This flash US obesity infographic was mentioned to me as part of an ongoing discussion about information graphics. The original source data likely came from the PPT presentation linked on the CDC’s Overweight and Obesity page. The CDC maps present annual data from 1985-2005, CNN only chose to show six incongruous years to remove edge-case fluctuation. I threw together a quick animation showing the complete dataset:

Michelle observed that the bar for information graphics was set “very, very low.” People are accustomed to lousy graphics, default-styled PowerPoint charts, plain Excel tables and raw scatter plots. Even the slightest attention to design becomes automatically exceptional.

I think that map chart would work better as a line plot, but then I’m most curious about whether or not there was a tipping point after which the population started gaining weight. Personally, I believe things turned for the worse between 1985 and 1988.

Mid-80s transition

In 1985, amidst the New Coke fiasco, Coca-Cola and other soft drinks switched from cane and beet sugar to high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Two main factors figured into that decision: Significantly increased potency and effectiveness of HFCS vs conventional sugars, and cost savings due US government corn subsidies and manipulation of domestic sugar prices. Bottom line was that soda got much cheaper to produce, thereby making “free refills” and oversized portions an economically sound loss-leader.

Three years later in 1988, Taco Bell introduced unlimited free drink refills and 7-Eleven started selling the 64-ounce Double Gulp, “biggest soft drink on the market.” I couldn’t find a source, but that was doubtlessly a response to escalating portions and unlimited refills among competitors. This was also about the time the soda manufacturers started experimenting with 16 ounce cans, 20 ounce bottles and other larger portions.

The following chart illustrates domestic per capita consumption of soft drinks from 1970-1995. Note the spike between 1987-1988:

Soda got cheaper, so people drank more soda. Snack foods also got cheaper as they also switched from sugar to HFCS, so people ate more snacks. More soda + more snacks = more obesity. This isn’t rocket science.

Two or three months ago I started running. It was something I’d been thinking about for a while but never got around to. Harris deserves a lot of thanks for motivation and nagging. The Cool Running website has also been a terrific resource, especially their Couch-to-5K plan.

Last week I ran somewhere between 16 and 20 miles, spread across four or five runs. Having never done any sort of deliberate distance/endurance exercise before, I find that number personally astonishing. Currently I’m running four miles in about 33 minutes, my next goal is five miles in 40-45 minutes.

I decided to buy one of those Nike+iPod thingies, mostly because I enjoy statistics. Also, I’ve wanted one ever since Cabel Sasser’s Multiplayer Game Of The Year post. However, the iPod is imminently due for a refresh — assuming the rumors are right. According to the MacRumors buying guide, the iPod and iPod nano are coming up on a year since their last refresh. I can wait another week or two.

While I’ve been going to the gym regularly for almost a year now (14th St Y Babysitting FTW), no amount of exercise can produce the levels of sweat running does. I’m absolutely, revoltingly drenched after 30 minutes.

Surprisingly, I’m not completely spent afterwards. After a 30 minute cool down and shower I generally feel great. When I sleep, I sleep better. I’m drinking less coffee. My contribution to the laundry heap has increased. When swimming I can hold my breath much longer than I used to be able to. Overall, I’m really loving it.

So some attention-deprived class action lawyers are suing Apple because of a false statement about iPhone batteries that appeared in a sensationalist article a few weeks ago. Patrick commented on my previous post with a link to a Business 2.0 posting about this. I’m sure it’ll be all over the press in the coming days.

Gizmodo summed this up perfectly with “dumbtastically stupid.” That phrase could also apply to Business 2.0, but would need a few other clauses added to cover petty, wrong and dull. Oh, and broke. And clueless. Reinforcing all of that, this bit of the Business 2.0 posting stood out as just pathetic:

My memory is not what it used to be, but I seem to recall that it wasn’t until after the iPhone went on sale that Apple issued a formal description of how many times the battery could be recharged before it might need replacement, in which case there might be something to the complaint.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, you are getting paid to blog, how hard is it to use Google? Or, you know, just remember something that was a huge stink in the area you cover professionally just two and a half weeks ago? You are paid to blog. Find the damn link. Here: Apple - Batteries - iPhone.

Apple’s battery page clearly states:

A properly maintained iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 400 full charge and discharge cycles. You may choose to replace your battery when it no longer holds sufficient charge to meet your needs.

I’m pretty sure this all started with Kent German and Donald Bell’s original iPhone review for CNET, also published by CNN:

Unfortunately, the Phone does not have a battery that a user can replace. That means you have to send the iPhone to Apple to replace the battery after it’s spent (Apple is estimating one battery will keep its full strength for 400 charges–probably about three years’ worth of use).

That slightly misleading paragraph, which implies the battery will be spent after 400 cycles, first echoed by Gizmodo, was later breathlessly parroted and made more dire by MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan:

The iPhone battery will only survive about 300-400 recharges, the company says.

Well that’s just completely wrong. Bob seemingly didn’t bother to check his facts against the original source. Gizmodo at least had the good sense to recant. John Gruber of Daring Fireball named Sullivan Jackass of the Week, the title could have gone to any number of people.

Apple has sold over 100 million iPods, none of those have had user-replaceable batteries. That obviously hasn’t stopped what seems like every fourth person on the sidewalk from buying and using iPods.

Frankly, I doubt most people ever change the battery on their cell phones and Apple discovered this during market research. I don’t ever recall doing so with my RAZR, for the most part I just charged that POS every night. I had a spare for my previous LG, but never used it. The iPhone’s fixed battery was most likely a well-founded design consideration reinforced by the unmitigated success of the sealed-battery iPod.

This whole mess should have been pretty much dealt with a few weeks ago. Jason Snell thoroughly covered this in MacWorld back on July 12th. Yet I was talking with a friend about the iPhone earlier this week and she brought up the 300 charges number.

No one ever sees corrections in the news. If a story gets in the paper, no matter how wrong, people will believe it and very few will ever find out that the truth was largely contradictory.

During their quarterly conference call Apple stated they sold 270,000 iPhones in the first 30 hours. That’s somewhere between $75,000 to $90,000 each minute. Apple’s stock punched through $150 after hours and was still trading over $148 when I published this.

The day prior, AT&T claimed activation of 146,000 iPhones over the first two days. That figure seemed very low and the news duly tanked Apple’s stock.

Another way of reading those numbers is that AT&T botched 124,000 activations. Considering my own iPhone activation experience and that of many friends, this seems very possible. Thankfully things have been flawless since.

I’ve seen this happen a few times, an email message just will not delete. Clicking the trash can shows the message delete animation, but the message just reappears behind the animation. The same thing happens in list view. The solution is to reboot the phone, everything should be fine after a restart.

To reboot the phone, hold the wake button for several seconds. A slider will come up asking you to power off. Shut it down, wait a second or two and then press wake to turn it back on. Your email should work normally.

I’ve found rebooting every few days is a good way to clear any slightly odd behavior or minor slowdowns. iPhone is a 1.0 release and these are software bugs. I’m confident they’ll be fixed in a future update.

Update: Force-quitting Mail can also help. To force-quit any iPhone application, just hold the home button for about 10 seconds, until the home screen displays.

Testing out direct posting to the site from the iPhone via Flickr, seems to be working, though photos are automatically scaling down to 640×480. [and line-breaks need to be cleaned up afterwards]

I’ve been seeing an issue with Apple Mail affecting several iPhone users on a several different of hosts:

• With a POP account, Apple’s Mail.app will ask for the password repeatedly, refuse the correct password and fail to collect any mail.
• With IMAP, the account seems to stall and does not necessarily update state or download new messages. Desktop IMAP behavior is particularly erratic.

In both cases, the iPhone continues to work just fine. The problems mostly affects users who’ve set their iPhone to Auto-Check for mail to something other than Manual. The following lines appear in the Desktop’s console.log almost immediately after setting the iPhone to auto-check for mail:

2007-07-05 15:33:17.190 Mail[21242] Unhandled response to command SELECT: * NO  Trying to get mailbox lock from process 28292
2007-07-05 15:34:24.098 Mail[21242] Unhandled response to command SELECT: * NO  Trying to get mailbox lock from process 29790
2007-07-05 15:36:14.917 Mail[21242] Unhandled response to command SELECT: * NO  Trying to get mailbox lock from process 31080

Those entries seem to indicate that the IMAP server is sending a response that Apple Mail doesn’t know what to do with.

A thread on the MacRumors forums claimed this was a multiple connections issue with the mail server, but I think I’ve conclusively debunked that, at least for IMAP.

To test the multiple connection theory, I set up Thunderbird on two other physical machines, one Mac and a Dell running Ubuntu, then set up my account using the default IMAP settings. I also opened my account in Horde webmail and hit reload a lot. Despite those simultaneous connections, Apple Mail seemed to be fine and messages were getting delivered. The little progress indicator was, however, still sitting there next to the account name, not spinning.

So now I can break Apple Mail just by turning on Auto-Check in iPhone’s Settings->Mail. Manual checking from the iPhone doesn’t cause any problems. So far I’m only seeing this on shared hosts running the Courier mail server.

IMAP is inconsistent about when it breaks, maybe relating related to server load issue. POP will break every time: If I check my email on a POP account with the iPhone, Apple Mail will immediately ask for and then refuse the password for that account.

An IMAP workaround

Installing IMAP-IDLE, pretty much fixes the problems with IMAP. I’ve had this running for several hours and the iPhone checking every 15 minutes, and things seem to be working smoothly. IMAP errors still appear in console.log but mail is getting through. I’m going to install this on a few other machines tomorrow and see what happens.

Not sure what to do about POP, but then we’re migrating everyone over to IMAP anyway.