hard heads soft hearts

a scratch pad for half-formed thoughts by a liberal political junkie who's nobody special. ''Hard Heads, Soft Hearts'' is the title of a book by Princeton economist Alan Blinder, and tends to be a favorite motto of neoliberals, especially liberal economists.
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Tuesday, January 07, 2003
 
various people are discussing diets, and O-dub in particular is endorsing the Atkins diet. Robert Park, a University of Maryland Physicist who wrote a very good book called "Voodoo Science: the road from foolishness to fraud, once had a funny post about diets in his weekly column "What's New", written for the American Physical Society:


http://www.aps.org/WN/WN00/wn022500.html
2. DIET SUMMIT: THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY MIGHT BE HELPFUL.
Eighty-five percent of Americans list weight loss as their top goal, but studies find we are going the other way. So Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman invited authors of the most popular diet plans to Washington to debate nutrition. At one extreme there was Dr. Dean Ornish pushing his high-carbohydrate diet, and at the other Dr. Atkins, the current number one best-selling author, urging people to eat the hamburger patty and the cheese and throw away the bun. Atkins, who didn't look exactly svelte, took a postprandial nap during the proceedings. Since all of these best-selling authors have become millionaires, WN decided to offer the "physics plan": burn more calories than you consume.