As I’ve mentioned before, as the person in our household who does all of the cooking and all of the shopping, I maintain pretty tight rein on our diets. The strategy I use is a bit different. I cook with real butter, my wife drinks whole milk and eats whole yogurt, and, generally, everything I cook and that we eat is the real stuff, doesn’t contain a lot of sugar, colors, or other additives, and is pretty unprocessed. My wife’s PCP recently proclaimed her “healthy as a horse”. The resemblance ends there, I hasten to add.

On the other hand I do serve very small portions, I prepare precisely as much as we will eat, and we eat many small meals in a day.

As it turns out there’s a bit of evidence that I might be on the right track:

In one paper, published by Swedish researchers in the Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care, middle-aged men who consumed high-fat milk, butter and cream were significantly less likely to become obese over a period of 12 years compared to men who never or rarely ate high-fat dairy.

Yep, that’s right. The butter and whole-milk eaters did better at keeping the pounds off.

“I would say it’s counter-intuitive,” says Greg Miller, executive vice president of the National Dairy Council.

The second study, published in the European Journal of Nutrition, is a meta-analysis of 16 observational studies. There has been a hypothesis that high-fat dairy foods contribute to obesity and heart disease risk, but the reviewers concluded that the evidence does not support this hypothesis. In fact, the reviewers found that in most of the studies, high-fat dairy was associated with a lower risk of obesity.

“We continue to see more and more data coming out [finding that] consumption of whole-milk dairy products is associated with reduced body fat,” Miller says.

I can’t help but wonder if this result is only true for some people and not others. Could Northern and Western Europeans be adapted for a diet that contains substantial dairy in as natural a form as possible? Seems reasonable to me. I suspect that my Swiss ancestors (who were dairymen) would have starved to death without butter, milk, and cheese and, judging by the church records, they lived to ripe old ages.

Remember my mentioning nuclear fusion as one of those development that’s always just on the horizon? Apparently, it’s still there:

For 60 years, experts have been saying that commercial fusion power could be 30 or 40 years away. While Hurricane is hopeful, he shies away from giving a timetable for future research.

“You picture yourself climbing halfway up a mountain, but the top of the mountain is hidden in clouds … and then someone calls you on your satellite phone and asks you how long it’s going to take you to climb to the top of the mountain,” Hurricane said. “You don’t know.”

He said the high-foot strategy was like a “base camp” on Mount Everest.

“What you do from these base camps is strike out in different directions and try to find the best way up,” he said. “The process repeats over and over again.” Researchers will continue to tweak the power profile as well as the shape of the fuel capsule and other components to reduce energy-robbing instabilities and inefficiencies.

Automotive technologies, even technologies in which the sponsoring companies are heavily invested, are not eternal. Just off the top of my head here’s a list of automotive technologies tried and then abandoned for one reason or another:

the Wankel engine
push-button transmissions
steam-powered cars
early electric cars
the first talking car (Datsun 810 Maxima)
automatic shoulder belts
turbine-powered cars

and my favorite, the Ford Nucleon—a nuclear-powered concept car. What could possibly go wrong?

Some of these technologies have been introduced again and again only to be abandoned each time. So, simply because a car company or even many car companies have invested billions in development of something, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s here to stay.

Archaeologists have found the oldest human footprints to be discovered outside of Africa, some 800,000 years old in, of all places, Norfolk:

Archaeologists have found the earliest human footprints known outside Africa, at Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast.

Dating back 800,000 years, the prints are thought to have been made by five individuals, including both adults and children.

They were identified by a team of scientists led by the British Museum, Natural History Museum, and Queen Mary University of London, after heavy seas removed beach sands to reveal a series of hollows in the silt at low tide.

Analysis of digital images of these hollows confirmed that they were ancient human footprints, direct evidence of the earliest known humans in northern Europe. In some cases the prints were so clear that the heel, arch, and even toes could be identified.

The archaeologists are surprised that such early humans had the technology to deal with the climate, mild as the British climate was at that time. My guess it that these early Brits were barbecuing. My experience has been that there are no conditions so severe that they would prevent a Brit from barbecuing.

Over the period of the last 50 years by my specific memory there have been several technologies that have been “just around the corner”. Sadly, they’ve remained will o’ the wisps. They’re still just around the corner today.

The two that leap to my mind are practical quantum computing and practical nuclear fusion. Just a little farther than “just around the corner” would be, say, a cure for cancer. That seems to be farther away now than it did forty years ago.

Can anybody name some other emerging technologies that have just never emerged? Or nominate some emerging technologies that are unlikely actually to emerge?

There’s a passage in Tanner Colby’s post on the inadequacies of affirmative action that I think bears some reflection:

Some would purport to remedy this by fixing the tech industry job pipeline: more STEM graduates, more minority internships and boot camps, etc. And that will get you changes here and there, at the margins, but it doesn’t get at the real problem. The big success stories of the Internet age—Instagram, YouTube, Twitter—all came about in similar ways: A couple of people had an idea, they got together with some of their friends, built something, called some other friends who knew some other friends who had access to friends with serious money, and then the thing took off and now we’re all using it and they’re all millionaires. The process is organic, somewhat accidental, and it moves really, really fast. And by the time those companies are big enough to worry about their “diversity,” the ground-floor opportunities have already been spoken for.

A place like Silicon Valley doesn’t have an established pipeline where the government can mandate there be X number of minority applicants per year who can then be tracked up the corporate ladder each fiscal quarter. A system has to have rules in order for authorities to make sure that those rules are being applied fairly to people of color. The legal profession is very mature. It has lots of rules. Municipal labor unions have rules. Silicon Valley doesn’t have any rules. Hollywood doesn’t have any rules. Media and publishing used to have rules, sort of, but Silicon Valley is destroying those rules as we speak and doesn’t seem to be replacing them with any new ones.

The key point here is that affirmative action is a mid-century solution and it isn’t mid-century any more. There are some other points that could be made, for example, in my view mass illegal immigration from Mexico was a specific response to

1. The end of the bracero program.
2. The civil rights movement of the 1960s and the ascendancy of the Black Power movement.
3. A basic unwillingness to deal with the problems of inner city blacks.
4. Demographics and economic conditions in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1970s and 1980s.
5. The amnesty of the 1980s.

but that’s a digression from Mr. Colby’s post to which I would add a couple of observations.

First, the upstart companies like Google, Facebook, and so on grow from a very small core group of people who are generally socially cohesive—college friends, family, and so on. If they numbered blacks among them it would be one thing but the reality is that most frequently they don’t.

Second, affirmative action as it has evolved has provided a mechanism by which well-to-do and politically connected blacks advanced their own positions rather than a mechanism by which most blacks benefited. That this mid-century strategy has proven inadequate and is, as Mr. Colby points out, becoming obsolete doesn’t imply that the problem it was hoped it would address has gone away but that we need new solutions.

Needless to say, I’m very disappointed in the latest move by the Obama Administration to delay the implementation of the PPACA:

Employers with fewer than 100 workers won’t have to provide health insurance until 2016 under Obamacare, as the administration said it would again delay a key requirement of the health law.

Larger firms have to cover at least 70 percent of the workforce starting next year, the Internal Revenue Service said in a rule issued yesterday.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act envisioned as a cornerstone of its expansion of U.S. insurance coverage that employers with 50 or more workers would be required to provide health benefits to their employees. Under pressure from business groups, the Obama administration has weakened that requirement since July, first by delaying enforcement of the mandate until 2015. Many firms will have even more time under the new regulation.

Some supporters of the PPACA, like Ron Fournier are increasingly frustrated with the administration:

It’s getting difficult and slinking toward impossible to defend the Affordable Care Act. The latest blow to Democratic candidates, liberal activists, and naïve columnists like me came Monday from the White House, which announced yet another delay in the Obamacare implementation.

[…]

The win-at-all-cost mentality helped create a culture in which a partisan-line vote was deemed sufficient for passing transcendent legislation. It spurred advisers to develop a dishonest talking point—”If you like your health plan, you’ll be able to keep your health plan.” And political expediency led Obama to repeat the line, over and over and over again, when he knew, or should have known, it was false.

Defending the ACA became painfully harder when online insurance markets were launched from a multi-million-dollar website that didn’t work, when autopsies on the administration’s actions revealed an epidemic of incompetence that began in the Oval Office and ended with no accountability.

Then officials started fudging numbers and massaging facts to promote implementation, nothing illegal or even extraordinary for this era of spin. But they did more damage to the credibility of ACA advocates.

My criticism of the PPACA has always been that it was inadequate in addressing the real problem facing our healthcare system: rising costs. And, yes, costs have continued to rise—the rate of increase may have slowed but the costs are rising and not only has that resulted in ever fewer companies and individuals carrying insurance but it’s killing state and local governments which, in many cases, have no viable solutions to the problem.

The PPACA is the law of the land and unlikely to be repealed or even receive much in the way of maintenance for at least three years. Delaying aspects of implementation for what are manifestly political reasons makes it increasingly difficult to make a fair evaluation of what needs to be changed to make it workable. We need to take additional steps and that won’t be possible until we have a feel for the full implications of the law, which the administration’s most recent move has kicked further down the road.

Who was the top box office movie star of 1935? 1936? 1937? 1938? It wasn’t Clark Gable, Fred Astaire, or Ginger Rogers. It was Shirley Temple and she has died at age 85:

WOODSIDE, Calif. — Shirley Temple, the dimpled, curly-haired child star who sang, danced, sobbed and grinned her way into the hearts of Depression-era moviegoers, has died, according to publicist Cheryl Kagan. She was 85.

Temple, known in private life as Shirley Temple Black, died at her home near San Francisco.

A talented and ultra-adorable entertainer, Shirley Temple was America’s top box-office draw from 1935 to 1938, a record no other child star has come near. She beat out such grown-ups as Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper and Joan Crawford.

In 1999, the American Film Institute ranking of the top 50 screen legends ranked Temple at No. 18 among the 25 actresses. She appeared in scores of movies and kept children singing “On the Good Ship Lollipop” for generations.

After her spectacular film career as a child performer she went on to a moderately successful film career as a young woman, a brief career on television, a long, happy marriage to Charles Black, and a accomplished career in politics. Unlike many child actors she seemed to have a well-adjusted, good life after show business. I would recommend her autobiography, Child Star.

I am astonished that more of my fellow Illinoisans take a dim view of the economic conditions by a mere 13 points. No wonder they keep voting for the same people over and over and over (and over) again.