Rotundus.com

Quebec’s ‘pastagate’ PR nightmare: Story gets 60 times more coverage outside province than Marois investment trip

"While most of the stories were in Canada, Pastagate was chronicled in 350 articles in 14 countries, as far away as Australia, when it broke last week." The PQ party seems to do a wonderful job of shooting itself in the foot.

U.S. dairy industry petitions FDA to approve aspartame as hidden, unlabeled additive in milk, yogurt, eggnog and cream

The subheading that the "Milk industry specifically asks to HIDE aspartame from consumers" seems accurate based on the information in the petition. Unlabelled ingredients seem bad for those with dietary issues - and these artificial sweeteners don't seem to be problem-free.

Last Meals Of Executed Innocent Men

"The ads are via Amnesty International in Puerto Rico. The starkness of the photography — including the standard issue prison food trays — makes for riveting advertising."

What Housework Has to Do With Waistlines

"'we need to start finding ways to incorporate movement back into' the hours spent at home. This does not mean, he said, that women — or men — should be doing more housework. For one thing, the effort involved is such activities today is less than it once was. Using modern, gliding vacuum cleaners is less taxing than struggling with the clunky, heavy machines once available, and thank goodness for that."

Some of you know that I've got a secure wiki hosted on this domain. (It's running WackoWiki). On said wiki, which I tend to use to collect my thoughts on all sorts of subjects - not just to prep stuff for posting here - there's a page entitled the "Queue of Stuff" which acts as a general pool of information that might one day land up here. Basically I often like to let thoughts marinate for a while rather than immediately posting things. Out of curiousity I dug up a few stats on this wiki page:

Number of links contained:

256 (surprisingly a power of 2)

Number of words contained:

29120 according to a random online word count calculator or 30441 (according to Microsoft Word)

Number of pages it makes up copy-pasted into Word (with default font)

107

From 7 things we learned about online dating from the co-founder of OKCupid:

With the rise of pornography, plastic surgery and airbrushing, many people wonder — do guys know what real women look like anymore? The answer appears to be yes. When Rudder showed us a graph of the ratings men give to women on an attractiveness scale of 1 to 5 through OKCupid, there’s a normal distribution with fewer women falling at the 1 and 5 extremes and the grand majority getting ratings in the middle. However, when women rate men on a scale of 1 to 5 on attractiveness through the site, the graph skews sharply towards the lower end. Women overall rate many men as a 1, and shockingly few as a 4 or 5. Jokes Rudder, “A 3.8 for a guy is basically Hollywood material.”

... and when you get to the question of unhealthfully-skinny "supermodels", what do you find? Here's how Psychology Today answers the question Do Men Find Very Skinny Women Attractive?:

... we are often asked why then do men find super-skinny models so attractive? The answer is: they don't. Men don't find very skinny women attractive. How often do you see a guy ogling the latest issue of Mademoiselle or Vogue? The ultra-thin fashion models whose photos adorn these magazines and who flaunt the latest Parisian designs on runways are quite different from the women who are attractive enough to men that they are willing to pay to look at them, like Playboy Playmates.

I came across a somewhat peculiar story in Slate today whose byline asked the following question: "What if technology makes scientific discoveries that we can’t understand?". Here's a brief excerpt of the article:

Does such a hint of non-understandable pieces of reasoning and thought mean that eventually there will be answers to the riddle of the universe that are going to be too complicated for us to understand, answers that machines can spit out but we cannot grasp? Quite possibly. We’ve already come close. A computer program known as Eureqa that was designed to find patterns and meaning in large datasets not only has recapitulated fundamental laws of physics but has also found explanatory equations that no one really understands. And certain mathematical theorems have been proven by computers, and no one person actually understands the complete proofs, though we know that they are correct. As the mathematician Steven Strogatz has argued, these could be harbingers of an “end of insight.” We had a wonderful several-hundred-year run of explanatory insight, beginning with the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, but maybe that period is drawing to a close.

Far from an "end of insight" computers being able to tackle data and find patterns - big data in other words - seems more like the expansion of insight.

I was kind of intrigued about this Eureqa system though. Here's a bit of what I found in that earlier Slate article on the system (emphasis mine):

Lipson and Schmidt recently worked with Gurol Suel, a molecular biophysicist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, to look at the dynamics of a bacterium cell. Given data about several different biological functions within the cell, the computer did something mind-blowing. We found this really beautiful, elegant equation that described how the cell worked, and that tended to hold true over all of our new experiments,” Schmidt says. There was only one problem: The humans had no idea why the equation worked, or what underlying scientific principle it suggested. It was, Schmidt says, as if they’d consulted an oracle.