Cooking, health and cognitive therapy for both

For now: This is a quickie "fieldstone" for a general Quality / gumption matter. Food can be very uninspiring if you let it be. And when you eat easy-to-find prepared food products what you see when you look in the mirror can be a real gumption drain too.

A lot of people, many of them guys, grew up without really getting cooking. A lot of non-guys might have, too, I can't speak with authority about that.

There's a Zappa song called The Dangerous Kitchen [lyrics here] which sort of sums up some of the concerns (warning: lyrics are not entirely polite). Frank himself is reported to have generally limited his own cooking to jabbing a fork into a hot dog right out of the 'fridge and then cooking it over a stovetop gas burner until it blackened -- the eponymous Burnt Weenie Sandwich.

Bob Scher wrote a nifty little book (out of print, dammit) called The Fear of Cooking, which I dearly love [short review here].

Comes now further news of a website called Cooking for Engineers -- well, actually, I'd heard about it a while ago.

The point of all that is that a lot of people are developmentally limited when it comes to cooking. And by the time they're adult it can be really easy to either lose gumption entirely or lose zest and just fuel the meat machine mechanically--and either way, wind up eating fast food and high-calorie low-quality foods like peanut butter straight off a spoon.

We can do better than that. I'm living proof. Or I hope to be, soon. :)

The last time I was close to "fightin' weight", I was so broke I managed to be on a sort of caloric restriction. Well, now I've got a high-quality pedometer -- a Yamax DIGI-WALKER SW200, thank you very much, with a precision pendulum movement, not the cheapass $12 clicky-ball P.o.S. from Big 5 -- and I'm deliberately parking at the wrong end of parking lots so I can put in at least one extra mile of walking, every day. But I still have the tendency to procrastinate and loll in bed until I have to rush to work, and then I can't do some of the walking-- no time!

My personal goal is to fill my mornings with morsels: low-glycemic-index, tiny wonderful tasting treats (there is a ginger mango CHEESE out there in the world; can you IMAGINE such a thing?); and use that as leverage to (a) get my ass out of bed with a spring in my step and (b) get me more concerned with the experience of gustatory Quality and less with stuffing my maw until the mass-market container of Food Court / Franchise {x} Bad Food is empty.

There's a wonderful story I want to relate about M. F. K. Fisher (it concerns her father, too), but that will have to wait.

I bet I lose weight and have fun too. Let's see if I'm right.

QOTD: freedom

freedom

My two dogs
tied to a tree
by a ten-foot leash
kept whining and howling for an hour
till I let them off.

Now they are lying quietly on the grass
a few feet further from the tree
and they haven't moved since I let them go.

Freedom may be
only an idea
but it's a matter of principle
even to a dog.

-- Louis Dudek

Amen, brother, amen.

Worthy of the Presidency

This Guy.

At the moment this video doesn't require registration to view. It's 26 minutes long. Make popcorn.

I'd vote for this guy over either of the major candidates in a New York nanosecond. He's got the Palin "outsider" thing and blackness and all sorts of stuff going for him.

Plus, I don't think he'd want the job. That's a winning element right there, along the Cincinnatus / Buckley "phone book" line (The number's up to 635 now, from 400, but you get the drift).

And I know he'd drop dead before appearing with a pre-Presidential seal on his podium.

Bat bloodstreams blown-out by blades?

OK, this is truly sad/strange. Calgary researcher seem to have found that an inordinate seeming number of bats are being killed by wind turbines not from outright collisions but due to the pressure drop near the lifting surfaces damaging the capillaries in their little batty lungs...

Sigh. Ain't nothin' simple.

A love not offered lightly

Please go to, read and sign this petition.

If you don't know of Rick Rescorla yet, you'll feel like a better person once you do.

QOTD: In Tenebris

I recall that people have been asking me to tell more about myself. Herewith, the motto of my house, as rendered by me with some assistance from an unnamed classicist: In tenebris omnia vexilli glaucus sunt. In serviceable English: In the dark all flags are gray.


Footnotes:
Latin doesn't actually have one word that means exactly "gray". "Glaucus" also means cloudy. "In tenebris" can also be translated as "in doubt".

Sometimes it gets to me

[Original draft date: 2008.06.20, approximately]
Yes, long time no blog. Today I want to talk briefly about innumeracy and incompetence. Two examples follow.

1. Recently on Winds of Change a visitor reactivated an old thread to tell the readers it's implausible (/impossible) a plane with an over-100-foot wingspan could only make a roughly round hole less than 20 feet in diameter in the Pentagon. I'm afraid we following posters were not kind to that person.

2. Lately, someone I know who sells electronic parts and tools has been being deluged with customers who want to build "hydrogen generators" for their cars, to "double their gas mileage". These people are not, it appears, able to respond numerately to my exploration: if they could double their gas mileage, it would probably mean that they are (at present efficiency) blowing enough hydrocarbons out their tailpipe to blind the drivers behind them: assuming 20 mpg, taking 3800 cc/gal, that's a specific fuel consumption of 190 cc per mile. Half that is about three fluid ounces of unburned fuel out the tailpipe every mile. Hmm. I don't think that's anywhere near the numbers I get when they smog my car, either standing still or on the dyno. I wonder why?

Yes, I know there are probably all sorts of "analyses" available for why that approach is wrong-headed, some even involving *gasp* math stuff -- work diagrams and stuff about how vigorously steam expands. But my point is that these guys who come in to the store are just Pumpkin-Eaters, as far as he or I can tell. They Want To Believe.

Folks, I don't have the time to grab each one of you and tell you "No. No, that's not happening." And you don't even want to hear it. What you want is to build your hydrogen generator, or spout your conspiracy theory, because that way it feels like you're not just some sort of passive spectator.

I understand the urge. It is being misdirected.

What's wrong with this picture?

Behold, I bring you The Immaculate Sol. Spotless, just the way the Holy Roman Church and countless scholastic authorities envisioned it before that pesky Galileo got up to his naughty antics with optics and revealed that usually, the sun has acne.

NOAA has changed their minds about whether our sun had 0 spots or one really tiny little zit when this picture was taken. Either way, we are at a stark solar minimum.

Why does this matter? Quoting from the Daily Tech:

Solar physicist Ilya Usoskin of the University of Oulu, Finland, tells DailyTech the correlation between cosmic rays and terrestrial cloud cover is more complex than "more rays equals more clouds". Usoskin, who notes the sun has been more active since 1940 than at any point in the past 11 centuries, says the effects are most important at certain latitudes and altitudes which control climate. He says the relationship needs more study before we can understand it fully.

See, solar activity affects the solar magnetosphere which affects the Earth's magnetosphere which changes how many and powerful are the cosmic rays that get through. Which might change the nucleation of clouds, which would change cloud cover, which would change net insolation at the ground and in the troposphere. Got all that?

More from the Daily Tech:

Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins.

But this year -- which corresponds to the start of Solar Cycle 24 -- has been extraordinarily long and quiet, with the first seven months averaging a sunspot number of only 3. August followed with none at all. The astonishing rapid drop of the past year has defied predictions, and caught nearly all astronomers by surprise.

In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion.

The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial.

I bet they did. See, protracted solar somnolence is correlated with Ice Ages (see: Maunder Minimum), and we all know that fad died out with Peter Gabriel's fan base, right? (His "Here Comes the Flood" was inspired by the idea that an ice age was upon us, with a side order of Nuclear Winter. I like the song, as a meditation on folly and fate... but.)

Zany madcap environmentalismist hijinks will doubtless ensue.

Phlat: the new phat?

1) Constant Readers will recall I wrote a post a while ago about the imminent death knell for the incandescent lamp. Another hurdle seems to have been crossed: LEDs are starting to become practical for use as rear-projection light sources to replace halogens. I give you the Luminus Technologies Phlatlight. "Phlat" is not just 'hood-speak, it's a contraction of "Photon Lattice". Wizzy tech/consumer article here.

2) Another thing with "flatness" in its name: There's an open-online-content textbook company starting up. Flat World Knowledge LLC. They hope to sell hard copies at a profit. Me, I want the fast feedback for corrigenda that this sort of thing could, and morally ought to, provide. Man, I hate spending $70 on a textbook and then finding out the author can't be bothered to publish fixes. Such as a certain de Anza College professor who wrote one of the the most popular college-course networking fundamentals texts extant. Ahem.

3) Then there's the new info about the Antikythera Machine, most of the works of which were probably cut from a single sheet of metal 2 mm thick. Permit me to direct you to this Winds of Change post where you'll find links in the original entry and in the follow-on comments. Show Joe Katzman some love, why don't you?