fat vs carbohydrates in the NY Times

The fascinating article everyone's pointing to: What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie? [NY Times]  

 reader's digest weekend

Holidays during the middle of the week are sort of odd. You end up with something like a Reader's Digest version of a weekend -- the morning and afternoon are sort of like Saturday, then sometime around 5 or 6 pm, you go straight into Sunday evening.
-- July 4 entry from genehack's new diary site

 

 LEGOs

Very cool LEGO stuff:

• Andrew Lipson's Mathematical Lego Sculptures [via LarkFarm v2] and
  
  
• The Brick Testament [heard about on NPR]

 

 Free Bob Hillman tracks

Want some really good free music? On his site, Bob Hillman is posting some unreleased tracks (whole, not snippets) that didn't make it onto his latest album. The current song is "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?", an ironic riff on the McCarthy era. It may not be up for much longer (it was June's Track of the Month), so grab it...

Other complete tracks of Hillman's that are (legitimately) freely available as MP3s are at Amazon:

• Greenland, a driving lament about a bad relationship contrasting it with various facts about Greenland. Funny, catchy and smart. "Who needs a summer when you've got autonomy / from Denmark and ninety-eight percent literacy?"
  
  
• Valentine's Day, an anthem of partial scales and circular lyrics. This song can be lodged in my brain for hours at a time; someday I think I might arrange it... "Rock and roll stars / Where are they now / Here in this room / All over town"
  
  
• The Latenight, a less-immediately-catchy song but one with plenty of interesting lyrical bits including my favorite, "You should never have to worry / Drink whenever are you are thirsty / Stay up late and get up early / Sleep when you die"

...all of which are a good representative sample of his current album, Welcome to My Century. But if you only grab the free tracks, you'll still lack the brilliant "Tolstoy", the beautifully melancholy "Games", the rockin' "Movie Star", the cold pinpricks of "Las Vegas" and the riotous "Bolted Down". So you really should buy the album. :)