I'm trying to capture in a concept map the work that writing centers do. What am I missing? (Photo below links to larger one.)

I'm disappointed that this story about obesity in the NYT hasn't gotten more play. The story discusses research findings that show the degree to which obesity is genetically determined and the finding that the body's weight is going to maintain a certain range. If someone keeps his/her weight below that range, the physical and psychological effect is akin to starvation. Here's one of the most interesting parts, in my opinion:

The Rockefeller subjects also had a psychiatric syndrome, called semi-starvation neurosis, which had been noticed before in people of normal weight who had been starved. They dreamed of food, they fantasized about food or about breaking their diet. They were anxious and depressed; some had thoughts of suicide. They secreted food in their rooms. And they binged.

As I've mentioned in this space, I struggle with my weight. I'm not overweight; in fact, my body mass index is right in the middle of the normal range, but I have to fight constantly to keep it that way. A few years ago, I weighed about twenty pounds more than I do now. I dieted and lost forty pounds, putting me at 107 pounds. Then I gained some of it back. Now my basic goal is to stay under 130, and it is extremely difficult. I definitely have a touch of that neurosis they're talking about. I believe that if I ate as much as I really want, I'd be about 150 pounds. Anyway, I wanted to link to that story in the hope that it'll get more uptake.

Using Blackle instead of Google will save energy -- quite a lot, if everyone used it, according to Mark Ontkush:

Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let's assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.

Via Treehugger.

How do you subscribe to the WCENTER listserv? The site I linked, which is the only one I've found which accesses the list, only recognizes members. Instructions or a link or something would be appreciated.

It seems like a lot of bloggers are trying to lose weight right now. Me, I'm (as always) in my perpetual attempt to maintain current weight/lose 10 pounds, as my clothes are snug. Maybe 15. Anyway, I'm sure I've blogged about it before, but I enter the food I eat into FitDay, which I really like. It counts the calories for you and gives you a breakdown of your carbohydrate, protein, and fat intake. Here's a screenshot of my food so far today:

I only look at the number of calories as a rough estimate, but it's still helpful.

I want to see if I can queue up items to post to my blog on a future date. See, Jonathan and I are renting a house in Cedar Island, and we'll be gone for a week. I don't want to go that long without blogging if I can help it.

Under "Authoring information," I'm just setting it to post one hour from now. We'll see if it's successful. If that's not the way to do it, I'm not sure what is, but I'd like to know.

ETA: Sigh. Didn't work.

UPDATE: To those of you who have emailed me about this, thanks for taking an interest. I installed the scheduler module and enabled it, but when I tried to test it, I didn't see anything under Create content --> story --> Authoring information or Publishing options. So I investigated and then found this bit of information:

[The scheduler] module allows nodes to be published and unpublished on specified dates. If JSCalendar is enabled (part of the JSTools module), a popup Javascript calendar is used to select the date and time for (un)publishing of nodes, otherwise it defaults to text input.

I looked into the the JStools module, but it's unclear to me that it would work with the version of Drupal I have (one of the 4.7.x ones). I don't know what a development snapshot is, so I don't want to download it.

Does anyone know what they mean by "otherwise it defaults to text input"?

Collecting articles about the John Edwards campaign will have to wait for another day.

A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs, by Brad Stone, New York Times, 9 April 07

Sexual Threats Stifle Some Female Bloggers, by Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post, 30 April 07

Fear of Blogging: Why women shouldn't apologize for being afraid of threats on the Web, by Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, 4 May 07

I will now give you a tour of this little online exhibit I've curated: mastheads for this blog over the years.

Circa 2003-2004

When I first started blogging (here, not at my Blogger blog I had in late 2002-early 2003), I had one of the standard Drupal templates, but Charlie graciously offered to change it to a color I wanted, and I requested pink. Then a dear friend of mine from college, an extremely talented professional graphic designer, Adam Howard, created these three mastheads for me. I'd bought some old children's books that the Florence, AL public library was selling for 25 cents each and picked out images I wanted to use.

I never used that third image as a masthead for my site, as it was a little too tall. Now that I know CSS a little better, though, it could work.

The difference between these images designed by Adam and the ones that follow is absolutely jarring. 2003-2004 was definitely the heyday of this blog's design. From here on out, it's amateur DIY all the way.

2005

I had this next one for a while; I designed it and the one underneath it (an outtake) from Creative Commons licensed photographs of cats:

And then I thought, why does it have to be so literal, with the whole cat thing? I can put a picture of anything I want up there. I made this one but never used it:

Then I made this one and did use it:

I made this next one and had it for a long time -- still one of my favorites:

Then this one, which I also love, but mostly because of the font, which is called Beauty School Dropout:

2006

Then the most recent erstwhile masthead:

2007

And the one now -- you can see a difference now that I've started using ComicLife to make the images:

I also made these two, which I didn't end up using: