This (more or less) spam message that I received this morning makes my head hurt:

As a huge fan of NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, I thoroughly enjoyed this parody of the last Wait Wait! broadcast during the zombie apocalypse.

I just finished my first week on WeightWatchers online. I have followed the WeightWatchers plan in the past to lose weight, and I have to say, I prefer the current plan–the online version–over the previous plans.
The first reason is the online part–in the past, the WW plan focused on attending your weekly meeting. I’m an introvert and I hated the meetings; I never wanted to share my experiences, and I felt that didn’t get much from others’ experiences. With the online plan, I get all the advice, and the diet and exercise tracking using an online and iPhone app with no expectation of attending meetings.
The second, and bigger, reason reason I like the new plan is how you track your eating. Everything you eat is tracked as points, which you can look up in the apps (a point is roughly 60-70 calories, but also takes fat and fiber content into consideration). That’s the way WW has done it for several years. With the current plan, though, you get X points per day, plus 35 weekly points to use whenever you like during the week (plus, exercise earns you more weekly points).
Most days last week, I followed the plan really well, but I went over my daily points a little two or three days. But with the weekly points, that was no problem. And on Saturday, we visited my mother-in-law’s and aunt’s house in San Antonio, which is always an eating challenge: they keep lots of sweets and the meals aren’t often very dietetic. On Saturday, I ate better than I have in the past, but I still ate some cake and we ordered pizza for lunch. I consumed about 50% more than my daily points! On a ‘traditional’ diet, that would have been a failed day, but I had enough weekly points left to cover it. Again, no biggie.
By the end of the week, I’d used all my weekly points and a few of my activity-earned points, so I stayed on the program; more importantly, I lost some weight and felt successful.

The hot scientific pursuit is putting people in fMRI machines and recording their brain activity while certain things happen. On his excellent blog The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer discusses the findings of a recent experiment where scientists recorded brain activity while the subjects listened to music:

There are two interesting takeaways from this experiment. The first is that music hijacks some very fundamental neural mechanisms. The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors.
The second takeaway is that music requires surprise, the dissonance of “low-probability notes”. While most people think about music in terms of aesthetic beauty – we like pretty consonant pitches arranged in pretty patterns – that’s exactly backwards. The point of the prettiness is to set up the surprise, to frame the deviance. (That’s why the unexpected pitches triggered the most brain activity, synchronizing the activity of brain regions involved in motor movement and emotion.)

As a musician, those conclusions reinforce my own layman’s observations about music appreciation. The definition of music appreciation that Jonah compares this to is, in my opinion, pretty unsophisticated.
My question is: how to we explain why some people like totally predictable music? (I admit, there’s a lot of snobbery in that generalization)

Fred Clark, one of my favorite bloggers, offers the first explanation of the teabagging movement that makes sense to me (I prefer ‘teabagging’ to ‘tea party’ due to teabagging’s delicious double entendre).

What fascinates me here is not just that the Tea Partiers are choosing voluntarily to abandon reality, but that they’ve elected to fabricate a world that’s far worse than the actual one. They’ve chosen to populate their imaginary world with their worst nightmares. That’s a very strange choice.
What I don’t get is the kind of deliberate delusion in which a person chooses to pretend the world is more horrifying and filled with more and more-monstrous monsters. Why would anyone prefer such a place to the real world? Why would anyone wish for a world filled with socialist conspiracies, secret Muslim atheists, Satan-worshipping pop stars and bloodthirsty baby-killers?
But the Tea Partiers cling to these nightmares with a desperate ferocity. They get angrily defensive at the suggestion that this world isn’t actually as horrific as they’re pretending it is. They’re very protective of their precious nightmares. They cherish them.
In trying to understand this choice, this weird preference for a world more monstrous than it actually is, I’ve come around to two explanations. The imaginary monsters are thrilling and they are reassuring.

Read the rest of Fred’s blog post to find out why the teabaggers find their monsters thrilling and reassuring.

Earlier this week, I received a call from a producer at Voice America (internet) talk radio network. She wanted to know if I’d be interested in hosting my own weekly radio show.
I had never heard of Voice America and I was surprised at the offer. My first question: why me? She gave me a suspiciously non-specific answer, something like “Our hosts are people who are published or who are leaders in their fields.” Second question: so, what field do you think I lead? Her answer: software design. Okaaaaaaay.
I asked her a few more questions and ascertained that the offer does not come with remuneration. Since I’m already very busy, and because the whole conversation set off my scam warning bells, I declined.
After the call, I did a little Googling, and it appears that Voice America is indeed on the level, but I’m still perplexed at how the producer found me and why she thinks I might have something interesting enough to say that I’d draw a weekly audience–without her apparently having a firm idea of the topic that I would base my show on. I’m still scratching my head at the whole thing.
Do you have any knowledge of Voice America? Do you know anyone else who has been approached about hosting a show?

This op-ed in the St. Petersburg Times puts a human face on the health care crisis.
(via Rafe Colburn)

Simple ignorance is a curable condition, stupidity is a misfortune, willful ignorance is a character flaw.

Source.

The intro to this article by Matt Taibbi describes the current American political scene quite accurately and explains why I think the US is an empire in decline:

The really beautiful thing about the culture war, from an entertainment standpoint, is that it is fundamentally irresolvable. There isn’t a concrete set of issues involved, where in theory both sides could give in a little and find middle ground, reach some sort of compromise.
That’s because there are no issues at all. At the end of this decade what we call “politics” has devolved into a kind of ongoing, brainless soap opera about dueling cultural resentments and the really cool thing about it, if you’re a TV news producer or a talk radio host, is that you can build the next day’s news cycle meme around pretty much anything at all, no matter how irrelevant — like who’s wearing a flag lapel pin and who isn’t, who spent $150K worth of campaign funds on clothes and who didn’t, who wore a t-shirt calling someone a cunt and who didn’t, and who put a picture of a former Vice Presidential candidate in jogging shorts on his magazine cover (and who didn’t).
It doesn’t matter what the argument is about. What’s important is that once the argument starts, the two sides will automatically coalesce around the various instant-cocoa talking points and scream at each other until they’re blue in the face, or until the next argument starts.
And while some of us are old enough to remember that once upon a time, these arguments always had at least some sort of ideological flavor to them, i.e. the throwdowns were at least rooted in some sort of real political issue (war, taxes, immigration, etc.) we’ve now got a whole generation that is accustomed to screaming at cultural enemies as an end in itself, for the sheer dismal fun of it. Start fighting first, figure out the reasons later.

Depressing.