For most how-to articles, there’s a need to bring in examples from many different sources, but for this article, we need only to cite one source, the highly-anticipated online presence for the new novel by Eric Robert Morse, Monaco.

Though the site is primarily marketing for the book, it has everything: brilliant design, great use of technology, and ease of use. Those are the three features that make for great web design, all of which I will go over briefly.

A great website must follow basic design principles

There are myriad design principles that apply to any graphically-conveyed idea, but the most important are simplicity, order, and consistency. Monaconovel.com, though it’s packed with content, is very simple-looking. In fact, the simplicity belies all of the features that are going on. The site is generally divided into two sections: navigation and content, which have further divisions. But this simplicity is appealing (though subconscious) and aids in the next aspect, order. A great website must look like it was intentional and this means having order and hierarchy. Throughout monaconovel.com, there is a natural hierarchy with the title of the book maintaining importance over each aspect, then the title of the content, and so on. The last aspect of a great website is consistency. Monaconovel.com maintains consistency throughout and promotes its brand so that without seeing the name, you would know that each page belongs with each other. This is especially important to sites like these, which want to place the viewer in a specific locale—when you visit this site, you’re in one place in time—you’re in Monaco.

A great website utilizes technology

One of the strongest assets of the Internet as a vehicle for advertising, social networking, or entertainment is technology. From video to database integration, great websites make the most of technology. Sure Bob’s two-page static website is a fine idea for a personal site that shows of Bob’s model train collection, but only a website with music, flash animation, and data collection can be considered great. Monaconovel.com has it all. When you visit, make sure to check out the playlist of ’30s big band music and Margaux’s Diary for samples of great uses of technology.

A great website must be easy to use

They say that the average web surfer gives a site 8 seconds to impress before he or she clicks away to cyberspace—that’s not much time. If you’ve gotten this far in the article, we’ve managed to get past that threshold and it’s most likely because this site is easy to use. The content on a great site should be obvious, upfront, and easy to navigate to otherwise. Monaconovel.com again meets this high standard by allowing all of the content to be accessed at every page. No drill-downs are needed to present the content in an easy-to-access fashion and no pages are lost because the users can’t find them.

In conclusion, there are many aspects that make up a good website, but for a site to be great it must be designed well, utilize technology effectively, and be easy to use. If you have a great website, please tell us about it in the comments section. For a taste of a great website, take a trip to 1930s Monaco.

By JSB Morse, author of The Evolution Diet

Ever since certain fad diets became popular in the seventies and eighties, the general conception of a ‘diet’ is viewed as a quick and easy tool to help its participants lose a few pounds, without any regard to lifelong eating habits. In other words, it is seen as a short-term fix. What ends up happening with people on these short-term plans is that they tend to go back to eating poorly after the weight goal has been met or worse, when the weight goal hasn’t been met and seems impossible to achieve. In fact, researchers at UCLA have recently revealed shocking findings: dieting just doesn’t work. The school reviewed 31 long-term studies on dieting and found that people who go on diets usually end up regaining all of the weight they lost, plus some after they stop dieting. In addition to the weight gain, researchers say that the ups and downs of dieting cause added stress and contribute to heart disease. The study seems bleak for those looking to shed pounds, but, still, people continue the quick-fix methods, moving to the next one as soon as they give up on the previous one, usually to no avail.

This yo-yo dieting confuses the body and frustrates the psyche, and never quite lives up to the sensational claims that these diet gimmicks advertise. Testimonials similar to, “I lost 50 pounds in 5 weeks!”, and “I dropped 15 pounds the first week!” lead to inaccurate interpretations of what a diet should be. If these people were to continue on their so-called diet, they would be weightless within a couple years. Now that would be amazing!

The truth is that these diets, which temporarily allow rapid weight loss, are often times just dehydrating the body. The weight lost on these diets is primarily in H2O not LBS, and since the body is about 60% water, it is fairly easy to drop a few pounds of it. Inevitably, though, the ‘contestants’ on these ‘miracle diets’ must change their habits back or at least alter them so as not to eliminate themselves from existence altogether.

These whacky eating habits are missing the point completely and they are leading to a misnomer, a diet, by definition, is not some two-week panacea to help you lose weight; it is much broader than just that. A diet is someone’s general intake of food. People still have a diet even when they’re not on a diet. A diet also is something that takes place over one’s entire life, not just the five weeks before one’s wedding day or class reunion. When looked at in this light, people who go on those gimmicky diets advertised on late-night television aren’t on a high-protein diet, or a lettuce-only plan; these people are on an extremely unhealthy yo-yo diet.

Changing one’s eating habits so drastically so often is bad for one’s health, something that most diet promoters fail to explain. Interestingly, an obese person has a better chance of living longer than someone who fluctuates habitually between being obese and having an ideal weight. A University of Michigan study conducted by cardiologist Claire Duvernoy, M.D. has found that a direct link between the gain-loss-gain syndrome of yo-yo dieting and cardiovascular disease in women. It turns out that such an oscillation of weight adds a great deal more stress than a constant weight. But Natural Man went through long droughts without food—doesn’t that mean that we are designed to withstand ups and downs in our diet like our ancestors? While we do have a remarkable capability to adapt to our environment (described further in Part Two), up-and-down dieting is still considerably harmful. In addition, during a drought, Natural Man’s body mass index (BMI) shifted from ideal to underweight and back—a completely different physiological story than a BMI that shifts from obese to overweight and back.

That isn’t to say that one shouldn’t try to lose weight if they’re a little tight in the waistline. The constantly obese person has a drastically smaller chance of living longer than someone at a constant ideal weight. A Dutch study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine (2003) says that obese women live an average of 7.1 fewer years than women of normal weight. Obese men live 5.8 fewer years on average than their healthy counterparts. That’s almost 10% of the average lifespan!

The solution for everyone is to learn a method of eating that brings everyone to his or her ideal weight and keeps them there without the need to yo-yo diet. The typical counter to that statement would be, “Well, everyone is different. There can’t possibly be a diet that works for everyone.” But there is. It just so happens that at one point, all humans did eat the same diet: the natural hunter/gatherer diet, and they were remarkably healthier than we are today despite lack of medicine and wealth as we’ll see later. The Evolution Diet emulates this healthy hunter/gatherer diet and supports a robust lifestyle for everyone, regardless of personality or physical makeup. Because this method of eating is strictly linked to the natural methods of the body, it will work to create a stable, healthy weight for everyone who adheres to the guidelines. One of the most vital attributes of The Evolution Diet is that it is even beneficial for people who are already at their ideal weights, thus someone can maintain just one diet for their entire life, the healthy way it should be.

Read more on The Evolution Diet!

Indie techno is forging its own paths today and the genre is being led by Eurorockers like Lykke Li and Sebastian Tellier. The music is fresh, fun, and only slightly resembles the Casio sounds from the eighties. Enjoy these tracks by the Euros joined by Americans Submarines and Matt Costa.

Pollan’s book takes a dry and somewhat elitist look the state of the human diet and more specifically, the American diet. He investigates three meals (I’m not sure where the fourth one from the subtitle came from), fast food, organic, and a hunter/gatherer meal. What he finds is interesting and thought-provoking, much of which supports the findings I wrote about in The Evolution Diet: we are extremely removed from what we were designed to eat.

The author’s personal experiences make up the majority of this lengthy book, and his interactions with some of the characters in the food procurement industry is insightful if drawn out. The section on the hunter/gatherer meal was the most appealing (naturally), and despite the glaring flaw of ‘preparing a hunter/gatherer meal’, it was freer from contradiction than the other sections. Pollan rightly attacks the socialism that has led to a national food industry that pumps unrecognizable processed material into our stomachs, but he fails to notice that Roosevelt’s socialism is just as detrimental as Nixon’s. As Pollan quotes an interesting farmer Joel Salatin in the book, “You can’t regulate integrity”.

Pollan doesn’t commit to a diet plan for the reader–he admits that the extreme meals (fast and slow) should only be an annual ceremonial meal–but the stories that he conveys will no doubt lead the reader to a healthier lifestyle. For specifics on that healthier lifestyle, please feel free to reference The Evolution Diet, mentioned above.

Dinesh D’Souza provides in “Great” a summary of the recent history of religion and its increasing popularity–especially Christianity, which the author shares with over 2 billion other people, then succinctly counters atheist claims that religion is useless, unsientific, and in fact harmful to society. Drawing on science himself (though not too successfully), philosophy (D’Souza has a great explanation of Kant), and atheist think itself to refute the claims of atheism, D’Souza has created a very convincing argument for believers.

Though it’s unlikely that this book will change anyones mind who is dead set against religion, it is the most logical and well-thought out defense of the Christian faith since Mere Christianity and offers only a few contradictions. Throughout the book, the author makes solid points refuting atheists such as pointing out Huxley’s quote, “We objected the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.” D’Souza responds that atheists don’t find God invisible as much as objectionable and, “atheists aren’t adjusting their desires to fit the truth, they’re adjusting the truth to fit their desires.” D’Souza uses Hume’s skepticism against those who use it to reduce God to wishful thinking, and he successfully analyzes the recent believer/atheist arguments of the watchmaker and anthropic principle. D’Souza also makes it clear that the lack of religious belief has led to the worst crimes of humanity throughout history (Nazi, Soviet, and Maoist terrors to name a few).

This text isn’t without contradiction, however. In the final section, D’Souza relays the benefits of Christianity to society–the religion helps people feel good and comfortable confronting death/tragedy–but this only offers more of a reason why we would invent religion, just as the atheist thinkers purport. The result is a good book about the validity of religion and Christianity, specifically.

JSBM
Author, The Evolution Diet: What and How We Were Designed to Eat, Second Edition