You may have read recently about the study described here, which has been interpreted as showing that the Atkins diet is better than either a Mediterranean or low-fat diet.

Such claims, and the great majority of the media coverage I've seen, are extremely misleading.

First, was this really the Atkins diet that millions have embraced? The low-carb diet in the study "urged dieters to choose vegetarian sources of fat and protein." That's right, vegetarian. Is that what you think of when you think of the Atkins diet?

Second, the "low-fat" diet required dieters to consume at most 30 percent of their calories from fat. Thirty percent!

Getting at most 30 percent of your calories from fat is what has long been recommended by conservative, mainstream organizations (such as the U.S. government, which uses thirty percent for the nutrition information on packaged foods). Thirty percent is only slightly lower than the average for all U.S. adults (some estimates: 33, 34, 34). So 30 percent is hardly low fat. Those who actually follow a low-fat diet see 30 percent as a high fat diet.

Here's some more sensible coverage of the study.

I'm thinking of doing something that seems a little crazy
When I come home I will not have a penny to my name
I'm thinking of doing something that seems a little crazy
I'm thinking of taking some time to step completely out of the game

It's not that I don't love my life -- I do
I have a wonderful life right now
It's the best it's ever been
It's not that I don't love you -- I do
I do love you
But there's a territory within
and I want to go there

I'm thinking of doing something that seems a little crazy
No talking, no reading, no writing, no phoning home
I'm thinking of doing something that seems a little crazy
No lover, no friends, no sister, no brothers,
no colleagues, no mother, nobody I know

They say that the things in life that challenge you
are scary, too
I know that's true
'cause I am feeling scared
They say the things in life that you're meant to do,
you've got to do
or you won't be happy
I want to be happy

Hey
(I'm thinking of doing something that seems a little crazy)
I want to be happy
Hey
(I'm thinking of doing something that seems a little crazy)
I want to be happy
Hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey

I'm thinking of doing something that may not make sense to you
I wish you would trust me
It's exactly what I need to do
Who laid down the law that said we're all supposed to be the same?
My heart is good
I hear her voice
I'll follow her through any flame

How do you work for peace?
How do you calm your mind?
There are many techniques
I think that I've found mine

What colors do you choose to paint the canvas of your life?
My colors don't match yours but I know they are fine

I'm thinking of doing something that seems a little crazy
I'm thinking of doing something that seems a little crazy
I'm thinking of doing something that seems a little crazy

-- from Just as Sure by Rebecca Riots

One of my interests is in the concept of free will.

Cognitive Daily recently posted a description of an interesting psychological experiment related to our ideas about free will.

It certainly wasn't the main point of the post, but I had a quibble, which I raised with this comment:

I think in time we'll come to have a more sophisticated understanding of free will versus the lack thereof, but that's a long ways off. Currently, pretty much everyone implicitly believes in free will, and that belief is deeply tied to many different aspects of our culture.

Let me point to an example of that lack of sophistication: 'a case can be made that free will is simply an illusion, and that every "decision" we make is completely controlled by factors outside of an individual's control.'

I don't believe in free will. But I also know that it's wrong to say that my decisions are completely controlled by factors outside myself. I am by far the biggest determinant of my future actions (decisions and otherwise) -- it's simply a matter of direct versus indirect causality.

Here's an analogy. For the sake of argument, let's consider weather to be something that is unaffected by any "free will". The quoted statement would be analogous to saying that San Francisco's weather system is completely controlled by factors outside of San Francisco -- so the weather conditions within San Francisco have no effect on its future state. This is of course false. Although San Francisco's weather is not subject to free will, and is affected by all sorts of external factors, the largest factor of all is in fact San Francisco's current weather state.

So, too, with us. An individual is not outside the laws of causality. But the most significant and direct causes for an individual's behavior lie in that individual.

It's not so much that I don't believe in free will. It's that I believe in causality, and I haven't been able to come to a satisfactory understanding of free will that fits with my understanding of causality. The naive, commonsense view of free will, which is what I would argue against, posits the self as a free agent, as an uncaused cause (and as a different sort of uncaused cause than randomness). I don't know what that means.

From another comment on the Cognitive Daily post, it looks like my view might not be that different from a "compatibilist." I hope to learn more about that, but I'll go into it with a bias against defining terms in a way at complete odds with the commonsense meaning.

An "amusing" blog.

Note to self: find or create a Firefox extension that shows the watch.

You enter your birth date and choose a source for life expectancy data, and then see a small digital clock ticking down the seconds of your life. Yes, I need this.

Update: I installed Frederic Mercille's countdown clock. Then I took the quiz at Living to 100 and got 88 years. The clock is ticking! Excellent.

In recent years I've gotten back in contact with a lot of my old friends from when I was growing up in Wichita, Kansas. Six of the nine people who were my closest friends during junior high, high school, and college now live elsewhere.

(Two live in California, and one each in Illinois, Wyoming, North Carolina, and the Netherlands. One of the three that does live in Kansas returned to live near his family after developing schizophrenia, and otherwise probably wouldn't live there.)

This made me think of an article in the local newspaper that I read during my high school years on the so-called "Kansas Brain Drain." The article was about Kansas' negative net flow of National Merit Scholars. At the time I was a semi-finalist, and thinking about where I would go to college, which is probably why I still remember this article.

I relate my friends' disapora to this supposed brain drain because I regard them as bright, capable people. I'm biased, no doubt. But as evidence I can note that at least three were in gifted programs during primary education, a couple have masters degrees, and a couple others have doctorates.

I don't know that this is an unusually high fraction to have moved away. Perhaps it reflects normal migration patterns in the US. It's clearly a tiny sample. Doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations based on this suggests that the numbers are pretty close to (maybe just a tad higher than) what you would expect from population averages.

Besides the sample size, there's a clear bias with respect to politics and religion. On the whole my friends are more liberal—definitely more liberal than the average Kansan. So probably it's just my own bias that causes me to see my friends' lives as evidence for the "Kansas Brain Drain."

I see that the idea of a Kansas (and more broadly speaking, Great Plains and rural) brain drain is still active. NPR just did a report on it. There are offers of free land, talk of tax incentives, and job sites aimed at linking employers to the individuals that might otherwise be "drained" away.

This post is my little contribution to helping Google (and indirectly, everyone else) find the searchable archives of the Wing IDE mailing lists.

You can search archives of the wingide-users list from here.

If you use the search box at the top right of any page on the Wingware site you'll search wingide-users, wingware-announce, and other content on their site.

(Wing is a cool cross-platform Python IDE. I recommend it.)