My Suburban Destiny

A friend of mine recently had a bad experience with GameKnot. It looks like they have instituted an anti-cheating program and have hit on some false positives. They have a policy of closing your account, (paid or not) without warning, if you are suspected of cheating.

Aside from if their EULA allows from this, this isn’t how anyone should be treated if they pay or if a company wants a customer to become a paying member. If someone cheats, or looks like they are cheating, they should get a warning and be given an opportunity to deal with it. It is a matter of playground fairness.

Or play against the machine. They fight fair.

Chessmaster 10th Edition

Until the Japanese government enforces it’s own laws concerning racial discrimination, I’m boycotting all Japanese products, and I will not travel to Japan.

Here is a link to a web site documenting Japanese institutionalized racism.

This is a real bummer because I wanted to get a Hybrid car when it comes time to replace my Saturn. Hopefully either a non-Japanese company will make a hybrid as good as the Honda.

It took South Africa decades to get over their institutionalized racism, it took a hundred years and a civil war for the US to get rid of institutionalized racism and we are still dealing with informal racism. It may be a long time before I can buy Japanese stuff, but it is entirely within the Japanese governments ability to start enforcing their own laws today.

Thanks to BoingBoing for pointing this out.

(I wonder if I can make an exception for Hondas that are built in the US by mostly US labor.)

Programming has a few interesting characteristics and if I feel ambitious I’ll do more than just list.

It is a low productivity job for the first model you write, but infinitely productive once you start making copies of the final program. And why is it so low productivity?

It is incredibly error prone. There are huge classes of problems that make a program stop working entirely. Unlike in cooking, where small errors are not catastrophic.

Competency lasts for a very short time before you have to retrain, sometimes in a very radical fashion. This makes it even more laborious to write code because a good percentage of the time it takes to write the code is time spent reading how to write the code. You can’t coast on what you learned in college, like maybe a trained chef could.

It is very isolating. Possibly in part because it takes so much time to write code. Plus writing code is easier in big uninterrupted time blocks.

Productivity is non-linear. You don’t get 1 unit of output for one hour of work. You barely noticable results for 4 hours of work and can occasionally deliver most of the solution in ten minutes. Unfortunately, programming is still mostly the former, see above re: productivity.

Ad:

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 20th Anniversary Edition

Spend the whole day programming and eating gourmet food.

Breakfast was cardamom coffee with hazelnut soymilk, egg whites and mushrooms.

Lunch was almost gourmet, it was a burrito at Baja Fresh. Everyone decided to go to Whole Foods at the same time–lunch time, so I couldn’t get the materiel necessary to make lunch.

Dinner was Whole Foods French Bagguette, Monari Vinegar and Olive oil for dipping, tamari almonds for protein and Shiraz French red wine. Drinking red wine is like eating blue cheese. It is a complex flavor and tastes better after your nose recategorizes it as food instead of rot. Isn’t it ironic that so many gourmet foods probably originated from rotten food?

The only downside to the programming is how isolating it is. I did enjoy jumping up and down to the beat of Lucy on XM radio all day. I should take my XM radio to my office again.

What a novel way to socialize. Here is one cooking class I wish I could attend.

Last weekend I did make it to a book club (12 angry readers, the name, not the general mood of the attendees) I’ve ordered the book for the next meeting, with luck they Half.com seller in Baltamore will get the book to me on time.

Anyhow, I signed up with a cooking class in Arlington–all about brunch. Tomorrow I’m off to the Web Standards Meetup group. I’m signed up for the Ski Chalet Trip at WISP with the UUYA/FX.

I’m not doing poker because Wikipedia has ruined gambling for me. What is social about a zero sum game with absorbing states? Poker is just a very slow and elaborate system for transfering all wagered wealth to a randomly selected participant.

Someday I need to try a games night at my place. Or finish my movie club website. So much socializing to do, so few hours to take care of the bureaucracy that would support it.

This week for some reason is turning into macronutrient week. I’ve been reading up on proteins and fats. The Good Fat Cookbook is half a pop-sci recap of science research on fats and the second half are recipes.

FYI, the answer is that the good (vegetarian) fats are coconut, nuts, butter, olive oil, avacado, eggs and dairy fat. The bad (vegetarian fats) are margarine, soy, canola, mostly on grounds of hydrogenation and transfats. The book is generally pro-animal fats, but I skipped most of the text on those. I’m a vegetarian on grounds other than health, so I’m not interested in parsing the arguments. In any case, the book has warnings against saturated animal fats on page 26-27.

Macronutrients are agricultural commodities and the popular science press is an avenue for agribusiness to promote or smear products to their own best interests, so I’m sceptical of a lot of this research. There has been a smear campaign against tropical oils such as coconuts and palm oil. All commodities fund research and promote their products and being healthy, heck even cigarettes did at one point. In any case, the epidimilogical research I’ve seen on consumption of animal products points towards disease.

There are some seeming noncontroversial facts. Transfats are bad. Transfats are created by hydrogenating oil or overheating oils. [Update: merely heating oils will not create enough transfats to be interesting, after if it was possible to hydrogenate oil with 10 minutes of stove top cooking, manufacturers would do so, but instead they have to bubble hydrogen through oil for an hour to hydrogenate it.]

There are only a few vegetarian solid non-transfat fats, namely palm kernel oil and coconut oil. The fact that SE Asians eat up to 100 coconuts a year and have better heart health outcomes than Americans is reassuring.

Olive oil appears to be a non-controversial good oil, but it goes rancid easily. Same for nut oils. In any case, all my gourmet cook books recommend using it and in general, I think olive oil works well in gourmet cooking, especially in recipes where you are likely to notice the oil, for example in a salad.

Soy and canola oil appear to be controversial. A key issue with, canola, plus many other oils, is the chemicals used to process them (which may be an environmental bad, even if not a single molecule of a nasty processing chemical remains in the final product), and the heat required to refine a vegetable oil. Plus, once a vegetable oil is refined, it has hardly any oder, even when rancid, so you don’t get a signal to avoid a stale oil. Some of these issues are addressed by using expeller pressed oils, which keep the temperatures low and use physical extraction methods instead of chemical methods. Also, like any oil, a chef needs to keep a keen eye on the freshness and expiration dates of an oil, since rancid oils don’t taste any good, and could be harmful to the health to boot.

Transfats and Canola. It seems refining the oils creates transfats. Exactly how that squares with my bottle of Whole Foods Canola oil that says 0 transfats, I’m not sure. Maybe the refiners have fixed their process to stop putting tranfats into the bottle. I skipped over to the Canadian Canola oil website (did you know Canola is short of Canadian Oil? Canola was first developed in Canada), where they claim canola is the lowest in saturated fat, has no transfats and no cholesterol. So I’m not entirely sure why Canola got a bad review in this book.

Omega-3 Fatty acids appear to be good at some optimal level. For vegetarians, you can get some from flax-seed, walnuts and less from soy and canola oil. (Although in the Good Fat Cookbook, both of these oils are deprecated) Remember though, that both walnut and flax oil spoil very easily. Also, flax seed will pass right through you if it isn’t ground up.
As for the percent of calories you should get from fat, The Good Fat Cookbook is on the higher range of recommendations. Personally, I think the optimal ratio has a lot to do with your specific genetics. I’ve eaten a fairly high carb diet most of my life (especially after becoming vegetarian) and in general, I have a hard time gaining weight. If you’re ancestors ate tonnes of saturated fat, then you will be able to as well, but if you ancestors got by on mostly oatmeal then saturated fat might just give you an early coronary heart attack.

Anyhow, while I don’t think this book changed my opinion much, I think I did learn more about ranking the subtypes of fats, after you have chosen which one you are brave enough to add to your diet.

Whole Foods 365 Whey Protein Powder Vanilla flavor is some of the most horrible tasting protein powder I have ever purchased, and I’ve tried about 6 or so various vegetarian protein powders. If you have the misfortune of purchasing it, I recommend consuming it by mixing it with plain milk and drinking it with your nose closed as quickly as possible. Wash your mouth out with water afterwards to remove the taste from your palate.  Interestingly the grit goes away if you let it sit on the counter for five minutes.  You’ll be tempted to let it sit for a million years, but if you don’t drink it, you don’t get any benefits. Should my muscles grow on such a diet, I will have conclusively proved that muscle cells do not have a sense of taste.

Thanks to an idea I got from a discussion I attended, I saved up all my request for charity until the end of the year, so I could give in December. Unfortunately, December went by and I didn’t open the mountain of mail. I just did and let me tell you it took an hour to process it. Mostly I divided it into recyclable and trash and potential donations. I got maybe 2 cubic feet of paper requesting money. Even after recycling, this is a lot of dead tree to get my paltry three digit annual charity budget.

The award for most excessive mail goes to Amnesty International and the NRDC. I support both groups, so don’t get me wrong, but I think lawyers enjoy sending out bills. I’m tempted to start giving anonymously so they won’t send me any mail.

The Nature Conservancy gets the award for the most excessive number of return address labels. I avoid sending paper mail at all costs, so I now have a 60 year supply of return address stickers, about 30 times more than my expected tenancy at this address.

The Environmental Defense Action Fund sent mail, but they are proud that they petitioned George Bush to remove the Bald Eagle from the endangered species list. They will not get any mony from me, but I solemnly hereby give them some bad press. I don’t think these guys have their whole heart into saving the environment. I’ll follow up and read their website to find out if they really need to be villified or not, in any case. It appears to be some sort of progressive Republic environmental organization.

I got lots of requests to feed people in DC. I gave money to Food and Friends because I like that they create community connections between volunteers as a part of their work.

I’m giving money to the DNC and no one else politically, because the DNC will redistribute my two digit sum of money to the campaigns where it might actually affect an election’s outcome.

I’ve gotten some local charities, eg. Virginia and Fairfax County, but I think I’d rather give to the national organization for the same reason I give to the DNC, national organizations can better spread the wealth, I hope. Plus a lot of issues are national.

I will probably split my Unitarian Universalist contributions three ways, Mt. Vernon UU, Arlington UU and the UUA. I like the children’s program at Mt Vernon UU better than the one at Arlington UU.

I want to give online, but I don’t want to use my credit card.

As for giving money to the third world, I’m not sure what would be the best thing for my paltry two digit budget.

Having just re-read 1984, I decided it would be a good idea to chip in on the salaries of the lawyers working for the ACLU. Just because the socialists are gone doesn’t mean there isn’t a Party that would like to have a permenant majority.

Boing Boing also listed some cool charities that seem relevant for a programmer and computer enthusiast.