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Obviously eating less will cause weight loss. The problem is actually being able to eat less and to keep doing that for life. Maybe that is not a problem for you ... so far, but it is a real problem for many people.

This article could shed more light on the obesity problem and solutions to it. For example, it could very well be that our intestinal flora influences our own decision making. There is at least one known case of a micro-organism that does: the toxoplasma gondii.

It is also apparent that people become addict to sugar and that definitely would influence decision making.

On top of that, our behavior is in great extent influenced, if not determined, by the chemistry of our bodies. It may very well be that chemical imbalances caused by a combination of diet, intestinal flora and hormones, causes obesity.

In short, saying that it is simply a problem of calories in and calories out is a gross over-simplification of the problem. Science is way beyond that point.

Of course a calorie is a calorie, but this is more than often used as a simplistic view of how the body processes food. Now it is clear that both the type and amount of food one consumes influences the hormonal system and gene expression. It is naive to keep thinking just in terms of calories.

This is a problem of definition more than anything else. I feel more comfortable thinking of Computer Science as the Math used to study algorithms and processes. The rest, although based on Math and the scientific process, looks more like Engineering to me.

You can use spottiness.com to let others know about this guy anonymously

The user would have to correct the resulting text anyways.

I also mentioned that idea below :)

But the participant would have to take your statement at face value.

Perhaps you can try translating the message to another language and back. Then present the resulting text to the user for corrections. The resulting grammar and punctuation could be very different than the original.

We at spottiness.com are very interested in this line of work. I can see the appeal of the simplicity of the solution you propose. On the other hand, in many cases the invitees would prefer to not have their emails associated with their comments anywhere (your service would have that information internally). That is an interesting problem.

These are the reasons behind the Daubert motion, like the one that Google is filing against Oracle.

The part about Africa is about "priming" the subjects, a well-studied psychological effect.

Erdös also said: "Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems."

Maybe we should not be surprised, but we should be as upset as any espionage attack merits.

Excellent article, although a bit too long to make the point.

I enjoy the jokeless comedy a lot, but precisely because of its common irrelevant stream-of-though kind of dynamic and its lack of punch lines or gags in general, I can usually recall very few parts of these movies. I thought I was having memory problems!

I think the take-home point of the article is to avoid depleting your limited energies making new decisions about every little thing, which makes perfect sense for me.

Now, Whitehead's cite is another thing:

"It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing,[...] The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them."

I find it much better for me to be mindful of the things I do. That does not mean I have to make new decisions all the time. It is a non-judgmental mindfulness, the practice of experiencing the present moment.

That page comes out black in my browser, but the text is there, just with the wrong color. Select parts of the page and you will see it.

Barça's strategy resonates with Zappos'

The point he is making is that the broker could not predict the (inflated) marked valuation of the slice once it reached the market because of the nature of the process. It does not matter who profits from it, their privileged clients or some other speculator.

"There is no such thing as 'metabolism': just body mass, muscle mass and activity."

Those factors are not enough. The human body has many more important factors in play there, like hormones, intestinal flora, and so on.

I love Spain and feel your pain

Not really. It depends on each person's metabolism. I know people that get fat just by having regular desserts for a few days, and others (generally very young) that can eat anything until they burst without moving the needle.

Following that logic, people with different tastes would conclude that carbs are worse than fat.

Diet is has far more weight in weight (pun intended) than exercise. Just by exercising it is almost impossible to loose weight.

Apparently combining carbs with fat is conducive to fat accumulation. So, avoiding that pasta with olive oil or butter is a good idea if you want to loose weight.

What I do is more like "paleo" than Atkins, but they are similar.

Apparently both diets avoid grains and sugar.

Check out the comment about by jpb that refers to Robert Lustig's talk. It is very interesting. It refers to your point that low-fat high-carb diets could also be healthy, but not all carbs are recommended.

Apparently eating fat together with carbs in conducive to fat accumulation, and sugar by itself has the same result because half of it, the fructose, is metabolized into triglycerides.

Many vegetarians eat some food from animal sources, like eggs, milk, yogurt, etc. On the other hand, I have heard cases of people that tried to be pure vegan and had serious health problems.

I know, that's was one of my starting points. My comment addresses the last part of the parent comment: you should experiment and find what works best your yourself. Although I consider myself a paleo, I am not a purist.

Although grains don't seem to be very healthy, don't forget about sugar.

My strategy is simple: in general I avoid food that a hunter-gatherer would not be able to find. I said "in general" because I eat cheese, some hams and preserved meats and sausages, and I also drink wine.

After a short learning curve it became very easy.

In terms of convenience, I still find a sandwich and a canned juice pretty convenient, but I avoid them anyway. I have not had the need for other "convenient" foods like cereals, rice, noodles, and so on.

Fair enough, but, like the article points out, personal experience, or case studies, doesn't count as scientific proof here.

My own experience is that I can eat as much butter (real butter), bacon, olive oil, and other fats as I want and my weight won't change. But as soon as I start to eat bread and potatoes, I can easily gain 10 pounds.

This is a very complex issue. For every single person there are many factors involved, like personal make, hormones, age, genetics, even how your mother ate when you were in the womb.

On the big scale, these studies are trying to find the cause for the obesity (and heart disease) epidemics. The accumulating evidence is pointing to carbs as the culprit.