edward spurlock

TIME Magazine: 10 Truths About Weight Loss

TIME Magazine: Fast Food: Would You Like 1,000 Calories with That?

TIME Magazine: Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food

NY Times: Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch (Pollan writes about Julia Child)

Slate Magazine: Fix Your Terrible, Insecure Passwords in Five Minutes

Slate Magazine: Minicows

Spinning Continuing Education (home study) for instructors

TheraBand Exercise Balls at Amazon

Head First Web Design Book at Amazon

Born To Run - A Hidden Tribe… at Amazon

Julia Sweeney on letting go of God - TED talk

And check out WikiPedia’s External Links for Julia Sweeney

NLPConnections.com has an active NLP forum that looks interesting

How about this Strange Maps blog, eh?

As 23 states get even fatter, heavy costs loom

It’s time for the nation’s annual obesity rankings and, outside of fairly lean Colorado, there’s little good news. Obesity rates among adults rose in 23 states over the past year and didn’t decline anywhere, says a new report from the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

And while the nation has long been bracing for a surge in Medicare as the boomers start turning 65, the new report makes clear that fat, not just age, will fuel much of those bills.

…Health economists once made the harsh financial calculation that the obese would save money by dying sooner, notes Jeff Levi, executive director of the Trust, a nonprofit public health group. But more recent research instead suggests they live nearly as long but are much sicker for longer…

Well, if I can get my weight down to a healthy range, now I don’t have to feel as guilty about my projected longer lifespan.

Intern Nation:

With revenue-challenged employers, fewer opportunities, and even less demand, postgraduates and laid-off, mid-career professionals from Boston to Silicon Valley are hardly loafing. They conduct surveys, develop products, strategize funding, manage books, and spearhead social media branding-for free.

Welcome to Intern Nation, where postgrads pay $9,000 to work for free and serial interns build their skills in back-to-back unpaid gigs so they can one day secure a paid position with low wages that may take them years to remedy. It’s a world where interns replace employees who go on maternity leave, fill in for an entire staff of let-go workers, and represent brands online in “intern jobs.

“I felt sorry for myself when I saw my small paycheck, until I met a man who got no paycheck at all.” Or something like that.

Swan Song:

First he was very famous, now he’s very rich. But Nassim Taleb is still wrong.

…In noncatastrophic times, the Niederhoffers and AIGs make money consistently and quietly and then end up losing it conspicuously and painfully. The Talebs make money rarely, amaze everyone because they do it when everybody else is getting killed—and so make it easy to forget about years of steady losses. Over the long run, the anti-catastrophists often do fairly well (if they don’t get too greedy and make bets that cost them all their money in even a small market drop). But it is the catastrophists, a la Taleb, who look smarter.

Slate’s Daniel Engber (usual writer of Slate’s Explainer column) blogs about the new movie Moon. In his post, he points to a Slate magazine story from a couple of years ago about NASA’s plans for a permanent moon base. What’s NASA’s apparent justification for the moon base?

What does the space agency hope to discover on the moon? The reason it built the base…In deadpan style, the New York Times story on the NASA announcement declared, “The lunar base is part of a larger effort to develop an international exploration strategy, one that explains why and how humans are returning to the moon and what they plan to do when they get there.” Oh–so we’ll build the moon base first, and then try to figure out why we built it.

Yeah, that’s about what I think about the American manned space program at this point in history. Exploring space with our current technology is on a par with exploring the world with a balsa-wood raft. At least the Kon-Tiki had a sail — our current ships can only “drift with the current.” There’s one exception that I’m aware of — JPL’s robot Dawn mission, which has spent several months of continuous ion engine use since it was launched in September 2007. This is a great development, but we’ve got a long way to go until our space ships are up to the equivalent of a Viking longboat.

In 1990, economist Amartya Sen wrote an article in the New York Review of Books titled More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing, in which he argued that in many places in the world, including China and India, cultural biases against women have led to millions of women and female children killed or never born in the first place (due to sex-selection abortions).

In 2005 or 2006, Emily Oster, a graduate student in economics at Harvard, found an explanation for many of the “missing women” — pregnant women with Hepatitis B were more likely to give birth to boys than to girls.

Unfortunately, however, new data has shown that Oster’s explanation at least greatly overstated the role of Hep. B in explaining the disparity of male-to-female births seen outside of the Western world. In 2008, Oster published a working paper titled “Hepatitis B Does Not Explain Male-Biased Sex Ratios in China”, in which she evaluates the new data.

Additional corroboration of Amartya Sen’s hypothesis has come from studies in the British Medical Journal (as reported in Slate magazine) and in research reported by Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray.

Emily Oster first came to fame anonymously, as the subject of Narratives From the Crib, a study of language development in young children.

From the Red Tape Chronicles on MSNBC.com:

Lawsuit a glimpse into ‘worst’ of the Web:

Triple Fiber Network (3FN) (also known as Pricewert LLC and APS Telecom)…allegedly helped criminals serve up spyware, spam, Trojan horse programs and mount phishing attacks, and also helped them sell illegal drugs and pirated music.  But now, federal authorities say, the ISP at the core of a “witches brew” of illegal activity has been shut down…[3FN had] a five-year track record or serving up child porn.

Nasty stuff.

Playboy CEO looks forward to multiple partners:

As CEO, Flanders said he will listen to any serious bidders, but stressed he is more interested in attracting business partners to license Playboy’s bunny logo and other assets.

“Multiple partners”, huh huh huh.

And the new CEO’s name is “Flanders”? There’s a Simpsons joke or six just waiting to be made.

At a Sentencing, Details of Spitzer’s Liaisons:

The assignations, he said, took place in cities other than New York or Washington, and the governor paid using postal money orders, a method he called “relatively unsophisticated” and an indication that Mr. Spitzer was spending his own money.

He said information his client had provided helped prosecutors determine that Mr. Spitzer had not used government or campaign money to pay for sex, and thus helped lead to the government’s decision not to charge him.