Bias and Diets

Here's an interesting blog post about Bias and Diets.

Why is Taubes so interested in bias? For several decades, it has been the conventional wisdom that dietary fat (and especially saturated fat) contributes to obesity, heart disease, and cancer. Judging from Taubes’ exhaustive research -- indeed, I'd be surprised if any other book examined bias within a particular scientific field in such detail -- the conventional wisdom was based on unreliable and slender evidence that, once established and institutionalized in government funding, set a pattern of confirmation bias by which further research was judged (or ignored).

I recommend that you read the article and read the interviews at the bottom. If there's this much bias just for diets, it makes you wonder about the global warming debate.

Tomato Firmware

After listening to the discussion regarding wireless routers n the TWUUG list, I finally decided to buy a WRT54GL. About 4 years ago I purchased a Linksys WRT54GS v1.1 with the intention of replacing it's bios with one of the custom firmware releases. I never got around to it and I didn't want to brick my only router. So I bought the WRTG54L since it's the only one of the WRT54G/GS models that you can put Linux on now. All of the others have limited memory and only run VxWorks.

I installed OpenWRT. It installed without a problem. I wanted a nice webgui, but the latest didn't have one or I didn't find it. Instead, I used Tomato.

Tomato's webgui is nice. I set it up within a few minutes and replaced the old router with the new. The network statistics are cool. It provides a realtime graph that can be viewed in the browser and it maintains a daily, weekly, and monthly log.

I've turned on QOS, but I don't know how well it is working. This week should give me an idea of how well the QOS works. I set my Vonage voip device to have the highest settings.

I need the extra router for a trip to the beach later this month. After that I'll play around with OpenWRT. There are some interesting things that can run on the router. I want to play around with Asterisk. I've got some actual voip phones that I can use.

CC licensed images

Here's an interesting post about the usage of Creative Commons material available on the internet.