Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I’m sitting here watching the two new episodes of The Screen Savers on my TiVo and thought I’d share some initial impressions. For those who don’t know, the network G4TechTV produces this show and a couple of weeks ago they fired a bunch of the cast in a shakeup to improve ratings. The show and the network have a somewhat notorious recent history, as I wrote about in an earlier entry.

I’m trying not to jump to conclusions too fast, but so far the chemistry just doesn’t seem to be there, or anyway the humor isn’t there or just falls flat. Maybe part of this has to do with the fact they no longer seem to have a live audience, so they are mainly just speaking to the camera. The immediate feedback from an audience isn’t there anymore. Sarah Lane, one of the shows hosts, who in previous episodes would talk a mile a minute seems to have slowed down a bit, like she’s gotten tired (or switched to decaf).

The other main impression that I’ve gotten is that they seem to be doing a lot more little stories that were featured in some of the feeds I read very recently. On Monday’s show I think they mention Engadget by name at least three times! (so at least they are siting their sources some times) Somehow I don’t remember the earlier TSS relying on the blogosphere to such a great extent.

In all not nearly as bad as it could have been, and maybe the chemistry will get a little better and the various hosts will get better about not talking over each other or interrupting each other. Hopefully they will bring back the live audience as well. I wish them only the best. Although it’s a shame that they had to dump a bunch of good people, that was the network’s decision and I refuse to blame the cast and crew for a stupid marketing strategy. Besides, TSS is the closest thing to some of the tech blogs I read that’s on TV. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but unfortunately it’s the only thing out there of its kind.

Like many of my readers, I’m sure, I’ve had an ongoing battle with weight, but I also have done extensive reading on the subject. I’m not just talking about diet books, but also studies, articles, and interviews, debates, etc. on diet, nutrition, health, and even anthropology. I can’t call myself a scientist because I don’t have the hard-core grounding in proofs and research skills, but I can at least claim to be somewhat educated on the differing points of view surrounding these topics, in addition to simply being a fairly good observer of attitudes of those around me regarding this stuff. That being said, I thought I would ramble a bit about what I see as the issues we face but more importantly how to try to get around them. It’s a multifaceted topic to say the least. If it were simple we might have already nipped it, but it is complex and fraught with confusing contradictions and competing interests. I hope this litany will at least start to delineate individual items of attention and separate some of the major areas to work on.

The Issues:

1) Mind over Matter? As many of us know from countless attempts to lose weight, only to regain it later, the goal of losing weight and keeping it off is a very challenging one. For those who haven’t had to deal with obesity, a very easy assumption may be to blame the dieter for simply being too “lazy.” There are certainly those who can overcome the desire to slack and keep weight off for extended periods, so these exceptions to the rule are held up as the paragons that everyone could and should strive to emulate. However, despite the desire to simplify issues (which I’ll examine more closely below), it’s not always simply a matter of personal responsibility or will power. This isn’t an effort to make “excuses” but to look at the reasons why things have become so difficult.

a. One part of this is the so-called evolutionary argument that it is in our genes to overeat whenever possible. Hunter-gatherer ancestors dealt with a constant threat of starvation. Up until the agricultural age when humankind learned to preserve food with salt, and eventually bottling, canning, refrigeration, vacuum packing and irradiation, the only way we could “store” food was to eat it and have it accumulate in our personal biological “stores” of fat tissue. Because of this, some would say, we are compelled to eat as much as we can even though there is no threat today of starvation. Some of us have been able to override this urge most of the time, but given the opportunity, as with the “all you can eat” buffets, it can often be incredibly challenging not to stuff yourself.

b. Part of this may be due to simply not doing it “right.” In other words, the effort to work hard at losing may be there, but the results do not show. This may be because the dieter is doing something that they were TOLD was the correct way to eat and/or exercise, but it turns out to actually be deleterious to their goals.

c. Yet another issue is societal and cultural realities. Current U.S. (and perhaps at least some other westernized countries) suburban culture creates lifestyles that make it extremely hard to eat healthfully and get a decent amount of exercise. The car culture of the U.S. makes regular exercise something that one has to make time for instead of being an integral part of one’s day, and the busy lives of many makes this increasingly difficult. The prevalence of fast-food makes it much more appealing than the more time-consuming method of preparing one’s meals from scratch from whole foods, and such meals are not readily available ready-made, or when they are, they are considerably more expensive than the less healthy alternatives. Finally, while we have come to have a much greater awareness as a society of dieting these days, there is still a great adherence to eating things based only on what tastes best regardless of how healthy it is, and this can help erode the will of any dieter.

2) Simplicity

a. We crave simplicity – easy answers to complex questions. We hear about laziness a lot when it comes to people not wanting to do the “hard work” of exercise and eating right that are supposed to make weight loss possible. While there may be a very small subset of those who simply don’t want to do anything “hard,” I think much more prevalent is laziness when it comes to thinking about how to lose. Part of this is an educational issue where people unquestioningly accept whatever crap they read, whether it’s in a supermarket tabloid or the New York Times, without doing any critical thinking of their own. Many simply don’t have the tools to go about such thinking, but others do and simply decide to believe in one dogma or the other without questioning it or trying different approaches.

b. One Size Fits All – thankfully this attitude is slowly starting to change, but it is still something that most people believe applies in one way or another. Certainly we can agree that there are some universal truths that certain things are healthy for 99.9% of us and other things are unhealthy for a similar percentage. But the field of genetics has shown us that people do metabolize foods differently and have sensitivities and other issues particular to their ethnicity/genetic makeup. Instead we are given guidelines that are supposed to work for everyone. Even given one individual, they will react very differently to the same diet and exercise plan at different periods throughout their life based on many factors, such as how many times they have dieted in the past, what kind of health issues they have developed or haven’t, or simply their age. These concepts seem to be too confusing for many, or at least those who write books or articles have decided that they are too confusing, and so they dumb everything down into simple rules that over time harden into unchallengeable “fact” when they are really nothing of the kind.

3) Business and Government

a. We exist in a capitalist society where the “free market” reigns. Many of the large companies in such a system operate with the goal to get bigger which increases their stock and makes them and their stockholders wealthier. In doing so, altruistic motives often become of secondary concern and then only when they can coexist with the goal of making more profit. This situation can lead in more notorious cases to companies like the cigarette companies that profit on the addiction to harmful substances, but just as much to food and beverage companies that profit on the addiction to sugar, fast food, and junk food.

b. The U.S. Government is seen by those on the right and the left as being a spoiler in this area and others. For the right, the Government should have no place in telling people what to eat or how to spend their money. It should not be a “nanny” because it should be up to the individual to exercise their free will and be responsible for their own decisions when it comes to diet and health. For the left, the government is little more than a facilitator for big food companies, giving them corporate welfare and subsidizing huge factory farms that produce way more in the way of food then we can eat or even give away to countries in need. The smaller farmer interested in sustaining the land, producing a product that is healthier and more humane, gets marginalized if not eradicated.

4) Medicine and the Medical Industry

a. Pharmaceuticals have become a huge sector of the economy and due to the realities of the healthcare and insurance industries, the marketplace, litigation, and government regulations; they have turned into monstrosities of a sort. At the same time that they create drugs which prolong life for cancer patients, and even so much as cure other diseases, their drugs are increasingly seen as not having been adequately tested. They basically bribe doctors into prescribing as much of their drugs as possible with the unspoken threat that perks of free dinners and vacations will go away without high enough sales numbers. They need these huge sales numbers in combination with high drug prices that are ultimately paid for by health ever increasing health insurance premiums and the government (and thus your tax dollars), in order to make up for the huge costs of developing drugs and the potential risk of having a dud, or worse something that ends up eventually harming people and thus causing countless legal expenses.

b. Doctors have been accused of not understanding nutrition, and not wanting to pressure patients into eating healthy because they feel their pleas will be ignored. While there are certainly exceptions, many doctors have expectations for patients that are so low, they would rather prescribe drugs or even surgery over really urging a patient to eat better or exercise. Their slavery to the pharmaceutical industry makes it even harder for them to resist the temptation to simply prescribe a drug for a given symptom. Many patients are afraid to do the hard work of figuring out what the underlying cause of a symptom is and experiment with possible solutions (although this is getting easier with the internet and being able to communicate quickly with those who have similar issues), but doctors have much more background in science that should enable them to do this work faster and more efficiently. However, again the realities of the profession mean that it is a lot easier and more profitable to see a patient for a few minutes and sign a prescription for something that will allay some symptoms for a while as opposed to getting to the bottom of the problem.

5) Dieticians, Nutritionists, and “Experts,” oh my!

a. Our growing problem with obesity and obesity-related health issues has not only created a huge market for what most recognize as the today’s charlatan snake oil salesman equivalent of this diet pill or that fad diet, but it also creates a market for those with more recognized certifications and ostensible respect in the professional community. These so called experts dole out advice with confidence and do this in the place of the medical doctor who has largely given up this role.

b. Dieticians and nutritionists, and even personal trainers have generally been giving the public what they have been asking for. An expert to tell them what to do and how to do it. Unfortunately, these professionals practice a “science” which is not hard and fast the way, say, physics is (quantum mechanics not withstanding!). The theories behind weight loss and healthy eating aren’t as simple as these experts make them out to be. Very little if anything has been “proven” in studies, but these studies all the same are used as “proof” to back up the standard party lines. These lines become more solidified and more rigorously defended over the years. As it’s been said, if you repeat anything for long enough, it becomes accepted as fact. When dieters follow the advice of their “expert” but do not see any improvement, the patient is often the one who is blamed for doing something wrong, or even for cheating. Even if the patient convinces their expert otherwise, instead of causing the expert to question their foundation of knowledge (assumptions), they patient is labeled an anomaly (usually genetically speaking these days) and told to pursue a remedy in prescription form. Since their standard advice is useless and they cannot suggest something that goes against that advice.

Solutions

Ok, so, as you can see, the situation is a complicated, convoluted mess. Can we make any sense out of it? As cynical as I may sound above, in the sense of the upcoming New Years’ resolutions, here are just a few personal and collective goals I can suggest. Some of them will be hard, if not all but impossible but I don’t see anything wrong with having such goals as long as there are others that are more achievable or achievable faster. The harder ones give you something to work towards after all the easy things are out of the way!

Suggestions for the individual:

1) Stop following and start thinking.

a. This really relates to a lot of the issues above. Really all I mean is to not just listen to what the so-called “experts” are saying, but to do your own thinking. Think about what makes sense regarding what they tell you, and what doesn’t. You’re smart enough and at least have common sense to know that some things that “experts” tell you to do don’t make sense, or at least don’t for you.

b. Get other opinions. Just as with politics, diet, nutrition, and exercise have their fare share of differing camps. Low carb vs. low fat vs. calorie counting, aerobics vs. weights, etc. Read about the different approaches, but more importantly try them out. If something doesn’t work, after giving it a fair chance, try something else. Is this going to be hard for some people? Sure! But there are plenty of communities on the internet that will help you understand the different issues. Instead of relying on a “expert” to tell you what to do because that’s been drilled into them as a party line, talk to your peers and ask them what works for them. Get suggestions and have a dialogue, not a one-way list of orders that you can’t stray from at the risk of dire punishment.

2) Don’t listen to the Government.

a. At least don’t listen to what they tell you as far as dietary advice. Our society, economy, and government are centered on money and commerce. Officials rely on campaign contributions from wealthy individuals or large companies in order to get reelected and so are lobbied incessantly and successfully by factory farms and big food companies, and even by non-profit special interest groups, who all have their own agendas. The part of the government that currently makes dietary guidelines (the much-maligned food pyramid included) is the USDA. That is the US Department of Agriculture. Agriculture as in farmers. The USDA’s raison d’etre is to promote the interests of farmers and the agricultural industry in the U.S. There seems to be an inherent conflict of interest here!

b. The current administration is very pro-big-business at the moment and so they have a bias towards promoting things that help those big businesses, whether they are big food and beverage companies, pharmaceutical companies, or fast-food chains. So we will necessarily see recommendations and even laws supporting these businesses right now. That doesn’t mean you have to support them as well.

3) It’s not simple!

a. It’s not all about weight. Most experts would have you believe that weight is the paramount issue here, but that simply isn’t the case. Excess weight may be perfectly healthy if it is in the form of muscle and not fat. Most scales only measure total weight, at least until recently, and that one measurement has also been simple and convenient for the “experts” to obsess about. Body fat percentage is a much more telling measurement. Even with excess fat, there’s some evidence to suggest that maintaining a steady, albeit above average weight (with that excess weight being fat) over the long haul (especially if regular exercise is part of the picture) is much healthier than gaining and losing over and over even if half of your time is spent at some mythical “ideal” weight.

b. Don’t let the scare tactics get to you when it comes to cholesterol. Very often doctors will urge their patients to go on cholesterol medication because their LDL is too high or even just their total cholesterol is too high. However, there are pleanty of layman, scientists, and even doctors who have come to the conclusion that the current standard methods of measuring cholesterol are at best misleading, and at worst completely meaningless. Given the risks of taking serious medications like the cholesterol-lowering Statins, it’s extremely important to know whether there is a really good reason to take these.

Suggestions for the medical industry, dieticians, etc:

I’m not sure whether such suggestions (even coming from someone other than myself who has credentials and real influence) could ever affect significant numbers within these professions because of the inherent forces within them that have caused the current status quo. Perhaps the only way of changing things in some cases would be to create competing bodies or professional associations that could somehow challenge the more mainstream ones. Such bodies exist currently in some forms, but sometimes these have their own issues because they are blinded by their own ideology as opposed to real science. In any case, here are my suggestions:

Look at the opposing point of view and look at it dispassionately. Those in the medical industry are supposed to be practicing science, but like scientists in other fields, a status quo is developed and anyone who challenges the ideas of that status quo is ridiculed, but, if their ideas truly have merit there may eventually be grudging acceptance and finally adoption into the accepted tenets of that science. Scientists are supposed to weigh (no pun intended) things dispassionately, but they are still human and as such unavoidably have biases and turfs they feel they need to defend. The growing amount of litigation and cost of insurance only make it harder for Doctors to go against the grain, and the “standard of care” solidifies this practice. But I would argue that doctors also need to look really hard at their Hippocratic Oath and ask themselves whether doling out pills and not suggesting anything that goes against standard orthodoxy is really helping patients, and if it’s not helping patients are you are in fact hurting them because you are preventing them from getting the advice that really would help?

Likewise, nutritionists and dieticians need to look beyond their training which accepts only a narrow dogma with little flexibility. Admitting that things we thought were true are subsequently shown to be false is much less painful than clinging to an argument that has really been proven false over time. It smacks of fear of losing one’s place as an authority and one’s job. With adherence to dogma comes inevitability of obsolescence since with progress we often learn new things that contradict what we thought we knew. Refusing to accept new evidence staring one in the face will only worsen an individual’s or entire profession’s reputation and hasten it’s demise. An old guard defending itself is never to be trusted to advance the interests of anyone but its own.

Finally, to the medical industry, I would suggest creating studies that actually mean something. So many of the “studies” that come out today really don’t prove anything. Part of the fault here goes to the mainstream media who sees a preliminary study on mice and extrapolates it to be proof or at least a strong suggestion of how things work in humans. But scientists should know this and refrain from talking to the mainstream press about studies they know are only going to get hyped into ridiculous simplified generalizations. Even aside from animal studies, there is simply a lack of good human studies especially when it comes to diet and health. Many of the studies I’ve seen are with very small groups for short periods of time, or they aren’t even studies themselves but rather “meta studies” which simply look at other studies and try to argue a point based on hand-picked literature that supports their cause – while ignoring those that don’t. If we really and truly want something approaching objective “proof,” we need to spend lots of money, and not the money of special interests. Perhaps a large fund, like that of Bill and Melinda Gates, could support something that would not allow for special interests to influence the results to any significant extent. Doctors would have to resign themselves to any conclusion, instead of starting with a conclusion in mind and writing off an unexpected result as some anomaly. The numbers of participants should be very large – in the thousands or even tens of thousands. All variables should be plotted, not just weight, height, gender, and age, but body fat percentage, previous dieting and exercise experience, ethnicity, medications, smoking, etc. Ideally participants would have to be confined to an area where there would be a fair degree of confidence as to what the participants reported were true. In other words, all exercise could be monitored and all food intake as well. Not just monitored so much as allocated. Different levels of macronutrients would be allotted to different groups. There wouldn’t be just a “standard group” and a group that differed to a moderate extent in one of their macronutrients like carbohydrates. Instead you would have a group that took in 80% of their calories as carbs, 10% as protein, and 10% as fat, another group which took in 5% of their calories as carbs, 65% as fat, and 30% as protein, and all the different combinations in between. The study would also follow the individuals over at least a three year period, but as many as seven years. As I implied, this would not be an easy or a cheap study, but satisfying all or most of these strictures will be the only thing that will convince the majority of people (experts and laypeople alike) that a particular method of weight loss works best for a person given their very particular makeup (ethnicity, dieting experience, medications, etc.). Perhaps computer modeling and genetic profiling will take a lot of the work out of this in the future, but for now, anything short of this full-on approach will be, as it has been in the past, meaningless except as something for scientists, doctors, universities and/or hospitals to get their names in print.

Back in the wacky days of the dot com bubble, I had this idea which I’m sure at least a few (thousand?) other people did to create a website that was basically about wish lists. I had an Amazon.com wish list (which I still do), but part of the problem was at least at that time they were primarily about books, CD’’s. I had another wish list on buy.com for my electronics items, and probably a couple of others for yet more product categories. Lots of companies had their own wish lists for the products they sold, which was a horribly decentralized way of going about something like this. Why not, I thought, have a one-stop service where you could search for products among dozens if not hundreds of different merchants and the database of products you wanted would be kept on this third-party site rather than on all the individual ones. A central store, that is, for wish lists.

I feel a bit odd about finally “going public” with this idea, except for the fact that I’m sure it’s been attempted and the fact that I can’t think of an actual site that tried to do this means that it wasn’t very successful. Since those days, Amazon has expanded into many more product categories, so I no longer need to have a wish list at Buy.com. But it still is limited in many ways. For example, they simply don’t have certain brands of products when it comes to Audio/Video equipment which is easily attainable from Best Buy or Circuit City. So maybe there is a market for this somewhere and I’ll be kicking myself if it actually takes off. The problem, I think, is that companies don’t want to farm out their product database to third parties, at least not the big guys like Amazon.com.

Just today there’s a piece on J-Walk about another player stepping up, and their idea is pretty similar to mine! Google has had a feature called Froogle for a while now which allows users to check for the lowest prices for a given product among a database of many vendors. They have now attached wish-list functionality to Froogle, and called it Froogle Shopping List. I played around with it for just a little while and it works pretty much the way you would expect but it is still pretty bare-bones. You can add items to your list, delete them, and edit little notes attached to each item like with Amazon’s wish list. You can’t, however, specify how many you want of a given item, nor, more importantly, can you rate it from 1 to 5 in terms of how much you actually want it. That last one is actually a fairly recent feature of Amazon’s and one initially that seems a bit silly. I mean why would you put something on a wish list that you don’t want people to buy you? That brings me to another use for wish lists – wish lists as just bookmarks of sorts.

Ever since I had a wish list on Amazon, I would put stuff on it that I had no plans on buying myself, or expectation that others would. Some of these were just interesting books I’d heard about, but others were items that were well beyond my means and of course nothing that a friend or family would ever buy me. Up until recently, there was no way on Amazon to distinguish between things you just wanted to save for reference purposes in a database you thought you’d always have access to online, and those things you actually were considering buying or thought others might buy for you. Unfortunately, when you edit or more importantly view an Amazon wish list, you still cannot sort based on this important field. I’m not sure why since this would enable you to quickly see the things that the person in question is most interested in. Google has a slightly different approach so far. As I mentioned, there is no field to rate how much you want a product. However, there IS a field that Amazon does not have, a field for making an item public or not. So while you can’t specify if something is a “love to have” vs. a just “like to have” you can just make something visible or not. So in a way it is better because people don’t have to read the fine print about whether you want something to level 5 or level 4. If it’s on your list, they can just buy it. Or, if you really want to explain to people how much (or how little) you want something; you can always add an explanation in the notes field.

The other nice thing that Amazon has which Google still doesn’t is a mechanism for categorizing products so you can sort or filter stuff based on a product category. Say you’re only interested in getting a friend a book. Well, you just filter their wish list for only books. Amazon can do this easily because they already have all their merchandise categorized. Google, of course, is just pulling items from lots of different vendors’ databases, and I’m sure many of them don’t have category fields, and if they do, they probably aren’t consistent with other vendors, so Google can’t automatically assign a category to a product. However, what they could do fairly easily is to let you the customer assign categories. They could either create a standard set of categories or better yet let the customer create them. This way you wouldn’t just be limited to having a books and movies and electronics category, but you could actually have a category for yourself, a category for your kids, a category for a special event (Amazon has special baby and wedding registries which are completely separate from your standard wish list), etc.

The big thing that Google has going for it is that you can choose to buy from many different vendors, finding the cheapest vendor for a given product, or just the one you trust most. Amazon is primarily a one-price shop (although you can have different prices if you opt to pick it up at one of their partner retail stores like Circuit City). But while this is a big advantage for Google, it’s also not nearly as you might think it would be. For example, when you are picking something to put in your wishlist, you have to pick a product from a specific vendor. This may sound obvious, but what happens if another vendor kicks it’s price down $100 less than your chosen vendor after you pick them? All you or the person looking at your wish list will see is that product you picked which is no longer the cheapest price. You can, of course, pick multiple items, but this would just make the wishlist unwieldy, especially if you can’t filter it! Say you pick 10 different pieces of consumer electronics, 20 different movies, and 10 different books. If you just include 5 different vendors for each product, that’s already 200 entries in your wish list! I have over 300 items on my Amazon wish list, so if I wanted to recreate this, we’re talking about over 1000 items if I want just four vendors per item! Google needs a way of implementing wish list items that aren’t specific to a vendor, but rather are based on the title of an item. That way, I can give the model number and brand of a piece of hardware, or even be less specific and say “400GB Hard Drive” and Google will put this into my wish list and when people click on this it will bring them to a search results page where all such items are listed. The only problem with this is one that I’ve found inherent to their Froogle price-search engine. That it can’t distinguish between, say, a Treo 600 phone and just a hands-free headphone for Treo 600 when your search is “Treo 600.” You can filter your results if you play with it a little. For example, I was able to successfully filter out all but the actual Treo 600 phone by searching for “Treo 600 –GPS” and specifying a price range of $200 to $700. This looks for all instances of Treo 600 that don’t also have “GPS” in the title and range from $200 to $700 in price. I figured that price range would get rid of the vast majority of accessories for the Treo, and would probably never actually exclude the phone, since the lowest I’ve seen it for ever has been $399, or maybe it was $350. Obviously this is not the most user-friendly method of creating a listing, and maybe this is one reason it hasn’t been implemented yet, but the bottom line is that Google’s wish list is sitting on top of this incredibly powerful engine which is only being used once - to create the wishlist item for the first time.

Froogle also doesn’t seem to index anything from Amazon, which is a shame since there are certain things, the new Criterion Collection Holiday 2004 Gift Set being an example, that Amazon sells exclusively. I’m not even sure why this is the case since Google would theoretically be driving customers to Amazon, and Amazon does have an affiliate system. I can only suspect that Amazon has some corporate reason they want to keep people on their site using their wish list which I’m sure they’ve worked hard at developing and maintaining. And while centralization of some things is bad, I think in this case a central “authority” for wishlist creation would be helpful. What it might even develop into is some kind of open source xml-based standard like RSS that would allow for universal publication and distribution of your wishlist outside of Amazon and wish list creation tools which have nothing to do with a single proprietary company. But for now, Google’s wish list seems a step in the right direction, albeit one that needs work…

Oh the humanity! The promised nirvana of smartphoneness has been yanked from our clutches! Or so it seems.

Just over this past weekend, a firestorm developed over reports that the Treo 650’s new non-volatile memory stored things less efficiently (so that the same files take up more space), and this means that the paltry 22MB of memory available go even more quickly.

One of the big cheerleaders for the 650, Andrew at Treonaughts, wrote a diatribe of how disappointed he was if the reports turn out to be true. I can’t say I would blame him either.

This is not the first time PalmOne has disappointed us. When the 650 was first announced, we found out that it would have the same amount of memory as the current 600 and also that it’s camera would not be the expected 1.3 Megapixel improved one everyone was expecting, but the same one as the 600 as well. Then there was the whole debacle around the crippling of the bluetooth implementation for Sprint customers which Sprint then had to backtrack on based on the outcry.

I want to be fair to PalmOne and I’m sure there are very valid reasons for not including certain items, be they technical or cost-related. But it is truly hard to imagine why no additional memory could have been added. I realize that the volatile memory in the Treo 600 is cheaper than the non-volatile memory in the 650, but the non-volatile memory in all the flash memory sticks and cards that are sold for digital cameras have come down in price significantly over the last year. I’m betting they’ve at least halved in price. One can now buy 1GB of flash memory with mail-in rebates for as low as $50, maybe lower. And this is retail. Wholesale I’m sure the prices are significantly less. So adding an additional 32MB of memory I’m thinking would add a couple of bucks to the phone’s cost.

PalmOne is currently pleading for a few days while they do a group huddle to figure out whether the claims are accurate and then what should be done about it. It seems like they may be understanding what being a pennywise and a pound foolish is about. Handspring developed the Treo 600 and was subsequently bought up by PalmOne, so I wonder what the corporate culture of PalmOne did to change things in terms of strategy for the 650. Some have suggested that this was merely a marketing strategy that would put out a more basic model first, then trump it with subsequent releases that offered more memory and perhaps other features. But if this were the case, it would be unfair to those who would opt for the top of the line but based on the information that’s been given them can’t expect any new models for another year and so, and this would just alienate some of the earliest adopters and biggest fans of the phone.

Currently the only Treo 650’s on sale are CDMA models from Sprint. This is another snub, in my mind, to a huge cross-section of the Treo’s potential customer base. PalmOne decided to partner with Sprint to give them exclusive rights to all Treo 650’s produced until next year. While this has angered a lot of non-Sprint customer, it also seems to be (as PalmOne’s decisison to keep the amount of memory the same) devine retribution. Now all these Sprint models will be crippled and will have to be, undoubtedly, recalled to the factory for upgrading of their memory. When PalmOne finally gets around to producing their GSM models for T-Mobile, and AT&T/Cingular, they will have to have this memory issue nipped in the bud. But by then it may be too late. The word on the street will grow that the phone has issues and this will at least delay further sales, and possibly just hamper sales in general.

The whole idea of the 650 has been tarnished for me and while I still crave many of its improvements over the 600, I can’t justify putting many hundreds down for such an incomplete product and one who’s company seems clueless. I may yet have to start looking at some PocketPC phones next year, although for now the 600 does everything I need. No doubt PalmOne has a lot of damage control to do right now, and I wish them well. Hopefully they will use this as an opportunity to improve the product even further, even if it means a slight price increase.

Back five or six years ago, my then roommates and I got our first satellite antenna and one of the networks that we spent lots of time watching was a computer/tech/gadget-oriented “ZDNet.” “ZD” was from Ziff Davis, a publisher of computer magazines. There were lots of cool shows and some not-so-cool ones, but a good mixture of subjects was covered to suit various interests. They had kind of general news and tips shows called The Screen Savers, a show for novices, Call for Help, a McLaughlin-esque round-table of pundits arguing about the latest industry trends with the curmudgeonly John C. Dvorak as host, a gaming show, and others that don’t come immediately to mind. I enjoyed them immensely. Perhaps I enjoyed them a bit too much as I remember having to stop for months at a time due to oversaturating myself with the stuff.

In 2002 I moved in with my then girl friend and got cable, but alas the cable in DC did not include ZDNet, which by then had been rebranded as “TechTV.” I was bummed! When we eventually moved back out of DC earlier this year and got satellite again, I searched for TechTV but found nothing. Then I discovered that TechTV had been bought out by some video game network. While a show about the latest hottest games out there is fun to watch once in a while, I don’t consider myself a gamer. I actually try to stay away from the things because I know from past experience how addictive they can be. While some may say to this - “so what’s the problem with that?” now that I’m a real adult with a wife and a house and a career, spending 6pm to 7am online all night gaming is not exactly conducive to this kind of life! Or perhaps I should say that the other way around?

So, I wrote off my past affection to TechTV and went on my way. Just a couple of weeks ago, I saw that Leo LaPorte, who was the host of a couple of shows on TechTV, had his own radio show that had the same themes as his TV shows. Not only that, but he was podcasting his shows, as well as hosting an online community around the show. I started listening to some of his podcasts and got greatly nostalgic for the old TechTV. Leo, for those who never saw his shows or have never heard him on the radio, is just the perfect host for a computer show. He’s honest, friendly, goofy, caring, smart, and genuinely interested in helping people at all levels, never arguing, correcting, or putting people down. He also shows interest in peoples’ lives outside of technology, which is always nice. It’s great to geek out and all, but when that consumes everything and there’s no room for anything outside of geekdom, it can get pretty bland and isolating.

Anyway, I was listening to Saturday’s show and Leo began talking about G4TechTV. Apparently Comcast (the Cable company) owned a channel on video gaming that was struggling. Earlier this year they bought TechTV and merged the two in order to increase viewership. Unfortunately they did away with most of the TechTV shows, favoring their G4 Gaming shows instead. The one that remained was The Screen Savers, but Leo among others, were let go and the remaining staff were forced to move from San Francisco to LA or lose their jobs as well.

After listening to Leo’s earlier podcasts last week, I started TiVo’ing Screen Savers. What I learned today listening to Leo’s podcast from Saturday, was that G4TechTV had actually let go a bunch of staff, including some of the on-camera folks from Screen Savers. Apparently this actually happened over a week ago and since then they have just been showing repeats! So the repeats that I was watching over the last several days had a staff that will be gone when the new shows finally start coming again (supposedly next Monday). While not comparable to Leo’s earlier shows, the episodes I watched were not as bad as I first expected. My only complaint would be that it seemed like they intentionally sped things up to keep what they probably think is their target audience’s (teen gamers’) attention. Also the last show that I TiVo’d on Sunday night had a split screen where they showed the new Nintendo DS footage at the bottom half and the Screen Savers at the top. This made the Screen Savers video so small that it was unwatchable and while I could have just listened to it, I decided not too on principle! I mean, come on, if I’m watching a show because that’s what interests me, why are you killing half of it to show me something else? It’s like if NBC decided to do a split screen to show The Biggest Loser on the bottom of the screen while they showed West Wing on the top. While the shows may share some of the same audience, in the end, both of these audiences lose out when the distraction level and minimized screen sizes make the shows much harder to watch.

So there is still no real scoop on what is going on at G4TechTV regarding The Screen Savers other than it is reorganizing. There is no clue as to who will be hosting the show, or really anything. Some of the current and former staff of the show have commented on their blogs, but mostly pretty briefly and very professionally. The only real commentary is on a thread on Yoshi’s (one of the show’s hosts who was let go) forums from watchers, in the comments of some of the current or former staff’s blogs, in other blogs of watchers like myself, even in G4TechTV’s own forums, and in Leo’s Saturday show. The general reaction from these third parties are generally justified digust. Leo said that in his view the network was basically imploding and would probably be gone sooner or later. Some rumor on Yoshi’s forum proposed what sounds like a conspiracy theory (but perhaps not as unbelievable as it might initially sound) that Comcast bought TechTV, G4’s biggest competitor, in order to slowly kill off all of its shows and then eventually (by the beginning of next year) go back to being 100% about games and even ditching the TechTV part of their name.

All I can say is “how sad.” I realize business is business, but it really seems unfortunate for all involved: for the staff that had worked and built a great lineup of shows who were unceremoniously dumped earlier in the year; for those who actually made the move to LA only to be let go less than a year later; and for all of the faithful watchers of TechTV who had their shows ripped away. But maybe, as Leo was commenting in his podcast, this is just a sign of things to come. As we see over and over and over again, “Big Media” just doesn’t get it. They are obsessed with marketing to the hottest market in town – that of teenagers and early 20-something’s – and could care less about anyone else. They are driven by stockholders who want to see constant growth of profits in a skittish market. They are obsessed with ownership rights and feel threatened by even the slightest ability for people to fairly and reasonably use technology to view content the way they want rather than the way the content company wants. The audience is seen as a bunch of deadbeats who, given the opportunity, will steal their product and give it to all their friends, thus bankrupting them. Perhaps part of this is due to what they see as their target audience and how that young audience isn’t mature enough to understand the consequences of their actions. It’s a catch 22, unless of course these companies start looking outside of their current narrow tunnel vision and start looking at the big picture and where things are headed, whether they come along for the ride or not.

Leo, I think correctly, envisions a time when media is distributed like podcasts to audiences of all sizes. Sure a lot of it will be crappy home-grown stuff, and I’m not sure where the revenue stream will be to help support the people who want to make these, unless they actually embed commercials in their content too. Maybe IPTV and podcasting and PVR technology will merge in the not too-distant future and instead of having a choice of two or three hundred channels of content delivered by a handful of companies, we will have thousands of choices, perhaps tens of thousands or more, from almost as many different sources. I’m not sure how this will change the dynamic (except that it will probably change it profoundly), but it seems like the current system has so many problems when networks can be destroyed by competitors (whether intentionally or not), and great shows with cult followings (Sports Night or Freaks and Geeks anyone?) get ditched because they were aired on Friday or Saturday nights where they never had a real chance to thrive.

I wish all the folks at TechTV luck – this stuff reminds me way too much of the internet bubble and crash from a few years ago that I narrowly missed participating in. It must be terribly stressful working in an environment like this where your job is constantly on the line. Then again, I suppose this has always been the case for most of media, or show business. When the numbers are down, your show isn’t worth as much to advertisers and so your neck gets closer and closer to the chopping block. Maybe one solution for the future would be a kind of open-source movement for media and entertainment. If you like a piece of audio or video content, a piece of fiction or even a blog entry, you could commit to a one time (or repeating) donation of a few cents or a bit more. This of course relies on people actually wanting to voluntarily sacrifice hard earned money in order to keep stuff on the “air” which cynics would say is pretty doubtful, and even optimists would admit is a big challenge. Yet National Public Radio and Public TV have been doing this pretty successfully for years! They also get government funding, and block out all programming for days a few times per year to plead for money. I don’t know how things will go down in the scheme of things, but it’s a very interesting period for media right now and things may get a lot worse and more confusing before they get better.

In a random remembrance moment I had this morning, a couple of food items that I really enjoyed, but only briefly, came back to me. It’s odd that I would remember such ephemera and I can’t think why I would right now except maybe for the added focus on food during the week of Thanksgiving.

Zeus Pasta Chips – Back when I was in college in Boston in the late 80’s, a small Massachusetts snack food company called Smartfood was making some waves, at least locally. Their cheddar popcorn was all the rage, but another snack by them didn’t quite make the big time. I remember buying Zeus Pasta Chips or just “Zeus Chips” a few times at a local convenience store. I was smitten with these chips, which were some kind of pasta that was fried and covered with a similar cheddar powder. They were crispy, but not tough and brittle like raw pasta. Smartfood eventually got bought by Frito-Lay who did not continue the Zeus Chips product, if it was even still being made by that point. A Google provided only one small bit of info about Zeus Chips and some other similar pasta chips by Bill Robert on this page.

Pepsi Kona – Much later than my affaire with Zeuce Chips, I came across this product at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. It was Pepsi that had been given a slight coffee flavor. Being a big fan of coffee, I was smitten. Unfortunately, as I found out later, I believe from Pepsi itself, it was a product that was being test-marketed in certain areas but apparently had not garnered enough good buzz to warrant an actual release. I would say that I probably had this drink somewhere between 1995 and 1999, but I can’t be any more exact. Ok, some further searching on Wikipedia says that it was released in 1997; however, this Geocities page (watch for popups - no pun intended!) has this to say:

Pepsi Kona was an innovative creation by Pepsi, being a mix of Pepsi and Coffee. In 1994, when this soda came out, Pepsi began to limit production of the lines that were just released; only selling 20oz and 2 liters. Also in the highly caffeinated arena, but in a different era, was Pepsi A.M. A.M. actually stands for what one thinks A.M. should stand for, being the period in the day before noon. In the mid 1980’s, Pepsi came out with A.M. to reach a lot of the coffee-drinking youth. Of all of the failed sodas, Pepsi A.M. was the only soda that I remember a commercial for. The commercial ended with a sunny window and Pepsi : The Taste of a New Generation in horridly bright white letters.

Further searching on the web “uncovered” the fact that I probably knew at one point but had forgotten that the company that bought Smartfood – Frito-Lay - is owned by the company that makes Pepsi, PepsiCo! Hey, there’s a connection!

Katherine from Low Carb Freedom has a nice piece on a recent study presented by Brown University that purports to show that low-fat diets are more effective at weight loss for the long haul. I saw this article (article no longer available) yesterday but hadn’t gotten around to commenting about it I guess because it comes with the refrain that we’ve been hearing for months now - “low carb diets are on their way out.” There are so many articles with those headlines and yet all the people I know who have been doing low-carb plans are still doing them.

The problem with these studies is that they are flawed from the get go, and so whatever they allegedly show is really nonsense. As Katherine mentions, they often deem “low carb” as simply being lower then the ridiculously high average that has been the case in the American diet, at least until recently. So instead of 300 grams of carbs per day, the dieters are consuming 100 grams. But as anyone who has read a low-carb book knows, 100 grams is much higher than what a low-carb dieter would eat unless he or she were on the maintenance phase after losing all their weight. This is doubly dumbfounding because so many critics basically paint low-carb as NO-carb diets. This all may seem like an abstraction, but the fact of the matter is that much of low-carb theory is based on keeping the level of carb consumption at a point where it has minimal effect on insulin. If you go slightly over, you end up with it not being that effective. Sure eating 100 grams of carbs is better than eating 300 grams, but for many it’s not going to allow them to lose much weight, if any.

As Katherine notes, the actual text of the study is not available and so we don’t know whether they accounted for various variables. Let’s look at just a few of these. Did the dieters all have the same level of exercise? Exercise (what type and how long) play a significant role in how a person loses weight. Did they all start at roughly the same weight? Those who have more to lose to begin with tend to lose more weight on average, no matter the diet. What was their dieting history prior to this study? Frequent, “yo-yo” dieters often have a much harder time losing weight because, it is though, they have conditioned their metabolisms to hold onto more excess fat for longer. What were the dieters eating? While the news report notes the macronutrient levels and caloric totals, the types of fat (MFA vs. SFA, etc.), and the vitamins and nutrients in natural food as well as the chemicals and preservatives in processed food, all have effects on the overall picture. Dieters studied from similar ethnic and racial groups? Genetics have been shown to effect how the body metabolizes things. Those whose ancestors are from hot climates generally have a much greater potential towards insulin resistance for example. Was the amount of water among the two groups tracked? In terms of weight loss, was only the actual weight measured or was their any effort to determine how much of that weight was fat and how much was muscle, water-weight, etc.? And we haven’t even talked about the murky waters of psychology and how a person’s attitude effects how well they adhere to the diet, stress levels, etc.

The dieters were participants in The National Weight Control Registry, which is a voluntary and open registry, but you need to have maintained a 30-lb loss for over a year. So this eliminates anyone who has lost under 30 lbs, even if that’s all they needed to lose. None of the results are verified by doctors, they simply ask participants to fill out a form, so even the validity of the data is in question.

The ONLY way, as far as I can see, to get anything approaching usable data is to take many individuals and isolate them in a setting where you can completely control as many of the variables as you can. You compare only individuals who are about the same age, race, ethnicity, diet history, and starting weight. You give each participant within each group the same exact food. You make each of them do the same exercise routine, etc.

Even doing something like this you’re going to run into differences based on genetics which for the time being we won’t be able to easily differentiate. Mapping the Human genome will eventually produce a much tighter understanding of at least that one facet. Sleep levels have also shown to be important in weight loss and you can’t make people sleep the same amount necessarily. Stress can also have an affect and while you can remove stress from an environment, you can’t control what inherent issues may crop up from a participant being away from their family, or being with other people that they may not get along with, or simply other emotional issues people will bring with them to such a study.

Studies of the kind I mention have been done, but they are few and far between and relatively small due to their expense. If we are really serious about getting to the bottom of some of these questions, though, such studies with larger numbers need to be funded more because it will be the only way to get close to having some degree of confidence in what the best way to eat is, and I suspect even if this were to happen we would get conclusions that were open to interpretation and which varied based on one’s age, heritage, and dieting history. In the mean time, my advice would be to just read as much as you can about different diets and fitness plans and try each, recording how easy it was to lose weight, how long you are able to keep it off, how the diet impacted your energy level and other health factors that are measurable (blood sugar, insulin, triglycerides, etc.), and how it changed your body fat percentage, not just your weight. Ultimately we all have to be our own study – both the researcher and the participant – in order to come up with what works best for us. Getting bent out of shape or even taking at all seriously a “study” such as the one Brown University presented, is pretty much pointless.

UPDATE: There was a press release today from Catherine LaCroix of Low Carb Living Magazine in which she got a comment from the presenter of the study, Suzanne Phelan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Human Behavior at Brown University, that the headlines stating that the study showed that low-fat was more effective than low carb was “misleading.” Additionally, LaCroix uncovers that the differential in calories that may have caused less weight gain was not from fat per se but from “junk food.”

There’s been recently some news about how Vitamin E taken as a supplement might be bad for you because a study found slight increase in mortality in a group that took the standard 400 IU daily dosage. Laura has an excellent and detailed critique of this study on Turtle Way, and rightly points out that the study means very little, and doesn’t prove or even suggest anything except possibly that taking a Vitamin E supplement might not have a significant effect on increasing a person’s longevity. Even, that, though, I fear, can’t be extrapolated.

One issue that Laura doesn’t go into, and which I think few outside of biochemists and experts in the field of supplements will even be aware of is that of the complexity of what we call “Vitamin E.” The Linus Pauling Institute has a terrific synopsis of the different subcomponents of Vitamin E for those interested, but suffice it to say that the most common is Alpha Tocopherol, and its been shown to actually deplete the other subcomponents of Vitamin E, so the natural form that Vitamin E comes when you eat food is not duplicated and may even be compromised by consuming synthetic supplements, unless you get a brand that can show it consists of a mixture of the subcomponents. So it is likely the study participants were consuming mostly synthetic Alpha Tocopherol and so this might have had an effect. Then again, as Laura pointed out, the numbers really aren’t scientifically significant.

Finally, there are times when Vitamin E has been shown to be harmful, in particular when doses larger than 2000 IU, but also when it’s combined with certain drugs such as anticoagulants (blood thinners). And if that weren’t enough you also have the variable of diet. Vitamin E is, like most vitamins, fat-soluble, which means that without fat it’s not going to be absorbed as well or at all. So if you don’t consume it with fat, or you consume low amounts of fat (such as on a low-fat diet), then your absorption of E, whether it is a synthetic supplement or naturally from food, is compromised. This is why many Vitamin E supplements on the market are in capsule form that also contains oil, but not all of them are.

So, Laura’s point still holds in that there is just not a statistically significant number to take this study seriously as proving or even suggesting much of anything. Not only that, but there are so many other variables involved that even if there was such a difference, you wouldn’t be able to separate out most of these variables since in the study they just aren’t noted in the data. Then again, this has not prevented scientists from asserting that a study suggested one thing or another in the past.

Vitamin E is an essential micronutrient and has been shown to improve many risk factors, but as with anything else, you shouldn’t just buy a pill off the shelf (or accept one from your doctor) without doing any research. Not only could you be taking something that would make the Vitamin ineffective or worse dangerous, but there are also different kinds substances that too often the media dumbs down because they don’t think the public can handle anything with the least amount of complexity. Getting into details seems too nerdy and not easily digestible (no pun intended) in a two-paragraph blurb or a 30-second sound-bite-like report on the evening news. Do your own research! Google is your friend!