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Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed a complaint against Rep. Gregory Meeks for what looks like accepting a very large bribe. A New York businessman gave him $40k in 2007, which Meeks is claiming was a loan despite that he never disclosed such a loan on any of his financial disclosures. The FBI got involved and Meeks paid back the money…by getting an unusual home equity loan from yet another New York businessman.
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A couple of years ago, the story developed that the AP was requiring that bloggers pay a licensing fee of $12.50 to quote just five words from an article. I only half-followed the story at the time, but I never figured out if it was for real or not. Columbia Journalism Review looked into this, and found that it's just not true.
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The term "western swing" was an invention of Spade Cooley's promoter. After Cooley defeated Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys in a battle of the bands, Cooley started to bill himself as "the king of western swing." I like Spade Cooley (well, I like his music; he stomped his wife to death and died in prison), but history has judged who deserves that title, and it's undoubtedly Bob Wills.
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Here's a fun new theory: gravity doesn't exist. That is, it doesn't exist as some sort of fundamental force in the universe, in the manner of magnetism. It's just a byproduct of randomness. Evidence that gravity is a bit player in physics has been stacking up, but nobody's yet figured out what really causes objects to be attracted to one another. Troublingly, the paper making this argument is terribly confusing, leaving some of the brightest minds in physics scratching their heads.
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Exercise doesn't offset sedentary activity. That is, the health problems that come from sitting in front of the TV for hours each day are not reduced by regular exercise. You can no more buy an indulgence at the gym now than you could at church in 1517.
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Re: The Men Who Stare at Screens
The only specific study referenced in the article concludes with: “…high levels of physical activity were related to notably lower rates of CVD death even in the presence of high levels of sedentary behavior…”
The conclusion you are reaching does not appear to be supported. I don’t see where the study said regular exercise doesn’t have health benefits. The conclusion was that we should focus on both increasing activity and decreasing sedentary activity, not that they don’t offset.
Sorry, I just watched the Frontline on the Vaccine Wars and it got me riled up.
To be clear, it’s not my conclusion—it’s the New York Times’ conclusion:
The men worked out, then sat in cars and in front of televisions for hours, and their risk of heart disease soared, despite the exercise. Their workouts did not counteract the ill effects of sitting.
That said, neither I nor the Times said that “regular exercise doesn’t have health benefits,” simply that the exercise fails to offset the drawbacks of being sedentary. But I haven’t read the study, just the Times article, so I can’t say if even that is correct. Based on the quote you’ve provided, it looks like perhaps not!
Fair enough. The abstract of the study is linked in the article. The abstract also includes the following: “Regardless of the amount of sedentary activity reported by these men, being older, having normal weight, being normotensive, and being physically active were associated with a reduced risk of CVD death.”
That statement doesn’t appear to contradict any existing published material by CDC, NIH, and others.
T think that this would be a quite likely explaination of gravity, but it doesn’t therefore reason that gravity doesn’t exist. That’d be like saying that osmosis doesn’t exist because it too originates from chaos (but tell that to a salted-slug). I’d take this one step futher though to say that there are no fundemental forces at all, or rather that all of them are derived from chaos.
Think about it like this: the biggest problem in physics is not why the universe exists but why there isn’t total uniformity. Empty space may contain enough raw material to make a universe (0 = -1,000,000 + 1,000,000, and in fact particles and their antimater equivalents are constantly being born and wiping each other out.
So why doesn’t everything exist everywhere all at once? For that matter why is there a bias (at least in this corner of the universe) for matter over antimatter? Simply put, the universe abhors contradiction and chaos is not uniform. In other words, two objects exist in two different places because to exist in the same place would be self-contradictory. As for chaos not being uniform, just look at the ocean or the weather.
So why does matter exist, or for that matter, why are you over there, and me over here? It is because this is one of the least contradictory states at this given moment. In other words, we exist in this space and time because there is no reason for us not to.
Many people talk about the absurdly low probability of life developing because of all the prerequisites. You’d have to have a planet at exactly the right size and orbit to have life like ours. I’d reverse that argument and say the very reason that something as complex as life can occur is because of the constraints themselves.
I’d argue that all the forces of the universe basically distill down to this very simple concept. Gravity, inertia, et al all come down to the least contradictory way that any given thing can exist. They exist primarily because there is no reason for them not to exist.
I like that last sentence in particular. :)