driver sits on the left of the car as an example. Something like this, but it would have to be well designed and less cluttered. Maybe even not applied to the whole windshield just the part where a HUD is required so crap isn't popping up in front of you all the time.

But that's not really what matters for obesity - it's fat accumulation. Not only does a calorie need to be digested, it has to be stored as fat.

Or it has to be consumed as energy or excreted. I'm not saying it's a hugely useful guide for weight loss (though it works for some) but I don't see why you're arguing the concept.

That's not true at all. Insulin resistance was inferred, not measured, and differential insulin resistance (the key factor with the insulin hypothesis of obesity) wasn't even considered.

This article noting the 10-20% of MHO's just popped up in my RSS feed in the time since I last posted. If you really want to get an answer from an expert try posting there (though don't expect a long exchange).

Of course not. He was just the first one to make the definitive survey of the literature and history and publish his investigation. The townspeople who thought the castle was the tavern they were just drinking at were too drunk to see straight :)

You never did read his book, did you? :) Borrow it from a library if you're worried about lining his pockets, but please, understand that Taubes isn't simply pointing at an old tavern and calling it a castle, he's showing that the emperor has no clothes.

Gary Taubes is not a researcher, he's a reporter who had an idea then, went cherry picking for evidence to support his idea, then wrote a really book about it, which he could do because he's a reporter and a very good writer.

He did NOT "make the definitive survey of the literature and history" books by reporters with no formal training in a field rarely produce high quality scientific work, that's not being elitist that just common sense in understanding the strength and weaknesses of people with different backgrounds. If you want actual reviews on insulin and obesity look here. I can't find one that addresses Taubes directly, most likely because it's a question they answer in undergrad and don't find it worthwhile to ask.

You've basically got two possible scenarios. 1) A science reporter heard about low-carb diets (which ARE supported in literature), got an idea about how they worked from his basic understanding of how insulin works, became convinced it was true, then went looking for evidence to prove it and write a compelling but mislead book.
or 2) For decades thousands of fulltime researchers have got everything wrong and have been missing an answer so obvious that a reporter essentially proved it at a glance.

Note that Taubes' book is NOT an investigation because an investigation implies you're looking for the answer. When Taubes wrote his book he'd already decided on his insulin mechanism years ago. Taubes' book is a summarization of the evidence for his theories, which is fine, except I don't believe he started his investigation with an open mind.

Also note I've pointed out Taubes' history of attacking straw men, misrepresenting evidence, and ignoring hugely inconvenient pieces of data like Asia. These are not the qualities of someone looking for the truth and if you launch into a investigation with that kind of confirmation bias you'll almost certainly be wrong.

I'd argue this, it doesn't seem cause heart disease as was suggested but it doesn't suppress appetite. Protein is the one that will reduce your appetite, but fat and carbs are pretty much neutral in their effects on appetite. The main danger with saturated fat is it makes food more palatable (mmmmmm.... bacon) which leads to us eating more of it.

This is easy to debunk: paper contains a lot of calories, but eating 100g of paper a day will not make you fat. The same amount of calories from sugar will.

I think we can assume that they're properly calculating calories as things we can digest?

This is just wrong. Convertingaminoacids into glucose is a slow process, a high aminoacid intake will not create high blood sugar

I overstated a bit, some of the glucose scores are comparable but the Insulin response is actually pretty comparable.

The thing that does stand out is the satiety score, the winner in a land slide are starchy baked potatoes, they also win the glucose title as well! What's on the bottom as the least satiating things? Croissants, cake, peanuts, ice cream, basically things that are really yummy. One of the other reasons why low-carb works is it's hard to find really yummy things without carbs.

And cortisol, and thyroid hormons, and leptin, and ghrelin... but that runs amok when your diet has nothing to do with what your body is designed for, and high carb diest does just that.

So explain Japan and China eating loads of white rice, explain the Kuna, who eat almost as much white sugar as us.

Sugar and white bread contribute to obesity, no one will argue that. But the story is far more complicated than high carb=>fat.

No, places I would never expect would be Kansas, Siberia and the middle of the Sahara. If cable television has taught me anything, it's that the sea is out to kill me. If I can smell saltwater in the air, I'm expecting some explosion of deadliness.

who says they have to be marine only? bioinvasive, freshwater jellies have been found:

Hamilton County
Erie County, Ohio
Trenton, Ontario
Hoosier county (aka Laporte), Indiana

Canada is right next to the US and is subject to the same think tanks, all the right wing parties on the North american continent talk to each other all the time because they are all capitalists. You should read about harper.

http://harpercrusade.blogspot.ca/

So his main issue with gmail....

"It doesn't work with Exchange Active Sync"

And that's google's fault?

Yes, they removed EAS support, you have to buy a Google Apps for Business subscription to get it back.

I think the aritcle you are referring to is this one from 2008 about a student handing out live CDs provided by the HeliOS Project.

The teacher in that particular case took a real beating on Slashdot and in the comments sections of the original HeliOS blogpost. In a follow up post, the author apologized for some of his stronger assertions (like implying that the teacher's dis-belief in free software had been influenced by monetary contribtions Microsoft had made to the NEA) and reported the teacher's side of the story, which had been missing from his initial post.

Both parties had been acting out of ignorance to a certain extent, but the simple act of communication allowed each to gain a better understanding of the other's perspective.

So maybe there's hope for the judge in this case, if someone from the hacker community would care to take the time to engage him.

Paul Breed was 3D printing liquid fuel rocket motors in 2010 and was test firing them by 2011. His test firings also took place at FAR, the same facility mentioned in this article.

Here is a link to Paul's blogs that (somewhat) relate to his experiments with printed engines:
Unreasonable Rocket

I believe that he beat NASA and everyone else out of the gate with this technique.

In fact, MS was the one who released the first OS/2 2.0 SDKs to developers in the first place. I wrote a blog article relating to what happened to the project: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-px00307-and-dr.html

http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Developer_resources#Implementation_documentation notes that the ZFS On-Disk Format document is "a good overview, but sorely outdated". Of possible interest: Max Bruning's weblog: ZFS Raidz Data Walk (2009)

You seem to know alot about this device. Where did you get all this info? I love the python phone/sms/gps libraries that I have in my N900/Maemo device. I don't suppose Sailfish still has that?

Not so sure that it does, but you can certainly try and find out by installing the Sailfish SDK and poking around in the virtual machine! Also related to the question of Python on Jolla/Sailfish, http://thpmaemo.blogspot.ca/2013/07/the-way-forward-with-python-on-qt-5.html (blog post by perhaps the most noteworthy Python-on-Nokia-Linux-devices programmer out there, Thomas Perl).

You'd be mistaken...

http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.ca/2012/12/bodhi-armhf-alpha-for-samsung-chromebook.html

There's a more recent build of that particular distro for it, but that's the instructions for how to do it. That's not a chroot, it's a native boot. You can, if you choose, nuke the chrome partition entirely and go fully native.

Reminds me of the chapter in Neal Stephenson's The Confusion (part of The Baroque Cycle). Japanese mercury vendors try to disable the Minerva (an armed merchant vessel) by filling its cargo hold with half-filled pots of mercury, rather than filling them to the brim. The idea is that the sloshing in the hull would resonate with the waves at the entrance to the harbour and slow the ship enough to be captured (or something to that effect). There's a discussion of whether Stephenson got the science correct here.

I'm not sure if I quite understand your researcher/other person example.

The point is we can't isolate one variable and hold everything else constant. Other variables can kick in to compensate, the brain responds to the situation, and the factor you're measuring never has a total function as simple as your hypothesis. No matter what you do the data is really messy and the answers can only be guessed at by looking at a lot of different experiments.

And maybe that's the problem I have with your frame - you're asserting that the brain is some massively omnipotent organ that dictates to the rest of the body, and that we can ignore all other factors and concentrate on it as the first order term.

I'm arguing a different frame based on our observations of cellular intelligence (http://www.brianjford.com/w-intelcell.htm, for example). Given the biochemical processes on the *cellular* level is the only way to rationally attack this problem, as far as that frame goes.

No, I'm saying we already know the brain is heavily involved, including decisions made at an abstract level like comfort food or eating in company. Therefore to show a particular biochemical process is active you first need to measure the influence of the brain which we know is there.

So, are you leery of those who say "it's due to eating more calories than those burned!"?

Oversimplification, I'd be leery of those who say "it's all due to palatability", because activity levels, social factors, mental health, advertising, convenience, and a dozen other factors are all probably involved.

Btw, since you think the carb/obesity is only in western populations due to a carbohydrate allergy explain Cuba, during an economic crisis calories dropped from 3,100 to 2,300 and:

"The percentage of dietary fat in the energy intake decreased, while the contribution of carbohydrates (polished rice and refined cereals) increased from 64% in 1990 to 79.4% in 1993. Availability of essential dietary amino acids and fatty acids declined as a consequence of a reduced availability of animal protein and edible oils and fat. Sugar cane, a traditional source of energy in the Cuban diet, rose to 28% of total energy intake, almost three times that of the fat contribution."

Want to guess what happened? Obesity rates dropped by half. So what happened to the carb allergy that caused the initial obesity? Why did they start eating fewer calories? Despite the economic hardship there wasn't actual starvation so surely they could afford 800 of the cheapest calories per day, if your theory about their obesity being caused a carb allergy was correct the extra sugar and refined carbs should have given them uncontrollable hunger and blew them up like a balloon.

Don't forget the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco, or why did it take 10 years after the 386 was introduced before 32-bit programming became popular:

http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-px00307-and-dr.html

(notice the mention of DR-DOS in the end)

Yea, MS turned what was originally the OS/2-386 project into an entire fiasco:
http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-px00307-and-dr.html

My personal favorite is the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco (notice the mention of DR-DOS in the end): http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-px00307-and-dr.html

I'm sorry but Taubes is a crank (I've been in a massive week long debate in another thread (that's seriously less then half of it, there's 1.5 other threads going...).

I get that some people might not want to read through all the science and dodge through Taubes's various rationalizations so I thought I'd toss out this gem that illustrates Taubes intellectual honesty from a previous Taubes interview (emphasis added)

TAUBES: And soy. But that’s Yeah, it’s tough. So you’re pretty much stuck with (gasp!) animal products. And it becomes this ethical issue, this religious issue, this environmental issue when it’s fundamentally The argument I You know, let’s get the health right. Like if somebody knows that they’re going to doom their kids to a life of obesity and diabetes cuz they’re going to make them vegetarians or vegans, then that’s fine as long as they understand that they’re not doing their kids any favors and that (that’s) the choice they made.

There in a snapshot is the credibility of Gary Taubes, evidence doesn't fit your theory? Just reverse the evidence.

There's actually almost no evidence that calorie restriction diets work (in fact there is much more evidence in favor of low carb type diets).

That's so idiotic it hurts my head to read it.

ALL DIETS involve calorie restrictions. Low-fat diets, low-carb diets, Mediterranean diets, all-kelp diets, etc., they ALL involve reducing calorie intake as the fundamental first step in the diet program.

No studies have shown any type of diet is more effective than any other (beyond the margin of error). Whether you follow Atkins, or the FDA pyramid, or Jenny Craig, or anything else, your chances of success are the same, and you'll lose the same amount of weight. It's the "diet" part, consuming slightly fewer calories, that causes the weight loss and health improvements.

Calorie restriction ALWAYS works. There's no way for it not to. All the body reactions that can cause gains or reduce losses, are entirely temporary and rather short-term. And starving is never required... Just keeping yourself very slightly hungry for a few weeks, rather than stuffing your face at every opportunity.

It's not quite that simple.

At the end of the day you can't beat input vs output but that doesn't mean you have to be hungry, some diets like low carb and/or high protein tend to lead to spontaneous caloric restriction, ie people are simply less hungry and eat fewer foods.

Another strategy is bland foods, say you want to eat 2500 kcal/day. Doing that on pasta, cake, and cookies you're probably going to fail. But looking at a bunch of raw broccoli tends to keep your appetite in check.

No, the high blood sugar during gestation in an otherwise non-obese woman can grant differential insulin resistance to her child, who then, under the same diet as her mother, ends up being obese instead of normal weight.

Even if that's a thing that can happen you'd need this to be a huge effect to explain western obesity, and you'd need to show immigrants with the same lifestyle and diet don't get fat (they catch up, but there's lifestyle and diet confounders). You'd also need to explain one of Taubes own favourite examples The Tokelau Island Migrant Study who started getting fat in less then a generation.

The problem is that it very well may be that eating, appetite, activity, and even excretions, are driven by fat accumulation. And what I mean by that is that if the *first* order cause is fat accumulation, and that makes you hungrier, and lazier, and makes you eat more, and perhaps even excrete less, we need to be able to discern that.

Put another way, the orders of magnitude here are important, and I don't think that simply because the system is complex that all factors are of equal weight.

I never implied they were of equal weight, but they're all part of the picture and you're discounting every other factor and making it all the result of one root cause.

And it's a good thing that despite that there are some people out there who are willing to argue with textbooks :)

Oh I still argue with textbooks, but I've learned that the most common result is that I misunderstood the textbook. There's a difference between digging deeper into the consensus view because a certain part doesn't make sense to you, and digging in because you want to prove it wrong in a specific way.

The sad fact, and Taubes exposes this extraordinarily well in GCBC (even if you dismiss his conclusions), is that the nutrition science in this country has not been driven by science, but by pre-determined agendas, be it to sell more cereals and grains, or to demonize meat eating, or to prop up a pet theory by a powerful government science administrator.

Honestly, more than a science book, I found Taubes work to be more interesting on the history side of the equation.

Frankly my issue with Taubes is when ever I read/listen to him he sets off alarm bells. Why could I listen to an hour long interview with him talking about the dangers of carbs, sugars particularly, but also starches, and I never heard him mention Japan or China? Why when asked about Japan did he start talking about brown rice and 50 years in the past? Why in this summary of his book is Japan only mentioned once, and in the context of Sumo wrestlers who were also high protein in addition to high carb, and who may have chosen the extra calories from carbs because it lead to a healthier fatness? Why doesn't he talk about all the cases that seems to be problematic for his hypothesis? Even his post about the lipohypertrophy, presented like a coup de grace even though it didn't challenge conventional wisdom in the slightest.

Taubes weaves a very nice story, but when he's leaving out something as significant as Asia in his main argument you have to wonder why. A proper researcher embraces the conflicting evidence because it offers another part of the story, a crank ignores it because his goal isn't the truth but the theory. That's why I don't trust Taubes, his goal is to push his theory and I don't think he looks at conflicting evidence as anything other than something to explain away.

No, the high blood sugar during gestation in an otherwise non-obese woman can grant differential insulin resistance to her child, who then, under the same diet as her mother, ends up being obese instead of normal weight.

Even if that's a thing that can happen you'd need this to be a huge effect to explain western obesity, and you'd need to show immigrants with the same lifestyle and diet don't get fat (they catch up, but there's lifestyle and diet confounders). You'd also need to explain one of Taubes own favourite examples The Tokelau Island Migrant Study who started getting fat in less then a generation.

The problem is that it very well may be that eating, appetite, activity, and even excretions, are driven by fat accumulation. And what I mean by that is that if the *first* order cause is fat accumulation, and that makes you hungrier, and lazier, and makes you eat more, and perhaps even excrete less, we need to be able to discern that.

Put another way, the orders of magnitude here are important, and I don't think that simply because the system is complex that all factors are of equal weight.

I never implied they were of equal weight, but they're all part of the picture and you're discounting every other factor and making it all the result of one root cause.

And it's a good thing that despite that there are some people out there who are willing to argue with textbooks :)

Oh I still argue with textbooks, but I've learned that the most common result is that I misunderstood the textbook. There's a difference between digging deeper into the consensus view because a certain part doesn't make sense to you, and digging in because you want to prove it wrong in a specific way.

The sad fact, and Taubes exposes this extraordinarily well in GCBC (even if you dismiss his conclusions), is that the nutrition science in this country has not been driven by science, but by pre-determined agendas, be it to sell more cereals and grains, or to demonize meat eating, or to prop up a pet theory by a powerful government science administrator.

Honestly, more than a science book, I found Taubes work to be more interesting on the history side of the equation.

Frankly my issue with Taubes is when ever I read/listen to him he sets off alarm bells. Why could I listen to an hour long interview with him talking about the dangers of carbs, sugars particularly, but also starches, and I never heard him mention Japan or China? Why when asked about Japan did he start talking about brown rice and 50 years in the past? Why in this summary of his book is Japan only mentioned once, and in the context of Sumo wrestlers who were also high protein in addition to high carb, and who may have chosen the extra calories from carbs because it lead to a healthier fatness? Why doesn't he talk about all the cases that seems to be problematic for his hypothesis? Even his post about the lipohypertrophy, presented like a coup de grace even though it didn't challenge conventional wisdom in the slightest.

Taubes weaves a very nice story, but when he's leaving out something as significant as Asia in his main argument you have to wonder why. A proper researcher embraces the conflicting evidence because it offers another part of the story, a crank ignores it because his goal isn't the truth but the theory. That's why I don't trust Taubes, his goal is to push his theory and I don't think he looks at conflicting evidence as anything other than something to explain away.

War propaganda is as old as war itself.

No, it's not. Propaganda, as such, especially military propaganda, is fairly modern. Ancient/classical militaries didn't depend much on popular support. There was political grandstanding, sure, but that's very different.

I guess you never studied ancient history. Here's one example of an academic who disagrees with you. Personally I considered Pericles' Funeral Oration pretty full of propaganda.

If memory serves me correctly it was a fairly major issue during Hannibal's Italy campaign as well as the Pyrrhic War.

How about the hundred years war?

Or did I misunderstand your meaning of modern?