Last Quiet Workout

Oh the gym will get crowded next week, I'm sure. And stay that way a while. On the plus side, I'll be curious to see what the latest trends are for the legions of personal trainers.

With Discounts Like These, ....

Christmas Confit

Today is confit day. I have four goose legs well-rubbed with salt, garlic, bay leaf, and thyme for the past 48 hours. The roast goose breast on the bone turned out perfectly for our Boxing Day feast. I've rendered all the fat from the geese as well. Lovely stuff. Now to cook the legs, jar them, and resist eating them.

A Word on Knives

I love my Global knives for most cooking prep tasks, but for finessing the legs off a goose or turning a boneful piece of meat into a boneless one, hard to top the value of plastic-handled eicker trade knives. The one I just used on the christmas geese cost less than £10.

LOTR

Just re-read The Lord Of The Rings. Think I'd last re-read it just before the films came out. Re-reading the books has been a self-indulgence and a comfort coming up on 3 decades now. Some observations:

This time I re-read on the iPad, instead of my still-surviving 30 yr-old prints. This was more convenient but I realized partway in that some of the comfort derives from those old physical artifacts, with the age-darkened pages and that particular typeset.

Shadowfax. Good lord do they go on and on about that damn horse. Seriously, wtf?

I forgive the movies a lot of sins, but the egregious modernization of Faramir is still appalling. Tolkien's heroes were pre-modern, and I get that Jackson felt the misguided urge to make them modern [most of them, that is; Karl Urban's Eomer was still allowed to be awesome, because nobody fucks with Norse horsemen]. This business of feminizing the heroes was a shame for Aragorn, but he was still excellently played by Viggo Mortensen, and he got his moments. With Faramir, there was nowhere for the acting to go. He's all kinds of awesome in the book. It would have been more merciful to cut him from the film.

The palpable sense of loss that pervades and defines the books is still heartbreaking and wonderful.

Christmas Goose

The geese are ordered. Only 2 this year. Recently finished off the last of last year's (final freezer bag of roasted, diced goose breast, reheated and served over shredded sweetheart cabbage with some sour cream and lime wedges).

My plan, as usual:
(1) confit the legs
cut off the legs, rub generously with a mix of salt, finely chopped bay leaves, thyme, garlic (make lots, reserve some) and put uncovered on a plate in fridge
after 24 hours, re-rub the remaining spice mix and put on  clean plate for another night
scrape spices into a roasting pan, briefly brown the legs in butter or olive oil in a heavy pan
add legs to the pan -- pick a pan in which there is as little space left as possible, really crowd them in
cover with melted goose fat and cook for a few hours at 150C until very tender
(for goose fat -- scoop out hunks of fat from the cavity of your goose and render it down, you can also buy some extra to get you started the first time you do this; save all the fat for next time and you won't need to buy it again)
remove the legs, put them into glass jars or another sealable container, cover with the goose fat (strain via muslin), close
they will last for a couple months like this if not too warm, or many more months in the fridge
or eat them immediately
crisp them up in a very hot oven on a rack in a pan before serving
strain any/all leftover fat through muslin and store in jars for reuse -- goose fat is a great fat to cook with in general, does not need to be saved just for future confit

(2) roast the rest
stab the skin all over with a fork (or don't, nothing bad seems to happen if I forget this step)
rub in some salt and black pepper (or use an alternate rub)
roast on a rack in a pan in a fairly hot oven quickly (I generally use 220C, but 200C would work if you want a bit less risk of smoke)
I would tend to pull it out when the coolest part of the breast reaches 65C, or I might not wait that long
some people cook it much higher
if you cook with the legs on you have to deal with the classic roast bird problem of the legs being better, generally, a bit overcooked, while the breasts fare better being undercooked -- in goose this problem gets even trickier because, as with duck, I like the breasts a bit more on the rare side

remove it from the oven and let it rest 20-30 minutes before carving and serving
the skin should be nice and crisp, with an almost bacony crackling saltiness to it

be sure to strain the fat from the pan through muslin and save in jars for future use!

stuffing: generally no longer stuff the geese, but when we did, a prune/apple/onion/armagnac-type thing in the cavity worked well, but the real treat was a sausage-like stuffing of the neck

Probably the best full-goose treatment I've seen is in The River Cottage Year, in which Hugh Fairly-Longname does a confit of the legs, a separate cooking of the stuffed neck, and a roast of the rest.


For fancier full-goose christmasy roast recipes, I've not tried these, but they all look credible:
this or this or this

My Zombie Baseball Movie

"The Balking Dead", starring James Earl Jones and the reanimated corpse of Kevin Costner. Had to cut the scene where Tom Hanks explains the infield fly rule to the zombie Cubs, but it will be an extra on the DVD, I promise.

Thanksgiving Cooking Notes

Very much in the vein of last year, and following on from previous year. 6 adults on Saturday, plus kids, one of whom eats as an adult now.

Friday:

• chestnut dressing, same as last year except added some ceps and oyster mushrooms browned in butter.
• green bean casserole (same as last year)
• poached turkey legs in goose fat, also did 4 chicken legs with them for good measure
• roasted and made stock (onions, garlic, celery, bay leaf) out of the back of the turkey

Saturday:

• made brownies (with pecans), same as last year
• made gravy by thickening turkey stock with a roux
• roasted the turkey (5.6kg whole), as last year, 45 minutes back up at 220C, then flipped and cooked at 200C until done, then rested for 30+ minutes
• mashed potatoes (about 5 lbs worth; butter, double cream)
• while turkey was resting, heated at 180C+fan: dressing (uncovered), green beans (uncovered), legs (covered)
• JJ made fresh cranberry salad

Timing worked out great. Turkey turned out really well. There was plenty for everyone and enough for leftovers.

School of Bruce

All rockstars should be Bruce Springsteen. Seriously, is it too late to sign Keith & Mick up for some remedial tutoring?

Still waiting for the NFL to make an edict that all superbowl halftime shows must either be Bruce or be a marching band.

chicken wings

After occasional cravings, I finally took a stab at making buffalo-style chicken wings. Turned out to be incredibly easy. Prepping the wings is simple if you've got a knife with a bit of rigor to it. I went with baking instead of frying. They'd probably be a bit better fried, this worked great. Overcook on a rack in a roasting tin (I went 200C for maybe an hour or so), most skinful side up, and finish under the broiler to really crisp up the skins if they're not crackling enough for you. Toss hot in large bowl with sauce, which, simply enough, is a tabasco, melted butter, and white wine vinegar mix at (officially) 5:4:1 ratio. Unofficially I just mix roughly equal parts of melted butter and tabasco and then put a splash of vinegar in. Mix then toss (don't skimp!) piping-hot wings in a bowl, serve, eat.

F1 goes ficto-futuristic

Armored cars, gun-toting bandits... yes, somewhat insane, but maybe it's only a matter of time before we get to see kung-fu fighting in the pit lane.

What a Relief!

Oklahoma passed an anti-Sharia law. Phew! That must've been a close call for them. Next up: I'm proposing ballot initiatives to ban monsters under my bed.

NFL Getting Harder To Watch

The quantity and extent of injuries seems to get worse every year. An unofficial count puts the number of consussions this season so far (and we're not even halfway through) at 46. And long-term health data indicates most NFL players will end up with long-term health problems and shortened lives (and not just the ones with brain damage from concussions). Being party to that weighs on the conscience more heavily each season.

Football is the most telegenic sport out there [while porn is at the front of the adoption curve for many entertainment-related technologies, I think football was the driver behind early adoption of HDTV in the US], but I'm not sure it can be saved. Size, speed, and specialization have increased to the point that it's unlikely any rule changes or further equipment development will make any difference. In the mid-80s, "the fridge" was a novelty because he was over 300 pounds. Today Chicago has at least 11 players on the roster over 300 lbs, and that's typical, if not slightly small, for NFL teams. And the big guys have gotten faster. The big guys are the ones who can barely walk by age 50 with neck, spine, hip, and joint injuries. The smaller guys are concussing themselves into permanent brain damage. Players like to puff themselves up with blabber about it being a man's game and all. Now that I'm older, and a dad, this comes off as youthful bravado, and I can't help wondering how much strut the same guys will have a decade or two after playing, when walking properly or living without pain on a daily basis might be the biggest challenge.

What can fix it? Better equipment won't do it. Some rules changes would help (e.g. eliminating the 3-point stance). The only real solution is to get rid of the protective equipment. The consequence of the equipment has been greater injuries. (Rugby has vastly fewer injuries than the NFL. It's not as telegenic, but it's close enough to football in some aspects to be instructive. And yes, they play all-out in a rough, manly way despite there being rules about what types of tackles are dangerous and disallowed.) But moving away from a technology-based solution is so un-American that this will never happen.

Are You Feeling Sorry For Him Yet?

I love it when well-off folks threaten to work less because of taxes. Hilarious! I especially enjoy the weaselrific use of "in effect". Let me see if I can do that, too. If I were taxed less, I'd have an extra dollar to win the lottery, which would yield my children tens of millions of dollars. But instead they get nothing. In effect, my family's absolute [let alone marginal!] tax rate is thus virtually 100%! How demotivating. I think I'll work less. Or switch jobs to one better for tax avoidance.

A Slow Chili

A few weeks ago I made confit of beef cheek -- poached, pulled, and potted. Still getting great returns on the holiday goose fat. Sunday I roasted a variety of fresh chilies, tomatoes, and garlic, and then cooked them with some more onions, garlic, tomatoes until I had a fairly thick paste. Got it to a fine consistency in the food processor, then broke out the jar of beef and folded them together. The beef was incredibly tender and rich, a nice offset to the sharp/sweet/spicey roasted chili paste, yet they blended well and settled in to make a very nice dish.

Adobe & Microsoft? Please no!

Despite my loathing of flash-based websites (which long predates the Jobsian jihad on Flash), I really like Adobe. They are one of the best ever large development shops. Adobe Lightroom is in my apps hall of fame. Recent rumours of an acquisition by Microsoft are now fading. Let's hope they dissolve completely. I can't imagine a happy partnership. Adobe's more Apple-like on focus on functionality, while Microsoft is a monument to mediocrity and bloat. 

(Although microsoft does in fact produce some astonishingly good technology, mostly in the realm of dev tools and core technologies. One of the great mysteries is how the same place can craft such great stuff for software development and then develop such awful software.)

More Trains On The Way

I'm disappointed by the estimated three more years until this is operational, but will be great to take a single high-speed rail line from London to Frankfurt.  I'm also dreaming of a revival of sleeper service trains, having now enjoyed such to Edinburgh and Penzance. A proper sleeper service from London to, say, Zermatt, or Berlin. Now there's a dream.

Scanner!

I ponied up for a good one, a Fujitsu S1500M. Despite free delivery from the UK version of buy.com, it arrived less than 20 hours after ordering(!), and I've set it up and started scanning. I still expect devices such as this to be rickety and error-prone. So far, it is vastly exceeding my expectations. It is slick, quick, and does pretty much exactly what I want it to do. And I've used the included software to set my default profile to one that automatically shunts scans directly into evernote. So I put a doc in the feed try, press one button, and a few seconds later I have a new pdf in evernote. I've scanned some old school reports from the boys, one of which was A4 on thick stock, color printing, comb bound. After pulling out of the binding, I dropped it in and pushed the futuristic blue scan button. It automagically performed dual-sided scanning. Another was on thin A5, stapled, with some bent corners. No problem. So far, it just works.

Virtual document archival is a problem I've been pondering for years. Seems like a good time to be able to sort it finally.

Zero History

Gibson's latest: highly recommended. Good to read Pattern Recognition and Spook Country beforehand, but not mandatory. In fact, I read Spook Country first, then PR, now ZH. Was a bit sad getting near the end, as I suspect the characters won't be appearing in any further books. But well worth it. Does not edge Spook Country off its pedestal for sheer brilliance (reading that was pure revelatory bliss) but not far off. Charming and a pleasure to read.

Scanner?

Evernote makes me want to buy a scanner. Bizarrely, some institutions still insist on transferring information on paper. This does me no good as I am terrible at hardcopy file & retrieval paradigms. Now I can scan everything and dump it to my cloud brain for searching from anywhere. I have no idea what to look for in a scanner, though.

Shirts

I've picked up a possibly bad habit of buying shirts from tm lewin. They are always on sale, 5 for a dollar or something like that. They are a bit hit or miss. Some of them end up great, many so-so. Probably all made in china. I have occasionally bought nicer-quality shirts elsewhere, and liked them. I'm mulling getting some very high-quality shirts actually made for me. Not sure if it's worth it. Although my doctor did instruct me to buy better-fitting shirts.

speaking of festivals

Woodstock happens, then turns into a rather pathetic legend for decaying boomers.
Glastonbury happens, everyone decides it's pretty fun, and they're still at it, every year for the past 40.
There's a bit more wisdom in the latter.

Another Festival in Victoria Park

There's another music festival this weekend in Victoria Park. I love these. Nice crowds, lively music. The festival walls weren't photogenic, but I took some random photos in a big walk around the music grounds.

some wildflowers in Well Street Common

new olympic stadium looming over Tower Hamlets... looks wonderfully alien

Trending Aesthetics

I've noticed that the iPad versions of apps for which there are also desktop versions tend to have much nicer interfaces (e.g. Evernote, SplashID, OmniFocus, BBCNews). Has Apple made it ok for both hardware and software to actually look good? Has the aesthetics of the device and the free availability of competition in the marketplace raised the bar? Maybe it's just the iPad versions are newer, but I think there's more to it.

Evernote

Started using Evernote a few weeks ago. Its utility increases exponentially with use, so I've made a good-faith effort to seed it with info. Once it gets to critical mass I can see it will be phenomenally useful. Even a couple weeks in, it's already proving to be handy. Example use case: anything that might be tax-relevant info I now just send to evernote with a #tax tag. Or anything I find related to, say, cycling, that I'm interested in, I have Evernote remember, whether it be a website, a product I'm interested in, route info, PDFs of install & maintenance guides for components I have, etc. This could partially be covered by saving bookmarks, and keeping them in sync. Not entirely though. And I've got clients on my desktop, iPad, and iPhone. (The iPad client is the best for browsing, actually, much nicer than the desktop client. Desktop client is the best for adding new content. Also there are plug-ins for firefox and safari on the desktop to add pages to evernote with a single-click, but the iPad safari has no plug-in capability yet, which is a shame.) Will re-evaluate in a year, but so far it looks like it will be good.

Some Movie Viewing Recommendations

Inception: recommended for viewing in a theatre

Let The Right One In: recommended for viewing subtitled version, especially before the american remake comes out (virtually assured to be inferior in all aspects)

Burrata!

Occasionally the chalk sign for the neighborhood deli will announce "Burrata back in stock!" I never paid much attention. I didn't even know what burrata was. Finally I decided to see what all the fuss was about. Turns out it's a southern italian cheese thing, in which they make a pouch out of mozzarella and stuff it with a mixture of shredded fresh mozzarella + cream.

Yes.

HDTV

Finally got HDTV a few weeks ago. Wasn't sure I'd notice a difference.


I notice a difference.

Some things look fantastic. Sports tend to look ludicriously good. Nature shows, Top Gear, and GT5: excellent. Movies are a mixed bag. Some look wonderful, but sometimes the HD makes them look like they were shot on video. Edges too sharp and flat backgrounds or something. There are lots of settings for the TV, though, I think there are plenty of tweaks to optimize for film. Overall, definitely enjoying it.

My MiFi vs. My Use Cases

So I've been using a MiFi thingy (take a 3G phone, remove the voice functionality, and turn it into a wifi router) and it generally works fine but I am still baffled by it's modes of operation. It has 3 buttons. One to toggle power, one to toggle the wifi routerness, one to toggle the 3G connection to the internet. So it can be in these modes:

1. off
2. power on, but not connected to the 3G network and wifi OFF
3. power on, connected to the 3G network, but wifi OFF
4. power on, wifi ON, but NOT connected to the 3G network
5. power on, connected to the 3G network and wifi ON

When you power it up, it goes to state #2! Sometimes it then automatically goes to either #3 or #4. It seems nondeterministic. Additional button pushing gets it to state #5. Sometimes the wifi bit turns itself off, for no apparent reason. But what I'm really wondering is what are the use cases for states 2-4?? I only ever want it to be in state 1 or 5. I can't for the life of me figure how any of the other states could be used.

London's New Cycle Route 3: when does the "super" start?

The first two of  London's unfortunately named "Cycle Superhighways" opened officially the other week. This morning I rode Route 3 from the docklands east to the end in Barking. It goes all the way west to Tower Gateway, but I've already ridden down Cable street to Tower Hill a couple times prior to it being any kind of highway. So the new route 3 ride was... well, kind of crap. I do like the blue paint, and they've supposedly done their homework on the surface and durability of it. Much of the route is just an older bike path tarted up a bit. And that bike path was essentially just pavement segregated into pedestrian and bike halves, with a dangerous little concrete berm in between them. Some of it is on streets, in which case there's no blue bike path but there are large and helpful blue squares with the route designation on them at regular intervals. The bike paths mostly suck. Most sections are way too narrow. Even a modest traffic volume would be a nightmare. No passing, and somewhat nerve-racking in some bits having to ride a narrow chute with on-coming traffic just off the curve to your left, oncoming cyclists brushing your shoulder on the right. There was one section where the pathway widened out to reasonable proportions, with a pleasant grass strip in between the path and the A13, but for most of the length it was uncomfortably narrow. Also in the path: lampposts, road signs, and the occasional car. Fun. For the most part, the route marking was fine, but there were a couple sections where the blue disappears and there's no clear signage where you're supposed to go, including a couple non-obvious navigations of large roundabouts and a particularly bad one through the edge of the docklands. And the end in Barking is not clearly marked at all. Flow-wise, there are a high number of intersections on the route that use pedestrian crossings. On the balance, it wasn't that pleasant an experience. In Barking, I headed north and then west back into hackney. I was honestly relieved once I was on actual roadways, jostling with the buses and vans.

To be fair, yes, it is an improvement. Some sections I might appreciate if I were commuting on that corridor. No, I wouldn't want to take the kids on it (even though they are competent cyclists), nor would I recommend it for anyone nervous or inexperienced. In other words, if you're not already ok riding in London, this probably isn't for you. If you are, some bits of it might make your life slightly easier, but don't expect it to be entirely pleasant or to make a big change in your commuting time.

Calling them "superhighways" was about the worst thing they could have done. It's like making modest improvements to a driving route that was in bad shape (e.g. unpaved sections with no signs) such that you ended up with a single-lane (in each direction) paved roadway, with plenty of stop signs and traffic lights, and then telling everyone you've built an autobahn. Instead of a few people being happy with your improvements, you get everyone thinking you're an idiot. Especially because there are good examples of autobahns that just about everyone is familiar with. Likewise, there are good examples elsewhere in europe of fast, wide, segregated cycle routes. We're still waiting for ours.

Bike Mechanic

What I lack in skill and knowledge I make up for with stupidity and perserverance. I rehabbed my bikes recently. On the legendary Trek 7600, I finally retired the softride suspension stem. They haven't made them for years, but I was quite fond of mine. Being an old bike, I had to get a quill-threadless stem converter. Then put a new stem on. And ended my ill-advised cork-tape-on-straight-handlebars experiment with some new grips. Also put some schwalbe ultra marathon++ tires of uninstallibility on (eventually), after getting tired of flatting out on broken glass on the towpaths. They seem like they will outlast the heat death of the universe, which is good because they were nearly impossible to put on. I may just buy new wheels if I want to put cross tires on for some rides.

I also dusted off the road bike frame, not used in anger in the past 6 years. I had put a mtb crankset on the front in Switzerland, to gear it down to accomodate my feebleness in the mountains (climbing is all about power/weight ratio, and gosh is my ratio low). I decided to reinstall the original campagnolo cranks, chainrings, and bottom bracket, but could not get the old cranks off. I'd gone with an isis bottom bracket with the mtb cranks. Unlike the campy bottom bracket, onto which you which you tighten the cranks to a specific torque setting, the isis interface has a positive stop, so torque is a guide but you keep tightening until you hit the stop, regardless. Isis was a clever design, actually. But I managed to essentially friction-weld the whole thing into a solid metal unit. So I took the boys out and we bought an angle grinder. Oh yes. The angle grinder. (I've found that now I'm constantly trying to come up with excuses to use it.) So we had a lot of fun with it. Nothing (much) caught on fire in the kitchen. And the cranks came off.

campy parts, ready for install, once we're done with the angle grinder

pre angle-grinder: this filed-down coin didn't help, but at least I didn't break my crank-pullers

the road bike, reassembled

suspension stem, RIP

the front end is a lot lighter and more responsive now

the bike room

Beef Shin Confit

Finally cracked open the beef shin confit I'd made. Seven+ months in the fridge. Still good. Fried it up a bit like shawerma -- wonderful combination of tender & crispy. Really good. Definitely something to try again.

iPad: first 2 weeks

If the Motorola flip phone let you be Captain Kirk, the iPad turns you into Captain Picard, receiving a report in your ready room off the bridge. It's more futuristic in daily use than I expected. A bit over two weeks ago, I got one (wifi only), and took it on the road -- longhaul flights to the Pacific and back.

The verdict: OK, this thing is awesome. I love it. I have grown inordinately attached to it in a very short time. It's not perfect, but for what I most use it for, it's great.

Web: Fantastic. So much nicer for casual sofa browing than a laptop. My laptop usually is driving a big monitor on my desk at home. Not only is it a pain to unhook it just because I want to browse from the sofa, but even opening it and waiting for it to wake up, then logging on, etc., now seems like a real chore. The immediacy of the iPad is striking.

Psuedo-Web Content: Even better. By this I mean online "magazines" and such that have dedicated "apps". The Wired app, for example, is beautiful. They really got it right for a tablet-based magazine. Great touches include side-scrolling to get from article to article, but vertical scrolling to page through once inside an article. Also some interactive animated bits and such. Just ideal. Another example: the bbc news app. Pretty basic still but already superior to reading the BBC news site via the browser (which in itself is perfectly fine). It changes its layout whether you're in portrait or landscape, has intuitive scrolling through stories and topics, very easy to read the major stories. Not ground-breaking, just nicely done.

Book Reading: Excellent. I've been skeptical of e-books. I do still prefer physical ones, but given that, the iPad is a great alternative. Travelling is the perfect use case. I finished two books and started a third while on a single trip. There's no way I would have lugged three physical books along on the trip with me. I've got books via apple's bookstore and via amazon. Amazon's iPad Kindle app works well. Apple's book app is even better. A lot of little details, even things that seem cheesy at first -- the animation for page-turning -- actually make a subtle but powerful difference that is noticeable when I go back to using the Kindle app. The Apple reading is slightly more immersive. And, predictably, the integration with the book store is much smoother. Not to slight the Kindle app -- I gladly use it as it gives me access to all of Amazon's e-catalog in addition to Apple's.

Movies: Fantastic. And renting movies works really well for business trips. Watching movies on this thing is great. I watched a variety of movies. It's 720p HD, but I couldn't tell the difference between normal quality and HD movies. The normal ones looked great. I watched a normal rental from apple, an HD rental from apple, and a DVD I'd ripped myself and re-encoded down to about 1.7GB -- erring on the side of higher quality. I also tried some I'd done at much lower quality (less than half the size), and they were noticeably poor, but the other one was great. (I don't remember the settings, but was something along the lines of 2-pass encoding with avg bitrate a bit over 2000).

Games: have only tried one game, Need For Speed: Shift, and it is really fun. It's a turn-the-pad-to-steer racing game. Lot of potential on this, although I'm not much of a handheld gamer and probably won't be buying many games (maybe chess).

Photos: Beautiful. Photos look great. I just wish I could get an iPad version of Adobed Lightroom (one of my all-time favorite pieces of software). Not for library management, but for basic image editing, the iPad would be great. Multitouch is a natural for cropping, rotating, and adjusting sliders (moreso than the mouse).

Maps: Wow! It's hard to imagine google maps on any other device after this. Not being able to touch-zoom/scroll a map now makes normal computers seem really clumsy and crippled.

Battery Life: Super good. Exceeds expectations. Haven't run it all the way down yet, but have gone 8 & 9 hours with time left. Should exceed 10 hours in normal use. This is excellent for a plane trip with no power adapter -- watch several movies and read a book.

What's bad? OK, typing is awful. It would be good if I couldn't type, and had to hunt & peck with 2 fingers. But I can type, quite well, with ten fingers. And typing means you rest your fingers on the keys. Which doesn't work with the iPad currently, since touching is the same as typing. So you have to hover your fingers in the air above the keypad. You can get a docking or wireless keyboard for it. Don't expect to get much mileage out of typing directly on it. Also, it does get a bit heavy in the hand for reading especially. Usually not an issue as it's lap (or chest-) based, but sometimes noticeable.

Overall: it's great. Amazing content-consumption device. And could be really good for certain types of content-creation, just not typing-based ones. A side-effect of iPad use is that I am now totally spoiled for multitouch functionality. I really want my desktop computers to have this as well, so at any moment I can reach up and start manipulating things "directly" with my fingertips. Someday soon, I suspect. (Imagine a 27" iMac with multitouch glass over that beautiful LED-backlit monitor.)

Accessories:
(1) I got a slipcase (Tuff-Luv iPad Veggie Leather Pull-Tab Case), which works well. I like it, despite the idiotic ring device used to affix the strap. A bit of velcro would've been in order here. Aside from that, does just want I need it to do.
(2) I put a Zagg Invisible Shield screen cover over the front. It worked great for a while. Even the small bubbles, which I didn't notice on install, went away after 2-3 days, just like the instructions said would happen. But near the end of my second week travelling, the edges began to separate in a few places -- almost curling up a bit. Not sure if it was the change in climates and humidity levels and/or the extended a/c use in the hotel room, but it shouldn't have happened. One corner curled up completely and I had to smooth it back down. That looks bad now. The screen part is still good, and looks quite clear and all, but I'm not entirely happy with the ratty look at the corner now.
(3) VersaCharger minisync charger+airplane adapter+etc. worked fine charging the iPad on the plane.
(4) Not really an iPad accessory per se, but used Sennheiser PXC 450 noise-cancelling headphones extensively on various flights. Overall, quite good. Best pair I've had, and I've gone through Sony (a while ago), and cheap JVCs. Sound quality on these is by far the best. My only complaint is that they take a lot of power to drive. Volume can be a bit low in some cases. Could use an inline headphone amp maybe.
(5) Definitely not an iPad accessory, but deserves special mention for being great: Tom Bihn "checkpoint flyer" carryon bag. I love it. Got a "slip" folder to tuck inside. Perfect variety of pockets, excellent laptop solution (too big for iPad, but still worked well), just great to travel with. Very easy. Heartily recommended.

U-S-A: songs for the cup

The biggest disadvantage the US has heading into the world cup is the lack of a rousing chant. "U-S-A! U-S-A!" is as moronic and uninspiring as it is tedious. It's not that US sports fans lack an affinity for music. Students at fall football games chant ("this is our school fight song/and we don't know the words"). University pep bands feed the manic energy inside packed basketball fieldhouses. NBA and NHL arena sound systems have blasted snippets from Gary Glitter to The Fratellis. None of these quite work for soccer, though. For that, we have to turn to baseball. Were the late 70s the golden era of singing in baseball stadiums? The alka-seltzer jingle might not work, but "kiss him good bye" definitely would (yes, Steam's "na na na na/na na na na/hey hey hey/goodbye").

iPad screen shield tip

If you decide to put a Zagg "Invisible Shield" on your iPad, don't strictly follow Zagg's directions. In particular, ignore the instruction to not spray the solution on the device itself. DO spray it on the device. Spray it everywhere. Took me seconds to install it, whereas I've read reviews where people fiddled for minutes on end. The best instructional video is here. Do what he says.

10 Years Abroad

Couple days ago marked the 10th anniversary of moving overseas. When we got in from heathrow, the key to our place was not ready for us. Nothing like a screaming 2-yr old coming off an overnight flight and a 90-minute van ride across London to focus the minds of a roomful of estate agents. The key shortly became "ready". Moved into an empty house. On a business trip prior I'd bought a mattress and scheduled delivery for the day we arrived. Luggage, child, mattress on floor, empty early victorian row house. Went for a walk around the neighborhood and had lunch outdoors at a pub, son finally asleep in the stroller. One more child, a stint in Switzerland, a few houses, a couple jobs, and 10 bikes later, we're still here.

Embrace Cannibalization

Speaking of the iPad, I've seen some hand-wringing about the iPad "cannibalizing" sales of macs and/or iPods. This is a nonsensical worry. Companies should actively seek to cannibalize their own sales. Think of it this way: a new product comes out that people prefer to your company's existing products. Would you rather that new product have come from your company, or from someone else's?

iPad Shortages

Just back from the US. The continuing demand for iPads is astonishing. The release date in the UK has been pushed back a couple times. Now it's easy to see why. In the US, online orders look to be about 2-week delay in shipping. The apple store folks I talked to in CT revealed they have a 1-2 week backlog of reserved in-store customer orders, and it's the same with other stores in the area. I called the 5th avenue store to confirm. Yep, completely out of stock, even wifi-only models, not just the more recent 3G versions. The apple stores are getting new shipments every morning, but not nearly keeping up with the demand. Interesting.

UK Elections

Unfortunately I can't vote yet. I tried to get worked up about taxation without representation, but it's so hard to buy guns here, let alone tri-corner hats, I just grumbled a bit instead. But the election happened this week, or is still happening, sort of, and it's been pretty interesting.

First, all due props to the BBC website for

1. a truly fabulous comparison of where everyone stands [seriously, check it out for an example of the way political coverage should be]
2. a nice explanation of hung parliaments, that they've kept updated with specifics now
3. clear and well-updated results

I feel bad for the UK Independence Party, amassing well over 900k votes but not a single seat, whereas the Democratic Unionist party punches well above its weight with 8 seats on a mere 168k votes. I have no idea how districting works, but seems a bit favorable there for those unionists. I'm not quite sure what the UKIP is about, but they've described themselves as "non-rascist libertarian". If you have to disclaim your non-rascistness from the get-go, probably a bad sign. Maybe this is their way of saying, "we're not the BNP". For any Americans reading this, note that even the self-proclaimed "libertarians" of the UKIP are in favor of free public healthcare via the NHS. I guess this means they are either really crap at the libertarian thing or really evolved at it, depending on your viewpoint.

I don't like so-called "proportional representation" (PR), but it's big on the agenda for lib dems, and it's easy to see why. Labour gets 4.5x the seats as lib dems on only 1.26x as many votes. On the other hand, PR would give the BNP 12 seats instead of zero. Zero is a good thing.

If you look at number of votes required per seat, putting aside the UKIP and others who came up empty (BNP second with 564k votes and no seats), the ones who had to try hardest were the greens, securing a single seat on 286k votes, and lib dems second at nearly 120k votes/seat. Labour and conservatives were in the same range of 33-35k votes/seat, while the dem unionists got away with a mere 21k votes/seat.

Normalized by MPs per 100k votes (just because I like the sound of "mp100k"), the order is:

(dem unionist 4.8)
labour 3.0
tories 2.9
libdem 0.8

Or, normalized by taking the average number of voters per MP elected -- 29,653,638 total voters for 649 seats -- 1 seat left because a candidate died recently, election for that seat deferred, yielding one seat per every 45,691 people who voted. "mp45.7k" doesn't have the same ring to it, sadly:

labour 1.4
tories 1.3
libdem 0.4

So as you can see, labour and conservatives yield better than average return on votes, whereas libdem votes are a bad investment. (Although not really, because they now have more power than their overall showing might warrant because they are desperately needed by whomever attempts to setup a government.)

If PR were adopted, the biggest beneficiaries would be, of course, the UKIP and the BNP. But of parties who actually got seats in the election, percentage impact would be highest for greens, then lib dems, then SNP and plaid cymru, whereas biggest losers would be tories, then lab, then alliance party, then dem unionists.

My chart of fun facts & figures can be found here.

City Bike P.S.

So Trek is already making a good-looking and well-reviewed belt-driven city bike. I would prefer the sram over the shimano rear internal gear hub, for no reason other than I like sram. On the front hub I would go with a dynamo hub for an LED front light. And I would much prefer single disc brakes up front rather than drum brakes front & rear. But looks mostly spot-on for a city bike.

Given that as a utility bike, the recreational bike would likely be something along the lines of a cyclocross bike -- ok for long road rides as well as path and off-road. I still feel suspension should be in the mix somewhere, though. Hm.

Radishes at the Market

Nice radishes at the market today. Favorite way to eat them: with good butter and flakes of sea salt. Then toss the leaves with peppery olive oil and a splash of lemon juice.

Also got some cheerful young asparagus, a pint of garlic-stuffed olives, and a pot of pate (top 3 ingredients: chicken liver, bacon, double cream....). Sustenance for a cold and grey May Saturday.

City Bike

Went out for a nice ride for the first time since my triple-puncture week back in December. Now I've got both front and rear tires fitted with schwalbe marathon plus tires. These prevent punctures on the road first by being impossible to put on, so you can't ride at all, then by nearly guaranteeing pinch-flats, so you can't ride at all, and lastly, if you somehow manage to correctly install them, by being nearly impenetrable. Definitely tarmac tires, though. I did managed to put myself down in some mud at one point after the bike went sideways on me.

Thinking a lot about what I would want for a city bike in London. Ideally it would be fully suspended. I like my suspension stem, but it's starting to go wobbly and they stopped making them years ago. So a suspension fork and frame then. But most suspensions are made for mountain biking and downhilling, not the kind of constant vibro-pounding your spine takes on the rough pavement, tarmac, bricks, and cobblestones of London streets, parks, and towpaths. The hardpack on some of the towpaths is the smoothest surface to be found. Add some grass, wet leaves, potholes, glass, rubbish, curbs of all manner of height and state of disrepair, along with some rutted muddy bits, and it's your basic challenging urban environment. I want a full suspension tuned for the constant vibration, not tuned for huge travel when I catch air coming down off of boulders.

I'd like something fairly simple and low-maintenance and able to withstand the near-constant drizzle. Ideally internal gears in the rear hub, something like sram's 9-speed internal gear rear hub. Add truvative hammerschmidt cranks and you get 18 gears with a single ring on front and a single on back, no derailleurs. Of course, I don't think this wouldn't work well with a fully suspended bike without having to either add a rear derailleur or adding a chain tensioner. But with a hardtail this would be an attractive setup. Very simple, low maintenance, durable, never drop a chain, and change gears, front or rear, even at a dead standstill.

On the front, an internal generator hub (schmidt or sram) powering an LED front light. For brakes: I hate v-brakes. Either old-school calipers or, more likely, go with disc brakes. Possibly overkill on a road-ish bike, but definitely nice to have considering the amount of time spent riding in the wet here. Front only. I can live without rear brakes on a city bike. Red LED on the back. Lightweight clip-on fenders. Depending on commuting needs, either backpack (my choice), or rack with panniers.

Ha Ha Tonka

Purely by chance, saw Missouri band Ha Ha Tonka at the Doug Fir in Portland last month. Fantastic show. I was really taken with the band. Bit like Jayhawks crossed with East of Eden, maybe a touch of Uncle Tupelo. They can dial up the big rock as well as the harmonies and the wide-open spaces. Unfortunately their studio work doesn't fully do justice to their energy and dynamic range [I may, fundamentally, simply want Steve Albini to record every band I like], but the CDs are still worth a listen. Heartily recommend catching them live if you can.

Plants & Plausibility

Are plants protective for cancer? The evidence has been mixed, to say the least. Evidence, that is, in the form of specific human interventions. And it's fairly ambiguous observationally. Recently yet another result from EPIC was published, looking at correlation between fruit and vegetable intake and cancer. Basically there was no difference. The best-case hazard ratio was only down to 0.97 (compared with a more encouraging HR of 0.72 for, um, eating lots of cheese ... oops!). Given uncertainty in figuring out what people actually ate over the period, and given uncertainty around "correcting" for variables (these corrections are built upon pyramids of observational studies, it's not an exact science, although it pretends to be), this is probably meaningless. The biggest worry for the pro-plant brigade should be that even with the flaws, we could expect a more dramatic difference in hazard ratio simply (or solely) from healthy user bias. So it's possible plants are causing cancer. Who knows. If you're choking down foliage by the bucket in the belief you're saving yourself from cancer, there's not much evidence for that. Eat them if you like them. Or maybe to foster a diverse ecology of gut flora, or to poop a lot.

In any case, lots of smart people are absolutely convinced that plants have magical health benefits. I think this stems from a problem that Pauling succumbed to -- the plausibility peril. In the lab, we can see specific interplay at the molecular level, and this builds up a promising avenue of research. The plausibility peril: once we come up with a plausible explanation for how something could or might work, the plausibility itself acts as evidence in support of the theory. Not even deliberately or intentionally, but nonetheless it becomes a bit of a trap. E.g. you sneak up on some cancer cells in a beaker, minding their own business, and hose them down with tocotrienols. They stop growing. Well, that's certainly promising. Tocotrienols are in plants, thus eating plants might slow or stop cancer growth. And freebasing vitamin C might cause immortality (sorry, Linus). But when you try it out in humans it actually has to work. And often it doesn't, no matter how plausible the story.

High Confusion & Heart Disease in Women

A recent study came out observing a higher risk of heart disease within a 30k+ sample of Italian women who consumed higher carbs, or higher GI foods, or higher GL foods. What fascinates me is not the study itself, but the description of the results by both the press and the study authors themselves. More on that in a bit, first the study.

It was a cohort study. Take it with a grain of salt. A big one. The analysis for the women in the study concluded the following, ordered by relative risk:

1. women with highest GL [glycemic load] diets had a relative risk of heart disease of 2.24
2. women with highest total carbohydrate intake had a relative risk of heart disease of 2.00
3. women with highest GI [glycemic index] diets had a relative risk of heart disease of 1.68

Even though this study would seem to confirm my own biases, I think it's mostly worthless. It's an observational study that assesses diets based on questionnaires, so the data should be treated as highly unreliable. Given that, relative risks should be very high before we get too worked up. Relative risks around 2 in a study like this are pretty boring. (And fewer than 1 in 200 women developed heart disease over the course of the study, compared with greater than 1 in 50 men.) Useful only to generate funding for further studies. Not at all useful for guiding public health policy. So this isn't really worth so much attention in the press.

That said, I'm fascinated by how it was described, even by its own authors. There seems to be a real disconnect between the data and the editorializing. Let's review from a few lines above: total carb intake showed a greater risk than just GI. High GL, which is essentially a combination of the two, showed the highest risk. The risks of total carbs and high GL were close to each other, with high GI trailing in third farther behind. Naturally, the press coverage focused on GI.

The headline from the BBC explicitly and only mentioned "High GI". The Independent says "Sugary". The BBC article even rolls out these head-scratchers:

"high GI foods, rather than carbohydrates per se, appear to pose a risk"

and

"Low GI carbohydrates, such as pasta, which release energy and raise blood sugar far slower, showed no such link with heart disease."

Maybe I'm losing my reading comprehension skills. Let me look at the study again.... As I remembered, carbohydrates per se not only appear to pose a risk, but they appear to do so to a greater extent than high GI foods. Both of those statements are demonstrably false if you take the very study they claim to be about at face value. How's that for spin?

Worse, the actual authors of the study are being dishonest, saying,

"Thus, a high consumption of carbohydrates from high-glycaemic index foods, rather than the overall quantity of carbohydrates consumed, appears to influence the risk of developing coronary heart disease."

So the reporters are uncritically regurgitating how the study was described, rather than reporting on the study itself [likely the reporters never bothered to read the study], and the authors are misinterpreting their own results ["lying" is a strong word]. The study actually did in fact observe that "the overall quantity of carbohydrates consumed" influences the risk to a greater extent than high-GI foods does, yet the authors claim the opposite. Well, I'm baffled.

The only explanation I can come up with is that they've already decided carbs are good. Since most people keep protein intake within a fairly narrow range, the higher carb diet is the same as a lower fat diet, and vice versa. So in part what was observed was women eating more fat had lower risk of heart disease. This causes so much cognitive dissonance in the researchers they have to figure out a way to not say it. You already know the punchline, right?

"They could try broadening the types of bread and cereals they eat...."

That's right! Conclusion = Eat More Carbs!


____________________
bbc article
independent article

P.S. The only thing missing from the coverage was a recommendation for women to take statins.

Quiet Skies Over London

Speaking of air travel, there's been none of it here since Iceland has launched its Dr. Evil volcanic assault on the rest of europe. Once the blank skies were pointed out to me, I can't stop noticing. It's been beautiful and sunny and clear. The complete lack of anything in the sky is almost shocking. Odd and fascinating. And it's gone literally quiet as well. We're less than 5 miles from London City, which is a protected habitat and breeding ground for the endangered jumbolina, which makes a distinctive pitch-dropping sound on approach. We're also 15 miles from Stansted and about 18, as the heron flies, from Heathrow (a fact I try not to dwell on when I'm 90 minutes into an attempt to get there). There's never not metal criss-crossing the sky. Except now.

Domestic Air Travel in USA

or
"when did United become a discount airline?"
or
"you're doing it wrong!"

Flew United Airlines domestically for the first time in many years. I remember United as being one of the "premium" airlines, but from the moment I booked I was assaulted by piecemeal pricing and upgrades. Relentless pitches to upgrade my seat, my check-in, my luggage options, etc. The implied message, delivered repeatedly, was "our default service SUCKS! please pay more to make this journey bearable". At the airport, more weirdness. Upon check-in, I was given a "departure management card", rather than a boarding pass, that got me through security but I still had to check in again at the gate to get an actual seat. This didn't happen on the return trip, so I'm not sure what the deal was. The per-bag fee caused the predictable chaos. On the plane, united had put diagrams on the overheads as to how to align max-size carryons most efficiently in the bins. And the bins were full. Everyone had large roll-on carryons. Getting everyone on and off the plane took a loooong time. How is this helping anyone? How does this help the airline? I have no idea.

How and why did United decide to become a discount airline? Southwest Airlines is a true "cheap and cheerful" play. United's attempt is neither cheap nor cheerful.

First Dentist Visit Since The 90s

Been a while. Maybe 12 years. No cavities, no problems. I attribute my overall cavity-free streak to my gum-chewing habit. I have no evidence for that. The hygienist put a big hurt on me. Have to go back for a followup scraping session, too. Ouch. I will be upgrading my toothbrush to a sonicare. Yes, yes, and flossing.

Overall I'm having a hard time buying the every 6-12 month schedule the dentist recommends given the observed success of my once-a-decade scheme.

London Is Really Freaking Cold

London cold is a dense, damp thing. Seeps into homes & bones... seeps, settles, won't be sloughed.

London is (subjectively) the coldest place I've ever been. I've enjoyed January after January in Chicago (standing on an el platform in the dark of a subzero-F morning with a face full of windchill), brittle and bitter midwestern nights, razor-sharp snowy gusts in the alps... nothing makes me feel colder than a sunless & drizzly London spring day with the temp just above freezing.

Free Books On My iPad

[and you shall know them by the badness of their malts...]

Saw a rumor that the entire Project Gutenberg library will be freely available from the iPad bookstore, which would be fantastic. My first NeXT workstation in the early 90s had the Shakespeare plays pre-installed (for no good reason, but it was cool), so this would definitely be in keeping.

I have to assume the guy writing a heartfelt treatise on brewing never expected me to be reading a non-print copy nearly 300 years later...

The many Inhabitants of Cities and Towns, as well as Travellers, that have for a long time suffered great Prejudices from unwholsome and unpleasant Beers and Ales, by the badness of Malts, underboiling the Worts, mixing injurious Ingredients, the unskilfulness of the Brewer, and the great Expense that Families have been at in buying them clogg'd with a heavy Excise, has moved me to undertake the writing of this Treatise on Brewing, Wherein I have endeavour'd to set in sight the many advantages of Body and Purse that may arise from a due Knowledge and Management in Brewing Malt Liquors, which are of the greatest Importance, as they are in a considerable degree our Nourishment and the common Diluters of our Food; so that on their goodness depends very much the Health and Longevity of the Body.

Avoiding Irony Deficiency

Irony is a virus. Early exposure is crucial for health later in life. An irony deficiency can have dire consequences if left untreated too long. Best results are seen when exposing children to irony. Overly sterile environments can be detrimental. Ideally irony exposure starts at home at a young age. Often groups of children will develop irony at roughly the same time, but if someone in your child's social group catches irony early, it can be a good idea to schedule an irony party, allowing other neighborhood children to get enough exposure to their infected friends to get a healthy inoculation.

Weird Lower-Leg Cramping

I have strange lower-leg cramping -- calves, feet, toes -- only at night and only after either drinking alcohol or eating lots of sugar. The only thing that seems common between the two would be my liver (since fructose and alcohol are metabolized similarly in the liver), but how my liver would have some sort of neuromuscular impact on my lower legs while sleeping is beyond me.

I see no plausibility for the usual (mostly half-assed) explanations for cramps such as "dehydration" or deficiency of magnesium or potassium or "electrolytes". Very odd. The obvious solution, which I practice most days, is to simply neither eat sugar nor drink. Still, it's an odd one.

Scrubs == Mash

My 12-yr-old and his buddies love Scrubs. I enjoy it a lot. Nice and goofy. I only belatedly realized that for him it's basically what Mash was for me & my friends.

Personal Trainers

I get a kick out of watching the personal trainers do their thing at the club. They seem to operate out of the same playbook. The current script is to do something with kettlebells (lots of kettlebell swings), something with a box, and to do some mini squats in the cage with a barbell. The latter is especially clever because most of the people getting personal training would never approach a barbell or cage. I'm not sure why the trainers don't teach them actual squats. They put a barbell across the back and half them bend the knees just a little then back up. Makes me think of Tugg Speedman in Tropic Thunder, to the little kid with the stick figure: "I will call you... Half Squat." But they aren't even half squats. More like quarter squats.

In January the trendy trainer exercise was to get people to crouch on an inverted hemisphere. "For skiing", I bet. I saw a poster advertising the imminent arrival of some sort of weighted tube with handles that promises to be the next excellent exercise accessory. Looks like one of the battering rams cops use on doors. Can't wait to see that in action.

Health Care Reform In The USA

The health care reform that has just passed in the US is mainly concerned with insurance reform. It doesn't turn the US into Canada or the UK. It does make the US a lot more like Switzerland (or, oddly enough, Massachusetts). I find this interesting since I lived in Switzerland for a couple of years. I have never lived in Massachusetts, although I have seen nearly every episode of Cheers.

In Switzerland about twenty years ago insurance companies started pulling the same shenanigans they were pulling in the US -- aggressively dumping people off their coverage, expanding denial for "pre-existing conditions", that sort of thing. The Swiss shortly got annoyed and about 15 years ago enacted reform that cleaned up insurance practices and made insurance mandatory, along with public and subsidy provisions. The measure was passed by referendum. [Switzerland is much more of a democracy than the US, which is not always a good thing.] Private healthcare in Switzerland is still going strong and by all measures I can see, including anecdotal first-hand experience for myself and my family (we had private insurance), the overall system is of good quality.

The UK, on the other hand, seems to have adopted a typical "worst of both worlds" approach, trying to get the worst of capitalism and the worst of socialism and combining them, with the best will in the world, to yield something that kind of works, kind of fails, and is in perpetual CRISIS. From personal experience and observation, if you've got decent private insurance and/or enough money to pay for private healthcare, you can get fantastic quality care in the UK. If you are poor, you'll do much better for healthcare in the UK than in the US. The group that would really be better off in the US than the UK is the subset of the middle class that don't have private insurance through work, but likely would in the US doing equivalent jobs. But, seriously, if anyone's thinking of big-time reform, the UK would not be on the shortlist of models to emulate.

France, though, is a different story. I have never lived in France but by all accounts the quality of care is very good from top to bottom. For full universal health care with public options but still allowing private hospitals and doctors in private practice (I am more than happy for good doctors to get wealthy, it's an important job and they've earned it), France would top my shortlist.

Comparing Switzerland, France, and the US*:

• %GDP spent on healthcare is substantially higher in the US than in either France or Switzerland
  
• Total spent per capita on healthcare is substantially higher in the US than in either France or Switzerland
• despite percentage of costs covered by the government being lower in the US, per capita public expenditure is higher in the US than in either France or Switzerland
• life expectancy at birth, infant mortality rates, and some other gross markers of health are better in France and in Switzerland than in the US
• both France and Switzerland have substantially higher ratios of practicing physicians/population than the US
• Switzerland has more nurses per capita than the US, but the US has more than France

It will be interesting to see how this evolves in the US over the next decade or two.


*These numbers, and lots of others, along with pointers to the more comprehensive full report, available here.

Conditioning Upkeep & Decline

Per plan, I've scaled way back on the running this year after a hugely gratifying New Year's Day 10k race. I've stuck with weight training, not as often as I'd like, given demands of the new job, but usually hitting my 3x/wk target. My strength has measurably improved. I've not been able to run at least once a week as hoped, but have gotten out occasionally. It's surprising how rapidly sport-specific fitness declines, in particular endurance. Thirteen weeks ago I put in a 22k run, but now I wouldn't be able to get close to that. Interestingly, my pace is still ok. I just did a short tempo run, covering just over 6k in 30 minutes. But the ability to sustain that same pace for a further 60 or even 30 minutes is gone.

Anniversary Dinner

Second time I've been to Boundary, and it was even better than the first time. Just a fantastic meal! Started with oysters: english rocks, french rocks, english natives. All fine, but the english natives were winners by knockout. Then sauteed foie gras, lovingly seared in butter and served with some poached rhubarb, with just enough sweetness and sharpness to offset the rich, silky indulgence of the perfectly cooked liver. My mains was trotter, sweetbreads, and morels -- pig's foot magically slow-cooked to leave everything fork-tender but still full of rich porky flavor, stuffed with sweetbreads and complimented by morels in a reduction sauce. Dessert was St. Emilion au Chocolat, which was like the richer, denser, tastier, smarter, over-achieving cousin of a dark chocolate mousse. They even got the espresso right. Heartily recommended.

Innumeracy In The Medical Community

Sigh. Dr. Davis recently blogged ostensible evidence that butter has an "unusual ability to provoke insulin responses", which will trigger weight gain, "because of butter's insulin-triggering effect, doubling or tripling insulin responses (postprandial area-under-the-curve)."

Doubling or tripling post-prandial insulin AUC? OK, I'm intrigued. So I read the study.

The insulin AUC numbers from the study are as follows

19960 +- 2766 control*

27970 +- 2107 VEFO
29619 +- 4975 MUFA
34749 +- 1167 HPSO
37582 +- 4364 SFA (butter!)

*And here's a really important detail: the "control" meal has no fat at all, and is not isocaloric with the test meals. "the macronutrient profile was as follows: 72% fat, 22% carbohydrate, and 6% protein (see Table S1 under "Supplemental data" in the online issue). The subjects also consumed the same test meal containing no fat as a control meal". So the butter test meal has nearly 4x as many calories as the control meal. The AUC for insulin between the two is about double for the butter, but that seems like a useless measure.

Comparing like-for-like, the spread between average insulin AUC for butter meal and the isocaloric alternate fat meals shows the butter to be about 34% higher than VEFO and only 8% higher than HPSO.

8% above the nearest non-butter meal is not "doubling or tripling".


P.S. A few further notes.
(1) Quick search of pubmed turns up a few interesting things: one, papers contradicting this study, when isocaloric meals were tested (but seems like potatoes are a popular choice for carbs instead of wheat flour used by Dr. Davis's cited study). Here's an example: "Differential effect of unsaturated oils and butter on blood glucose and insulin response to carbohydrate in normal volunteers"
(2) Studies like this all seem to be studying responses of fat + carbs. Not sure how relevant this is if you don't eat a lot of carbs.


P.P.S. Peter at Hyperlipid has a more thorough piece on this, in his typical hilarious-yet-rigorous style ("FFAs do not pop in to existence merely to prove that butter is going to kills us through obesity")

Insult to Injury

This disclaimer was at the bottom of an online menu. Cheaper to not get sick I guess.

The consumption of raw or undercooked seafood may increase the risk of foodborne illness. A discretionary 12.5% service charge will be added to your bill.

Guinness Is Good For You

After the most consistently cold London winter I've experienced, the weather's warmed slightly, the days are longer, and the sun's been out. At lunch this week there have been crowds of businessmen outside pubs with pints. I find this reassuring and civilized. It's a shame that most places in the US feel they can't trust people to drink outside. It's not even close to being warm, but tonight being St. Patrick's the crowds outside were larger (although it's not that big of a deal here, certainly not like it is in the states), and I even caught some live music from a pub with open windows. Yeah, it might barely be 50F out, but not many jackets being worn.

In honor of pubs and what passes for spring, here's my favorite Guinness ad. I remember seeing this in the 90s, grabbed it as an avi off someone's share as I recall. Back before videos were so accessible on the web. Guinness has had an astonishing run of memorable ads in print and vid, eh? Must be the beer.

Repeating Myself In The USA

Cars are oversized.
People are oversized.
Americans really dress like slobs in restaurants. <--I am an old coot.
On the plus side, service is really good.

Editing Goldacre

I like Ben Goldacre a lot but I find him a bit hard to read sometime, because of the writing, not the content. His energetic, digressive style works well extemporaneously but doesn't translate well to writing. His essays more often than not leave me a bit confused. His recent article on smoking and alzheimer's (or is it on the source of evidence? or is it on media coverage?) is an example: some good points in the wrong order, a typical goldacre apparent subject-switch right at the end, and a couple side remarks injected into the mix. The article is worth reading, but I took a 2-minute stab at editing it. I like my edit better. Here's Goldacre, remixed:

In Nazi Germany two researchers, Schairer and Schöniger, worked on biological theories of degenerate behaviour under Professor Karl Astel, who helped organise the operation that murdered 200,000 mentally and physically disabled people. In 1943 those same researchers published a well-conducted study demonstrating a relationship between smoking and lung cancer. Their paper wasn't mentioned in the classic Doll and Bradford Hill paper of 1950, it was referred to only four times in the 60s, once in the 70s, and then not again until 1988, despite providing a valuable early warning on a killer that would cause 100 million early deaths in the 20th century. It's not obvious what you do with evidence from untrustworthy sources, but it's always worth appraising its untrustworthiness with the best tools available.

You've probably heard that smoking may prevent Alzheimer's. It comes up in the papers[1], sometimes to say it is true, sometimes to say it has been refuted. Maybe you think it's a mixed bag, that "experts are divided". Perhaps you smoke, and joke about how it will stop you losing your marbles.

This month, Janine Cataldo and colleagues publish a systematic review on the subject, but with a very interesting twist. First they found all the papers ever published on smoking and Alzheimer's, using an explicit search strategy which they describe properly in the paper – because they are scientists, not homeopaths – to make sure that they found all of the evidence, rather than just the studies they already knew about, or the ones which flattered their preconceptions.

They found 43 in total, and overall, smoking significantly increases your risk of Alzheimer's. But they went further. Eleven of the studies were written by people with affiliations to the tobacco industry. This wasn't always declared, so to double check, the researchers searched on the University of California's Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, a vast collection of scanned material which has been gathered over decades of legal action [2].

How much did it matter if the researchers worked for the tobacco companies? A lot: the risks of Alzheimer's associated with smoking reported by these papers were on average about a third lower than those conducted by others, and they produced many papers showing cigarettes were protective. If you exclude these 11 papers, and look only at the remainder, your chances of getting Alzheimer's are vastly higher: comparing a smoker against a non-smoker, the odds are higher by 1.72 to 1.

[pithy conclusion here, please]

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[1] If the media were actuarial about drawing our attention to the causes of avoidable death, newspapers would be filled with diarrhoea, Aids and cigarettes every day. In reality we know this is an absurd idea. For those interested in the scale of our fascination with rarity, one piece of research looked at a period in 2002 and found that 8,571 people had to die from smoking to generate one story on the subject from the BBC, while there were three stories for every death from vCJD.

[2] If you ever want to spend a chilling afternoon in the head of an industry whose product has been proven to kill a third of its customers, this is the place for you. "The importance of younger adults" uses financial modelling to explain the importance of recruiting teenage smokers to replace the dying older ones before it's too late, and explains that "repeated government studies have shown less than one third of smokers start after age 18 [and] only 5% of smokers start after age 24." "Youth cigarette – new concepts" from Marketing Innovations Inc takes these ideas further, into cola and apple flavour cigarettes, because "apples connote goodness and freshness".

Profit-Taking

Speaking of ginormous balls, Matt Taibbi's article on the wall-street profits is well worth reading. Although it pains me, I have to defend the traders here a little bit. If the government presents, repeatedly, opportunities for them to make risk-free money, they have to take it. They just can't help but do it. You can't really expect traders to have any social conscience or to ponder the greater good or, really, to spend even a microsecond on the question of whether they have any human social responsibility whatsoever. It's unrealistic to expect them to act as if they were humans with moral and ethical considerations, even ones that are suppressed and ignored. "Ethics" is only considered with respect to a calculus of financial gain or loss. Morality doesn't even come into it. It is as purely amoral (and thus, arguably, as purely immoral) as an industry can be.

These are creatures who are exceedingly good at gaming anything -- figuring out where the chances to game exactly live, in a changing environment, and taking advantage as quickly as possible. That's all they do, and they do it to make money. At an individual level, there is huge upside reward potential and minimal or zero downside risk. At an institutional level, "too big to fail" means relatively small downside potential and huge upside potential. Private profit, public loss. That they usually get to write many of the rules helps, too. So if the government loans them money for free then offers to borrow it back not for free, why be surprised when they do it? If the government decides to sponsor purchases of toxic assets in a way that will raise market value for those, why be surprised when banks start buying them to resell or revalue and make profit?

They can no more resist than our pet carp can resist when we drop a couple food sticks into the water. Investment banks have repeatedly made it clear they are not fully functioning members of society. Why keep treating them as such in the hopes they'll rise to expectations?

The Seduction of Squats

Since starting some weightlifting, in a fairly light, not-at-all hardcore approach, I can appreciate more the lifter mentality. It's a great workout, and, for me, driving [little girlie bits of] iron is much more gratifying than using machines. I love squats. I'm only a novice at them -- I do goblet squats and haven't gone beyond sets with 30kg (yes, little mini baby starter squats) -- but I can appreciate the squat mentality and find this video funny and accurate.

I saw this at conditioning research, which references some good reasons I might want to tone down my enthusiasm for weighted squats before too long. When I can do bulgarian split squats with 100kg across my shoulders, I'll let you know.

Hockey

I love international football (soccer) -- world cup, euro cup -- but have a hard time getting into the professional sport as a fan because it's kind of boring. What hockey (ice hockey) really adds is that possibility of scoring. It's the potential that adds tension and excitement. I watched a bit of NHL in 1991 by virtue of having free cable for some reason in my apartment in Chicago. Years later I went to a blackhawks game at the (then) new united center. I can't get past the fighting. It totally ruins it for me.

It's a great sport -- looks awesome in HD, has (like baseball) wonderful sounds, fast, elegant, bruising but without all the stops in play of NFL. I watched some men's and women's hockey during the olympics and was reminded how beautiful the game can be. I just can't abide the fighting in the pro game. It's not done in the international game or the college game. It's an easily solvable problem. Fix that and I'm in.

Double Cream

I love the stuff. I keep some at work for coffee. A woman the other day "caught" me using it and started chuckling and smiling and going on about how "naughty" I was being. Naughty? Like I was stealing spoonfuls of a coworker's soup, or doing something illicit in the supply cabinet? I wondered what she ate, since she was not obese but certainly not slim and probably in a near-constant state of neurosis about food choices that most women are socialized into now. What's for breakfast? But I didn't ask. I simply and truthfully stated, without apologizing, that I love double cream, leaving her envious.

I don't understand the "guilt" about food choices. While I believe that eating involves all kinds of moral choices (e.g. if my double-cream came from cows whipped with barb wire daily, milked by 5-yr-old slave labor, driven to market in a cart made of the bones of the elderly and fueled by distilled baby fat, I would feel really guilty), I don't see how or why macronutrient content would factor into it. "Guilt free" food usually means "low fat!" As if dietary palmitic acid were immoral.

My knowing colleague in the coffee room might do well to give up the guilt. I guarantee her grandmother had no qualms about using real butter or cream.

Disingenuous Deficit Hand-Wringing

Tired of hearing deficit fear-mongering from those whipping up the folks who should care least about the deficits and the most about jobs and public spending to create them?

Joe Conason in Salon points out that David Walker, whose name is often taken in vain by rabid neocons, has penned a clear and direct essay with Lawrence Mishel that is well worth a read:

The answer, from a policy perspective, is not that hard: A focus on jobs now is consistent with addressing our deficit problems ahead.

The Misery Of Flying

Enjoy commercial air travel? It's astonishing that we've taken an activity that should be wondrous each and every time we get to do it and make it so miserable.

The biggest problem is the asinine security theatre which keeps getting worse with no bottom in sight. Thank the USA for providing thought leadership here on the reactive, ineffective, outright imbecilic fronts. If that's not bad enough, airlines, airports, and passengers are all colluding to make the experience as bad as possible.

I get perverse pleasure now out of the dismay people experience coming into the brand new heathrow terminal 5. A significant percentage of deplaning happens onto buses. The pilots still tend to be apologetic about that. Should be embarrassing for BA. Even those who are spared the tedium of the buses just delay their dismay a few minutes, once it starts to sink in, after getting off the plane into a terminal building, they are still nowhere close to passport control and customs [five escalator rides and a train trip later....]

Do any airlines enforce carryon size regulations? Every flight I'm on there are more than a few people completely taking the piss with respect to "carry on" luggage. I can't fully blame passengers for being rude, as the airlines both tolerate and encourage this behavior. The encouragement comes from increasingly popular baggage fees. How stupid are airline executives? Appallingly so, based on this logic: all evidence is that baggage fees cause airlines to lose business overall, yet airlines that have them won't give them up because "baggage fee" revenue is up! This would be like a restaurant charging a fork-usage fee, losing half its custom, but declaring the policy a success because year-on-year fork-usage revenue increased from zero to positive.

Despite this, I still get a little thrill every time I get to board something as beautiful as a 747. But the glimpses of wonder from the fog of misery are ever briefer. Air travel industry, please wake up.

Ski Louise

Had a fantastic time skiing in Canada. First time with the kids there this year -- one snow-plough turning, the other learning to board. It might not seem to make much sense to go to Canada from the UK for a ski holiday, but at half-term school holidays the alps are absolutely packed, and incredibly expensive. Plus a bad snow year in Canada would be a good year in the alps. The all-around service level is much higher in Canada. And the quality of instruction is just amazing. Every instructor, from the kids to adults, was just great. Canada takes ski instruction very seriously, and it's reasonable to expect consistently high-quality and coherent tutoring anywhere you'll find certified instructors. That said, all of them we've met have been fun, laid-back, and great about tailoring style and pace to the individual, despite (almost secretly) being really rigorous in skill-building.


In previous trips, without the kids, we'd stayed in Banff and at Lake Louise, skiing Mt. Norquay, Sunshine, and Lake Louise, but liking Louise the best. This year, with the kids, we tried the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise, a ginormahoosive hotel on Lake Louise proper, about a 7-minute drive from the ski area. Character-wise, it's not exactly my ideal place, but it worked out perfectly for the family trip. Within the hotel are a variety of restaurants and shops, including a 24-hr deli that was a real deli, not a convenience store. At 3am we'd bump into other jet-lagged parents getting some bagels & cream cheese. The pool opened at 5am. The buffet breakfast perfectly suited each of us. I skipped the french toast (regular, plus some made with flattened croissants), pancakes, cereals, muesli, pastries, and fruits and went for the variety of egg dishes, ham, tomatoes & cucumbers, smoked salmon, etc. [Smoked salmon with sliced peppers & capers, plus eggs every morning!] The restaurants included a saloon with lots of sports on TV & sofas, which was perfect for olympics-watching. Very nice hotel, all around.


The ski area is not on the same scale as the larger linked european areas, but is quite large and diverse. The "easiest way down" is marked from the top of each lift, plus there are really nice intermediate runs, plus a ton of in-bounds but off-piste bumps and steeps and wooded runs (depending on snow) to satisfy all levels of ability. I personally spent most of my time getting faster on piste.


There are no accomodations at the ski area itself, but there's a large day-lodge with several different dining options, and of course a ski shop, service place, rentals shop, ski school, and such. The only on-mountain dining is the Temple Lodge behind the main mountain, at the bottom of the "larch" area which was originally the only ski hill. It includes cafeteria-style, table-service, and outdoor grill areas. The food was all pretty good. Not like the best on-mountain alpine food, but not bad. I usually skipped lunch and just went with a great breakfast, skiing all day, then a hearty early dinner at the hotel.

Overall, wonderful time. Can't wait to go back.

Bad Government in Action: Grants for Electric Cars

London wants to reduce vehicle emissions. Fair enough. They've got a plan to install a large number of charging stations, which I'm all for. They've also got a plan to hand out grants to motorists to buy specific types of vehicles, which is idiotic. If they want to subsidize low emissions, regardless of whether I think that's a good use of public funds, they should do it solely based on the desired result. Instead they are dictating criteria for the cars: "Only battery electric, plug-in hybrids with emissions of less than 75 g/km, or hydrogen fuel cell cars will be eligible."

Why not just say any car with less than 75 g/km CO2 emissions qualifies? If that's your goal, why does it also have to be a specific type of car? [Don't dictate solutions!] Are they worried someone will build a car that runs on compressed carbon monoxide? A fabulous unintended side effect is that the public will end up subsidizing £87,000 pound electric roadsters. Another example: the guy who trades in his ancient transit van spewing out 350g/km of CO2 for a 91g VW Polo BlueMotion TDi gets nothing, whereas the guy who trades in his 91g VW PoloBlueMotion TDi for a 75g hybrid gets £5000.

Even with the grant, it will be much cheaper to buy a dirtier car than a pricier iMiev or other eligible electric vehicle. This is public grant money funnelled to, well, people like me, who already can afford £25,000 cars. It's idiotic and unconscionable.