The proportion of U.S. adults who self report they are obese increased nearly 2 percent between 2005 and 2007, according to a report in today′s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). An estimated 25.6 percent of U.S. adults reported being obese in 2007 compared to 23.9 percent in 2005, an increase of 1.7 percent. The report also finds that none of the 50 states or the District of Columbia has achieved the Healthy People 2010 goal to reduce obesity prevalence to 15 percent or less.

In three states – Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee – the prevalence of self-reported obesity among adults age 18 or older was above 30 percent. Colorado had the lowest obesity prevalence at 18.7 percent. Obesity is defined as a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or above. BMI is calculated using height and weight. For example, a 5-foot, 9-inch adult who weighs 203 pounds would have a BMI of 30, thus putting this person into the obese category.

Latest CDC Data Show More Americans Report Being Obese

Kurt Vonnegut:

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you're writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead --- or, worse, they will stop reading you.

How to Write With Style

Tom Wolfe, who calls himself “the social secretary of neuroscience,” often turns to current research to inform his stories and cultural commentary. His 1996 essay, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,” raised questions about personal responsibility in the age of genetic predeterminism. Similar concerns led Gazzaniga to found the Law and Neuroscience Project. When Gazzaniga, who just published Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, was last in New York, Seed incited a discussion: on status, free will, and the human condition.

Tom Wolfe + Michael Gazzaniga

James Dobbins:

It is highly flattering to be offered this opportunity to offer thoughts on a new grand strategy for the United States. I must admit, however, to certain reservations about the utility of such exercises. Having entered public service at the beginning of the Vietnam war and continued through the rest of the Cold War, the short lived New World Order, and the opening campaign of the War on Terror, I have become persuaded that the United States has enduring interests, friends, and values, all of which militate for a high degree of consistency in our behavior and continuity in our policies. Observation of the war in Iraq has only reinforced this view.

The contemporary schools of foreign policy – realism, Wilsonianism and neo-conservatism – provide pundits and political scientists with useful instruments for analysis but afford poor guides for future conduct. Wise presidents and legislators will pick and choose among these alternative efforts to describe and prescribe for a world that defies easy categorization, worrying less about ideological coherence and more about incremental progress toward long-term national goals which do not and should not, in the main, change from one Administration to the next.

Of course we need a national strategy, and of course it must evolve with changing circumstances, but I doubt we need a new strategy every year, or even every four or eight years. Rather than use my brief time here to lay out an entirely new and fully developed strategic construct, therefore, I feel I can better serve the Committee by explaining how our existing national security strategy should be modified in light of recent experience and changing circumstances.

Does America Need A New Grand Strategy?

Luis Suarez, of IBM:

Earlier this year, I became tired of my usual morning ritual of spending hours catching up on e-mail. So I did something drastic to take back control of my productivity.

I stopped using e-mail most of the time. I quickly realized that the more messages you answer, the more messages you generate in return. It becomes a vicious cycle. By trying hard to stop the cycle, I cut the number of e-mails that I receive by 80 percent in a single week.

I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip

Using the latest technologies and innovations in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Corkboard lets you manage your data and works-in-progress in a new and intuitive way. Corkboard works alongside your clipboard—the place things go when you copy or paste them—to hold more data and show you exactly what's going on.

You can drag-and-drop data to Corkboard, where it will be kept for safekeeping between reboots, crashes, quits, and saves. When you need to use the data again, just drag it back out to the program that needs it. It's fast, simple, and easy.

Corkboard. ⌘C and ⌘V are so 1984.

CRUSH (Custom Reporting Utilities for SHell) is a collection of tools for processing delimited-text data from the command line or in shell scripts.

crush-tools

What does it mean to be a liberally educated person? It seems such a simple question ...

In speaking of “liberal” education, we certainly do not mean an education that indoctrinates students in the values of political liberalism, at least not in the most obvious sense of the latter phrase. Rather, we use these words to describe an educational tradition that celebrates and nurtures human freedom.

Freedom and growth: here, surely, are values that lie at the very core of what we mean when we speak of a liberal education.

Here are the ten personal qualities I most admire in the people I know who seem to embody the values of a liberal education. How does one recognize liberally educated people?

From the recent archive:

I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.

Only Connect: The Goals of a Liberal Education

Hitotoki is an online literary project collecting stories of singular experiences tied to locations in cities worldwide.

The word Hitotoki is a Japanese noun comprised of two components: hito or “one” and toki or “time,” and is often translated as “a moment.”

Cities include New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Sofia.

hitotoki : A Narrative Map of the World

As a reverse (chronological) follow-up on The Random Wok:

This is the coolest restaurant. It's called Wiki Wiki Teriyaki, and it's in Austin, a few blocks from the convention center.

Rather than having a set menu, they just have a bunch of ingredients and invite you to bring your own. The diners, who call themselves "recipedians," get to put together their own recipes and have them cooked. Other diners can then build on each other's recipes and discuss them, creating a seemingly limitless array of recipes. Soon they'll add ratings and tags to make it easier for diners to parse their options.

Wiki Wiki Teriyaki: Restaurant 2.0