I recently mentioned a study showing that dietary intake of fiber from grains was strongly tied to lowered risk of death from cardiovascular, infectious, and respiratory diseases, and also protective against cancer deaths in men. (That intake would have to be mostly from whole grains, since the whole point of refining grains is to remove the fiber-rich bran.) And I mentioned that this was another strike against the "paleo" diet, which strongly discourages consumption of grains, as well as legumes and tubers.

Followers of the paleo fad argue that their diet is optimal because it represents what humans ate before the development of agriculture. But as it happens, for years we've had evidence that consumption of wheat and barley -- and perhaps even grain-flour bread -- goes back at least 23,000 years. (And there are hints that it might go back as far as 105,000 years, but that's still very speculative.)

And more recently, in an analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences researchers from George Washington University and the Smithsonian Institution examined phytoliths (microscopic bits of silica or other minerals from plants) and starch grains found on Neanderthal teeth dating back 36,000 to 46,000 years. Their research shows that these most iconic cavemen (who have been recently shown to be part of our ancestry and not just an evolutionary dead-end, as was argued for some years) were not only eating legumes and grains like barley, but were cooking these carb-rich foods to improve their digestibility. (Full article here, though it may be hit by the copyright cops at some point.)

This made my day: a Javascript version of the old "Asteroids" game that lets you blow up HTML elements on web pages.

To try it out on this page, you can click this link. Rotate with left and right arrow keys, up arrow for thrust, shoot with the spacebar, press B to highlight shootable regions, and Esc to quit. (You'll probably want to reload the page afterwards.) For more fun, drag that link to your bookmarklet toolbar, then invoke it from some other webpage -- maybe one laden with ads, or maybe one with photos of whoever's pissing you off this week...

A tip of the hat to young Mr. Erik Rothoff Andersson, author of this applet.

Over at The Daily Beast, Ezra Klein weighs in on why unions are worth fighting for:

That means higher wages, but it also means that workers can go to their managers with safety concerns or ideas to improve efficiency and know that they’ll not only get a hearing, they’ll be protected from possible reprisals. Second, unions are a powerful, sophisticated player concerned with more than just the next quarter’s profit reports—what economist John Kenneth Galbraith called a “countervailing power” in an economy dominated by large corporations. They participate in shareholder meetings, where they’re focused on things like job quality and resisting outsourcing. They push back on business models that they don’t consider sustainable for their workers or, increasingly, for the environment. In an economy with a tendency toward bigness—where big producers are negotiating with big retailers and big distributors—workers need a big advocate of their own. Finally, unions bring some semblance of balance to the political system. A lot of what happens in politics is, unfortunately, the result of moneyed, organized interests.... One of the few lobbies pushing for the other side is organized labor—and it plays a strikingly broad role. The Civil Rights Act, the weekend, and the Affordable Care Act are all examples of organized labor fighting for laws that benefited not just the unionized.

Despite a previously announced 4 p.m. deadline, the AP reports that Wisconsin Capitol Police police have decided not to forcibly remove protectors from the capital building. As members of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association have joined the demonstrators, this eliminates (for now) the possibility of the spectacle of cops dragging cops out of the building.

Wisconsin, well done.

This week's Zelda's Inferno exercise: Google ad stories, as described here. The point: 'to litter the internet with stories where stories have not previously been." The format: a title line, up to 25 characters, which may be part of the story but must also stand alone as a title; then two lines of up to 35 characters each. (If published as an ad, there is also a by-line for the author.)

Stopping at an ATM
Instead of $20s, the machine gave
him the secrets of the Cosmos.

Boy meets Girl
Boy sells soul to the Devil for her
love; learns no soul means no love.

Life's Ambition
Joe wanted to be a writer. He
practiced until he realized: he was

One fine March day
spring's first blossom pushed a
susceptible man into enlightenment.

Once up a time
there was a foolish boy who loved
everyone. Surprise - he ended up ok

Things may get very interesting in Wisconsin over the next 24 hours or so.

Wire reports say that Wisconsin police plan to clear protesters out of the Wisconsin Capitol on Sunday at 4 p.m. In the words of one protest organizer, "I'm pretty sure there will be people unwilling to leave the building on their own two feet."

The president of the Wisconsin Law Enforcement Association (WLEA)'s executive board, Tracy Fuller, says that police would "absolutely" carry out any order given to them, even using force against peaceful protesters, whether they agree or disagree policies being protested.

The very very interesting part comes from the fact that some of those protesters are cops. The Wisconsin Professional Police Association (WPPA)'s Executive Director, Jim Palmer, has requested members from across the state to come to the Capitol and join the occupation. "Law enforcement officers know the difference between right and wrong, and Governor Walker’s attempt to eliminate the collective voice of Wisconsin’s devoted public employees is wrong...That is why we have stood with our fellow employees each day and why we will be sleeping among them tonight."

According to Ryan Harvey, yesterday "Hundreds of cops have just marched through the center of the capitol to show solidarity. Massive applause. So much for the 4 pm deadline." Rainforest Action Network's "The Understory" has more info and video of a police union spokesman rallying protestors.

USAToday reports that today, hundreds of off-duty officers and deputies joined protests against Walker's attempt to strip unions of collective bargaining rights.

(Background on Walker and his billionaire backers, the Kochs, attempt to kill unions here.)

So what's going to happen if the order comes down to clear the protesters? Will pro-union cops try to talk other pro-union protesters into walking away? Will "I was only following orders" cops drag fellow LEOs out of the building?

What happens tomorrow at 4 p.m. in Madison may determine America's future.

If you haven't been following developments in Wisconsin, this article at Mother Jones will get you up to speed. But to recap: the first thing you need to know is that Scott Walker, the state's newly elected governor, is in the pocket of the Koch Brothers. (And this is not a new revelation, it came out during the campaign.)

If you've been asleep for the past year or so, the Kochs are the oil billionaires whose company has been described by Greenpeace as a "kingpin of climate science denial". Their family fortune -- built, ironically enough, on seed money obtained from contracts with Stalin's USSR -- is a major part of the bankroll behind Reason magazine, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute. And more importantly, they funded the astroturfing of the whole "Tea Party" farce. As one GOP Republican consultant who has done research on behalf of the Koch brothers said of the Tea Party, "The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It’s like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud—and they’re our candidates!"

It seems that every few days we see another story about employers firing or suspending employees for comments made of Facebook or elsewhere on the web. It's a worrisome trend.

Given that, you might think that if a company finds your resume on-line, before their recruiters call you up they might Google your name + their company's name, and see if you've bad-mouthed them. For example, I'd expect someone from Amazon.com to Google '"Tom Swiss" amazon' before calling me about a job, and see on the first page links to my post, "Amazon must be destroyed", where I write about my loathing for these patent-abusing pro-censorship bastards, and then cross me off their list. (BTW, such a search also finds the MP3 downloads for my tracks for Words on War.)

Apparently not, though, since I just got a call from an Amazon.com recruiter. (I was polite.)

I'm not in the job market right now, and my resume page even has a link explaining this. But since my resume has been at the same URL since, IIRC, the late 90s, I guess it comes up fairly high on Google searches.