I pay attention to Lawrence Lessig, even when I disagree on the details.

I’m starting to see something over and over again.

Students who feel entitled to lecture their professors on the quality of the feedback they get, that it’s not positive enough.  Students who simply can’t handle being told that their work was an incoherent mess (this is a real example, from a guy who then went on to remakr that it was no wonder I’m rated so poorly online, as if I would actually alter my class based on a ratemyprofessor rating).

It’s one thing not to be an asshole.  And BOY HOWDY can I be an asshole. (I don’t know what that means, actually, it’s a Kansanism I picked up of a friend down here.  If you’re Boy Howdy, I apologize)  But it’s quite another thing to be so fragile that you can’t handle even medium-weight feedback.  Methinks something went wrong with all that self-esteem training.

I’ve ranted about High-Fructose Corn Syrup for something like twenty years now, after I went through a grocery store and found all the fruit juice was 60% or more sugar-water, and HFCS was showing up in my MEAT PRODUCTS.

Well, the heavy research is in.  The shit’s not only as bad for you as I thought it was… it’s worse.  MUCH worse.

Researchers observed a hyperactivity of hepatic protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B (PTP1B), which is associated with defective insulin and leptin signaling, in fructose-fed rats.

Now, that’s not a human study…. but this was.

A dietary history and paired serum and liver tissue were obtained from patients with evidence of biopsy-proven NAFLD (n=49) without cirrhosis and controls (n=24) matched for gender, age (+/-5 years), and body mass index (+/-3 points). RESULTS: Consumption of fructose in patients with NAFLD was nearly 2- to 3-fold higher than controls [365 kcal vs 170 kcal (p<0.05)].

NAFLD.  Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease.  Cripes.  If I want liver disease, I want to get it from beer and vodka, not from some syrup additive that’s all over the food industry, from baby food to sausage.  I’m a man, not a moth, dammit.