28 Jun 2011 - permalink
Type 2 diabetes is rapidly becoming a huge and world wide health problem. The Guardian reports that, according to a new study, more than 350 million people are now affected:
“[Diabetes] is set to become the single largest burden on world health care systems,” one of the study’s main authors, Professor Majid Ezzati, of Imperial College London, told the Observer. "Many nations are going to find it very difficult to cope with the consequences."
The article mentions another study, claiming that type 2 diabetes can be reversed in newly diagnosed. If true, it may help millions of people and save billions in health costs.
It turns out to be a study by Roy Taylor from Newcastle University. BBC covered the study.
While the study only includes 11 people, the results so far are remarkable as they hint at a possible diet-based cure. Roy Taylor:
This is a radical change in understanding Type 2 diabetes. It will change how we can explain it to people newly diagnosed with the condition. While it has long been believed that someone with Type 2 diabetes will always have the disease, and that it will steadily get worse, we have shown that we can reverse the condition.
3 May 2011 - permalink
Herman Daly interviewed for Seed magazine:
What we tax mostly now is income from the input of labor and capital, what economists called “value added.”
Value added to what? To the resources extracted from nature, which are treated as zero. So, the idea is to shift our tax base away from value added and toward the resources themselves. If we want to increase efficiency, then we have to begin by making things more expensive. We’re careful how we use gold. We’re not so careful how we use aluminum.
28 Apr 2011 - permalink
Melissa Febos writes about living in New York and crying in public.
In a place where we are so rarely alone, we find privacy in public. We all have our masks, behind which we are free to be, yes, depressed, or any other emotional state we may not want to share with 30 fellow passengers.
11 Apr 2011 - permalink
Alice Gregory reviews Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story for n+1:
It’s hard not to think “death drive” every time I go on the internet. Opening Safari is an actively destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken away from me. Like the lost time between leaving a party drunk and materializing somehow at your front door, the internet robs you of a day you can visit recursively or even remember. You really want to know what it is about 20-somethings? It’s this: we live longer now. But we also live less. It sounds hyperbolic, it sounds morbid, it sounds dramatic, but in choosing the internet I am choosing not to be a certain sort of alive. Days seem over before they even begin, and I have nothing to show for myself other than the anxious feeling that I now know just enough to engage in conversations I don’t care about.
7 Apr 2011 - permalink
Will Shipley on success:
We’re blindly following past lottery winners thinking we can win the lottery, too, if we just emulate them. But, mostly, lotteries create lots of small losers. Losers aren’t written about in magazines, but they’re the majority.
And further:
This doesn’t work. Your idea sucks. No, I’m not calling you stupid — my idea sucks, too. All ideas suck, because they are just ideas. They’re worth nothing.
My success is because I worked to make the idea real. A lot. All my life. Starting when I was 12, I learned to program, and I’ve programmed every spare moment since.