Link linkety

[magid]

Apparently, fat people make their friends fatter. Hrm. I mean, I can see that there can be a connection between social networks and the increase in obesity rates in the US, but the way it's being framed, it sounds a lot like demonizing the overweight again.

Cambridge locals: annoyed about cars blocking bike lanes? You can post photos of the offenders. Doesn't get them a ticket, but it looks like places that have persistent issues might be revamped or more ticketed.
There are similar blogs (is it really a blog?) for many other USian cities.

Guerilla gardening. Just what it sounds like, really.

Origin of punctuation symbols.

I'd heard the idea of one laptop per child, which is a pretty cool goal, though part of me wonders about issues with automatically adopting technology as a good thing.

Comments

[vigilant20.livejournal.com]

The bike lane thing looks like someones person blog, they are all from the same poster. Don't know how big a problem it is since I don't like deep in the city. All I've ever seen are bicyclists causing safety problems. (like driving very slowly down the middle lane of a 3 lane highway with a 45mph speed limit at rush hour, and my personal pet peeve - bouncing off of cars with their hands in order to squeak between lanes...ugh that's my personal property)

[farwing.livejournal.com]

Guerilla gardening. Just what it sounds like, really.

Well, I dunno. I was hoping for pictures of gorillas gardening. *runs away*

[coorr.livejournal.com]

The main idea behind one laptop per child is that its a lot cheaper to distribute educational materials in electronic format than it is to distribute them in book form. I can see some advantage behind this. for the cost of one of those laptops you could buy, what, one text book? Maybe two?

That said I find Negroponte to be pretty much a shameless self promoting hack and I would be far more in favor of the project if just about anyone else was running it other than him.

As for the Fat friends make you fatter thing. I tend to buy it. Humans are social animals and we pick up behaviors from our peers. I suspect you would see pretty much the same pattern with just about anything else. If you hang out with alcoholics (non recovering) over time your alcohol consumption is likely to increase. The places you go and the things that your social network does are all likely to expose you to more alcohol and would likely, over time, alter your behavior. I don't see why eating/exercising habits would be much different.

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

I need to sit down and actually read the social obesity article at some point, I've seen a lot written about it in the last few days, and I'd like to know some more about it. I am frustrated with people who are trying to dismiss the article's conclusions on social obesity out of hand. It's such an interesting result, contrary to many things one might assume. I don't think that anyone should be demonized over it, but it shouldn't be a taboo subject now that it's been brought up.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

One of many blogs talking about the obesity-friendship link (http://viv.id.au/blog/?p=777). One of the interesting things the blog author points out is that:

Female friendships did not seem to be impacted by obesity. But the chances that a man might gain weight from having a fat pal doubled for so-called mutual friends — friends who both listed each other as buddies.

And that many of the articles writing about this study kind of omitted to mention that aspect of the results.

Other interesting results:

It’s well worth mentioning that that study demonstrated, among other things, that there’s no clear link between longevity and BMI, that among non-smokers, obesity was correlated with greater longevity, and that the largest single determinant of longevity was… drumroll… genes.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

Okay, two more links on the obesity study and then I'm done.

Kate Harding (http://kateharding.net/2007/07/26/warning-if-you-read-this-you-might-get-fat/) offers a possible way to explain how friends make friends fat: recommending diets. Because if you diet (as in weight-loss diet), and lose weight, then when you go off the diet, your body will want to go back up to its natural set point - and above it.

And here is a rather long write-up (http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2007/07/oh-what-tangled-web-we-weave-sir-walter.html) that points out a number of flaws (they used a computer simulation to derive the results, conflated "causation" with "correlation," claim that being best buddies with an obese person who lives a long way away is a BIGGER influence than being married to an obese person) in the original study, and some really atrocious assumptions being made by the Dr. who was partially responsible for it! It sounds to me like questionable science at best, and when you add to it the way the media is going to reinterpret it - ugh, I cannot imagine how horribly the major networks are doing at presenting it. I am going to file this one in the "Garbage" pile.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know what to make of the obesity study. Aren't there a lot of factors? One fat friend of a pair, or among four, or three among four? Who is in the position of preparing the meals? I find it hard to believe that one fat friend, all else being equal, would influence his group of four or more to become obese.

Studies are fine, but a study that could increase bias and hatred should be handled quite carefully. Burying the fact that this was found among males and not females is irresponsible.

I remember learning long ago from an informative book that the dollar sign comes from the overlapped letters U and S, signifying the United States, and not from the P and S of the peso that the linked article describes.

[fairdice.livejournal.com]

That "origins of punctuation" site is chock full of all the urban legend folk tales. Some of them are open to actual debate, but it quotes the "octothorp" retro-fabrication that has been thoroughly debunked, even if the true answer is not known...