Body

I’m up above the 160 pound mark now, which is pretty exciting, although I’m still recovering from a cold so we’ll see how that affects things. I am increasingly tempted to try to count my calories and protein intake, just to see what’s happening.

A lot of the information on men and eating disorders is pretty old– 1999-2001, mostly. I think it was one of those media frenzies that didn’t quite catch on. I mean, I’d at least expect a Livejournal community centered on it, given the number of pro-anorexia groups. Oh, there’s a few: a whole Hydroxycut interest group, for example, and the odd suspiciously self-aware workout journal though. But even the weightlifting groups are populated nearly exclusively by women. I wonder if it’s a LiveJournal thing, or a distribution of illness thing, or labeling, or what.

Thesauri

A visual thesaurus describes the relationships between words as a three-dimensional network, letting you interact with their relationships, traverse them, etc.

AllConsuming does something similar for books, and, tangentially, for ideas. It tracks book links on blogs, so that you know that persons A and C are reading the same book, and can infer that they’re thinking similar thoughts, or working on similar projects, and so forth.

I wonder if you could find a thesaurus for concepts, or maybe an encyclopedia of ideas that pointed out the relationships between them: derivation, opposition, refinement, sub-categories.

Church, State

Say it with me folks. Church, State. Not the same thing at all. Keep them distinct. Mixing them is harmful to both. I see an article like the one yesterday about the Catholic Church’s opposition to gay marriage and I think, well, of course they oppose it, but that’s all the more reason to allow it! Think about it: they oppose gay marriage because their religion opposes gay marriage. There isn’t a civil or secular rationale that would oppose it at all.

Time to write more strongly-worded letters to my government officials.

Dissident Patriot

Been thinking about the concepts of “loyal opposition” and “dissident patriots,” and having just seen his Columbine movie, I quite liked Dissent Magazine’s take on Michael Moore’s failures. He’s really emblematic of the left, to me, and the article has a much more nuanced feel for what I have been groping for when I said “most protestors are idiots” or whatever.

Getting arrested isn’t a powerful symbol anymore. Conflict and protest don’t win hearts and minds the way they did in 1960 when it suddenly became apparent that the police were turning dogs on unarmed protestors. It was certainly something when everyone knew that Nice Kids did not get arrested, that an arrest, even without conviction, barred you from Good employment, and so forth. But now, not so much. Now, it’s not really a big deal to rack up that symbolic arrest. The police have a whole procedure for putting you in jail for an afternoon and letting you out with a small fine that covers the cost of disposable plastic handcuffs and gas for the paddy-wagon.

I do feel the frustration of not being able to convince people of the obvious truths before them: Our Leader is turning this nation into a kleptocracy, and our rights are malleable and disappearing fast.

Them Democrats better get their asses in gear and start promoting fiscal responsibility and exposing Bush for the puppet he is. I just wish the citizenry were more economically and mathematically astute– they’d see through this a lot easier.

Well, at least there’s some positive news on the horizon: new research says video games are good for hand-eye coordination.

More on Man and Nature

I’ve been getting a lot of comments on the Shell/Economist Essay Contest, mostly involving the fact that, the distinction between humanity and nature is pretty arbitrary. Now, I should point out, to be fair, that the essay isn’t actually supposed to answer the question “do we need natur?” The idea is to explore the relationship of interdependence between human beings and the natural world around them, and especially to discuss the idea of balancing immediate human needs with the longer-term health of the planet.

Nonetheless, I’m tempted to open with the famous words of C. Montgomery Burns:

“Oh, so Mother Nature needs a favour? Well, maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys. Nature started the fight for survival and she wants to quit because she’s losing? Well, I say hard cheese!”

Cityscape

This weekend I saw Metropolis, the 1927 version. Naive and over-the-top, and of course the standard silent-film overacting. But nonetheless, pretty neat. Now I’ll have to watch the 2002 anime version. You could pair Metropolis with urban dystopia pics like Blade Runner, or industrial-wasteland movies like Eraserhead or Modern Times, or of course union movies like Matewan. But for some reason I ended up watching it right after I’d seen L.I.E., which still forms neat parallels: suburban rather than urban wasteland, and the corruption of privilege, semi-innocent kids discovering parental malfeasance, male bonding, etc. etc.