I had to laugh about this exchange at foodnavigator-usa, titled with the industry-friendly headline, “Whether yogurt is a health food or junk food depends on who is talking.” (No, it’s not just he-said-she-said.)

I hope you've noticed that Dr. Pamela Peeke and I collaborated on an interview, posted just below this one on the blog. There'll be another one, too, when I'm done transcribing and editing the chat for a print version. The following isn't going to be in the edited version, for editor's reasons, but I neither did I want to let it slide completely from notice, also for obvious reason. We were talking about the good and bad things about being an author when she said,

Welcome to another episode of “10 Words or Less,” in which I ask brief questions of interesting people and ask brief answers in return. Today’s guest is vice president for business and social purpose at the PR behemoth Edelman, but has written for GreenBiz, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal on CSR and sustainability issues for years. Remember, “10 Words” is an ethic, not a limit, so to those of you at home, please, no counting. If you think it’s so easy, let’s see you do it on the fly.

Name Aman Singh
Born when, where New Delhi, India, Sept. 15.
The year? "Earlier in the decade of the gas leak in Bhopal."
Anything notable about the circumstances? "At that time, parents did not find out the sex of their child. My parents wanted a boy, had a boy’s name picked out, but they had a girl and stuck with the name."
How's that working for you? "I think it empowered me. My name in Punjabi, which is my native language, means peace. I’m quite the contrarian, but they had the right thought in mind."
Where do you live? "New Jersey."
Family circumstance "I’m happily married to a car geek, also from my hometown Delhi, and we have a 14-month-old son."
When did you move to the US? "2003."
An early influence outside your immediate family "A TV journalist in india, Barkha Dutt. She was one of the first women journalists to really emerge on the broadcast scene and report on hard issues like war."
First paying job "A small website in New Delhi focused on investigative journalism. I was just out of high school, waiting to hear back from my college choices, and I knew I wanted to do journalism but wasn’t really sure what that would involve. I was their first beat reporter, covering one the many political parties in New Delhi."

My committedly curmudgeonly friend Alex Beam used to have an evergreen column about people with the same names. I was always disappointed that when he wrote of the Doug Browns, he didn't include my pal Doug, of the ESPN Browns. (I seem to recall I may not be recalling this anecdote precisely, but I can count on Alex to correct me.)

Among the tidbits learned in our conversation: The only hint she'll give to her age, how to become a New York Times best-seller, and the unexpected wisdom culled from her many TV appearances. 

Aman and I had a great conversation, running about 27 minutes, about her and about her work as a stalwart in the fields of CSR and sustainability. She's been CSRwire's editorial director;  written for the Wall Street Journal, Greenbiz, Forbes, and others; and is now a veep at the PR firm Edelman. In a week or so, I'll also publish an edited-text version of the interview as well.

I’ve been reading the excellent report, “Kids Unbranded,” created by the Center for the New American Dream, and hope you will too. It does a wonderful job both stating the problems created by commercial exploitation of children and offering tactics that individuals can use to fight that exploitation.

Did you know that the first three characters ever typed on the Internet were L-O-L?

No, this is not a joke. It’s a tiny bit of knowledge identified as interesting by someone who does that all the time: Ira Flatow (right), founder and principle voice of the public radio show Science Friday.

On Oct. 24, he was interviewing Charlie Kline, who entered those (and other) letters on Oct. 29, 1969, but had never himself realized that that was kinda funny. Kline was telling the story of the first test of ARPANET, which became the Internet: He was at UCLA, and as a test run, tried to log into a computer at Stanford Research Center in Palo Alto. There were no names and passwords; to log into this computer, one typed, L-O-G-I-N. Kline said that when he typed L, it appeared on the screen in Palo Alto. Same when he typed O. But then the SRI computer crashed.

I wrote previously in response to Ted Kyle’s “three tribes of obesity” post, in which I reacted to the world as he described it, but I needed to return from another angle. In case you missed it, he identified the trio as Healthies, Quants, and Buttouts.

Writing on ConscienHealth, Ted Kyle talks about the three tribes of obesity, whom he labels the Healthies, the Quants, and the Buttouts.

It’s not hard to see where the sympathies of Kyle, chairman of the Obesity Action Coalition, lie, from his choice of descriptors: In his paragraph on the Heathies, he writes: