Q: The nutrition community is fascinated by the French paradox — the fact that the French eat seemingly fattening food but don’t get fat. In your book you describe an American paradox. What is it?

A: Americans are a people so obsessed with nutrition yet whose dietary health is so poor. That strikes me as a paradox. We worry more about nutritional health, and we see food in terms of health. Yet we’re the world champs in terms of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and the cancers linked to diet. I think it’s odd. It suggests that worrying about your dietary health is not necessarily good for your dietary health.

The above passage comes from a Michael Pollan interview. I read and thoroughly enjoyed his Omnivore’s Dilemma, especially for its behind the scenes look at the organic food industry. That book prompted me to see him speak in Seattle last month, and buy his newest book, In Defense of Food, which I haven’t yet read. But little revelations like this make me look forward to it all the more.

Graphic designer Michael Bieruit was recently interviewed by Newsweek about the achievements of Obama’s design:

He’s the first candidate, actually, who’s had a coherent, top-to-bottom, 360-degree system at work. Whereas, I think it’s more more common for politicians to have a bumper-sticker symbol that they just stick on everything and hope that that will carry the day.

The thing that sort of flabbergasts me as a professional graphic designer is that, somewhere along the way, they decided that all their graphics would basically be done in the same typeface, which is this typeface called Gotham. If you look at one of his rallies, every single non-handmade sign is in that font. Every single one of them. And they’re all perfectly spaced and perfectly arranged. Trust me. I’ve done graphics for events —and I know what it takes to have rally after rally without someone saying, “Oh, we ran out of signs, let’s do a batch in Arial.” It just doesn’t seem to happen. There’s an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients.

Then if you go to the Web site, it’s all reflected there too—all the same elements showing up in this clean, smooth, elegant way. It all ties together really, really beautifully as a system.

I listen to NPR off-and-on throughout the day. But I rarely listen to live radio — it almost entirely comes from podcasts that I download with iTunes. I want to listen to what I want, when I want, and be able to re-arrange the order of upcoming shows in any arbitrary order I please. But the two main daily shows that I’d like to listen to, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, don’t offer podcasts. I could play the shows directly from npr.org, but then I obviously can’t listen on my iPod, and have less control over how I use it.

So I did some searching and a do-it-yourself approach is far easier than I’d imagined thanks mainly to an open source program called streamripper. Binaries are available for Mac, Linux and Windows. It’s a command line program, so you have to give it some parameters and set it to a schedule, so I can record Morning Edition from my local affiliate, KUOW, by running this command at 5 a.m. each weekday:

streamripper http://128.208.34.80:8002/ -a morning_edition.mp3 -s -d /data -l 7200

To write id3 metadata tags to our new file (used by mp3 players like iTunes), I downloaded id3v2 and gave it the following command:

id3v2 -a “NPR” -t “Morning Edition” -y `date +%Y` -g “Podcast” morning_edition.mp3

I wrapped these commands in a shell script to make it more generic. It saves each show as a separate file such as “Morning_Edition_2007-12-14.mp3”. This will work on the Mac/Linux, but a similar .bat file will need to be created for a Windows environment.

#!/bin/sh

# Config variables
MINUTES=120
ARTIST=”NPR”
DESC=”Morning Edition”
DIR=”/data/podcasts”
GENRE=”Podcast”
SRC=”http://128.208.34.80:8002/”

# Script starts here
DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
STUB=`echo “$DESC” | awk ‘{gsub(/\ /,”_”);print}’`
FILENAME=$DATE\_$STUB.mp3
/usr/bin/streamripper $SRC -a $FILENAME -s -d $DIR -l `expr $MINUTES \* 60` -r —quiet
/usr/bin/id3v2 -a “$ARTIST” -t “$DESC” -y `date +%Y` -g “$GENRE” $DIR/$FILENAME

I named the script “morningedition.sh” and put it in my crontab to fire up weekdays at 5a.m.:

0 5 * * 1,2,3,4,5 ~/morningedition.sh

And voilà, I have my podcast. Pair this with other media sources and you can record any NPR show you like.

I was planning on upgrading my Macbook to Leopard in the next month or two with the assumption that all of my essential applications would run fine. I mean, with the Universal PR that Apple has put out over the last couple years, I didn’t think it would be an issue. Then I happened across this notice from Adobe, which says that the Photoshop CS 2 that I bought a year ago won’t be supported with Leopard, and I’ll have to pay $599 to upgrade it.

Q. Will older versions of Adobe creative software—such as Creative Suite 2 and Macromedia Studio 8 software—support Mac OS X Leopard? A. While older Adobe applications may install and run on Mac OS X Leopard, they were designed, tested, and released to the public several years before this new operating system became available. You may, therefore, experience a variety of installation, stability, and reliability issues for which there is no resolution. Older versions of our creative software will not be updated to support Mac OS X Leopard.

Adobe CS3 was released on April 17, 2007, so if you bought CS2 in early 2007, it’s now already out of date a mere 8 months later. I’m not sure who to be more angry with — Adobe or Apple. I can see Adobe’s motivations, however ill-intended they may be, of trying to get users to upgrade. The amount of work required to release a patch would be minimal since Leopard is not drastically different than Tiger. So this must be a marketing decision, since most people have little need to upgrade an already stable, mature platform. But I’m stunned that Apple didn’t work out an agreement with Adobe to support this, or fix whatever the problem seems to be on the OS side. Isn’t poor support of older hardware and software the main problem facing Windows with Vista upgrades?

…is that by the Fake Steve Jobs.

It’s either sad or funny, I can’t decide. The overpaid spoiled morons who write all the shit that gets blasted out onto the TV networks want even more money for their piles of shit. What makes it beautiful is that the guys on the other side of the fight are even more overpaid and more moronic and more full of crap than the writers. It’s like watching two guys you really despise get into a barfight, and you don’t know which one you want to win and ultimately you just hope they both beat the daylights out of each other.

A side project I’ve been working on the last couple of weeks is finally finished: superscreenshot.com. As the name implies, the site will produce a screenshot of any URL you send it — a full-page screenshot — not just the top screen. It’s a free, ad-supported service.

If you send a URL it already has on file, it returns the saved screenshot and gives you the option of refreshing it. Since any screenshot program has to download the actual web page in its entirety before it can make the screen capture, this will take anywhere from a few seconds up to a minute or more depending on how many images and ads the page contains (since we generally start reading a page as soon as the content is loaded, we normally don’t realize how long many pages take to completely load the last Google Analytics script or third-party ad).

If too many screenshot requests come in at once there’s a queue since the hardware can only process so many screenshots at a time. But the AJAX-style updater gives you the current progress.

Without further ado, head on over to superscreenshot.com and give it a try.

This is one of the few times that I actually choose a Microsoft product over the competition — that is, when the competition is Real.

There have been a flurry of media stories on American’s rising consumption of bottled water. You now see people toting bottles of water everywhere, as if the country underwent a serious thirst over the last few years. But the stories center around the ecological side effects of bottled water, much of which is just tap water: the fuel for transporting liquids around the world and the plastic and packaging materials used when every American (with rare exception) has access to cheap, clean tap water.

I’m not a big fan of bottled still water since I find all of this pointless — I drink water from my Brita filter (to remove the chlorine taste). But I do drink bottled sparkling water almost daily as a substitute for soda and beer. Sometimes I get tired of just drinking plain water and need something to tickle the tongue, something more interesting than the water I’ve drank all day, without empty calories.

I can also say that after spending last summer in Italy and France, I would be reaching for certain mineral waters on the store shelf that had just the right amount of effervescence and taste, and would enjoy drinking them as much as any other fine beverage. Local brands that I’ve never heard of, some would taste creamy, or sharp. Water with character. Italians drinks more bottled water than any other country, and are serious enough to label their bottles with all of the mineral content, temperature at the spring, and even electrical conductivity.

One article that may have started the flurry appeared in Fast Company magazine, titled Message in a Bottle. Here are some noteworthy passages:

[I]n Fiji, a state-of-the-art factory spins out more than a million bottles a day of the hippest bottled water on the U.S. market today, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have safe, reliable drinking water. Which means it is easier for the typical American in Beverly Hills or Baltimore to get a drink of safe, pure, refreshing Fiji water than it is for most people in Fiji.

In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It’s so good the EPA doesn’t require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35. Put another way, if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.

The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity—something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from “one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth,” as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze.

Writes New York Magazine:

In press photos of the iPhone, the device displays a New York Times Web front page on its screen. And that page contains a tiny ad for Beautiful Evidence, one that ran on the Times site for exactly one Sunday. Tufte thinks the cameo was a lucky break. I have no doubt that it’s an anonymous Apple designer’s thank-you note.

The New York Times is reporting on the backlash against the newly launched London Olympic design.

It was said to provoke epileptic seizures. Someone compared it to a broken swastika or “some sort of comical sex act between ‘The Simpsons.’”

It’s edgy, urban, the typography is a little strange, but I think it’s a logo that will grow on people.