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More Stats, Less Crime

Living in one of the most crime-ridden cities in the nation, I have gotten in the habit of reading the Baltimore Crime Beat, a blog within the Baltimore Sun, written mostly by Peter Hermann and Justin Fenton.

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Corn, by any other name, is still as sweet

Sweet Corn

The Corn Refiners Association has sought permission from the FDA to change the name of, High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), the sweetener found in everything, to "corn sugar." HFCS already goes by several aliases, like Corn Syrup, Yeast Extract, Isoglucose (Europe), glucose-fructose (Canada), and fructose glucose syrup.

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Candidates' Dabbling Threatens Prospects

Carly Fiorina's campaign may be in trouble. More than a decade ago Ms. Fiorina made comments to the effect that she dabbled in corporate management when she was a young woman. While her efforts led to the devaluing of Hewlett Packard stock by almost half, Fiorina made light of the whole matter, “How many of you did not hang out with questionable folks on Wall Street?”

GOP guru Rove said Sunday that will be a continuing problem.

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Selling Food - Owning Seeds

This morning I found an alarming article claiming that Senate Bill S510, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, will make it illegal to grow, share, trade or sell homegrown food.

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A Good Clunker is Hard to Find

Automobile sales are slow. Around here, local car dealers are offering 1% financing, 0% financing, leases, and even their own version of Cash for Clunkers. $4,500 off, supposedly. Heh.

Last year, I thought Cash for Clunkers was a fair stimulus plan but not much of an environmental benefit. From what I read, many customers traded in their clunkers for what I considered slightly newer clunkers, SUVs and trucks, with only slightly better mileage. Supporters argued that even a small improvement in mileage was significant, but I had a more aggressive agenda.

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Meta Post: Designing the News Experience

Khoi Vinh on design and the news

I thought this talk, by a former design director for the NY Times, might be interesting to dag management, and indeed to authors of the other small blogs that have sprung up since the tumult at the Cafe. Vinh even mentions TPM, among other blogs.

Most interesting to me was when Vinh stumblingly compared the decline of print journalism with the decline of the Romans or Mayans. I had the feeling that the blogger he was trying to quote had read some of Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, but that Vinh had not.

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I'm OK, You're Meat

Meat Bikini

I have come to regard nutritional advice as a giant pendulum. It swings one way and you are supposed to drink eight to ten glasses of water a day; a few years go by, the pendulum swings back, and - no one can remember who was giving us that advice.

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Sex Sin Soil


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Jack and the Statstalk

Beans

Statistics are the magic beans of pop science. Tell someone that heavy drinkers live longer than teetotallers, and she'll say, "How is that possible? What about cirrhosis of the liver?" Tell her there are statistics proving it, and she'll say, "Wow, I never would have guessed that!" That particular stat is making the rounds of the news talk shows right now, and I'd imagine so are a lot of beers.

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Donal is now posting on a wordpress blog called simply, Donal.

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