Plenty of annoying skinny (including me!) or even not-skinny people have snarked about their “physics diet“: energy out matches energy in. Perhaps a bad way of thinking about the issue, at least if you believe Robert Lustig. The hormones insulin and leptin regulate weight, and are responsible for both energy efficiency (you might be surprised by rest energy expenditure) and feelings of satiation vs hunger. In obese people, insulin suppresses the effect of leptin to ensure increased energy intake & retention (conversely, by suppressing insulin in the obese the weight “plateau” from the starvation response is avoided). Why did we evolve that? Lustig hypothesizes that in puberty & pregnancy such an effect is desirable. Hat-tip to Modeled Behavior, who probably linked the study before without my bothering to read it.

Elsewhere (more specifically, at the Mises blog), an actual physicist (or at least aspiring physicist) sticks up for Austrian epistemology by attacking Milton Friedman’s “positive economics”. However, a number of commenters point out errors you really would not have expected a physicist not to make.

Finally, I can’t tie this into physics at all, but while looking for the previous link, I discovered that the creator of Sita Sings the Blues (which I think was nominated for an Oscar or something) is anti-copyright and made the movie freely available. I’m watching it right now, which is a much for gratifying experience than having my browser repeatedly crash trying to play the DivX for “McCabe & Mrs Miller”.

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