News You Can Bruise for 2005 March 31

I've told this story before, but when I was a kid my father would eat grapefruit halves for breakfast and I thought it disgusting. But recently I had the other half of a grapefruit my mother ate and it was still disgusting but not after I'd put sugar on it. Previously even sugar was not enough to disguise the foul taste of the grapefruit, but with sugar it was pretty good. Now I eat grapefruit all the time, though I don't yet have a special spoon for it. I guess your taste buds do change as you get older.

Then I started thinking about sugar and fruit in general and got totally lost. Why exactly is fruit good for you? I have been eating more fruit than I used to to satisfy my sweet tooth, but that's because it's chock full of fructose. The sugar named after fruit.

Obviously a mango is better than a slime moldcandy bar, because in addition to sugar the mango has fiber and vitamin chemicals, while the candy bar has fat and preservative chemicals. But is the mango really a good nutritional investment in an absolute sense? And what about fruit juice? This canned (bleah) 100% fruit juice on my desk says 180 calories and 37 grams of sugar. That's more calories and more sugar than a can of ginger ale. What does the fruit juice have that moves it from the tiny space on the top of the food pyramid into the middle?

I tried to figure this out with web searches but all I got was people telling me to eat fruit. I'm eating fruit! I just want to know what's in the fruit that makes it so great.

What's the deal with WIGU? The old strip ended, and after a couple weeks of messing around with other things, half the characters from the old strip showed up again and now it's like it was before. It's the Outland of web comics.

The Beautiful Soup 2.0 beta is available for a limited time only, before it becomes the real 2.0. Before I bless it I want other people to try porting their old code to the new version, but mainly to see if the new tree builder works as well as I think it does deciding how to build a parse tree out of bad HTML. All the other stuff is new features, so if you have to change your code, it's because your old code was a victim of the weird ways version 1.x parsed bad HTML. One fun way to test it is just load an HTML file into a BeautifulSoup and prettyPrint() it to see if the tags line up the way you think they should. It all depends on your idea of what's fun, of course.

Beautiful Soup 2.0 only works with Python 2.2 and above, which is unfortunate but I had to do that so I could subclass the string and Unicode types. Should a sufficiently large mob form outside my castle, I'll consider doing a version of the the new version that works with Python 1.5.2.