tingilinde

a rather successful kickstarter project

Kickstarter is a mechanism to legally supply funds to microstartups in the US where the investment options for these things are minimal.  Most of the proposals fail, but enough have succeeded that it has become a viable way to raise money for projects up to around $50,000 or thereabouts.

The Pebble Smartwatch is a proposal that has resonated strongly and is currently setting records.  Watch the video and see if it appeals...   a nice example of re-displaying information from your smartphone.

steve jobs and the un-desert years

An interesting piece by Brent Schlender on the "desert years" of Steve Jobs and the impact of Pixar.

Like or dislike him (and there are reasons for both responces), Jobs is a great example of businesses moving beyond their conventional roots with many getting blindsided by the resolution they can't grasp...  this old Bloomberg article quotes some subject matter experts who didn't realize the area they study was beginning to inflate in areas far removed from their expertise.

running out of spectrum is like running out of color...

A short discussion of the "we're running out of spectrum" cries of the mobil industry in the New York Times

(title quote from David Reed)

food swamps?

It turns out food deserts in poor areas may not really exist ... Of course there is the issue of the cost of healthy produce and getting people to eat healthy food in the first place...

the slate walking series

We mentioned the Slate series on walking when the first installment appeared and Roger recommended a piece later on in the series.

All four pieces are worth reading and are now online.  Find them here

passions

It is always impressive to see a kid working on his or her passion.

In the meantime a lot of kids seem to be looking for advantages in k12...  there is a lot of jostling for positions in elite schools - even at the middle school level and below... lots of people worry about getting their kid in the "right" kindergarten.

Somehow I think encouraging a passion in a teen is more important.

 

the difficulties of going vegan

Tara Parker-Pope on the challenges associated with going vegan. (via The New York Times)

snip:

...

Giving up favorite foods is never easy, food scientists say, for it means overriding taste preferences imprinted on the brain during a lifetime of eating. “In most American adults, meat intake has been associated since childhood with pleasurable nutritional effects,” said France Bellisle, an eating behavior researcher in Paris. “Liking for meats has been learned and reinforced over years. Any substitute would have to mimic the total sensory experience elicited by meats.

“It always takes more motivation to change any type of behavior than to go on with old habits,” she added.

Dairy products are particularly difficult to replace, says Daniel Granato, a researcher at the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil, because the intrinsic attributes of dairy foods come from proteins and fats that are difficult to mimic in a nondairy substitute. And because people start consuming these foods in infancy, the taste preference is deeply ingrained.

“Usually dairy products made with milk fat are softer and present a very pleasant viscosity and texture,” Dr. Granato said. “Consumers do feel the difference between milk-based and soy-based products. And once their first reference is milk-based products, they tend to reject plant-based products made with oat and soy or other vegetable-based food.”

Vegan ingredients and cooking techniques can be overwhelming for beginners, even if the changes are relatively small. Substitutes like vegetarian margarine and nutritional yeast can impart an unaccustomed nutty or cheesy flavor. Another method for making vegan foods creamy or cheesy involves soaking and blending cashews.

...

 

I'm just a vegetarian (I drink milk), which is vastly easier.  The successful vegans I know tend to cook most of their own meals and tend not to use fake meats.  They have learned to prepare and enjoy meals painted with very different brushes.

In the end one should go with a healthy diet that you are comfortable with - with or without meat.  It is a personal decision.  What is clear is that many of us have unhealthy and unsustainable diets and exercise behaviors.

snip

...

What if fatness, even obesity, is less a lurking danger than a likely destiny, and the surprise isn’t how many seriously overweight people are out there but how few?

Those are among the unsettling questions raised, at least implicitly, by “The Weight of the Nation,” an ambitious multiplatform project that takes the full measure of our girth, its genesis and its toll.

A book with that title will be published next week by St. Martin’s Press, and it boils down information from a more sweeping, ambitious, four-part documentary to be shown next month on HBO, which produced it with input from the Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. HBO will also make the documentary available on many Web sites, including the network’s own.

Distilling many decades of research, “Weight” chronicles how we’ve eaten our way into disease and sometimes despair. About two-thirds of American adults now qualify as overweight or obese, according to the C.D.C.

But here’s the scariest (and trickiest) part, which deserves much more attention than it has received and must be factored into our response: we may be doing nothing more or less than what comes naturally to us. Our current circumstances and our current circumferences may in fact be a toxically perfect fit.

...

 

 

more on maintaining weight after a diet

Every analysis of dieting I've read suggest that they are not effective for most people with only a small percentage of people who diet maintaining their target weight a year after the diet ended.  The consensus is that, while dieting is difficult, maintenance is *really* difficult.

Several studies have looked at groups of people who have been successful over long terms - usually for more than two years, but sometimes for five or more years and common behavioral signals emerge.  Most of these are behind paywalls or are jargon filled, but here is a clearly written article that reinforces what they others find. (pdf)

Lessons from Patients Who Have Successfully Maintained Weight Loss

Holly R. Wyatt, M.D.,¹ Suzanne Phelan, Ph.D.,² Rena R. Wing, Ph.D.,² and James O. Hill, Ph.D.¹

¹University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Center for Human Nutrition, Denver, CO,

²Brown University, Providence, RI

 

The common behaviors are:

• Eat a moderately low-fat diet

• Watch total calories

• Eat breakfast

• Self-monitor

• Engage in high levels of physical activity

 

Exercise seems to be extremely important.  Almost all of the successful maintainers exercise daily at levels that exceed the recommended levels of exercise by at least a factor of two.   The diets tend to be low fat (under 30% of calories come from fat) and are generally not large.  Self monitoring and eating breakfast also seem to be centrally important.

Exercise is interesting as it isn't that important for weight loss (it takes a huge amount of exercise to displace enough calories to lose weight).  New work suggest people have different responses to exercise - Gretchen Reynolds of The New York Times wrote a brief summary of the subject.

snip

...

What all of this suggests, Dr. Hagobian of Cal-Poly says, is that “exercise has a definite impact on food reward regions. But that impact may depend” on who you are and what kind of exercise you do.

His group of fit young people, he points out, completed prolonged, strenuous endurance sessions. “It’s likely that, in order to achieve weight loss and weight maintenance, you need to do a fair amount of exercise and do it often,” he says.

For exercise noticeably to dampen your desire for food, in other words, you may need to sweat for an hour. It may also help if you’re already lean and in shape.

But Dr. Hagobian is optimistic that research might help almost everyone to better deploy exercise against appetite control. “There may be doses or types of exercise that are more effective for some people than for others.” Eventually, brain research may help to point people to the exercise program best suited to them.

In the meantime, he says, don’t take to the couch, even if exercise makes you ravenous. “Being fit can have psychological effects,” he says, perhaps increasing your desire to consume a better diet and, in the long term, shed pounds.

“Four or five years ago, it really looked like appetite hormones” controlled what we eat, says Dr. Habogian, who conducted some of the first studies of exercise and the hormones. “But I’m more and more convinced that it’s the brain. Hormones don’t tell you to go eat. Your brain does. And if we can get the dose right, exercise might change that message.”

In my case it is critical to exercise a fair amount.  I walk at least an hour a day and usually at least ninety minutes along with five one hour plus sessions of intense aerobic rowing a week.  The amount of work involved is still less than many laborers perform and a far cry from athletic training, but it seems to get past my minimal requirement.  It should be noted that in counties like Denmark and the Netherlands many people get this level of exercise directly from the way they commute and do errands.

The monitoring aspect has also been critical.  While I tend to weigh myself weekly, I do journal everything I eat as well as track my exercise.  I find the weigh-ins are redundant and I can predict my weight to about one percent with monitoring alone.

majorana particles spotted?

What if a particle could be its own antiparticle? Majorana worked out a theoretical particle a long time ago and I remember thinking what a beautiful idea - but ine that was probably an artifact rather than descriptive of nature.

It may be they are real! after all!

 

an inexpensive diy home video studio

For good lighting and a neutral backdrop for video conferencing ....  $100 should do it.  You'll want to add a good microphone though...