Category: rePosts

If you want to lose fat in 2014, how about we do it together?  I need to work off some Danish butter cookies.
Last year, the Lift team helped me test The Slow-Carb Diet® with 3,500 readers.  The result: 84% of people lost weight and the average weight loss was 8.6 pounds over four weeks.  Many people lost more than 20 pounds.  This didn’t surprise me, given the case studies of people who’ve lost 100+ pounds.
Working alongside UC Berkeley, Lift is now launching the largest study of popular diets ever performed.  You can choose from 10 different diets (Paleo, vegetarian, gluten-free, etc.), and the study includes control groups and a randomized trial.  The Slow-Carb Diet is one option.
via Ten Popular Diets — Which Work and Which Are Hype?.

But the Real, Often Forgotten, Promise of Mesh Networks Is…
Yet beyond the benefits of costs and elasticity, little attention has been given to the real power of mesh networking: the social impact it could have on the way communities form and operate.
What’s really revolutionary about mesh networking isn’t the novel use of technology. It’s the fact that it provides a means for people to self-organize into communities and share resources amongst themselves: Mesh networks are operated by the community, for the community. Especially because the internet has become essential to our everyday life.
via It’s Time to Take Mesh Networks Seriously (And Not Just for the Reasons You Think) | Wired Opinion | Wired.com.

Busyness actually restricts professional performance and limits mental capacity. With plenty of recently published psychological and biological evidence of this, Kreider seems to capture it well in the previously cited Busy Trap when he says,
“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice. It is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”
Busy often keeps us from the finer things in life. Though being busy can make us feel more alive than anything else for a time, the sensation is not sustainable long term. We will inevitably, whether tomorrow or on our deathbed, come to wish that we spent less time in the buzz of the rat race and more time actually living. Or as Seneca says in Letters from a Stoic, “There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living, and there is nothing harder to learn.”
via Busy isn’t respectable anymore..

6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better PersonBy David Wong December 17, 2012
motherfuckers. Yeah! LETS DO THIS.”Do what?” you ask. I DONT KNOW. LETS FIGURE THAT OUT TOGETHER, MOTHERFUCKERS.Feel free to stop reading this if your career is going great, youre thrilled with your life, and youre happy with your relationships. Enjoy the rest of your day, friend, this article is not for you. Youre doing a great job, were all proud of you. So you dont feel like you wasted your click, heres a picture of Lenny Kravitz wearing a gigantic scarf.Via Upscalehype.comFor the rest of you, I want you to try something: Name five impressive things about yourself. Write them down or just shout them out loud to the room. But heres the catch — youre not allowed to list anything you are i.e., Im a nice guy, Im honest, but instead can only list things that you do i.e., I just won a national chess tournament, I make the best chili in Massachusetts. If you found that difficult, well, this is for you, and you are going to fucking hate hearing it. My only defense is that this is what I wish somebody had said to me around 1995 or so.
via 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person | Cracked.com.

The same week the movie opened, the very week the birth of Christ, the original champion of social justice, is celebrated, our God fearing GOP-led congress stripped 1.3 million Americans who have been unable to find work of their unemployment benefits. If there were ever victims who needed some attention shed on their plight it is those who lost their jobs and can’t find another one thanks to the recession brought about by the outrageous greed and barely legal (and sometimes not legal at all) behavior of the “too big to jail” financial institutions and those who run them. By comparison guys like Belfort and Prousalis, who at least did some prison time for their crimes, are small players.
via Direct your anger at the greedy rich, not the Wolf of Wall Street film | Sadhbh Walshe | Comment is free | theguardian.com.

Conrad concludes: “It’s not too much of a surprise that when Facebook changes their formula that a lot of people are getting upset.”
“But can you blame Facebook?”
“A lot of people have been posting sub-par content for a long time.”
“Going forwards into 2014, I think social media is going to see a very strong push for better content. It will no longer be just the ‘share if you hate cancer’ posts or the pages that are 24/7 infomercials, we will be able to start to see more real, relevant content in our news feeds. ”
via This Guy Makes His Whole Living Off Facebook Traffic – Business Insider.

Creativity is sometimes described as thinking outside the box. Today the box is a gilded cage. In a climate of careerist conformity, cheap cities with bad reputations – where, as art critic James McAnalley notes, “no one knows whether it is possible for one to pursue a career” – may have their own advantage. “In the absence of hype, ideas gather, connections build, jagged at first, inarticulate,” McAnalley writes of St Louis. “Then, all of a sudden, worlds emerge.”
Perhaps it is time to reject the “gated citadels” – the cities powered by the exploitation of ambition, the cities where so much rides on so little opportunity. Reject their prescribed and purchased paths, as Smith implored, for cheaper and more fertile terrain. Reject the places where you cannot speak out, and create, and think, and fail. Open your eyes to where you are, and see where you can go.
via Expensive cities are killing creativity – Opinion – Al Jazeera English.

In the same vein, programmers who pay attention to how they construct written language also tend to pay a lot more attention to how they code. You see, at its core, code is prose. Great programmers are more than just code monkeys; according to Stanford programming legend Donald Knuth they are “essayists who work with traditional aesthetic and literary forms.” The point: programming should be easily understood by real human beings — not just computers.
And just like good writing and good grammar, when it comes to programming, the devil’s in the details. In fact, when it comes to my whole business, details are everything.
I hire people who care about those details. Applicants who don’t think writing is important are likely to think lots of other (important) things also aren’t important. And I guarantee that even if other companies aren’t issuing grammar tests, they pay attention to sloppy mistakes on résumés. After all, sloppy is as sloppy does.
That’s why I grammar test people who walk in the door looking for a job. Grammar is my litmus test. All applicants say they’re detail-oriented; I just make my employees prove it.
Read the summary of the #HBRchat on Twitter based on this blog post.
via I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why. – Kyle Wiens – Harvard Business Review.

British man becomes first person to visit all 201 countries… WITHOUT using a plane
Graham Hughes, 33, used buses, taxis, trains and his own two feet to travel 160,000 miles in exactly 1,426 days – all on a shoestring of just $100 a week
Yesterday he trudged into Juba, the capital of South Sudan, to end the epic journey that began in his hometown of Liverpool on New Year’s Day 2009
Spent four days ‘in a leaky boat’ to reach Cape Verde, was jailed for a week in Congo, and was ‘saved from Muslim fundamentalists by a Filipino ladyboy’
His lowest point was when his sister, Nicole, died of cancer two years ago
He says: ‘I think I wanted to show that the world is not some big, scary place, but in fact is full of people who want to help you’
via Graham Hughes: British man is first person to visit all 201 countries WITHOUT using a plane | Mail Online.

As I watched Bayonetta: Bloody Fate, the new anime film based on PS3 and 360 title Bayonetta, two thoughts kept running through my head: “This is the most 90s anime I have seen in a decade,” and “this is even more over-the-top than the game was!”
via The Bayonetta Movie is Even More Over-the-Top than the Game.