hardly working

Study finds that Chocolate improves blood vessel function:

During the six-week trial, 45 people were given 8 ounces (227 grams) of cocoa without sugar, cocoa with sugar or a placebo each day.

An upper arm artery’s ability to relax and expand to accommodate increased blood flow — known as flow mediated dilation, or FMD — was measured using high-frequency ultrasound before and after daily cocoa or placebo consumption.

Of the 39 subjects who completed the trial, FMD improved significantly in both cocoa groups — by 2.4 percent among those who had it without sugar and 1.5 percent among those who had it with sugar. It dropped 0.8 percent in the placebo group.

The CEO Mega-Mansion Factor: “Finance professors David Yermack of New York University and Crocker Liu of Arizona State University looked at the relationship between stock performance and the size of a CEO’s home. The bigger or pricier the house, they found, the greater the risk of lackluster shares.”

While I appreciate the sentiment, could it be just a size bias? We know that smaller companies tend to outperform larger companies and we could reasonably guess that smaller company CEOs make less money and would tend to live in smaller houses. But they only looked at the S&P – so is there a small-cap and large-cap bias within the S&P? Does the S&P exhibit a typical power law? Dunno.

See for yourself (thanks b): “Soil blows onto the lake from a nearby dry valley, warms in the sun, and melts downward, leaving a bubble column in its trail.”

From the NYT, Slow Down, Multitaskers; Don’t Read in Traffic (thanks dad). Turns out that you really can’t read, eat, talk on the phone, blog and drive at the same time. Who knew?

“We came home to a squirrel eating our pumpkins. They were fermented. The squirrel was drunk.”

Because Penni lives in the blog ghetto I’m going to steal her thread with a poll.

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There we are, in the packaged foods aisle, wondering just what to have for dinner. Time is tight and nobody really wants to spend all evening cooking. Right next to us is the ginormous Hamburger Helper^tm section, with Tuna Helper^tm right next to it. Those flirtatious photos on the cover are convincing; the only challenge is choosing between beef stroganoff, potato stroganoff, lasagna, spaghetti, tomato basil penne and about 50 other tempting flavors.

Our take: basically edible, but we won’t be buying again. This experience left us wondering just who is buying all that hamburger helper… grocery stores don’t make enough money for 2 inches of unused space, much less for 50 feet of Hamburger Helper^tm to sit in the same place for 50 years, as I imagine it should. Do kids like this crap? I must have lived a charmed life (who knew?), having made it 29 years without tasting the stuff.

WSJ: Weekend at Obama’s. Obama and McCain agree to “accept public money and spending limits for the 2008 general election” if both nominated. Finally some interest in sanitizing the fund raising arms raise.

From the WSJ, Slide Leaves Cash in Uncertain Position: Out of Stocks, and Into …?. Wow, I hadn’t cought that the Vix jumped 70% last week.

In LA today to give the “keynote” at Angelbeat: “Novell keynote on its Microsoft partnership & running Linux & Windows simultaneously.” Of course by keynote they mean exactly the same as everybody else.