Zombie Nutrition

I have to point out that zombies instinctively follow a low-carb diet.

This Is How Zombiegeddon Starts

First there's a potential flu pandemic that starts in Mexico city then quickly spreads to New York. Then a mysterious fly-over of manhattan by a large jet panics the locals and gets explained away as a "photo op". This is obviously the military seeding a counter-virus. And this, of course, will be the cause of Zombiegeddon. What's not as obvious is that this is almost certainly the doing of Capcom as a viral (ahem) promotion of their Resident Evil 5 game title. Not to say that it's a hoax. Oh no, it is all too real. Creating the actual zombiegeddon to promote RE5 will go down as the greatest viral marketing campaign of all time. To be fair, there will be no future contenders since within the next few months we will all be dead.

worry much?

CNN International homepage currently lists the following as "hot topics":

• Influenza
• Taliban
• Iran
• North Korea
• Pirates
• China

Why Knowing the Causes of Obesity Matters

[aside from all the obvious reasons]

Gluttony and sloth are still roundly believed to be the causes of obesity by the general populace and by far too many public health officials. This is a sickly rewarding belief for the non-obese in that obesity becomes a moral failing that one has avoided. The science of the matter to date does not justify this belief, but that's not stopping conventional wisdom. The consequences of the "moral failing" school are themselves immoral, ranging from casual incivility to outright dehumanizing hostility towards the obese. Case in point: a Guardian review of a tv show on obesity generated the following bits from comments:

Too many fat idiots.
....
They should be kicked out onto the street and left to die.
....
Yet she 'couldn't understand why she was so fat'. It's because you keep stuffing food in your face you stupid cow! Hopefully social services will step in and take the kid into care before she deep fries it and eats it.

These are trivial examples but the sentiment is out there.

In The Loop

I heartily recommend In The Loop, a British film that is well-served by a lack of US-style slickness. Cringeworthy in moments of hilarity as well as in some on-the-mark satire. Unfortunately, it's saddled with an incredibly forgettable name. In between the time I decided I wanted to see it and the time I was in the theatre waiting for it to start (a span of maybe 10 hours), I repeatedly could not recall the title and had to keep looking it up. Oh well. Looks like it might not be in the states for a while.

Fructose Bad

There's a very nice writeup explaining results of a recent study comparing impact of fructose vs. glucose. Basically, fructose causes degenerative metabolic changes relative to glucose. I don't see that much coverage of this in the US press yet, and this will likely not do much to make the public better informed. For example, most people now seem to associate "high fructose corn syrup" with "bad", which is good, but I suspect equate "fructose" with "high fructose corn syrup" (hey, it's got fructose in the name!). This leads to things such as "pepsi raw" (in the UK), which proudly boasts of the use of cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. What seems to be a little-known, though, is that sucrose is 50% fructose, whereas high-fructose corn-syrup is 55% fructose. So replacing hfcs with "sugar" won't help much. Furthermore, the results of this study aren't surprising if you know that glucose can be used immediately upon entering the blood but that fructose pretty much has to be metabolized by the liver (thus you'd expect differing metabolic effects of some sort). This is also why fructosey foods will show up as lower "glycemic index" than similar non-fructosey foods, which is really misleading (and a good reason why glycemic index can be very useful but should not be the sole metric to judge quality of dietary items). Would be nice to see more popular press coverage of this study.

ST:TNFG

Against my own better judgment, I find myself looking too forward to the new Star Trek. And special kudos to the review that made me laugh out loud with "and an ominously unnamed colleague who's obviously not seen Galaxy Quest".

sunrise, sunset

You can keep your cute little flash games -- for fun on the internet I love stuff like this.

Chocolates

Just had the Lindt 90% for the first time, alongside the 85%, which is my current favorite. The 90% was... surprising. The difference in taste from the 85% was almost startling. It was very smooth, not bitter, but somehow less chocolatey. Not unpleasant, but I prefer the 85% still. Worth a side-by-side again, I think. I really need them to come out with 86%, 87%, 88%, and 89%. Of course, the taste difference could have been almost entirely due to variations in the batch and beans used.

Cheeses

Italy wins. I think British cheeses are underrated. I love British cheese. France makes awesome cheese. Great cheeses from Spain, Austria, Switzerland, etc. Wonderful artisan cheeses from the US, too. But Italy takes the cake. Depth, breadth, quality. Fantastic.

Vitamin D

Really good lecture on Vitamin D. Entertaining & well worth a watch.

What Speed Rail?

I'm a big fan of high-speed rail. I think stimulus money spent on infrastructure is a great idea, and also that high-speed rail in the US is long overdue. So Obama's newly announced rail plan is welcome. But... why is the bar set so low? The US govt considers anything that exceeds, or can exceed, 90mph to be "high speed". The Ocelot line or Ebola line or whatever it's called that's supposed to be high-speed between Washington and Boston travels at about 80mph, which is sad even by British standards. TGV lines reache 186 mph or more in regular service (test speeds much higher). Similar results from the Shinkansen. Even when construction of both of these networks was started 50 years ago the targets were more ambitious than the "100 mph" talk from Obama. The utility of these depends a lot on how long the trips actually take. The 2009 definition of high-speed rail should be: a train that reaches 186mph or more as part of regular service (i.e. pretty much every trip). The target for average speed for each corridor should be 150mph or more.