How young liberals become old conservatives.

Obesity in the United States is associated with poverty. Michael Pollan asks why:

Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

"Foodlike substance." Accurate, I think.

This week's wrong definition of faith comes from David P. Barash who writes:

It has long been, let us say, an article of faith that at least in polite company, religious faith — belief without evidence — should go unchallenged.

If Barash could drop the attitude, this article would be an interesting survey of explanations for the origin of religion in human society.

Calorie restricted diets and anorexia:

A CR person says he wants to live longer; an anorexic typically says she wants to be thin. But the deeper wish for a sense of purpose—and the discovery of that purpose in the rewards of not eating—are the same.

Steve Chapman writes about the partial-birth abortion decision.

You don't actually have to exercise. Someone just has to convince you that you're exercising:

Although actual behavior did not change, 4 weeks after the intervention, the informed group perceived themselves to be getting significantly more exercise than before. As a result, compared with the control group, they showed a decrease in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index. These results support the hypothesis that exercise affects health in part or in whole via the placebo effect.

Rethinking Rachel Carson:

Her concerns about the effects of insect death on bird populations were well-founded. But threats to human health were central to her argument, and Carson was wrong about those. Despite massive exposure in many populations over several decades, there is no decisive evidence that DDT causes cancer in people, and it is unforgivable that she overlooked the enormous boon of DDT for malaria control in her own time.

Another promising treatment for HIV.

Ron Rosenbaum explores the world of gold-plated Scrabble sets, hand-cranked gadgets, and, of course, the SnacDaddy.

Srinivasa Varadhan has won the Abel Prize. I'm embarassed to admit I'd never heard of him before.

The fossil fuel economy is making us less social:

We’ve built an economy where we need no one else; with a credit card, you can harvest the world’s bounty from the privacy of your room. And we’ve built a culture much the same — the dream houses those architects build, needless to say, come with a plasma screen in every room. As long as we can go on earning good money in our own tiny niche, we don’t need a helping hand from a soul.

Of course it's better for the environment to bring your own mug to the coffee shop. Or maybe not.

There are a bunch of problems with this study; it looks like they're calculating "energy of manufacture" in a very simple and probably inaccurate way, and I'd like them to include "energy of delivery" and "energy of disposal" (ie, gasoline for the garbage truck), both of which are costs that occur many times for the disposable cups and only once for the reusable. But it is striking anyway - I wouldn't have guessed that the environmental cost of washing a mug is comparable to the cost of manufacturing a styrofoam cup.

A loyal reader points me to this piece about the race to find the most stable three-dimensional shape. Those who know their fables will be able to predict the winner.

On a slightly more technical note, Terrence Tao explains why my favorite millenium problem - global regularity for Navier-Stokes - is hard.

Let your kid play outside:

A child is almost as likely to be struck by lightning as kidnapped by a stranger, but it's not fear of lightning strikes that parents cite as the reason for keeping children indoors watching television instead of out on the sidewalk skipping rope.

Worrying shortens your life; the good news is you can stop worrying.

It works for NASCAR, why not NASA? I look forward to seeing the shuttle Discovery with a huge DuPont decal and the number 24 on its side...

I was introduced to the greatest rap lyrics of 2007 in a 15-passenger van on the way to New Orleans:

I'm hot 'cause I'm fly
You ain't 'cause you not.

The Village Voice goes into painstaking detail to explain why these lines are so compelling. I especially like Figure 4.

What happens when one of the world's greatest violinists takes his three-million-dollar violin and acts as a street performer in a DC subway station? It turns out that context matters.