• On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: The Long Edition

    At some point in the last 2 weeks, I had 0 unread items in Google Reader. It was a short-lived, joyous experience, but this is the result of my web branching: HCG Diet Dangers: Is Fast Weight Loss Worth the Risk? – MSN Health & Fitness – Healthy Living – "But the so-called hCG diet is either a weight-loss miracle or a dangerous fraud, depending on who's talking. The plan combines drops or injections of hCG, a pregnancy hormone, with just 500 calories a day." I don't even have words for how stupid this sounds. And how unhealthy. "Yeah, I'm going to shoot up with a hormone and engage in…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: All Over the Place

    There’s no particular theme to this week’s surfing, but there are some pretty pictures and good reads here. The problem with waste – Note that the list of not-recommended screenings include things like screening for prostate cancer in men older than 75 or colon cancer in folks above 85. I glanced through the USPSTF's procedure manual, and it looks like they're taking into account a variety of factors (age, gender, race, etc.), but their information is only as good as the studies they're pulling from. How worried should we be about researchers' biases (ageism being the first that comes to mind)? "So we’re confronted with a set of screening recommendations…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: Politics, Money, and Some Music

    The original posting of this was horribly borked. I may be switching link-posting plugins. Warm and Fuzzy Budgeting – "You have things that matter to you. Hopes, and goals, and dreams. This is going to sound cheesy, but I think it’s true: Your budget is simply your hopes, and goals, and dreams … on paper." Maybe those tax incentives for creating new jobs should be for hiring a currently unemployed person | Prometheus 6 – What? How are you only going to hire people who already have jobs? "Members of Congress had urged the commission to explore the issue, after reading press reports of numerous instances in which employers and…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly linkage

    This week’s internet cruising: Living Like a Millionaire on Pennies a Day – "Now, I’m not talking about racking up thousands of dollars in consumer debt, or buying fancy cars and houses. I’m talking about something more valuable than that: having time. The only pre-requisite to living like a millionaire is being able to overcome your fear of uncertainty." Google: Google Street View Cars Sniffed Wi-Fi Networks | News & Opinion | PCMag.com – "Google Inc said its fleet of cars responsible for photographing streets around the world have for several years accidentally collected personal information that consumers send over wireless networks." Good job, Google. I'd completely slept on this…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly linkage

    This week’s internet cruising: How to keep someone with you forever – "You create a sick system." I wanted to cry when I read this. Looking Back — Discord&Rhyme – "To be successful at bootstrapping, you have to cut every feature except those you think are absolutely necessary. Then you cut some that you thought that you absolutely had to have. You compromise your design because you need to get the product to market. You ignore automated testing and documentation because your code is too unstable to be held back by rigorous processes." Launching beta, or “How to decide when and where to cut corners” – 200+ Seamless Patterns Perfect…