In a nutshell, Time Magazine tells us that working out to lose weight is a waste of time.

The basic problem is that while it’s true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn’t necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

The LA Times fires back, citing a high correlation between those who exercise and those who lose weight. In other words, while some people will eat back their calories, there’s evidence that others don’t.

While losing weight is not the only reason to exercise, it’s the primary reason for millions of people who sign up for gym memberships each year. I’d be interested to see if this article impacts gyms around the country…

According to Tim O’Brien in the Atlantic, when we choose verisimilitude over imagination to tell our stories, we reach the following:

Batman weighed 188 pounds. His hair was black. His complexion was fair. Young Batman grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, where he spent an unhappy and decidedly disturbed childhood. His grandfather was well known in town as the man who had invented the machine that lays down lane stripes on highways all across America. Batman’s mother was an insomniac. She could sew pretty well. She loved a good pork chop. Batman’s father, by contrast, preferred seafood. The church Batman attended was made of limestone. His school was a brick structure. The family car was an Oldsmobile.

Reading this monotonous paragraph calls back the ghosts of multiple consumer segmentation descriptions I’ve come across over the years.

Of Wired’s 100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About, eight things on the list elude me.

1. Using jumpers to set IRQs
2. Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it
3. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID
4. Archie searches
5. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet
6. Starbuck being a man
7. A Marathon bar
8. Omni magazine

(photo taken by sunside on flickr)

Last April, the USS Bainbridge was integral in rescuing Captain Philips of the Maersk Alabama. The hostage situation brought the growing issue of Somali piracy to the forefront of public attention. This month, Scott Carney has detailed the piracy enterprise in Wired, with an economic analysis and an intriguing Q&A with an ocean hijacker.

Armed men are expensive as are the laborers, accountants, cooks and khat suppliers on land. During long negotiations our men get tired and we need to rotate them out three times a week. Add to that the risk from navies attacking us and we can be convinced to lower our demands.

Wired even includes a strategy game — where your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to vicariously live out this difficult managerial occupation. Makes you think twice about hijacking a ship on open waters, eh?

(photo via wikimedia)

Good Magazine has put out an interesting chart on the best and worst seafood to consume, based on overfishing and health risks.

For the seafood I love (and I love seafood) –

• American crab, check
• Lobster, check
• Salmon (if Alaskan), check
• Oysters, check
• Sea Bass, darn
• Tuna, darn
• Shrimp, darn