McDonald’s—the place where even healthy choices are anything but. Since 1955.

Real oatmeal contains no ingredients; rather, it is an ingredient. As such, it’s a promising lifesaver: oats are easy to grow in almost any non-extreme climate and, minimally processed, they’re profoundly nourishing, inexpensive and ridiculously easy to cook.

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[In] typical McDonald’s fashion, the company is doing everything it can to turn oatmeal into yet another bad choice. […] “Cream” (which contains seven ingredients, two of them actual dairy) is automatically added; brown sugar is ostensibly optional, but it’s also added routinely unless a customer specifically requests otherwise. There are also diced apples, dried cranberries and raisins, the least processed of the ingredients (even the oatmeal contains seven ingredients, including “natural flavor”).

A more accurate description than “100 percent natural whole-grain oats,” “plump raisins,” “sweet cranberries” and “crisp fresh apples” would be “oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.”

Right now, ebooks are a byproduct of paper books; the distribution and publishing process is identical, while the reading experience differs only slightly. The current crop of ebooks takes advantage of the digital format in as much as they permit you to carry more of them around than you could before; but other elements of the medium—“hyper” part of hypertext—are noticeably absent.

Many developers are sticking closely to a paper metaphor in apps used to read these books. The paper metaphor can be done away with. Books that play video and show passages others are highlighting don’t need “pages” with a fancy curl animation. Scrolling is a better method on a touch-based device, but probably isn’t the best answer. It will be interesting to see what other conventions are explored as devices and the format mature.

In a laboratory vault outside Paris is a small cylinder of platinum–iridium alloy that serves as the standard for all mass measurements worldwide. By an 1889 international accord, the mass of this metal cylinder defines the kilogram.

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The reference cylinder’s mass has drifted slightly through the years—not enough to throw off your bathroom scale, but enough to bother measurement scientists.

Researchers plan to discuss relating the kilogram to Planck’s constant.