Brown Fat: A Fat That Helps You Lose Weight? – TIME
An interesting article about a kind of fat that burns through excess energy, and thus keeps people thin. They cells are filled with mitochondria which differentiates them from regular fat. Thin people are presumed to have larger stores of this type of fat than people who carry more weight. The medical possibilities opened up by this finding are significant, as is the potential for abuse…
A company has managed to created chromosones, and now hopes to patented the process. Some of the suggested uses for the technology seem brilliant but could have drawbacks. And since these patents would be privately owned, we have no idea what the chromosomes would actually be used for.
Wikimedia Foundation – Watch Jimmy’s video…
This video is cool, and highlights two nations that need it, and which I hope to travel to. Please try to overlook the several creepy moments of Jimmy’s eyes and hands…
An enlightening article on the evangelical movement in AMerica and its recent fallout.
Gotta love the closing graph:
But liberals, he said, should not start gloating. “Some might compare the religious right to a snake,” he said. “We may be in our hole right now, but we can come out and bite you at any time.”
I hope citing the source doesn’t count as gloating…!
Look at how fat we are, and how fast we got that way!
Fit Nation: The Obesity Fight – Special Reports from CNN.com
Hummer owner gets angry message – Washington Post – MSNBC.com
While the violent act of sabotage wasn’t necessary, this may be the only viable m.o. for getting these pieces of trash off the street.
Edge; DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier
An incredibly provacative piece about meta-aggregators like wikipedia and popurls, and how they enable a sort of “hive-mind collectivism” that is at once fascinatingly supreme, and drably stupid.
This article is effective in challenging many of our assumptions of the saving grace of the internet. A few clippings appear below:
That new magnitude of Meta-ness lasted only amonth. In April, Kelly reviewed a site called “popurls” that aggregates consensus Web filtering sites…and there was a new “most Meta”. We now are reading what a collectivity algorithm derives from what other collectivity algorithms derived from what collectives chose from what a population of mostly amateur writers wrote anonymously.
Kevin Kelly says of the “popurls” site, “There’s no better way to watch the hive mind.” But the hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?
There is a pedagogical connection between the culture of Artificial Intelligence and the strange allure of anonymous collectivism online. Google’s vast servers and the Wikipedia are both mentioned frequently as being the startup memory for Artificial Intelligences to come.
(Kind of disconcerting to think that these will be the sources of knowledge and understanding if AI were ever to become a reality!)
What I’ve seen is a loss of insight and subtlety, a disregard for the nuances of considered opinions, and an increased tendency to enshrine the official or normative beliefs of an organization.
An especially good one:
Here I must take a moment to comment on Linux and similar efforts. The various formulations of “open” or “free” software are different from the Wikipedia and the race to be most Meta in important ways. Linux programmers are not anonymous and in fact personal glory is part of the motivational engine that keeps such enterprises in motion. But there are similarities, and the lack of a coherent voice or design sensibility in an esthetic sense is one negative quality of both open source software and the Wikipedia.
These movements are at their most efficient while building hidden information plumbing layers, such as Web servers. They are hopeless when it comes to producing fine user interfaces or user experiences. If the code that ran the Wikipedia user interface were as open as the contents of the entries, it would churn itself into impenetrable muck almost immediately. The collective is good at solving problems which demand results that can be evaluated by uncontroversial performance parameters, but it is bad when taste and judgment matter.
And another:
The collective is more likely to be smart when it isn’t defining its own questions, when the goodness of an answer can be evaluated by a simple result (such as a single numeric value,) and when the information system which informs the collective is filtered by a quality control mechanism that relies on individuals to a high degree. Under those circumstances, a collective can be smarter than a person. Break any one of those conditions and the collective becomes unreliable or worse.
Meanwhile, an individual best achieves optimal stupidity on those rare occasions when one is both given substantial powers and insulated from the results of his or her actions.
I have mixed opinions, but for the most part agree with a man who is obviously very intelligent.
Shouts & Murmurs: Sheepish: Humor: The New Yorker
My mom sent this to me in the wake of news that some sheep have been proven to be genetically gay.
New report highlights need for hospitals to do more to stop MRSA
We should be very wary of this, as Doctors have been hinting at it for a long while. If a bacteria were able to form an antibody to our strongest antibiotics, it could have an effect something like the plague. MRSA – put it in your head.