Jeremy Gollehon's Profile

Aspartame and Weight Gain

Would it surprise you to learn aspartame may cause you to gain weight? It’s true -- products marketed as “reduced calorie,” “sugar-free,” and “diet” can actually sabotage your weight control efforts.[19]

The two main ingredients of aspartame, phenylalanine and aspartic acid, stimulate the release of insulin and leptin -- hormones which instruct your body to store fat.

In addition, a large intake of phenylalanine can drive down your serotonin levels. Serotonin is the neurotransmitter that tells you when you’re full. A low level of serotonin can bring on food cravings which can lead to weight gain.[20]

What about the other knee bursae?

A second bursa of the knee is located just under the kneecap beneath the large
tendon that attaches the muscles in front of the thigh and the kneecap to the
prominent bone in front of the lower leg. This bursa is called the infrapatellar bursa, and when
inflamed, the condition is called infrapatellar bursitis. It is commonly seen
with inflammation of the adjacent tendon as a result of a jumping injury, hence
the name "jumper's knee." This condition is generally treated with ice, rest,
and oral antiinflammatory and/or pain medicines.

My job as CEO, I now realize, is easy. All I have to do is recruit superstars. Of course, it's more than that: They need fair salaries, meaningful equity stakes, and most importantly, the authority to make decisions. To make this happen, I had to accept three difficult principles: 1. As a leader, I have meaningful weaknesses which will become an obstacle to growth; 2. the company is better off hiring those weaknesses, which means I need to hire people better than me and then give them equity and power; and 3. although I love my job, my goal ultimately is to make the company safe for my departure. It may take 10 years, but I must work toward that every day.

The funny part is that once I accepted these principles, it gave me the humility I needed to inspire key recruits to join. In their eyes, I saw not only excitement for the equity we offered, but the earnest belief that they would be entrusted to do their jobs with my counsel, if they sought it, but without unwanted meddling. By accepting and acknowledging my own weaknesses, I was able to prove the naysayers wrong and hire winners from both worlds. I now begin my conversations with potential recruits with a sentence that always brings a smile: I am not good at what you do, and I need your help.

Tools




It’s more or less trivial to automate most of the tweaks from “additional optimizations” section. There already exist tools that strip comments, whitespaces, and remove quotes around attribute values. But these are still in their infancy and perform a very limited set of optimizations. We can definitely do better.




A couple of months ago, me and hakunin started working on a similar, Ruby-based compressor, but never had a chance to finish it.




So what do we have so far?





1. 
   

   Absolute HTML Compressor (desktop, windows)

   
   

   Does great job, but only after turning off options like stripping doctype and replacing STRONG with I.

   
   
2. 
   

   HTML Compact (desktop, windows)

   
   

   Makes document inaccessible. Avoid.

   
   
3. 
   

   HTML Compressor (desktop, windows)

   
   

   Only removes whitespace, and even in whitespace-sensitive elements, such as PRE. Not very useful.

   
   
4. 
   

   Pretty Diff (web-based)

   
   

   Doesn’t have option to completely remove whitespaces (only collapses them). Doesn’t perform any optimizations except collapsing whitespace and removing newlines. Doesn’t respect whitespace-sensitive elements. Not very useful

   
   
5. 
   

   htmlcompressor (java-based)

   
   

   Performs most of the optimizations described here (but doesn’t remove optional tags or shorten boolean attributes). Respects whitespace-sensitive elements. It is more or less best option at the moment.

   
   





As you can see, current state of affairs is pretty disappointing. There seem to be no compression tools for Mac/Linux, and those for Windows are hardly useful.