Flutterby™! (short)

From Shadow: Worn-Out, Pre-Skidded Tires for ‘Fixie’ Fashion Victims. Yep, Retired Belts is making belts out of worn out bike tires.

Insert eye roll, followed by head slap because I didn't think of it first, here.

The headline reads Study: Multitasking hinders youth social skills:

Young girls who spend the most time multitasking between various digital devices, communicating online or watching video are the least likely to develop normal social tendencies, according to the survey of 3,461 American girls aged 8 to 12 who volunteered responses.

Now I'm not one to suggest that technology mediated interactions are necessarily a good thing, but "normal social skills" are, even by the terms of this article, normal only in a world without "...various digital devices communicating online".

Dear All Things Considered. I haven't listened to you in a long while. I haven't been driving anywhere, and when I have, podcasts are generally much better quality than radio. However, I now have a real job, with a commute, and yesterday afternoon on the drive home the podcast wasn't making it for me so I switched on the radio for some variety.

I tuned in in time to hear Billboards Slather On The Guilt With Anti-Cheese Campaign, in which the crank behind this campaign was complaining that:

DR. NEAL BARNARD: If you look at the chemical makeup of what's in cheese, it's mostly saturated fats - the kind that's linked to heart disease. It's very high in cholesterol. Ounce per ounce about the same as any steak you can find, and surprisingly high in sodium. So, how often do you want to eat such an unhealthy food? I would argue never.

You mentioned that Americans are eating 31 lbs of cheese a year. You then went on to call up the French Embassy, in which a charming cultural attaché said a few nice things but... well... It was all I could do to keep from grabbing my smart phone and fact-checking.

You could have mentioned that U.S. cheese consumption isn't all that far out of line, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Greece, and more, all consume over 40 lbs of cheese per capita per year. You could have mentioned that the evidence against dietary cholesterol is kinda thin, and the war on salt is being reconsidered.

In fact, you could have just dropped the story altogether, and filled those 5 minutes with something that made me smarter.

Back to the podcasts.

iPad users: DD vision impaired adult needs note pad app that can be configured to use large text. Recommendations?

Software which is expected to be a part of a complex system and run indefinitely is very different from needing to ship for Christmas...