not how we did it in my day

Seahawks win. SportsIllustrated.com reports whatever the hell they like.

Deweytruman

WTVH.com: Sports News – Wild Wildcard – Cowboys Lose to Seahawks 21-20:

Wild Wildcard – Cowboys Lose to Seahawks 21-20
Jan 06, 2007 – All Tony Romo had to do was put the ball down and let Martin Gramatica make a short kick. He couldn’t do it – and the Seattle Seahawks are still alive in the NFL playoffs. Romo’s botched hold on a 19-yard field goal try with 1:19 left forced the Pro Bowl quarterback to scramble left, but he was tackled at the 2 and the Seahawks escaped with a 21-20 victory in the wildest of wild-card games Saturday night.

links for 2007-01-06

you are what you know about what you eat

Conversation elsewhere about food choices makes this entry in the Cool Tools list particularly timely.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

Author [Michael] Pollan, now an enlightened omnivore, challenges everyone to take responsibility for their food — no matter what it is — by tracking its path back to the sun. If you can face the path of your food in full knowledge and be at ease with it, then happy eating!

If you can raise it and harvest it, be it a potato or a cow, you can eat it without a qualm. But outsourcing the worst of it — read the book for details, as he doesn’t shirk from it, be it cutting the throats of chickens or shooting a wild hog — doesn’t work for me. Hard to say that without seeming judgmental and it’s not my intention at all.

if you knew then what you know now

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: December 31, 2006 – January 06, 2007 Archives:

CBS: 68% ‘optimistic’ about 110th Congress; 25% ‘pessimistic’.

Top priority for 110th: Iraq, 45%, Economy/Jobs 7%; Health Care 7%.

Perhaps some of my public opinion analyst friends will chime in on this. But I’m not sure I remember ever seeing such a stark number on public priorities on a question like this. With nearly half the respondents giving the same answer and the second highest not even rating in double digits.

The poll question I would like to see put to GOP voters who identify as having pulled the lever for Bush in 2004: knowing what you know now, would you have returned Bush for a second term?
Looking back, Kerry main strength seems to have been that he wasn’t Bush — not a bad thing, I’m glad I’m not Bush either but hardly a compelling argument. Are the Dems going to put someone forward in 2008 who can compete against whoever succeeds the incumbent? In a perverse sense, I wish we didn’t have term limits: you know he would want to run for a third term and who could talk him out of it, a guy who equates leaving with losing? He’d never go willingly. He’d throw everyone under the bus to convince the voters he was making a break with the past. I don’t think they would buy it, but who know?

numbers I hate to read

I actually hope these are bogus, but I fear not. I know the number for TV watching was 7 hours/day 10 years ago, so that seems consistent.

We live in a sad time when you consider the following statistics:

§ Only 14 percent of adults with a grade-school education read literature in 2002.
§ 51 percent of the American population never reads a book over 400 pages after they complete their formal education.
§ 73 percent of all books in libraries are never checked out.
§ The average American watches 32 hours of TV every week.
§ The average American reads only eight hours (books, newspapers, magazines, Yellow Pages, etc.) every week.
§ The average American annually spends 10 times more on what he puts on his head than what he puts into his head.

Consider the following:
§ If you read just one book per month for 12 months, you would be in the top 25 percentile of intellectuals in the world.
§ If you read just 15 minutes a day — every day, for one year — you can complete 20 books.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “The doors of wisdom are never shut.”

Mackay’s Moral: Life is like riding a bicycle. You don’t fall off unless you stop pedaling.

So what are you reading? Give me some ideas in comments of things I can try.

links for 2007-01-04

got kids and a scale?

While fascinating and depressing myself, by turns, here, I was reminded of an anomaly that those with kids might have noticed. Weight and height for kids generally tracks at one pound/inch. A 60 inch tall kid weighs about 60 pounds. Yet for adults, it looks more like one pound per centimeter — 2.54 times as much. At 183 cm my ridiculously ideal weight is close to 183 pounds. But my kids both follow a pound/inch ratio.

Do our <ahem> bones become that much more dense?