Octopodial Chrome

Robert Kustig (M.D.) discusses the cause of the obesity epidemic: fructose. He’s pretty persuasive, even if his suggested solution of State action is a bit short-sighted. Why not just stop eating and drinking the stuff?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation have a neat tool out: the Panopticlick. Many folks don’t know this, but every time you visit a web page your web browser sends lots of information to the web server you’re talking to—stuff like what web browser you’re using, what sort of pages you can read, which plugins you have installed and so forth. This is necessary in order for the remote web server to answer you appropriately. But it can be used to identify you.

How? Imagine that your web browser is just describing you: it might say that you have brown hair, blue eyes, fair skin, a mole on your left cheek, a slight limp, prefer wearing plaid shirts, never wear a hat, have a birthmark on your left ankle and so forth. None of those data are unique: the world is full of brunettes, full of folks with blue eyes and so forth. But there’re not that many brown-haired, blue-eyed, left-cheek-moled folks out there—and still fewer have fair skin, and fewer still have a slight limp, and fewer still have birthmarks on their left ankles.

Why does this matter? Well, it matters in the same sense that fingerprints matter. Every time you touch something, you’re leaving fingerprints—and every time you visit a website you’re leaving a fingerprint. Pretty nifty, huh?

Forthwith, a rogues’ gallery of unjust beer laws. Florida bans bottles larger than 32 ounces; Iowa beers stronger than 5% ABV; Utah beer over 4%; New York bans beer an liquor in the same business.

When will the madness end?

Here’s an interesting theory from Roger Unger, M.D.: obesity is not the cause of metabolic syndrome but rather a defense against it. Metabolic syndrome is a fancy new name for belly fat and increased risk for heart disease, strokes and diabetes—it’s afflicting more and more Americans these days.

Dr. Unger’s theory is is intriguing, and he may be on to something. I’m not certain, though, what the prognosis is: okay, so fat doesn’t cause the problem but what does? Is it simple lack of exercise? In that case, the answer is simple: raise the gasoline tax to $4/gallon, all proceeds to go toward bicycles for the poor and new bike-only roads. Is it the wrong sort of food? Then start subsidising the right stuff and stop subsidising the wrong stuff (although—what if certain key political states like Iowa can’t meet the nation’s needs for healthy food as they can for maize?). More research is clearly needed.