Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

I hate to give the game away right here at the beginning of a whole book devoted to the subject, and I'm tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a couple hundred more pages or so. I'll try to resist, but will go ahead and add a few more details to flesh out the recommendations. Like, eating a little meat isn't going to kill you, though it might be better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you're better off eating whole fresh foods rather than processed food products. That's what I mean by the recommendation to "eat food," which is not quite as simple as it sounds. For while it used to be that food was all you could eat, today there are thousands of other edible foodlikesubstances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages elaborately festooned with health claims, which brings me to another, somewhat counterintuitive, piece of advice: If you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

You can see how quickly things can get complicated.

The above is from the introduction of a new book by Micheal Pollan, In Defense of Food. Read the whole introduction to the book here. It's the single best, most concise food advise I've ever read.

His last book was, The Omnivores Dilemma was eye opening, and this book is now on my list of must read books. The Google page on the new books has some reviews.

Continue reading "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Windsurfing sail size guide

Chart from this brilliant windsurf sail size calculator, found over at the rec.windsurfing group.

Continue reading "Windsurfing sail size guide"

Watching TV Makes You Smarter

The New York Times says that watching TV makes you smarter. They make sense too:

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ''24,'' you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ''24,'' you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all.

I find it hard to watch older sitcoms like the 70's shows or Fraisier - they're just to simplistic. There's nothing to keep track of as everything is spoon fed to the viewer. This is what this article is about - that what everyone has assumed since time immemorial may be wrong: that the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all - the idiot box has hit rock bottom and is now turning upwards in a Sleeper Curve.

Continue reading "Watching TV Makes You Smarter"

TV vs Books

White Jeep Sketch

Pencil sketch by Fasih Uddin Toor.

Acceptance speech from the Sunburst Awards

Nice speech:

No writer is an island, no idea is original, no effort is a solo effort. We stand upon the shoulders of giants, we collaborate with our colleagues and with the immortal words of our dead literary ancestors. Literature -- indeed, all human endeavor -- is dignified and uplifted through collaboration and cooperation. We sit atop a great erected infrastructure of human invention and effort, all of it embodied in the bricks and boards that surround us, and, most importantly, in the traditional knowledge that allows each generation to improve upon the bricks and boards of the last one.

The writer is engaged in dialog with the world and with posterity. Our words go on to form a layer of the substrate of human creation. Those who tell us that our words, our art and our posterity are best served with strong locks and high fences are not on our side. No writer could pen a single word but for the rich humus of public domain effort with which we garden our notions and conceits.

So thank you all, and thanks most of all to our ancestors, the bringers of fire and the inventors of the wheel, the Judith Merrils and the Phyllis Gotleibs, the Gilgameshes and the golems, the Turings and the Teslas. Thanks to the brave pirates who continue to preserve our posterity in the face of outrageous insult to creation. Thanks to the readers and to you all.

Change This

Change This:

Welcome to our new kind of media. A form of media that uses existing tools (like PDF files, blogs and the web) to challenge the way ideas are created and spread. Poke around, give it a spin and share the best parts with your friends. And don't forget to subscribe.

Some of the manifesto's are really good. So is their outlook:

People call the team at Change This optimists because we don’t believe it has to be this way. We don’t believe humans evolved to be so bad at making decisions, so poor at changing our minds, so violent in arguing our point of view. We’re well aware of how split our country and our world have become, but we don’t think the current state of affairs is built into our very nature.
>> ChangeThis: About Us

Continue reading "Change This"

Gadgets Galore

Stuff to possibly get:

TV products:
Unites your network with your home entertainment center, allowing you to share, access, and enjoy your digital media-whether it is music, videos, or photos-in the comfort of your living room.

• D-Link DSM-320 Wireless Media Player :: Froggle Search for DSM-320 :: Plays back just about everything under the sun, and has built in 802.11g.
• Prismiq Media Player :: complaints of it being buggy, slow, but otherwise seems very good. review 1 :: amazon link
• Roku HD1000 :: High definition, but doesn't support DivX playback. Primarily for photos and music. No built in wireless. Expensive. No good? review 1
• Pinnacle Showcenter
• Actiontec Wireless Digital Media Player

Continue reading "Gadgets Galore"

Automotive Tech

Automotive tech is akin to black magic in Pakistan. Most new cars in Pakistan are electronically fuel injected (EFI) now, even the locally assembled ones. In fact, on the bigger cars, EFI has been quite common since the late 80's. So as time has gone by, these EFI vehicles have started trickling into workshops around the country, mechanics all over the country are tearing out their hair (and emptying the owners' wallets) in frustration.

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Website Redesign

Warning: This corner of the web has encountered a temporal anomaly - adjusting style-sheets to compensate. Alarms. "Cap'n, it's not working! The box model hacks are overloading the temporal capacitor's ability to compensate! They cannae handle it, Cap?n!"

"Get a grip on yourself Scotty! We licked them nested tables and by gosh darn we'll get them boxes!"

"Goddamin't Cap'n, why did they have to turn it into some kind of rocket science! I thought this web thingamajig was for the masses!"

"It is, Scotty, it is, it's just that some websites are uglier than others."

Continue reading "Website Redesign"

Obsolescence of Happenstance

This is something I've been wondering about myself, and Anil Dash sums it up excellently:

Once, there was fairly frequent interaction with people who weren't your intended target of conversation. Speaking to a receptionist before getting to a business contact comes to mind, and its certainly an example that's not going away any time soon, but the more casual conversations are the ones that intrigue me. Your friend's younger sister who always ran to answer the phone first, the roommate of a person whom you spoke to frequently, your parents screening your phone calls when you were grounded; Those unexpected encounters with people often yielded extraordinary results.

[..] So I lament the serendipity that's been lost. Many of the most interesting and exciting things that happen to us happen by chance, and now most of the time when I talk to someone, I do it by getting in touch with that specific person. There are of course the rare times when someone is using a computer that belongs to another person and that entry on my buddy list yields a surprise when I send a message. Or a few times I'll call a cell phone and it will have to get handed to its rightful owner before the conversation can begin. But those pass-through moments used to be commonplace, and used to result in the incidental creation of social capital.

We might not notice that those social intermediaries are gone, but I suspect when we recall in the future the anecdotes that result from them, the kids who are born today won't understand how a phone number used to belong to a family or a group of people or how, in the days before email, a message might pass under the wary gaze of a few unanticipated recipients. An "address" used to refer to a place, not a person.
>> Anil Dash: Obsolescence of Happenstance

Continue reading "Obsolescence of Happenstance"

Asian Weblog Awards

It's the end of the year, and numerous lists are being drawn up all over the world. This year, the first ever Asia Weblog Awards is taking place at a weblog near you. I first found out about it when someone voted my weblog for Best Pakistani Blog, so thanks to whoever that was. I ended up casting only two votes, one for this blog as the best Pakistani blog, and the other one for Baghdad Burning as the best Iraqi blog. The best part about these listings is all the interesting blogs they point to which otherwise I'd never have come across.

Continue reading "Asian Weblog Awards"

The way of the tao

Every day of the week gone by, and today's still not here. While tomorrow is but a dream and nobody knows which way it lies.

This is a preemptive strike on the inevitable blog post about nothing in particular. Some years back I would email my writings to friends, and sometimes they would reply. Then that stopped, and we're still busy battling on who stopped first to write any more. Inevitably, they disappear into the horizon moving ever further away. Maybe I should tell them that I have a personal website/weblog, but you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink.

this post is a work in progess

Google: My Jeep is the Most Powerful!

The above says it all! Check the results for yourself.

For more, see the founder members page of the 4×4 Offroaders Club Karachi.

A Quick Overview of Buddhism

The lazy person's condensed guide to Buddhism. The article itself is not that great, but there are links to some good resources in the discussion.

The Buddhist community is one of the largest growing groups of believers in the world today. It is especially gaining interest in the West where people are searching for alternatives to traditional religion.

What proceeds is an attempt at giving a brief overview of Buddhist history and teachings. Please understand that Buddhism is a large and complicated area to research and because there are many different understandings of Buddhism what I've written here may not apply to everyone. Indeed, because this is really an overview I have only really scratched the surface!
>> Kuro5hin.org

The Google Vanity Search

Today I checked the great google, and this site is now in the top 10 results for my initials KO at Google. However, the strange thing is, I pressed search around 15 times over 10 minutes and the results kept moving from 6 to 8, then off the page then back again.

17/08/2003: It's now gone all the way up to the second spot!

September 8, 2003: It's now at no. 1! I changed the title of the main page around 3 weeks ago, and google has finally indexed it with the new title. And if you scroll down below, it's also the no. 1 result for The Google Vanity Search. That's strange. Maybe the results are a bit skewed and soon this site is going to disappear into the pits of googleland, never to be found again.

The children who wont grow up

Peter Pan syndrome: people in their 20s and 30s clamor for comfort in happy childhood memories, says Frank Furedi. When does nostalgia turn into infantilization?...
>> spiked-life: Frank Furedi

Jobs

RSS News Page

I have set up a [url=http://ko.offroadpakistan.com/news/]news page[/url] of the websites which i check daily. I used [url=http://www.mouken.com/rss/]CaRP[/url] to automatically grab the rss/rdf/xml feeds. It is suprisingly easy to use, and hardly took any time. I was going to integrate them onto the front page, but there are too many to fit in a sidebar. I found this experimental convertor that takes a Google News search and turns it into RSS over at [url=http://www.voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php]VoidStar[/url]. It's amazing usefull for monitoring specific news Items. For now, I have it set to monitor Pakistan. For some reason, at least two of the top headlines are always about cricket.

How Do You Get Work Done?

[quote]I am currently a university student and have a major problem: being able to simply sit down and get work done. I can set aside a day to work, whether it is homework or contract work, and I will be lucky to have an hour done before dinner time. The only time I can actually get solid work done seems to be after midnight under a lot of pressure (ie. a deadline the next day). This has led to too many 5 a.m. nights and turning down too many invitations to go out only to stay in and accomplish nothing. I have stopped playing games, stopped watching TV, tried reading the Seven Habits book, and am currently seeing what classical music does for me. I don't think I have [url=http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/18/0024228&tid=146]ADHD[/url], and I am not sure what else to try. If it is computer work, the web is always a click away, and I can always escape to my imagination. I know many of you will have had the same problem. Can anyone please give advice on how to overcome this problem, be it a little trick, medication, or anything else? >>[url=http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/24/2355245&mode=thread&tid=146&tid=99]Ask Slashdot[/url] [/quote]

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