Month: March 2012

Christie Aschwanden was curious about the effect of drinking on exercise:

My friends and I often joke that we're carbo-loading when we split a six pack together, but once in a while I wake up groggy and wonder: Could my drinking habit be hurting my running? Turns out the research on alcohol and exercise is as herky-jerky as our culture's attitude toward the bottle. Most early studies investigated alcohol's potential as a performance enhancer. It seems ridiculous now, but during the 1904 Olympic Marathon, U.S. gold medalist Thomas Hicks was given a mixture of brandy, strychnine, and egg whites in an effort to gain a competitive edge. Many coaches then believed alcohol boosted energy.

Using a small sample set, Aschwanden and exercise scientist Gig Leadbetter found that women ran an average of 22 percent longer the morning after drinking while the men ran 21 percent shorter. Leadbetter is doing a follow-up study with more runners.

For the series Train, Mark Sherratt photographed his fellow passengers:

Once I got into it, I realized that the trains are such a good microcosm of Indian society. They are full of the rich and poor, the old and young, etc. They are also a great example of how the society works in general. They are often crowded and hectic, but everything seems to work really well. There is always room for one more, and people are always willing to help you out.

(By Mark Sherratt)

Mark Mitchell worries about the dramatic trend toward "solo living":

[M]ost obviously, living alone can lead to a disposition that I am center of the universe. When I eat, sleep, brush my teeth, and exercise I must ask leave of no one and can to exactly as I please. I never have to make a meal out of something I despise because it is the favorite of someone else. I don’t have to get up in the night to help a sick roommate or spouse, to rub a sore back, fetch a glass of water, or get an extra blanket to stave of the chills of fever. If I do any of these things, it is solely for myself and no other. 

Fun with mirrors:

Making of video here, via Christopher Jobson.

That's the buzz:

One of the company’s three co-founders, Yancey Strickler, said that Kickstarter is on track to distribue over $150 million dollars to its users’ projects in 2012, or more than entire fiscal year 2012 budget for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), which was $146 million.

Clay Johnson breaks apart the comparison:

Much of the NEA's money is spent on state and regional partnerships making sure that art happens in North Dakota. Kickstarter's funded $40,000 in the state since 2009. In 2011, the NEA gave $764,000 (what looks to be about the minimum for the NEA) to its state partner, North Dakota Council on the Arts there.

Jacket Copy nods:

Interestingly, of the obviously arts-ish Kickstarter funding that Johnson tallied, film/video is the biggest share, followed, in descending order, by comics, music, art, publishing, theater, photography and dance.

Robert Moor reviews multimedia book apps, including Al Gore's Our Choice:

Inset into the text of each page are photos, which can be unfolded and enlarged by un-pinching your fingertips. Occasionally, these images lurch to life as BBC News-style videos, audio slideshows, or brilliantly conceived infographics. … The problem with Our Choice is that among the elephantine hi-def images and infographics, the text gets buried. Reading it feels like flipping through a coffee table book: grazing the lush images, you avoid eye contact with the daunting gray bricks of text. If this is the future of the book, then the book is indeed doomed.

Along similar lines, Laura Miller looks at "Chopsticks," an interactive book app geared towards young adults:

I think fiction works in part by eliciting an imaginative investment from its reader. Instead of the access to the characters’ inner selves that prose usually offers, "Chopsticks" shows us what they look like, what they draw (Frank, Glory’s boyfriend, is an artist), what they pack for a trip, what they scribble in the margins of the books they’re reading. From these clues, the reader is invited to imagine not just what’s happened, but how the two principles feel and think about it.

From HuffPo. On foreign policy:

Mitt Romney makes it as well as anyone could – especially on the individual mandate. Good to hear a proud conservative tout his singular achievement when governor. And impressive to see how a moderate Republican forged the path on a state level that a moderate Democratic president has followed federally. There really is a bipartisan consensus on this, isn't there?

A poll analysis of next Tuesday by Mark Blumenthal. The race is tightening. My criterion for judging whether Romney has turned a corner, will be his votes in the South among evangelicals, and in Ohio among the white working class. I don't see how you win a general election for the GOP without hefty turnout from both groups. Equally, if Santorum cannot win Ohio's votes, his own claim to replace Romney as the nominee comes under scrutiny.

Romney increasingly reminds me of a zombie candidate: human-seeming but lacking in any discernible actual human traits; unstoppable but slow and haphazard; and for some reason we cannot quite understand, desperately hungry for electoral flesh.

The WaPo editorial board is now demanding that the GOP repudiate Rush. Money quote:

Like other “shock jocks,” Mr. Limbaugh has committed verbal excesses in the past. But in its wanton vulgarity and cruelty, this episode stands out. Mr. Limbaugh’s audience, and those in politics who seek his favor as a means of reaching that audience, need to take special note … What we are saying is that Mr. Limbaugh has abused his unique position within the conservative media to smear and vilify a citizen engaged in the exercise of her First Amendment rights, and in the process he debased a national political discourse that needs no further debasing.

This is not the way a decent citizen behaves, much less a citizen who wields significant de facto power in a major political party. While Republican leaders owe no apology for Mr. Limbaugh’s comments, they do have a responsibility to repudiate them — and him.

Conor, to whom we linked yesterday, has long followed Rush Limbaugh's poisonous entertainment. This latest demand that a young woman make him a sex tape to masturbate to is not in any way out of the ordinary. Limbaugh's misogyny is as old as it is deep. Conor reminds us of the following soliloquy:

My cat comes to me when she wants to be fed. I have learned this. I accept it for what it is. Many people in my position would think my cat's coming to me because she loves me. Well, she likes me, and she is attached, but she comes to me when she wants to be fed. And after I feed her — guess what — she's off to wherever she wants to be in the house, until the next time she gets hungry. She's smart enough to know she can't feed herself. She's actually a very smart cat. She gets loved. She gets adoration. She gets petted. She gets fed. And she doesn't have to do anything for it, which is why I say this cat's taught me more about women than anything my whole life. But we put voices in their mouths.

And he corners Limbaugh in that masterful post with this nugget of research:

This is hardly the first time. Defending himself during a 2010 controversy, Limbaugh said, "If you read all the way through the story, you'll find that they are livid at me, even though I've called nobody a 'bitch,' I called nobody a 'whore,' I called nobody a 'slut.'" 

Well he has now. Look, it's a free country. But here's Conor's point:

No leader of the conservative movement is willing to defend Limbaugh on the merits. They just stay mum.

Hence the sickness. The WaPo is right to take a stand.

(Photo: A cardboard cutout of conservative celebrity Rush Limbaugh at the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC. By Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call via Getty.)