Doctors Seek Way to Treat Muscle Loss
Why muscles wither is captivating more scientists and drug and food companies, let alone aging baby boomers.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Sarcopenia: Doctors Seek Way to Treat Muscle Loss
"At this point, what we can say is that older people are at risk for eating too little protein for adequate muscle preservation"
NYTimes: Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
I have always recalled events and topography in terms of cardinal directions. In fact, I've convinced myself on occasion that I can recall a vague memory better if I am facing in the same direction as when the event took place. I always just thought it was an oddity, but this essay describes a few scattered cultures where cardinal directions are a huge part of language, memory, and hence the speakers' experience of the world.
The essay also talks about how the gender assigned in some European languages influences native speakers' mental picture of those items - 'bridge' is masculine in Spanish, where bridges are associated with strength, but feminine in German where they are considered slender and elegant.
Mother tongue doesn't prevent our understand of concepts, but gives us a predisposition to think about concepts in a particular way: "if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about." TE
The essay also talks about how the gender assigned in some European languages influences native speakers' mental picture of those items - 'bridge' is masculine in Spanish, where bridges are associated with strength, but feminine in German where they are considered slender and elegant.
Mother tongue doesn't prevent our understand of concepts, but gives us a predisposition to think about concepts in a particular way: "if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about." TE
Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
The idea that your mother tongue shapes your experience of the world may be true after all.
Cool hand
The Leidenfrost effect - a thin veil of protective gas forms at an interface between liquid and an object that is well above its melting point.
Here's an image (and a video, next, below) of a hand being dipped directly into liquid nitrogen for an instant.http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid89176697001?bctid=595188459001
And here's a video of a hand being dipped into molten lead.
Safeway's massive warehouse
Dropped Pin (click on satellite view)
Here's the location of the Safeway warehouse for the Seattle area. I passed it on the train this morning. It's massive, and hundreds of trucks were busily loading and unloading at 0630. This warehouse probably services a few million people.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Facebook...pros and cons
I had occasion today to re-examine the benefits and dangers of facebook. I recognize, and am constantly told that it is beneficial and everyone is using it, and it allows connection on an unprecedented level, that people can share ideas that spread like wildfire and connect over the things they like. Here are some recent New York Times articles pointing out the pros and cons of facebook. It seems that having a large number of people whom you may not know access your information can lead to problems down the line, with recruiters, employers, etc. And having murky obligations to people because they are a ‘friend’ or are ‘unfriended’ can make relationships unnecessarily complicated.
-Friends, Until I Delete You
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/fashion/29facebook.html?scp=3&sq=facebook%20unfriend&st=cse
deleting friends does not generate a notification of any sort, leaving members to discover they’ve been unfriended only when they find they no longer have access to someone’s profile. It can be a jarring experience, especially considering that the person who dumped you at some point either requested you as a friend or accepted your request …
While many trivial actions do prompt Facebook to post an alert to all your friends… striking someone off your list simply is not one of them.
…Of course, not all unfriendings are equal. There seem to be several varieties, ranging from the completely impersonal to the utterly vindictive.
…On Facebook, as in life, no unfriending is as fraught with pitfalls as the one you really mean.
…The two had a falling out …During an emotional late-night moment, she clicked the “remove”…“Now I really, really regret it”
+In India, Using Facebook to Catch Scofflaw Drivers
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/technology/02traffic.html?ref=facebook_inc
… two months ago, and almost immediately residents became digital informants, posting photos of their fellow drivers violating traffic laws
… acknowledged that it was possible photos could be manipulated to incriminate someone who was not actually breaking the law. But, he said, drivers can contest the tickets if they think they were wrongly issued. The police advise residents not to let personal animosity influence their photo-taking, and not to do anything to compromise their own security, like antagonizing law-breakers while snapping photos.
-Price of Facebook Privacy? Start Clicking
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/technology/personaltech/13basics.html?_r=1
Which is longer, the United States Constitution or Facebook’s Privacy Policy? -the latter
The new opt-out settings certainly are complex. Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons.
-Germany Plans Limits on Facebook Use in Hiring
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/business/global/26fbook.html?scp=3&sq=facebook&st=cse
the German government on Wednesday proposed placing restrictions on employers who want to use Facebook profiles when recruiting…
There are currently no rules governing how companies use Facebook data…
-How to Use Facebook’s New Location Feature
Apple has built impressive location detection into its newer iPhones. They have GPS, plus they sniff the air for local Wi-Fi network names and compare them to a map of known network locations…
Facebook will query your iPhone for its location, and prompt you with a list of nearby places that it knows… Tap the screen to set your location, and all your Facebook friends will be able to see…
Second, Facebook Places lets you see where your friends are. …iPhone app will pop up a list of who else is nearby…The end goal is obvious: You can contact and meet up with friends who are near you.
Here are the two issues that will surely bother the most people: First, if you are at a location but have not checked in, Facebook friends at the same location can check you in themselves
-How to Hide From Friends You Don’t Like
…it’s inevitable that you’ll be friended by someone you know, but with whom you don’t want to share your online life… how do you avoid them without the awkwardness of unfriending them?
Facebook has made it easy to hide other members’ status updates…
When you write a status update of your own, look for the lock-shaped icon below and to the right of the text input box…There are two ways to exclude people.
+The Language of Fakebook
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/fashion/15Culture.html?ref=facebook_inc
Lauren Mechling and Laura Moser have been writing a clever serialized novel on Slate called “My Darklyng.”Their innovation: the plot unfolds not just in text but on Facebook and Twitter.
…[it] offers a brilliant commentary on how fictional teenagers are on Facebook…A 14-year-old I talked to about this sent me a message that pretty much sums it up: “I write more enthusiastically on Facebook than I actually am in real life. Like if I see something remotely funny I might say ‘HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA,’ when really there is no expression on my face.”
…Facebook gives the exhibitionism, the pure theater of those years, a whole other level of stage.
…You can find polite little girls cursing like sailors on Facebook. Everything is louder, more ardent, capitalized. This is a way of dramatizing or raising the stakes on even the most inane or banal exchange
…Being “friends” on Facebook is more of a fantasy or imitation or shadow of friendship than the traditional real thing. Friendship on Facebook bears about the same relation to friendship in life, as being run over by a car in a cartoon resembles being run over by a car in life. Facebook is friendship minus the one on one conversation, minus the moment alone at a party in a corner with someone
…Somewhere in the gap between status posting and the person [they are] in their room at night is life itself. So fiction is the right response, the right commentary, the right point to be making about who we are in these dangerously consuming media, in these easy addictive nano-connections.
-The Web Means the End of Forgetting
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html?ref=facebook_inc
we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities… In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten…the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past…far from giving us a new sense of control over the face we present to the world, the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era.
a photo …showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor …said she was promoting drinking… As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree.
Sued that…violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech…A challenge of…how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever.
Other examples: 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”
Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away …[for] an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with L.S.D.
U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research …— including search engines, social-networking sites…Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online
the Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring — and permanently storing — the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.
A Manhattan woman…she was afraid of being tagged in online photos because it might reveal that she wears only two outfits when out on the town…“You have movie-star issues,” she said, “and you’re just a person.”
Last December, the company announced that parts of user profiles that had previously been private — including every user’s friends, relationship status and family relations — would become public
In February, the European Union helped finance a campaign called “Think B4 U post!” that urges young people to consider the “potential consequences” of publishing photos of themselves or their friends without “thinking carefully” and asking permission.
Those who think that their online reputations have been unfairly tarnished by an isolated incident or two now have a practical option: consulting a firm like ReputationDefender, which promises to clean up your online image.
Web. 3.0 — a world in which user-generated content is combined with a new layer of data aggregation… For example, the Facebook application Photo Finder, by Face.com, uses facial-recognition … to allow you to locate any photo of yourself or a friend on Facebook, regardless of whether the photo was “tagged” — that is, the individual in the photo was identified by name. At the moment, Photo Finder allows you to identify only people on your contact list, but [will soon] almost certainly challenge our expectation of anonymity in public.
an exclusive bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, requires potential members to sign an agreement promising not to blog about the bar’s goings on or to post photos on social-networking sites
[future legal options:] laws forbidding people to breach confidences could be expanded to allow you to sue your Facebook friends if they share your embarrassing photos or posts in violation of your privacy settings.
experiments about the “decay time” … of good and bad information — in other words, whether people discount positive information about you more quickly and heavily than they discount negative information about you. His research group’s preliminary results suggest that if rumors spread about something good you did 10 years ago, like winning a prize, they will be discounted; but if rumors spread about something bad that you did 10 years ago, like driving drunk, that information has staying power.
What people seem to want is not simply control over their privacy settings; they want control over their online reputations… of course, an unrealistic fantasy.
but a humane society values privacy, because it allows people to cultivate different aspects of their personalities in different contexts
Friday, August 27, 2010
Thursday, August 26, 2010
NYTimes: A Box of Fresh Air
"...required that the house be evaluated for air tightness. An inspector trained a blower on the facade and gauged how much air passed through it..."If it were any tighter, when you open the doors, the toilets would flush." "
ON LOCATION: A Box of Fresh Air
In Racine, Wis., a climate-controlled structure of glass, steel and concrete offers a sweeping view of Lake Michigan — and the future.
NYTimes: What Do Girls Want?
Where 20-somethings shop.
FALL FASHION: What Do Girls Want?
A few fashion Web sites seem to have figured out what the young shopper is looking for today.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
NYTimes: The New Coffee Bars: Unplug, Drink, Go
This article makes a point about a trend at cafes: getting rid of the expectation that the expensive price of a cup of coffee entitles you to free wifi for your laptop. Instead, in the Italian tradition, how about a quick gulp of latté at a barstool, sans table or laptop makes for cheaper coffee. A key social observation in the article: "Tables create a feeling of territorialism" TE
The New Coffee Bars: Unplug, Drink, Go
The latest spots want customers to leave their laptops at home.
New Biofuel Cell Demonstrated; Could Be Filled With Sugary Soft Drinks to Power Devices | Popular Science
Finally, someone's found a safe way to provide mobile energy i.e. non-nuclear, non-fossil fuel : New Biofuel Cell Demonstrated; Could Be Filled With Sugary Soft Drinks to Power Devices
NYTimes.com: Ferrari 458 Italia Has Enough Superlatives to Match the Sticker
All I can say is - 'woooooeeeeeeeeee!!' It's a pretty rare car review that uses these kind of superlatives. This car really lives up to the name.
|
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
NYTimes.com: Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime
“Instead of having long relaxing breaks, like taking two hours for lunch, we have a lot of these micro-moments,”...
“People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,”[Here's what people interviewed in the story said about using devices all the time:]
...“I wanted to take advantage of the little gap,”...“It’s become a demand. Not necessarily a demand of the customer, but a demand of my head,”...
[...From rat studies] "when people keep their brains busy with [constant] digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas...
"A [human] study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued."
"Flurry, a company that tracks the use of apps, has found that mobile games are typically played for 6.3 minutes"
[...However,] "...Some researchers say that whatever downside there is to not resting the brain, it pales in comparison to the benefits technology can bring in motivating people to sweat."
|
Saturday, August 21, 2010
NYTimes: For Pianist, Software Is Replacing Sonatas
Snap photo of a score, it plays the music. Museami software later this year.
For Pianist, Software Is Replacing Sonatas
Robert Taub has put his concert career aside to develop computer aids for musicians.
NYTimes.com: Looking for Baby Sitters: Foreign Language a Must
|
NYTimes: Simplifying the Lives of Web Users
STATE OF THE ART: Simplifying the Lives of Web Users
A new service called OpenDNS is faster and more reliable than your Internet provider's. And it's free.
NYTimes: Math Lessons for Locavores
"It takes a teaspoon of diesel to ship a pound 3000 miles by train, and 3 tsp by truck."
"The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of land, favorable climates and human labor is to grow [produce] in the places where they grow best and with the most efficient technologies — and then pay the relatively tiny energy cost to get them to market, as we do with every other commodity in the economy."
"The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of land, favorable climates and human labor is to grow [produce] in the places where they grow best and with the most efficient technologies — and then pay the relatively tiny energy cost to get them to market, as we do with every other commodity in the economy."
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR: Math Lessons for Locavores
Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself.
Friday, August 20, 2010
NYTimes: Math Lessons for Locavores
Don't forget the astonishing fact that the total land area of American farms remains almost unchanged from a century ago, at a little under a billion acres, even though those farms now feed three times as many Americans and export more than 10 times as much as they did in 1910.
The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of land, favorable climates and human labor is to grow lettuce, oranges, wheat, peppers, bananas, whatever, in the places where they grow best and with the most efficient technologies — and then pay the relatively tiny energy cost to get them to market, as we do with every other commodity in the economy. Sometimes that means growing vegetables in your backyard. Sometimes that means buying vegetables grown in California or Costa Rica.
From The New York Times:
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR: Math Lessons for Locavores
Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself.
http://nyti.ms/bc4Sbq
Get The New York Times on your iPhone for free by visiting http://itunes.com/apps/nytimes
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR: Math Lessons for Locavores
Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself.
http://nyti.ms/bc4Sbq
Get The New York Times on your iPhone for free by visiting http://itunes.com/apps/nytimes
Sent from my iPhone
NYTimes: Math Lessons for Locavores
"Words like "sustainability" and "food-miles" are thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture of energy and land use."
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR: Math Lessons for Locavores
Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself.
NYTimes: What Is It About 20-Somethings?
An interesting, lengthy essay that questions whether we are coddling our grown children these days, or allowing an important new stage of life to flourish.
What Is It About 20-Somethings?
They move back in with their parents. They delay beginning careers. Why are so many young people taking so long to grow up?
Thursday, August 19, 2010
NYTimes: Simplifying the Lives of Web Users
"OpenDNS is one of the last great freebies of the Web. It manages to pull off the Google trick: offering, at no charge, incredible utility and speed to the masses — while still finding inoffensive ways to make money."
STATE OF THE ART: Simplifying the Lives of Web Users
A new service called OpenDNS is faster and more reliable than your Internet provider's. And it's free.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Swath Hull Design - Understanding the Concept Behind It
SWATH (small waterplane area twin hull) is an intriguing boat design in effect floating a boat on top of a semi-submerged submarine. The lower hull cuts through the waves at a constant depth, the boat rides smooth and level cutting through the waves.
http://www.brighthub.com/engineering/marine/articles/60455.aspx
Thule Hullavator - Product Reviews
This intriguing contraption allows you to load kayaks onto an overhead vehicle roof (the one I saw was a 9-foot high camper) with double-folding arms that hoist it up for you.
http://www.paddling.net/Reviews/showReviews.html?prod=1565
Sent from my iPhone
Wind vs. Coal: The Fight for a Mountaintop
"Hundreds of feet of elevation are sometimes removed, with equal amounts of nearby valley filled in, creating a peculiar landscape of high, wide plateaus in various stages of revegetation, encircled by the pointy, forested peaks native to the area... Mining companies, however, value it as a cost-effective way to gain access to coal deposits that otherwise couldn't be reached... 500 mountaintops and roughly 1.2 million acres in four states that have been altered by mountaintop removal... 352,000 acres and 136 mountains have been affected in West Virginia alone."
Wind vs. Coal: The Fight for a Mountaintop
Opponents of mountaintop mining have proposed an alternative in West Virginia: a wind farm that they say could save the landscape while diversifying employment.
Balmoral Grist Mill
Visited North America's oldest continually running grain mill, tucked into rolling farmland in rural Nova Scotia. A branch of the NS museum, they've hired a keen, hardworking miller. His affable humility, commitment to pure original methods, self-sufficiency and the reward of loving cantankerous machinery intimately were spellbinding. The story has just peaked as yesterday he milled the first batch of whole wheat flour, rather than oatmeal, in five years - thanks to persistent painstaking repair of a mill abused by an uninformed predecessor. To hear him describe walking the mill, feeling the product carefully in hand to gauge the state of his beef-tallow-lubricated wooden (yes, wooden, made by himself) bearings, adjusting the 2400 pound millstone a few millimeters while spinning at 120 rpm, all the while listening to every creak, grumble, and and clunk in the machinery for subtle signs of misalignment like a tenderhearted physician is spellbinding reminder of the lost skills of yesteryear.
Here's an article about this dedicated miller. Note that the land was bought for $12, and that there has been an unbroken succession of millers working this venerable old mill.
Here's an article about this dedicated miller. Note that the land was bought for $12, and that there has been an unbroken succession of millers working this venerable old mill.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
NYTimes: Breast Milk Sugars Give Infants a Protective Coat
"From the infant's perspective, it is born into a world full of hostile microbes, with an untrained immune system and lacking the caustic stomach acid which in adults kills most bacteria. Any element in milk that protects the infant will be heavily favored by natural selection"
Breast Milk Sugars Give Infants a Protective Coat
A large part of human milk that cannot be digested by babies coats the lining of a breast-fed infant's intestine, protecting it from noxious bacteria.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)