Jonathan's blog

From a press release from Queen's University:

A new study by Queen's University researchers shows for the first time that visceral fat in the abdomen is directly associated with a higher risk of mortality in men. According to Physical and Health Education doctoral student Jennifer Kuk, who is the first author of the study, these findings underline the importance of measuring abdominal fat to predict the risk of future disease and mortality. "This reinforces the need to target visceral fat in therapeutic strategies for dealing with obesity," she says. "Body weight alone is not a sufficient indicator of risk." Since visceral fat is strongly correlated with waist circumference, the researchers recommend that waist measurement be a routine measure in clinical practice. When looking at diet weight loss versus exercise weight loss, those who exercise tend to lose more visceral fat and maintain muscle fat better than those using strictly a diet approach, he points out. "This reinforces the importance of maintaining regular physical activity."

From a press release from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center:

In a study comparing the associations between faith and health, a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) physician has shown the improvements in life expectancy of those who attend religious services on a weekly basis to be comparable to those who participate in regular physical exercise and to those who take statin-type medications. These findings are published in the March-April issue of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. The study uses life expectancy tables to compare the impact of regular exercise, statin therapy and religious attendance, and shows that each accounts for an additional two-to-five years of life, suggesting that the real-world, practical significance of weekly religious attendance is of similar magnitude to this other widely recommended therapy or health behavior. "This is not to say that religious attendance should replace primary prevention such as exercise, or a proven drug therapy, such as statin therapy, but it does suggest that regular religious attendance is associated with a substantially longer life expectancy, and this warrants further research," cautions study author Daniel Hall, M.D., who is a resident in general surgery at UPMC and an Episcopal priest.

via kendallball.net, an opinion piece from a couple weeks back by Kevin Philips in The Washington Post makes the argument that:

The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history. Today, a leading power such as the United States approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions currently on display: an elected leader who believes himself to speak for the Almighty, a ruling political party that represents religious true believers, the certainty of many Republican voters that government should be guided by religion and, on top of it all, a White House that adopts agendas seemingly animated by biblical worldviews. When religion was trod upon in the 1960s and thereafter by secular advocates determined to push Christianity out of the public square, the move unleashed an evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal counterreformation, with strong theocratic pressures becoming visible in the Republican national coalition and its leadership. Besides providing critical support for invading Iraq -- widely anathematized by preachers as a second Babylon -- the Republican coalition has also seeded half a dozen controversies in the realm of science. These include Bible-based disbelief in Darwinian theories of evolution, dismissal of global warming, disagreement with geological explanations of fossil-fuel depletion, religious rejection of global population planning, derogation of women's rights and opposition to stem cell research. This suggests that U.S. society and politics may again be heading for a defining controversy such as the Scopes trial of 1925. That embarrassment chastened fundamentalism for a generation, but the outcome of the eventual 21st century test is hardly assured. These developments have warped the Republican Party and its electoral coalition, muted Democratic voices and become a gathering threat to America's future. No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science. The last parallel was in the early 17th century, when the papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain, disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system.

Today I finished watching The Prisoner of Zenda (1937). From Wikipedia:

It tells the story of a man who has to impersonate a king, whom he happens to closely resemble, when the king is abducted by enemies on the eve of his coronation.

It was mildly enjoyable. It's certainly a crime for me to give it the same score I gave The Nutty Professor, but that's what I'm going to do. Obviously, my rating is intended to gauge how much I enjoyed the films, not their objective intrinsic merit. I give it 3 out of 5.

From the April 15 installment of The Writer's Almanac, "Headlines" by Robert Phillips from Circumstances Beyond Our Control: Poems, The Johns Hopkins University Press:

Headlines War Dims Hope for Peace. Plane Too Close to Ground, Crash Probe Told. Clinton Wins Budget; More Lies Ahead. Miners Refuse to Work after Death. Include Your Children When Baking Cookies. War Dims Hope for Peace. Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Experts Say Prostitutes Appeal to Pope. Clinton Wins Budget; More Lies Ahead. Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half. Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide. War Dims Hope for Peace. Stolen Painting Found by Tree. Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over. Clinton Wins Budget; More Lies Ahead. Iraqi Head Seeks Arms. Police Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers. War Dims Hope for Peace. Clinton Wins Budget; More Lies Ahead