How little can you spend on food and still enjoy a healthy, well-balanced diet? Rebecca Blood is running a month-long experiment to find out.

Peter King from Sports Illustrated, quoted, as they say, for truth:

I want to say this with all due respect, because I’m an animal lover. But I wish there would be as much hand-wringing over the 3,376 American fatalities in Iraq than there is over the death of Barbaro.

I saw a pointer earlier to these poll results from Rasmussen:

Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure.

Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view.

First of all, I find it amazing that 1 in 7 Republicans believes that President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks before they happened. Obviously these poll results can be used to bash Democrats, but nobody should kid themselves into thinking that the numbers wouldn’t be reversed if a Democrat were President. What percentage of Republicans believed that Bill Clinton had Vince Foster whacked for reasons that elude me to this day?

What astounds me is that a good percentage of people from across the political spectrum are willing to believe anything. There is no evidence whatsoever that anyone in the US government knew that terrorists were planning to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings on September 11, 2001. So why do so many people believe it?

Maybe what this poll tells us is that what people really fear is things being beyond our control. That it’s scarier to live in a world where terrorists can strike the United States without our being able to detect the plan and respond to it than it is to live in a world where the President knew we were going to be attacked and let it happen for some nefarious reason. Maybe people just watch too much 24.

You watched Planet Earth, didn’t you? It’s the eleven part BBC/Discovery Channel nature documentary series that’s been getting tons of hype recently. Here’s the thing — the hype is deserved. The footage is stunning, and the producers managed to capture animal behavior that has never been documented on film, all in stunning HD. If you have a high def television and you haven’t checked it out, you’re really cheating yourself. Wikipedia has a good episode guide if you want to find out what you’ve been missing.

All too often the image we get of the natural world is that every bit of it has been spoiled by human intrusion, but Planet Earth illustrates that there are lots of truly wild places left to explore, and there are plenty of amazing sights out there that remain undocumented. I consider myself to be a bit of a nature buff, and I still found much of the series surprising.

Planet Earth is a monument to the paradox of human existence in the early twenty-first century. In many ways, it’s the culmination of thousands of years of civilization. As humans in 2007, we can sit in our homes and look at gorgeous pictures of things that few humans in previous generations could ever have seen. Even tribesmen in Papua New Guinea would never have seen the mating rituals of the bird of paradise, and now anyone with cable or satellite television has the opportunity to witness them. Great white sharks feeding on seals off South Africa, water flowing off of Angel Falls in Venezuela, and snow geese nesting above the Arctic Circle — only thanks to the advances in technology we have made as a species are we able to witness these things.

And yet at the same time, this series may serve as the last memorial for some of the animals and habitats that were filmed. Many of the wild places that were captured are threatened by human encroachment. Climate change is expected to alter habitats all over the world. There’s plenty of footage of endangered species that may not be with us much longer. The fact that we are the only species that is capable of both appreciating and destroying the amazing world that we live in is a hard paradox for me to reconcile.

Chris Anderson has an excellent post on spare cycles and how they are the fuel of Web 2.0. Albert Einstein used his spare cycles as a patent inspector to come up with his theory of relativity. The least favorite spare cycles activity I’ve observed among coworkers is day trading. It doesn’t seem as popular now as it was eight or so years ago. I can remember certain coworkers being glued to Yahoo Finance and eTrade all day, trying to wring out a few bucks trading stocks.

I’ve never been on the “impeach Bush” bandwagon, but if he knew of the plan to fire San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam to end her investigation of government officials associated with the Duke Cunningham corruption scandal, he must resign. Needless to say, everyone else associated with that firing has to resign too.

Stephen O’Grady on applying the Moneyball philosophy to growing a small company:

So when I consider what I want RedMonk to be, and where I want us to go, I think not of Forrester, Gartner, or IDC. I think of the A’s and the Twins. The implications for hiring here are significant: you do not, as might be expected, go for the big name, the high profile, high visibility folks that drop you resumes (you’d be surprised at some of the folks that want to work for us, trust me). You instead try to hire the folks that will become those big names. You don’t hire the stars, you try to make the stars.

Unless you’re backed by very high margin offerings or VC dollars (read: not us), it’s very difficult to build a team with folks that already consider themselves high profile – particularly when your business is designed to be low margin and low overhead. Even if I had the money to bring in tons of bodies or superstars, I wouldn’t: it’s not so much that I lived through three consecutive organizations that overhired and then dumped people, disrupting lives, but more that it just doesn’t work.

Ed Felton explains why people care about the 09 number (aka the AACS secret key). Go read …

The user revolt at Digg and elsewhere, over attempts to take down the now-famous “09 F9 …” number, is now all over the press. (Background: 1, 2) Many non-techies, including some reporters, wonder why users care so much about this. What is it about “09F9…” that makes people willing to defend it by making T-shirts, writing songs, or subjecting their dotcom startup to lawsuit risk?

The comments on his post are worthwhile as well.

A study finds that many popular news sites do a poor job of producing RSS feed that reflect the full breadth of stories that they publish. I think the conclusions are a bit overdrawn, but hopefully the study will nudge news publishers toward putting more stories into their feeds.

One possible solution to the problem the study cites is to subscribe to feeds from more than one source. I also read Slate’s Today’s Papers and Dan Froomkin’s White House Watch pretty much every day.

Dahlia Lithwick catches us up on the latest legal machinations concerning prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. You may not have thought that the prisoners there had any legal rights, but they do, and the Bush administration is trying to strip those away as well. The Supreme Court doesn’t seem interested in intervening. Our national shame continues.