Tuesday, January 27, 2004
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - With self-refilling bowls of soup and jumbo buckets of stale popcorn, professor Brad Warsaw has identified one culprit for U.S. obesity: food.
The University of Illinois researcher has set up several food experiments that show the more people are given, the more they will eat, and that the more they eat the more likely they are to be obese.
"In the obesity war, food is the front lines," said Warsaw, who founded the University of Illinois' Food & Brand Lab. "It's easy to point at, and we don't have to take responsibility because we can blame the restaurant or supermarket."
Others have marvelled at the professors conclusions. "We've always suspected the link between obesity and food, but now for the first time this link has been proven as more then anecdotal," says fellow colleauge and diet professional Herb Tarton. "We expect this study will have a profound effect on the way that people regard food."
"I wasn't aware of it," said Nina Hughes, one of the students of Dr. Warsaw. "That's why I've been gaining so much weight I guess. I've been told about the connection by friends and family, but I never believed it. I thought they were just trying to save leftovers."
Tarton believes that many people have had the same attitude as Ms. Hughes. "Its one thing to be told that there's a link between the amount of food you eat and your weight, but its an entirely different thing to have scientific evidence of it. Dr. Warsaw's finding remove any doubt from the matter."
Traton adds: "Its of similar importance to the lunar landing and the cofirmation that the moon is not made of green cheese. Until that point, it was nothing more then speculation."
Saturday, January 17, 2004
I dreamt a dream of a beautiful princess with skin of chocolate and eyes of jade.
So perfect. Why must I be tempted by something so out of reach? I don't even have hands for this. I strummed away all day to a dream of Dylan, all the time dizzied by a dream of my own. Even Bob's dream's are more likely then this.
At least his are paved. Mine seem to have no path.
Friday, January 16, 2004
My Own Beat
She pointed at me menacingly with her lit cigarette. It glowed and crackled, but I stared past it to look her in the eye. In the background the monotonous, repeating rhythm of Taking Care of Business pounded against the back of my head.
'If you can't dance, then you can't write,' she said.
Then she took her cigarette and extinguished it forcefully into the little elvis shaped ashtray that sat between us on the table. She shook her head once, still staring at me with disdain, mechanically rose from her seat, and paced out of the establishment.
I didn't sleep that night. I cried until my pillow was soaked. And then, the next morning, to the brilliant melody of silence, I began to write.
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Here's some blather.
I'm agnostic on the matter myself.
But anyways, since the question was asked... so why is the existence of a 'Universal Moral Law' evidence of God? I don't really think its necessarily evidence of anything besides its own existance. Humanity had to develop in some way, and it had to have some characteristics, or no characteristics and then as chaos, but whatever way we ended up there is nothing special in it that suggests the cause. Evolutionists, I think, have a similar flaw when they say that Universal Moral Law is proof that it is the best way for us to develop. I don't think we can say that for certain either. i don't see how our morality, or any other characteristic we have, has any attribute that implies its originating cause. Because we recognize it, we can be sure it exists, but beyond that, I think the rest is just speculation.
Its conjecture!
Now that I'm thinking about it, this would seem to me to be the start of a good argument against evolution. That there is nothing intrinsic about the way we are that suggests that evolutionary forces have been at play in our development. Its all speculation. Evolution says survival of the fittest, which really isn't saying anything, just that the one's most fit to survive, do survive. Of course you could turn the same argument onto the existance of God.
If you really want to argue something on this point, you have to do so by saying something like 'the existance of any Universal Moral Law is evidence of God' which basically is saying that existance itself is evidence of God. Because if we admit that our specific version of Universal Morality has no traits that prove that it is of a divine nature when compared to other possible Universal Moralities, then it follows that the only way Universal Morality can prove the existance of God is by being in existance itself. But once again, we don't really understand existance yet, so you're going to have a tough time coming to any conclusion on that.
But you know, as a sideline, I think that a real flaw in this whole line of reasoning is that there is an underlying assumption that humans are completely rational being. Economists try to use this all the time, and I really believe its a bunch of nonsense. When he says 'In the same way, if a man asks what is the point of behaving decently, it is no good replying, 'in order to benefit society', he makes the assumption that every person thinks through rationally what is in their best interests and what is not, and that that is the only factor that plays into the decision. But its not true. When I make the decision to behave decently I do so based on a bunch of things - on convention, that this is the easiest way to live, - on intuition, that it just seems to feel like the right thing to do, - on experience, that this seems to have worked pretty well in the past. Now you might argue that these things are proof of the existance of God, I can see that argument as I write this, but really they aren't. Like what I said above, they don't prove anything except that these are the characteristics that factor into human decisions. They don't imply the existance of a God or deny the existance of a God. The only attribute they really have that supercedes their actual essence is that they exist, so any argument that this is evidence of God really boils down again to saying that existance is evidence of God.
So all this stuff comes back to the same thing. Nothing about us really proves anything, except that we exist. I don't see how we can infer anything from any of our qualities about the existance of a some higher motivating force. And that's the end of that.
And in the end we're all dead.
Sunday, January 04, 2004
every morning of every weekend he went out for coffee.
he woke up at 6 in the morning, long before anyone else in the house woke up. he thought he liked the peace and quiet of the house at that time. it was very quiet. but he didn't stay in the house long, just long enough to grab a piece of fruit, a banana or an apple, or sometimes a yogurt. then he went out to his car.
when it was winter he would go out to his car and brush off the snow and scrape the windows and start it up and go back in the house and wait for a few minutes before going back out. in the summer he would just in the car and leave.
he went to different coffee shops. in fact, he went to a different coffee shop every weekend. after a while he ran out of coffee shops and started going to little diners. but he wouldn't order sausages or eggs or anything to eat. just coffee.
he didn't know why he went to a different establishment every morning. one morning he decided that it was silly to be always going to a different place. there's a perfectly fine coffee shop not more then two blocks away, he thought. he had been there once, he couldn't remember for sure but he guessed it was on his very first outing. he seemed to remember that the coffee had tasted fine. not that he was a connoussier. he could tell the difference between the different coffee's, but he didn't much care for one over the other.
he decided to walk. he didn't usually walk, he usually drove. even to the coffee shops that were only a few blocks away. as he walked he noticed the wind that was blowing strong from the west that morning. he felt cold, and he didn't like the feeling. he cursed that he hadn't worn a better jacket and got frustrated with himself for being so cold. this just made his colder.
the sun wasn't up yet, and so he also felt afraid. he wasn't sure of what. the darkness was scaring him. there weren't any lights on in the houses that he passed, and that scared him too.
he wished he would have drove. he had a longing for his car stereo. he would always play music as he drove to the coffee shops. the same music, an old record of dylan's that he loved. he kept it in his car just for these type of mornings. he wanted to listen to dylan. he didn't like the silence.
when he finally got to the coffee shop he opened the door and walked in. at the counter was the girl who had served him the other time he had went there. she was an average looking girl, shortly cropped brown hair, a little button nose, maybe slightly overweight, and an earring pierced through her left nostril.
he went up to her and forced a smile. he asked for a medium of the dark roast. the girl asked him if he wanted it to stay. he always got it to stay.
this time he said no, i'll get it to go. she nodded and smiled and turned around to get the cup of coffee. he sighed. she brought him his coffee and he paid for it.
before he walked back home he went over to the bus stop bench that was across the street from the coffee shop. he glanced behind him to make sure that the girl from the coffee shop couldn't see him. she couldn't, her counter was obscured by the side of the building. still, he looked back a second time just to make sure. there was no one looking. he through the coffee into the garbage can by the bench and walked back to his car, where he got in and went looking for another coffee shop.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
