Brent Kearney

I recently watched a powerful film named Flow: for the love of water, and I highly recommend that you see it. You may never buy bottled water again. Here is the official trailer:

A brief part of the film, near the beginning, discussed the presence of atrazine in water. Especially in North America, where it is used as herbicide on corn farms, and travels up to 6000km via rain. Because it causes prostate and breast cancer, and has destructive environmental effects such as chemically castrating fish and amphibians, it’s use is banned in Europe. However, it is still widely used in the USA and in Canada.

According to the film, there is less regulation of bottled water than there is for tap water. Independent testing of over a thousand bottles and hundreds of brands of bottled water revealed high levels arsenic, organic chemicals, and bacteria. Just because there is a photo of a mountain stream on the label doesn’t mean that it wasn’t pumped out of an industrial parking lot!

The film is not all doom and gloom, though. It highlights progress by several communities banning together to implement new technologies or old traditions to create sustainable water management in their area. The film’s website is also the central part of a social movement to have the right to clean water declared as a basic human right by the United Nations:

Article 31:
Everyone has the right to clean and accessible water, adequate for the health and well-being of the individual and family, and no one shall be deprived of such access or quality of water due to individual economic circumstance.

I signed the petition today. You should too.

The look and feel of Windows 7 is great. It reminds me more of a Mac than any previous version of Windows.

Don Reisinger’s recent review on C|Net had some praise for the Apple Macintosh-like user interface of the Windows 7 beta, which apparently makes it more attractive, but on the other hand, compared to XP it is “harder to perform basic functions”, and, “Microsoft has placed too much stock in Apple’s design and not enough in usability.”

Microsoft Vista, the latest version of Windows, was criticized for poor performance, annoying user interface, lack of compatibility, and ongoing susceptibility to Internet malware. This provided a major incentive for people to switch to Mac, and was the subject of much ridicule by Apple’s marketing team.

I found one thing interesting in Reisinger’s review: given the significant user interface changes in the upcoming Windows 7, large businesses will have to consider the training and support costs of the upgrade. I think that another consideration should be: if they’re going to have to learn a new user interface anyways — one that looks like a Mac — why not go for the real thing, and be spared the traditional Windows headaches?

The next version of Mac OS (10.6) is likely to be out before Windows 7, and according to Apple, it will “set a new standard for quality”. It will also feature even greater compatibility with Microsoft server products, adding to the all-in-one platform’s attractiveness for the corporate IT department.

Everyone knew that it would happen sooner or later — the world’s most populous country now has the most number of people on the ‘net, and only 19% of them even use the Internet. Techcrunch published a summary yesterday of the latest World Internet Usage Statistics findings, in the form of a top 15 list:

Top 15 countries, by Internet population:

Asians dominate the Internet population, as shown by the IWS graph:

Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Only 15.3% of Asians use the Internet, according to the report.

According to Forrester, online retail sales in the USA for 2008 was forecast to be $204 billion. 73.6% of the U.S. population uses the Internet, so there is about $2.77 billion of sales online (per year) per 1% of the population that is online, in North America.

Canadian online sales, despite over 84% Internet penetration, amount to only $12.8 million according to StatsCan, so Canadian stats are rounded off when calculating for North America.

It probably doesn’t translate directly like this, but if we assume that Asian Internet users spend online the same way that U.S. consumers do, there is a potential Asian market of $42.4 billion right now, with wild growth in the coming years. Anyone selling online would be well advised to translate their website into Asian languages!

As the owner of the Heart Attack Grill explains the merits of lard-soaked buns and 4 ½-pound meat patties smothered in cheese and mayo in this interview, he remarks, “This is bad for you, and it’s going to kill you”. The dessert menu is composed of unfiltered cigarettes, and scantily clad girls in fantasy nurse costumes will push you to your car in a wheelchair.

I wonder if anyone has actually had a heart attack in the restaurant, half-way through a “triple bypass burger”…

The marketing angle here, and the fact that it is successful, is quite interesting. The tobacco industry could probably learn a thing or two from it. Let’s hope they don’t!

It was puking snow in Banff last night at midnight, when I went to bed. I had spent the past two hours tuning my skis, excited for the morning to come. The forecast called for clear skies, for the first time in a week of fog and snow storms. Over half a meter of snow fell on the local resorts, and I planned to be first in line when the lifts opened.

I got off the Sunshine gondola at Goat’s Eye mountain, just as the lift was opening to the public. I’ve done so many times in the past five years on powder days, usually to be rewarded with fresh tracks of fluffy knee-deep powder everywhere I ride. Not today though.

Despite it’s having dumped snow every day this week, mother nature threw a curve ball, and there was a quick melt-freeze cycle before Friday morning. My first run on Goat’s Eye involved scraping across dust on crust: about 2cm of dust on what felt like half a meter of crust. It wasn’t the porcelain type that can develop on the Goat, but it wasn’t particularly pleasant for my fat powder skis. One run was enough, and I jumped back on the Gondola to test the snow on reliable old Mount Standish.

Standish was much better, as it tends to be. The snow just accumulates on it’s south-easterly aspects, which also happens to be a stunningly beautiful place to ski first thing in the morning, as the sun rises behind Mt. Assiniboine. Maybe it’s the early sun that hits those slopes that softens the snow in the morning. In any case, I found some fresh gnar close to the ski area boundary on a steep little run called Laryx. The last time I was there, it was a rock garden, but there is finally enough snow that I didn’t bottom out once, and I was ripping fairly hard.

Unfortunately Laryx is only long enough to get about four turns in before you hit the cat track. A short jaunt over to Strawberry Face provided a few more powder turns before returning to the corduroy. I ended up repeating that line about 5 times, which only took around 40 minutes (yeah, it’s short), before hoping over to Continental Divide to see what the big mountain had to offer. It offered mostly wind-packed snow, with shallow pockets of loose powder between crusted moguls. A couple of runs there was enough, and I thought I’d check out that old chestnut, The Shoulder, which often hides a little powder oasis outside of the mainstream slopes.

Today The Shoulder was totally wind-blasted, the tracks of yesterday’s powder-hounds entombed in white marble, mocking me, and pounding my thighs all the way down as I negotiated the death-cookies. I decided to bear right, and skate back to the Goat’s Eye area, where I boarded Banff Ave and skied out to the parking lot. Maybe tomorrow conditions will be better.

The over mineralization theory of aging holds that the build-up of calcium, iron and copper in the body is responsible for age-related chronic health problems such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and many other ailments. The theory seems compelling, as it seems to explain why humans age in different stages — something that the oxidation theory does not account for.

This video explains the theory in 8 minutes. The video was created by a company that has a patent-pending “nutraceutical” supplement for chelating excess minerals from the body.

I mentioned resveratrol in an earlier post, and after looking into it, I think it’s worthwhile. This website has dozens of links to and summaries of peer-reviewed, published scientific studies that support the over-mineralization theory of aging and the efficacy of resveratrol. For example, this summary discusses findings from Cornell University showing that oral doses of resveratrol reduces brain plaque, due to it’s ability to chelate copper. The accumulation of brain plaque is associated with senility and Alzheimer’s disease.

The over-mineralization theory of aging is new to me, and I look forward to researching it more. If you have any comments or links to other information about the theory, especially to any opposing voices, I would love to hear from you.

One thing I’m particularly curious about is appropriate conclusions that one can take away from this theory in regards to diet, in light of athletic performance. Calcium is a critical mineral for muscle contractions, and iron is necessary for muscle growth and recovery. From a performance perspective, what is one to do if these minerals also contribute to the dysfunction of cellular processes? Chelation would seem to be one answer, but what other advice is prudent?