Obesa cantavit

The New England Journal of Medicine published a Harvard study using 35 years of data from the Framingham Heart Study, demonstrating that people who associate with over-weight people are likely to become over-weight themselves.

My ex-roommate Bryan, ever the sleuth, discovered an amazing animation in Figure 2 of the paper, which shows graphically how the obese people conglomerate and become bigger together as little yellow circles. Yellow, no doubt, to allude to bulging lipid micelles.

A hilarious article or blog (? I can't remember which...) on the NYTimes pondered if over-weight people would lose friends as a result of this study. I think they forgot that most of the people in the study were not obese to begin with!

The full text of the article (and the animation!) are available here.

Brevior saltare cum deformibus mulieribus est vita

As a Karen Filipelli sympathizer, I'm a big fan of Rashida Jones (for those of you who don't watch The Office or are not members of the great Facebook group, "Choosing between Pam Beesly and Karen Filipelli is a moral dilemma," you might want to skip this one...).

Rashida Jones had a great exchange from Jonathan Soroff's interview of her in The Improper Bostonian.

JS: If you had to watch porn, what would it be, and why?

RJ: [Laughs.] Oh, God. I was saying the other day actually that the equivalent of what a strip club does for guys, for women would be a bunch of girls going to a place and having a guy make them laugh a lot and then tell them that they're really hot. That does the same thing to us that porn does to guys.

Ab initio

I'll be content, for now, with finally choosing a title for my new blog. Leo da Vinci's words, not mine.

By the way, there's some craziness going on about his Last Supper painting - if you overlay its mirror image, you see Jesus holding a baby, and something about a grail? That would be pretty crazy if da Vinci intended that.