If you are a guy you might want to modify your behavior as appropriate:
Frequent sexual activity may reduce a man’s risk of prostate cancer, according to a study in the April 7 Journal of the American Medical Association.
The cancer risk in men who reported more than 20 monthly ejaculations was 33 percent less than that of other men, the Harvard University study showed.
Your mileage will vary…..
The US National Security Agency apparently played a major role in the arrest of 9 folks in Britain and 1 in Canada on charges of planning a terrorist act and belonging to a terrorist group. The key: an intercepted email message:
“That’s the first admission I’ve actually seen that they actually monitor Internet traffic. I assumed they did, but no one ever admitted it,” Mr. Farber said.
Officials at the NSA could not be reached for comment. But U.S. authorities are uniquely positioned to monitor international Internet and telecommunications traffic because many of the world’s international gateways are located in their country. And once that electronic traffic touches an American computer — an e-mail message, a request for a website or an Internet-based phone call, for instance — it is routinely monitored by NSA spies.
“Foreign traffic that comes through the U.S. is subject to U.S. laws, and the NSA has a perfect right to monitor all Internet traffic,” said Mr. Farber, who has also been a technical adviser to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.
Uhhh, no they do not have that right and to the extent that there are laws allowing this behavior they need to be severly curtailed if not eliminated. There is too great an opportunity for abuse and, at minimum, these searches should not be allowed without probable cause. This does not appear to be the case at NSA.
Frankly, I would have expected Farber, who sits on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation to express a little more concern about this.
I spend a lot of time around the sports of basketball and rowing and, though dealing with a biased sample, I thought Americans were getting taller. There seem to be more and taller women and men in these programs then in the past.
But Burkhard Bilger reports in this weeks New Yorker that this is not the case across the population as a whole:
By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the country seemed set to regain its eminence. The economy was expanding at a dramatic rate, and public-hygiene campaigns were sweeping the cities clean at last: for the first time in American history, urbanites began to outgrow farmers.
Then something strange happened. While heights in Europe continued to climb, Komlos said, “the U.S. just went flat.” In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years.
One possible reason:
In a recent British study, one group of schoolchildren was given hamburgers, French fries, and other familiar lunch foods; the other was fed nineteen-forties-style wartime rations such as boiled cabbage and corned beef. Within eight weeks, the children on the rations were both taller and slimmer than the ones on a regular diet.
This may not be the whole story but it certainly provides food for thought and, I think, individual action.
Via Newmarks Door.
Christopher Hitchens says he asks all opponents of the Iraq invasion this question (among others) and claims it never gets answered:
Do you believe that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein’s regime was inevitable or not?
Tim Dunlop fixes this for Hitchens by answering this question (and the others):
Hitchens himself mentions in the article the long-term interest in regime change shown by people like Paul Wolfowitz (dating from the 1980s), and we know that such a policy was a high, if infrequently mentioned, priority of the incoming Bush administration, so I’d say that a confrontation with Iraq was inevitable once the Bush administration came to power.
And, not knowing that they were responding to Hitchens question I ran across two other folks in the same reading session that also have answers. First, John Scalzi who supported the war:
Indeed, I submit that had 9/11 never happened, we’d still have had tanks trundling through Baghdad one way or another — because Dubya would have found a way to make it happen. It was personal. Saddam was dead meat as soon as the Supreme Court gave Dubya the keys to the White House.”
And second, Jaquandor, who riffed off Scalzi’s post:
A friend of mine who is considerably more liberal than I (!) remarked to me when Bush was sworn in, “How long before we’re at war with Iraq again?” I confess that my answer was, “Probably not that long, I imagine.”
Jaquandor then points to the main reason the bushies are in so much trouble now. I paraphrase: 1) within the administration there was a common goal of invading Iraq but different factions had different reasons and 2) the reasons the administration gave to the people were not their real reasons (plus the reasons given were apparently not quite based on fact). The world we live in does not like dissonance between idea and action and will resolve it with often unpleasant results for the perpetrators.
This seems like Friday material but what the heck. Most of the day is already down the toilet so head over and check out Toilets of the World.
If your favorite is missing just send the host a round trip ticket and he’ll go photograph it. And he helps you out with Toiletological Linguistics or Where’s the toilet? in 70 languages.
Via Metafilter where one of the commenters reminds us of this jewel from 2003: The Top Ten Urinals.