Randomness for 9/15/09

Standard

1) Tron light cycles build out of Lego. Pretty cool, but it’s not something for my son–he’s never seen the movie.

2) Strange and spectacular sinks/wash basins. I expect you think I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel, link-wise, but these are pretty amazing. I want the Art Ceram, myself. via marthawells

3) Newsweek does a story called The Real Cause of Obesity: It’s not gluttony. It’s genetics. Why our moralizing misses the point. The comment section, as you might expect, is a disaster of dim-witted moralizing. “Mr. Friedman is not very well informed. Genetics is only a very small factor in obesity. The role that it plays is that as a person eats junk food, is sedentary in their overall activities, it weakens the genetic code and gets passed on. But not only do the genes get passed on, the bad habits get passed on to the offspring and the genetic code continues to get weaker. ”

4) Sexual assault prevention tips that are guaranteed to work when employed correctly. via james_nicoll and theweaselking

5) One thing I struggle with in my writing is how to show mental states of many characters in a first-person POV. This TED talk about the development of the part of the brain that recognizes other people’s mental states doesn’t address my struggles specifically, but it’s pretty interesting.

6) You know who wants more Americans to have government-run insurance? Doctors. Yeah, doctors complain about Medicare reimbursement rates, but private insurance is an even bigger headache.