JohnFrat.us

• Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Honey Laundering. There was an interesting article on the radio program Life On Earth this week highlighting this eight-part investigative report by Andrew Schneider. Basically, Schneider discovered that imported honey — about 2/3 of the honey consumed in the US — is quite likely to be “trans-shipped” to avoid tariffs. A huge percentage of the imported honey comes from China, but because of the tariff issue it’s labeled “Australia” or “Korea”. And honey from China has traditionally had the same sorts of quality concerns we’ve seen with other food products from there. Since there is no legal definition of honey it’s pretty much impossible for the USDA or the FDA to inspect honey to determine if it’s even real. Apparently there are all sorts of additives in honey, such as illegal antibiotics and inexpensive corn syrup. And don’t expect that “Organic” honey is any better. Since bees fly all over to get their pollen, the honey is totally dependent on what sort of plants they visit. If the plants aren’t organic, neither is the honey.

• NY Times: Obama’s New Chef Skewers School Lunches. This is a very good sign. Here’s his thoughts about the National School Lunch Program which provides breakfast and lunch for 28 million kids a day, including every single child in the Cleveland School District.

There are a couple major repercussions of [the National School Lunch Program] felt by our children. The first is their ability to learn. There is overwhelming evidence that confirms that additives of colors and preservatives common in lunchroom food hinder a child’s ability to learn. In addition, the abundance of high fructose corn syrup in lunches and snacks has been shown to have a direct link to the attention deficit disorder epidemic.

The second is physical health. According to the Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine and the International Journal of Pediatric Obesity, by 2010 nearly half of the children in North America will be overweight or obese.

• Cleveland Magazine: Med-Mart Free For All. Very nice roundup of the various reactions and comments to the Medical Mart / Convention Center decision. The best item linked here is all the sputtering by the Greater Cleveland Partnership, whose desires were totally rejected. Obviously the Mall site is the correct one (and I believe that’s the case no matter the cost difference), but there are some good follow-up questions here. The best ones center around whether or not the convention center can or will extend over the train tracks and shoreway and finally connect downtown to the lake. This kind of connection is both obvious and needed and I hope that it can be accomodated in this plan.
• NY Times: Babies Know: A Little Dirt is Good For You. One of the major theories as to why immune related diseases and allergies are on the rise in the West is that we do not expose ourselves (and our children) to enough bad stuff. Basically, as one of the doctors in the article asks, “Are we too clean?”

• Slate: Why some foreigners can’t believe Obama won the presidency fair and square.

• Dell: Latitude XT2 Docs and Specs.
  Update: Looks like they’ve pulled the page down for the time being. Nothing really earth shattering there, but at least the new machine uses a standard Intel chipset. The ATI X1250 chipset on the XT is horrible.
• Project Virtual Reality Check. “Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) is a joint venture of Log•in Consultants and PQR, who have researched the optimal configuration for the different available hypervisors (hardware virtualization layers). The project arises from the growing demand for a founded advice on how to virtualise Terminal Server and Virtual Desktop (VDI) workloads.”

• The ALA gave out their 2009 literary awards yesterday. Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book won the Newberry. Quite a change from last year’s winner. Maybe the ALA’s been reading their press? Anyway, I was happy to see that a majority of the Newberry and Printz (YA) medal and honor books have rolled through the house already. Ned’s comment about The Graveyard Book was that it was “good, but complicated.” Coming from Ned, I’m not quite sure what that might mean! One award I was not previously aware of: The Alex Awards, for adult novels that will appeal to teen audiences. Interesting.
• Errol Morris in the NY Times: Mirror, Mirror. Morris asked the photo editors for AFP, AP, and Reuters to each select ten photos that they thought epitomized the Bush presidency. Then he interviewed the editors about the photos. Fascinating. Especially the different photos of the same moments.
• The Chronicle of Higher Education: The End of Solitude. The thesis here is that with the rise of all the various web-based social networks and other ways to communicate on the Internet and via cell phones, younger people expect to always have contact with others and are unhappy and bored when they cannot. The author worries that, without the interest or ability to be truly alone, this generation will not be able to hear those quiet thoughts that only emerge in solitude.

• New York Review of Books: Google and the Future of Books. A relatively thoughtful piece about the sea change that’s going to occur once Google does reach their stated goal: to scan and make available the information from all books. Won’t they have some sort of “monopoly” on “knowledge”? How do traditional libraries or even bookstores fit into this picture?
• Slate: Robert Frank’s The Americans. One of the most important books of photography ever. It’s amazing what kind of commentary can be created with a simple candid snapshot. This article also discusses how the layout of the book contributed strongly to the story it was trying to tell, again without anything explicitly didactic.

• Heise Security: A Single Overwrite Will Do It. It’s been conclusively proven that overwriting the data on a hard drive just once will make it impossible to recover. Now how to convince our security guys that this is true? I’m sure they have an order in for one of these.

• Onion: Area Teen Up to Something.
• Slate: More about Heroes and Cowards.
• Slate: Cooking Their Books. Is it possible to recreate restaurant meals at home? Not really very well. And especially if the recipes aren’t actually the ones used in the restaurant.
• GreenCityBlueLake: City Chickens. More on the upcoming Cleveland urban farming legislation.

• NY Times: This has got to be the best article ever in the Times. (via Scalzi)
• YouTube: An Engineer’s Guide to Cats. It’s got cat yodeling!
• Cleveland.Com City Council Blog: Chickens, bees, police deployment and $24 million in neighborhood rehab funds: The week ahead at City Council. Apparently the Urban Farming bill will be discussed in committee on Monday. Other recent Urban Farming links from EcoCity Cleveland: Back to the future: Cleveland urban agriculture movement, Re-imagine a more sustainable Cleveland, Urban growers discuss local food economy. And the Cleveland Memory project has a section on urban farming: Feeding Cleveland: Urban Agriculture.