This is actually kind of a sore spot, so I thought that I would touch upon it. The New York Times recently announced that they were going to start charging for content in 2011. Strangely enough, most people who grew up in the Internet age seem to think that everything, including premium content, should be free of charge. I personally don't believe that's the case, and would even go so far to say that having an economy based on content generated at the expense of advertising dollars is an extremely bad thing. But at the ...

I do the odd post from time to time on health issues and current research I think is interesting. About a year ago I posted an article discussing how caffeine seems to have a negative influence on the body's insulin signaling, which ultimately affects blood sugar levels in the blood. What this ultimately means is that caffeine might be a major contributing factor in the obesity epidemic, since high insulin levels in the blood promote the storage of fat and make it difficult to burn it. Here's a recent 2008 study that investigated the effects of caffeinated coffee and ...

I just read the results of an interesting study done down south. Apparently americans spend approximately three hours per week grooming themselves and looking good, but less than an hour (per week people) on foreplay and intercourse. So it appears the collective mass would rather look good in bed than be good in bed. Photo from here Here's a couple of paragraphs from the write-up. Americans spend nearly three hours every week grooming themselves, but less than one hour on foreplay and sexual intercourse. It’s no wonder that only 46% of us describe our love lives as exciting, or ...

I picked up a book the other day that I've been meaning to read for a few months now. It is a book by a scientific journalist named Gary Taubes entitled Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health (Vintage) (although after reading it, I think a more appropriate title might be something like "The People's History Of Diet And Nutrition.") For those of you who follow nutritional research, you may remember Gary from a controversial article he wrote in 2002 in the New York Times called 'What If It's Been ...

Big thanks to all of you who pinged me about helping with my little web experiment. So far we have six hosts represented, but I'd love to have a lot more. So if you have any friends that have blogs and can help out, please direct them to me. I'm collecting data in real time right now, so it will be interesting to see what it'll all look like after a few days. When this is done, we should all have a pretty intimate insight into all the various hosting companies out there and how ...

Hey guys. I want to do a fairly simple web experiment this week. I want to try to assess real-world uptime and latency for a bunch of popular hosting sites. I need a bunch of volunteers to help out. Basically all I'll need you to do is upload a file to your root directory and allow me to ping it from time to time to do some measurements. I'll tabulate the data next week and put it online for everyone to see. So, if you can help out, drop me a comment and let ...

I caught the original news for this in a Skype back channel yesterday, and have had a few people email me links about this since. For those of you who missed it, Microsoft has announced that it will be opening a Vancouver office to attract Canadian talent and to sidestep some of the immigration problems it has had in the past: Microsoft Corp. has ratcheted up the pressure on the U.S. government to boost the number of foreign worker visas it gets by announcing plans for a new software development centre in Vancouver. The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant said yesterday ...

I've had a few requests lately from people asking if I could send them a copy of my master's thesis. So in the interest of saving time, I'm throwing it up here in case anyone wants to download it and read themselves to sleep. My research was primarily in the area of high definition video compression, specifically on a new codec called H.264 that is used in the new HD DVD formats such as Blue-Ray and HD-DVD. I proposed a novel scheme to combine concurrently broadcoast MPEG-2 standard definition (SD) streams with H.264 spatial difference information to create ...

If you would have mentioned that you were trying to lose weight by a reducing your carbohydrate intake a few years ago, people would have dismissed you as crazy and told you that you were only hurting your body. However, that all changed sometime around 2003 when a prestigious medical school released a peer-reviewed study that basically showed Low Carbohyrate diets not only help people lose more weight, but also result in better blood-lipid profiles than their low-fat counterparts. Since then, I've read countless studies on PubMed that basically indicate the same thing. However, another fairly major study just came ...