Young Jeezy is one of those rappers that’s so bad at what he does, he’s sometimes kind of good! Similar to other hiphop artists who also fit this paradox, like Lil’ Wayne, The Game and 50 Cent, Young Jeezy pumps out slick sounding beats with catchy (and often stolen) hooks, which he then raps over with the level of lyrical sophistication you’d expect from a stoned out 5-year old.

My president’s black, my lambo’s blue, and I’ll be god damned if my rims ain’t too.

Despite sounding juvenile, silly, and often superficial to the extreme, sometimes this style of music works. Perhaps it’s similar to how an accidental channel flick can swindle you into watching a half-hour of Billy Mays acerbically hawk Kaboom and Oxiclean products. The delivery of the message is entertaining, but the message itself is nothing more than a blitz of lyrical baby food for the pre-cognitive mind. Young Jeezy raps entire albums about his cars, clothes and money. His message is effortlessly consumed because it’s vacuous in nature, and yet, it is this ease of consumption that makes his music appetizing to his audience.

As my high school music teacher would carefully say, “sometimes hiphop can be clever.” This was his way of lightly praising the genre so as not to disturb the volatile emotions of his teenaged students (me included). Of course, him, like most non-fans of rap music, have long associated the art form with the less erudite. But really, one can only go so far when criticizing musical taste. So the question, I think, is whether or not rap music should be taken seriously. For instance, Harry Potter is a billion dollar franchise, but no one disputes that it’s purely children’s fiction. Does rap music serve a similar role, but for a slightly different crowd?

Also, what about these hiphop artists who are clearly deficient in their verbal fluency: are they self-deluded by their fame and wealth and actually believe that they’re a modern day Shakespeare or Beethoven? Or are they fully aware of their dumbed down, boiled to a pulp lyrics and realize that their success is wholly dependent on their image, studio mastered beats and chintzy music videos?

Growing up, I remember constantly being bombarded by Drink Milk ads and fridge door nutritional guides that placed dairy products among the essential food groups needed for optimum health. Years later, I would realize that most of what I had heard about drinking cow’s milk was plain wrong and usually just the propaganda of the dairy industry.

Taking into consideration that 70% of the world’s population is lactose intolerant — including about 90% of Okinawans ( who live as long as sea turtles) — the question must be asked, since when did humans need to drink cow’s milk to remain healthy?

Increased calcium consumption is a leading selling point for marketing dairy products, yet the typical western diet gets less than 50% of its calcium from this source. Calcium is found in many vegetables like broccoli, parsley and cabbage, in nuts like almonds, and in a variety of seafood choices, but if you’re like me, and grew up around western culture, you’d hardly know that calcium was available outside of dairy products and food supplements.

Humans only started drinking milk relatively recently in terms of human history, which is why most populations are still lactose intolerant and why dairy allergies are one of the most common food allergies around. In addition, humans are the only mammals that consume milk after weaning, and are the only species that regularly drinks the milk of another. The evidence seems to indicate that dairy products are not as important to our health as marketers would like us to believe.

With an aging population, osteoporosis – a disease that decreases bone mass leading to painful fractures and immobility – has been used by the dairy industry to push calcium consumption via their products. It is interesting then, that the disease is common among American women, one of the largest consumers of milk products. Indeed, there is no evidence to suggest that consuming cow’s milk protects someone from this bone robbing disease. Even diets that are extremely high in calcium do not seem to ward off osteoporosis.

The traditional Inuit (Eskimo) diet is very high in calcium and yet this population experiences high rates of osteoporosis. This phenomenon has been linked to the Inuit’s high intake of animal protein. When animal meat is consumed, calcium is transferred from the bones to the digestive system to help counter the acid generated by this food group. Therefore, to maintain a healthy bone mass, one should consume calcium in reasonable amounts whilst limiting meat in their diet. In addition, regular exercise, magnesium, and vitamin D (sunlight) are also needed to maintain a healthy bone mass; drinking milk alone is not enough.

Now before I end this blurb sounding like a total dairy hater, I just want to disclose that although I’m not a huge milk drinker, I do eat yogurt almost every morning and I love my French bread with cheese – gouda, edam, or smoked cheddar preferably – so I’m hardly dismissing the appetizing pleasures of this food group. Also, I love eating meat! So I hope you don’t interpret this post as some sanctimonious rant on behalf of vegans and the 70% that get the squirts after taking too much cream with their coffee.

What are your thoughts on drinking milk? Do you buy into its promoted health benefits, or do you drink it simpy for enjoyment?

This past week was all about Google’s public beta of Chrome. Being primarily a Mac user, I was a little disappointed that no version of the browser was available for OS X, but fortunately I keep a copy of XP running under Parallels for just such occasions.

My first impression of Chrome was that it looked similar to what I would expect from a Google product: clean, simple and intuitive. I like the tabs-on-top design and the combined search and URL box. However, aside from those features, I didn’t find anything too compelling or innovative to make Chrome stand out from the pack.

Opening up multiple tabs and surfing around seemed smooth and uneventful, but I decided to cut my test run short when YouTube crashed and I figured I had seen enough. Currently, I am happy using Safari and Firefox, but I’ll be giving Chrome a serious chance when the OS X version makes its debut.

After my short stint with Chrome, I hit my favorite tech sites to see what others had to say about Google’s new browser. What I read was a lot of discussion about Chrome’s speed – particularly its JavaScript performance – but what really got my attention was its multithreaded architecture.

Chrome, like the IE 8 beta, runs as a multithreaded application, which means it’ll make better use of dual and quad core CPU’s that are common in today’s computers. Furthermore, each tab runs as a separate process, which means that if one browser tab crashes, the other tabs will not be affected. This is a wonderful feature for people who surf with many tabs opened at once or use web-based applications like Google Docs.

It seems that Chrome has been programmed to be both speedy and muscular, but such traits can come at a cost. For instance, Chrome eats up plenty of RAM and its multithreaded design allows it to hog the CPU like no browser before it. For power users seeking a faster and more stable web browsing experience, Chrome will likely satisfy their needs, but for users running power sipping laptops, bare bone netbooks or even less brawny smartphones, it remains to be seen how well Chrome can accommodate these platforms.

Despite the challenges ahead, I feel confident that Google will deliver a solid product across many platforms. In particular, I can’t wait to see the mobile version of Chrome running on Google’s Android platform for mobile devices. I’m sure it’ll be a worthy competitor to mobile Safari and mobile Opera. 

So, what’s currently your browser of choice? And am I the only one who wishes that Firefox plug-ins were available for more than just Firefox?

For most people, I assume, when they’re downloading videos or whatever with their bittorrent client, they simply queue up their torrents and let the program do its thing. This is how bittorent worked early on, before the advent of uTorrent, Bitcomet, Vuze and the many other clients that allow serious tweaking in the options menu.

Impatient as always, I have found myself tinkering with these settings any time a torrent is seemingly dragging its feet. The problem is, I have already set my client (I use Azureus) to optimal settings for my connection, but I can’t seem to stop myself from adjusting things like the upload speed and peer connections in the hopes that I can somehow accelerate the transfer.

The idea that I am somehow shepherding the file fragments onto my hard drive, like some RTS where I’ve sent my peasants out to chop wood and mine gold, is a thought I can’t easily put to rest. I realize that most of the time I’m probably not contributing very much to the outcome of the transfer, but it feels better than remaining passive through a long, arduous download.

Do you ever find yourself obsessively managing your torrents? Drop me a comment if you’ve turned file sharing into a computer game.

A few days ago, I posted about my defective iPhone 3G. I received this phone last Monday, but by the evening, I realized that it was broken beyond repair. That night I went through some troubleshooting with a friendly and responsive Rogers iPhone specialist and she assured me that I would receive another unit within 48-hours. So, assuming that the phone would ship out on the Tuesday, I expected it to arrive sometime on Thursday. Thursday came and passed, and by midday Friday I felt something was wrong.

I called up Rogers and went through the usually steps to speak with a representative. After a couple transfers I was connected to an iPhone specialist. I told the representative that I was still waiting for a replacement unit, and he perused my file to see what had happened. After putting me on hold to chat with his boss, he came back to tell me that my order had been cancelled!

Apparently, the lady who submitted my request for a replacement iPhone did not complete the troubleshooting checklist correctly, and as a result her boss decided to scrap the entire order. Needless to say, I was a bit perplexed. Clearly, I was expecting the imminent arrival of a replacement phone, but I guess this didn’t concern someone in management who deleted my order without making any effort to contact me or to correct the mistake made by his or her subordinate.

Later that night, after my frustrations had died down, I looked over at my almost-perfect iPhone with somewhat mixed feelings. The thought that it was going back was good and bad. On one hand, I felt annoyed by the extended delay of receiving a replacement — I hate being stuck at home waiting for deliveries and it’s almost impossible to get a tracking code from Rogers — but on the other hand, I’ll have a brand new iPhone 3G to unbox next week!

So I’ve begun to see my current iPhone as much like a test model that I’ve been allowed to take home and review. I have it in a soft case with a screen protector so that it’ll remain pristine, but short of destroying or losing it, there’s really nothing holding me back from pushing it to its limits. I’ve thought of running some battery tests, like draining it from full charge under various settings, or seeing how many free apps I can install until it breaks or shows signs of slow down.  There’s always a silver lining if you look for it, and I have to remind myself that dealing with telecoms is rarely a smooth process when you have issues.

Do you have any suggestions for testing my temporary iPhone 3G? Do you want to know how many hours of continuous Youtube it will play before dying or catching on fire?

When people think of psychology, they usually have a short list of terms that they know (or think they know) about the subject, including: relationship counseling, subliminal messages, Sigmund Freud, and personality testing. I was quite the same when I first attended school, so when I had the chance to enroll in a third year personality course, I couldn’t wait to learn about something that was mentioned so often in pop culture and the mainstream media.

Looking back, I don’t remember much from that course, but I do remember the Big Five model, which attempts to describe an individual using just five personality traits. These factors are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

Perhaps I remember the Big Five (which can be remembered by the acronym OCEAN) because it was the easiest theory to recall and seemed to be the least flakey. Unlike a lot of what I learned in that course, the Big Five is backed by empirical research.

You might find it odd that you could describe a person by using just five personality traits and not the many other descriptors that you could easily list off from the top of your head. However, these factors weren’t chosen ambiguously, they were discovered by using factor analysis, which I’ll explain a little bit about.

What the researchers did was start off with a huge list of adjectives, such as: happy, anxious, creative, curious, moody, aggressive, etc. Then, through interviewing tons of people, they began to group terms that appeared to regularly coincided. For instance, a person who was deemed highly sociable had a more than likely chance of also being talkative and assertive. After this grouping had been completed, the researchers had boiled down their giant list of traits to what is now known as the Big Five. So going back to a person who might be described as sociable and talkative, this individual would probably rate high in extraversion.

I should note that a person isn’t categorized, black or white, as an extrovert (the life of a party) or the opposite (an introvert), but that they rate somewhere along the dimension of extraversion, often not at the extremes. Think of the Big Five as five separate point scales that run from positive to negative.

So does it bother you that your unique and brilliant personality can be (or attempt to be) described by just five factors? Or do you like the idea that something so complex and mysterious in nature can be easily summarized by using the Big Five model?

Are you a fan of Weeds? In these middle months, most TV shows take their summer hiatus, and thus, the cable channels are awash with reruns and filler material. This is how I found Weeds, the Showtime comedy series that’s currently airing in its fourth season right through the heat of late August.

It seems that Weeds may be the only decent show on right now, although I have to admit that I’ve not been much of a TV watcher since broadband Internet came along over 10 years ago. Still, compared to the other comedies that I enjoy, such as Entourage and Californication, the show holds its own as a fun half-hour of R-rated humor, stuffed to the brim with politically incorrect content and brusque one-liners that often have me laughing out loud.

Weeds is a show that relentlessly pokes fun at various ethnic groups, the rich, the poor, fat kids, ugly people, the disabled, Republicans and, well, more than I could ever list here. It never takes a moment to apologize for its offending humor, and this is partly what makes the show so fresh and exciting to watch. Oh, and did I mention, the show’s entire premise is about growing, selling and smuggling marijuana? Finally, a show for adults that’s a world away from the terrible sitcoms I grew up watching.