Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Those of you who have been here before may have noticed a small change in the appearance of this blog. Ok, a large change. For about five years, almost since I started blogging, I’ve been using a blogging host provider called Blog City. BC has served me very well over the years, but it was time I moved on.

I originally chose BC when there weren’t any really mature blogging platforms, and BC had just as many if not more features than many of its competitors. Also the idea of setting up my own blogging software and having to tweak it at that time, while not a big deal, seemed like enough of a nuisance to at least be a factor in my decision.

Over the years, BC came out with new functionality, new widgets, and whole new administrative platforms. The amount of personal attention was also great. They are still a good choice for a segment of the blogging or potentially-blogging community.

Still, there are a few things that have motivated me to move to Wordpress, and I finally made the jump, after lots of prep work on the back end over the last month or so. I am still a relative newbie at Wordpress and will be continuing to add new content and functionality, tweaking the look of things, etc., etc., over the next few weeks or even months. But I believe with this new blogging software will help motivate me to get back into the rhythm of blogging, even if it’s just to post a link and a short paragraph here and there as I come across something interesting and want to share my thoughts.

For those of you who don’t know much about blogging, Wordpress is an open-source application that one can install on a huge number of hosts out there. You can easily take your entire blog, save it to your local computer, then reimport all that content on a new host if you decide to go from one to another. The software stays the same. The software is also very easy to use, with lots of customization via “plugins” and “themes” to change the look and add functionality. There are lots of these available for free, plus you can program your own if you are so inclined, or just tweak the ones that are available. Some of these plugins are extremely powerful, adding very significant new functionality. Since the software is open-source, it will never go away due to a company going out of business or switching tactics, and becuase it is so popular, your data is in a format that can be imported into many other software platforms if you ever choose a different one. And if it isn’t now, chances are that some developer will create a migration tool for such a huge market.

Its popularity as well as the open-source nature of WordPress ensures many advantages, as well as a few small burdens which other blogging platforms, especially ones that do your hosting for you as well, do not. For anyone with technical savvy, such software is a pretty obvious choice, although like I did five years ago, you might decide on a solution that avoids the added work of installing and configuring such software simply due to time constraints and a busy life. WordPress does have a fully-hosted version as well, similar to Blogger and Blog-City, and like the others it comes in both free and paid, more premium versions. If you ever want to get a feel for these different software platforms, the best place to start would be to create one of these free accounts on the various choices and play to see which one fits your style best.

My first transaction ever on eBay, back in 1997, was selling an old VCR to some guy in Texas. The guy sent me a bad check, but I didn’t quite understand how banking worked back then and after the amount showed up in my account several days later, I assumed it went through ok and sent the VCR. Then I learned it bounced and I was charged $5. He eventually sent another check which bounced as well for another $5 fee. After that he basically told me that it was my fault for sending him the VCR before the check cleared and I didn’t hear from him again.

I didn’t use eBay again for another year or two. We did trade negative feedbacks for each other, but in any case, I think it’s a little odd that if a buyer rips you off, you can’t mark them as being just as dishonest as a bad seller. Both sellers and buyers have responsibilities and you can usually tell if a seller gave a negative mark just in retaliation to a buyers if that buyer has an otherwise prestine record…

Quoting from techDirt:

eBay has been making some changes lately that aren’t sitting well with eBay sellers. First, it announced fee changes that initially were promoted as “lower fees,” but the details showed were only lower for goods that didn’t sell. The fees on sold goods were actually higher. Now, the company has banned sellers from giving “negative” feedback on buyers.

I’ve been shopping at Whole Foods (a health-oriented grocery chain with many stores across the U.S.) for a good ten years now. We’ve had them in the DC area since I came here 13 years ago. It is definitely more expensive to buy things there, but my perhaps naïve assumption was always that the things I bought were hopefully a little healthier - without the preservatives, chemicals, high-fructose corn syrup, aspartame, trans fats, and other junk that’s rife in products at mainstream supermarkets. At the very least, their hot food bars supplied me with many lunches and breakfasts throughout the years at pretty reasonable prices and offering what I thought were great and healthy options.

Perhaps it was the naïve assumption that most products in Whole Foods were healthy that made me a bit lax about looking at ingredients lists, or perhaps it was just that Whole Foods did not have ingredients listed for most of their prepared foods until recently. In any case, I’ve been reading these labels recently and have come to the conclusion that just about everything that Whole Foods makes (there prepared foods you buy for heating up at home as well as their hot-bar items) has canola oil in it! It is already very difficult to find packaged products containing an oil other than canola or a similar vegetable oil in them, but seemingly this is also the case for many non-packaged items as well.

Now, many of you may be saying “so what, isn’t it the saturated fat that’s bad, not the unsaturated stuff”? Well, not exactly. Check out Gary Taubes’ “Good Calories Bad Calories” and you will see a great outline about how this myth came to be. Even the traditionalists have disembarked from the pure “eat more unsaturated fat” to just “eat more MONO-unsaturated fat.” Monounsaturated fat (MUFA) is the type of fat that olive oil is primarily made up of and presumably the healthfulness of the Mediterranean diet is based on this. A diet high in polyunsaturated fats (PUFA’s) has been linked, albeit tenuously, to increased risk of cancer. It’s true that Canola oil does have a decent amount of MUFA (60%), but it also has a lot of PUFA (almost 40%).

There are other potential health concerns specific to Canola. Apparently processing of the oil involves a “deodorization” process which converts omega-3 fatty acids into harmful trans-fatty acids.

Of course not everyone will believe that Canola oil is unhealthful. There’s certainly no incontrovertible truth and intelligent people can still disagree about whether canola oil increases risk factors or decreases them. Still, because this oil is a bit controversial, especially among what is probably one of Whole Foods’ target audiences, my thought is it would behoove them to use an oil that is less controversial.

Olive oil is seen almost universally as, if not a perfect oil, at least one that is acceptably low in potential health risks. The advocates of the Mediterranean diet of course contend that the MUFA’s in it are exceedingly healthy, as are its low levels of saturated fatty acids (SFA’s). Those on the other side of the spectrum who believe that SFA’s are healthy while PUFA’s are not, view olive oil at worst as a neutral oil, since it’s mostly MUFA with just a tiny percentage of PUFA.

Likewise, butter is a great option for many items that require fat, especially baked goods. When I’ve looked at the ingredients of baked goods at my local Whole Foods they invariably list canola and not butter, although very occasionally I will see something that doesn’t have it – for example a pound cake I picked up last night. Of course, butter is relatively high in SFA and so for the traditionalists who still believe in the diet-heart hypothesis (that SFA’s increase cholesterol levels and that increased cholesterol levels increase coronary heart disease risk factors) despite lots of evidence that refutes this theory, it isn’t acceptable. Similarly the tropical oils that used to be used a great deal in baking had their reputations tarnished (I believe wrongly) because of the whole saturated fat scare of the 80’s and 90’s. Only in the last 10 or so years are we starting to see reports about how some of the fatty acids in these oils can actually be heart-protective.

Even if we just concentrate on olive oil as the least controversial alternative, it is a lot more expensive than canola, and there’s the rub. If it wasn’t for this factor, we might be seeing a lot more olive oil in Whole Foods’ prepared foods. As it is Whole Foods charges a premium for their food, and using olive oil would probably make their food that much more expensive. At this point, though, I don’t even have the option of buying most of their prepared foods because I don’t care to consume canola oil. So Whole Foods is losing sales because they’ve made it too hard for me to buy lunch there, given the small number of options that don’t contain added canola.

Sadly, few people care enough about this stuff to be aware that there’s anything controversial about canola, and others simply won’t believe that there’s enough evidence to implicate it in health issues. I contend, though, that the people who pay a premium at Whole Foods for presumably healthy food are probably more aware of the controversy and more likely to use that as a factor when making buying decisions. Still, I think this issue needs a lot more exposure. Optimally, I should be preparing all the food I eat myself, of course, but being a busy parent this isn’t always possible, and I would like to not be so constrained in my choices when going to a store that is supposed to be carrying products that are healthful…

I’ve only had my Treo 700wx for about 4 months now, but it works very well for me. Now Palm is finally unveiling a decent successor, the Treo 800W. It has just about every enhancement I can think of outside of a multi-touch iPhone interface, and a bigger screen. The only thing I don’t see mentioned is GPS capability, but given that other Palm devices are including this and the wealth of all other features, it seems pretty likely. The only thing that I’m a little sad about is the microSD, since both my cameras and my phones have taken regular SD now for the last 2+ years. But maybe by the time I actually get this phone, the 8GB microSD will be affordable. You can now get a 16GB SD card for half the price of an 8GB microSD… Oh well, I don’t even use more than one quarter of my cheap 4GB SD card in my current phone, so I guess I should stop whining!

http://blog.treonauts.com/2008/01/more-treo-800w.html?utm_source=tnemail&utm_medium=daily

Ok, well, maybe not exactly, but more or less. At least that’s my fervent hope. As readers here may have noticed, I have not posted an entry here in over a year! That is a long time to go without blogging, especially for someone who tended to post not every day, but at least a couple times a month in most months, and often more than that.

2007 was a busy year for me personally. My daughter turned two, and rapidly demanded more attention as she became totally super-mobile as well as agile enough to climb tables, leap tall buildings, or at least cushions with a single bound, etc.

I also started a new job in 2007 where I’ve been kept very busy. Previous jobs have almost all had some serious downtimes, especially the job previous to my current one. The business at work means I’m sometimes working late and/or on the weekends. Since many of my previous jobs were for government contracts where you really couldn’t work overtime, this is definitely different!

But the blogging bug has been gnawing at me for a while. I’ve actually been keeping my writing going by participating in a number of discussion forums, and a recent reply to a message asking me if I was a professional writer (incredibly flattering to someone who’s never had a piece of writing printed other than a couple of college paper editorials!) has given me that much more motivation to get this thing back on the tracks again. I really want to put some thoughts down here and there if only in a paragraph or two. Unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately for some of my readers - the long tomes you may encounter by viewing the archives here probably will not occur again, or only on very rare occasion. I’m going to attempt, however, to at least start scribbling down a disjointed thought or two on a more regular basis - well, hell, on ANY basis – and we’ll see what happens.

I did feel like I needed to write SOME kind of intermediate message, though, explaining my absence for over a year, so here it is.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemm a, journalist and author Michael Pollan takes us on a journey through four of the main kinds of meals that are generally get eaten here in the U.S.: a fast food meal; an “industrial organic” meal; a meal from a non-industrial, sustainable, local farm (self-labeled “beyond organic”); and finally a meal for which Pollan provides the majority of the ingredients himself - by hunting and gathering. The book is not only about the meals and their ingredients and preparation, however. Rather, Pollan tries to take us from the very beginning of how the components of each meal, to the end product. Thus he traces the cow, chicken, or pig from its origins and life on the farm (or forest) to its slaughter, preparation for sale or cooking, and final preparation by the Pollan himself or McDonalds. He also traces other parts of the meal, most notably corn (for the fast-food meal) and mushrooms (for the hunter-gatherer meal). Along the way, we Pollan gives us the history of various kinds of agriculture, discusses much of our historical and prehistoric relationship to food through the anthropological record, and even how animal and plant species have evolved to defend against predation but also to survive with the help of humans or other animals. The book is not purely one of information, though, but also a very personal account of Pollan’s own journey as he immerses himself in the details of what most of us take for granted as simply the food we buy and eat every day.The title of the book refers to the fact that humans, like some other primates, rats, pigs, chickens, bears, and a bunch of other species, are “omnivores,” meaning that they (we) are generalized feeders that can eat both animal meats as well as plant foods for our nourishment. Other species have a more specialized diet, and can only survive by either eating meat (carnivores) or plant foods (herbivores). While being an omnivore gives distinct advantages, allowing for a wider assortment of nourishment, the flip side of this increased number of choices is the problem or dilemma of what to eat. Koala bears know they can eat eucalyptus leaves, and that’s it. Omnivores have to figure out what they can eat, making sure not to eat something poisonous, and also trying to determine the most nutritious animals or plants (or parts of these) so that they don’t waste their limited capacity to consume and fill up on ones that aren’t as very nourishing. Also, since we’ve developed culture, language, philosophy, and religion, we also need to deal with the decision of what we should eat. Should we eat meat, for example, or is that “immoral.” Should we eat by the rules of kosher or halal? Should we eat organic or conventional? Should we eat something that authorities tell us will eventually be detrimental to our health despite no immediate or obvious danger? These questions, although they perhaps only infrequently come up for most of us, are ones where we differ from other species, and Pollan demonstrates throughout the book that these decisions can be at times very difficult ones if one really chooses to contemplate them seriously.

The first section of the book details industrial agriculture. Specifically, it describes everything about the biggest single crop that the U.S. produces - corn, or more accurately the species zea mays. The history of corn is a fascinating one as Pollan tells it. He describes how in the last fifty or so years it has become part of an absurdist spiral that has bankrupted huge numbers of farmers, made the U.S. one of the most obese countries on the planet, and has usurped the vast majority of our arable land. Most of this, Pollan writes, is due to government subsidies that compel farmers to grow corn over anything else. Government regulations also favor corn, industrial methods of farming, and the largest of operations. These regulations are no doubt affected by the lobbying dollars spent, and campaign contributions given, to government officials on behalf of the manufacturers of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and huge industrial farms.

Corn has become such a cheap commodity, Pollan tells us, that new ways are constantly being devised to deal with the ever-increasing yields and surpluses that would otherwise rot on the silo floor. So corn goes into all processed foods for various purposes - bulking, sweetening, preserving, or adding this or that quality. Sweetening, of course, is one of its main functions, as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) found in soft drinks and desert foods and in many other non-desert foods that one wouldn’t expect it to be in. The escalating consumption of soft drinks with HFCS has been proposed by many as a major causal factor in the U.S. epidemic of obesity and diabetes - especially childhood diabetes.

In addition to corn, Pollan also tracks a steer he purchases that will eventually be slaughtered in a factory farm, or has the industry calls it, a Confined Area Feeding Operation, of CAFO. The steer gets to have a happy few weeks with his mother, eating a natural diet of grass, after which he is shipped to the CAFO and subsequently made to eat a completely unnatural diet of corn, soy protein, and the fat from fellow slaughtered cows. Corn is the carbohydrate of choice, of course, because it is so cheap, but also because it fattens the cow very quickly (not unlike how it fattens us), and produces the marbling affect that the USDA uses one of its two main variables in how it rates rate cuts of meat. Such cows are routinely given antibiotics as part of their regular diet due to the unsanitary conditions of the industrial feed lot as well as their unnatural diet. They are also pumped full of hormones to speed their growth even more.

Aside from the humanitarian, health, and economic issues involved, there is even one of geopolitics. This is because industrial farming is based around petroleum, and according to Pollan accounts for 20% of the United States energy expenditure! Not only does this industrial system involve shipping food products across the vast distances of our country, but the fertilizer itself requires a great deal of petroleum to produce. While technology like genetically modified organisms and new farming methods have made the yield per acre of corn very high indeed, the efficiency of producing it in terms of resources needed is still low. According to Pollan, it takes something like 50 calories of energy (mostly from oil) to produce a single food calorie from corn. Of course, all this government subsidizing, and hence cheapening of corn, means that corn and the animals raised on it have become much cheaper to eat. But, Pollan argues, there is a tremendous hidden cost, or costs, the two major ones being public health and our increased dependency on foreign oil.

The second part of the book is devoted to “industrial organic.” This might seem like a contradiction in terms and Pollan argues that this may be the case. He describes the origins of the organic movement in the 60’s and 70’s and how part of the tenets of the movement was about “sustainability” - the ability for a farm to sustain itself without a significant amount of outside “inputs” - chemical fertilizer, pesticides, etc.) The first farms of this movement grew haltingly, but eventually took off, mainly in the 1980’s, after which their products were in such high demand by national chains like Costco that their demand could not be bet via the original ideals of organic movement. So a more “industrial” approach was adopted. Still, neither the animal feed nor the crops grown for human consumption via industrial organic can use chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Antibiotics can only be used in case