Telegraph UK: McDonald's to distribute children's books

McDonald's to become UK's largest book distributor with Happy Meal deal - Telegraph: McDonald's is to become the UK’s biggest children’s books distributor as it commits to handing out 15m books with its Happy Meals by 2015.

 I wonder if The Jungle will be one of them...

Buzzfeed: Vintage School Supplies On eBay

The 13 Most Ridiculously Expensive Vintage School Supplies On eBay: 11. '80s Original Trapper Keeper Notebook, $74.99
'80s Original Trapper Keeper Notebook, $74.99

What, no Pee-Chee's?

Never Mind E-Books: Why Print Books Are Here to Stay - WSJ.com

Never Mind E-Books: Why Print Books Are Here to Stay - WSJ.com: The initial e-book explosion is starting to look like an aberration. The technology's early adopters, a small but enthusiastic bunch, made the move to e-books quickly and in a concentrated period. Further converts will be harder to come by. A 2012 survey by Bowker Market Research revealed that just 16% of Americans have actually purchased an e-book and that a whopping 59% say they have "no interest" in buying one.

 Emphasis mine. That last stat blew me away.

via Bookshelf.

Kansas City Star: Beef's Raw Edges

Beef's Raw Edges: Three years ago, at age 87, Lamkin was forced to wear a colostomy bag for the rest of her life after a virulent meat-borne pathogen destroyed her colon and nearly killed her.

What made her so sick? A medium-rare steak she ate nine days earlier at an Applebee’s restaurant.

Lamkin, like most consumers today, didn’t know she had ordered a steak that had been run through a mechanical tenderizer.

 87 year olds shouldn't be eating medium-rare meats.

That said, this seems to be a really good series. Worth a read.

via Metafilter.

Does Experience Matter?

There's an old joke:

A recently laid-off engineer is called by his former boss to fix one of the factory's machines. The factory had been offline for days due to this machine having malfunctioned, and the laid-off engineer was the only person that knew how to fix it.

He arrived at the factory and examined the machine. Within moments he located the problem, and drew a giant "X" on the broken part. He sent the company a bill for ten thousand dollars.

His old boss was a bit angered: "It only took you one minute to fix the machine, but you want ten grand. I'm going to need to see an itemized breakout to show why I should pay you this much!"
So the engineer sent another invoice. This one read:

1ea: "X"  - $1.00
1ea Knowing where to put it - $9,999.00

Peter Gabriel released "Music Tiles" today. Its an app for Apple iThings.

"MusicTiles allows everybody to create Peter Gabriel music, transforming music fans from passive listeners to active performers."

I mean, really, what's the point anymore? Why bother to excel when now an app can turn "everybody" into a Peter Gabriel producer?

And don't bother me with invocations of magic: "There will always be people who are more creative, more skilled..." THAT DOESN'T MATTER!!  Someone who's investing time in fiddling around with fantasies of creating "Peter Gabriel music" on their iToy is not someone investing time in a band/artist (other than Peter Gabriel, good on him there.) They're trying to speak - not listen.

Everybody's got something to say, and everybody feels they deserve to be heard. As the saying goes, when your mouth's open, your ears and mind... aren't.

"I have always loved the idea that music and art should be fully open media from which no-one is excluded. They are languages that anyone can learn to speak and definitely not the exclusive province of the high priests armed with 'Talent '." Peter Gabriel, High Priest

I wonder if Peter could be prompted to name three or four of these priests armed with "Talent" (scarequotes.)

This isn't so much about Gabriel and what he chooses to do as much as its about the language and assumptions about art and creativity. The arts may indeed be democratic at an entry level, however, our culture demands we compare one another. These elements are in constant tension - the idea of democratic access (anyone can do it!) versus the need to recognize excellence.

(I want to write more about this but am to short of time today. Wanted to get these thoughts out.)

Bookshelf: Louis Vuitton’s bookcase trunk

Bookshelf: Louis Vuitton’s bookcase trunk

Style.

Al Jazeera Seeks a U.S. Voice Where Gore Failed - NYTimes.com

Al Jazeera Seeks a U.S. Voice Where Gore Failed - NYTimes.com:

Current, similarly, has suffered from paltry ratings. “Nobody’s watching,” one of the channel’s prime-time hosts, Eliot Spitzer, quipped to a reporter last month.

It's buried in the God-only-knows hinterlands of the cable directory, AND requires a special subscription package. No wonder. It was one of people's best outlets for neat content for a while. Current's website broke dozens of talented news producers.

Wiley Online: Using subtle reminders of love to foster healthy snack choices

Using subtle reminders of love to foster healthy snack choices - Raska - 2012 - Journal of Consumer Behaviour - Wiley Online Library:

Results from the studies suggest that exposure to subtle reminders of companionate love lead to a greater likelihood of making healthy eating choices than subtle reminders of sexual love.

That's a really interesting revelation. Instead of "Carrots make you sexy!", think "Eating carrots makes people want to hang out with you!"

Tangentially related:

Association of Nutrient-Dense Snack Combinations With Calories and Vegetable Intake

 Children consumed 72% fewer calories when eating a combined snack compared with when they were served potato chips, P < .001. Children who ate the combination snack needed significantly fewer calories to achieve satiety than those who ate potato chips, P < .001. The effects of the snack conditions on caloric intake were more pronounced among overweight or obese children (P = .02) and those from low-involvement families (P = .049)

 Eat some veggies and a bit of cheese. With friends.

Autism and Organic Foods

A math geek on Reddit published this amazing graph:

It shows a perfect correlation between organic food sales and autism diagnosis.

Just let this sink in for a moment.

....

Nobody is claiming organic food causes autism, but that they track so perfectly means there's some relationship...

Consider how autism diagnoses tend to cluster. In wealthy zip codes.

There's a dense set of elements here: economic wealth (equals leisure time and 'lifestyle' resources), in addition to creating incentives for 'good parenting', allows parents to dedicate more attention to their children. "Good parents" will buy organic foods believing these are the best choices for their families (marketing works!) and take their children to the doctor at the first sign of any problems.

All of these elements conspire to create the following reality: rich people are unable to think of themselves as substandard. This makes a kind of sense given the daily reinforcements the rich receive (constant social deference, more free services, etc), but it has terrible consequences when it comes to the critical life skill of self-assessement. I think these parents place unreasonable expectations on their children, who inevitably fail to live up to them, who are then 'diagnosed' with 'autism.' This gives great comfort to a Good Parent: they've done the Right Thing by bringing their concerns to a doctor, and now they have a perfectly reasonable, natural, authoritative answer to why their child isn't perfect: Autism.

See? They're not bad parents after all, in fact, quite the opposite. They've done everything right: Nature gave them an imperfect child.

I'm sure there are plenty of autism diagnosis that are genuine, however, I am also certain these socio-economic clusters exist for more superficial reasons.

Why is this important? Because this segment of society is politically powerful enough to command limited public resources for themselves at the detriment of the commons. This nation has an established tradition of building political realities upon the firmament of denial.