Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Culinary, Education, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Terrible Nutrition Advice

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More of the usual nonsense:

The study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that at the 34 fast-food chains they analyzed, the average combo meal contains 1,193 calories, and that the quantities of sodium, saturated fat and sugar are through the roof.

But all a person has to do is hold the dipping sauce; remove toppings, such as cheese; and opt for water over soda — and you’ll be good as gravy, says lead author Kelsey Vercammen of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health in an interview with Reuters Health.

The problem with fast food is not calories, or saturated fat, or sodium. It’s the bun and the potatoes. The only good advice here is water instead of soda.

Administrative, Business, Mathematics, Technology and Society

Email Problems

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I’ve got a problem, that my system administrator won’t help me with. My Trash folder on the server has grown to several gigabytes, and there is no way for me to empty it. It slows down getting and deleting mail, but Thunderbird crashes when I even try to load it. Here is the helpful email I got when I asked to simply delete it on the server (which I can’t do, because I don’t have root privileges–on my own hosted server).

“You’ll need to access your email accounts with a proper email client from your PC to clear them out. We can’t just delete the mail from the server, then the indexes are messed up. You need to be properly emptying your trash. 

You have multiple Gigs of mail in the trash folders on the Simberg account. “

Note that this is nothing I don’t know, except I don’t understand why it would mess up indexes to delete the trash. Is that true?

[Update a while later]

OK, Tbird crashes, but I seem to be able to access it from Evolution. But there is no obvious way to empty it, other than to Expunge, which seems a little drastic, but maybe that’s what I have to do. And it doesn’t load all of the headers; it gets stuck at 99%.

[Update a while later]

Well, I hit “Empty Trash” in Evolution, and it seems to have done the job (even though Evolution says it’s still working on it).

OK, Evolution thinks it’s finished now. My next problem is that it’s not properly displaying my inbox. But now my web interface is much more manageable.