Ever man in college has done this

From PhdComics.Com.

This law has been proven at my work countless times

The grass is always greener



Another argument for low carb diets

Many years after the low carb diet craze kicked off by Dr. Atkins has diet down, I still find that keeping the number of carbs in my diet low has been key to my weight loss. And it turns out there is yet more evidence to back up this kind of eating plan.

Pay What You Like

How much is a burger worth? How about a cup of coffee? New restaurants are popping up where you decide what a meal is worth. The basic set up is that restaurant will have a "donation" box near either the counter or the door where you pay what you can afford or what you think the meal was worth. So far most of the restaurants have had success and say it is more likely that people will pay more than their meal is worth than less. I can see this working. One of the conveniences is also that some people pay for a weeks worth of coffee at a time or if they forget to go to the ATM before the restaurant, then they just pay more next time they come in.

The Truth of Doggie Love

Sometimes I wonder.

"Do As I Say, Not As I Do" is again a failure

The New York Times has up an amazing story of an African country which turned itself from a net beggar to a net exporter of food by doing one simple thing. They defied Western "experts" and instituted a fertilizer subsidy program which mimicked those in place in the USA and Britain. Typically, the World Bank refuses to grant loans to countries which subsidize fertilizer, so most nations try to make due with depleted soil and wind up starving.

In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. “We will not be able to use it!” Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly...In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.

Here is proof yet again that the best way to succeed is to do what is proven to work, and not what bureaucrats theorize in office buildings. Of course, we still need to see what happens long-term, but for the moment the people of Malawi is fed and even able to bring in some capital by exporting food.

Are foods getting healthier with the trans-fat ban

It seems the answer to that question is not as cut and dry as you'd think. Less trans-fat == healthier food, you'd think. But it seems that some food producers are simply replacing the trans-fats for saturated fat, which is only nominally better than the trans-fat it's replacing. Reading about all these chemicals and what they do to your body almost makes me want to eat raw like my mom, but then I remember how much I like steak and lobster and decide otherwise :)