Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary Rotating Header Image

July 18th, 2008:

Odd Lots

  • I'm not quite as ga-ga as the reporter, but make no mistake: This is one of the most startling deep-space videos ever taken, of the Moon making a transit across the Earth, seen from a distance of fifty million kilometers. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
  • My nephew Brian just bought a Blackberry cellphone and is trying to find a software package that will allow him to sync his Google Calendar data with the phone. This is something I've never had to do (I do not currently have a PDA nor a smartphone) and so I'm looking for suggestions.
  • Eat kohlrabi, Dean Ornish: A long-term study published in the New England Journal of Medicine indicates that low-carb diets are significantly better at helping people lose weight and lower cholesterol than low-fat diets. As complex as the obesity issue is, I speak to people again and again and again who have found what we've found in their own lives: Lowering fat does not help much. Lowering carbs, and especially lowering sugar, helps a lot.
  • Carol and I were down in Lincoln Park the other day, and saw saturation advertising for a wind-powered condo complex that intrigued me enough to write the Web address down across Heath Ledger's late face on the Red Eye. Take a look and read the fine print. Those well-hidden wind turbines on the roof generate up to 2% of the building's electricity. And so wind power takes its place as a techno-fetish among the terminally hip and the gorgeously clueless. Larger turbines could generate significantly more of the building's power, but the neighbors might complain—and that's not hip at all, is it?