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A few days ago I stumbled upon a graph of the obesity rate in the U.S.. It was steadily slightly increasing since the 1960s and then around 1980 (the data points are too sparse to exactly locate the point), there was an inflection point where it started to climb more rapidly.

Now, look at this graph of U.S. consumption of sugars. HCFS gets introduced in the 1970s, it's cheap, and so we started to eat more sugar -- increasing our per-capita consumption about 20 pounds a year.

Notice the similarity in the shapes of the graphs. Hmm.

That 20 pounds works out to extra 25 grams of sugar a day, an extra 100 calories from sugar alone. So sugar itself is only a fraction of how many calories we over-eat -- our caloric intake increased about 25% between 1970 and 2000. But there's a pretty clear link -- put sugar in any food, and we'll eat more of it!

Correlation is not causation, as they say; but it does jump up and down and point and say, "Look here! Look here!"

I don't know how much of a role subtle biochemical effects involving fructose might or might not play a role on top of increased caloric consumption; the research seems mixed, though I've admittedly only scratched the surface. But the simple fact that food got sweeter, we started eating more of it, and got fat, explains a lot.

So here's an interesting pair of trends: the price of solar photovoltaic power continues to drop, due to economies of scale and improvements in technology and manufacturing, while the price of building nuclear fission power is rising. According to this study from the North Carolina Waste Awareness and Reduction Network (NC-WARN), the trend lines have now crossed, and in North Carolina solar power is now cheaper than nuclear. (The report was prepared for the state government; the exact results will be different in other states in depending on insolation, but the trend is going to be the same everywhere.)

The prices compared by the study are the prices to consumers and include government subsides for both solar and nuclear; but even if the solar subsides were removed, the crossover point would be delayed no more than ten years. And the solar includes only PV, with no accounting of the potential of concentrating solar power.

According to the New York Times, the construction of the first round of nuclear plants in the U.S. resulted in electricity users getting stuck with nearly $100 billion of costs from bankruptcies and "stranded costs", and a report by Citigroup Global Markets last November termed the financial risks for a new generation of nuclear plant "so large and variable that individually they could each bring even the largest utility to its knees."

Meanwhile, the proposed American Power Act is set to give away about $56 billion to the unsustainable nuclear power industry, including tax credits, access to bonds, an increase in government insurance against regulatory delays, and loan guarantees -- guarantees which leave the American taxpayer on the hook in case of default.

The risk of default for these nuclear industry loan guarantees is about 50 percent.

So, we can get stuck with the bill from the nuclear fission industry as they give us a power source with huge security, waste disposal, weapons proliferation, and safety concerns; or we can make clean, efficient, and effective use of that large nuclear fusion reactor that Providence has provided just 93 million miles away.

Art is a retirement from life that is sweet and beautiful and full of wise genius. While the lovers roam arm-in-arm beneath the boughs of the Forest, the artist sits under a tree and makes fine pictures and holds them up to see. He is in love with himself, but he is also in love with the others, because he shows them his fruits and works and cries -- "See? See?" Then, afterwards, he rests, and goes back to all of them, back to the arm-in-arm of earthly love, and they love him because he has done such a beautiful thing, he has celebrated their life and love, and he has come back to them. They say -- "How strange and beautiful is this one! -- this soul!" And it is true, as true as it is mysterious and compelling. "He is of us, he is us! -- but he is alone beneath his tree a while. He will rejoin us with his sweet productions." And they will say -- "He loves God as well as men and women, thus he must be alone awhile." "And what is God?" "God, Oh God is the sum of it, the sum of it all." -- Jack Kerouac (from his "Forest of Arden" journal)

A study published earlier this year in the Archives of Internal Medicine looked at the effects of nut comsumption on blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels. The news is very good for those of us who are nuts for nuts: looking at data from 583 people in 25 trials conducted in 7 countries, the authors found "the best evidence yet that eating nuts reduces LDL cholesterol and improves the blood lipids profile," according to co-author Dr. Joan Sabaté, chair of the nutrition department at the Loma Linda University School of Public Health.

The found a dose-dependent effect where they lowered total cholesterol levels, improved the ratio of HDL (good) to LDL (bad) and total cholesterol, and reduced high triglyceride levels. The effect was the same for all types of nuts -- walnuts, almonds, peanuts (botanically, not a nut, but fakes it well enough), pecans, hazelnuts, macadamias and pistachios. They also found that the cholesterol lowering effect is greater then found when nuts replace saturated fats than when they replace olive oil or carbohydrates.

Now, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing: nuts are a great source of energy, as any trail-mix chomping hiker knows, so overdoing them can pack the diet with too many calories. The highest daily intake of nuts looked at in the trials reviewed was 132 grams -- 4.66 ounces, which is probably a little high. Sabaté recommends a limit of 3 ounces a day.

According to the FDA, "scientific evidence suggests but does not prove that eating 1.5 ounces of most nuts per day, as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol, may reduce the risk of heart disease."

As a snack, I love to cut up an apple or a pear and sprinkle on some almonds or walnuts. It's great raw, or sprinkle on some cinnamon and briefly bake, or heat it up in the microwave for a minute -- yum!

The Guardian reports on Wikileaks' release of secret US military files, revealing a war that's even more of a failure than we realized. (If you hadn't yet realized that the war was a failure, may I respectfully suggest that you wake the fuck up already?)

The files were released by Wikileaks to the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel. Most of the material was classified "secret" but is no longer militarily sensitive; the Guardian has withheld some from publication, and Wikileaks says it will redact harmful material before posting on its own servers.

Some of the details now available:

• IED attacks have risen from 308 in 2004 to 7,155 last year. Between 2004 and 2009, at least 7,000 Afghan civilians were killed or injured in IED attacks.
• The files detail 144 attacks by allied forces on civilians.
• There are allegations -- unproven -- that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has been arming and training Taliban insurgents. There are also US military intelligence reports showing Iranian efforts to finance, train and equip the Taliban.
• Task Force 373, a "black ops" special forces unit, has been hunting down alleged Taliban and al-Qaida members -- to either assassinate them or hold them without trial or legal process. In pursuing its extrajudicial killings the unit has murdered civilian men, women, and children, and even Afghan police officers, who got in the way.
• Report of deliberate "green on green" firefights between Afghani troops and of accidental "friendly fire" incidents make it clear that the enemy isn't the only threat over there.

Maybe the god(ess)(s/es) smile upon Wikileaks. This machine kills fascists.

Don't tell Paul Simon, but the last roll of Kodachrome ever produced by Eastman Kodak has now been developed at Dwayne's Photo Service in Parsons, Kansas. Dwayne's is the last place still processing Kodachrome, or at least the last place certified by Kodak to do so.

Kodachrome, a color slide film favored by professional photographers, was produced from 1935 to 2009. This last roll was shot by Steve McCurry, a freelance photojournalist whose work has appeared in National Geographic magazine; National Geographic Television was on hand to document that last roll.

Dwayne's will be ending its Kodachrome processing service in December, so if any of you shutterbugs have an old roll in a drawer somewhere, get it in soon.

Even in these days of Facebook, it can take news, good or bad, months to find us.

Marty Baum was part of my original poetical family, one of the regulars at World Famous Poetry Night at the Planet X coffeehouse in College Park, Maryland, back in the mid 1990s. Though we were all equal poets there, he was a mentor to me in the full-on, balls-to-the-wall style with which he read and performed his stuff.

He was one of the nutcases who kept coming even after the place burned down, meeting on the "grassy knoll" right across the street on the campus of the University of Maryland, or under the awning of a sub shop a few doors up. I remember a bunch of us meeting under that awning one night with a tornado warning in effect -- I can't remember for sure if Marty was there that night or not, but I think he was. We were a bunch of crazy young poets, so what the hell and why not?

It was Marty, as I recall, who introduced me to the work of Charles Bukowski; Bukowski's been a favorite of mine ever since.

I had lost touch with Marty over the years, but back in February we met up on Facebook, and for about two months after that we would occasionally swap comments. I hadn't heard from him in a while, but that happens; I wasn't checking on his page or anything. So I missed the news.

I just learned that Marty left us back on April 4th, a victim of lack of health insurance. According to notes left on his Facebook page, he had lost his health insurance when he lost his job last year. And so a minor infection was left untreated and ran rampant, costing this fine young poet his life. Another needless death brought to you by our ridiculous, laughable, tragic, profit-oriented healthcare system.

So if I should happen to punch out the lights of the next goddamn teabagger who parrots the bullshit about the U.S. having the best healthcare system in the world, you'll know why. But I'll try to refrain, in honor of Marty's general good nature.

Instead I'll try to take this as a reminder to let the people who've touched my life, know what they mean to me. So all my fellow poets, those I've shared the stage at readings with, those I've struggled with crazy writing exercises with: you are my brothers and sisters in arms, and I love you.

So a few years ago, The Onion did a news spoof that featured a fake "Congressman" discussing a bill to provide funding for emergency response against zombie attacks or other supernatural disasters. It's worth a chuckle.

But now, somehow, it has resurfaced and, despite the ridiculousness and despite the "Onion-Span" logo, is being accepted as genuine news by the right-wing "Obama is a secret Muslim racist terrorist born in Kenya and scheming to destroy us all!" crowd.

Just further proof that for any way-out, wild, irrational, outlandish theory, you can find believers on the web.

Here's some numbers I worked up for a recent thread over on Slashdot, that illustrate the pace of technological change since the late 1980s:

The costs of actually moving bits around have gone way down since the 80s -- I now have a ~4,700,000 bps (according to speedtest.net) WiMax link for less (counting for inflation) than I paid in the late 1980s for a phone line I could only use to move data at 2,400 bps. (9,600 and 56k modems didn't come into common usage for ordinary folks until the 1990s.) Improvement: a factor of over 1,900.

The costs of storage are tremendously lower. Back in 1988 or so my first hard disk cost on the order of $200. It held 30 MB -- 30,000,000 bytes. One can get terrabyte disks -- 1,000,000,000,000 bytes -- now, for less money. Improvement: over 33,000 times.

And the costs of twiddling bits are far, far lower than they were in the late 80s. My first PC operated at 8 MHz -- "Turbo" mode. My current box, old and pokey as it is, runs at 2210 Mhz. Let's say the overall cost was roughly the same, though I remember my dad paying something on the order of $5,000 for our first PC. (A Victor 9000 that could run both CP/M and MS-DOS, wow!) Improvement, over 270 times -- and that's not counting the improvement in what gets done per tick. My current box rates 4420.08 BogoMIPS; using the conversions at that article, my 8 MHz "Turbo" PC would have rated about .032 BogoMIPS. Improvement: over 138,000 times.

Eating "local" is a trendy thing these days, with hipsters making much of going to the farmers' market and "Locavore" bumper stickers all over the place. And certainly, all else being equal, it's more energy efficient and gives fresher produce to choose apples from an orchard within 100 miles than to buy apples shipped over from New Zealand.

But, as is often the case, when we look more closely we see that all other things are not necessarily equal.

First off, food coming from far away will tend to use highly efficient rail transport, or moderately efficient tractor-trailers, while your local farmer is probably delivering his goods in a panel van or pickup truck.

The difference is enormous. I got curious, so I ran some rough numbers.

As you may have heard in those CSX ads, rail can move one ton of cargo 436 miles on a gallon of fuel; that works out to moving a pound of food (or other stuff) 872,000 miles on one gallon of fuel. A typical tractor-trailer might haul 50,000 pounds at 5 mpg: that's one pound moved 250,000 miles on one gallon. Now consider a panel truck that gets 20 mpg, carrying a two tons of food: it moves one pound only 80,000 miles on one gallon. (Pretend the panel truck runs on diesel, but since these are back-of-the-envelope calculations it doesn't really matter.)

The tractor-trailer and the panel truck both have to make empty return runs, while the train picks up new cargo for the next leg of its loop; so we should half the numbers for both types of truck.

Rail: 872,000 pound-miles per gallon.
Tractor-trailer: 125,000 pound-miles per gallon.
Panel truck: 40,000 pound-miles per gallon.

That means that, for the same amount of fuel it takes a small farmer to move food 100 miles in their truck, rail transport might move that same food over 2,000 miles! Of course, it has to be moved to and from the train depot, but this illustrates the issue: it's quite possible for food coming from far away to use the same or less energy to transport, than "local" food.

(Of course the most local food is what you garden or forage yourself; there's no transportation cost when I walk out front and pick a few leaves of kale, and I'm thinking of trying some experiments with the plantain that's taking over the yard...)

So in terms of transportation efficiency, local food may not be a big win, or indeed a win at all. But more than that, transportation is a small piece of agricultural energy usage, as this WorldWatch article explains. Final delivery from producer or processor to the point of sale accounts for only 4 percent of the U.S. food system's greenhouse gas emissions; add in "upstream" miles and transport of things like fertilizer, pesticides, and animal feed, and transport still only accounts for about 11 percent of the food system's greenhouse gas emissions.

80 to 90% of greenhouse gas emissions from the food system come from agricultural production. So reducing those is far more important than reducing transport emissions. And how can we shift to more efficient food production? You know what I'm going to say: plant-based diets.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that 18 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock, a bigger share than the total of all transport. Livestock account for about 20 percent of the total terrestrial animal biomass. Grazing occupies a stunning 26 percent of the Earth's land area, while about a third of all arable land is devoted to feed crops for livestock.