• Sleep improves learning and mental performance.

• Sleep deprivation causes you to consume more calories.

• Men with untreated obstructive sleep apnea have less brain grey matter.

• “Exercise is not real great at causing weight loss. But every study has shown that if you want to keep the weight off you have to exercise. “

• Which is why I need a heart rate monitor.

• According to Dr. George Blackburn of Harvard Medical School, if you are more than 100 pounds overweight, “this is beyond our ability to make these lifestyle changes to lose enough weight to get healthy.” In other words, you’re out of luck unless you get gastric bypass surgery.

• If you buy music online, be sure to buy it from Amazon to avoid dirty mp3 files.

• Here are the incredibly depressing results of one of the longest and most robust weight loss studies I’ve seen to date. After two long years (with various groups trying low-carb diets, low-fat diets, and everything in between): “Among the 80% of participants who completed the trial, the average weight loss was 4 kg; 14 to 15% of the participants had a reduction of at least 10% of their initial body weight.”

• Why food is getting sweeter.

• The science of obesity and processed foods, from a former FDA commissioner: “The latest science seemed to suggest being overweight was my destiny. I was fat because my body’s ‘thermostat’ was set high. If I lost weight, my body would try to get it back, slowing down my metabolism till I returned to my predetermined set point… ‘Higher sugar, fat and salt make you want to eat more.’ I had read this in scientific literature, and heard it in conversations with neuroscientists and psychologists. But here was a leading food designer, a Henry Ford of mass-produced food, revealing how his industry operates. To protect his business, he did not want to be identified, but he was remarkably candid, explaining how the food industry creates dishes to hit what he called the ‘three points of the compass’. Sugar, fat and salt make a food compelling. They stimulate neurons, cells that trigger the brain’s reward system and release dopamine, a chemical that motivates our behaviour and makes us want to eat more.”

• Meditation may help relieve the uniquely modern types of stress that evolution arguably did not prepare us to deal with.

• How to train to do one hundred pushups.

• Why DRM doesn’t work.

• How to always get free shipping on Amazon.

• Why red light cameras don’t work, and actually make us less safe.

• Alternate data streams in NTFS: hide files inside other files.

• Bookmarked for later:Why I need a kitchen scale.

Chrome is Google’s new web browser. It’s features are, shall we say, strongly reminiscent of Opera, which is my preferred web browser. In fact, Opera had almost every feature of Chrome (such as the Speed Dial New Tab Page) or Firefox (such as tabbed browsing) at least a couple of years before either browser. Welcome to 1994, guys. On the plus side, Chrome is open source.

Recently, my bank account password was stolen by the Russian mob.

No, seriously: a glitch in Internet explorer (which I don’t normally use) infected my computer’s master boot record with a virus. The trojan that was installed collected the password to my online bank and then put up a mocked-up bank login screen which asked me for my credit card information and ATM code to “verify” my login. Interestingly, this mock login screen appeared in IE but not in Opera (my usual browser of choice). I’d been detecting unusual performance from my computer for a couple of days, and so I was already suspicious that something was amiss, but having my bank apparently ask me for my credit card number was obviously a giant freaking red flag. Fortunately, I was able to remove the virus and change my bank password before any lasting damage was done.

Interestingly, the virus was apparently developed by the Russian mob using code that was stolen from a presentation presented at by computer security researchers at Black Hat. At least now when I point out the dangers of security through obscurity, I can tell people that I’ve put my money where my mouth is.

Here’s some news to brighten your day: the RIAA lost one of their lawsuits recently:

In what appears to be the first known case of its kind, the RIAA has been ordered to pay a defendant nearly $70,000 in attorney fees and costs after unsuccessfully suing for copyright infringement…

[T]he RIAA filed suit against Deborah Foster in November 2004. Her adult daughter Amanda was added to the complaint in July 2005 when it was indicated that she had access to the internet account. Because Amanda failed to defend herself against the complaint, the RIAA won the case against her by default.

The ruling against Deborah was then amended to allege she “contributorily and/or vicariously” infringed on copyrighted recordings…

On July 13, 2006 the Oklahoma court ordered the RIAA’s claims against Foster be dismissed with prejudice and ruled she was eligible to be awarded attorneys fees. The court was skeptical that “an internet-illiterate parent, who does not know Kazaa from a kazoo” could be liable for copyright infringement committed by someone else using her internet account…

The court eventually whittled the award down to $68,685.23 in a 14-page document which itemized her expenses.

Via Infamy or Praise.

About a year ago, my personal (and completely unpublished) email address started getting spam. Lots of it. Somewhere along the line, it seems, I had given my email address to the wrong person, who then gave it to the wrong person, who in turn sent out an email forward to everyone in her address book, and so on; and eventually, the spammers found me again.

My point is: if you’re dealing with a similar problem, and if you’re technically inclined or willing to read up on technical issues, I’m going to go ahead and recommend hosting your email with Tuffmail. It’s inexpensive, extremely customizable, and far more powerful than any other email host out there. Just as important (for me), they’re the only major email hosting service I found that lets you enable greylisting automatically. I haven’t used the service long enough to feel comfortable recommending them in corporate/mission-critical situations, but for personal email, it’s a godsend.

As an aside, the other major anti-spam measure I’d strongly recommend is Spam Gourmet. This free service can be used with any email address with no configuration at all, other than signing up for an account. It’s a great way to protect your personal email address from those corporate or “legitimate” spam emails which don’t let you easily unsubscribe.

I’ve recently run across comment censorship in a number of unexpected places.

The Georgetown Law Faculty Blog apparently censors comments which are critical of its authors. (See this post for an example).

The Uncivil Litigator also censors comments which are critical of his arguments, even when those comments are completely civil. I learned this through personal experience.

And perhaps most notoriously, Brad DeLong is infamous for routinely deleting comments that express civil disagreement with his opinions.

I confess that I don’t understand this impulse at all. What is it about disagreement that is so threatening to these writers? To tell the truth, my instincts run in the opposite direction: I greatly prefer to receive comments which disagree with my opinions. After all, if someone disagrees with me, I might learn something new.

Brad DeLong has explained his comment deletion policy by arguing that his duty is not to his commentors but to his readers, and that his site is only useful to readers if it contains comments which reflect the truth (as he sees it, naturally). Maybe I just don’t have that kind of certainty that my views are always correct.

Update: Brad DeLong responds in the comments.

Second update: The Uncivil Litigator responds in the comments.

Jeffrey Veen recently overheard a terrifying phone conversation:

Now, here’s what I want you to type. ‘are em’ … yes. The letter ‘r’ and the letter ‘m’, together. Now type a dash. Yes, like a hyphen. OK, and then another ‘r’. Yes rm space hyphen r. OK, now another space and then a star. Shift 8. Yes. Now read it back to me. [pause] OK perfect. Hit return and tell me what happens.

via Kottke

Holy crap, how did I miss this? Dreamfall was just released.

For those who don’t know, Dreamfall is the sequel to The Longest Journey, one of the most renown adventure games in recent memory. Now, for the record, I hated The Longest Journey: the gameplay sucked, the puzzles were often pointless, and the story was so amazingly rich that when the ending resolved almost nothing, it actually made me angry. Nevertheless, despite my dislike for the original game, the world it created was remarkable enough that I can’t quite leave it behind.

By all accounts, Dreamfall is like TLJ, only more so. It’s a remarkable accomplishment, but the review’s that I’ve read indicate that the gameplay is somehow even more maddening in Dreamfall. The story is even more engaging, and the ending is even less satisfying.

However. Ragnar Tørnquist, the game’s creator, has this to say on his blog, and it’s enough to make me willing to play the game:

Dreamfall was from day one designed as the first part of a two-part story… and also the middle part of a trilogy. (Which again is part of a larger saga. Phew. No wonder people are getting confused. I’m getting a headache myself.) There are lots of unanswered questions because the story isn’t over. Yet. I know exactly where it’s going and how it will end, and I know how the next game plays out, chapter by chapter. It’s been planned from the get-go. We’re not making this up as we go along. Promise. I hated that about The X-Files. I felt so cheated when I realised that the writers had no idea where the show was heading. Betrayed, even… So try and trust me on this: this story has an ending. I know what it is. It hasn’t been told yet.

Because, yes, the story will be completed. If, for some reason (the collapse of Western civilisation, for example) I don’t get to make an interactive (emphasis on ‘interactive’) sequel, I will do everything I can to complete the story in some other way - be it through the pages of a comic book, a novel, a serial on my website - or, if all else fails, just sending out my super-secret story notes to anyone who’s remotely interested. I know that it would be horribly, incredibly, unbelievably frustrating to never find out how it all ends, and I’ll work hard to make sure that no one who’s invested in Dreamfall (or The Longest Journey) will be cheated out of a proper conclusion - to this part of the saga, at least.

Bear in mind that it’s been over six years since TLJ was released. So we may be in for a bit of a wait. It’s almost like reading George R. R. Martin in that way.

Writing in his new CNET blog, ImageThief writes about Apple’s iPod factories in China:

“Living China for a while can change how you think. Beliefs that were rock solid in the comfort of fully developed countries can go wobbly when confronted with the realities of China. Working in a Shenzhen sweatshop seems like a miserable existence until you wander around a few desperately poor provincial villages and see the destitute alternative.”

That’s just right. I actually think that sweatshops can be, on balance, a good thing.

So I traded in my shiny white ipod earbuds, opting instead for the more sedate Sennheiser MX-500’s. And I’ve got to say, I’m astonished by the improvement. The Sennheiser’s sound significantly better to my ears than the Apple earbuds did: for a $15 pair of earphones, that’s an astonishing feat.

As an added bonus, these new earbuds are much less obviously connected to an ipod: those shiny white ibud’s fairly scream “Mug me and you’re guaranteed to net at least $400!”.

And now, by request:

“Wonderchicken returns, brethren and sistren! He returns! Dance dervish, and spill the blood of politicians in tribute and walleyed joy!”

Seriously, it’s good to have him back, and my sidebar has been appropriately updated.

I want to give a shout-out to Acronis Migrate Easy for making a fantastic piece of software!

When it became clear last week that my hard drive was failing, I expected that I’d have to go through the huge hassle of backing up my files and then reinstalling all of my software, including Windows itself, on the new drive. Instead, I used the free 14 day trial version of their software to clone my old drive onto my new drive: it literally took me about five minutes to set up, then I let it run overnight, and by the morning, my new hard drive was working flawlessly.

This is how all good software should work: it does exactly what it promises, it’s dead-simple to understand, and it’s free for the casual user. So far as I can tell, it’s perfect.

In recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the President of MetaMachine, Sam Yagan, explained why he’s shutting down his company and ceasing all further development on his software:

The Grokster standard requires divining a company’s “intent,” the decision was essentially a call to litigate. This is critical because most startup companies just don’t have very much money. Whereas I could have managed to pay for a summary judgment hearing under Betamax, I simply couldn’t afford the protracted litigation needed to prove my case in court under Grokster. Without that financial ability, exiting the business was our only option despite my confidence that we never induced infringement and that we would have prevailed under the Grokster standard.

This is what happens when judges make law on issues that they don’t adequately understand. You wind up with rules that stifle innovation.