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Wednesday, June 04, 2014

"Everyone deserves 'the license to explore the nature of his own soul.'"



Diet Drinks Help Weight Loss - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "The meme that drinking diet sodas causes weight gain has been ricocheting around the Internet for years. Generally, this claim has been based on observational studies in which researchers find that fat people tend to drink more diet drinks than do skinny people. This has always seemed to me to be a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc, i.e., after this, therefore because of this...

I know that I will annoy some epidemiologists, but a large proportion of observational studies seem only slilghtly more respectable than casting horoscopes. Why? Because, even with the best will in the world, it's nearly impossible to eliminate confounders so that a real causal relationship might be revealed...

A new randomized trial study in the journal Obesity (and funded by beverage companies) followed more than 300 people through a weight loss program. The only difference is that half were asked to drink at least 24 ounces of water per day and other half to drink 24 ounces of non-nutritive sweetened (NNS) beverages per day. The program involves 12 weeks of losing weight followed by 9 months of weight maintenance. The study found that those consuming diet drinks lost an average of 14.2 pounds whereas those drinking water dropped an average of 10 pounds...

Look, it may turn out that the observational studies suggesting that drinking diet sodas make people fat are true, but I wouldn't bet on it. It has always seemed much more plausible that obese people drink diet soda because they don't want to get even fatter by consuming the extra calories in sugar-sweetened drinks. Sometimes interestingly counterintuitive claims are bunk."





  

   
Redneck's R-Rated Commercial for the Chevy Silverado| BroBible.com: "If this isn’t part of an in-house viral marketing campaign at Chevy, the automotive company should clean house and rebuild their entire marketing department starting with this guy."





Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, psychedelic pioneer, RIP - Boing Boing: "Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, maverick chemist, psychedelic pioneer, and inspiring human being, died yesterday at 88 years old. Sasha is best known for popularizing MDMA (Ecstasy) and introducing it to the psychological community, and synthesizing hundreds of new psychoactive chemicals that he first tested on himself. His scientific research is detailed in a huge output of papers and books including the seminal tomes TIHKAL and PIHKAL, co-authored with his wife and research partner Ann Shulgin. As Sasha once said, everyone deserves "the license to explore the nature of his own soul."" 







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