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Yet another post on my series on Food. This time it’s a video by Mark Bittman who talks about our food system, what we’ve lost and what we should be doing. (I love his focus on real food – not most of the imitation food we have today.)
Original Post. Licensed as CC-BY-NC-ND.
(Thanks to Deb for finding this!)
Lawrence Lessig by Joi Ito, CC-BY
The Open Video Alliance will be hosting an online chat with Lawrence Lessig tomorrow at 6pm eastern time / 3pm pacific time (see more time zones here.)
There are a lot of events in person as well. I will be at the event near San Francisco.
The event will also be broadcast live with open video, thanks to Fluendo. The best client for you to watch it in will be either Firefox or VLC. More instructions on clients can be on the openvideo wiki.
We’ve got an opening at Mozilla to work on the team that does both web developer and mozilla developer documentation. We’re looking for someone awesome, who groks HTML, CSS JavaScript, C, C++, loves working with people and is a great writer to boot.
Basically we’re looking for a word Ninja.
If you fit the bill, feel free to apply.
(Note: Ninja outfit not included with hire offer letter.)
There was a recent post on LWN suggesting that three specific Nokia patents may cover Theora. A deeper analysis indicates that’s just not true.
Two of the patents 6,950,469 and 7,263,125, are post-VP3 and therefore not relevant because the patent filing dates are after the invention and introduction of VP3 (the basis for Theora.) Thus, Theora predates these patents and could not infringe.
The other patent, 6,504,873, requires the affirmative step of defining a “linear equation” between two reference pixels. Theora does not use such an equation; thus it doesn’t satisfy the limitations of the claims and does not infringe.
A video of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine in operation at the Computer History Museum.
A larger and higher quality version of the video is also available.
Recently, I’ve been doing some posts on food. This is another one.
A friend of mine recently posted a link to a pretty interesting article about an animal model meant to observe the effects of artificial sweeteners on rats. Here’s the money quote:
Even though the saccharin-sweetened yogurt group actually got fewer calories from their yogurt, they gained more weight than the group fed yogurt sweetened with glucose (Swithers & Davidson, 2008; Swithers, Baker, & Davidson, 2009). At the end of 5 weeks of study, the saccharin-fed rats had also gotten significantly fatter than the glucose-fed rats.
With my own body I know that there is some kind of expectation created by texture and flavor when you’re eating a specific food. In my experience, eating artificial sweeteners often makes me hungrier. And after eating a relatively natural diet based on foods that I can recognize, eating something that includes processed ingredients and artificial sweeteners is a shocking experience once I’ve consumed it. I can tell my body doesn’t really know how to react.
If this is something that interests you I also strongly suggest watching the video in my post on sugar by Dr. Robert Lustig as well as the video of Michael Pollan speaking at the Long Now Foundation. These are both long attention span posts, but they are worth your time to understand the world of food we live in.
(I’m aware that there’s some Confirmation Bias in my selection here, but evidence does seem to be aligning with my own personal experience, the experiences of my peers and large groups of people as well – see the videos for more information on the effects of sugar and processed foods.)
interesting stuff