Well, the brouhaha over yet another celebrity statement is just getting started. This time it's Kate Moss and the offended people are, surprisingly, not fat people everywhere, but skinny people that are sick and skinny because they don't eat. As a fat person, I think Kate's comment bears further examination.

"Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels"

It's not easy to misrepresent just exactly what Ms. Moss meant. Being thin feels better than being fat. I don't think we need to bring in doctors to nod their heads and take your taxpayer money for a government funded study to prove this either; you know it's true and so do I. Being fat feels about as healthy as smoking a couple packs of cigarettes a day. Being fat costs us and the health care system a lot of money to treat disease that is directly caused by obesity. Being fat might be great when you're sitting at the dinner table snarfing down a triple sized portion of linguine carbonara but that's as far as the good feelings go.

I'm not going to touch on actual eating disorders because people with them are not in the obese and unhealthy group I'm talking about - they're in the skinny and unhealthy group who needs to try harder to eat a 1 X portion of carbonara. The rest of us should stop and just mull over that little interview quip of Kate's: "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels."

Having just eaten 10 fresh baked chocolate chip cookies, I'm taking that to heart and putting the cookie jar down for today. Maybe Kate is on to something here. Medical researchers have known this is true for years. Studies on rodents have proven that calorie deprived mammals live significantly longer. What does it take for us to actually change our behavior?

From my experience, it takes quite a bit. Maybe if we keep trying to remind ourselves of just this next time we are reaching for seconds and ordering dessert it will eventually settle in and remind us to stop. To just stop and eat in moderation, in healthy portions - that's all I'm shooting for. I'll never be as thin as Kate, and honestly I don't want to be, but I sure could lose a couple pounds.

I just hope that the thin and sick people don't go overboard in trying to get Kate to apologize for her words. With obesity as rampant a problem as it is today, there's real wisdom there Kate.

If you live in a major city you probably have broadband internet. Broadband internet is internet that works like this: you ask for some content and it is delivered. Dial-up internet is a little different - you ask for content then get coffee. When you return your content is there! According to some random statistics I found published on the internet, 55% of US households have broadband, while only 10% still use dial up. Broadband just isn't available everywhere but it is far better than it used to be years ago when you had to live in a major city to be able to get broadband speeds. 10 years ago I was still struggling with ISDN at 128kbps.

It came as a bit of a surprise to me that we are working on an interplanetary internet network when we have just only really entered the age of fast broadband here at home (on Earth, that is). My first thoughts were "Why do Martians need internet?" and "Did SETI actually find something they aren't telling us?" My second thought was "I know we are planning a moon colony, but surely there are easier ways to deliver fast access to internet porn?"

It turns out I had no idea why we need an interplanetary internet system. What NASA is trying to do is create a communications system they can use to carry data between the Earth and all of their various probes, rovers, orbiters, and spacecraft. Martians need not apply. What is even more interesting is that the system is all about communicating very very slowly, across huge distances. Packet speeds are such that a handshaking exchange between a Martian rover and Earth mission control takes 16 minutes! Dial-up users rejoice, at least your coffee is piping hot when your data gets there. At 16 minutes for a handshake, interplanetary porn isn't going to happen anytime soon.

You can find more information here at the IEEE Spectrum site

Many of you have heard of SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI has been trying to find signs of aliens in radio signals that are received here on earth. The task is sorting through the junk (man made signals, naturally occurring signals) to find signals that would have meaning. There is a project run by the University of California at Berkeley called SETI@home that will enable you to use your computer to analyze radio signals as part of a distributed computing effort.

Folding@home is a similar idea, using spare computing power of many, small home computers to tackle extremely large computing tasks. In the case of Folding@home, the task is molecular modeling and the goal is to prevent human disease. The program is being run by the Pande lab at Stanford University.

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