Category: Uncategorized

New drink burns calories

Accidental Hedonist – Coke’s Caloric Sophistry

There are a couple things wrong with this.  First, they say that drinking three twelve ounce cans will burn about 100 calories.  Okay, fine.  How many calories are in a can?  There’s about 140 calories in a 12 ounce can of Coke.  Unless each can of this new stuff is less than 35 calories or so (Highly unlikely, but I can’t find the number online), even if the calorie-burning claims are correct, you’re still taking in more than you’re burning.

Second, you’d burn about 35 calories taking a slow walk for ten minutes.  35 calories is not that much.

Third, “The makers claim that a combination of extracts from green tea and caffeine speeds up the drinker’s metabolic rate, which helps the body to burn calories”.  How many can I drink in a day before my metabolic rate is at an unsafe level?  Artificially speeding up your metabloic rate just doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.

Fourth, “But, this is a positive step that people can take to make a difference to their health with regular physical activity and a balanced, healthy diet.”  So says Rhoma Applebaum, chief scientist for Coke.  Everything I’m reading from Coke implies that this is a health drink.  That is, something that will help you be healthy.  Is it healthy like Diet Coke is healthy?  I mean, sure, drinking it is probably healthier than drinking straight high-fructose corn syrup, or drinking battery acid.  But I doubt drinking one of these Envigas is healthier than drinking nothing.

Anyway, I love Coke.  Not the company, but the soda.  I know it’s bad for me, and that’s why I try not to drink it too often (Although I should drink less of it).  But this stuff is being marketed deceptively, and I’d like to see Coke get sued for it.

Winter is here

Yesterday morning, it was 65 degrees (18 C for those of you who use that ridiculous system.  Freezing is zero degrees?  Crazy!) out when I went to work.  Today, it was 34 (1 C).

Now, I like the cold.  But those first few days of cold are always a bit of a shock.  All the windows in the house were still open this morning, so it was a bit chilly inside.  And our flag football game tomorrow is at 8AM, so that will probably be cold.

Of course, it’s still hot in my office, as usual.

Anyway, that’s probably all I have to say about the weather.

Listening to NPR makes me cry

Charlie’s Diary: Playing the Genocide Card

The Lancet isn’t just any medical journal, it’s one of the big three that you used to — and probably still do — find in common rooms in hospitals all over the UK (along with the British Medical Journal and sometimes the New England Journal of Medicine). It is not noted for publishing random speculation, agitprop, and crank letters — it’s the top journal of record in its field. Getting an article into The Lancet is like getting one in Nature, or Science: it’s a big one.

This morning, for example, I heard President Bush and one of his big shot generals dismissing this report because they’ve never heard a number bigger than about 50,000, so this 650,000 estimate MUST be wrong.

Now, before you go doubting my source, I know Charles Stross is an author, not an expert in military excursions or whatever.  But we are bringing the qualifications of The Lancet into question here, not Stross.  The Lancet was founded in 1823.  When a scientific journal is that old, one guesses that it has not made a habit of inventing numbers more than 10 times the number we’d heard previously just for kicks.

So, NPR followed that with a little bit telling how Bush has made absolutely sure that we associate North Korea with terrorism.  The only thing North Korea has in common with Al Qaeda is that they have been making a nuisance of themselves (And by “making a nusiance” I of course mean “testing nuclear weapons”) at the same time as we are fighting a war that we like to think has something to do with Al Qaeda.

I suppose it is fair to lump North Korea in there with Iraq, though.  There’s probably just as much chance of finding Bin Laden in North Korea as finding him in Iraq.

I was a Republican during the Clinton administration.  By the end of this administration, I expect to be huddled on the floor in a corner, rocking back and forth and mumbling something about “the days of yore”.

Space Invaders is awesome

Teenager moves video icons just by imagination Via Futurismic

The teenager, a patient at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, had a grid atop his brain to record brain surface signals, a brain-machine interface technique that uses electrocorticographic (ECoG) activity – data taken invasively right from the brain surface. It is an alternative to a frequently used technique to study humans called electroencephalographic activity (EEG) – data taken non-invasively by electrodes outside the brain on the scalp. Engineers programmed the Atari software to interface with the brain-machine interface system.

So this kid is not only helping us learn how we might deal with epilepsy, but can also play Space Invaders without a controller.  That’s just one step closer to the end of computer input devices as we know them.  Wouldn’t it be cool if your interaction with the computer wasn’t limited by the speed at which you can communicate with it?

More on Googles purchase of YouTube

The Jeff Pulver Blog: Some thoughts on the Google Purchase of YouTube:

Some interesting speculation here.  Jeff Pulver thinks (hopes?) that this could mean a real step forward towards internet TV.  The combination of YouTube’s community with Google’s developers and resources could be the start of a real alternative to cable/satellite TV.

That could be really cool.  An entirely new model for distributing mainstream video entertainment.  Maybe we’d finally stop being stuck with this antiquated “this show is on at this time” system.  You’d think that the popularity of Tivo and DVR would suggest that maybe people don’t like being forced to watch a show at a specific time, but the networks don’t seem to want to deliver what people want.

Oh, you mean this wasnt just an unsubstantiated rumor?

Google to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion – Yahoo! News Link via Gizmodo

Hmm. I’m not sure what Google’s intention is here. For a while, I trusted their judgement and figured they knew what they were doing. But their sea of perpetual betas is starting to get old. Yes, I love Gmail. Yes, I love Google maps. Yes, I use writely and calendar and spreadsheets and translate. But they have a million more things that are in a constant state of upheaval. I guess it’s good that YouTube is pretty stable.

I wonder if they’re going to make a lot of changes. Google is much more of a target for the lawsuits that YouTube has been getting over the copyrighted content that people put up. And Google has been much more willing to remove things under pressure from copyright holders (Probably why no one I know uses Google video). YouTube has never really made any money, so I think people hesitated to sue them. Google, on the other hand, has gobs of money. Will Comedy Central stop thinking it’s cute that you can find about a million Daily Show clips on YouTube now that YouTube is Google?

You know what I’d like to see come out of this?  A standardized video format.  Something I can view embedded in a browser, or streaming, or on my desktop, or wherever, nicely compressed, in stereo, and all that.  I don’t want Real Player and QuickTime and WMV and Divx and whatever the heck else you need to watch video.  I want one little app that plays one little open source format that EVERYONE uses.  Can you do that, YouTube and Google?  Please?

Ive actually WORKED from home

So, I have honestly spent most of the day working at home. Now, to be fair, that was all spent installing Subversion, Java 1.5, the GWT, and Intellij IDEA, and it’s still not all working, but I’ve been doing things for work since nine this morning. With a quick break to go to the grocery store and then fix lunch.

I’m close to getting something to work, though. So close. Right now, though, I’m going to get up from the computer. I think that will be best for my mental well-being. I might even go for a run, since I haven’t done any physical activity since Friday.

Edit: Good day for a run. Ran past an old coworker I haven’t seen in over a year who now works right around the corner.

Working from home

Our office is all but closed today, and I got permission to work from home (Mostly because I’m pretty sure I’m technically supposed to do the combination lock on the office door every time I go to the bathroom if I’m the only one there).  And what’s even better is that my assignment for the day is to get IntelliJ up and running with the Google Web Toolkit and see if I can get an environment set up to write some web services.  I’m thinking I might try writing a little something for Complaint Hub if I can get it working (And playing nicely with the WordPress php theme that I’m using).  Maybe I’ll put up a little Nano progress bar so you all can yell at me if I start falling behind next month.

Why I dont blog at home

HOWTO: Draft A Good Complaint Letter – Consumerist

The wife is half-looking over my shoulder as we watch some Sunday Night Football, and she saw the headline.

“How to draft a good complaint letter?  What are you doing?”  She says.  And it’s the tone she used that’s important here.  The tone implied that blogging about how to draft a good complaint letter is utterly worthless and ridiculous.

I run a blog called “Complaint Hub”.  Blogging about complaining is what I do.  And Consumerist also does a lot of complaining.  So sometimes I link to their site (Don’t tell them it’s because they pay attention to who links them, and sometimes link back.  Tell them it’s because they’re so witty.  They’ll like that.).

I don’t think that’s ridiculous at all.  I’m here, providing a service to the community by helping to spread the word about how to write a good complaint letter.

So, go out and write a complaint letter to someone who has wronged you.  It will feel good, trust me.

Norton Antivirus kills my processor

I hate my laptop.  It’s a Dell, and I have a Dell desktop that I’ve had since 1998 that I love.  Once it got too old to do much with, I installed Ubuntu Linux on it, and that’s been pretty cool.  But this laptop has been a piece of crap ever since I bought it.  And now I’ve found that maybe I’ve put too much blame on Dell, and not nearly enough on Norton.  My antivirus that came with the computer expired long ago, and I refuse to pay for virus protection.  I’ve never had a virus in my life.  Never.  And I don’t trust Norton to work, anyway.

So, the computer has been running slowly for a while.  Finally I decided to uninstall all the extra junk I’ve gathered along the way.  Soon enough, I got to Norton.  I can’t believe how much faster the computer is running now that Norton is gone.  It’s not just Norton, but that was the only thing I uninstalled where I saw an immediate change in how the computer was running.

I would suggest to all of you that you get rid of Norton, but I don’t know what you should replace it with.  So I won’t recommend that you do that just yet.  It’s one thing for me to go without virus protection, but I’m not going to recommend that you do it.

But I have to say that I’m thrilled with my uninstalling exploits.  I’ll keep you all posted on how it works from here on out.