Letter Never Sent

The World According to Kurt Vonnegut “Where is home? I’ve wondered where home is, and I realized, it’s not Mars or someplace like that, it’s Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there’s no way I can get there again.” I just remembered that I had the pleasure of seeing him speak several years ago at Trinity University in San Antonio.

Exercise amount more important than intensity “In journal CHEST, researchers from North Carolina report that people who walk briskly for 12 miles per week or for about 125 to 200 minutes per week will significantly improve their aerobic fitness and lower their risk of developing heart disease.”

Addicts’ own stories confirm neuroscience “Research has shown that stress is a major contributor to addiction. People who repeatedly take drugs may end up with an exaggerated response to stress, so minor stressors become major ones, says Frank Vocci, director of NIDA’s Division of Pharmacotherapies and Medical Consequences of Drug Abuse.” Great article.

Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia (or Build a Website for No Reason)

Scientists Finding Out What Losing Sleep Does to a Body “A large, new study, for example, provides the latest in a flurry of evidence suggesting that the nation’s obesity epidemic is being driven, at least in part, by a corresponding decrease in the average number of hours that Americans are sleeping, possibly by disrupting hormones that regulate appetite. The analysis of a nationally representative sample of nearly 10,000 adults found that those between the ages of 32 and 49 who sleep less than seven hours a night are significantly more likely to be obese.”

20 of your unusual words “So far as I’m aware, no other language has anything equivalent to the Icelandic ‘setja upp gestaspjot’, a verbal phrase denoting the action taken by a cat when cleaning itself, with its body curled tightly in a circle and one back leg sticking directly up in the air. Literally it means ‘put up a guest-spear’ and when a cat was seen doing this it was supposed to indicate that visitors would be turning up.”

Vonnegut, on politics, presidents and librarians “The America I loved,” he writes, “still exists in the front desks of public libraries.”

China to Develop Its Own DVD Format “Up to 80 percent of DVD players are made in China, but makers have to cough up around 40 percent of the cost of each player to license holders, according to Chinese reports.” Good leverage.

Snake bursts after gobbling gator An unusual clash between a 6-foot (1.8m) alligator and a 13-foot (3.9m) python has left two of the deadliest predators dead in Florida’s swamps.

Intro go anywhere disposable scrabble game.

I/O Brush: The World as the Palette: I/O Brush is a new drawing tool to explore colors, textures, and movements found in everyday materials by “picking up” and drawing with them.

10 Foods You Should NEVER Eat! What’s so bad about Bugles? The highly saturated coconut oil that General Mills fries them in –oil that’s about twice as saturated as lard.

A first look at GIMP 2.4

AMERICAN DIASPORA “the above map was based on more than 40,000 postings on Internet “safe lists” by Katrina survivors. ePodunk analyzed messages containing both the person’s hometown and the location after fleeing the storm. Pass your cursor over points on the map to see city names and to click to information about the community.”

Watched 40-year Old Virgin last night. Laughed. So. Hard.