Coldplay Tonight at the ACC

Coldplay are at Toronto’s ACC this evening for the first of two shows

Women love them…..so do guys with expense accounts and three piece suits cruising around in BMWs. The rest of us are stuck in either loathing or indifference (the latter are the ones who will most likely put up the militancy of Coldplay fans, if they could actually be described as militant about anything).

Coldplay perform the first of two sellout shows this evening at the ACC here in Toronto. I’ll be there for the first show tonight. Here’s the usual boilerplate response from the band about how their new tour is coming along:

“It always takes a while to get up and running. … It’s not until you actually play in front of an audience that you realize what works and what doesn’t. We’re kind of really hitting our stride around now, which is great,” he said on the line from last week’s tour stop in Philadelphia.

…and why they prefer a stripped down set:

“We have little tricks and ways and means of doing some things when a song needs a bit of push or filling out, and we can do that.

“It all comes from our desire to have a very homemade feel to the record, so the visual side of it, the uniforms that we wear, we didn’t want it to be an overly produced or techno-feeling stage show. We wanted it to feel a lot more intimate … so it doesn’t become dwarfed by these big arenas that we’re playing. It’s always a constant challenge, and we’re always trying to break the line between us and the audience and make them feel like they’re really part of the show.”

What Happens To Your Body When You Drink a Coca-Cola?

An American institution still going strong worldwide

Ever wonder what happens to your body when you drink a Coca-Cola? Well, here’s what:

• In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down.

• 20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get its hands on into fat. (There’s plenty of that at this particular moment)

• 40 minutes: Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dilate, your blood pressure rises, as a response your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked preventing drowsiness.

• 45 minutes: Your body ups your dopamine production stimulating the pleasure centers of your brain. This is physically the same way heroin works, by the way.

• >60 minutes: The phosphoric acid binds calcium, magnesium and zinc in your lower intestine, providing a further boost in metabolism. This is compounded by high doses of sugar and artificial sweeteners also increasing the urinary excretion of calcium.

• >60 Minutes: The caffeine’s diuretic properties come into play. (It makes you have to pee.) It is now assured that you’ll evacuate the bonded calcium, magnesium and zinc that was headed to your bones as well as sodium, electrolyte and water.

• >60 minutes: As the rave inside of you dies down you’ll start to have a sugar crash. You may become irritable and/or sluggish. You’ve also now, literally, pissed away all the water that was in the Coke. But not before infusing it with valuable nutrients your body could have used for things like even having the ability to hydrate your system or build strong bones and teeth.

This will all be followed by a caffeine crash in the next few hours. (As little as two if you’re a smoker.) But, hey, have another Coke, it’ll make you feel better.

25 Internet Startups that didn’t make it

Big ideas with big money backing them couldn’t turn these sites into winners

It was only a little over a decade ago that we were told the internet would completely revolutionize how we would shop, read, interact, learn, invest, and smell. Maybe the order was a tall one and maybe the internet didn’t replace our traditional methods of doing all of these things, but it certainly has given us more options. The 1990s saw the proliferation of websites devoted to e-commerce of one sort or another as well as e-applications. These resulted in the dot.com boom that became a dot.com fizzle as everyone tried to tap into this new online market for their products and services. From Homer Simpson and his Compuglobalhypermeganet Systems to The Onion’s e-graters.com, everyone was taking a swipe at the hysteria.

Some sites have managed to survive and thrive, ebay.com and amazon.com being the two most notable.

The Business Pundit lists for us the top 25 Internet Startups that didn’t make it. All your favourites are there, including pets.com, etoys.com, and the spam-friendly lycos.com.

Speaking of which, whatever happened to these guys?

Greece prepares itself for an onslaught of drunken British tourists

The Brits are coming, the Brits are coming! Greek tourist operators shudder……

If you’ve ever been on vacation in Europe and in particular along the Mediterranean coast, you’ve no doubt encountered the ugly British tourist. Usually clad in a soccer jersey and roaringly drunk by noon, they travel in packs and by the evening are engaging in the most public of sex acts with their female counterparts for whom the concept of shame is a completely alien one.

This year the Greeks are ready for the onslaught, as Helena Smith reports from Athens:

While Faliraki might be shaking off its notoriety as a ‘modern-day Sodom’, young Britons are still flocking to its neighbours in search of sun, sex and a hedonistic nightlife. Sometimes the result has been rape or even death, leaving bewildered Greeks to ask: what is wrong with the British?

In Malia on Crete, for example, the tourist season may barely have begun, but already a seemingly non-stop stream of Britons, many in their teens and most on their first trip abroad, have passed through the local courts. Evangelos Rossakis, the owner of a local supermarket, was last night recovering at home after being attacked by six British youths who had beaten him ‘black and blue’ because he had dared to ask them to drive less recklessly on quad bikes through the resort. Rossakis says his injuries are nothing next to the damage the teenagers later inflicted on his shop – or the time when a Briton bit off the nose of a bartender who asked him to leave.

But wait, there’s more!

Meanwhile in Laganas, on Zakynthos, 17-year-old Matthew Cryer, from Sheffield, appears to have drunk himself to death last week; the previous week 15 English tourists were charged with ‘lewd behaviour’ after participating in an open-air oral sex contest.

‘What is wrong with the British?’ asked Yiannis Kyriakakis, a senior police officer on Crete. ‘Why can’t you have fun calmly?

Good question.

Haiti – Land of the Mud Pie Eaters

Mudcakes are inflation-proof

While the UK seems to be leading the way in the credit crunch, Haiti is blazing the trail for everyone else in regards to the inflationary crisis hitting food. Only a few months ago Haitians were rioting to protest (and loot) rising food staple costs. Indicative of the problems of Haiti’s poor is that the ultimate inflationary-proof food is now gaining prominence there: the mud pie.

Rory Carroll takes a look at the Mudcake industry in Port-au-Prince:

At first sight the business resembles a thriving pottery. In a dusty courtyard women mould clay and water into hundreds of little platters and lay them out to harden under the Caribbean sun.

The craftsmanship is rough and the finished products are uneven. But customers do not object. This is Cité Soleil, Haiti’s most notorious slum, and these platters are not to hold food. They are food.

Brittle and gritty – and as revolting as they sound – these are “mud cakes”. For years they have been consumed by impoverished pregnant women seeking calcium, a risky and medically unproven supplement, but now the cakes have become a staple for entire families.

It is not for the taste and nutrition – smidgins of salt and margarine do not disguise what is essentially dirt, and the Guardian can testify that the aftertaste lingers – but because they are the cheapest and increasingly only way to fill bellies.

“It stops the hunger,” said Marie-Carmelle Baptiste, 35, a producer, eyeing up her stock laid out in rows. She did not embroider their appeal. “You eat them when you have to.”

Bling Culture: Why Those With Less Money Spend More……

Bling Bling! Conspicuous Consumption is more prevalent amongst those with less money

Bling Culture has become a part of the American fabric thanks to the commercialization of crass hip hop that has occurred over this past decade. Label whores, big rims, oversized and too-too bright jewelry and accessories……but why?

Virginia Postrel gives us the lowdown in A New Theory of the Leisure Class:

Conspicuous consumption, this research suggests, is not an unambiguous signal of personal affluence. It’s a sign of belonging to a relatively poor group. Visible luxury thus serves less to establish the owner’s positive status as affluent than to fend off the negative perception that the owner is poor. The richer a society or peer group, the less important visible spending becomes.

On race, the folk wisdom turns out to be true. An African American family with the same income, family size, and other demographics as a white family will spend about 25 percent more of its income on jewelry, cars, personal care, and apparel. For the average black family, making about $40,000 a year, that amounts to $1,900 more a year than for a comparable white family. To make up the difference, African Americans spend much less on education, health care, entertainment, and home furnishings.

Read more at the link.

Is Your DNA Your Destiny?

DNA tests can tell us a lot about what we can expect in our future

The old “Nature vs. Nurture” argument has been around since Gluk the Caveboy started playing around with flint to the consternation of his cavemother and cavefather. Lately though, the argument has been tipping towards the nature side with the breakthroughs piling up in genetic research.

One BBC Reporter decided to do a genetic test and have his results analyzed. Here’s what he found:

Up pops a list of grisly conditions – most of which are familiar to me, indeed some of them lurk in my family history.

And it’s the ones that have touched my life that I am drawn to first. I click on Heart Attack, bypass the warm-up “introduction” to the condition, and head straight for my own “risk summary”.

I’m told: “According to the selected literature, the relative genetic risk calculated from your genotype for males of European ancestry is 0.90.

“This corresponds to a 44.2% lifetime risk of developing heart attack, which is 10% less than for males of European ancestry in general.”

So far so good, I suppose, but that’s still a high risk and I’m not celebrating with a full English breakfast yet.

I scan the list of 25 traits again and settle on Crohn’s disease. Here I’m told the research indicates that I have a lifetime risk 1.42 times the average. Not so good. But for Diabetes, types 1 and 2, better news.

Pretty neat! Read more from the above link to see what else the test told him about himself and then click on this link to see how the deCODEme site gives its users a genetic snapshot. 

Europe’s last untouchable – Marie Beauzac, the only known Cagot still alive

Marie Pierre-Manet Beauzac claims to be the last living Cagot, a caste of European outcasts from the Pyrennes of Spain and France

Genealogy projects sometimes take strange turns. Whether you’re using centuries old birth records from churches tucked away in remote hills on the European continent to sending away for your DNA results that end up revealing a 5% African gene presence, you’re more often than not presented with unexpected surprises.

Marie Pierre-Manet Beauzac of the French Pyreenes is no exception. The arrival of children in her life led her on to a quest to discover her roots and what she found was quick a shock: she is descended from the Cagots, a people that were outcasts from Medieval Europe. We can’t be certain that she is the world’s last Cagot, but what we do know is that the existence of the outcast Cagots in Europe is not everyday knowledge. Much about the Cagots is blurred thanks to the fog of history and the deliberate destruction of documents by Cagots themselves who wished to be rid of their lower-caste status.

Here are some thoughts on where the Cagots came from, who they are, and what we do know about their treatment in Europe:

The people first emerge in documents around the 13th century. By then they are already regarded as an inferior caste, the “untouchables” of western France, or northern Spain. In medieval times the Cagots – also knows as Agotes, Gahets, Capets, Caqueux, etc – were divided from the general peasantry in several ways. They had their own urban districts: usually on the malarial side of the river. These dismal ghettoes were known as Cagoteries; traces of them can still be found in Pyrenean communities such as Campan or Hagetmau.

For hundreds of years, Cagots were treated as different and inferior. In the churches, they had to use their own doors (at least 60 Pyrenean churches still boast “Cagot” entrances); they had their own fonts; and they were given communion on the end of long wooden spoons. Marie-Pierre adds: “When a Cagot came into a town, they had to report their presence by shaking a rattle. Just like a leper, ringing his bell.”

Daily Cagot life was likewise marked by apartheid. Cagots were forbidden to enter most trades or professions. They were forced, in effect, to be the drawers of water and hewers of wood. So they made barrels for wine and coffins for the dead. They also became expert carpenters: ironically they built many of the Pyrenean churches from which they were partly excluded.

Some of the other prohibitions on the Cagots were bizarre. They were not allowed to walk barefoot, like normal peasants, which gave rise to the legend that they had webbed toes. Cagots could not use the same baths as other people. They were not allowed to touch the parapets of bridges. When they went about, they had to wear a goose’s foot conspicuously pinned to their clothes.

Quite interesting. Here’s the speculation on their background:

The Birth of Cuil

Cuil is ready to take google on head-to-head

Google.

A name which meant nothing several years ago is now not only a noun, but a verb as well. And it’s one that has transformed our daily lives. Books have been written about google and whether or not it’s making us smarter or turning us into attention-deficit dummies. Google has anchored itself atop the food chain of search engines on the internet and has been challenging Microsoft for some time now as the largest and most important IT company in the world.

However, google now has a challenger in the search engine sweepstakes: ladies and gentlemen, meet Cuil (pronounced “cool”). It was launched earlier today and boasts an incredible 120 billion plus websites in its index, thus outnumbering google who some time ago stopped publishing their index figures.

On Cuil:

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced “cool.” Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers – Russell Power and Louis Monier – searched for better ways to search.

Now, it’s boasting time.

For starters, Cuil’s search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that’s at least three times the size of Google’s index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index’s breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.

Cuil won’t divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn’t ceding the point: Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is the largest.

It’s been a very bumpy day one for Cuil with problems like their servers not being able to handle the loads and with a lot of search results showing spam that any decent site would filter out. However, Rome wasn’t built in a day and google could use the competition.

The Secret of Switzerland’s Success

Bern, the Swiss capital, being sheltered by the Alps in the background

Quick question: What are the first three things you think of when you hear the word “Switzerland”? The most common answers tend to be The Alps, chocolate, and banking (with watches coming a close fourth).

Having lived in Switzerland for a year, I was shocked to see how rural much of the country is and by “rural” I mean rustic. I was always under the impression that Switzerland has wealthy for most of its several centuries existence but was shocked to learn that it was quite poor until this past century.

Being a strong admirer of Switzerland’s highly autonomous and decentralized political system that quite often relies on localized direct democracy, I learned that their system had much to do with their economic success. A highly skilled workforce combined with high exports, a stable currency and most of all, a stable financial/political regime has allowed Switzerland to prosper and become the envy of the world.

Could it all be thanks to the Gnomes of Zurich? John Fund explains the success story that is this alpine country in: Cuckoo for Switzerland.  

The Summer’s Hottest Parties

Admit it….you wish you were right there with these two…..

Where are the beautiful people partying it up this summer? Everywhere from the traditional stalwarts of the party scene like Ibiza to new up and comers like Hvar, Croatia.

Take a look at this list of the summer’s hottest parties.

Human Evolution is Speeding Up

Genetic research is telling us that human evolution is proceeding at a much faster pace than previously thought

While some are still mired in the debate about evolution actually being real, scientists continue to find the clues that are solving some of the most elementary mysteries of who we are as humans and where we’re going.  Nancy Shute in US World News Report tells us that human evolution is proceeding at a faster pace than any time in our short history. A few excerpts from this excellent article:

Until recently, anthropologists thought that human evolution had slowed down. But last December, Hawks reported that it has actually accelerated 100-fold in the past 5,000 to 10,000 years. He figured that out by comparing chunks of DNA among 269 people from around the world. Over time, DNA accumulates random mutations, just as the front of a white T-shirt tends to accumulate spots. The bigger the chunks of DNA without random spots, the more recently it had been minted. Using this system, Hawks concluded that recent genetic changes account for about 7 percent of the human genome. Much of the increase, he says, has been fueled by the growth of the world’s population, which has expanded by a factor of 1,000 over the past 10,000 years. Having more people increases the odds of mutations.

At the same time, the human genome has been scrambling to adapt to a rapidly changing world—11,000 years ago, nobody farmed, nobody milked domesticated animals, and nobody lived in a city. People with a mutation that aided survival were more likely to thrive, reproduce, and pass that mutation along to offspring. For example, the capacity to digest lactose, the sugar in milk, has become common only over the past 3,000 years. Now, about 95 percent of the people in northern Germany have the mutation, which also popped up independently among the Masai in Africa and the Lapps in Finland. Hawks says: “This is really rapid evolution.”

Mutations serve as triggers for change.