Eubie's notes

OK, I wear reading glasses, but it’s nice to know that wearing them doesn’t accelerate the eye’s weakening, according to NY Times.

Steve Ruebel’s week-long blog-only diet is over. Given a news quiz by Poynter’s Steve Outing, Ruebel knew 12 of 20 news items that happened last week.

Ruebel found the best blogs for news was Blogdex, Memeorandum, Drudge Report and Instapundit.

N.Y. Times: The Express Lane to the Internet, Now With Fewer Bumps. As prices fall more people sign up. Imagine how many would sign up at $20?

Wired News: How Can I Sex Up This Blog Business?: Hot gossip! Cool gadgets! Gawker & Gizmodo, Fleshbot & Wonkette! Inside Nick Denton’s plan to become the nanopublishing media mogul.

Interesting article from Harvard Magazine about “The Way We Eat Now.” Covers familar ground about growing portion size, sedentary lifestyle and switch to foods with more sugars and carbohydrates.

Why the fuss about overweight: “three aspects of weight?BMI, waist size, and weight gained after one’s early twenties?are linked to chances of having or dying from heart disease, strokes and other cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and several types of cancer, plus suffering from arthritis, infertility, gallstones, asthma, and even snoring.”

Article takes a swipe at TV: “The best single behavioral predictor of obesity in children and adults is the amount of television viewing,” says the School of Public Health’s (Steven) Gortmaker. “The relationship is nearly as strong as what you see between smoking and lung cancer. Everybody thinks it’s because TV watching is sedentary, you’re just sitting there for hours?but that’s only about one-third of the effect. Our guesstimate is that two-thirds is the effect of advertising in changing what you eat.” (Walter) Willett asserts.

Willett is author of Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating. Tip: kottke.org remaindered links.

Steve Ruebel of Micro Persuasion plans a blog-only news diet starting Monday. “This information junkie is going to attempt to go cold turkey on most news produced by the pros for seven consecutive days beginning Sunday, May 30. I will not pick up a newspaper, magazine, watch TV news, or visit a news Web site. The only way I will stay up to date on what’s going is by reading what’s posted on other Weblogs.”

What about RSS feeds? “I will also not click any blog links to journalist-written stories or browse non-blog RSS feeds.”

My self-imposed info-hunger strike, however, does not mean that mass media is going away anytime soon. In fact, it will only become more relevant as blogs act like a media magnifying glass and perform essential “checks and balances” on news reported by the pros.

Well if nothing else, Ruebel will be the topic of many blogs through the diet.

Rexblog: What magazines do the candidates’ backers read?: “Proving once more that most research provides little insight, a recent study from a company I won’t embarass by naming, came up with this gem: the top five magazines read by the two major presidential candidates’ supporters.”

Space.com: Dinosaurs Fried Within Hours of Cosmic Collision, Study Concludes

N.Y. Times: “A new study says that almost half the ties worn by doctors in a Queens hospital proved to be carrying pathogens.”

N.Y. Times: In the Era of Cheap DVD’s, Anyone Can Be a Producer. The tech improvements that allow this to happen are interesting, but the marketing efforts mentioned in the article were very interesting. After all, it’s one things making a DVD; it’s another selling it.

If the movie is any good, it might make it to Cannes. Guardian Unlimited: $200 family film is festival hit.