Actually, it looks like Type II diabetes is caused by POVERTY. See this map, showing where people are living in poverty. It looks like regions of high poverty correlate very closely with regions of high diabetes incidence:

http://visualizingeconomics.com/2007/08/11/united-states-poverty-map/

There are a few exceptions: in Southern Texas, poverty is higher but diabetes is not. But it's pretty much one-to-one elsewhere.

So, why this correlation? I think that poor people can only afford starchy food like potatoes and spaghetti, so they develop diabetes.

Great poem on English pronunciation:

http://www.mipmip.org/tidbits/pronunciation.shtml

It also lags for me just as the balls begin to move individually. I suspect that the usual MPEG video compression algorithm has a lot of trouble with that kind of information: lots of tiny objects (high spatial frequency information), moving from one video frame to the next. IIRC, MPEG compression relies on motion estimation: it takes two consecutive video frames, and checks if the second frame can be constructed from the previous frame by sliding and stretching chunks of it. Then, it takes this construction, which will be similar to the second frame (but not exactly equal), and encodes the slight differences, and transmits them.

Probably lots of tiny balls moving around randomly creates just the kind of consecutive frames where you cannot predict the next frame by sliding and stretching the previous frame. Hence there are huge differences between frames, and you don't get enough compression to transmit full frames within the bandwidth budget that vimeo provides.

> She has a promising career as a pole dancer
> to look forward to.

My thought's exactly, but it's more like an inverse pole dance. I wonder how many hits the video would get with an ugly man handling the hoop?

I don't like rich people owning the means of production, but I don't think that's what's going on here.

It depends on what it means for a company to "own" another. I noticed that one of the top companies listed in the study is Vanguard. They are a mutual-fund manager, and specialize in low-fee index funds. Vanguard MANAGES the money of its customers: you give it a pile of your money (usually your retirement money), and they will use it to buy shares in companies. If those companies pay dividends, Vanguard's customers get some of those dividends. If those companies' shares increase in value, Vanguards' customers have more money (on paper).

I don't think that Vanguard has a lot of its own money invested in owning shares of those companies. It's using the customers' money. And that's a good thing, it's exactly what the customers what Vanguard to do!

Since most of the top companies in this list are banks and mutual-fund managers, I suspect what you're seeing here is that a lot of middle-class people are putting their retirement money into mutual funds, and thus collectively own a lot of the world's biggest companies.

It is not accurate to say that the mutual-fund companies actually own the shares of the stocks in their funds. They are investing their customers' money.

Of course, many mutual-fund companies have high fees, and otherwise are greedy and don't play nice, but that's another story.

Maybe the spinal column of the shonisaur got squeezed length-wise, and collapsed into the zigzag pattern that we see here, kind of like an accordion.

Then again, maybe prehistoric giant squids liked to decorate their lairs.

Alejo

That' what happens when you let architects get too familiar with 3D surface modeling software.

Or, dip the sponge in water with bleach. Then rinse the sponge. Good old sodium hypochlorite.

All hail Dr. Kwasniewski! Millions of Poles are eating a high-fat, adequate protein, low-carb diet and are in great health.

A Texas woman has won the million-dollar lottery FOUR times, using scratch tickets like the one in the story:

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/texas-woman-wins-millions-lottery-fourth-time/story?id=11097894

By the way, she graduated from Stanford University, and taught math for 10 years. Obviously it's not just luck. She clearly has figured out weaknesses in the design of the scratch tickets, just like the Canadian statistician in the story here. The difference is that she kept the money, unlike the statistician who TOLD THE LOTTERY ABOUT HIS DISCOVERY (why on Earth did he do that?).

People who figure out weaknesses in casino games, even if they aren't cheating, are soon expelled from the casino. Lotteries are more tolerant.

Too silly for comment, but hey I'll comment anyway.

Suppose religiosity is inherited. Ancient civilizations were all very religious. Hence we, their descendants, would also be religious. But many modern countries are very secular. Where did all that secularity come from? Surely it can't be genes. That makes no sense.

More likely the reason modern countries are more secular is that they are more urban. When you live off the land, you are in intimate contact with nature, which is more powerful than you and serves as something onto which you can project your religious instincts. When you live in a city, your world is man-made, and you lose the feeling that something non-human controls your life. There's no place to put your religious instincts.

And let's not forget Nietzsche, who said "God is dead" and also said "we ourselves have killed Him." He meant that Christianity's call to "know the Truth" gave birth to science and scepticism, which in turn undermined Christian faith.

Using materialist explanations (like genetics) for psychological, social and spiritual phenomena is bound to produce absurdities like this one.

Alejo

I looked up the Oxford Electric Bell on wikipedia and, sure enough, this may be doing something similar. The "galvanic motor" driven by the batteries may be drawing such a tiny amount of charge with each cycle that the batteries have not yet run down completely.

But they will run out, eventually. Nothing magic is going on here.

Actually, a very revealing map shows the rate of POVERTY in the USA (google "poverty in USA map" images). Such maps are almost identical to this one.

I think the true cause of both diabetes and obesity is that poor people can't afford good food like meat and fresh vegetables, and have to get by on starchy cheap food like spaghetti, potatoes, and bread.

The map, effectively, shows the distribution of social and economic inequality, not disease.

Alejo Hausner

I found the user interface for the black-and-white grid puzzle very confusing. I suggest you look into Simon Tatham's puzzle collection, an open-source set of puzzles which includes a program that will generate endless variations on this one. I play his puzzles a lot. They're well programmed. I recommend them highly.

Reminds me of the Beatles: "so, I lit a fire, isn't it good, Norwegian wood".

Wait, IKEA is Swedish. Drat.

Alejo