[Mother Earth]
Nasa is keen enough to provide a huge
picture of Mother Earth. An obvious choice for desktop background.
[thanks to wired news]
[Lactose Intolerace]
I developed lactose intolerance as an adult. Some years ago I started having stomach aches for no apparent reason. At the time I was working a lot - not extreme in any way but still with some stress so I thought that was the reason for an upset stomach. A doctor suggested that it might be the milk. She turned out to be right. The accidental hedonist
says something interesting:
What makes Lactase Persistence so interesting to me is that it's a dietary genetic mutation that has occurred in homo sapiens that has created a clear delineation within the world population. Sometime between 4500 and 4000 BCE, a group or groups of people adapted to their diet of milk, even after weaning off of mother’s milk. This adaptation allowed their bodies to process lactose long into adulthood. If you can drink milk without difficulty, it's reasonably safe to assume you can trace your ancestry to Western Eurasia and/or parts of the Mediterranean. If you can't drink milk as an adult, some of your ancestors come from elsewhere in the world.
Interesting indeed. I am definitily eurasisan though... Someone suggested to me that the way we treat milk nowadays (pasteurization, homogenization etc) may have increased intolerance. A bit contradicting to the hedonist findings. Interesting is that Finland seems to have a large portion of intolerant people. Their milk producer Valio have som great milk products without the evil lactose and they are sold in Sweden (lucky me).
[O'Reilly Radar > IMDb API??]
Radar Tim asks
O'Reilly Radar >What you would do with an IMDb API? Funny to get this question just some days after I thought about my need to log my whereabouts. I don't remember what movies I saw and when. I don't remember what books I have read. I don't remember the name of the wine I drank to the outstanding fish dish in a nameforgotten (starting with R?) brilliant London restauarant the easter 2005. I need to log it somewhere. And I don't mean writing about it - just a log entry saying that I did it. I will need it 4 years from now. What I would like to have is some kind of unified web and handheld interface which I easily can tell:
tonight I saw Underworld: Evolution,
yesterday I drank Gobelsburger Riesling 2004 which was excellent to curry cod with rice,
this summer I read A second chance at Eden by Peter F. Hamilton or
in June I saw Porcupine Tree live at Sweden Rock. To make this happen nice APIs to imdb and allmusic would be nice. How to make the book and wine thing happen I have no idea of. Haven't found anything resembling an Internet Wine DataBase yet. Lets pray for it to emerge in the future.
[Pandora goes public sort of]
Pandora
announces that they now will use other users feedback to in order to decide what happens on my station. I think it is a great step forward. Some of my stations haven't managed to find much that I would classify as similar to the station artist or song. I made one on
Abba for example and it turned up with the worst of the bad 70s music. Not likeable at all. Most of the time it is brilliant though. My "Hearts Radio" based on the
Yes song
Hearts from 90125 produced almost only great songs. However - by a quick look at the post comments most users are happy about this change. Keep up the good work.
