For the true grub-loving gastronome, the most fatal by-product of enjoying our food has to be weight gain. Monsieur and I are no different, loving our food as we do and engaged in a constant battle of taste versus calorific content. It was therefore serendipitous to catch a tweet from Quadrille Books, asking for bloggers to review Lighten Up by Jill Dupleix.

President Obama has been in office for six months, and speculation about his 2012 Republican challenger has been going on for just as long. But with star Republicans abruptly resigning or hiking the Appalachian Trail to Argentina, there just aren't that many left to speculate about. I guess this explains the bizarre flurry of recent attention paid to Jeb Bush.

Wolfram Alpha is devoting enormous resources to the problem of data and computation on the web. As described in a fascinating article in Technology Review, Wolfram's vision is to curate all the world's data. Not just find and link to it, but have a human think about how best to report it and how to connect it to relevant calculation and visualization techniques.

The Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2010 requires that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) conduct a study of the efficacy of export control laws and regulations. Judging from the Committee Report that accompanies the bill, HR 2701, it seems as if the request may have come from commercial satellite companies, and possibly some pockets in the government, that have long argued that "U.S. restrictions on the sale of commercial imagery are beginning to inhibit their growth and their competitiveness in foreign markets, especially as foreign imagery satellites improve and foreign reliance on U.S. systems diminishes."

It's easy to believe the natural purpose of sex is reproduction. Offspring, after all, are the single most spectacular result of sex. Many of us seem bedazzled by that fact. Consequently, some of us seem to have got the notion the natural purpose of sex is reproduction and that sex without the possibility of reproduction is at best selfish indulgence and at worse perversion.

During recent turmoil in Xinjiang, China again revealed the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) ability to stonewall Internet access regionally, and block sites such as Twitter nationally. However, with the growth of domestic copy-cat micro-blogging services such as Fanfou, TaoTao, Jiwai, Komoo, Zuosa, and Digu, China's government may be losing their cat and mouse game with connected denizens.

No one can deny that Facebook has a certain convenience factor. You can now find out which former classmates got fat, went bald (or both) from afar without having to embarrass yourself at a high school reunion.

Politico posed this question to its readers in yesterday's Arena: "With unemployment rising, is the stimulus a failure? Is the answer more stimulus? Was there, as Biden says, 'a misreading of just how bad an economy we inherited?'" The last part of that question is disturbing on several levels. Is it still possible for a rational citizen, knowing that his or her tax dollars are going to be sucked into the mountain of stimulus induced debt, to put their faith in the government to solve this economic recession?

The plan for buying troubled assets -- which was earlier announced as the central element of the administration's financial stability plan -- has been recently curtailed drastically. The Treasury and the FDIC have attributed this development to banks' new ability to raise capital through stock sales without having to sell toxic assets. But the program's inability to take off is in large part due to decisions by banking regulators and accounting officials to allow banks to pretend that toxic assets haven't declined in value as long as they avoid selling them.

Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office released its latest snapshot on the federal budget. For the first time in more than ten years, the government ran a deficit in June. June is a big tax-paying month, so it usually records a surplus.

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