The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
--H.L. Menken

Yes, NextBus was a pioneer in this, but had some significant deficiencies in their information architecture that caused serious problems for the end user. For one thing, NextBus used a system of GPS locations rather than actual bus stops to give real-time arrival information.

This blog post contains a quite entertaining and instructive story of what can happen when the user and back-end points of view are conflated.

The long and the short of it is that the user misses the bus because the bus doesn't stop at the location from which NextBus reported its GPS data.

I think I have read that the law itself cannot be copyrighted and it should be possible to make it available available to everyone. But as a techie who drafts standards and specifications, I was wondering about how far this goes--especially since Congress recently proposed enacting some of our standards into law. (They decided not to, but they read some parts into the committee records as they debated.) Can you still accomplish your project if a governmental body adopts (or considers adopting) a privately owned, copyrighted technical reference manual or set of safety standards as administrative law (or regulations that carry the force of law)? Or would such obstacles keep you from being able to digitize all of the government's laws (and archives of proposed laws)?

I'm not sure where you got "self-published" and "new-age mantras" from. I think a 30-year long medical study, multiple publications in nutrition, epidemiology and other medical journals and a collaboration between Cornell University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences qualifies as peer reviewed science. The same goes for a Johns Hopkins anthropologist's life work researching the sugar trade and its consequences.

Now I would readily agree that no study is without its flaws. Similarly, no model of scientific inquiry is without its flaws. One of the troubles with almost all medical studies of nutrition is that isolating a variable is quite difficult. Having been a research scientist at the Salk Institute, I can tell you from firsthand experience that the idealized model of science we have from billiard ball physics, in which isolating the variable is paramount, doesn't really work well for studies at this physical scale of research. Human organisms and human nutrition are complex systems; complex stochastic methods are probably the best methods to study something as nebulous as human health at an organismic (or cultural) level.

In the end, however, I'd concede the result is usually of the variety that science has shown that "eating your vegetables" is good for you. And eating too much sugar is bad for you. In other words, common-sensical. Don't know about yours but my mother's advice about eating right was the same, and she was no new-ager.

Nope, the USDA recommendations are subject to an intense amount of lobbying by the large food companies. Anyone who thinks that government scientists are free to speak their minds hasn't worked in government, and unfortunately their scientific research is largely ignored or reshaped by economic and political forces when it comes time to make policy recommendations (see Reagan, R., under whose administration ketchup was famously considered a vegetable in school lunches).

If you really want to eat healthy, and wanted to eat what the science tells you is best, you might start with the research by Dr T. Colin Campbell and Dr Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr. who did large-scale studies of the effects of eating processed crap vs. whole foods. See for example their books The China Study and PlanEat for citations, if you want to understand the evidence and know what to eat.

For the history of this, I recommend the anthropologist Sid Mintz who wrote Sweetness and Power, a history of sugar. In it he traces the shift in the British diet from healthy, farm-based foods to sugar-based foods and shows how that shift in diet was inextricable from the growth of cities and factories during the Industrial Revolution. In other words, he shows how the political economy of sugar has led to our present sugar and carb based diet. Unlike Campbell and Esselstyn, Mintz won't tell you what to eat, but he will tell you why everyone wants to sell you processed crap masquerading as food.

The upshot, however, is simple. Eat no-to-little processed, sugar, dairy and high-carb foods; eat only a little meat and some fish; eat a lot of protein-rich legumes, nuts, vegetables and whole grains. Drink mostly water; avoid sugary soft drinks, fruit cocktails and even too much juice. And cook for yourself; restaurants suck (from a healthy eating perspective).