Welcome to the Health and Fitness News, a weekly diary which is cross-posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette. It is open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.
Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.
You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.
Basil contains flavonoids that are believed to have some antioxidant properties; it’s an excellent source of vitamin K, and a very good source of iron, calcium and vitamin A.
Pots of Basil will also keep away flies although it is unclear why, possibly the fragrant oils. The oils have also shown to inhibit the growth of some pathogenic bacteria that has become resistant to antibiotics.
Eddie Redmayne, who won an Oscar playing Stephen Hawking in Theory of Everything, will try to make it two in a row by portraying pioneer transgender woman Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl.
The United States stock market was on track for its worst week since 2011 by Friday afternoon, and the Hong Kong market had already reached that milestone. The British stock market has fallen for eight straight days, the third-longest run on record. The price of oil and emerging market currencies around the world continued a swoon that dates to last year.
And it’s about time.
That’s not to minimize the losses investors have incurred, or to say that each of these moves can be completely justified by data, and certainly not to predict what will happen next week or next month. But if you step back just a bit, what has happened in financial markets this week looks less like a catastrophe in the making and more like a much-needed breather when various markets had been starting to look a little bubbly.
Yah think?
(F)lat stock prices in 2015 mask what came before: a remarkable run-up in stock prices in the preceding half-decade. From mid-2009 to mid-2014, stock prices rose much faster than corporate earnings, or gross domestic product, or pretty much anything else you might think of as fundamentals.
In effect, investors became more and more willing to take the risk inherent in owning stocks, so much so that they were willing to pay very high prices for shares relative to the profits of the companies they were buying a piece of. Thus, by definition, they were accepting low returns (low both by absolute standards and even relative to the very low interest rates offered on safer investments like government bonds).
Just over three years ago, in July 2012, investing $100 in the S.&P. 500 captured more than $7 in annual earnings; putting the same money in a 10 year U.S. Treasury bond paid out only $1.55.
In other words, stocks might have been risky, but investors were being compensated nicely for that risk.
…
Even after the sell-off in stocks this week, the same $100 invested in stocks buys only $5.59 in earnings, compared with $2.08 for Treasury bonds. The fact that investors aren’t being compensated very much for taking on risk is, quite logically, making them more skittish when those risks materialize.
A mix of interventionist policies from the Federal Reserve and other central banks, and a global glut of investment capital have created a mismatch between the global economy, which has grown glacially, and markets, which have been on fire.
As Josh Brown of Ritholtz Capital Management tweeted on Friday, “2015 is the first year since the recovery began where the real economy is outperforming the financial economy.”
by Jon Henley, Shane Hickey, and Alexandra Topping, The Guardian
Friday 21 August 2015 06.00 EDT
Rebels within Greece’s ruling party, the leftwing Syriza movement led by the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, have announced they are breaking away to form a separate entity called Popular Unity.
Angry at what they see as a betrayal of Syriza’s anti-austerity principles, the 25 MPs announced their intention to form a new party in a letter to parliament the day after Tsipras resigned to pave the way for snap elections next month.
Led by the former energy minister, Panagiotis Lafazanis, the new movement will be the third-largest group in the Greek parliament and could conceivably receive a mandate to try to form a new government.
Tsipras announced his resignation in a televised address on Thursday night. He said he felt a moral obligation to put Greece’s third international bailout deal, and the further swingeing austerity measures it requires, to the people.
Last week he piloted the punishing deal through the Greek parliament, but suffered a major rebellion when nearly one-third of Syriza MPs either voted against the package or abstained. Tsipras is gambling that he will be able to silence the rebels and shore up public support for the three-year bailout programme.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Soviet coup against Mikhail Gorbachev fails; Exiled revolutionary Leon Trotsky murdered in Mexico; Nat Turner leads a slave rebellion; U.S. flag gets 50th star; Count Basie and singer Kenny Rogers born
On this day in 1959, Hawaii became our 50th state. Hawaii is the only U.S. state made up entirely of islands. It occupies most of an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean, southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of Australia. Hawaii’s natural beauty, warm tropical climate, inviting waters and waves, and active volcanoes make it a popular destination for tourists, surfers, biologists, and volcanologists alike. Due to its mid-Pacific location, Hawaii has many North American and Asian influences along with its own vibrant native culture. Hawaii has over a million permanent residents along with many visitors and U.S. military personnel. Its capital is Honolulu on the island of Oahu.
The state encompasses nearly the entire volcanic Hawaiian Island chain, which comprises hundreds of islands spread over 1,500 miles (2,400 km). At the southeastern end of the archipelago, the eight “main islands” are (from the northwest to southeast) Niihau, Kauai, Oahu, Molokai, Lanai, Kahoolawe, Maui, and Hawaii. The last is by far the largest and is often called “The Big Island” to avoid confusion with the state as a whole. The archipelago is physiographically and ethnologically part of the Polynesian subregion of Oceania.
The first known settlers of the Hawaiian Islands were Polynesian voyagers who arrived sometime in the eighth century. In the early 18th century, American traders came to Hawaii to exploit the islands’ sandalwood, which was much valued in China at the time. In the 1830s, the sugar industry was introduced to Hawaii and by the mid 19th century had become well established. American missionaries and planters brought about great changes in Hawaiian political, cultural, economic, and religious life. In 1840, a constitutional monarchy was established, stripping the Hawaiian monarch of much of his authority.
In 1893, a group of American expatriates and sugar planters supported by a division of U.S. Marines deposed Queen Liliuokalani, the last reigning monarch of Hawaii. One year later, the Republic of Hawaii was established as a U.S. protectorate with Hawaiian-born Sanford B. Dole as president. Many in Congress opposed the formal annexation of Hawaii, and it was not until 1898, following the use of the naval base at Pearl Harbor during the Spanish-American War, that Hawaii’s strategic importance became evident and formal annexation was approved. Two years later, Hawaii was organized into a formal U.S. territory. During World War II, Hawaii became firmly ensconced in the American national identity following the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Admission, or Statehood, Day is an official state holiday. It is the home state of President Barack Obama, the only President from that state and one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited. The pictures were the very hard to select. The second picture (above) is an aerial view of Diamond Head.
Diamond Head is a dormant volcanic cone on the island of Oahu. It is called Le’ahi by Hawaiians, most likely from lae ‘browridge, promontory’ plus ‘ahi ‘tuna’ because the shape of the ridgeline resembles the shape of a tuna’s dorsal fin. Its English name was given by British sailors in the 19th century, who mistook calcite crystals embedded in the rock for diamonds.
Then of course there are volcanoes at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The first picture on the left is the more famous of the volcanoes, Mauna Loa which is the largest volcano on Earth by volume and area and one of the five volcanoes in that form the islands.
To keep prices high, the federation enforces strict quotas for the province’s 7,400 producers. Instead of flooding the market during years with bumper crops, all syrup produced beyond that amount is stored in the federation’s warehouse, which helps prop up prices by limiting supply. When seasons are lean, it releases the syrup, to maintain stable supply and pricing. (Sales of small containers to consumers at farms are exempt from the system.)
After five particularly bad seasons drained most of its stock by 2008, the federation enlarged its hoard. Stacked in barrels nine high, the reserve currently holds about 60 million pounds of maple syrup.
Prices are set by the federation, in negotiation with a buyers’ group. The federation holds most of the power, given that it controls a majority of the world’s production.
Such domestic systems are facing scrutiny in a global marketplace. One major hurdle in the talks over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a major trade deal with 12 countries, has been Canada’s refusal to dismantle a similar quota system for dairy and poultry farmers.
Brown gold. Worth more a barrel at this point than Oil.
Fairly recently I’ve spoken about the need to keep your private information, private. Ideally you never, ever use your own name and only anonymous email addresses. This limits your exposure to things you can not control, like your credit card and shipping info.
I have a separate family of emails I devote just to that. I suppose if I was serious I’d get into BitCoin or at least a blind Paypal account. If you have a couple of bucks to incorporate you can go wild with the added protections corporate personhood affords, but my prescriptions are only the mild sort designed to keep the casual spy off your back.
One idiot move I’ve never done is sign up for a porn or swinging site under my own name and certainly not one that required my personal information (Disclaimer: not that I’ve never visited a porn or warez site to evaluate anti-virus performance, of course I have, where do you think you picked them up? Mary-Bo Peep’s Knitting and Yarn Supplies? It’s just as likely actually, and the reputable porn sites are pretty good at policing and most warez sites not so much.).
So you might think that I’d laugh off the Ashley Madison hack and I do except on the ethics question-
Do you have things about your life you’d like to keep private?
I’m not much into porn because sex is icky and there are only a finite number of ways to do it so it’s also boring. Neither am I inclined to enter a romantic relationship at this point in my life (mid-30s, 1926, do the math) and it’s been my experience that nothing is zipless.
Still, there are things that I don’t think are relevant to you as a reader and I don’t care to share with my family and friends because their opinion of me is important and enduring. This is why there are therapists with whom you can have a professional relationship and those communications are privileged.
There are two things that bother me about the Ashley Madison hack. The first is that it seems to be based mostly on its purient interest rather than any possible public good. It’s kinda sorta relevant if some “homosexuality can be cured through conditioning and punishment” spouting icon gets burned lurking Craig’s List (Why you so stupid?) but not so much if some random teenager is driven to suicide by the exposure of their sexuality.
The second is not what you would expect. It’s that businesses, people you actually pay money to in expectation of delivery of a particular good or service, are so disrespectful of your privacy that they leave the most intimate details of your transactions exposed to thieves who can steal from you or simply sell it to other businesses (corporate personhood, gotta love it) to use to target your particular used shoe fetish and Mary-Bo Peep’s Knitting and Yarn Supplies is no less likely than anyone else to do this.
I will note that I’m not much for the needle arts though I can sew well enough to make horrible looking sacks that might keep your personal micro-climate warm enough to keep from getting chilled while at the same time giving you more mobility than if you were wrapped in blankets.
On Tuesday, hackers appeared to make good on a threat to release what they said was 9.7 gigabytes of account and credit card information from 37 million users of the site.
Frankly that seems rather high even for 37 million users. Surely it is not all text.
The data includes members’ names, user names, addresses, phone numbers and birth dates as well as details of credit card transactions.
…
Brian Krebs, a security researcher, said in a blog post that he spoke with three people who found their information and the last four digits of their credit card numbers in the database, suggesting they were indeed stolen from the company.
“I’m sure there are millions of AshleyMadison users who wish it weren’t so, but there is every indication this dump is the real deal,” Mr. Krebs wrote.
Why?
The hackers said they were upset about Ashley Madison’s policy for deleting user data when requested. The company has long offered members the ability to scrub their profiles and information from the site for $19, a feature that BuzzFeed News said generated nearly $2 million in 2014. But, as the breach showed, the data remained.
“We have explained the fraud, deceit, and stupidity of A.L.M. and their members,” Impact Team wrote, referring to Avid Life Media. “Now everyone gets to see their data.”
So basically, useless extended warranty plans.
Science Oriented Video
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
On this day in 1911, a dispatcher in the New York Times office sends the first telegram around the world via commercial service. Exactly 66 years later, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sends a different kind of message–a phonograph record containing information about Earth for extraterrestrial beings–shooting into space aboard the unmanned spacecraft Voyager II.
The Times decided to send its 1911 telegram in order to determine how fast a commercial message could be sent around the world by telegraph cable. The message, reading simply “This message sent around the world,” left the dispatch room on the 17th floor of the Times building in New York at 7 p.m. on August 20. After it traveled more than 28,000 miles, being relayed by 16 different operators, through San Francisco, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, Bombay, Malta, Lisbon and the Azores–among other locations–the reply was received by the same operator 16.5 minutes later. It was the fastest time achieved by a commercial cablegram since the opening of the Pacific cable in 1900 by the Commercial Cable Company.
The Voyager 2 spacecraft is an unmanned interplanetary space probe launched on August 20, 1977. Both the Voyager 2 and the Voyager 1 space probes were designed, developed, and built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, California. Identical in form and instruments with its sister Voyager program craft Voyager 1, Voyager 2 was launched on a slower, more curved trajectory that allowed it to be kept in the plane of the Ecliptic (the plane of the Solar System) so that it could be sent on to Uranus and Neptune by means of utilizing gravity assists during its fly-by of Saturn in 1981 and of Uranus in 1986. Because of this chosen trajectory, Voyager 2 could not take a close-up look at the large Saturnian moon Titan as its sister space probe had. However, Voyager 2 did become the first and only spacecraft to make the spaceflight by Uranus and Neptune, and hence completing the Planetary Grand Tour. This is one that is made practical by a seldom-occurring geometric alignment of the outer planets (happening once every 175 years).
The Voyager 2 space probe has made the most productive unmanned space voyage so far, visiting all four of the Outer Planets and their systems of moons and rings, including the first two visits to previously unexplored Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 2 had two sensitive vidicon cameras and an assortment of other scientific instruments to make measurements in the ultraviolet, infrared, and radio wavelengths, as well as ones to measure subatomic particles in outer space, including cosmic rays. All of this was accomplished at a fraction of the amount of money that was later spent on more advanced and specialized space probes Galileo and Cassini-Huygens. Along with the earlier NASA Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, sister probe Voyager 1, and the more recent New Horizons, Voyager 2 is an interstellar probe in that all five of these are on one-way trajectories leaving the Solar System.
Welcome to the Health and Fitness News, a weekly diary which is cross-posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette. It is open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes. 
Hawaii’s natural beauty, warm tropical climate, inviting waters and waves, and active volcanoes make it a popular destination for tourists, surfers, biologists, and volcanologists alike. Due to its mid-Pacific location, Hawaii has many North American and Asian influences along with its own vibrant native culture. Hawaii has over a million permanent residents along with many visitors and U.S. military personnel. Its capital is Honolulu on the island of Oahu.
Fairly recently I’ve spoken about the need to keep your private information, private. Ideally you never, ever use your own name and only anonymous email addresses. This limits your exposure to things you can not control, like your credit card and shipping info.
On this day in 1911, a dispatcher in the New York Times office sends the first telegram around the world via commercial service. Exactly 66 years later, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sends a different kind of message–a phonograph record containing information about Earth for extraterrestrial beings–shooting into space aboard the unmanned spacecraft Voyager II.
allowed it to be kept in the plane of the Ecliptic (the plane of the Solar System) so that it could be sent on to Uranus and Neptune by means of utilizing gravity assists during its fly-by of Saturn in 1981 and of Uranus in 1986. Because of this chosen trajectory, Voyager 2 could not take a close-up look at the large Saturnian moon Titan as its sister space probe had. However, Voyager 2 did become the first and only spacecraft to make the spaceflight by Uranus and Neptune, and hence completing the Planetary Grand Tour. This is one that is made practical by a seldom-occurring geometric alignment of the outer planets (happening once every 175 years).