I kinda see where you're coming from. I attended two different high schools: one in the suburbs of Toronto, which served children of working-class parents (many worked at the local auto assembly plant). It was hell. Few students valued academic subjects, and if you excelled in math or English you got persecuted. Shop class was highly valued, though. Then we moved to downtown Toronto, where students were well off (Toronto reverses the American pattern of rich suburbs and poor downtown). It was lovely: students valued learning. What I experienced was class solidarity: if you try to step outside your class (eg, if you value book learning when your peers value mechanical skills), you will be ostracized. The instinct to fit in and conform is very powerful, especially during adolescence.

But just because the ITU says they don't have the mandate, or the budget, and insist that the alleged plan is just a mis-information campaign, why should be believe them? Of course they would deny it. They're just trying to get our guard down, as any sinister anti-American organization would. Just watch: the minute the WSJ stops running editorials like this, the UN will take over! ;-)

If you look at an actuarial table from the USA: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html and plot the probability of death versus age, on a semi-log graph, you get a straight line after age 30. This means that the probability of death rises exponentially with time. It reaches 100% probability at age 121. Hence that's the hard limit. Interestingly, there's a slight change in slope around age 97: maybe some other aging mechanism takes over. Nevertheless, the change is slight, and the probability continues its lethal rise to 100%.

Please people, read the article in Wired. It points out something very simple and very important: since websites lock you after a handful of failed login attempts (or slow you down with captchas), brute-force cracking of passwords is no longer an issue! Strong passwords are a thing of the past.

Feel free to use as simple a password as your system allows. No one will guess it.

Another way to look at this is that antibiotics are a short-term imbalance on a nature's long-term balance. In the short time (since the 1930s) that antibiotics have existed, we have managed to push back against bacteria. In the long term, organisms develop defenses against pathogens, and the pathogens develop ways around the defenses. We can expect that nature, with its huge numerical advantage (many microbes vs very few antibiotics), will eventually find evolutionary pathways around our defenses.

> The nth doughnut disappears just about as quickly as the first.

Not if you are the only person in the room, and are eating all twelve donuts. Back when I was young and strong, I could eat a dozen donuts in one sitting, but I did slow down near the end of the box.

As slashdot.org/~Sir_Sri points out, the study quoted here is provocative, but it's way off the mark. Go to the newscientist article, and you'll see, for example, that Vanguard is #8 in the list of evil companies. Vanguard is a mutual fund company. It doesn't have its own money. It just takes your money, keeps a small fee (theirs are among the lowest in the business), and uses your money to buy shares in other companies.

.

It is more accurate to say that a large fraction of the middle class in Western countries owns, through mutual funds, a substantial portion of the stock of the largest publicly-traded companies in the world. What's the big deal?

Or maybe it's some vast middle-class conspiracy. If so, you're probably part of it.

I don't see how that could have been rendered in real time, especially the fully shaded hand. Think of all those pixels! Each frame was rendered on a CRT and photographed individually.

Ingredients:
1 lb of beef chuck, chopped into 1-inch pieces
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 onion, chopped
2 tbsp oil for frying
one bay leaf
salt and pepper to taste
water
Directions:
1. Attach a large pan directly to the server CPU with heatsink compound, and brown the beef, a few pieces at a time, to avoid steaming them. Set aside.
2. Detach the pan from the CPU about 5 mm, and sautee the onions until golden brown, about 5 minutes.
3. Add the garlic, sautee 1 minute.
4. Add beef, salt and pepper, bay leaf, and water to cover.
5. Place pan over 1kW multi-GPU exhaust, and simmer two hours, or until meat is tender.

> Calories in > calories out == fat bastards

Not that nonsense again. Jeez. How many times are people going to quote this energy balance equation as if it were gospel?

Lots of good research shows that exercise does not cause weight loss. Getting lots of exercise just makes you hungry. So it's got nothing to do with "calories out".

Again, read Taubes' books, or his article from New York Mag "The scientist and the stairmaster." What actually seems to happen is that skinny people (like me) have trouble storing fat, so we have an excess of nutrients running loose in our blood, and hence our bodies jump into action to burn those calories off. In other words, being unable to store fat causes you to exercise. You exercise because you're thin, not the other way around!

On the other hand, fat people's bodies tend to grab every nutrient in their bloodstream and stash it into their fat cells. They have no available fuel, and hence their bodies slow things down. They are sedentary (and hungry!) because they are fat.

There's a lot of misinformed prejudice showing its ugly head on this topic.

> glucose is what our bodies run on

Actually this is false. I think only your cornea needs glucose to run on. The remaining organs can run on glucose, fatty acids, or ketone bodies. Even your brain can run on fatty acids and ketones. As Atkins used to say, "you hear about essential amino acids and essential fatty acids, but you never hear about essential carbohydrates".

This idea exists in Greek myth: "[Semele] then demanded that Zeus reveal himself in all his glory as proof of his godhood. Though Zeus begged her not to ask this, she persisted and he was forced by his oath to comply. Zeus tried to spare her by showing her the smallest of his bolts and the sparsest thunderstorm clouds he could find. Mortals, however, cannot look upon Zeus without incinerating, and she perished, consumed in lightning-ignited flame" You should not ask the Godhead to reveal itself in its pure form. No mortal can sustain it.