This is the most profound youtube video I have ever watched. It’s 90 minutes, and it’s filled with things I never knew. For example, it explains what the Atkins Diet and the typical Japanese diet have in common that helps you stay thin. If you don’t want to watch all 90 minutes, the section from 45:00 to 1:09:00 explains how fructose causes all sorts of health problems. If you still don’t want to watch this, here are a few quick facts and teasers:

• There is an epidemic of obese 6-month olds, so it’s not just laziness that causes weight gain.
• Fructose gives you calories without making you feel full.
• Fructose creates almost as many health problems as ethanol.
• Fructose is converted into much more fat that glucose, since fructose does not trigger insulin production to use the sugar, so it just gets stored. You aren’t going to succeed in a low fat diet that is high in fructose.
• High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) and white sugar (sucrose) are equally as bad for you.
  • HFCS is a mixture of approximately 50% glucose and 50% fructose.
  • Sucrose is a molecule made up of a glucose molecule and a fructose molecule bound together, so it is exactly 50% fructose.

This presentation is done by Robert H. Lustig, MD, Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, in the Division of Endocrinology Director of the Weight Assessment for Teen and Child Health (WATCH) Program at the University of California San Francisco.

Since it such a long video, you may want to download it.

This is a very interesting article on the history of producing nitrogen for fertilizer.

http://discovermagazine.com/2001/apr/featbomb

This is a nice presentation on how innovative products need to be managed differently than commodities and that new technologies are continually commoditized. (I also like how the lighting in the auditorium reminds me of MST3K.)

I was thinking about how the lunar month has 28 days, which nicely conforms to four weeks. Then I realized that if we made all the calendar months be four weeks long, that would be 48 weeks total, and there are 52 weeks (plus a day) in a year. Therefore, if we just added one more month, we would have 12 months with exactly 28 days and one month with 29 days. This seems so clean and simple, I was surprised that I never heard anybody mention this idea before. Fortunately, the all-knowing Internet was able to clue me in. A 13 month calendar was proposed back in 1849, and it seems the biggest drawback was that the quarters of the year would then be three months plus one week. This just seemed to weird people out, and the shortening of the months means that 29 days worth of birthdays/holidays would have to be re-done.

I was disappointed that the 13 month calendar was just too drastic a change to ever work, but I was fascinated by the World Calendar, which has been promoted since 1930. This calendar was discussed in the League of Nations and later in the United Nations, but it obviously never took hold. Fortunately, the US calendar is the same as the calendar used internationally, so we don’t have the whole Metric system versus the English system of measurement confusion all over again.

The World Calendar had the really cool effect of eliminating the need to buy a new calendar every year so that you will know what day of the week January 1st or any other holiday falls on. Even the 13 month calendar didn’t solve this problem. How did the World Calendar do it? They just added a week with eight days in it. There are 52 weeks in a year plus one day, so December 30th is a Saturday, December 31st is World Day, and January 1st is always a Sunday. Leap Day is also an extra day of the week, so it is also handled easily by the calendar. Just think how much time would be saved each year by the government and schools planning their calendar? April 15th would be on the same day of the week every year, and Thanksgiving would always be on November 23rd.

If the World Calendar could save so much time and effort as well as help the environment by reducing the number of calendars being printed each year, why was it unsuccessful. It appears that the World Calendar succumbed to one of the problems facing software development. Big Planning Up Front is the easiest way to plan the entire scope of the project, but it also creates the most risk that the project will never be approved or completed. Agile development would implement the most useful features first, so you will have some benefit from the project even if it is cancelled before everything is complete.

My biggest grip with Agile development is when people use it solve problems that don’t exist. If you have a one or two month project that doesn’t have a lot of risk of not being completed, there is no reason to break up the project into one week iterations. However, the World Calendar has been pushed for since 1930, so they definitely could benefit from breaking down their goals into smaller chunks. Here is an example of how we can split up this project to increase the odds of at least partial success:

• Step 1: Make December 31st and February 29th an extra day of the week. Now, every calendar will be the same except Leap Year, and Leap Year will only differ with Leap Day, so March 1st will continue to be on the same day of the week.
• Step 2: Make the quarters of the year more uniform. Currently, the quarters are 90 to 92 days. We can make the year have three 91 day quarters and one 92 day quarter on a normal year and two 91 day quarters and two 92 day quarters on a Leap Year. Just add February 29th every year and make August 31st be Leap Day.
• Step 3: Make the days of the week more uniform for each quarter. The first month of each quarter will have 31 days and the next two months will have 30 days. This is the most drastic change.
  • Extend February to have 30 days.
  • Shorten March to have 30 days.
  • Extend April to have 31 days since it is the first month of the quarter.
  • Shorten May to have 30 days.
• Step 4: Move Leap Day from August 31st to June 31st. I don’t think this step is worthwhile at all, but it does make the calendar exactly what was planned by the World Calendar Association.

In the excellent book, Blink, the author refers to Project Implicit, which is run by Harvard University to study people’s hidden biases. Project Implicit can detect biases that a person might not be aware of by timing how quickly they are able to associate different terms or pictures. For example, words referring to women such as aunt, mother, daughter might be more strongly associated with liberal arts degrees than science degrees.

Of course, this study doesn’t actually measure whether split-second associations affect deliberative decisions. What is amazing is how easily influenced our instantaneous decisions are. Just by watching a movie with non-stereotypical portrayals of races, the author of Blink was able to change the results of the tests at Project Implicit.

This brings me to a question I’ve had for a long time. Why is there such a disparity between the genders in computer science, even when compared to other science degrees? Just to verify that I am not imagining this situation, I found these statistics on declared majors, which confirm my suspicion. My best guess at this point is that computer geeks’ substandard personal hygiene is what makes being a math nerd so much more appealing to women.

One of my pet peaves is reading an online article that claims to
provide useful information but is just a meandering piece of fluff. As
opposed to just writing a tirade as if I were some kind of blogger,
this article will discuss ways to avoid adding more unwanted fluff to
our lives.

Contents:

• What is fluff?
• How to fight fluff.
  • Don’t lie in describing the article.
  • Organize the article.
  • Research the topic.
  • Know when to throw away an article.
  • Let your readers moderate your article.
  • Don’t blog while drunk.
• Summary

What is fluff?

Fluff is definitely in the eye of the beholder. One person’s audience
participation theater is another person’s waste of time, e.g. WWE
wrestling. Fluff isn’t really the problem. It’s the writers who try to
pass off fluff articles as something with substance.

How to fight fluff.

Don’t lie in describing the article.

This is the biggest cause of wasted time. So many articles promise to
reveal great mysteries and to enhance your life, but they don’t live up
to their grandious claims. If you are rambling about some software you
installed, don’t try to pass it off as a product evaluation. Your
writing might be terribly entertaining, but don’t make me skim through
five pages of witticisms looking for a few hard facts. Obviously, many
commercial webzines benefit financially from lying about the contents
of their articles, and they would scoff at my suggestions, since their
job is just to sell ads.

Organize the article.

If you are writing anything of considerable size, it is very helpful to
organize it with paragraph headings or even a table of contents. Also,
don’t try to be funny in your table of contents. I was tempted to use a
bunch of cute taglines in the table of contents, but that wouldn’t help
the reader fight fluff. The Nvu HTML editor
has a nice feature for generating tables of contents for you. I used to
really love Tom’s Hardware for being able to jump to the conclusion of
a product evaluation immediately, since I wouldn’t always need to read
several pages of statistics myself. Unfortunately, Tom’s Hardware has
so many flashing banner ads, that I don’t even want to add a link to
their site on mine.

Research the topic.

In my defense, I spent a whole 5 minutes searching google for
information on writing articles. However, I mainly found generic
academic guidelines for writing. Maybe this is why there is so much
redundancy in blogs. Searching for abstract concepts is hard, but
ranting is easy.

Know when to throw away an article.

At this point, I have only written three, now four, tips on how to
fight fluff. The question I should be asking myself is, “Would anybody
else actually benefit from four measly tips, or should I just accept
the fact that the google ads are the most useful part of my blog.”

Let your readers moderate your article.

Wouldn’t it be nice if slashdot didn’t just let you filter out comments with a low score but also let you filter out articles that are subpar. I guess the Alexa toolbar
does this already, but this still could be a useful feature to add to
blog software, or you could just read your flame mail, since it’s
really only constructive criticism from concerned readers.

Don’t blog while drunk.

It really is only funny to you, unless, of course, you completely embarrass yourself by exposing your deepest feelings.

Summary

This article isn’t anywhere near as useful as I first anticipated, but
I think it will help me in structuring my future posts. This is my
first blog entry, so I am still trying to decide if it is cool if I get
“first post”.