The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Stuart:

Patrick,

I'm fascinated by the perverse intensity that this issue evokes from the wingnuts. It finally struck me that it echoes the dynamic of the Millerite disappointment. Miller predicted the world would end in 1844 and about a 100,000 believers sold their worldly goods and went out and waited for it to happen. When it didn't come, rather than destroying their belief, they believed more zealously.

I would expect the flag wavers and militarists to rip George to pieces for failing to fulfill his obligation to the National Guard. Instead they attack anyone who questions his fulfillment of his duty. It is beyond question that George failed to take his flight physical and in so doing violated his agreement with the National Guard. I think all else is secondary to this. Sure he was busy snorting coke and getting drunk, who cares? But in the present day he holds himself up, or his followers do, as a model of integrity while he lies to us about what he was doing thirty years ago.

If he had come clean about all of this ten years ago no one would remember it now.

Tim,

I worked as an applications engineer for Cirrus Logic for 3 and 1/2 years. Dave Clemenson was the person I talked to most often at Digidesign, including one visit to the facility in Palo Alto. Dave told me stories of his going to Xerox PARC when he was young and playing with the Alto computer in Alan Kay's office.

Jon,

I had Rendezvous in mind but also something with more smarts. I was with the Bose Pro Systems division for 2 and 1/2 years. While there I worked on the architecture of a networked pro audio system. The individual nodes were to be much smarter than would be the case with a lot of consumer audio equipment.

In regard to high definition video, any home networking standard is likely to be around for a long time. It doesn't make sense to build it so that it can't handle already foreseeable applications when it is a certainty that in the future we will want even more bandwidth.

Bose is an interesting organization to study in relation to what Patrick has said about the publishing industry. A publisher is a marketer of books. Everything else is secondary. Bose is a marketer of consumer audio equipment. As an engineering organization they rate no better than a B-. They are truly masterful at marketing to their primary market. They know what their customers want to buy and why they want to buy it.

There is an advantage that companies like Bose and Apple have. They sell their name and every marketing dollar contributes to that. Try to pick up a magazine that doesn't have a Bose ad in it. A publisher in comparison sells dozens of different authors. I am jobless now because the marketing people at Bose couldn't solve the problem of selling to the Pro audio market. Pro audio is in fact much more like the book market and it is tough. The new marketing manageer was shocked when he found out that his stock in trade, the Bose name, was actually a handicap in the pro market.

Teresa,

There was indeed a video equivalent of Pagemaker for the Amiga. It was called the Toaster and was built by a company called NewTek. It enabled people to do video work for less than $5,000 that had previously required a 100k+ investment.

Now you can buy a copy of FinalCut Pro and a G5 and do professional level work on a desktop. If you want to spend more money you can move up with software and hardware from Avid or Media 100. Read the final credits of any CGI intensive movie (LOTR for instance) and you will see credit given to the Avid team.

Sennoma,

Early this year Scientific American published an article on the evolution of the human brain. Our brains consume about a quarter of our energy intake. The authors contend that the human brain could not have grown to its current size until our ancestors started to consume a high energy diet containing meat.

The article also contained a chart of the diet, average cholesterol (around 150) and BMI of a number of pre-industrial societies. The Inuit were the only people to have a BMI higher than 20, theirs was about 25, because of the stocky build evolved to cope with a cold climate.

Humans have the shortest digestive tract of any of the primates indicating that we are the most adapted to a carnivorous diet. That is not to say we are perfectly adapted to eating meat. Cats on the other hand are obligate carnivores, ask my diabetic cat about that.

I quite agree with you on the matter of supplements. I also strongly recommend Omega 3 supplementation using either cod liver oil or flax seed oil. The diet we eat ourselves and the food we feed the animals we eat lacks the requisite levels of Omega 3s. Neither we nor our prey evolved to live on a diet consisting primarily of grain.

I think Kathryn is correct to question the sanity of those who use low carb dieting as an excuse to gorge on saturated fat. Any diet can be abused though, I've seen plenty of people who are willing to eat the whole box of Snackwells because they are low fat.

I am a Type 2 diabetic and eating low carb allows me to control my blood sugar without using dangerous drugs. All of the drugs used to treat diabetes have serious side effects.

When I ate a low fat diet my HDL cholestrol was dangerously low and my triglycerides dangerously high despite large amounts of aerobic excercise. When I doubled my fat intake and reduced my carbs to less than 40 grams a day my lipid levels changed to healthy normal.

The key is in the kinds of fats consumed. A daily dose of cod liver oil reduced my triglycerides more than any drug I ever took. I consume a lot of olive oil, nuts, and avocados. The largest volume of what I eat is low carb raw green vegetables. I eat reasonable amounts of meat, fish, and chicken.

This is hardly the diet from hell and I've never been constipated.

I am convinced that we are adapted by evolution to go hungry part of the year and to eat a diet primarily of meat and fish suplemented with low carb fruits and vegetables.

The figures I've seen on the aboriginal Inuit indicate that their diet was 96% animal products while their average cholestrol was 50 points lower than the average American. The average body mass index in most pre-industrial cultures is 18-20. Two thirds of American adults have a BMI of 26 or greater.

It has been interesting to see the outrage of the medical profession over the low carb diet. Doctors are as mercenary as any group you can name but they are outraged that someone might be making large amounts of money selling diet books. The low fat diet has never been subject to the degree of scientific scrunity that is being demanded for the low carb diet. I fully credit the low fat diet I was on for ten years for giving me diabetes.

Two more composers who should cause forehead smacking: Igor Stravinsky and Duke Ellington.

The American economy depends on the large quantity of illegal immigrants. Who would build our houses, cook our food in restaurants, and take care of our children if not for the illegals.

When I arrived in Massachusetts I quickly learned that Spanish is the language of the production line, just as it is in Texas.

When they start asking for the benefits of citizenship that's another issue. We don't want to educate their kids, give them health care or make sure they have decent working conditions. This does not speak well for us as a society.

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