Fat Country

Bloomberg reports that a study in The Lancet has us as (statistically) among the fattest nations:

"About 2.1 billion people, or almost one-third of the world’s population, were obese or overweight last year, researchers estimated after examining data from 183 countries... The heaviest country was the U.S., accounting for about 13 percent of the world’s obese people."

By my math, that means that the, ahem, vast majority (~4/5) of Americans are obese. Of course, there's also a few sleights of hand here:

• The 2.1 billion number is the number of people who are either obese or overweight
• The 13% number is the American share of obese people
• Buried further down in the Bloomberg article is the fact that of the 2.1 billion figure reported above, only 671 million are obese (and thus, 87 million or roughly 1 in 4 Americans are obese)

But wait, there's more! The device used to measure all of this is... the body mass index. Input your height and your weight, and this device will till you whether you are underweight, normal weight, overweight, or obese. Hint number one: all women who are beyond the second trimester will be marked as overweight or obese. Ditto for postpartum women (at least for the first few months). Yikes.

And if you happen to be big-boned or a heavily-muscled man, odds are that you're at least overweight. And, I notice that if I put in my height and weight from my junior year of high school--during which time I was still considered to be somewhat of a beanpole--I still end up in the "normal weight" category, albeit at the lower end of it.

But, of course, such studies are useful for banning large fountain drinks and pushing for "healthier" meals at school, both points found in favor of those who are rich and powerful. Therefor, they will continue to receive funding, and so the march of SCIENCE! continues.

The State of the Internet

The state of the internet is entertaining, if broken down by common search terms in each state.

Some favorites:

CALIFORNIA: Alcoholics Anonymous / Bros Before Hos / Dandruff Cure / Food Poisoning / Google Glass / Kim Kardashian / Meat is Murder / Paris Hilton / Pokemon / Rogaine / What does Siri look like?
Analysis:  California has a variety pack of issues.

NEVADA:  Bitcoin / Breast Implants / Gamblers Anonymous / Great White (band) / Guy Fiery (TV chef) / Online Poker / Quiet Riot (band) / Tattoo Removal

Analysis:  The shallow hedonism that was the 1980s is alive and well in Nevada.

OREGON:  Allah / Sex / Spork
Analysis:  Somebody needs to go and check on Oregon.

RHODE ISLAND:  Andre the Giant / Beer Pong / Blumpkins / How to roll a blunt? / MSNBC
Analysis:  So is Rhode Island is just one big college fraternity?

UTAH:  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints / Def Leppard (band) / Demolition Derby / Girls Gone Wild / Global Warming Hoax / Jay Leno / Kama Sutra / Laser Hair Removal / Magic Tricks / Mustaches / Star Trek / Star Wars / Twinkie / Tinder / Twilight (book series) / Weird Al Yankovic (singer) / What is the internet?
Analysis:  Utah spends too much time on the internet. 

Commencement

No, not mine, though my name was listed among those graduating form the department. If all goes well, then I will this summer. No, I'm thinking of commencement speeches, most of which are actually pretty banal.

The one P.J. O'Rourke would give for Rutgers isn't, however:

What intrigues me is that there are 31.1 million Americans between 18 and 24, and 21.8 million of you—70 percent—are going to college. It is not possible that 70 percent of you are among the 50 percent of you who are above-average in intelligence....

What constitutes a “college education”?

You need to study history, so that it doesn’t come around again and, per Santayana, bite you in the Ukraine. You’re thinking, “Santayana—historically great guitar player.”

You need philosophy, not the modern bull session kind but the Socratic method of “What the hell am I thinking?” And what the hell were you thinking, majoring in History of Film? At least you got to see So-crates in action in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

You need literature and the arts so you can read something longer than a Beyoncé tweet and throw Bartok into the iPod mix and hear what Jay Z is up against experimenting with music.
A general understanding of science is necessary. You don’t have to learn how to cure cancer. You just have to learn that the guy my age with what’s left of his hair tied in a ponytail who works at the organic locavore shop and talks about the healing properties of crystals and magnetic fields is crazy.

The same goes for mathematics and economics. You should be able to do the math—if you’re still repaying your student loans when you’re 50, college education probably wasn’t a good investment....

Eight or so subjects to get a college education. Think you could find 100 wonderful experts in each of these, 800 professors, for $1.4 billion? That’s $1.75 million a year apiece. There would be applicants. You could hold classes in the Moose Lodge or at the Y. Classes would be large. So was the agora where Socrates taught. But there’s no free WiFi in the Moose Lodge.  And this kind of college education sounds like work.  Which is something you’ll be looking hard for, starting tomorrow.

Go read the whole thing.

Eye of the Tiber on the Black Mass

I've been very busy lately, so I haven't really had time for blogging. And apparently my co-blogger has been dealing with computer issues. In any case, we more-or-less skipped over the Harvard Black Mass debacle. I guess I have a few short reactions to it.

First of all, any claim that this is meant to be merely a cultural event, and not meant to offend anybody, is blatantly ridiculous. The claim might be made--albeit even then it would stretch the bounds of credibility--if this was, say, a pseudo-Black Mass, or if they skipped over the whole desecrating of the Eucharist part which is the the central aspect of a Black Mass. And they did, after all, initially make the claim to have obtained a consecrated Host for this express purpose. They retracted this claim later, of course, but why make the claim in the first place if not to specifically "offend" Catholics?

Second, I can't really give props to Harvard for not hosting this, because the university's response was at best tepid and seemingly forced. Many of the faculty and administrative staff have long since sold their souls, at least figuratively, and they seem to have backed down on this one only after strong public reaction against it. Even then, it doesn't seem to me that the university (or at least the university's president) really went so far as to say "no, we will not allow this on campus." The Canon lawyer Dr. Ed Peters rightly compares the university's president's reaction here to that of Pontius Pilate towards the crucifixion of Jesus. In some sense, Pilate's washing of his hands was a better reaction, in that he could at least claim (vincible) ignorance about Jesus.

Finally, Eye of the Tiber replies with a dose of parody, lest people argue that this is really just a "cultural experience" which is not meant to offend any particular group. But really, offending faithful Catholics is the least of the sins here.

Ramblings About Fiction

I think my reading has slowed somewhat of late. Unless you count thesis-related reading. I just finished Gene Wolfe's "Castle of the Otter," which is his reflections on writing The Book of the New Sun. Part of it (Castle, not New Sun) were very interesting, other parts kind of go under "file for the future if I ever want to take up writing fiction." Wolfe is an excellent writer, perhaps the best active storyteller I've encountered. It's a good day when I find one of his works at Half Price Books. I am currently hoping to get my hands on the second part of The Book of the Long Sun, and would like to read The Book of the Short Sun if I can find a copy with cover art which won't raise my wife's blood temperature.

The other thing I've read recently is a young adult fiction work, the first part of the Chesterton Chronicles: The Tripods Attack! The premise of this book is that it is set in an alternative timeline at the turn of the century, and so is something of a steampunk work, featuring a young Chesterton as the hero. My thought on this one is that it is unfortunately one of those young adult/children's books which really may be enjoyable by children and young adults, but which I found harder to enjoy. Its problems are first that it borrows a little too much from other stories, including Chesterton's stories.

Making Father Brown a character was ok, but then including Flambeau as his godson was a bit too much of a stretch. Ditto to including Dr. Rasnom (from C.S. Lewis' space trilogy) and specifically stating that he somehow has traveled to Mars along with the "Special Branch" operative Dr. Weston. It was just a little too over the top as far as character-use. The story itself is a bit of a blend of War of the Worlds (and H.G. Wells is a major character in this one, which I guess makes sense given that he was Chesterton's real-life friend) with John Christopher's Tripods trilogy, and  C.S. Lewis' space trilogy (in particular That Hideous Strength). However, it came off as a little too hammy for my tastes.

In other sci-fi news, it would appear that John C. Wright has some new works out, and that one of them is free today and tomorrow.

Dustbins

There are worse places to land than the dustbin of history. After all, we are all dust, and to dust we shall return.