Time to replace the BMI as a measure, or otherwise, of obesity
20 January 2025
The Body Mass Index (BMI), may, at last, be about to be shown the door. Health care experts from across the world have been calling for a new means of defining obesity, according to research published by The Lancet:
We recommend that BMI should be used only as a surrogate measure of health risk at a population level, for epidemiological studies, or for screening purposes, rather than as an individual measure of health. Excess adiposity should be confirmed by either direct measurement of body fat, where available, or at least one anthropometric criterion (eg, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, or waist-to-height ratio) in addition to BMI, using validated methods and cutoff points appropriate to age, gender, and ethnicity.
It’s always struck me as an odd way to determine whether a person is of a healthy, or otherwise, weight, simply by dividing their height by their weight.
My BMI has always been in the OK zone, but I often wondered how it could useful for people who are, say, professional athletes, or front-rowers of the Wallabies. Surely their height to weight ratios would send the BMI into meltdown. I queried a past GP about this, who told me the BMI was but one tool available to medical professionals, but did not elaborate further.
I made me immediately think if there are other such measures, why aren’t they used more widely.
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current affairs, health, trends
How to fact check in places where Facebook is the whole internet
20 January 2025
Upcoming changes to Meta’s fact checking and content moderation policies might precipitate greater free speech in some parts of the world. But the removal of these checks and balances could trigger unrest and violence in other regions, say Libby Hogan and Natasya Salim, writing for ABC News:
Nobel laureate and Filipino journalist Maria Ressa warned of “extremely dangerous times ahead” for journalism and democracy. Celine Samson, a fact-checker with Vera Files, said roles like hers were especially important during the last election. Vera Files recorded a rise in misinformation posts that used a particularly dangerous tactic in the Philippines — portraying opposition leaders as communists. While the term “communist” may seem relatively harmless elsewhere, in the Philippines, it can be life-threatening.
In countries where Meta platforms are among other media channels, questionable content can potentially be disputed, but that’s not the case everywhere. In some places, Meta’s social networks are considered to be the internet. The removal of fact checking and content moderation controls in those environments could have dire consequences.
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current affairs, politics, social media, social networks
My blog is powered by my obsessions
18 January 2025
What makes for a good blog? Merlin Mann, writing in 2008, the golden age of blogging if ever there was one, has a few answers to the question:
Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?
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Demolishing the AC/DC house, and what little rock history Australia has
18 January 2025
I’m not really a fan of the band that was formed in Sydney in 1973, and is still going strong, but it seems odd that the house where founders, brothers Angus and Malcolm Young used to live, and founded AC/DC, was not worthy of preserving. For those not in the know, AC/DC are probably Australia’s version of the Rolling Stones. But last month, the residence, in the inner-west Sydney suburb of Burwood, was bulldozed to make way for a high rise apartment block.
This might sound like over-development on steroids, but many parts of Australia, including Sydney, are experiencing accommodation shortages, and high density housing is one of the solutions. While numerous people, including the local municipal council, were aware of the house’s history, this was not enough to spare the property. Mind you, I’m not sure how the house could have been kept, and somehow integrated in the much needed residential development.
For more about the story of the “AC/DC house”, and its demolition, check out this short YouTube clip by Sydney Morning Herald writer, Tom Compagnoni.
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Australia, Australian music, history, music, Sydney
Vale American filmmaker, storyteller, David Lynch
18 January 2025
The director of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, and the surely surreal Mulholland Drive, died on Thursday 16 January 2025. We shall watch Mulholland Drive, which is in the home movie library, this weekend in his memory.
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Free Our Feeds with Bluesky and AT Protocol. But not Mastodon, ActivityPub?
17 January 2025
The Free Our Feeds project launched a few days, prompted in part by changes to fact checking and content moderation policies across Meta properties, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The goal of Free Our Feeds seems admirable, to prevent one person/entity having full control of a social media platform:
Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.
Is this desirable. While it remains to be seen what the actual outcome of the changes at Meta will be exactly, members of their social media platforms, plus those of other companies, have been ceding ever more autonomy over their user experience in recent years. But is Free Our Feeds, who seem intent only devoting resources to Bluesky, the solution?
But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech — the AT Protocol — into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.
The AT (Authenticated Transfer) Protocol was created by the Bluesky Public Benefit Corporation, just for Bluesky. Mastodon, on the other hand, is built on ActivityPub, a protocol allowing different, separate, social media channels to “talk to”, and share information with each other. And unlike AT Protocol, ActivityPub is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation.
Free Our Feeds is hoping to raise thirty-million (US) dollars over the next three years to fund further development of AT Protocol. So, should you contribute? You might want to do your homework first. Jürgen Geuter, AKA tante, is concerned about the lack of details:
It feels weird to go to the community asking for so much money without any specifics. Just vibes. Sure, Bluesky is hot-ish right now, but asking for that kind of cash should maybe come with a bit more details and plan? Thoughts about how that new entity will be governed. What the actual mission is (and “outsourcing ATProto development so Bluesky no longer has to pay for it” shouldn’t be it).
Ruben Schade, meanwhile, points to the elephant in the room:
Why is there no mention of ActivityPub, or Mastodon, at all? You know, the protocol that isn’t tied to one app? At best, this reads like not-invented-here syndrome. At worst, it’s obfuscation.
Mastodon, and ActivityPub, are mentioned by Free Our Feeds, but you have open the concealed notes at the foot of their webpage to see this.
Talking of Mastodon though, a few days ago CEO Eugen Rochko announced the transfer of “key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components to a new nonprofit organization.” This, says Rochko, will ensure the decentralised micro-blogging platform is never under the control of any single person or entity.
It could be Mastodon is the place to stay for the time being.
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social media, social networks, technology, trends
The 2025 Banished Words List has recently dropped
16 January 2025
Lake Superior State University’s annual list of words and phrases we should cease using, was published recently. Among inclusions are game changer, era (you know why…), IYKYK (If You Know, You Know), and sorry, not sorry, which I can’t stand. Another term is dropped, but I don’t really take any notice off it, though maybe I should.
Once edgy and cool, “dropped” has become more of a letdown. Whether it is an album, a trend, or a product, this term has fallen flat. “Books, music, and all kinds of unnecessary things are currently being ‘dropped’ rather than introduced, released, or offered for sale. Banished for overuse, misuse, abuse, and hurting my head when all that “dropping” stuff lands on me!,” laments Susan of Littleton, CO.
Swedish House Mafia have dropped a new album. I’ve dropped a new blog post. But the image that usually forms in my mind is the item in question has ended up on the floor, rather than landing in a bookshop shelf, or a play-list, or whatever.
Also, reach-out is absent from the list. Or did the term feature in a previous year? Please feel free to contact, or message me, if you know.
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Prolonged use of social media may make you short tempered
13 January 2025
Research from Massachusetts General Hospital, I believe, in the United States, possibly underscores what many of us already suspect: that prolonged use of social media may not be the best:
This kind of study cannot prove that your hours of doomscrolling is directly making you Tik’d off, but in light of known associations of irritability and mental health issues, maybe we should put down our phones just a little more.
While I have a few social media accounts, I’m no power user, as some of you may know. Does that not make me short tempered? Maybe that’s not for me to say…
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psychology, social media, social networks, trends
The one-hundred best book covers of 2024 by PRINT
13 January 2025
PRINT’s annual list of the best book covers of 2024, features double the number of entries as 2023, one-hundred, up from fifty. Either a record number of books were published in 2024, or cover design has become so good more books needed to be included.
Among inclusions is a cover for Intermezzo, Sally Rooney’s latest novel, which features a chess board. Not the version of the cover I’ve seen in this part of the world, but it is damn fine.
The chess board cover version was designed by New York based illustrators June Park and Rodrigo Corral. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, but book cover designers do not always receive the recognition they deserve for their work.
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books, design, illustration, novels, Sally Rooney
HTML: a programming language, not mere markup
9 January 2025
Tim Carmody, writing for Wired:
Because HTML looks easy and lacks features like formal conditional logic and Turing-completeness, it’s often dismissed as not a programming language. “That’s not real code; it’s just markup” is a common refrain. Now, I’m no stranger to the austere beauty of the command line, from automating scripts to training machine-learning models. But underestimating HTML is a mistake.
I might venture to say that the HTML of today is more like a programming language, than the HTML I began working with (and sort of continue to do so) back in the late nineties. Some web designers of the day were adamant HTML was markup, not code (which I sometimes labelled it as), and certainly not a programming language.
HTML gave online life to all manner of web creative’s ideas, how could people fail to see this?
<sarcasm on> Oh now satisfying it is to be vindicated all these years later. </sarcasm off>
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