Or go with the flow. As TFA points out, whether you lose weight or not, work out a few hours a week and you're healthier.

My own experience confirms this. All my life, I was too thin. Then I left school and got an office job about 5 years ago. All the sudden I'm not having a problem keeping on the pounds. I never got noticeably overweight but I was getting a little soft around the center. Signed up for a 24-hour fitness membership a couple years ago and was surprised that my weight continued to inch up.

Finally, earlier this year, I changed up my workout. More cardio, less weightlifting. Also went from around 4 1.5-hour workouts a week to 6. I just treat it like my job. As soon as I get off work, it's off to the gym for two hours (which has the advantage of waiting out traffic.) I also made some adjustments to my diet. Less fast food. Replaced cola with coffee (caffeine) or lemonade (sweet). And though my sweet tooth is as sweet as ever, I am more conscious about eating that extra snack or the dessert that was left in the break room, and consequently, I probably eat a few less calories on average.

But my real secret weapon: the Nintendo DS. I needed something to distract me from the drudgery of the stairmaster and lifecycle and I can only gawk at the girls for so long. I don't play video games otherwise, so I look forward to an hour or so playing with the DS while I sweat. Turned-based games like Advanced Wars (or chess) are perfect for the stairmaster.

The result: for the last 6 months, I've been shedding a pound or so every 2 weeks, about the same as the study. A few months of that will add up.

That's how I read it, too. Krugman continues in the same article:

Bear in mind also that government officials have a stake in accentuating the positive. The administration needs a recovery because, with deficits exploding, the only way it can justify that tax cut is by pretending that it was just what the economy needed. Mr. Greenspan needs one to avoid awkward questions about his own role in creating the stock market bubble.

Bush and Greenspan needed a bubble to sell their tax breaks. More recently, others (as Krugman has noted) have been demanding a bubble, too:

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/recession_plagued_nation_demands

Thanks for the reply. Not that any of it makes any sense to me. :) But if an AT&T tech had said something to that effect, it would have saved me running all over the internet looking for an explanation.

Not sure if this is related or not, but I had a puzzling experience with AT&T related to my DSL service recently.

I have had a AT&T Basic DSL plan for over a year now. It's ~350kbs down/~750 kbs up. It's never been great, but I'm a pretty light user, just internet surfing and moving files back and forth every once in a while between a remote server and my machine, and internet radio. I run Ubuntu 8.4 with a Linksys Router (wireless off) and use Firefox.

About a week ago, my internet connection started getting really sluggish. Couldn't even support my streaming radio. I opened Ubuntu's system monitor and download rate was capped at 40kbs. I would it test it by trying to load youtube videos. Every once in a while it would briefly spike above that, like at 60kbs, then right back down. Youtube was impossible.

I called AT&T customer support at the beginning of the week. They referred me to tech support recommending I request "Tier 2". So I finally had time to call this evening. After about 20 mins on hold and with Tier 1, I got to Tier 2, a woman in Texas, who opened a ticket and told me I would get a call back this evening or tomorrow. About an hour later, I get a call back with a recorded message saying everything is fixed and asking me to press 1 or 9 or something to confirm or press 0 for a technician. I'm curious to find out what happened so I press 0. Meanwhile, I fire up youtube, look at my system monitor, and sure enough it's scaling up to 80, 100kbs.

After a 10 min wait, I get a guy in California who sounds like he's been dealing with AT&T customer support for the last 2 hours. I'm polite, do my little Columbo routine, tell him I'm just following up and am curious and am updating my own notes (which I've learning to always take in these situations) and ask him if he can tell me how the issue was fixed.

He was pretty vague saying he didn't see anything that indicated it "was optimized." He said they just ran a line test and that seems to have fixed it. I asked him if it would have been restricted for some reason? He said it might if the line was showing "intermittent signal." I didn't press the issue. I just said, "Well, it looks like the issue is solved," thanked him and said goodbye.

Anybody have any further insight into what might have been happening? Was AT&T capping my broadband -- at 40kbs!? Is there a more innocent explanation?

You may also want to look at this:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/can-you-get-fit-in-six-minutes-a-week/?em

Even 6 minutes a week, with the breaks described and the equipment, may be more than is possible for you. But you're going to need to find some kind of optimization obviously.

I guess we'll never see anything like this:

http://www.monzy.org/unsafesearch/

Thank you for injecting a measure of reason and decency in what has been, for the most part, an unbelievably aggravating thread for me.

I believe the term of art I've heard experts on the region use to describe South Korea's role in any military resolution of the matter is "kill box".

What about Google's Knol? Wikipedia specifically prohibits original research. Knol welcomes it. You could also start an article on the broader subject of prior art and invite people to contribute to that.

You need a Google account, but that would insure attribution. And you can even see how many people have viewed it.

It also gives the idea a fixed url or permalink which could be the starting point for wider circulation.

Or, failing that, because they spent a lot before the rest of us caught on.

Some people speak with a lisp. He writes with it.

Extend it to administering their medicine and changing their diapers and the like and it's a common job. Not particularly glamorous or well-paying, but with an aging population, ever more in demand.