Alan Hogan

The FDA, sucralose, and “artificial flavors”

FDA,

I recently purchased a beverage produced by Neurobrands of California.

On the bottle, it prominently displays: “NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS OR FLAVORS.”

(In the ingredient list, “crystalline fructose” is listed, making me believe this was the only sweetener present.)

I purchased the drink and thought, “this tastes weird and very sweet for how many calories it contains.” Re-checking the ingredients, I discovered sucralose!

How is this allowable?

I consider “sweet” to be a flavor, wouldn’t you? Since sucralose is a sweetener, the company should NOT be allowed to say “No artificial flavors.” Or if so, then immediately below, it must say “Sweetened with sucralose, an artificial sweetener.”

Otherwise this is just disingenuous, especially for people who don’t know what sucralose is (after all, it sounds like sucrose or glucose, but is not a real sugar).

So my complaints are:

• Companies should not be able to claim “no artificial flavors” while using an artificial sweetener unless clarified to exclude sweeteners (in the immediate vicinity of the text in question).

• When artificial sweeteners are used, they should be declared together (somewhere other than the ingredient list).

Alan Hogan

You can voice your opinion by emailing consumer@fda.gov.

The Proposition 8 Ruling (in simple language)

squashed:

On August 4, 2010, Federal Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that California’s Proposition 8, which prohibits California from recognizing same-sex marriage, is unconstitutional. The ruling was stayed pending appeal—which means that nothing will happen until a Federal Appeals court reviews it. As you might imagine, it will be appealed. The ruling itself is 138 pages long. I’ll summarize.

The previous lawsuit challenged Proposition 8 on procedural grounds. My post on that case is here. The California Supreme Court disagreed with me. Since the California Supreme Court gets the final say on the California Constitution, it got the last word.

The new suit was brought by two same-sex couples on different grounds. And, since it was brought in Federal court, the California Supreme Court doesn’t get a say at all. Something strange happened. California’s government was sued. The Attorney General said, essentially, “I agree that this thing is unconstitutional.” The other government groups said, “I’m not going to bother defending this.” So did a number of other people, including “ProtectMarriage.com - Yes on 8.”

The people who brought the lawsuit (“the Plaintiffs”) claimed two things. First, they claimed that marriage is a fundamental right under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. (There is some decent precedent on this—the only question is whether the protected marriage is the one man/one woman kind of marriage). If the 14th Amendment protects same-sex marriage, the court reviews the case using “strict scrutiny” which I’ll discuss below.

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GitHub Notifications

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I get many notifications on GitHub that I care very little about, but some of them I care very much about and want to hang onto.

So I currently have two practical options.

1. Migrate the important ones to other to-do managers or otherwise track them, and use “Mark All as Read” often.

2. Delete unimportant notifications and keep the ones I care about.

Neither is a perfect solution, as #1 involves significant work and #2 is a kind of mild data loss. (If a collaborator mentions a recent change I wanted to quickly find via the notification, I might have to go to the right project, branch, and then commit, instead of just scanning recent notifications.)

I suggest that GitHub allow me to star ★, flag ⚐, or pin important notifications while automatically marking all displayed notifications as “read” when I visit my notifications page.

This would allow a maximum of functionality (and flexibility) with a minimum of work.

★