Tag: habits

Fact-checking Trump is easy. He tells the same lies over and over again.

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❝ I’ve made it my mission to fact-check every word Donald Trump utters as president. That means trying to watch every speech, read every transcript, decipher every tweet. I’ve accidentally established a reputation for using Twitter to point out that he’s lying within seconds of him telling a lie…

I [Daniel Dale] have no special talent. My secret is that Trump tells the same lies over and over…

❝ Fact-checking Trump is kind of like fact-checking one of those talking dolls programmed to say the same phrases for eternity, except if none of those phrases were true. As any parent who owns a squealing Elmo can tell you, the phrases can get tiresome.

Expand your knowledge of our fake president’s dishonesty by reading Daniel Dale’s complete article.

Obesity? We’re number one, we’re number one!

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❝ Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fattest country in the world?

The obesity rate for American adults (aged 15 and over) came in at a whopping 38.2%, which puts the birthplace of the hamburger and the Cronut at the top of the heftiest-nations-in-the-world rankings, according to an updated survey from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development…

❝ On average, 19.5% of adults are #obese across OECD countries.

❝ In most countries, the OECD has found that women are more obese than men, though obesity rates for the male population are growing rapidly. Education is a determinant as the organization found that less schooling makes a woman two to three times more likely to be overweight than the more educated in about half of the eight countries for which the data was available…

And the OECD has found that obese people have poorer job prospects than their slimmer counterparts, earning about 10% less, and are then less productive at work, with fewer worked hours and more sick days…

❝ The future is fatter: Perhaps even more disturbing is the glimpse that the OECD offers into the coming years…Obesity rates are expected to increase until at least 2030, led by the U.S., Mexico and England, where 47%, 39% and 35% of the population are expected to be obese by 2030.

❝ As for solutions, the OECD suggest food labeling, and offered praise for health promotion campaigns across Facebook and Twitter, or dedicated mobile apps that have been shown to have the potential to help with weight loss and body fat. As one survey showed this week, obesity puts individuals at risk from related illnesses — diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol and more. In other words, you can’t be fat and healthy at the same time.

If that isn’t depressing enough, watch for the posts I have coming up on Artifical Intelligence – and jobs – in the United States. Not all countries handle knowledge the same, eh? 🙂

Will monster wildfire seasons become the new normal?

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Harley looks just like our Sheila

In the end, Ira and Carolyn Hodge drove out with some photos, their clothes, their horse and their dog, Harley.

Their home took seven years for them to build and contained everything they owned – vehicles, mementos from their parents, memories. All of it was reduced to fine ash when the fire swept down the high sides of the densely forested gorge that bottoms out at Canyon Creek in Grant County, Oregon, six hours’ drive east of Portland.

“It was a monster,” Ira says. “A beast.”

He and Carolyn were helping a neighbour hose down their house when it became clear the fire was moving with astonishing speed towards them. “We had five minutes to get out,” Ira recalls. They tossed the few things they had gathered in their car, rounded up their frightened horse and fled over a wooden bridge that burned behind them.

Ira has since talked to experts who came up to survey the damage. They said that the flames may have reached 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit – hot enough to melt copper and aluminium. They sifted through the rubble and there was almost nothing left.

Harley recovered just one possession: a charred bone he had buried somewhere in the yard.

When you drive south out of John Day, up into the canyon towards the Malheur national forest, the flattened homes and the blackened Douglas firs and ponderosas tell this summer’s story.

Wildfires are capricious, and some houses are untouched. But those that the fire found were razed, and the forest it burned will take decades to recover.

Thirty-six homes were destroyed in Grant County on 14 August. That night, the Canyon Creek Complex fire became the most destructive in Oregon for 80 years. The national media glanced and moved on, but the fire is still burning on just over 105,000 acres. That’s about 10 times the size of Manhattan.

In Oregon as a whole, there are 11 large fires burning on 435,799 acres. In Washington there are 14 burning on 900,000 acres. This season – which is still in full swing – has seen 1,422,880 acres burned in the two states, or 2,223 square miles, an area just a little smaller than the state of Delaware.

More than 11,000 firefighters are still in the field. Firefighting resources in the American west are completely committed, and both states have called out their national guardsmen to help contain the blazes. Firefighters have come from as far away as Australia and New Zealand to pitch in, and three firefighters died while in duty.

RTFA. These fires have become an annual national emergency. People are to blame, habits and carelessness are to blame, short-term weather is often to blame and, yes, climate change plays a significant role.

That may be hard to understand for someone who has never had their home or community threatened by a wildfire; but, it is true.

I do not count climate change deniers as relevant. It’s hard to count them as useful citizens of Earth.

Cocaine-carrying phony nuns busted in Colombia

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Three women dressed like nuns have been arrested at a Colombian airport allegedly smuggling drugs…Police said the women, aged 20, 32 and 37 had two kilos of cocaine each strapped to their bodies.

Officers said they became suspicious because the women “didn’t look like nuns” and their habits “didn’t look right”.

They were travelling from the capital Bogota to the island of San Andres, popular with holidaymakers…

The three, who according to police broke into tears when the cocaine was discovered strapped to their legs, will be charged with drug smuggling.

They reportedly said they had been forced into drug trafficking because of “financial hardship”.

The Colombian island of San Andres, just off the coast of Nicaragua, is a popular destination for foreign and Colombian tourists alike.

The island is also along a busy drug-smuggling route, especially popular with speedboats and submarines laden with cocaine, stopping off on their way from Colombia to Central America.

Always useful to avoid a monocultural economy.

FDA approves a sensor you can swallow

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You say you keep hearing Billy Idol tunes from your navel?

Taking a pill seems like the easiest thing in the world. Pill, glass of water and swallow, right? For many people, however, it isn’t that simple. For them, it’s very easy to take the incorrect dosage at the incorrect time. To help prevent this, Proteus Digital Health of Redwood City, California has developed an ingestible chip that can be embedded in pills and other pharmaceuticals.

Taking pills on a regular basis requires a lot of discipline or a really obsessive use of text alerts. Many modern medicines can’t do their job properly if they’re not taken at the correct time, in the correct dosages and in the correct manner. Unfortunately, over half of all patients don’t follow their prescriptions consistently.

Many patients, such as cancer sufferers, transplant recipients and those with HIV must take batteries of medicines that are hard to keep track of. For the elderly, failing memories make it just as difficult. They make errors or fall into bad habits and don’t get the full benefit of their pharmaceuticals. This is where Proteus Digital Health’s ingestible sensor comes in.

The sensor, called the Ingestion Event Marker (IEM), is a sensor chip that can be embedded in a pill and then swallowed by the patient. When the chip reaches the stomach, the stomach fluids start powering it and the chip sends out an ID signal complete with time stamp. This is picked up by a special patch worn by the patient. The patch notes the ID and time stamp, and wirelessly transmits this to a mobile phone application along with data collected directly by the patch such as heart rate, body position and activity.

This information can, with the patient’s consent, be shared with doctors and other caregivers to see if the medication has been taken in at the right time, place and manner and to help the patient develop healthier habits.

My sense of humor gets the better of me sometimes. All I can think is – our government figures we’ll swallow anything.

Partial junk food ban brings positive results in California

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Five years after California started cracking down on junk food in school cafeterias, a new report shows that high school students there consume fewer calories and less fat and sugar at school than students in other states.

…The study found that California high school students consumed on average nearly 160 calories fewer per day than students in other states, the equivalent of cutting out a small bag of potato chips. That difference came largely from reduced calorie consumption at school, and there was no evidence that students were compensating for their limited access to junk food at school by eating more at home.

While a hundred calories here or there may not sound like much, childhood obesity rates have more than tripled in the United States in the last four decades, and many researchers say that most children and adolescents could avoid significant long-term weight gain by cutting out just 100 to 200 extra calories a day…

California students had the lowest daily intake of calories, fat and, especially, added sugars. And it seemed clear that their eating behaviors at school played a large role. California students got a lower proportion of their daily calories from school foods than students in other states: about 21.5 percent, compared with 28.4 percent among students elsewhere…

Still, California’s students had not suddenly become health nuts. They were still eating junk food — just slightly less of it than their peers in other states. And their vitamin and mineral intake was similar to that of students in other parts of the country.

…Dr. Daniel Taber said…said that schools could take an additional step by replacing some of the junk food being filtered out with healthy options like fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Iowa, for example, began requiring in 2010 that at least half of the foods available outside meal plans contain whole grains. Other than that, no state has laws that require whole, unprocessed or fresh foods to be available outside of school lunches for high school students…

Dr. Taber realizes that school-based rules are limited. Students consume about 25 percent of their calories at school. Looking for a magic switch to turn off won’t change the whole problem. The battle for healthy kids is going to require strategies that take the message home.

But, changing the landscape in school – ceded to the junk food trade years ago – is a healthy step forward. These are verifiable results.

One more study finds children consume too much sugar – NSS!

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Older children consume more sugar than younger ones do, boys consume more than girls, and white children consume more than black or Mexican-American children, according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics. And they all consume too much.

Researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a continuous examination of a large cross-section of the American population. The survey includes interviews, physical examinations and laboratory tests of blood and urine. For this study, published on Feb. 29, researchers interviewed subjects about their food consumption over the previous 24 hours…

Boys got an average of 16.3 percent of their calories from added sugar, and girls 15.5 percent. The older the child, the greater the intake of sugar calories — the diets of 2- to 5-year-olds had less than 14 percent sugar, but boys 12 to 19 consumed 17.5 percent of their calories as added sugar, and adolescent girls, 16.6 percent.

Non-Hispanic whites consumed the largest percentage of calories from sugar and Mexican-Americans the smallest. Family income made no difference in sugar consumption.

The numbers reveal two facts that may contradict commonly held beliefs. First, young people got 60 percent of their sugar calories from foods, and only 40 percent from soft drinks. And second, whether it was from food or drink, they got most of their sugar at home, not at school or elsewhere.

Golly – what a surprise.

Before the next study determines the same stupid behavior one more time – how about we spend the money on something that explains to parents they’re brainwashing their kids into self-destruction?

The freedom of solitude – is 1 really the loneliest number?

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Amy Kennedy runs in place during TV commercials and talks to herself in French

If there is any doubt that we’re living in the age of the individual, a look at the housing data confirms it. For millenniums, people have huddled together, in caves, in mud huts, in split-levels and Cape Cods. But these days, 1 in every 4 American households is occupied by someone living alone; in Manhattan, mythic land of the singleton, the number is nearly 1 in 2.

Lately, along with the compelling statistics, a stealth P.R. campaign seems to be taking place, as though living alone were a political candidate trying to burnish its image. Two notable examples: Eric Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, recently published “Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone,” a mash note to domestic solipsism, which he calls “an incredible social experiment” that reveals “the human species is developing new ways to live.” And last fall, an Atlantic magazine cover story examined the rise of the single woman, a piece in which the author Kate Bolick fondly invoked the Barbizon Hotel and visited an Amsterdam apartment complex for women committed to living solo…

True, the benefits of living alone are many: freedom to come and go as you please; the space and solitude to recharge in a plugged-in world; kingly or queenly domain over the bed…

In a sense, living alone represents the self let loose. In the absence of what Mr. Klinenberg calls “surveilling eyes,” the solo dweller is free to indulge his or her odder habits — what is sometimes referred to as Secret Single Behavior. Feel like standing naked in your kitchen at 2 a.m., eating peanut butter from the jar? Who’s to know?

Amy Kennedy, 28, a schoolteacher who has a two-bedroom apartment in High Point, N.C., all to herself, calls it living without “social checks and balances.”

The effects are noticeable, she said: “I’ve been living alone for six years, and I’ve gotten quirkier and quirkier…”

What emerges over time, for those who live alone, is an at-home self that is markedly different — in ways big and small — from the self they present to the world. We all have private selves, of course, but people who live alone spend a good deal more time exploring them…

Ronni Bennett, who is 70 and writes a blog on aging, timegoesby.net, has lived alone for all but 10 or so years of her adult life. She said she has adopted a classic living-alone habit: “I never, ever close the bathroom door.”

The longer she lives alone, she said, the less flexible she becomes — and the less considerate of others’ needs…

RTFA. Beaucoup anecdotes and not a lot of conclusions. Some of these folks think they could re-socialize if they wished to, if it became necessary. Some don’t. Most don’t see any need to find out if they could. I can understand that.