DENVER - A homeowners association in southwestern Colorado has threatened to fine a resident $25 a day until she removes a Christmas wreath with a peace sign that some say is an anti- Iraq war protest or a symbol of Satan.

... Jensen, a past association president, calculates the fines will cost her about $1,000, and doubts they will be able to make her pay. But she said she's not going to take it down until after Christmas.

"Now that it has come to this I feel I can't get bullied," she said. "What if they don't like my Santa Claus."

Yeah, Bob. Trying to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace by hanging a peace sign on her door? The nerve of that woman. What'll she do next? Talk some nonsense about peace on earth and goodwill to men, too?

I am not an expert in parallel algorithms, but one would think that tools like gzip, bzip2 and the GNU tool-chain could be re-written so that they make better use of multiple CPUs.

It kind of sucks that compressing a 25.8 Gb backup file on a four-way machine with bzip2 utilizes only one of the CPUs.

Four states - Georgia, Alabama, Iowa and Ohio - have decided to split from the group over concerns its changing direction on issues like the minimum wage, the environment and Internet law instead of core issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.

Hunter, who was scheduled to take over the socially conservative political group Jan. 1, said he had hoped to focus on issues such as poverty and the environment.

"These are issues that Jesus would want us to care about," Hunter said.

He resigned Tuesday during an organization board meeting. Hunter said he was not asked to leave.

"They pretty much said, 'These issues are fine, but they're not our issues, that's not our base,'" Hunter said.

*boggle*

I am sure issues like same-sex marriage and abortion are great for making the members of the church feel angry which, in turn, gets them to vote or contribute to fund drives. Fine and dandy - it keeps the business going. However, what does it say about the church - supposedly a christian church - when the people who run it say outright that poverty is not a core issue.? And hate-mongering is?

Why don't they just add "Inc." to their name or register as a political party and stop the charade? Or are they tax-exempt as a church?

LONDON (AP) - European health ministers from 53 countries approved the world's first charter to fight obesity on Thursday, vowing greater action against the epidemic of expanding waistlines across the continent. The charter, approved in Istanbul, Turkey, was drafted by the World Health Organization in consultation with its European member states. It is the first real attempt to compel national authorities to take concrete action to combat obesity.

At least in this article the plan actually sounds reasonable. Targetting the problem in children's diet is the key - sugary food makes the baby RoF grow. Well, actually sugary food makes an adult RoF grow, too, but it's more difficult to influence the diet of an adult who doesn't want to change.

The only thing that would probably work is taxation ("BMI tax") or an increase in the cost of health insurance if you're clinically fat. Draconian, but EU could very well try to implement something like that at some point.

Speaking of sugary and fatty foods, have you noticed that most "light/health" snack foods (yoghurts, etc.) which are advertised with slogans like "0.2% fat content!" or "fat free!" are actually chock full of fast carbs? Yeah, there's no fat, but there's so much fast carb in there that it's not by any means light in terms of calories. You'll also get a huge insulin spike when you eat the damn thing. In other words, you'll get drowsy and when you recover again in about half an hour, you're feeling hungry again.

I sat in a Concept2 rowing machine, warmed up slowly for five minutes, did ten HIIT cycles (heart rates: 30 sec at around 130-140 bpm, 30 sec at 170+ bpm) and cooled down for five minutes.

After everything I had read and heard about how intense HIIT is, my initial thought was: "That's it? I don't feel like dying, so did I do something wrong?". Sure it was intense and I was sweating and panting like crazy, but I could have pushed even harder if the bloody machine would have let me. I've done more intense (180-190 bpm) climbs while biking, so this felt like child's play compared to those. When I was leaving the locker room I was still trying to figure out how I could have made the exercise more intense.

However, the "afterburn" I got indicated that the exercise did actually work - I was sweating like a pig for about an hour after the workout, which is something that rarely happens after my usual 40-45 min bike ride (average heart rate: 150-155 bpm) to work. I guess there really is some magic in that alternating low intensity/high intensity system.

Some observations:

10 minutes is too long at this early stage. Not because it was too intense, but because the idea of HIIT is to keep the exercise time short. If you look at the HIIT charts, they usually start at 4 min and eventually increase up to 15 min effective time (excluding warm-ups and cool-downs). They are, however, designed with running in mind and since rowing is probably less intense than running, I should probably increase the duration of the jogging-sprinting periods from 30 s to 1 min.

The rowing machine sucked in two ways. Firstly, the straps that were supposed to keep my feet in place kept getting loose. Secondly, the resistance/load was already maxed out, so I couldn't make the exercise more intense that way (and rowing faster than the 57-60 rows per minute I was doing during the sprints wasn't really possible either). Fortunately, as I said above, I can make the sprint periods longer, so the intensity is not as much as a problem as the thing with the straps.

I don't know how many calories an HIIT session burns. The exercise itself burns only about 200 kcal, but how to figure in the afterburn? This kind of sucks, because I really like having a fairly accurate estimate of my daily energy balance. But yeah, I know that the trend in the size of my Ring of Fat will be the ultimate indicator of that balance...

HIIT rocked! Psychologically this was exactly what I want from an exercise in the first place: high intensity and short duration. That's why I like weight training and biking up hills, but HIIT was even better. It's an exercise that's so intense that it makes it impossible to think anything else than the clock and the next 30 seconds. My daily job involves nothing but hard thinking, so it's nice to be able to turn the brain off for a while.

I'll keep doing HIIT now for a while, try to fine tune it for myself and see how it feels like. If it's still good after about a month, I'll probably give up normal biking in the winter and do HIIT instead.

The Maltese and the Greeks are the heavyweights of Europe, figures from the European Commission reveal. The Italians and French the most trim, while the average Briton - like the average European - is slightly over the ideal weight.

Of course the EU, well known for all its brilliantly planned, efficient and bureaucratically lightweight initiatives and practices, is stepping in:

The Commission plans to launch a strategy to tackle obesity next year.

I have no doubt that they'll spend two years and several million euros writing up a directive saying that the EU nations should standardize their citizens' average BMIs to 22.5. This directive, as usual, is then promptly ignored by all the member nations and the life goes on as usual.

I say all we need is a friend. A chocolate friend.

Ryan said the women have very similar looks, and that the mistake was easily understood because of it. "They have the same color hair, they're about the same size and they wear the same earrings," Ryan said. "But they are two different people."

Cell transplants have successfully restored vision to mice which had lost their sight, leading to hopes people could benefit in the same way. UK scientists treated animals which had eye damage similar to that seen in many human eye diseases. They were able to help them see again by transplanting immature retinal stem cells into their eyes.

To the women he groped and grunted at, Thomasz Stepniowski's sleazy behaviour was no laughing matter. But for the 24-year-old Pole it was all perfectly acceptable. This, he claimed, was because such "cultural naughtiness" is entirely normal in Eastern Europe.

Finally got the computer stuff I expected to arrive last weekend running.

So, how am I going to satisfy my geeky lust for extreme computer hardware from now on? Maybe this is the answer? ;-)

I don't usually go for snacks like this, but occasionally - maybe 2 or 3 times per year - I get this immense craving for salted peanuts.

Mmmm... calorie rich and very unhealthy goodness. :-D

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage."

:-/

It's just madness that we as a society shut down for a day because of a religious holiday that means absolutely nothing to 99% of people living in this country. It's not just about All Saints day, but other shit like the Christmas and Easter, too. I'm sure you could find people who'd be willing to work on such holidays for a little bit of extra pay or extra vacation days. I know I would. However, since it's a State Church declared holiday, we all have a day off whether we liked it or not.

Now all the stores are closed, I've got no food in the fridge and the new computer stuff I ordered, and specifically asked (and paid for) to be delivered on Saturday when I'm actually home, won't be arriving until Monday because of the All Saints day. And because it arrives on Monday morning, I won't be at home to receive it and that means that I'll have to grab a taxi and collect the 30 kg shipment at the local post office at my own expense - even though I paid extra for weekend & home delivery. I can't get refunds, because hey, it was an official religious holiday and I should have known better not to ask for a delivery on this Saturday.

And how do I feel about it? To paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction: "Well I'm a mushroom-cloud-layin' motherfucker, motherfucker! Every time I think about it, I'm SUPERFLY T.N.T, I'm the GUNS OF THE NAVARONE."

Yeah, I'm about to explode. >:-O