The Bellwether That Is Don Imus

It's not enough that this bigoted bastard got back on the air again... but now he continues his crusade of almost-crypto-racism.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ncl=1223862967&topic=h

It is going to be an ugly, ugly year in American history as the racists rise up. You'll know it's really bad when Imus starts saying "white power" on the radio...

Spread The Word About The Evils Of Corn Syrup

I heard on the radio this morning that the world's largest producer of HFCS (high fructose corn syrup), the nearly ubiquitous chemical sweetener made with battery acid and a host of other nasty shit, is about to start an 18 month marketing campaign. It will primarily be aimed at mothers to convince them that HFCS is A-OK, despite its proven track record of being the most fattening additive in prepared foods today, and despite it being a significant contributor to childhood obesity.

They're doing this because people are actually starting to change their behaviors. People are reading labels and buying fewer products with HFCS and similar derivatives. Childhood obesity rates are actually levelling off. We're actually winning the war on corn syrup, so they're going to counter-attack by spending millions of dollars on lies and spin to convince people that HFCS is "not so bad".

The only way to combat this is to continue telling everyone you know how unhealthy HFCS is. Tell mothers to read food labels and not purchase things with these ingredients (all deceptive alternate names for HFCS):

corn starch
maltodextrin
dextrose
malitol
glucose (or glucose syrup)*
fructose (or fructose syrup)*

*these don't have to be from corn necessarily, but their origins aren't usually identified!

Suggest reading The Omnivore's Dilemma or watching King Corn and tell people not to trust advertising!

EDIT: John McCain has proposed that we take the tariffs off cane sugar, and use it to make ethanol! Because why should we use edible SUGAR as a sweetener in food, when we can use chemical HFCS?? IS HE CRAZY??? Yes!

Make cane sugar cheaper and use the inedible corn as fuel! Stop supporting megacorporations you pig bastards and provide for the health and welfare of PEOPLE!!

Wired WHUT?

Does this make sense to anyone?

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory

I'm trying hard to grok how exactly massive data analysis can replace models and theory. Is he just using hyperbole?

Although I've now gotten a good idea from this whole Petabyte Era series of articles they've run... outsourced massively parallel pattern recognition.

You have massive sets of data to parse, and your hardware is crazy fast and awesome; but your machine intelligence and algorithms just aren't good enough to find what you're looking for - so you need humans to find your patterns. You go somewhere in Asia, start up or rent a data/call center, and hire a bunch of people really, really cheaply to eyeball sets of data.

For example, there's this project called HiRISE which is searching for the crashed Mars polar lander. They are relying on volunteers to scan through many tiny sections of massively high resolution images to find the impact site - which would likely appear in something like 30 x 30 pixels of the picture. Admittedly they have no money for this, but if they did, they could easily hire a room full of very low paid people to scan, once they learned what to look for. Such a thing could even be useful in searches for lost planes or for people lost at sea, assuming you had good enough satellite imagery.

I'm sure you could get a lot of people power for a relatively small amount of dough. And I think it's a business that will thrive in the age of MASSIVE DATA.

Good Pick??

There's a report out now that says NYC tops the list for size of technology workforce at 316,500 high-tech workers in 2006 with an average wage of $91,451. The tech job growth rate is second highest, just behind that of Seattle.

I'm curious though... I wonder how many of those jobs are finance-specific? I suspect many. Silicon Valley still has more "cool" tech jobs, I think. Google did just expand their facilities here though...