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Monday, July 08, 2002

Scalia's Chilling Vision From Justice Scalia, a Chilling Vision of Religions Authority in America. Justice Antonin Scalia seeks to abandon the intent of the Constitution's framers and impose views about government and divinity that no previous justice has ever embraced. By Sean Wilentz. [New York Times: Opinion] A must read! 9:44:47 PM  Permalink  comment []

Ranes, the T-Shirt king Nice piece on my old pal Raines Cohen. But there are no pictures! 9:38:58 PM  Permalink  comment []

FileMaker 6 Due Tuesday FileMaker tries on new look for Mac. Version 6 will support both Windows XP and Mac OS X. The Mac version is also capable of retrieving images directly from digital cameras. [CNET News.com] Though I've used FileMaker since about 1.0 back in 85 or so, and reviewed version 5 a couple years ago, I haven't used the the program much lately. But a couple things here caught my eye, notably the supprt for Microsoft SQL Server (which I have used extensively for the past few years) without ODBC support. ODBC support on the Mac has typically been touch and go, and this is especially true with OSX, for which I don't think it's available at all. My guess is they use the very good XML capabilities of SQL Server to get it to talk to FileMaker, which is another feature they're touting. On the other hand, it's interesting that they focused on SQL Server. That's probably a way to get FileMaker into a lot of big shops. But I imagine a lot of Mac owners would be interested in seeing it used as a front end to mySQL or PostgreSQL both of which run in OSX and are, I would guess, stealing some market from FileMaker. 7:32:03 PM  Permalink  comment []

Dark Places in the City of Light My schoolboy pal John, who is going there soon, sends this article about the cemeteries of Paris. Really a great travelogue. 7:08:39 PM  Permalink  comment []

A Big Fat Lie? Fascinating article in the NY Times Sunday magazine about carbohydrates and fat. If the alternative hypothesis is right -- still a big ''if'' -- then it strongly suggests that the ongoing epidemic of obesity in America and elsewhere is not, as we are constantly told, due simply to a collective lack of will power and a failure to exercise. Rather it occurred, as Atkins has been saying (along with Barry Sears, author of ''The Zone''), because the public health authorities told us unwittingly, but with the best of intentions, to eat precisely those foods that would make us fat, and we did. We ate more fat-free carbohydrates, which, in turn, made us hungrier and then heavier. Put simply, if the alternative hypothesis is right, then a low-fat diet is not by definition a healthy diet. In practice, such a diet cannot help being high in carbohydrates, and that can lead to obesity, and perhaps even heart disease. ''For a large percentage of the population, perhaps 30 to 40 percent, low-fat diets are counterproductive,'' says Eleftheria Maratos-Flier, director of obesity research at Harvard's prestigious Joslin Diabetes Center. ''They have the paradoxical effect of making people gain weight.'' Well, that's something to make you sit up and take notice. But the key paragraph is the next one: Scientists are still arguing about fat, despite a century of research, because the regulation of appetite and weight in the human body happens to be almost inconceivably complex, and the experimental tools we have to study it are still remarkably inadequate. This combination leaves researchers in an awkward position. To study the entire physiological system involves feeding real food to real human subjects for months or years on end, which is prohibitively expensive, ethically questionable (if you're trying to measure the effects of foods that might cause heart disease) and virtually impossible to do in any kind of rigorously controlled scientific manner. But if researchers seek to study something less costly and more controllable, they end up studying experimental situations so oversimplified that their results may have nothing to do with reality. This then leads to a research literature so vast that it's possible to find at least some published research to support virtually any theory. The result is a balkanized community -- ''splintered, very opinionated and in many instances, intransigent,'' says Kurt Isselbacher, a former chairman of the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Science -- in which researchers seem easily convinced that their preconceived notions are correct and thoroughly uninterested in testing any other hypotheses but their own. How many entire industries -- and, indeed, religions -- are based on how little we know about our physiologies? 6:32:03 PM  Permalink  comment []

Mapping the Universe Nice set of graphics showing where we exist in the universe, from the nearby stellar neighborhood (about 12.5 lightyears) to the universe as a whole. 6:27:20 PM  Permalink  comment []

© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.