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.

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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.

I think what we're seeing here is that, if you steal from very rich and powerful people (like the directors of GS), you will be severely punished. That's why Bernie Madoff is in prison for the rest of his life: he too stole primarily from rich people.

Of course, if you steal from the less-well-connected, nothing much will happen to you. Thus the directors of Goldman, AIG, Citi, etc who bet their shareholders' equity, and also risked the pensions of many workers, did not go to jail. Instead, they got themselves installed in the Treasury department, and got their cronies even more money from taxpayers!

As Matt Taibbi said "Why isn't Wall Street in jail?" : http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/2/22/matt_taibbi_why_isnt_wall_street_in_jail

Then again, as Billie Holiday sang, "Them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose. So the bible says, and it still is news!"

The research says that cellphones don't cause cancer. Agreed. But do cellphone EM fields affect your thoughts? Has that kind of research been done? Of course USING a cellphone affects your thoughts. It can even cause brain injury, if you are driving a car and end up hitting your head on the windshield because you were distracted and hit a tree. The question is whether the radio waves from the cellphone antenna are doing something unusual to your neurons.

The snowblower was invented in Montreal, for a good reason: they get lots of snow, and it stays in place until March. Hence the city has come up with an almost militaristic solution. It involves giant snowblowers, dump trucks, blinking red lights, and looking for your car (which is not where you parked it) after the city crews come up your street: http://chicagomontreal.blogspot.com/2006/01/snow-removal-in-montreal.html

Toronto has such a machine: http://www.toronto.ca/transportation/snow/torontomelt.htm

This comes as a surprise only to Americans. The rest of the developing world knows that the U.S. likes dictators. Many latin American countries endured dictatorships that were endorsed or tolerated by the U.S. government, mostly because the dictators favoured the interests of American companies. It's nothing new. What's surprising is that Joe Biden would be candid enough to claim on national TV that Mubarak isn't a dictator.