Delicious LiveJournal Links for 9-22-2010

[andrewducker]

• Australian 17-year-old takes blame for Twitter chaos
  (tags: twitter worm)
• Key changes to US health insurance take effect tomorrow on Sept. 23. And about time too.
  (tags: usa healthcare)
• The maths of the music industry - how the music labels make a fortune while musicians don't.
  (tags: music publishing marketing piracy audio copyright)
• Blind person finds the iPhone amazing. Sounds pretty incredible actually.
  (tags: iphone apple accessibility blind)
• Children with adenovirus 36 weigh, on average, 50lbs more than people that don't have it.
  (tags: obesity weight infection virus health)
• American Intelligence, Guantanamo, and the appalling clusterfuck of basically pure evil that has me incandescent with rage.
  (tags: EpicFail interrogation torture usa guantanamo intelligence military fbi cia war)
• An excellent speech on liberty, human rights, and the liberal agenda
  (tags: libdem liberal uk politics)
• Mapping Stereotypes. Some very, very funny bits and pieces here.
  (tags: maps visualization funny europe stereotypes map)
• Samoan clerics blame homosexuals for global warming
  (tags: gay globalwarming EpicFail)
• Stonewall: “We’re against Equal Marriage”
  (tags: gay lgbt rights EpicFail)
• Vatican Bank being investigated over money-laundering
  (tags: catholicism banking fraud)
• Lib Dems call for end to barriers to gay marriage
  (tags: gay marriage lgbt libdem politics rights uk)

Comments

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

I've read that particular music article before, and I think that it's absolutely disgusting. I swore I would make sure that the record labels never make any money out of me.

This has proved pretty much impossible to hold to, but whatever.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

* On the music thing: let's just say, it's a lot different for writers (and a lot better).

* On the AD36-obesity link: this has been bubbling under for a couple of years now, but this is the first hardcore study by a first rank western research institution (the original finding came out of India where a postgrad student noticed that chickens that had survived an infection put on a lot of fat). I'm betting on this as a major viral pandemic that's been hitting us for decades; like CFS, it's one that takes a long time to recognize as such because the symptoms arise post-infection and are relatively subtle.

[andrewducker]

I'm glad they're better for writers. I wonder if this is for odd historical reasons, or because the majority of writers don't sign their contracts while still teenagers.

I hope you didn't read the comments on the obesity link. They made me want to punch people.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

I've thought for a long time that there was probably some infective agent PLUS particular (fairly common) genetic profile that were combining with increased food intakes to produce an increased incidence of obesity. Also maybe a developmental window. Nice to see proper research going on.

I was just going on my own vague biological knowledge, plus observations of the world around me and thoughts like "Even if I went on the mega beer, sugar + cheese diet for ten years I just would not get *that* fat - what is going on?" And that the younger generation were almost all as fat as the "fat kids" were when I was at school. Watch film footage of crowds from the 70's to see what bodily norms were back then... it's kinda shocking the change.

[andrewducker]

Yup. I totally agree.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

For historical reasons, we have a whole bunch of cultural hang-ups that we're mostly not aware of.

The ancient greeks equated beauty with good (if you were good, the gods smiled upon you and made you beautiful; if you were bad, you would be cursed with ugliness), and even today we have hang-overs of this attitude -- look for beautiful villains and ugly heroes in Hollywood movies, for example.

Among these, there's the fat == gluttonous == sinful thing in Christianity. In ancient China, being fat meant "wealthy", i.e. "lucky". We just happened to fall victim to the meme-complex of an ascetic religion (the Esenes) that considered eating too much to be un-Godly ... and which spread via its bastard offspring, Christianity. So that now "fat" people are assumed somehow to be sinful and responsible for their condition, either by eating too much or living badly or something else.

I'd be utterly unsurprised to discover that there's another pathogen out there that has been unrecognized because of a blind-spot in our cultural outlook which insists that its symptoms are evidence of immorality. After all, look at AIDS. (And note that, given how widespread the obesity epidemic has become, and the negative impact of obesity on life expectancy, it could be killing more people than HIV.)

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Steve Albini said pretty much the same things about the music industry, better, earlier: http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

[andrewducker]

I think our understanding of the way the brain works is going to play merry havoc with that as well. It's much harder to blame people when you understand the way in which they end up carrying out their actions.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

There was an sf novel (I think it was in the Hooded Swan series) which included an alien disease which made people immensely fat and wasn't diagnosed for a long time because people assumed it was a moral issue.

At the time (70s? 80s?), my first thought was that people wouldn't be that stupid, and my second thought was that they just might.

In other news, on the first reading I thought The Sparrow was unfair to the Catholic Church.