Odds stacked against you

Last night, someone I know pointed me at a July 2007 blog article by a Dr. William Davis, talking about why excessive consumption of processed wheat products is bad for your health.  That includes breads, cakes (see, you always knew Ho-Hos were evil!), pasta, and even those breakfast cereals with the boxes plastered with logos telling you how heart-healthy they are.¹

It’s an interesting blog overall. The title of this post comes from part of Dr. Davis’ capsule “about” text:  “You’ve been playing the health game by someone else’s rules with the odds stacked against you.”

Davis stresses that he’s not dispensing medical advice, just sharing information and discussing health issues frankly as he sees them.  But it seems to me there’s a lot of good information here.

I’ve just syndicated his Atom feed here on LJ as heartscanblog.  If you want to become a little more of an informed player in the health game, you might want to pick the feed up.

[1]  Oh, wait, wait, most of them don’t actually come right out and say that they’re heart-healthy ... they usually wrap the insinuation in weasel-words like “Supa Wonda Brekky Bikkies can be part of a heart-healthy diet” and let you draw the conclusion they want you to, without ever actually making explicit claims.  Well, cellulose packing peanuts can be “part of” almost any diet you care to name, too, but I still don’t recommend eating them.

Seeing the light

A while ago, I talked about replacing all the profusion of incompatible copper data interconnects between computers, peripherals and home-electronics devices with a single unified optical-fiber connection standard that could carry everything but power, and as a bonus wouldn’t pick up surge currents.

Intel just demonstrated essentially what I talked about.  They call it Light Peak.  Intel appears to be designing it to be logic and protocol compatible with the USB 3.0 specification — essentially, implementing USB 3.0 over fiber.  It’s hot-pluggable, and Intel says you can tie it in a knot and it’ll still work.  The current implementation can carry 10 gigabits per second, full duplex, over distances up to 100 meters, and Intel is predicting 100Gbps in the next decade.

It’s about time.  Good for Intel.  I just wish Intel could internalize the idea that when it can come up with stuff this good, it doesn’t need to play dirty pool in the marketplace.  Products like this will sell themselves.