How to reduce your risk of cancer (excluding smoking).

• Body fatness — Be as lean as possible within the normal range of body weight, BMI 21-23
• Physical activity — Be physically active, e.g. brisk walking at least 30 mins a day
• Food and drinks that promote weight gain — Limit consumption of energy dense foods. Average energy intake should be 125kcal/100g of food. Avoid sugary drinks
• Plant foods — Eat mostly foods of plant origin: fruits & non-starchy vegetables at least 600g a day
• Animal foods — Limit intake of red meat, no more than 300g a week. Avoid processed meat including bacon and ham
• Alcoholic drinks — Limit alcoholic drinks, two a day for men and one a day for women
• Preservation, processing and preparation — Limit consumption of salt to less than 5g a day. Avoid mouldy cereals and pulses
• Dietary supplements — aim to meet nutritional needs through diet alone
• Breastfeeding — Mothers to breastfeed; children to be breastfed
• Cancer survivors — Follow the recommendations for cancer prevention

Source: World Cancer Research Fund (via the Economist)

• 472 contacts in AddressBook
• 234 RSS feeds subscribed to
• 114 LinkedIn contacts
• 102 Facebook friends
• 55 Pseudofish RSS subscribers
• 50 MySpace friends
• 16 Flickr contacts

Based on Dunbar’s research, 150 is the theoretical maximum size of a well formed social group.

Assuming that I know some people in the offline world, and that there is some overlap in the groups above, it is still feasible that I’ve exceeded the limit. This means I’m either spending excessive time keeping in contact, or that I’m not keeping up my end.

As such, my apologies.

The new social software seems to create a trend towards large numbers of shallow relationships. Although, it may be a symptom of other social problems that lead to a similar result.

The question that is puzzling me — What does the society of tomorrow look like? I guess time will tell.

In the New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman writes:

People often ask: I want to get greener, what should I do? New light bulbs? A hybrid? A solar roof? Well, all of those things are helpful. But actually, the greenest thing you can do is this: Choose the right leaders. It is so much more important to change your leaders than change your light bulbs.

Take the New York City taxi story. Two years ago, David Yassky, a City Council member, sat down with one of his backers, Jack Hidary, a technology entrepreneur, to brainstorm about how to make New York City greener — at scale. For starters, they checked with the Taxi and Limousine Commission to see what it would take to replace the old gas-guzzling Crown Victoria yellow cabs, which get around 10 miles a gallon, with better-mileage, low-emission hybrids.

On May 22, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of the greenest mayors in America, decided to push even further, insisting on a new rule, which the taxi commission has to approve, that will not just permit but require all cabs — 13,000 in all — to be hybrids or other low-emission vehicles that get at least 30 miles a gallon, within five years.

This is how scale change happens. When the Big Apple becomes the Green Apple, and 40 million tourists come through every year and take at least one hybrid cab ride, they’ll go back home and ask their leaders, “Why don’t we have hybrid cabs?”

So if you want to be a green college kid or a green adult, don’t fool yourself: You can change lights. You can change cars. But if you don’t change leaders, your actions are nothing more than an expression of, as Dick Cheney would say, “personal virtue.”

From the Economist:

“THEY hate our freedoms.” So said George Bush in a speech to the American Congress shortly after the attacks on America in September 2001. But how well, at home, have America and the other Western democracies defended those precious freedoms during the “war on terror”?

…

Governments argue that desperate times demand such remedies. They face a murderous new enemy who lurks in the shadows, will stop at nothing and seeks chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. This renders the old rules and freedoms out of date. Besides, does not international humanitarian law provide for the suspension of certain liberties “in times of a public emergency that threatens the life of the nation”?

There is great force in this argument. There is, alas, always force in such arguments. This is how governments through the ages have justified grabbing repressive new powers.

…

When liberals put the case for civil liberties, they sometimes claim that obnoxious measures do not help the fight against terrorism anyway. The Economist is liberal but disagrees. We accept that letting secret policemen spy on citizens, detain them without trial and use torture to extract information makes it easier to foil terrorist plots. To eschew such tools is to fight terrorism with one hand tied behind your back. But that—with one hand tied behind their back—is precisely how democracies ought to fight terrorism.

…

Human rights are part of what it means to be civilised. Locking up suspected terrorists—and why not potential murderers, rapists and paedophiles, too?—before they commit crimes would probably make society safer. Dozens of plots may have been foiled and thousands of lives saved as a result of some of the unsavoury practices now being employed in the name of fighting terrorism. Dropping such practices in order to preserve freedom may cost many lives. So be it.

There is more in the article, “Is torture ever justified”.

MarsEdit is my long standing blogging client of choice. I loathe trying to write blog posts in a web browser. Version 1 of MarsEdit was a god send.

Version 2 brings some newness, such as Flickr integration and a slicker user interface. The best thing is the new features not detracting from the existing tool. Just how a new release ought be.

If you are stuck on the Windows platform, as I often am, Windows Live Writer is another good tool. Similar feature set to MarsEdit, somehow not as much fun.

If only I could sync drafts between the two …