Monthly Archives: October 2011

Marijuana Isn’t Getting Legalized Anytime Soon

Posted by on October 31, 2011 2 comments

A couple of months ago, the White House added a “petitions” section to its website, the idea being that regular people could petition the administration for whatever blew through their minds. If the petitions got enough signatures (originally 5,000, now 25,000), Obama or one of his underlings would take a gander at it. One of the most popular petitions was to abolish the highly ineffective TSA, which we talked about before. And not surprisingly, legalizing marijuana was a blockbuster, gathering more than 75,000 signatures.

Today, the administration responded to a few of the petitions, including the one on legalization. The short answer is “no.” A slightly longer version of the answer is that marijuana is bad for you and has no proven medicinal value; but education, not law enforcement, is the key to curbing use, and so they spend a little more money on education than arrests.

No word on why the same arguments don’t apply to alcohol and tobacco, or why the state is in the nanny business to begin with — maybe it’s trying to earn money for college and nanny taxes are more attractive than stripping. It also completely ignores that the government’s message on marijuana being evil is diametrically opposed to the mainstream media’s message on it being the bee’s knees; somehow, between the billions spent on both sides, and Hollywood being way cooler than D.C., it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which way teenagers are going to skew.

So despite legalization being supported by a virtual majority of the population, drug prohibition lives to see another day and will likely do so until there is such massive support for legalization that it can no longer be ignored. Probably also on Obama’s mind is that, as the first black president, he should try not to do things like legalize chronic and declare fried chicken to be the national bird.

The entire response, written by the current Drug Czar (who reminds us that he is a former police chief), is available on the White House website.

From The White House, via Slashdot

The Important Field In Web Forms

Posted by on October 28, 2011 Comments Off

The Important Field

The latest xkcd comic; the hover text reads:

I hear in some places, you need one form of ID to buy a gun, but two to pay for it by check. It’s interesting who has what incentives to care about what mistakes.

It seems like lately, a lot of the newer sites realize that the double-typing check is a huge waste of time for almost everyone and they don’t generally require you to double-type anything, including the password. For example, RunKeeper has three fields and no double-typing for their sign-up form. In the industry, they call this frictionless sign-up.

From xkcd

Why Crash Diets Don’t Work

Posted by on October 28, 2011 1 comment

Your body is really not a fan of quick weight loss — or maybe it’s just the more primitive parts of your brain. In any case, a new study shows that you need a lot of will power to lose weight fast and keep it off, because even a year later, your body still remembers it used to be fatter. In its infinite wisdom, it will try to make you eat more, because it feels less secure in its ability to survive… in case you got stranded somewhere with no 7-Elevens. (Apparently this need to survive in unlikely scenarios trumps more likely concerns, like the ability to not get heart disease, the ability to be attractive, and the ability to go up stairs without wheezing and having people stare.) Metabolism was also down.

So that’s why people usually gain all the weight back, and then some. Which just reinforces what the fitness community’s been preaching for years: eat healthy, eat less calories and exercise — for the rest of your life. You’ll end up losing weight slowly (you also gained it slowly, since you probably didn’t gain 30 lbs in 3 months), and your body, like the frog in boiling water, will get used to being thinner and not raise alarms about it.

Details of the study? Sure: the (Australian) researchers put 50 fat people on a crash diet (550 calories/day, meaning a quarter of normal) for 2.5 months. They lost about 30lbs each, or 14% of their body weight; they also tested their blood for levels of hormones dealing with appetite and hunger, and they were in “eat more” mode. Then they went back a year later, and the people had gained back about 13 lbs each and were now down to 8% weight loss. They also measured their hormones again, and they were still telling people to eat more. For example, leptin, a hormone that suppresses appetite, was low; ghrelin, which says you’re hungry, was high.

 

Ghrelin is not the same thing as Gremlin

 

From The New England Journal of Medicine, via NPR

“Shame”: A New NC-17 Movie

Posted by on October 26, 2011 2 comments

The Hollywood Reporter is…. well, reporting that Steve McQueen’s new movie Shame, which opens December 2nd in a few places, got an NC-17 rating. That happens now and then and the studio normally appeals or edits the movie to avoid the death knell that is the NC-17. But this time, Fox Searchlight is going to treat it as a badge of honor and stick with the rating, which it got because the movie’s about a sex addict (played by Magneto from X-Men: First Class), so it’s dirty.

NPR also has a great write-up on how the public use of the rating system is all screwed up because it’s not being used as it’s meant to be: namely, as information for parents. Instead, a film with an NC-17 rating will get limited theatrical releases, limited advertising channels and a lot of stigma, because everyone thinks it’s going to be a Skinemax movie. And of course, no one watches porn. The ratings system is also inconsistent, because crazy violent and gory movies are routinely rated R, but even moderately sexual or crude ones are rated NC-17. Then there’s The Human Centipede, which ended up with an R-rating while Requiem For a Dream had to get rid of a sex scene to get one.

Finally, no, the Steve McQueen from The Great Escape isn’t back from the dead; this Steve McQueen is British, and critically acclaimed for his 2008 movie, Hunger.

From The Hollywood Reporter and NPR

The Four Female States

Posted by on October 26, 2011 Comments Off

Via imgur

Shocker: Amy Winehouse Died Of Alcohol Poisoning

Posted by on October 26, 2011 1 comment

A few days after Amy Winehouse died in July, her family said she had been clean of drugs and alcohol for a couple of weeks, and they figured she died of alcohol withdrawal. The theory being that giving up the bottle was so tough on her tiny body that her system just went into shock and called it quits. Yeah, nobody else bought that either. And today, you (and Occam’s Razor) have been proven right: the coroner reports that while she had no illegal drugs in her system, her blood alcohol level was 0.416%, which is more than five times the legal driving limit, and a little bit above the fatal level that’s around 0.400% — explaining why she died from it.

 

Illustration by VectorPortal.com

 

Apparently she wasn’t so much an alcoholic as a binge drinker — she wouldn’t drink for weeks, then go nuts on the stuff. No word on whether she died while snorting vodka.

From Monsters and Critics

Well, If You Put It Like That…

Posted by on October 26, 2011 Comments Off

Third Giant LEGO Man Washes Up On Sarasota Beach

Posted by on October 25, 2011 7 comments

This morning on Siesta Key Beach (a.k.a, the best beach in America), some guy found a giant LEGO man in the surf. It’s 8 feet tall, made out of fiber glass, and is wearing red pants and a green shirt that says “NO REAL THAN YOU ARE.”

Sarasota LEGO Man (Photo by Herald-Tribune/Jeff Hindman)

 

Giant LEGO men like these have also washed up in other beach resort towns: Brighton, England in 2008 and the first one in Zandvoort, Netherlands in 2007. They all wear red pants, but the one in Zandvoort had a blue shirt; the other two had green shirts. And the ones in Sarasota and Zandvoort were 8-ft tall and had the “NO REAL THAN YOU ARE” slogan, while the one in Brighton was 6-ft and had no slogan.

That slogan, by the way, is the title of Ego Leonard’s website; he’s an artist and has a picture of a LEGO man on the site that says “HELLO HOW ARE YOU DOING TODAY.” If you for some reason use only his last initial, his name is Ego L. ; if you then did the last-name-first thing, you’d end up with L., Ego — the LEGO man. The earliest the Internet archive time machine crawled his page was in October of 2007, two months after the first man was found. His website title was the same.

Zandvoort Lego Man (Photo by c.e. delohery)

 

Brighton Lego Man (Photo by Kent News & Pictures)

 

Lego Man on Ego L.'s website

 

There’s a very interesting pattern at play here: besides the fact that they appear in beach resort towns, you can draw an almost straight line on the map, going southwest, connecting all three towns. And each time, it crossed (or went around) land too — first, across South East England, then across Florida. It took nine months for the phenomenon to cross the North Sea to England, and then just five days shy of four years to cross the Atlantic to Florida. In miles per month traveled though, it went four times faster across the Atlantic: 5,000 miles in 48 months vs 375 miles in 15 months; maybe it had a faster ship to cross the ocean.

 

Giant LEGO man route

 

If the pattern holds, it should next land somewhere around Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, sometime in mid-2013 — assuming same speed over land, and a bunch of other things. Finally, here’s a video of the Zandvoort one:

Update, Oct 26th, 2011: The Herald-Tribune emailed Ego Leonard, who responded thusly:

I am glad I crossed over. Although it was a hell of a swimm. Nice weather here and friendly people. I think I am gonna stay here for a while. A local sheriff escorted me to my new home.

From The Herald-Tribune

Apple Is Making A TV Set

Posted by on October 25, 2011 Comments Off

Besides the fact that Steve Jobs accidentally met his real father without either of them knowing, it sounds like the other interesting revelation from The Gospel of Steve Jobs according to Walter Isaacson is that before he died, folks at Apple had reinvented the TV. Said Jobs to Isaacson: ““It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine,” as if anything else was even a possibility.  Anonymous Apple employees who can’t keep secrets say that the guy who invented iTunes (and had a big role in developing the iPod) is heading up the project — which, if it’s not called iTV, then Tim Cook isn’t doing a good job impersonating Jobs… who would’ve probably bought itv (the British TV network) just to get the trademark.

Apple is of course not acknowledging anything in order to build buzz and you know… keeping being Apple. But besides this rumor having popped up before, Steve also told his biographer that AppleTV (the toy that connects your Apple gadgets to your TV), was just a hobby, not an actual money maker. The iTV though will probably do stuff like integrate cable and streaming video into one interface and come with Siri and iCloud installed. Speculators say it’ll be out sometime in the next year or two. By then, Google will probably also come out with a mediocre TV, or at least a clunky operating system for it.

From Bloomberg

Why Daylight Saving Time Should Be Abolished

Posted by on October 24, 2011 2 comments

C.G.P. Grey — the guy who explained the difference between England, Britain and the U.K., and taught us that there’s no good way to figure out how many continents there are — has a new video all about Daylight Saving Time (DST), the curse of which is about to end in a couple of weeks, at least until next year. The video tries to be somewhat objective, but makes a few good points on why DST is bad:

  • In hot climates, it doesn’t save energy. The biggest reason for that is the invention of air conditioning: in the summer when it’s hot out, people won’t enjoy the summer heat, but rather stay inside with the A/C. Now, they might not turn on the lights because the sun’s still up (and this is what DST was meant to do), but the A/C consumes more energy than a dozen light bulbs.
  • Overall, there are conflicting studies that show both that DST saves energy and that it wastes more energy. In either case, the savings or waste is less than 1%, which is about 4$/year per household. Is that worth the hassle?
  • No, it’s not, because there are a lot of human costs associated with the time change: heart attacks and suicides spike the week after the time change; coordinating international meetings (which is pretty common these days) is a productivity loser, because different countries change times at different dates and not even our techy gadgets can keep up with all of them. Not only that, but even within the US, there are places where DST is not observed — like Hawaii and Arizona.

From YouTube, via Laughing Squid