This month's Popular Science highlights obesity -causation theories (artificial sweeteners, viruses, otitis, air conditioning) and treatments. They point out that mother nature builds lots of redundancy into physiologic systems that are as important as storing food as a safeguard against famine. So a drug that blocks one, or two, of these hormones simply allows a backup to kick in after a 3% weight loss. And candidate hormone systems tend to be good at signalling to eat more but not to eat less if they're switched off. To further complicate the problem, switching off the brain's desire for food turns off our desire for life, and suicides increase. It's a conundrum.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Low-fee indexed mutual funds are the best in the long run.
Something I learned years ago and have followed -
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/your-money/stocks-and-bonds/22stra.html?em
They say, based on an experiment that took into account fees, and taxes on gains,
"it turns out that, after fees and taxes, it is the extremely rare actively managed fund or hedge fund that does better than a simple index fund" and "only a minority of funds that beat the market in a given year can outperform it the next year as well"
The outrageous cost of text messaging.
Having been stung with a $27 surcharge for excess text messages recently, the price versus cost of text messaging stings even more. The amount of data is so small compared to transmitting voice, yet is charged much much higher. In fact, because text messages are transmitted on the carrier locator signal that confirms where your cell phone is located periodically, it is essentially free (no marginal cost) for the carrier.
"But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.
"That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/business/28digi.html
According to Consumer Reports (and anyone with an engineering background can back this up), 500 text messages use less bandwidth than a one-minute cell phone conversation. [Jan. 2009 issue, page 5] http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/cretin-or-crook-sen-herb-kohl-of.html
Just as ironic, the cost of a text message is greater than the cost of a message sent from the Hubble telescope...
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
USAF uses 10% of all aircraft fuel.
The US Air Force uses 2.5 billion gallons of fuel annually - a full 10% of the entire fuel supply used by all domestic aircraft. -Popular Science Feb 09 p. 60
http://www.popsci.com/node/31142
http://www.popsci.com/node/31142
Monday, February 2, 2009
Floating garbage the size of Canada. Wow.
Can you believe there's a mass of floating garbage mid-pacific that's the size of Canada? It weighs some 100 million tons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch#Impact_on_wildlife
There's a guy going to sail through it to document and research it and publicize its magnitude.
http://www.popsci.com/node/31395
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