Monday, November 29, 2004

Cheese 'can be as addictive as morphine': "An American doctor has claimed that cheese can be as addictive as morphine.

Dr. Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee on Responsible Medicine, says cheese is addictive because it contains small amounts of morphine from cows' liver.

In his book - Breaking the Food Seduction: The Hidden Reasons Behind Food Cravings and Seven Steps to End them Naturally - he explains why people are hooked on products like cheese, meat, sugar and chocolate.

He says: 'There's a biochemical reason many of us feel we can't live without our daily fix.

'Cheese, for example, contains high levels of casein, a protein that breaks apart during digestion to produce morphine-like opiate compounds, called casomorphins.

'These opiates are believed to be responsible for the mother-infant bond that occurs during nursing. It's no surprise many of us feel bonded to the refrigerator.'

"
Top News Article | Reuters.com: "CHICAGO (Reuters) - Brain scans of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder show abnormalities in the fiber pathways along which brain signals pass, scientists said on Monday.

The finding indicates the disorder may be more than just a chemical imbalance, they added.

Using an imaging technique called diffusion tensor imaging, researchers found subtle anatomical differences in children diagnosed with ADHD that may affect communication between key areas of the brain -- the frontal cortex, basal ganglia, brain stem and cerebellum."

Friday, November 26, 2004

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Two more top spies quit troubled CIA: "According to a former CIA official quoted in Newsweek magazine, he tried to lean on the agency to declassify information that he could use to 'embarrass the Democrats'.
Much of Mr Goss's career has been accidental. He is the scion of a wealthy Connecticut family and joined the CIA after Yale in 1960, when he fell into a cross-purposes conversation with a recruiter at a jobs fair.
He thought the man was a representative from his father's metal company, telling him he had just stopped by to say hello to his dad's friends. The recruiter assumed he was the son of a senior agency official.
In his job interview for the clandestine service, the jacket of the CIA director, Allen Dulles, caught fire. Assuming it must be a test, Mr Goss said nothing but stared at the smoke rising. No doubt impressed by his cool, Dulles hired him. "

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

ABC News: Versions Differ in Wis. Hunter Shootings: "There have been previous clashes between Southeast Asian and white hunters in the region. Hunters have complained the Hmong do not understand the concept of private property and hunt wherever they want. The tension once led to a fistfight in Minnesota, and a Hmong bow hunter in Wisconsin this fall reported having at least two white hunters point guns at him. "

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

A View to a Kill - JFK Reloaded is just plain creepy. By Clive?Thompson: "When I finally managed to kill JFK and watched his head blow open while he flopped forward like a rag doll, I was genuinely horrified. The game wants you to think about what's happening as a mere physics experiment, but you can't, nor would you want to. Because it's focused solely on the narrow question of whether you can replicate Oswald's shots, it doesn't try to achieve the sort of catharsis that is supposed to come from wrenching art. When the ballistics reports told me, for example, that one of my shots hit JFK in the right shoulder, exited his chest, bounced off his right fingers, and ricocheted through the limo until it hit Connally in the shin, I wasn't really thinking about how if I just aimed a little higher, then I could've gotten closer to 1,000 points."
:: rogerebert.com :: reviews: "As for 'P.S.' and the new F. Scott (Topher Grace), there's little doubt in the mind of Louise Harrington (Laura Linney) about what she should do, which is to take him home in the middle of the afternoon so they can have safe sex immediately. That she is a Columbia University admissions officer and he is a student applying for admission creates an ethical conflict, but should ethics stand in the way of earthshaking metaphysical lust? We would all agree that ethics certainly should not, although of course if a 39-year-old male admissions officer were to sleep with a 20-year-old female applicant, castration would be too good for the fiend."

Saturday, November 20, 2004

:: rogerebert.com :: (xhtml): "'But to the guy who's killed, try telling him about heroism and courage. Get him to listen after he's dead. Even World War II, with all its idealism, basically there was a lot of hypocrisy. Because basically what the rich were saying was, 'We loaned a lot of money to Europe that we're never going to get back if Hitler wins.' That was a valid enough reason for fighting the war."

Friday, November 19, 2004

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Friday, November 12, 2004

FARK.com: (1211014) Dave Matthews offers $100,000 to people he pooped on: "I work for the company that does the live sound for DMB. All the buses were parked at the venue at the time of the dumping. They've been saying this the whole time. I don't know why it keeps coming up.

2004-11-12 01:06:05 AM Eidolon

I met Dave Matthews at a wedding a few years ago. When the cajun fiddler found out who Dave was he pulled some bacon fat out of his pocket, cut him off a slice and Dave actually ate it. Helluva nice guy.

2004-11-12 01:07:12 AM Mr. Programmer [TotalFark]

Whats funny is i used to have DMB.. whenever a video would come on or their song was on the radio id change the channel.. i didnt do that for any other band, i HATED them.. i would hang up on people at work if the hold music was a DMB song, etc.. but my friend who was a DMB nut sent me a few songs and told me to listen to them.. so i did.. and i hated them.. but then a few months later i was hearing parts in my head so i listened again and started to like it, now i have all the albums and some live concerts and dvds and i love most of the songs.. i also like daves solo album (some devil). give them/him a chance!"

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Thesis/Dissertation Final Oral Examination Schedule -- University of Louisville
Salt Lake Tribune - Salt Lake Tribune Home Page: "Arafat tolerated the bombers, Kader says, because 'stopping them would have required a bloody civil war and he wasn't willing to do that.' "
Salt Lake Tribune - Salt Lake Tribune Home Page: "For no apparent reason, Arafat sometimes would order everyone in the room to switch chairs. He did that just before his near-fatal 1992 plane crash in the Libyan desert, one of the pilots told Ritchie. Had he been in his original seat, Arafat would certainly have been killed."

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

eBay - , Historical Memorabilia and Collectibles items at low prices cub scout uniforms on ebay.
JSTOR: Journal of Higher Education: Vol. 64, No. 1, p. [19]
COUNTERPRODUCTIVE EFFORT IN THE WRITING PROCESS
A Whole Lotta Nothing: Persuaders: "Like Douglas Rushkoff's last piece, Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders scared the living bejesus out of me. After the fog of advertising consumed our lives, they went emotional on us, and then they ingrained advertising into everything we watch, read, and consume. Now they're focus grouping us to the point where their messages reach our subconscious.

The political stuff at the end was especially disheartening, on both sides of the fence. It was like George Lakoff's language research combined with psychology that approaches hypnotism, all used to push people to support political positions that ran counter to common sense."

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

AntennaWeb
stevenberlinjohnson.com: "First, if Bush does win, I really don't want to hear a lot of carping about how Kerry was a terrible candidate and blew an easy win. The fact that Kerry is leading by a hair on November 1st is pretty amazing in itself. You cannot underestimate the unique power of the White House in this post 9/11 period; I cringed every time Bush described himself as a 'war president' but they had him saying those words because they know they have an hypnotic power over people. It is no easy feat to take on a likable guy who cuts taxes and is engaged in a battle to defeat the forces of darkness before they kill you and your family. Even if the guy has been a miserable failure when it comes to actually doing his job. "
WSJ.com - Analyzing Customers, Best Buy Decides Not All Are Welcome: "The devils are its worst customers. They buy products, apply for rebates, return the purchases, then buy them back at returned-merchandise discounts. They load up on 'loss leaders,' severely discounted merchandise designed to boost store traffic, then flip the goods at a profit on eBay. They slap down rock-bottom price quotes from Web sites and demand that Best Buy make good on its lowest-price pledge. 'They can wreak enormous economic havoc,' says Mr. Anderson."
Adding Additional Sound Samples to GarageBand: "Since these .exs files appear to be identical to those used by GarageBand's 'big brother' Logic, I wanted to see if I could come up with a way to use additional samples. Please note, I think the samples that come with GarageBand are generally pretty good to very good, but I'm always looking to make a cool toy even cooler. "

Monday, November 08, 2004

Plastic: Just Another Stolen Election?: "Two things: A bias in the actual polling. The pollsters have said that 59% of the people being asked were women, largely because of them time of day when the polls were being done.

Second: Early voting. Early voting was the rage this year. Some places had up to 45% of their voting done through early voting. None of the early voters are included in the exit polls.

I don't see how the results of the exit polls could be accurate, when they didn't poll a significant part of the electorate, and mispolled the part they did by asking too many women. "
jwz - election rigging: "There would be no issue at all if the fucking Democrats could pick someone even half likable to run.

Kerry was very much a 'hold your nose and pull the lever' person - he was greasy, evasive and lacked even the most basic of personalities. When they picked him over people like Dean or even Edwards I figured they were planning to lose anyway and didn't want to waste a good candidate against Bush.

The mistake they made in that strategy was Bush falling on his face and making it possible to actually win. I think if they'd had someone like Dean in there, the Dems would have won."
stateIQ-income: "How State IQ relates to income and politics"
dada_send.pl - Discussion Lists: "dada_send.pl - Discussion Lists"
Democratic Underground Forums - Proving a fix is actually very simple and quick, so here it is:: "The assertion by pundits/Bushies that exit polling was 'way off', and thus, exit polls, which showed an easy Kerry victory in both Ohio and Florida, were incorrecty skewed and did not represent the electorate, is completely bogus.

This is disproved in minutes by simply noting the entire rest of the suite of exit polls conducted by AP and distributed to the news media. View here:

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/presiden... /
"
Voting Irregularities

Sunday, November 07, 2004

macosxhints - Sync your iCal events without using external servers
Herald Sun: Don't whine, says Clinton [08nov04]: "Mr Clinton attributed the loss to a failure to combat how Republicans portrayed Democrats to small-town America. 'If we let people believe that our party doesn't believe in faith and family, doesn't believe in work and freedom, that's our fault,' he said.

Democrats 'need a clear national message, and they have to do this without one big advantage the Republicans have, which is they won't have a theological message that basically paints the other guy as evil,' he said. - NEW YORK POST"
Election Fallout / Faith in democracy, not government: "Thus, concern for two Americas is not discernable in John Edwards' multimillion-dollar legal fees, the Kerry jet, or Soros Inc.'s global financial speculation. It is easy for a Noam Chomsky or Michael Moore to trash Halliburton, but Red America wonders about the source of university contracts that subsidize privileged professors' sermons or why corporate recording, cinema and advertising conglomerates that enrich celebrities are exempt from Hollywood's Pavlovian censure of big business. That the man who nearly destroyed the small depositors of Great Britain also fueled MoveOn.org seemed to say it all."

Saturday, November 06, 2004

:: rogerebert.com :: (xhtml): "The method of the film is crucial to its success. 'Tarnation' is famous for having been made for $218 on a Macintosh and edited with the free iMovie software that came with the computer. Of course hundreds of thousands were later spent to clear music rights, improve the soundtrack and make a theatrical print (which was invited to play at Cannes). Caouette's use of iMovie is virtuoso, with overlapping wipes, dissolves, saturation, split screens, multiple panes, graphics, and complex montages. There is a danger with such programs that filmmakers will use every bell and whistle just because it is available, but 'Tarnation' uses its jagged style without abusing it."

Friday, November 05, 2004

Ask MetaFilter | Community Weblog: "Well konolia, it's like this. Your basic difference between jews, protestants and mormons is that jews don't recognize jesus, protestants don't recognize the pope, and mormons don't recognize each other in liquor stores.

A mormon I once told that to said that sometimes one even fails to recognize family members in liquor stores."

Thursday, November 04, 2004

Waxy.org: Daily Log: Greg Knauss on the Political Divide: "There is a divide in this country today, miles wide and fathoms deep. It has cleaved our great nation, and has only grown — and will only continue to grow. But it's not a left/right split, or Democrat/Republican one. It's lunatic/non-lunatic.

Our culture has been swept along in a tide of emotionally-resonant, steadfastly anti-rational entertainment, and politics is at the head of the wave. The course of our country, the future of our people, is being determined by lizard-brain responses to images designed to trigger sub-rational responses.

Michael Moore and Ann Coulter aren't opposed to each other, they are each other: determined propagandists, using the language and mediums best suited to strike at the emotional core of their audiences. They do not work from a common set of facts, and would ignore them even if they existed. When they speak well, they're Henry V on St. Crispin's Day. When they speak poorly, they're a spittle-flecked wacko with an 'End of the World is Nigh' sign. But that's just a matter of presentation: they're all lunatics, asking us to stop thinking and start feeling. And to start feeling what they want us to feel.
"
Democratic Underground Forums - Kerry winning Exit Polls - FRAUD LOOKS PROBABLE: "Kerry is well ahead in exit polls, but still losing the counts. WTH is going on?"
TomPaine.com - Kerry Won. . .: "I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad.  But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.


Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent.  Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.


So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, 'Who did you vote for?' Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, 'Was your vote counted?' The voters don't know.


Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, 'An Election Spoiled Rotten,'  November 1.]


Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.


The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called 'spoilage.' Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote."

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

Apple's X11 vs. XDarwin | MacMegasite: "enerally when you have probelms installing the binary fink packages, the solution is to run:
'sudo apt-get -f install'
with no packages specified.
Then try installing again."
Re: epiphany

Fixing fink with xcode tools 1.5, which I just installed to try and fix fink. Sigh.

Monday, November 01, 2004

Q
The New Yorker: "In most industries, companies that treat their customers poorly end up losing them. But insurance brokers, lawyers, and stock advisers are rarely held to the same standard. Deluded by the cult of expertise, principals are remarkably hesitant to fire agents. (Marsh says that the scandal hasn’t cost it many clients.) In some fields—medicine, for example—such deference may make sense. In others, it does not. Sometimes agents are just glorified middlemen, and the best response if they misbehave is not to regulate or supervise them but simply to get rid of them. Now that the Internet and cheap software enable buyers and sellers to find each other with great ease, why take a chance on a broker who may be ripping you off? If the middleman offend thee, cut him out."
The Linux Cookbook: Tips and Techniques for Everyday Use - Analyzing Text