I was talking to a doctor friend about cholesterol and stuff and he mentioned some interesting facts about alcohol: drinking up to 2 units of alcohol per day is good for your health. The numbers I find on the New England Journal of Medicine site are somewhat smaller (1 unit per day) but the effect is proven:
Light-to-moderate alcohol consumption reduces the overall risk of stroke and the risk of ischemic stroke in men. The benefit is apparent with as little as one drink per week. Greater consumption, up to one drink per day, does not increase the observed benefit (NEJM)
As compared with men who consumed alcohol less than once per week, men who consumed alcohol three to four or five to seven days per week had decreased risks of myocardial infarction (NEJM)
Most of you probably knew this, but what he also said is that you can use your weekly quotum (7 to 14 units, depending on the source) in a not-evenly spread out manner. So if you do not drink during the week, you can use your full alcohol allowance over the weekend. Unfortunately, for this piece of information, I cannot find the source or study on NEJM. Darn.
Other stuff that helps: stop smoking
Alcohol consumption was associated with a small reduction in the overall risk of death in middle age (ages 35 to 69), whereas smoking approximately doubled this risk (NEJM)
and eat fish:
The n–3 fatty acids found in fish are strongly associated with a reduced risk of sudden death among men without evidence of prior cardiovascular disease. (NEJM)
So don’t be surprised next time I look angry when someone spoils my “Saumon effeuillé mariné aux trois moutardes” and white Sancerre with cigarette smoke: It’s killing me, that’s why!
Something I threw together, just because I could: Twitter Quotient indicator. This page will get your # of friends, followers, favorites and updates from Twitter and calculate some ratios. The result might be confronting, disappointing or slightly funny. You choose.
When I started dancing argentine tango, there were two sites that gave you an update of where and when you could dance tango in Belgium. The first one was tango.be, with a frame-based layout that I don’t find the most user-friendly nor visually pleasing, and the second www.milonga.be, with a Flash-based agenda that was quite easy to use. Unfortunately the editor of the latter had to stop the site due to lack of time. Two weeks ago I noticed that he had even let the domain name expire and it was free again. Five minutes later I was the new owner of milonga.be. My goal: to make it again into a comprehensive overview of where to take tango courses and dance tango in Belgium.
Wordpress again
Oh, what can I say, I know Wordpress so well now, I use it wherever I can. So yes, it’s a Wordpress site, with the K2 template, but with (currently) only static pages and no posts. I’ve divided the site into 2 parts: where to follow classes, and where to go dancing (practicas, milongas, salons, workshop). I’m obviously going to sprinkle some Web2.0 gold dust on the project. One example of this: Google Calendar. Continue reading ‘Creating a tango calendar’
I was chatting a bit with Bart about Barcamp, and I asked the inevitable question: “Should we do something with Twitter?” To which Bart’s answer was: “Maybe, but what?”. Let’s see:
create a “BarcampBrussels” Twitter account, which would serve 2 purposes: 1) be a source of Barcamp organisational info (”Speaker XYZ has to leave early, wants to do his speech before noon, anyone wanna swap?“) and 2) be the ‘glue’ between all Twitterers that are interested in Barcamp: the creation of a BarcampTwitterFriends group, of those who follow that channel.
But the Barcamp Twitter account also gets the updates of all its friends, so wouldn’t that be good info too? Well, you do get *all* updates, so not only the “Barcamp speech about XYZ rocks” but also the “feeding my cat” messages. What if you could create a filter on the aggregated messages? Hey: Yahoo! Pipes can do that! We take the RSS feed with all the Barcamp Twitter friends (twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/[code].rss), pipe it through Yahoo and only use the updates with the word "Barcamp"!
There are some issues with that: people have to remember to prefix each Barcamp-related comment with "Barcamp" (they choose a differente namespace, as it were). That's cumbersome and ugly. Also, the Twitter RSS only lists the 20 last updates, so the filter might easily remove all updates and leave an empty screen. Even worse, it seems the RSS feed is only updated every X minutes (easily 30, from my experience). So it seems we should have to use the Twitter API to create a live-updating feed. Imagine we do that:
Then we refresh it every X seconds, project it on a screen and tada!! ... ladies and gentlemen: the backchannel! We're not the first to think of this, of course.
What's your take: should we do anything with Twitter? Set up a group chat in MSN Messenger or Skype? Or use an classic IRC backchannel? (Who still has an IRC client on his laptop these days?)
I continued to work a bit on stuff one could do with the Metatale data. As a result, here are 2 RSS-based widgets for Metatale, that you can embed on your site:
Top 100 in RSS format
The ATOM/RSS feed MetataleTop100 (through Feedburner) now lists all 100 blogs in the top 100 of Metatale. You can use it in your RSS reader (it’s in my Bloglines), show it on your blog (like my Metatale Flemish Top 20 page) or recycle it with Yahoo! Pipes or whatever. It’s RSS, so it’s easy to process.
I’ve included in each blog description: its place in the Top 100, its Metatale influence indicator (a number between 0 and 25, plus a graphical representation of it), a screenshot of the homepage, a link to check Pagerank and incoming Technorati links and one for a more comprehensive blog dashboard.
Search results in RSS format (a.k.a. What’s my score?)
I also have a way for you to show your own ranking on your blog. You can do a search for a keyword in the blog names (’blog.forret.com’ or ‘forret’ would show mine, ‘wordpress’ will show all *.wordpress.com blogs like the image I’ve displayed here) and get the results in RSS. You can choose a ’small’ or ’short’ output format (without screenshot and links), because the screenshot is 270 pixels wide, and that might be too much of a good thing for some sidebars.
Use the following wizard to create the URL of your custom RSS feed:
For both applications: all suggestions are welcome!
UPDATE: because Clo asked me nicely: here’s a Javascript version of the widget: <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" src="http://tools.forret.com/metatale-js.php?s=[search term]"></SCRIPT>
Whether Twitter will turn out to be a conversational revolution or a giant waste of time, I’m still not sure about. Sometimes it feels like instant messaging (chatting *with* someone), sometimes like just changing the subtitle of your MSN/Gtalk (just a shout, no specific destination), sometimes it’s more like talking to yourself. But make no mistake: you are not just talking to yourself!
Thanks to its huge geek-appeal (over 145.000 backlinks in Technorati), Twitter is well on its way towards a respectable PageRank 8. Twitter also uses pretty URLs, (twitter.com/[user]/statuses/[messageid] ), which Google likes a lot. Twitter also generously links from one account to the other (Twitter Friends). And Twitter has a LOT of (small bites of) content. As a result of that, whatever you say in Twitter may come back to haunt you through Google.
Exhibit 1: Pietel
When you do a Google search for “Pietel”, his Twitter account shows up as result #4 of 226.000. Being the good boy that he is, he just wrote that he finished his work assignment at home. But if his last remark would have been: “stupid job, silly colleagues, moron boss“, would he like that to show up on Google? (depending on what Google server you fall, your results might be different, but the Twitter result has a good chance of ending up on the first page of results). Continue reading ‘Twitter: watch your mouth’
This is a text by Rauno Lindström that has now disappeared from its original URL. I don’t agree with all points in the text, but I store it here for easy reference. The definition of ‘interpersonal intelligence’ will remind you of “EQ“.
Arguments for the existence of a kind of intelligence which codes how a person understands the feelings, the responses, and the behavior of the others, was brought forward by Gardner (1985). He defends extensively this ability which he calls the interpersonal intelligence but he does not give any definition for it. I argue for one meaning which the definition should contain. My insight is based mainly on experience, very little on the psychological literature because I am a physicist. I try to illuminate my ideas by a few examples from everyday life. My view of the interpersonal intelligence consists of similar aspects as the social intelligence by Barnes and Sternberg (1989). They defined the social intelligence as consisting, in part, of the ability to accurately decode social information. The testees were given two tasks. First, they had to judge whether a couple pictured in a photograph was real (genuinely in a relationship) or fake (two strangers). Second, they were asked to judge which of two people in a photograph was the other’s supervisor. However, I wish to emphasize that the interpersonal intelligence does not really become apparent in the test items where the testee is to react only to the behavior of another person. In fact, testees possessing quite different interpersonal intelligences would response in a very similar way. The interpersonal intelligence becomes discernible when the testee self is involved in the matter. It shows the extent to which a person is willing to take into account the viewpoints of the other persons versus his or her own viewpoint. I think that it is possible to predict very well this kind of behavior of an individual if one has known him or her for a long time. Continue reading ‘Interpersonal Intelligence and Mental Violence’
A totally weird mix of posts on technology, advertising, social software, society, tango and women. Not necessarily in that order.
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I was talking to a doctor friend about cholesterol and stuff and he mentioned some interesting facts about alcohol: drinking up to 2 units of alcohol per day is good for your health. The numbers I find on the New England Journal of Medicine site are somewhat smaller (1 unit per day) but the effect is proven:
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