omenti

mean free paths - from pinafore to removing risk to custom design

It was a beautiful late Spring day and I found myself of singing a song from The Mikado as I strolled down West College past the Conservatory.  I'm not a good performer, but my rendition must have been recognizable as a chap walking next to me took the one of the other parts and we were doing a bit of harmony as our paths became a formation.  We stopped for the light, stopped and continued until we had finished.  I smiled and nodded.  He reciprocated, but then he started into the first song from  Pirates - We sail the ocean blue.  He had a strong voice and I followed him in whatever harmony I could muster.

 

We crossed the street and continued a block to the intersection next to the conservatory and more magic - two others joined and we continued walking until the song was over smiling broadly and nodding before we parted.

 

Oberlin, Ohio is a tiny town and we had all probably overshot our destinations as we sang together that day late in April 12 years ago.   It was a powerful manifestation of how serendipity - at least a certain type of serendipity - is possible when the mean free path between people with similar interests is small.

 

In physics mean free path roughly means the mean distance between objects that may collide - the mean free path between molecules in a very high pressure gas is less than that of one at a low pressure.  There is also a social mean free path and it is one of the reasons why cities, Silicon Valley, the restrooms and central atrium of Pixar, the old Bell Labs, and any number of other concentrations of talent are important.  Bring people within a few meters of each other and they interact.  Bring passionate and talented people within a few meters of each other and you may just get the unexpected.

 

These clusters may not be stable over time as people migrated - Brooklyn has become one of the East Coast regions that shrinks the mean free path between creative residents. Take a look at the Outlier video Om has featured for an excellent example of what a low mean free path can mean for someone interested in something novel in dungarees.  

 

Brooklyn has become so important for a certain type of young creative that the new Pixar building in California is known in some quarters as "Brooklyn"...  

 

Now back to Oberlin ..  There is enough talent in the Music Conservatory that it is possible for someone without great means (me) to have a piece of music composed.  You need to be tapped into the roots of the beast - I was an adjunct professor there for several years as part of a joint AT&T Research/Oberlin College Music Conservatory project.¹  This position gave me a rich interaction with students and faculty often into the wee hours of the morning with drink and good food.  Ideas would bounce around and people began to sense a few new possibilities that would normally remain hidden.  These things can and do happen over the Internet, but their cross section - the probability of them happened and being recognized as interesting - is much lower.  Our online environment, rich as it is,  is much less sophisticated and rich than the real world

 

Under the right conditions the Internet can decrease the mean free path between parties. Long distance mentor relations and even a few projects.  The problem is finding people well matched for serendipity and creativity.  A large amount of research has gone into creativity in individuals and groups.  To date online creativity - the connecting the dots/serendipity kind - is still a loooooooong way from face to face human interaction.  

 

But the Net can help creative enterprises - often at crucial movements.  Om has recently talked about Kickstarter.  Now most projects proposed on Kickstarter fail, but well thought out and articulated projects do succeed providing enough money to get them over a critical initial hump.  

 

Perhaps just as important is a funded project also gives insight into potential market size.  I know someone with a fairly well known podcast.  Some people had encouraged him to make a transcript of all of the shows aired to date available for sale.  Unfortunately the problem with this is he had about sixty hours of material and even the cheapest transcription services would introduce a risk of several thousand dollars if people didn't purchase the final product.  There was also an issue of understanding how to price it and if a print or ebook version should be made.  

 

He decided to turn it into a Kickstarter project and learned (a) there was a market large enough to support the transcription and editing effort, and (b) the price he picked was considered reasonable by those who bit - two absolutely vital pieces of information acquired with almost no risk.  His success gave me paused and made me think of a few small projects I've seen fail due to incorrect estimates of these questions.  

 

The Kickstarter approach may be superior to funding it yourself even if you have the money as it provides a sandbox to answer potential market size and price questions

 

One of you (the Jheri of the Jeri/Jerry/Jheris I know) happens to be very tall and hard to fit - not only clothing, but also airline seats, countertops, chairs and so on.  She introduced me to her taller friend Colleen.  Both of them don't think about their poor fit that often as you get used to your environment and learn to compromise, but being different can take a physical toll with bad backs being far too common in that crowd.  It is good to have friends like this as they provide a rich problem space you may not have considered.

 

I decided to work on a simple cutting board for Colleen who happens to love to cook.  It turns out there have been numerous studies on work surface positioning for almost every body type and physical condition.  It became clear a raised wooden board would be the best bet and I had one made for her as the cost of hardwood is so high that a woodworking shop could do it at a lower cost than I could and they would probably do a better job.   The owner of the shop became interested in the idea of making this a product and Colleen put together a page promoting it as she loved hers.²  A bit of asking around got the attention of a well-known women's tv show and they wanted to feature it.  The problem was they also demanded a copy be given to everyone in the audience in a special "tall" show.  In the end the cost of doing that was greater than the profit made selling these online.  The product remains as it is custom made for the user, but I don't think they have made  profit on it.  

 

In retrospect this may have been a great Kickstarter project.  Although it is custom made by a small shop the more important function of Kickstarter would have been gauging the size of the market before any major effort was undertaken.  It may also have allowed a volume purchase of hard maple as well as specialized shipping materials.

 

The other project that should have been done on Kickstarter was an attempt to make very long inseam jeans for tall women.  The designer spent about a year online lining up customers, finding a boutique manufacturer and so on.  He rounded up about 2,000 firm commitments that they would buy - enough to allow an initial low volume production run and sell them at a reasonable price.  Based on these commitments he went ahead with a somewhat smaller run to err on the side of caution thinking 500 or so would bring him close enough to break even that he could proceed.  Unfortunately only about 25 orders materialized and he lost a large amount of money.³  The beauty of Kickstarter is that not only must a threshold be reached to start a project, but the money will be there once the threshold is signup period has successfully concluded. 

 

We are moving to a world where individualization and shared design and intellectual property will become much more common.  The Maker movement provides some fuel for this and grassroot interaction street fashion is likely to become important. Sites like Etsy as outposts for the tiny manufacturers and spaces like Pinterest for matching interests with the makers.  There will probably be a lot of evolution and new thinking in this area - current sites and tools aren't up to the task.  We may be at a diamonds on the beach period.

_________

¹ At once the least musical and most mathematical faculty ever associated with the place

² It turns out the standard countertop height in the US is 36" and was determined in an ad hoc fashion when cabinets began to be mass produced for the great suburban expansion after WWII.  This turns out to be optimal for a 5'4 to 5'5" cook.  Significantly shorter or taller cooks will have ergonomic issues and those who are seriously away from average can experience pain bending or an inability to comfortably reach the surface.  On the tall side the threshold is around 5'10 - certainly cooks 6' or taller should use a higher surface.  The shop own and I both thought this meant a market might exist. If you think you might use one I can give a strong recommendation to AWP.

Before settling on a simple raised table I was interested in an adjustable board.  It presented a challange so I attempted to crowd source some solutions from readers of another blog of mine  here and here adding some notes on design. Some ideas were submitted, but nothing earth-shattering, so I went with a simple table.  There are times when brute force is appropriate.

³ It turns out 20:1, 50:1 or even 100:1 ratio between people who say they will order a product and those who follow through is common in apparel

________________

And a recipe.  I needed chocolate and pistachios recently.  In order to manage my weight and deal with Sukie's chocolate allergy a few neighbors had a happy evening.

 

Chocolate Pistachio Cookies
 

Ingredients

° 185 g  (6.5 oz) shelled pistachios

° 28 g (2 tbl) unsalted butter

° 115 g (4 oz) unsalted butter, sliced into tablespoons

° 115 g (4 oz) bittersweet chocolate, chopped - I used Lindt

° 1.5 tsp vanilla extract

° 60 g (1/2 cup) AP flour

° 35 g natural cocoa powder

° 1/2 tsp baking powder

° 1/2 tsp fine grained sea salt

° 100 g (1/2 cup) white sugar

° 2 large eggs 

° 1.5 tsp vanilla extract - you need the real stuff - mine is rum based

° 120 g chopped milk chocolate - again I used Lindt ..  reliable for baking

Technique

* Place one oven rack at the center of the oven and preheat to 350°F

° Line two cookie sheetswith a silicone mat or parchment paper.

° Spread the pistachios on an unlined baking sheet and bake for ten minutes until golden brown, Remove from oven and immediately add the 28g butter and stir well. Set aside to cool.

* Melt chocolate and remaining butter together in a microwave oven. Stir together until smooth and set aside to cool slightly as you beat the eggs. While the chocolate is melting combine the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt in a food processor and pulse to blend completely. 

* Combine the eggs and sugar and beat until they become pale yellow and light in texture. Stir in the chocolate. When it is mostly incorporated, add the vanilla. When the vanilla has been incorporated, add the flour mixture and stir gently to blend. When the flour is almost completely absorbed, add the pistachios and milk chocolate folding into the batter. It will be dark and shiny with a texture similar to marshmallow Fluff.

° Spoon about a heaping tablespoon (or 1.5 inch ice cream scoop) of dough onto the sheet tray for each cookie, arranging them in a 3X4 pattern on the tray. Bake the trays one at a time on the center rack in the oven for 10-12 minutes. The cookies will rise slightly, develop a shiny crust and appear to be just set. Let them cool for two minutes and then loosen the bottoms from the lined tray. Let them finish cooling on the sheet trays or move them to racks depending on the final texture you want - experiment the first time.

 

 

 

homeward bound

 

Homeward bound 
I wish I was 
Homeward bound 
Home, where my thought's escaping 
Home, where my music's playing 
Home, where my love lies waiting 
Silently for me 

....

 

Home is one of those loaded words that brings to mind a certain image for many even though it has a much broader meaning.¹

 

Pip, Dave and others in that team have been using it to talk about an important aspect of how companies can deal with customers ...  sort of a peace of mind that is quite different from low prices, product selection and so on.    I'm probably not using the concept in exactly the same way, but hearing about it from them recently caused me to reflect on some organizations that are good at it.  I suspect it is something best accomplished face to face and may be a powerful tool for brick and mortar stores as online ordering becomes more prevalent.  There may be some interesting ways of addressing it online too.

 

There are a lot of examples where it breaks too...  shopping suggestions based on prior searches and visits annoy me to no end.  It reminds me of Masahiro Mori's "uncanny valley" - a hypothesis that as robots begin to look and act like humans there is a point where we sense they are imperfect copies and that grates on us.  Inferior models are preferable.  Pixar is very aware of this effect and are careful to stray into the region as they found rather dramatically in the animation Tin Toy about twenty years ago and other works have been burned - famously Polar Express.  I suspect a huge amount of social understanding and much more sophisticated techniques will be required to make interacting with these online ads less negative to many of us.  

 

Many of you think about this more deeply than I do and I'd love to hear your experiences and insight.  To start things off I put together a short list of a few recent experiences in brick and mortar stores and something a bit more personal to illustrate a positive sense of being understood and cared for even though the interactions were with strangers for very short amounts of time.  In all three cases there is a very careful selection of staff along with a considerable amount of training.  The experiences were all powerful and left with with a strong images of a company that is doing something right.

 

Lululemon

About a month ago and friend and I were in Manhattan trying to understand a bit more about street fashion and its possible future directions given new technologies and rich online social networking.  Our base camp was the Lincoln Center area as Fashion Week was underway and the street fashionistras were curious about the shows as well as showing off what they had done and watching others - it was something of a sartorial scene.  Out of curiosity we found ourselves in a Lululemon across the street.  

 

Last week I was taking a gelato gelato break from some street fashion interviews with J across from Lincoln Center.  On the way back we walked by a Lululemon Athletica store.  She made the comment that she hadn't been in one, but some of the women she knew in the US who did yoga were passionate about the place and were regularly dressed in their togs.  So we went in… as two tourists…

J happens to look like a model, and also happens to be in great physical shape (she runs an hour a day and bicycles everywhere).  She tried yoga, but finds it frustrating and gave it up.  I happen to not look like a model.  I tried yoga a decade ago and quickly gave it up as I just couldn't get my mind and body to couple with the experience.  Both of us recognize it has a passionate fandom, but we're not part of it so we were visitors from a foreign land.

As she looked through the clothing a salesperson approached and asked if she was here for fashion week, where she was from etc.  Then came a few yoga questions with J noting that she didn't have much luck with it and considered herself a more kinetic personality.  The salesperson (very personable) noted a lot of people have issues like that and finding the right trainer can be a deal breaker - she said she could recommend several who specialized in working with people who were left with a distaste.

J then introduced me noting she rarely visits the city, but that I have similar issues. The salesperson asked a few questions and said she could link me with trainers who specialize in working with men and there were a few in my area of New Jersey.  Up to this point there was no sales pitch to J.  She consulted a sheet and wrote down some phone numbers for me.  

In the meantime J was looking at clothes and was told she would probably be too difficult to fit as she is very tall and thin.  She asked another woman who came over and said J could try on a top, but it probably wouldn't fit.  She knew of someone in the city who had a specialized business making custom athletic clothing for women.  She Googled on her iPhone and sent J the contact information.  

Our ten minute visit left us with a warm feeling that an effort had been made for both of us when a sale was impossible.  The feeling was a yoga lifestyle was being sold - the clothing was incidental.  J liked the styling and quality of the clothing, but felt it was overpriced - but she added:  "this isn't really a clothing store, is it?"  

They clearly wanted to make sure we both had had a proper trainer before abandoning us to a yoga-free life.  The fact that I was male and would never use their products didn't seem to make much of a difference.  I've seen similar behavior at Apple Stores.  A key point is these people really aren't salespeople (I shouldn't have used that term), but provide service instead and have a high degree of integrity.  I've seen that time and time again at Apple Stores, Trader Joe's and suspect it is true here.  

As we walked out we went past the Manhattan Mormon Temple …  an interesting juxtaposition …

 

Apple

 Apple Stores are almost always too busy, but somehow the sales guys manage to find you without being too intrusive.  You are encouraged to play with the products and the atmosphere is such that other customers often offer their own comments and suggestions.  The only pressure I've ever felt wasn't that great - mainly being encouraged to purchase AppleCare when I buy a computer.

 

The sales people do not work on commission and can route you to others if you have very specific questions.  Trouble shooting of existing product is done at the "genius bar" and the stores offer one-on-one training.  I've been visiting the stores since the first opened in New Jersey and note how much they've changed as the company learns more about retail and its customer mix changes.  There is a nearly constant experimentation and the overall quality of experience is kept high throughout.

 

The ability to help people with various skill levels use their computers is remarkable.  They have a few classes, but increasingly they offer one on one training using a full or part time employee who is expert at teaching and a few applications.  A friend spent $99 for this service and spent about 20 hours learning fine points of a serious video editing program taking him much futher along than he was able to get using books on the subject.  A user group meeting even meets in this Apple Store (in Manhattan on West 14^th St - sort of ground zero for that sort of thing)

 

I was interested in how a new AirPlay enabled amplified speaker might be sold.²  The speaker is the product of a medium to high end European audio company and it is one of their first excursions into the larger consumer market.  I approached clerks at several Apple Stores and was routed to their audio expert.  All of them gave the right advice for me - that this amplified speaker wasn't going to make me happy and I could put something together on my own for much less and almost no effort.  Three of them made lists of what to buy elsewhere.  How novel - get the maximum value out of what you own rather than buy something expensive - even though the item I originallly asked about is sold by the Apple Store.

 

Trader Joe's

I suspect many of you have shopped at Trader Joe's.  It may or may not be to your taste, but it caters to people who like a curated selection of a certain class of food.  We're often struck how much we identify with other customers as well as the clerks.

 

Channeling Barry Schwartz and Steve Jobs, they limit product selection to make the experience easier.  They cheerfully refund the inevitable disaster purchase, allow you to taste products in the store, offer advice and, most important - they watch and listen.

 

Information is gathered from employees and customers and is frequently acted on.  A friend worked in one for a few years and noted several customers wanted their particular store to open an hour earlier.  The store put it to a customer vote, found there was general support and that particular store now opens at 6am.  I suspect their information gathering system is much more powerful than massive data mining attempts by others...  Knowing your business and customers well enough to listen makes a huge difference.

 

personal chef

I've had a personal chef cook for me a few times as a present.  G. is the brother of a close friend and is amazingly talented.  More important is the fact that he listens and tries to come up with an experience involving fresh food, your own tastes, and his experience and inventiveness.  He loves to give surprises and walk you in directions you have never been.

 

I can only decribe him as passionate.  The experience starts with a trip to a farmer's market earlier in the day with you picking up things you like and letting you sample other items that might work out well.  There is a conversation about food and he's building models of what might work in his mind as the trip progresses - it is clear he never uses recipes.

 

The cooking experience, at least for me, involves me helping out as I want to learn technique and he's a great teacher.  To this day we still have email conversations about interesting things to do about food and he almost makes me feel welcome even though many of my ideas are probably naïve.  

 

His goal is not to cook a spectacular meal, but rather to spark a passion for food and cooking in me.  To this end he's also interested in learning what I can offer - sort of the physics of cooking and some of the chemistry involved.  This is so much better than a restaurant experience - so much deeper and more personalized and it inspires me to cook for quite some time afterwards.

____

 

None of this  is rocket science, but rather the hiring of passionate workers along with clear policies of doing right by the customer.  In most cases the product being sold only enhances what the customer is really after and it is up to the organization to make that desired experience central rather than the product itself.  Only a few organizations manage to pull that off.  

 

It may be helpful to have additional information available, but only if it enhances the ultimate goal.  And most remarkably it makes a lot of sense to recommend services and products that the company does not offer if it makes the most sense.  

 

One can imagine that happen as a community based experience online as well as in hybrid online/brick and mortar mixed model. Some - like street fashion - are probably best done by the mixture.  

 

I suspect getting this right takes a lot of common sense as well as the experimentation and honing that Apple and Trader Joe's are constantly performing.  You need passionate employees and a structure that gives them a bit of freedom and treat them fairly.  Your best employees may come from the pool of your most enthusiastic customers.  Commissioned sales probably poison the process as the optimization shifts from the customer to the employee.

 

Most of all drawing up this list makes me reflect on my own practice.  Am I bringing the appropriate passion to what I do and am I finding what my client is really after rather than what I - or they - may think on the surface?  My greatest value is probably helping people connect the dots where they didn't see connections before ...  other things may not matter as much to either of us.

 

So what are your favorite companies and what makes them special?  What about your passions - are they well supported?  Feel free to add your comments!

_________

ok - I mentioned cooking, so it is time for another recipe. This is my chocolate chip cookie recipe.  It is decidedly not healthy, so don't make it all the time.  It is simple, but a bit strange and has a long resting time in the refrigerator before baking.  Not exactly the Toll House recipe.  Although I don't really measure in cooking, I use a scale for everything in baking.  If you bake a lot you need to get a good scale accurate to the gram!

This one came out of the realization that all purpose flour is a compromise, so I use a mixture of bread and cake flour.  The cookies need to be large to take advantage of this mixture and it produces a soft and moist interior with an exterior with a nice crunch.  Make sure your ingredients are fresh!  I am a big fan of King Arthur flours.  Also - I am addicted to eating a bit of the raw cookie dough.  This isn't safe unless you use pasteurized eggs.

 

Monster Chocolate Chip Cookies 

ingredients

240g cake flour

240g bread flour

1.25 tsp baking powder 

1.25 tsp baking soda

1.5 tsp kosher salt

2.5 sticks butter (fresh and high quality!)

225g white sugar

285g light brown sugar

2 large eggs (pasteurized if you sample raw cookie dough like me)

2 tsp vanilla extract (I make my own with vanilla beans and rum and time for aging)

550g 60% to 70% bittersweet chocolate.  I like Lindt in the thin sheets and break them into bits about the size of a nickel

150g chopped pecans or walnuts 

small amount of large crystal sea salt (Maldon)

method

° sift dry ingredients into a bowl

° cream the butter and sugars in another mixing bowl until light and smooth - about 3 or 4 minutes on a medium speed with an electric mixer for me.  Add the eggs one at a time mixing well after each.  Add the vanilla.  Now add the dry ingredients and mix at low speed until just combined.  Don't overmix!!  About 10 seconds for me.  By hand carefully mix in the nuts and chocolate pieces.

° press the dough into a plastic wrap and tightly wrap into an airtight package.  Refrigerate for a day or so.  I usually go for a day to 36 hours.  There is a very slow chemical reaction going on and baking sooner won't produce the same result.

° preheat oven to 350°F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper

° scoop some large mounds of the dough into golf ball sized globs (I have a four ounce round scoop).  Some of the chocolate chunks will stick up - push them flush.  I go for about six cookies for my sheet to give them room to expand - these are BIG DANGEROUS COOKIES.

° sprinkle each with a bit of Maldon salt and bake until golden brown.  About 20 minutes in my oven (which runs just a bit cool).

° the leftover dough will keep a few days if you want several days of warm monster cookies that are fresh.

Also - Sukie is allergic to chocolate and I make a version with dried fried and more nuts that is pretty good.  If you aren't using chocolate, skip the Maldon salt finishing step - salt pairs well with chocolate, but not dried sweet fruit.

 

 

 

___________

¹ In my Human Computer Interaction department we kept track of some of these and tried to avoid them when there could be a misunderstanding.  Community is another example.

The lyric sniplet is from Simon and Garfunkel's Homeward Bound.  If you don't have a copy, you need one.

² Airplay allows to to wirelessly stream content from Macintoshes, iPads, iPhones and so on to any stereo system or TV in your house.  Content can be on any of the devices or from iCloud.  Properly executed it can add a good deal of flexibility to a home system.

 

 

empathy at the foot of a dangerous academic

Last night, on the train ride back from the city, I found myself thinking about the last post on ignorance and empathy.  

 

The reason for the trip was a semi-annual get-together that Pip Coburn hosts.  There were several sessions built around themes and I tend to go to a few where I might know a little as well as others - like story telling and marketing - where my ignorance is great in hope of picking up a bit in case I want to start down those paths.  Ignorance is a fine thing as long as it is a conscious and even a cultivated ignorance. 

 

It reminded me of the period when I was trying to learn a bit about sociology, psychology and anthropology in order to interact with my Human Computer Interface department at AT&T Research a decade and a half ago.  That was a wonderful time.  You know so little that the possibility space is great and I had several wonderful tutors to help me as I played.  I knew that most of the engineering problems were solvable, but the social problems were deeper - this interaction of the social and technical worlds was really interesting.

 

One of the anthropologists who worked there got in touch a few years ago and asked if I knew Sam Richards of Penn State.  I didn't, but ended up getting in touch and talking and visited.  

 

A fascinating guy.  He's a sociologist and was called one of the "101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" by David Horowitz.

 

sweet

 

One of his core notions is that empathy is at the heart of sociology if you want to be really good at it.  Rather than bore you with my filtered version of what I learned from him, I'll point you at his TED^x talk.   

 

Trust me - it is well worth your time.  He'll challenge you.

 

___________

ok - I took the easy way out and put up a video, so I owe you something.  Last night two people needled me about not posting any recipes in awhile, so here is one that worked out wonderfully.  And please write if you have any positive or negative comments.  I get very little feedback and, as a result, tend to treat this as a weekly journal rather than a conversation.

 

A note on my recipes.  I have a tendency not to measure, but keep rough track in the event something works (I do carefully measure when baking and usually start with a recipe as a guide - cooking is so incredibly different from baking).  I also tend to weigh rather than use volume measurements and the kitchen is metric.  

 

Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Parsnips

 ingredients 

4 parsnips (about 750g total for me)

4 medium red onions

150g really good extra virgin olive oil

2 sprigs rosemary

4 sprigs thyme

1 head of garlic (let how much you love garlic be your guide on what a head means)

2 medium (or one really big) sweet potatoes - about 600g 

24 to 30 cherry tomatoes (they weren't in season, but they seemed necessary)

2 tbl lemon juice

4 tbl capers roughly chopped

1/2 tbl maple syrup

1/2 tsp Dijon mustard (pick a good one)

salt and pepper

 method

° Heat the oven to 375°F

° Peel the parsnips, cut horizontally in half and then lengthwise a few times.  I aimed for about 2 x 1/2 inch pieces.

° Peel the onions and cut into 6 or 8 wedges

° Put the parsnips and onions into a large bowl and add about 3/4 of the oil along with the rosemary,  thyme and garlic (I cut the cloves about in half).  Mix well with a fair amount of salt and some pepper.  I like a good sea salt here (Maldon).  Spread on a baking pan and roast for about 20 minutes

° Take the top and bottoms off the sweet potatoes and then cut in half across the middle and then wedge each of them - maybe about 8 wedges from each half. Add them to the baking sheet with the heated parsnips and onions and bake about 45 minutes more.  You are looking for a golden color.

° Now they have cooked mix in the halved tomatoes and continue roasting for another 10 minutes or so.

° During the last roast whisk the lemon juice, capers, maple syrup, mustard and the remaining oil and salt it with a sea salt.

° Take the veggies out of the oven and drizzle with the dressing.   Stir and fool with the seasoning just in case.

° You can dress it up with roasted chopped walnuts or pecans - I like pecans:-)

 

Finally I had to do a cake for a very colorful friend's 60^th birthday.  Thinking about the tune from the Stones made me realize white cake and a bit of food coloring might work out pretty well.  

 

My guess is kids woud really love this too.  Make nice scratch white cake (much better than the mixes) and a good buttercream frosting.  I think coloring the frosting would be overkill, but use the person as a guide:-)

 

no pantones were harmed in the making of the cake...

 

trying to stay on track and finding some great questions along the way

Fourteen months ago I started a serious weight loss program that successfully transitioned into a weight maintenance program about three months ago.  Along with the weight loss and the associated benefits and problems that come with that, many questions presented themselves and finding answers and new questions has been a rich experience.

 

Some of the high points have been learning that, at least for me, losing the weight was much easier than maintaining it.  It turns out this is generally true and most diets end in failure.  Specialists in the field are not joking when they say “the best way to gain weight is to go on a diet.”  Why this is happens to be a rich area of academic study.  The general explanation most people use is the body needs less energy due to less weight to support, lower muscle mass, and a shifted metabolism.  But why does the urge to eat more than what the body needs at its new weight exist?  Is this relate to “plateauing” in weight loss?  What are the biochemical signaling links?  Why is this predominately unidirectional (why is it that underweight people are usually more successful gaining and keeping weight)? How much of this is genetic?  How much is epigenetic? ...

 

Curiously the exact energy available to us in food is only approximate.  Calorie charts must be viewed with a bit of skepticism, but they are still essential for tracking and it isn't terribly important that their listing may not match what your body is really doing - especially when what you eat doesn't dramatically shift.  You can learn to deal with the bias.  The same is true - but even more so - for exercise.  You can infer some of these relationships and adjust your calculations, like the Caloric calculations, with a weighting coefficient.  If you aren't into this sort of detail just adjust your intake downwards and/or increase your exercise if you are slowly gaining with time.

 

There are a pile of open questions and research is only beginning to probe some of them. Of course a magic bullet would be worth billions to the drug companies and many of them have tried to crack the problem with no luck.  The diet business is filled with pseudoscience and terrible nutrition advice.  Some of it may be good, some is neutral but doesn’t cause harm, and some of it is downright dangerous.  The best paths - and the best segments of the population - for dealing with the epidemic of obesity still are unclear, although prevention is probably the cheapest and most effective option at this point.

 

The fundamentals of controlling weight for someone who has never been overweight are well known, but the current level of inactivity coupled with the easy availability of low quality good make this difficult.  You would think children are important and in need of protection, but there are no signs they are well protected from this epidemic which seems to be lowering projected adult life spans in many countries.

 

In theory it is easy - eat good food, but don’t overeat, and get enough exercise.  Sadly that is impossible for the majority of the population.  

 

I’ve been overweight so I have to fight signals that my body is sending to return to a higher weight.  This means I have to monitor my activity and food intake.  Doing this isn’t too difficult with a little software assist as well as exercise coaching from a friend - basically I’m using techniques similar to those I used to lose weight, but with a different target on my daily energy balance. There are indications that the best techniques for losing weight and maintenance are somewhat different.¹  I keep a daily journal, but don’t worry about being a few hundred Calories over target here and there as long as I can cancel that excess from other days - I try to have a weekly balance where  my energy intake minus my energy expenditure are equal to my energy need.  Setting goals and giving myself rewards also seems to work for me.

 

To help with self-motivation I’m going to post the last nine months of my weight chart every few months.  It will be embarrassing to record a gain.  For background my doctor suggests the ideal weight given my height, age and bone structure is somewhere around 155 pound - conveniently close to the 70 kg assumption for a standard human used in many medical calculations.  He initially asked me to drop to something under 170.  

 

There could be some tools to make this easier and I’ll probably write one for my specific case.  I found it important to understand my regular daily energy requirement without extra exercise and had to extract that from my daily logs.  The number I come up with is about five percent lower than the standard medical calculations suggest and are probably related to a shifted metabolism.  Very interesting stuff!

 

Currently I’m experimenting on when I should be eating to feel most satiated. Earlier experimenting showed that taking my time to eat was important - one must learn to savor food, which has a real benefit of encouraging you to learn to become a better cook.  I suspect this is unlikely to generalize, but it is clearly useful for me if I’m to get to a point where I don’t have to monitor as much as I do.  In talking with some experts at Yale and the University of Toronto I’m coming to the realization that people who are successful in holding a proper weight after a significant weight loss (over 10% of their weight) need to be vigilant for at least a decade and possibly much longer before the body readjusts.

 

In the meantime I’ve learned that one needs to have quality food and real treats at times - as long as you don’t overdo it.  So there is no reason why you can’t make some delicious things. I can recommend Talenti gelato for example:-)

 

So apologies for something this personal and narrowly focused, but I suspect some of you have this issue or have family members who are trying to get to and maintain a healthy weight.  If so I strongly recommend using it as a learning experience and be able to sort out all of the snake oil.²  Informed common sense is very important in this game.  Just remember - losing weight isn’t easy, but is much easier than keeping it off.

________

¹ My physician was very impressed with the success of my weight loss program.  The core learnings I had were I needed exercise and Caloric restriction - neither was sufficient by itself, although food restriction is much easier than enough exercise. A nonjudgmental exercise coach was very important.  I would not have had the motivation without her help.  Support from family and friends was also very important.  Being a vegetarian probably helps as does cooking most of your own food.  Weight has to come off slowly - nothing faster than 3%  month or you will probably fail.  And finally you have to let yourself eat healthy and delicious food - it isn't worth the effort if you are eating cardboard.

Note there is evidence long term success in keeping weight off is different from weight loss - here is an interesting resource. (pdf)

Then they looked for patterns among what successful losers do and patterns among what successful maintainers do. And they found significant differences. For example, people who exercised consistently or ate plenty of lean protein were almost twice as likely to succeed in weight maintenance. People who engaged in a variety of exercise activities or planned their meals ahead were about two and a half times as likely to lose weight.

For losers, the most statistically significant behaviors:

• Eating a lot of fruits or vegetables
• Eating healthy snacks
• Limiting the amount of carbohydrates eaten
• Controlling portions
• Doing different exercise types

For maintainers, the most statistically significant successful:

• Eating a lot of low-fat protein
• Following a consistent exercise routine
• Reminding yourself of the need of controlling weight

There was only one behavior highly significant among both losers and maintainers:

• Thinking about how much progress you’ve made

From the study 14 behaviors were associated with either loss or maintenance but not both.

More important for loss than for maintenance:

• Participate in a weight loss program
• Look for information about weight loss, nutrition, or exercise
• Eat healthy snacks
• Limit sugar
• Plan your meals and snacks ahead of time
• Avoid skipping meals - especially breakfast
• Do variety of exercise types
• Do exercises you enjoy
• Think about how much better you feel when you are thinner

More important for maintenance than for loss:

• Eat a lot of low-fat high protein foods
• Follow a consistent exercise routine
• Reward yourself for maintaining your weight
• Remind yourself why you need to control your weight
• Journal what you eat and how much you exercise

A rich source of scientific work in this area is the open access Journal of Obesity.

 

² The pseudoscience associated with the diet and nutrition industry is awful. It turns out weight loss isn't difficult using any number of techniques, but few are effective in the long term and some are unsafe. ping me if you ever want more information..

 

the intersection of tech, art and the social - and the beginnings of change

People are often perplexed when they learn I have an interest in fashion. No one has successfully accused me of being a snappy dresser or understanding trends, but it does happen to be one of those areas with rich and dynamic intersections of other fields - specifically the arts, social sciences, and technology.  It also happens to be an enormous worldwide industry and one that is likely to undergo enormous change in the next decade or two.  Observing and trying to understand a developing revolution is, for me, time well spent.  If Apple has Apple TV as a hobby, this is sort of my hobby at this point..

 

About two weeks ago I visited Fashion Week in New York mostly to observe and listen.  I set up a few interview sessions, spent a bit on snacks and coffee and went into learning mode.  After thinking about the experience for awhile, I wrote a brief note to capture what seemed significant.  The note went out to a few people and two encouraged me to expand it in a blog.  To save time I’ll do the next best thing.  Here is the letter followed by some other comments that may be of greater interest to this group. (for those who have read it, I changed a few bits)

 

I have an interest in the social mechanisms of fashion, the changes being driven by a shift in communication modalities and emerging changes in manufacturing and distribution.  Fashion Week in NY is a good place to observe and ask questions.  I have a close friend who happens to be a well known model - this is her fifth year,  She has her own perspective and helps getting contact with interesting people.  This year talking to some small designers as well as the street fashion people and some fashion bloggers.

 

I went in on three days and the two of us talked to about 20 young women, a few other models and some people associated with one name and three small labels.  It turns out that a top model is attracts a lot of attention among the young street fashion types.  There were four discussions in a cafe with five or six of them at a time running an hour or so each.  I bought the coffee and a few pastries (the beer and pizza technique and the cheapest way I know to conduct this sort of interview).   The labels were by separate introduction.  It is good to know fashion royalty.

 

The industry has a very convoluted structure that defines a series of "looks" for a season and has rather strictly defined roles and information sources (last year I sat down and came up with a diagram showing the flow of information, material and money at a high level - ugh).  This traditionally comes out of an interplay between the designer and influential magazine editors. Prototypes are show to buyers who must sort out what will work in their stores about six months down the road.  Orders are placed and a rather clunky mass production web starts into action. Recently the time from prototype buy decision to delivery to the shelf has been dramatically tightened - down to a few weeks.  A few retailers (Zara, H&M,etc) have achieved a more or less constant flow of new fashion that is less coupled to the traditional model.

 

Fashion distinguishes itself from apparel by being all about an out of band communication - one that tends to be more important for women than men (and nearly non-existent in people like me). Its social nature means someone usually goes to a store and puts together the basis for combinations of pieces using what is available as a their pallet.   There is a lot of reference to what other people are doing and this is shifting away from the magazines -- quickly in fact. Fashion sites and blogs, at this point, have probably replaced physical magazines as a core sources of ideas.  The magazines all seem to have their sites, but the street fashion people and their followers aren't paying much attention.  There seems to be an explosion of interest in street fashion over the past few years.

 

Bringing up the subject of Pinterest brought a lot of conversation and debate.  It is clear there is a love/hate relation with it …  mostly love from the sample I spoke with.  It seems to be a natural extension of the pinboarding activities common among teenage girls - only it is now distributed to a larger group.  It involves this same out of band communication - or at least part of its vocabulary and I suspect it can be considered basic.  It certainly isn't optimized and one suspects more specialized versions will either emerge organically and/or be supported by Pinterest.  It is not the sort of thing I can imagine Google or Facebook - or Apple or Amazon for that matter - pulling off well.  I can imagine some of them getting involved as partners.

 

In the twenty and early thirty year old group Facebook is still a necessity - but something that can be frustrating and isn't the sort of thing people find cool anymore.  Time is still being spent there, but some of the apparel makers I spoke to suggested FB has almost no value to their business. They all have presences, but none of them can show the time and money they have put into it has been rewarded. Pinterest, on the other hand, is already making a change and driving business.  It is much more closely linked to the model of how some people communicate what "the look" will be - at least among their group.

 

"The look" is something very important that needs a lot of consideration.  It used to be dictated, but now there is a lot of communication from people who wear clothing.  There are still constraints as the pallet of available clothing is limited, but that is changing as mass customization emerges.  The industry has always been plagued by misjudging what the look and in recent years there have been more mistakes than the sour economy might suggest among the major players.  It is probably part of the growing disconnect between magazines and the consumer as the later group patches into different sources of active and passive communication. 

 

The structure of the industry is cumbersome and reminds me of the talent/production/distribution mechanism of the music industry fifteen years ago.  To the labels the end customer is really the store buyer - not the consumer.  Similar to the cellphone manufacturers - where most see the mobile service providers as their primary customer, and the four ecosystems - where Google and Facebook have different primary customers than the end user. In the examples of the music and fashion industries this creates opportunity.

 

There was an awareness of mass customization.  Most see the real benefit as better sizing, but freedom of personalization is also a benefit.  This is interesting as the size variation of the groups I was with is much less than the general female population (they were all young and mostly thin) where the need for better sizing is much stronger.   I brought up Threadless vs a few others as examples of image customization and a few of the shoe companies.  In general the Threadless model was preferred - very interesting as it is also constrained.

 

Many other questions come to mind, but time was limited and I was mostly injecting questions along with my model friend (who is absolutely great at this) and observing.    

 

I'd hate to be in the fashion magazine business

 

Separately my friend notes, and I saw a few examples, of how the catwalk itself is changing.  Tech is mixing in as part of the art, but also video is important.  All of the important shows were streamed and most had expert commentary and/or community commentary - almost like a sporting event. Some of the labels produced separate video spots that allowed a much closer look at the piece and there was experimentation with letting the model have a personality.  Probably due to the economy there were more beginning B-list models being used …  the sort who will probably not walk next season.  The whole notion of what a model does seems to be changing a bit, although high fashion runway models are still pretty much unchanged from those 10 years ago.  I'm told catalog modeling has seen a much larger shift as online catalogs become more important - things to say on the modeling piece, but I'll stop here…

 

A few additional observations:

 

° iPads, iPhones and MacBook Airs were everywhere.  The great majority of those I spoke to had Apple kit and 100% had smartphones. I asked a few questions and the fact this group has bought into the Apple platform is key.  Their music is from iTunes, apps are *extremely* important, and the Air is the only laptop they consider.  Granted this group is obsessed with style and fashion, but there is certainly no movement to Android.  I was frankly amazed by the acceptance of the Apple platform. 

 

° Most of them owned iPads.  It is seen as being hired for a different task than the iPhone or the Air, but the fact that these products link up and synchronize through the cloud mostly seamlessly was important.  The cafes I used had net and there were people, mostly women, watching the walks in being streamed live from the runways across the street.  There was a lot of social commentary going on face to face (ear to ear?) as well as in chat windows and text messages.  Twitter seemed to be an important space for commentary. Facebook seemed absent.

 

° People couldn’t stream to their phones or iPads.   An iPad linked to WiFi might seem to be the ideal viewing platform, but it was impossible as Flash was used.  They complained about the failure, but didn’t blame Apple.  The blame goes to whoever was doing the streaming.  There were also complaints about poor cellular service in the area - again it was not seen as Apple’s responsibility.  Flash on tablets and phones really is a non-starter at this point.

 

° Space doesn’t permit me to write the pages I learned about street fashion, which may be a central piece of the developing future as magazines lose influence and the process of fashion becomes even more social.  Material, money, and information flows are all in the process of changing.

 

° The backstage use of iPads surprised me.  I don’t think I’ve seen that density outside an Apple Store.  There appear to be several important custom apps as well as regular commercial apps.  One young designer joked that they are moving to the paperless atelier...  Steve Jobs would not approve that I saw a few people frantically sketching with a conductive stylus for last second visual notes to be communicated to others.  There was also a great deal of photographic annotation.  

 

__________

And a recipe or two!

 

After a few people saw this post, two wrote and asked where are the recipes?  OK - here is a fun one with a bit of science.  But first a word on measurements.

 

Most of my recipes have approximate measurements.  When cooking with fresh ingredients it is often necessary to adjust for the freshness and taste of the ingredients as well as your own tastes.  I'll try to supply weight and volume measurements, but encourage you to move to just weight for anything that isn't a liquid at the very least when amounts are important - some types of cooking and most types of baking.  Get an electronic kitchen scale that can tare - it will change your life in the kitchen.  Good enough ones aren't expensive.  I use the  EatSmart Precision Pro- about $25.

 

Now on to the food!

 

Maillard Reaction Squash in a Pressure Cooker

 

The Maillard reaction is this wonderful event that takes place between an amino acid, a reducing sugar and some heat.  Without going into details a complex mixture of molecules forms that are involve in the flavors and smells of many foods.  The browning of meats, the browning on toast, french fries, fried onions, roasted coffee, the browned sections of cakes and cookies.  In short it has a fundamental importance in baking and cooking.

 

Most of these reactions begin at around 300°F, although some start much lower - perhaps 250°F.  It would be nice to cook with the reaction, but in a boiling or immersed environment.  The trick is to use a pressure cooker.  Most will go to 15psi - pushing the interior boiling temperature to something past the threashold for some of the reaction.  Physics just works - increase the pressure of the gas over water and the boiling point increases.

 

It would be wonderful to get that great taste on something like squash in a pressure cooker.  It turns out a bit of experimentation shows the way.  Some of the experiments didn't work, but were edible none the less.  Adding a bit of baking soda increased the reaction just enough to make everything work (alkali environments generally encourage the reaction - we're sitting on the fence at 15psi and need to be pushed just a bit)

 

This one works:-)  

ingredients

° 55g (4 tbl) unsalted butter

° 0.75kg (1 1/2 lb) delicata squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into half inchish cubes

° 1/2 lemon grass stalk 

° 1 tsp kosher salt

° 1/2 tsp baking soda

° honey to taste

method

1. Melt butter in a pressure cooker. Stir in squash, lemon grass, salt and baking soda. Cover tightly with pressure cooker lid and cook at a gauge pressure of 1 bar (15 p.s.i.) for 20 minutes. Begin the timing after the pressure has been reached.

2. Depressurize the cooker according to the pressure cooker's manual.

3. Remove lemon grass. Blend the squash to a smooth purée.  Add honey to taste.

 

mmmm

 

Pressure cookers, if you haven't tried one, rule.  I use a Kuhn Rikon¹ and love it - spendy, but you probably won't find a better pressure cooker.  A core component of the kitchen and safe. 

_____

 

And a somewhat unhealthy, but delicious bonus.  This is especially good on a chilly night and guests love it.

 

Baked Hot Chocolate

 

ingredients

° 250g (9 oz) very very good quality semisweet chocolate (Lindt, Scvharffen berger, Guitard, etc) - maybe 60% to 70% - finely chopped
° 85g (6 tbl) unsalted butter cut up.  excellent grade butter only
° 4 large eggs
° 50g white sugar (1/4cup)
° whipped cream to taste

method

1. Preheat an oven to 350° F


2. find four oven proof coffee mugs or similar sized ramekins and put them on a pan


3. melt butter and chocolate in a double boiler and whisk until smoothly melted and mixed. Remove from heat and set aside


4. Stir eggs and sugar in a mixing bowl over simmering water until warm to the touch.


5. Beat egg mixture with a beater until light and fluffy - 3 to 5 minutes. Gently fold the egg mixture into the chocolate


6. Spoon batter into cups and add enough hot water in the pan to come up halfway on the cups


7. Bake until top of mixture looses its glossy look. About 15 or 20 minutes.


8. Remove and let cool to a bit above room temperature on the outside.  Put on whipped cream and serve

wicked fine

 

_________

¹ A review of the pressure cooker I use.  It was about $200 and worth every penny.

 

 

 

 

selling a dream

Two multibillion dollar industries - do they work?

 

Weight loss is a massive business in the US and online dating is large and growing rapidly.  Both attempt to satisfy very deeply seated desires and both have a lot of customers.  It seems reasonable to examine how effective they are.

 

Weight loss is certainly possible with hundreds of businesses and thousands of self help books helping people take in less energy than they use.  Losing weight can take a lot of effort, but millions of people do it every year.  One of the problems is a good fraction of those millions turn out to be the same people.  

 

It turns out the regulation of metabolism is a complex thing and cultural issues associated with food and exercise are equally complex.  As science probes these questions it is becoming clear that, while a reasonable percentage of people can lose weight, the percentage who keep it off for even a few years is very small.  It appears if someone has become overweight for some length of time - probably at least six months - their metabolism is permanently lowered, but their hunger levels remain high.  They begin to overeat relative to the level of someone who has always been at their current weight. Frequently all of the weight - or even more - is regained.  

 

Many researchers say "one of the best ways to gain weight is to go on a diet" ...  The community is beginning to talk about getting people as healthy as they can be at their current weights with additional exercise and good nutrition and recommend weight loss only when people are dangerously overweight.  They feel the place to focus efforts are on the young - it is critically important to make sure they never become overweight in the first place.

 

 "Overweight", although the societal norm at nearly 70% of the adult population in the US, is still not considered "beautiful" or "young".  It seems likely the weight loss industry will be in good shape for a long long time.   If science can provide interventions that regulate weight, it is likely they will become very popular - even if there are unhealthy side effects.

 

Online dating is another interesting business.  Millions want to find serious romantic parters and a few large businesses have emerged to create what they advertise as high probability matches.   The ads sometimes suggest a science based selection.

 

The problem is these services don't meet the standards of the scientific method.  There methods aren't testable by peers, and it is unlikely, given the sort of information they take the tests could even be cleanly done.  Science requires a hypothesis be falsifiable. Basically the logical possibility that an assertion, hypothesis or theory can be contradicted by an empirical observation.¹  If you can't do that it isn't science.

 

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.  - Richard Feynman

 

The claims of "science" are not universal in this business, but billions are spent and it is reasonable to probe how effective this approach is.  A nice paper was recently published that addresses the question (pdf).²

 

Great businesses for different reasons.  

 

One is not effective in the long term and ensures a growing number of customers who are serial failures.  They may jump around from plan to plan in a nearly hopeless effort to find something that works.³   The other addresses a fundamental human need and tries to make it somehow easier.  Much is lost in the initial communication and the matching techniques may be non-robust.  It is likely that many of the approaches will produce a higher percentage of solutions than conventional techniques.  Work needs to be done to settle that question.  Online dating is also fascinating in that it is an example of "big data" that may not have very much behind it.  Getting to the right questions and adding the right information is what is critical.⁴

 

note: based on a discussion with one of the readers I want to point out I am not dissing online dating.  It obviously works for some and doesn't for others.  What I do object to is the marketing use of "scientific" as it fails that defnition.  Since so many people use it and spend so much, it would be reasonable to better understand what is going on - perhaps to learn where it is applicable and where it isn't.  The paper is a good starting point.

 

Also - "big data" is very much in vogue these days.  To be useful it must be coupled with intelligent questions.  Frequently it isn't and since humans are good at finding patterns, a lot of false patterns are being "discovered".

_____

¹ Falsifiability does not mean something is "false", but rather that if it is false a repeatable empirical observation or experiment will produce a result in conflict with it.  When falsifiability is applied to pseudosciences like astrology, much of the global warming denialism examples, homeopathic medicine, intelligent design, etc. - the theories and assertions that underlie them are quickly rendered false.

² Abstract 

Online Dating: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Psychological Science

Eli J. Finkel, Paul W. Eastwick, Benjamin R. Karney, Harry T. Reis, and Susan Sprecher

Northwestern University; Texas A & M University; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Rochester; and Illinois State University

Abstract

Online dating sites frequently claim that they have fundamentally altered the dating landscape for the better. This article employs psychological science to examine (a) whether online dating is fundamentally different from conventional offline dating and (b) whether online dating promotes better romantic outcomes than conventional offline dating.The answer to the first question (uniqueness) is yes, and the answer to the second question (superiority) is yes and no. To understand how online dating fundamentally differs from conventional offline dating and the circumstances under which online dating promotes better romantic outcomes than conventional offline dating, we consider the three major services online dating sites offer: access, communication, and matching. Access refers to users’ exposure to and opportunity to evaluate potential romantic partners they are otherwise unlikely to encounter. Communication refers to users’ opportunity to use various forms of computer- mediated communication (CMC) to interact with specific potential partners through the dating site before meeting face-to- face. Matching refers to a site’s use of a mathematical algorithm to select potential partners for users. Regarding the uniqueness question, the ways in which online dating sites implement these three services have indeed fundamentally altered the dating landscape. In particular, online dating, which has rapidly become a pervasive means of seeking potential partners, has altered both the romantic acquaintance process and the compatibility matching process. For example, rather than meeting potential partners, getting a snapshot impression of how well one interacts with them, and then slowly learning various facts about them, online dating typically involves learning a broad range of facts about potential partners before deciding whether one wants to meet them in person. Rather than relying on the intuition of village elders, family members, or friends or to select which pairs of unacquainted singles will be especially compatible, certain forms of online dating involve placing one’s romantic fate in the hands of a mathematical matching algorithm.Turning to the superiority question, online dating has important advantages over conventional offline dating. For example, it offers unprecedented (and remarkably convenient) levels of access to potential partners, which is especially helpful for singles who might otherwise lack such access. It also allows online daters to use CMC to garner an initial sense of their compatibility with potential partners before deciding whether to meet them face-to-face. In addition, certain dating sites may be able to collect data that allow them to banish from the dating pool people who are likely to be poor relationship partners in general. On the other hand, the ways online dating sites typically implement the services of access, communication, and matching do not always improve romantic outcomes; indeed, they sometimes undermine such outcomes. Regarding access, encountering potential partners via online dating profiles reduces three-dimensional people to two-dimensional displays of information, and these displays fail to capture those experiential aspects of social interaction that are essential to evaluating one’s compatibility with potential partners. In addition, the ready access to a large pool of potential partners can elicit an evaluative, assessment-oriented mindset that leads online daters to objectify potential partners and might even undermine their willingness to commit to one of them. It can also cause people to make lazy, ill-advised decisions when selecting among the large array of potential partners. Regarding communication, although online daters can benefit from having short-term CMC with potential partners before meeting them face-to-face, longer periods of CMC prior to a face-to-face meeting may actually hurt people’s romantic prospects. In particular, people tend to over interpret the social cues available in CMC, and if CMC proceeds unabated without a face-to-face reality check, subsequent face-to-face meetings can produce unpleasant expectancy violations.As CMC lacks the experiential richness of a face-to-face encounter, some important information about potential partners is impossible to glean from CMC alone; most users will want to meet a potential partner in person to integrate their CMC and face-to-face impressions into a coherent whole before pursuing a romantic relationship. Regarding matching, no compelling evidence supports matching sites’ claims that mathematical algorithms work—that they foster romantic outcomes that are superior to those fostered by other means of pairing partners. Part of the problem is that matching sites build their mathematical algorithms around principles—typically similarity but also complementarity—that are much less important to relationship well-being than has long been assumed. In addition, these sites are in a poor position to know how the two partners will grow and mature over time, what life circumstances they will confront and coping responses they will exhibit in the future, and how the dynamics of their interaction will ultimately promote or undermine romantic attraction and long-term relationship well-being.As such, it is unlikely that any matching algorithm that seeks to match two people based on information available before they are aware of each other can account for more than a very small proportion of the variance in long-term romantic outcomes, such as relationship satisfaction and stability. In short, online dating has radically altered the dating landscape since its inception 15 to 20 years ago. Some of the changes have improved romantic outcomes, but many have not.We conclude by (a) discussing the implications of online dating for how people think about romantic relationships and for homogamy (similarity of partners) in marriage and (b) offering recommendations for policymakers and for singles seeking to make the most out of their online dating endeavors. 

³ I lost quite a bit of weight last year. I'm well aware that I am likely to fail if I'm not diligent. I've been at my goal weight for about three months now and find I must constantly monitor and count Calories and exercise. It is more difficult than losing weight so far. I can see why most people fail - in fact studies that look at people with long term success (only one to two percent of dieters keep at their goal weight for more than five years) note that daily diligence is the only method that seems to work. An excellent reason for never gaining weight in the first place.  

⁴ This will be the subject of several future posts - the often clueless reliance on having lots of data can be a trap.  It is like the kid who doesn't know how to work the problem on the test and puts down the wrong answer to nine significant decimal places because he used the wrong model and blindly plugged input into his calculator trusting that a result was a solid answer.  I can't tell you how often I've seen this in organizations that should know better.

 

the paganini strad...

I have a great fondness for artists and musicians.  For me their approach to work is very similar to some of the most enjoyable aspects of science.  Engineering and the natural sciences may be tied by a common mathematical language, but the approaches to the two sports are quite different - again for me, but I know others who share this view.  It is neither here nor there and variety in approaches to disciplines is important.  Others may find different kindred spirits and approaches - it is a fun area to ponder...

 

It turns out I’m a terrible musician.  The cello is my favorite instrument, so my gift to the world is refraining from playing.  I content myself with a bit of theremin building and fooling around with a strumstick - one is obscure enough that no one cares and the other simple enough that even I can achieve a bit of music.

 

But I love being around real musicians - from serious students to the masters.  Stony Brook, where I did my Ph.D., had a good music program.  They were particularly strong in the stringed instruments and the flute.  The Beaux Arts Trio was resident there creating some wonderful concerts and it was possible to find good music several times a week.  

 

There are  lot of fond memories from the music at that place.  As a grad student I co-founded a classical music series at Stony Brook that still exists to this day.  We were able to book the Beaux Arts Trio.  They offered a good price (I think it was about $4,000) as the trio was in residence at the school.  I had a friend who was a cello grad student and Professor  Greenhouse used to let me sit in on classes and master classes - he said it was critically important to connect with the audience, so why not.  

 

The D Major Suite

 

There was an amazing night when he was showing something to Amy (my friend) - something out of the Bach 6^th suite.¹  He played it a few ways, had her play it, play it another way and sighed - "this won't do" ..  then he performed the entire suite from beginning to end.  Sublime is not an adequate description.  Time simply ceased to exist for me and I think everyone else in the room.

 

He was still performing at the highest levels and teaching well into his 90s and only stopped playing about three weeks before he died.

 

Such an amazing person.

 

His favorite cello was the Paganini Cello - more properly known as the Countess of Stainlein Cello.  One of the few Stradivarius cellos and considered the best example of the breed.²  He started playing and time stopped until the last note had faded and we were all jarred back to Earth.

 

He was not a young man at the time.  He died last year at 95 - still playing almost until the end.  I have been lucky enough to have broken bread with Yo-Yo Ma a few times and he maintained a good cellist lacks the chops to do a really great job on the Bach Suites until he has the perspective of age.  He said he felt he could seriously attempt them for real when he is about 70.  Bernard was probably near the height of his powers when I heard him play. 

 

I know this cello well.  It surprised me to see an article in about it appear in this week's NY Times Magazine.   A great instrument is looking for a great caretaker for several more generations before it will be passed down through time.

 

Greenhouse died at 95 early last May - here is the NPR remembrance.  I feel lucky to have known him.  Such an incredible sense of humor and playfulness.  Cellists tell me he was a natural teacher - he was certainly a natural performer.  

 

sigh ..

 

Time is such a funny thing.  My world line has wandered through time and space and somehow managed to intersect with his world line on several occasions.  Those intersections became wonderfully colorful bits of thread for me.  You live for those colorful and lyrical threads that make up your path and they can even bring life to the fabric of spacetime.   I often feel my life is charmed and special.

 

Imagine the 305 year old world line of that cello as it embarks upon yet another segment.

 

____________

 

Recipe time.  Several people have encouraged me to continue with recipes.  This is something I have been doing for breakfasts for the past few weeks.  Basically whole wheat with scallions and a bit of olive oil and soy sauce.  It is really excellent and holds me well until lunch.  Use whatever ratios you like - I prepared a batch and measured for a guide.  I also like to use khorasan wheat which has a large kernel.  Kamut is the variety I like - mine is from Montana although it also grows in Alberta.  You can use any good olive oil, but I find rosemary infused oils add quite a bit - you can make your own, but start with a good olive oil.  I like Sciabica’s as I know where it is coming from in California and it is excellent - as good as any fine oil I’ve tried.  You pay a lot for good olive oils, but they are worth it is you care about your food.  Here is their rosemary evoo.  We've been using them for about 15 years now and find them to be very friendly with great service.

 

° 150 grams of whole wheat kernels

° 4 scallions - chopped

° 25 grams of rosemary infused olive oil 

° 30 grams pecans - chopped

° soy sauce to taste

° a finishing salt like Maldon (optional)

 

° Simmer the whole wheat for about 90 minutes in “enough” water.  I use a crock pot and enough water is something like 350 grams.  It should still have some texture when finished. 

 ° Drain the wheat and mix in the pecans and scallions. Mix in the olive oil and add soy sauce to taste.  I like to get it almost salty enough and then add a bit of Maldon salt at the end.

 

This makes about two servings.  Scale it as you like 

___________

¹ I can't make a recommendation for a single best set of Bach Cello Suites.  I just did the survey and find I have seven on vinyl, one reel to reel tape and four CDs ....  It is important, when you really love a piece of music like this, to hear as many great interpretations as you can.

² Yes - I realize that new great instruments may be as good as the old greats even to the performer - although I was not terribly impressed by the methodology of the paper.  Even if it is true,  there is a real magic of sorts being in the presence of musical history.

 

 

science and nutrition

This is the time of year when people are making resolutions about their eating and exercise habits - usually aimed at weight loss.  There are some tragically wrong concepts floating around in popular culture - things like "cleansings" - along with diets that  cause immediate weight loss, but may also be counterproductive to your overall health.

 

Looking at the literature and talking to experts one quickly comes to appreciate the complexity of the problem.  Silver bullets are probably very rare and one keeps coming back to some basic fundamentals that we have known for a long time and, as a society, mostly ignore.   Get lots of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, limit meat and full fat dairy. Don't overeat and get a lot of exercise and stay properly hydrated.  Very simple and proven.

 

There are indulgences that, in moderation, don't seem to be bad for you.  If you take in very little saturated fat, a small amount of dark chocolate is not a terrible thing nutritionally.  I tend to take in less than 10 grams of saturated fat a day not counting chocolate, so I don't worry about the load from an ounce of a fine piece of chocolate a day - another 7 grams or so.   This gives me an excuse to concentrate on the good stuff - really wonderful chocolate like the product from the artisans at Mast Brothers and other fantastic shops along with the occasional truffle.

 

But to the point of nutrition research being difficult and the trigger for this point.  The Science Talk podcast from Scientific American had an interview with Hagen Schroeter, director of fundamental health and nutrition research at Mars, Inc.  It is different from what you might expect from a food company and I strongly recommend it as an introduction to understanding a bit about nutrition research.  If you don't subscribe to the SciAm podcast an mp3 version is here - well worth the half hour of your time..  And if you haven't had a bit of chocolate today, feel free to indulge.

resolutions and such

As a rule I'm not the sort of person who makes New Year's resolutions, but last year was an exception.  For a variety of reasons I decided to lose some weight and, mirabile dictu, found success.   Now I find myself making another resolution - namely to stay within a "good enough" weight range and to eat a healthier diet while doing so.  A recent post mentioned the weight loss and several people got in touch asking for tips.  Oddly enough my family physician also asked for tips. While I'm not an expert by any means, but here are some comments.

 

I kept track of everything I ate as well as how much I exercised and compared this to a baseline to make sure I was six to eight hundred Calories below my normal daily requirement.  The idea was to lose about five pounds a month - a slow and steady rate that hopefully would be maintainable.  Some estimates were required (restaurant food) and I found the need to weigh what I ate when possible.  Staying motivated was a big issue for me and access to an exercise coach was central to my success.  The basic technique with product recommendations is here.

 

The type of food and even the timing of meals and food types became important.  I found it necessary to track fat, saturated fat (for safety), protein and carbohydrates.  In general I became very hungry by dinner if I didn't have at least 15% of my breakfast and lunch Calories from protein.  As a lacto-vegetarian I need to carefully monitor protein anyway so at least I was paying attention.¹  Very low fat meals caused a similar problem.  What seemed to work best was aiming for about 20% of my Calories from protein and 20% from fat (as little saturated fat as possible).   Much of the fat came from tree nuts like cashews, pecans, walnuts and pistachios. I tried to eat a lot of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains as they are generally agreed to be important parts of a healthy diet.  

 

I found allowing for some treats was very important.  For me this usually means a bit of chocolate.  I was able to only have four days this past year when I was over target and only two of those were feasts.  Quality food was important.  I found preparing most of my meals myself allowed me to track what was in them and gave me more satisfying meals.  I recommend anything by Mark Bittman as a a starting point for recipes.  He is committed to a quality diet and most of his dishes are very easy to make and delicious. He has about ten books in print, but since I'm a vegetarian I relied on his How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.²   

 

As I progressed I was able to hone in on my daily energy requirement before exercise.  It was a bit different from the published values, but was stable and gave me a baseline for planning.  Of course as I lost weight it changed as did the exercise numbers.   While a lot of people have success by just eating less, I found journaling to be very important.  If you use this approach, do yourself a favor and use software.

 

Here is the result for the year - January 2 through today.

 

Now my goal is to stay between the 155 and 165 pounds, which is medically my healthy weight range as I'm 6'1.  It turns out if you have been heavy the body will modify metabolism, hormone signals and even muscle type and percentage. The net effect is roughly a ten percent decrease in requirements.  If a person at, say 160 pounds, requires 2,000 Calories a day to maintain weight, a similar person who had been significantly heavier but is now 160 only needs about 1,800 Calories.   The hunger signals remain at, or even above, the 2,000 Calorie a day level - it becomes easy to overeat.   This is probably the reason why people gain weight after a diet, so the challenge is to eat less, eat better and add exercise.  It appears this is not a short term change - that it may take a decade or more for the body to move back to their earlier normal level.³  We are very well evolved to store energy for lean times.

 

At the suggestion of my doctor I tried to avoid sustained monthly weight drops that exceed three percent.  There is evidence that drops in excess of five percent are dangerous and damage hormone signaling to the point where long term stability at a healthy weight is nearly impossible.

 

A few months ago I began to approach my target range and, hoping for a smooth transition,  I adjusted the slope of the curve to decrease my monthly loss.  I'm where I should be now, but left to myself I would eat enough to gain weight.  It is clear I need long term monitoring.  So I find myself on the eve of another resolution - namely to stay within a weight range.  Some long term studies suggest I may need to do this for a decade.  Keeping it off will be a big challenge.  Sorting out a healthier diet is also important.  

 

So if you are planning a weight loss resolution my suggestions are:

 

° Go slowly!  Plan on losses under three percent of your body weight per month.

 

° Find a safe and balanced diet. Talk to your doctor and ignore pulp magazines andTV infomercials with their quick and easy fixes.  Fad diets are generally bad news. Also remember that if you have problems taking off weight, it is going to be even harder keeping it off, so find something that can work for you as well as a long-term transition diet.

 

° Monitor and journal everything you eat. 

 

° Use a good food scale that reads accurate to the nearest gram.

 

° If you don't cook for yourself, learn.  Hire a personal chef for a few lessons or go to an adult education course.  A culinary student or off-duty chef will sometimes provide a few hours of hands-on training for a very low price.

 

° Find a way to have some treats every now and then and allow for a few days when you eat by the old rules (Thanksgiving for example). 

 

° Find an exercise coach as well as exercises you like - or at least don't actively dislike.

 

° Plan a long term (years) maintenance strategy.

 

° If you have your own tips, post them in the comments section

 

A downside to all of this is that none of my clothing fits anymore.  I can get away with the tshirts, but jeans and slacks are a different matter.   I'm slowly buying new togs, but currently a belt is certainly a safety requirement as I've gone from a 36 to 38 inch waist to 31 to 32 inches.

 

________

¹ Anyone with a non-standard diet - vegetarians and vegans for example - should consult with a physician before taking on a challenge like this.

² The $4.99 iPhone version is particularly useful when you are in a store in need of inspiration.  I recommend his blog for his views about food and society.  I'm in general agreement - certainly more than I am with Michael Pollan.

³ Quite a bit of research has been done on metabolic shifts and a bit is mentioned in this recent NY Times Magazine article.  It is clear that keeping weight off is an enormous challenge - greater than taking it off - so the diet industry may be the perfect business with lots of repeat customers.  There has also been interesting work that indicates liposuction may be counterproductive - that the weight comes back and, no matter where it was initially removed, it tends to concentrate in the abdomen - medically the most dangerous location.

 

dealing with incomplete models - understanding nutritional energy balances

What happens when you are trying to modify your behavior with information that comes from measurements that can be difficult that feed into models that are fundamentally inaccurate even though the you may not suspect the models are flawed?  How do you understand this well enough to get a useful signal in a very noisy environment?

 

For many of us the period between Thanksgiving and the New Year involves way too much food. I’m trying to maintain my weight after a serious ten month diet and this means measuring and tracking what I eat as well as my exercise. 

 

It should be simple - after all, energy is always conserved.  Food is just a way to store energy.  If you eat as much as you require to stay alive, your weight should be stable.  Eat a bit less and/or do a bit more physical work and you should lose weight. Take in more than you need and your body tries to hold onto the extra energy by turning it into a energy stored in you - body fat.

 

But to do this simple calculation requires you have to know how much of the energy in food is accessible to your body, how much energy your body uses to run itself and how much energy it takes for you to do any kind of physical work.  All of these are difficult to know to a good degree of precision.  We have published guidelines, but few of us consider the error bars on the underlying measurements and calculations and some of the pieces are still being discovered by basic research.   

 

We tend to assume food nutrition labels are accurate, but it turns out they are based on a technique that is about one hundred years old.  That system, the Atwater System, has known flaws, but nothing has been found to be easy to use and more accurate.

 

Wilber Olin Atwater was a professor at Wesleyan University and a central figure in understanding modern nutrition.  By the mid 1800s people had worked out that proteins, fats and carbohydrates were major components in human nutrition and estimates were made of how much energy was available from each through metabolism.  

 

Atwater spurred the creation of an American nutrition research enterprise - one of the first examples of government funded big science outside of the military - and calculated how much metabolisable energy was available in proteins, fats and carbohydrates accounting for the efficiencies of digestion.  It became possible to measure the chemical energy in food  components and predict how much we could use.  You could simply measure the amount of protein, fat and carbohydrates in a food and determine how much energy the human body would extract.¹

 

The current standard used in the US and many other countries takes into account a few other nutrition sources and food labels are based on the following conversions:

 

	kJ/g	kcal/g
fats	37	9
proteins	17	4
carbohydrates	17	4
fiber	8	2
ethanol (alcohol)	29	7
organic acids	13	3
polyols	10	2.4

 

It turns out this is only a general approximation and to first order you can get away with just looking at the fats, proteins, carbohydrates and alcohol figures if you are creating your own recipes.

 

But your efficiency at absorbing food varies.  New work that looks at how the food was prepared suggests that food that is mechanically made into smaller bits is more efficiency absorbed and food that is cooked is absorbed even more metabolised.²  The largest effect is cooking.  Muscle proteins, sugars in starches and other energy laden molecules are physically opened up allowing digestive enzymes to attack their amino acid chains more effectively.  Food that is cooked gets more of its energy into your system than food that isn’t.  The science is still developing, but some researchers speculate cooked foods provide at least 10% more energy than raw foods and the number may be higher than 25% - I wouldn't be surprised given some of the preliminary results. 

 

The effect of cooking is not accounted for by nutrition labels.  So if you want to lose a bit of weight you might try increasing the raw food component of your diet.

 

The energy balance for your body has four general components: energy intake from eating, energy expended keeping your body running, energy spend doing physical work, and energy spent in thermogenesis (shivering for example).  Physical work comprises about  20% of the average person's energy budget, thermogenesis is usually under 10%.  Most of the energy we use goes into keeping our bodies functioning - our  Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR).³

 

Once you have an idea what your BMR is you can add up all of the physical activity during a day and have a fair idea what your intake should be - assuming you have a good idea of how much energy your body is getting from food.  This gets tough, so most people who worry about this talk in terms of basic activity levels that range from 1.2 for sedentary office workers to around 2.0 for people with physically active lives.⁴

 

My BMR approximation is 1,583 kcal a day by the basic calculation.  Colleen’s is 1,724, but her real figure is higher as she is very athletic.⁵

 

If you exercise regularly you can calculate the energy spent during exercise and add that to your BMR for a rough approximation - a lower limit as you move around doing other things during the day and there is some thermogenesis.  Unfortunately energy spent during exercise is only an approximation as our efficiencies vary person to person for various exercises.  That said you can probably get 80 to 90% accuracy using tools like this one.⁶

 

If you have made it this far the act of journaling your calories and exercise appear to be a futile effort as there is a huge amount of underlying complexity.  But you can get around that.

 

Keep track of your weight too.  If you plot the results you can get an idea of what your measurements for activity and eating mean assuming the types of food you eat and the activities you do don’t vary dramatically.  The numbers may not match what you would measure in a lab, but getting the bottom up numbers to match the top down results is extremely difficult even in that setting.

 

Absolute numbers are very difficult to measure in this case, but it is possible to come by a stable relative measure, and that is all most of us need for this purpose.

 

My goal was to lose about 5 pounds a month while dieting.  Using the rough figure that a pound of fat (what I wanted to lose) is about 3,500 Calories, I aimed at an average daily deficit of about 625 Calories through a combination of exercise and eating less food.  It worked and I was able to maintain a fairly constant rate until near the end when I wanted to gracefully transition to an exercise/eating routine that might be sustainable.⁷

 

Even though we have flawed models for how much energy we absorb from our food and how efficient our bodies are, the models are sufficient - with a bit of analysis - to effectively use as a tool for losing and maintaing weight.  It is easy to imagine local refinements - I’ve created a tool that helped me understand my own information flow and ultimately how that translates into weight - and it is likely that activity monitors like accelerometers can help, but in the end simple willpower rules.  I suspect many monitoring and computational aids will ultimately fail unless they can impact our basic urges.  To control something you need to combine motivation, the ability to make a change and some triggering event.  I’ve worked that out for myself.  Building a general tool seems difficult.

 

Perhaps what we really need to do is find the levels of eating and activity that evolution assumes.  Up until the Industrial Age people appear to have been self regulating in weight.  Now foods tend to be more plentiful, have greater energy densities and perhaps are even more palatable.  At the same time many of us are less active.  The balance is thrown and many of us gain weight easily.  Finding the right balance is tricky as evolution did not design us for a long and healthy life - basically we get to the point where we have been able to reproduce and then things begin to fall apart.  So the full nutrition offered by earlier diets may be very suspect even if the energy balance is good.  There is probably quite a bit to learn here.  Some of us (not me) are fortunate enough to have bodies that are great at self regulation.  Exactly how that happens is a very interesting question.

 

_________________

 

So now we shift gears and present a few deadly recipes:-)

 

No one seems to be complaining about the recipes and three people have asked for more, so here are two rich desserts - a banana cream pie and a lemon tart.  Both use the same shortbread crust.    

 

I think of baking and cooking as two very different arts and suspect few really outstanding cooks are also outstanding bakers.  Cooking demands knowing the state of the food and how flavors link up - there is a lot of improvisation that occurs as you cook so measurements are just a guide.  Baking, at least for me, demands careful measurements for ingredients and cooking, so I use weights rather than volumes.  I have a great $25 scale that measures accurately to the gram and recommend something like this to anyone who bakes.  I’ll leave the conversions to you if you bake using volumes.  

 

Both of these are very easy, delicious and something you should only eat sparingly.  They were part of Sukie’s birthday present a few days ago.

 

The shortbread pastry crust is really simple and no rolling is required.  Just put a few ingredients into a food processor, pulse a few times, and press into a tart pan.  I do recommend very fresh ingredients for baking.  Sugar or flour that has been opened and sitting around for a month or so pick up a funny taste.

 

Shortbread Pastry Crust

 

130 grams all purpose flour

35 grams powdered sugar

 a pinch of fine sea salt (too small for my scale - I’m guessing about 1/8tsp).  Note that iodized salt picks up a strange flavor when baking, so I use a fine grain un-iodized sea salt

 1 stick of cold unsalted butter - about 115 grams

 

 procedure

 

° heat oven to 425°F with the rack in a center position

° butter or lightly spray with a nonstick neutral vegetable oil cooking spray an 8” tart pan with a removable bottom. 9” would probably work too.

° cut the butter into chunks and put all of the ingredients in a food processor 

° pulse the food processor until the pastry starts to form into pea sized clumps - about 30 seconds for me.  don’t let it grow into larger pieces if you can.

° press the dough into the pan and pat as evenly as you can

° pierce the bottom of the crust with a fork to prevent it from puffing up too much during baking.

° Cover the pastry with plastic wrap and put it in the freezer for 15 minutes - this is a really neat trick that prevents the crust from shrinking when it bakes.

° Bake until the crust is golden brown - about 15 minutes for me.  Cool on a wire rack.  You can cover the crust and store it for a day in the refrigerator f you want. 

 

Lemon Tart

3 large eggs at room temperature

150 grams granulated white sugar

80 grams fresh lemon juice (about 3 lemons)

a half stick of butter - about 56 grams - at room temperature - cut into chunks

4 grams of lemon zest (be careful to only get the yellow part!)  I prefer a microplane for doing this

shortbread pastry

30 grams finely chopped almonds

blueberries and maple syrup - thawed frozen blueberries are fine

 

procedure

° In a double boiler over simmering water whisk the eggs, sugar and lemon juice together

° Cook, whisking or stirring with a spatula, constantly until the mixture becomes pale and thick - about 160°F.  This takes about 10 minutes

° Remove from the heat and strain to remove lumps.  

° Whisk the butter into the mixture until melted and add the lemon zest.

° Cover with a plastic sheet pressed to the surface of the lemon curd to prevent a skin from forming and let it cool to room temperature before filling the crust.

° Assemble covering the inside of the crust with finely chopped almond bits and then pour in the lemon curd.  Even out with the back of a spoon or a pastry knife.

° Separate the pie from the pan - just carefully push from the bottom

° Add maple syrup to the blueberries and spoon on to individual pies of the pie when you serve.  Sweeten as much or as little as you like.  

 

 

Banana Creme Pie

 

300 grams whole milk

half a  vanilla bean (you could use a good vanilla extract - maybe about a half tablespoon)

 3 large egg yolks at room temperature

 50 grams granulated white sugar

 20 grams all purpose flour

 20 grams corn starch

 3 large ripe bananas

 40 grams shredded coconut

 whipped cream (recipe at the bottom)

 

procedure

 

° Score the vanilla bean and add to milk in a saucepan and start heating at a medium heat

 ° While this is cooking mix the sugar and egg yolks together. then sift the cornstarch and flour into the egg/sugar mixture to make a thick paste.  Don’t let this sit around as it gets very lumpy if you do.  

 °Stir the warming milk.  Take it off the heat when it begins to foam and remove the vanilla bean.  Slowly add the hot milk to the paste whisking constantly.  

 ° Scrape out the seeds from the bean and add to the mixture.  If you use vanilla extract instead, now is the time to add it.

 °Pour the mixture back into the saucepan and heat over medium heat until it begins to boil and thicken.  

 ° Pour the mixture into a clean bowl and press plastic wrap to the top surface to prevent a skin from forming.  Let it cool to room temperature.

 ° Slice the bananas and fold two in with the cooked mixture along with the shredded coconut.  Pour into the pasty.

 ° Top with whipped cream and carefully release the pie from the pan side ring

 

 

Whipped Cream

 

120 grams heavy cream chilled

 15 grams powdered sugar

 1/2 tsp almond extract

 

procedure

 

° Chill a mixing bowl and beater from an electric mixer in the freezer for about 5 minutes.  You can also get good results with a whisk and copper mixing bowl, but that takes some elbow grease.

 ° Pour the cream, sugar and almond extract into the bowl and beat until peaks form.  

 

 

____________

¹ Atwater showed about 4 nutritional Calories (kcal) were available from carbohydrates, 4 from proteins and 9 from fat. 

² There has been a lot of speculation here, but now serious science is being done that supports the notion that cooking makes more energy available.  A paper by Rachel Carmody and Richard Wrangham in the Journal of Human Evolution is a good example.  Another study found that cooking gelatinizes starch meaning amylopectin and amylose are released and exposed to enzymes making more energy available.  Cooked starches have more available Calories than those that are raw.

 People have known for a long time that people who eat mostly raw food tend to be very thin compared with the general population, but serious studies on those populations are recent and the results spurred a deeper look into the more general question of food processing and available energy.  Women on a purely raw food diet regularly lack the energy to have a functioning menstrual cycle even though they are eating what should be a high quality diet.  The available Calories just aren’t there - we have based our food recommendations on cooked food and our bodies seem to have a body regulation mechanism that is based on cooked food - this may even be a short term evolutionary response, but that is currently speculation waiting on the verdict of science.

³ BMR is difficult to measure directly as it requires the measurement be made while the person is at rest for a long period.  A more common technique is to measure a person’s resting metabolic rate (RMR).  They turn out to be closely related and similar under most conditions.

A frequently used approximation is from Mifflin et. al. (1990):

BMR = 10*weight + 6.25*height -5*age +s  

where weight is in kilograms, height is in centimeters, age is in years and s is +5 for males and -161 for females.  

If you know your lean body mass in kilograms the Katch-McArdle approximation is probably more accurate.

BMR= 370 + (21.6 * lean body mass)

BMR in both of these approximations is in kcal (nutritional Calories)

⁴ One approximation is the Harris Benedict formula:  

sedentary office workers use BMR *1.2 Calories

light exercise 1-3 days a week use BMR * 1.375 Calories

moderate exercise 3-5 days a week use BMR * 1.55 Calories

hard exercise 6-7 days a week use BMR * 1.725 Calories

very hard physical labor use BMR * 2.0 Calories

This is very approximate.  Athletes in training can use incredible amounts.  Colleen was in the 5,000 to 6,000 Calorie a day range when training - easily blowing through the approximation for very hard physical labor.

⁵ Normally men have higher BMRs than women even when they are the same height and weight. Men, on average, tend to have a higher percentage of lean muscle.  Colleen is a bit heavier than me and, at 200 cm, quite a bit taller. She is also younger - all of this is enough to give her a higher BMR.  Since she is thin and athletic you really need to use a different approximation as her body fat is low at around 10%.  The Katch-McArdle formula gives a better BMR estimate of 1,925 kcal

Some unit notes:  Energy is just energy.  kilocalories (kcal) are the same as nutritional calories (Calories).  Converting 1,925 Calories to watt-hours we see Colleen’s BMR is about 2,239 watt-hours a day.  You can divide this by time to get her average power expenditure from BMR -- a bit over 93 watts.

In an inactive office worker mode she would need about 1.2 * BMR or 2,310 Calories a day - a figure that would cause a smaller person, even someone who is fairly active, to gain weight.  Of course a very heavy person would have a very high BMR and their weight loss in pounds per month can be very high.

⁶ Note that this is energy used above and beyond your BMR.  Often people assume the exercise figures are a person's total requirements during the exercise period.

⁷ I strongly recommend a good piece of software for logging exercise and meals.

Now I can deduce my daily requirements to be about 2,190 Calories per day.  This is consistent with my calculated BMR times a factor of about 1.4 for my normal daily activity.  It sort of makes sense.