the art of writing is discovering what you believe
The lesson is that though the French diet was rich in fat, overall, the Americans consumed more calories. Over the years, this would lead to substantial differences in weight.
Add to this the amount of processed/fried foods we eat here in the US and the hidden sugars (corn syrups instead of sugar).
Business 2.0 – Magazine Article – The Coming Job Boom
[warning: obnoxious subscription interstitial ]
No sentient adult could have made it through the past decade without developing a healthy distrust of forecasts like these. But the case for the worker gap differs from the usual economic entrail reading in one crucial regard: It’s based on demographics, a far more certain discipline. When Carnevale’s model, for instance, shows that within seven years 30 million people now in the workforce will be older than 55, that’s not a guess. It is virtually a certainty. “Any kind of demographic projection with respect to people who have already been born is notoriously accurate,” agrees former Treasury Secretary Summers.
Long (5 pages) article discussing the effects on the job market that will result from the baby boomers leaving the workforce: they claim there will not only be enough workers but they will not have the experience to step into those jobs. Not only will experience (or its lack) be an issue, but college enrollments in technology fields have been declining, giving hiring managers the vapors as they survey their aging cubicle dwellers.
The hiring managers interviewed have decided to take the counter-intuitive approach of investing in employees, making them happy, and helping them form some loyalty to the organization and their peers, in hopes of repelling the onslaught of HR poaching.
So on the one hand we have the commoditization of transient IT workers (who were car mechanics and handymen — tinkerers, in other words — a generation ago) and the prospect of a shortage of knowledge workers who understand an industry or organization.
Finally, after considerable largely redundant and repetitive effort, mod_perl is installed and running.
The biggest problem was in my initial installation of MovableType:I installed *everything* in /www/movabletype and ScriptAliased that directory so the cgi processes would be able to run. That was the beginning of a slow and inexorable ass kicking . . . . all self-inflicted.
What I *should* have done was installed the executables somewhere else (like /www/mt and the html, images and css stuff in /www/movabletype. Of course the documentation doesn’t spell out the the lib, extlib, and tmpl directories also have to live where the executables live.
Sometimes there are advantages to letting someone else do the machine monkeywork. I finally got mod_perl working on this system, some months after I thought I had done it and after three days of hairpulling and muttered profanity.
At some point I may write down my experience and send it on to whoever wrote the documentation I have been reading. In hindsight, it makes sense, but there were some assumptions made that didn’t help me very much. There’s not a lot of attention paid to migrating existing CGI-based instances of Apache to mod_perl not is there any really comprehensive “when the following step works, you’ve done it” kind of diagnostic, nor is there any “if this is happening, it’s not working.”
And this still isn’t working, apparently. The perl stuff is faster, true, but access to all the static html is blocked. So the httpd.conf file is wrong but I have no idea right now how to fix that.
I really really hate these bland “one simple command and you’re done” instruction pages.
The All-Natural Prank: Eating All-Natural Soap, Cat Food, Deodorant, and Aphrodisiacs
While visiting my local health food store, I noticed how many non-food products are labeled “All-Natural.” Toothpaste. Dog biscuits. Deodorants. Some of them, like those Carrot-Honey-Ginger soaps, sound good enough to eat. Is it a soap, I found myself asking, or a salad? Recently, I decided to find out, by eating a wide variety of “All-Natural” products, and reporting on their delicate flavors and aromas.
I just about woke the household while reading this.
CNN.com – Democrats start group to try to ‘recall’ Bush – Aug. 20, 2003
“What we hope to do is to remind people that all of the things that are being said about Gray Davis as the reasons for the recall can be applied to George Bush,” Lux said Wednesday. “For example, they say Davis turned big surpluses into deficits in a matter of a couple of years. That’s the same thing that happened with George Bush.”
And I don’t recall Gray Davis getting into any expensive and bloody overseas adventures . . .
‘Black box’ for cars a surprise – The Washington Times: Nation/Politics
[ . . . . ] the devices are finding [their] way into courtrooms as evidence in criminal and civil cases, leading some privacy advocates to question how the recorders came to be installed so widely with so little public notice or debate.
“It’s like having a government agent driving around in the back seat of your car,” said Bob Weiner, Miss Zimmermann’s defense attorney and a former prosecutor. “I think it’s a tremendous invasion of privacy.”
Most people apparently don’t even know whether the vehicles they drive are equipped with event data recorders. Nearly two-thirds of people surveyed by an insurance industry group knew nothing about them.
“The real issue is one of notice, and the problem arises from the fact that information is being collected about people’s driving behavior without them knowing,” said David Sobel, general counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a District-based public research center that focuses on civil liberties issues. “If drivers knew about the device, they could at least then begin asking questions.”
I have wondered about transponders in cars, to used as data gathering tools on freeways to gauge volumes and average speeds, but a data recorder that the consumer isn’t even aware of and that can be used against them in court is another matter. I’m OK with collecting information in the aggregate but collecting data on individuals (perhaps even remotely: imagine a highway data collection system that could gather data as you drive by it, tying it to your car tag and VIN. From there, it seems a small step to being able to govern your speed remotely: cut a speeder down in his tracks.) is instrusive. I have a 1995 and a 1998 car: I suppose they’re both full of stories about my driving.
This was a bit more work than I expected, but it works. The documentation linked above is pretty complete, but linking out to this page helped a bit. I’m not all that fluent in Apache’s config syntax, so I find examples and debugging info a big help.