I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.

For most of the existence of mankind and indeed all of mankind's progenitors, having too much food was a rare problem and being hungry all of the time was a fact of life. We are not necessarily well-evolved to handle it. So, no surprise that we eat to repletion and are still hungry. You don't really have any reason to look at it as an illness caused by anything other than too much food.

Martin,

The last time I had a professional video produced, I paid $5000 for a one-minute commercial, and those were rock-bottom prices from hungry people who wanted it for their own portfolio. I doubt I could get that today. $8000 for the entire conference is really volunteer work on Gary's part.

Someone's got to pay for it. One alternative would be to get a corporate sponsor and give them a keynote, which is what so many conferences do, but that would be abandoning our editorial independence. Having Gary fund his own operation through Kickstarter without burdening the conference is what we're doing. We're really lucky we could get that.

We do charge entry to the convention. We get really nice facilities for the people who actually travel there and for the speakers. Last year's location was subperb. But I don't see why they should actually subsidize the folks who do not attend.

I think TAPR's policy is that the presentations be freely redistributable, but I don't know what they and Gary have discussed. I am one of the speakers and have always made sure that my own talk would be freely redistributable. I wouldn't really want it to be modifiable except for translation and quotes, since it's a work of opinion. Nobody should get the right to modify the video in such a way as to make my opinion seem like it's anything other than what it is.

If I remember correctly, it was 4 video channels last year: tracking on presenter, proscenium, audience, projector.

Yes. I put in $100, and I am asking other people to put in money to sponsor these programs so that everyone, including people who did not put in any money at all, can see them for free. If you look at the 150+ videos, you can see that Gary's pretty good at this (and he brought a really professional-seeming cameraman to Hamvention, too) and the programs are interesting. Even if at least four of them feature yours truly :-) He filmed every one of the talks at the TAPR DCC last year (and has filmed for the past 5 years) and it costs him about $8000 to drive there from North Carolina to Austin, Texas; to bring his equipment and to keep it maintained, to stay in a motel, to run a multi-camera shoot for every talk in the conference, and to get some fair compensation for his time in editing (and he does a really good job at that).

So a whois.net domain name lookup on their site yielded nothing. And there are suspiciously no patents mentioning "wetag" or "ifind" and the names they listed (Dr. Paul McArthur) are in patents but for cold fusion BS in California.

Surely, though, they must have registered the "iFind" trademark? And if you search on TESS we find:

With an attorney listed as "Richard G. Eldredge" which corresponds to a local attorney. Before you deploy the door kickers to lynch somebody, that address is just somebody's $200,000 house and could possibly be a random address used by a jerk. Remember that it's entirely possible that this is all a front by some other actor and someone was paid western union/bitcoin to register this trademark through this attorney without realizing they were just being used by literally anyone in the world ... of course, kickstarter should have even better transaction details (hopefully).

Number Theory has application today, oh yes. Hellman (two 'l's, not one) had a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering. Diffie had a bachelor's degree in Mathematics. My question is this: after Number Theory was shown to have applications how many Mathematicians lost interest due solely to the fact that it was no longer "pure" math? I knew a topologist who grew embarrassed and closed his office door before discussing relativity. It just wouldn't do to be interested in applications. Perhaps I should have drawn the distinction less about abstract vs concrete, and more about pure vs applied.

Remember when we had a Debian system on the biosciences mission? They scrubbed the whole mission after they were already in space due to a fuel-cell issue that I think turned out to be a faulty sensor, and flew the entire mission a second time.

I agree in regard to logic. Critical thinking needs to be taught as early as the human mind can comprehend it. This is essential, and it isn't being done. I disagree that number theory is appropriate. Some of the applications of number theory are useful, certainly, but I couldn't apply number theory theory to either my CS or my Physics degree. I think Information Theory would be more useful, or Operations Research, even, for that matter.

Finally. When I was in High School, calculators where not allowed. In HS Chem and Physics we could at least use slide rules. In Math, it was just pencil and paper. Most people need to learn to calculate in order to solve specific problems. Math as its known and taught today isn't the way to teach the general population to do either. I'd suggest that buying HS students a laptop and a copy of Mathematica, and then teaching them to use it, would pay for itself in terms of how swiftly both the general concepts as well as actual calculating ability would be instilled. Many, many more people would be capable of using advanced maths if only they could leverage these rather inexpensive tools. Is it more important to memorize multiplication tables, or to understand intuitively what Div, Grad, and Curl are, and how to use them? Why not let even people with 400 Math SAT scores understand and be able to apply the concepts of Calc and DiffEq (and Probability and Statistics) without having to work so hard at it?

Agreed. But I'd say that in relation to not just any, but indeed to all branches of Science, Statistics are very nearly priceless.