45 Percent Of People Try Diets And That’s A Good Thing, Even If They Fail
Most people who try a diet don't succeed in keeping weight off long-term and that is trumpeted as a huge failure of dieting by people who, wait for it, are often selling a competing diet.The health truth is that even if you fail, you improved your health. Claims that people whose weight go up and down are dying earlier are just the same bad epidemiology that has journalists lamenting that International Agency for Research on Cancer activists claim pickle juice and aloe vera cause cancer.(1)
Evolutionary Psychology: Your Parents Income During Pregnancy Made You Gay
Evolutionary psychology, the discipline that claimed we're being manipulated by flowers and evolved to like the appearance of black men, also made the bold assertion that the income of your parents during pregnancy made you...gay?Oil Kept Congo From Starving – Western Academics Don’t Seem To Like That
If even a wealthy like Germany has to lie about emissions to placate government-funded environmentalists and burn wood and buy gas from Russia, it seems unfair to criticize a poor country like Congo, but the culture war on oil can't think about any of that.If you don't want to look like a rich, white progressive telling poor black people that the climate is more important than their children, the way to do it is to write...anonymously.
And an ironically-named humanities journal like Critical Historical Studies will still publish it, uncritically.
China Sells Western Progressives Solar Panels While Switching To Nuclear Power
China has quietly overtaken France to become the world's second-largest producer of nuclear energy.If You Care About Emissions, Rethink Urban Agriculture
Urban/local/small ag is a feel-good fallacy.There is nothing wrong with wishful thinking and aspirations, we all have harmless beliefs that get into our brains. Some home ag is clearly ridiculous - a $150 machine to grow $0.25 worth of herbs is a gimmick for the rich - but mostly it's good, slow exercise or at least good to not be on a tablet watching TikTok videos so China can harvest your personal data.
Black Mental Health Is Basically Ignored By AI Models
Large Language Models, colloquially called Artificial Intelligence by companies selling rebranded autocomplete tools to other companies and the public, can automate a lot of entry-level projects but when it comes to anything more complex the flaws are quickly seen.When Black people using social media exhibit possible depression in their prose, a paper claims LLM/AI tools don't detect it as easily as they do other skin colors.
Plank It: Meta-Analysis Shows Isometric Exercises Help Lower Blood Pressure The Most, By A Lot
Risk factors like salt and sugar intake and high blood pressure for heart attacks and disease need constant rethink if they are going to be more than folk wisdom.Low-salt and sugar-free have too many vested interests to get critical thinking on how valid population-level statistics are for individuals, and 'high' blood pressure rarely gets questions about how reliable the correlation was that picked 130/85 mmHg (millimeters of mercury) as high blood pressure for everyone. Thosa blood pressure numbers are the clunkily-named systolic on top over the diastolic below. The top is the pressure in arteries as the heart beats while the bottom is the pressure at rest.(1)
What Will It Take For Real Farming In Space?
If humans in space are happening any time soon, it will be despite government involvement rather than because of it. NASA couldn't even build a telescope without going 25 years and 1,000 percent over budget. By the time all cultural parties pick away at a manned space program, it will be so expensive and time-costly it won't be worthwhile, and the private sector will throw all that baggage out and just do it.The James Webb Space Telescope program showed NASA is incapable of doing Big Engineering now, but they can put cute robots on other planets, and fund smaller projects, like how we might grow plants. Early results for how monitors that plants can wear and will stretch as plants grow are due to a NASA grant, and that is a very good thing.
Social Media Brings Out Our Baser Natures – Anger Is Rising In Democracies
Like old media such as newspapers and televisions, content on social media is tailored toward audience engagement. Television and newspapers have long known that 'dead bodies sell' but in social media it can be sold in real-time. It has sped up information - and cynicism. Fifteen years ago Reuters was caught augmenting photos of an Israeli attack on terrorists so it looked like more smoke and destruction than actually occurred and few in media were bothered, more recently outlets pulled a photo of British Princess Kate of Wales because it had been retouched. Only after the audience flagged it, though.Carbon Offsets Won’t Work Until There Is Science In How Trees Are Planted
Former Vice-President Al Gore has a giant mansion but buys carbon offsets to mitigate the damage. Do they work?It depends, and that means it is unlikely. Lots of corporations dove into the carbon offset market, Mr. Gore made hundreds of millions of dollars investing in them, but there is no standard beyond 'we will plant this many trees.' The story is certainly compelling. There is no guilt about a mansion or private plane if you pay someone to plant trees that absorb carbon dioxide emissions equal to what you burned and create wildlife habitats and nice views for humans in the process.