My Suburban Destiny

Everyone everyone in awhile acts like they think I’m unprincipled on account of my quirky decisions on what is consistent with being a vegetarian and what isn’t. The general principle of vegetarianism is don’t eat animals. The general principle of veganism is don’t use animals, at least not in a manner that harms or kills the animal.

I believe there are many clear cases. Eating beef is clearly inconsistent with veganism or vegetarianism. Wearing leather shoes is clearly inconsistent with veganism. Also I believe the existence of edge cases doesn’t invalidate the clear cases. The fact that morality is not as crisp and well defined as algebra doesn’t mean moral systems are empty.

Vegan Movies. “No animals were harmed during the filming of this movie” Even if that is the case, there are a lot of movies I’ve seen with falling horses, which worries me about how they got the film shots– if they used a stuffed horse, that horse probably didn’t die of old age. If they are using living horses, the fall risks breaking the horses leg leaving them good as dead.

Vegan Music. Violins are strung with cat gut and that isn’t a fanciful name. It is about impossible to know what the artist was using from available information.

Vegan Information. Many crimes have been committed against animals to learn interesting and sometimes useful facts. For example, I read some of the basic research on the physiology of salt was performed on de-cerebrated ducks. A strict vegan principle would say we should try to ignore tainted information. That seems a bit pointless, since using existing information doesn’t cause further harm. I believe that such information tainted by inhumane animal experiments probably should be grandfathered in, but no more should be produced.

Vegan Driving, Vegan Transportation. Airplanes tend to kill a certain number of birds in landing and taking off. A certain percent of the time driving will result in the death of an animal.

Vegan Economics. Veganism takes on direct consumption of animal products, but not indirect consumption of animal products. For example, most people would consider a product to be vegan if it contained no leather, even if the tools to make it were leather. Similarly, in the entire economy, almost all industries take inputs from almost all other industries– so indirectly, almost the entire economy is tainted by the trade in animal products, more so now than ever now that animal farm products are being refined to use as industrial chemicals.

Vegan Housing and Buildings. Wildlife animal welfare is a matter of habitat. Habitat means forest. Single family houses and living out where wildlife is means less habitat and the death of animals.

Solutions. There isn’t an easy solution to these questions. Intentionality matters. The actual impact of your consumption decision matters. Consuming products that used animal inputs may weigh on your conscience, but foregoing them may not have a significant impact on the market. Other forms of activism, like say letter writing campaigns, might be more effective, hence the more moral act.

I was sick all week, didn’t make it to a single social event.  A general malaise and guilt about giving people a common cold kept me home alone. 

My new website, SocialAnimalsDC.com is now better than ever.  It’s super cool when I can start a project and get to a point where it’s done.  Not that I don’t have more plans–I do–but with reality, work and so on, too many projects fall too low on the priority list to make it this far.

I’m about ready to buy my tickets to Iceland, $827 for two.  Last I spoke with my son on the phone he was still excited about the trip.  [Speaking of the son, he's with the X this weekend, so I better do something with it besides sit around being sick.]

My Icelandic Meetup that I’m organizing now has 5 members and enough people attending the first meeting that we should be able to hold a successful first meetup.  I’ve got a lot of work ahead to prepare, but I’m sure it will be social and educational.

I’ve been sick for 3 days now.  The cold medicine I took is keeping me up tonight.  I’ve missed three possible social events.  On the other hand, maybe that is a good thing, some of my non-social personal projects were falling behind.

This message really should be posted with a low-priority– a messaging feature that wordpress doesn’t support yet.  Outlook doesn’t support low priority messages very well either, since a low priority message will still pop up and get in your face just like any other message.  Maybe I should have posted this to twitter.

I did it! I finished writing the first iteration of SocialAnimalsDC.com, a social event aggregator for vegetarians, vegans, animal rights, animal welfare, and wildlife conservation.

What problem does it solve? To get a complete calendar of events in this (or any, you’d have to visit about two dozen websites. Most of these sites don’t have an easy way to subscribe to updates. Some are seriously irregularly updated and are just waiting to be re-activated. Some of these special interest calendar sites are national, which isn’t too handy if you are stranded in DC and surrounding counties.

How does it compare to Meetup.com or the like? Many organizations large and small won’t discover Meetup.com for years. My site serves the same role as the community newspaper, except the events in the local newspapers for some reason are dominated by for fee spectator events.

How do I do it? I use RSS readers and page watchers to gather the information, then I manually republish the information. The audience can either read the event listings or subscribe to them with an RSS reader.

What features are in the works? I want people to be able to easily import the events into calendaring software, like Outlook or Google Calendars. I also hope to create some membership features like commenting, tagging, user event submission.

Why’d I do it? Issue advocacy in the US is mostly about writing checks to lobbyist groups and other impersonal communications. I want to redirect my issue advocacy towards actions that involve human contact. A social events aggregator that aggregates similar but different groups exemplifies engaged compassion–staying involved with the community rather than sticking within one’s comfort zone with people who already agree with you on most issues.

Why the name? I was originally going to call it CompassionEvents but decided that that name was too serious sounding for a recreational social events site. SocialAnimals.com was taken, which was fine, since I wanted the domain name to reflect the fact that the site is strictly for MD/DC/VA. SocialAnimalsDC.com sound like a sober party animal with a mission in mind.

What are some future challenges? The biggest challenge will be keeping the content quality high over the next five years. Calendaring data becomes stale after about a week or two, so every week I’ll have an opportunity to lose my audience.

Went to Ohio, made pancakes and muffins.  I could have made them vegan since the recipe was from a vegan cookbook, but the house wasn’t too picky so, I put milk and eggs in them.  The fake turkey was very good as usual– the key to good tofurkey is to add lots of thyme.

I’m a bit sick today, mostly from getting up to early to drive back from Ohio to return my rented car.  Despite being sort-of sick I’m in a good mood.  I have one event lined up this week, one possibility.  I’m still excited about my calendar website, which if I’m serious, I will publish today.  If I’m a pie in the sky lazy bum then I won’t.  And what is up with that phrase “pie-in-the-sky”?

Chemistry.com sent me an email saying they had a shortage of men.  Well, with positive response rates at less than 1%, it’s no wonder.  To get a cup of coffee out of someone on match, I’ll have to spam thousands of eligible women.  If Chemistry.com works like eHarmony, where you get just a few matches selected by the dating agency, then I presume the rejection rate will be the same as with the existing eligible women in the database.  That means it would take thousands of years to get a cup of coffee out of some one on Chemistry.com.  “Numerous, extremely patient women seek men on Chemistry.com for the love of the eon.  Subscribe and book your honeymoon in advance for year 20,000AD before airline tickets to Aruba go up anymore.”

So my car battery is dead…again.  The car has an electrical vampire in it.  Periodically, my car completely drains its battery while sitting in the parking lot.

The car acts like it has electricity when a battery pack is hooked up to it. However, even when the battery pack is at a full charge, it doesn’t have enough power to start the car.

So now I’m charging the battery.  The charger comes with several settings, one of which is the WET/GEL/AGM.  The user is supposed to select the appropriate battery type.  The manual says:

• WET– select when battery is WET type
• GEL– select when battery is GEL type
• AGM– select when battery is AGM type

Ok, so the manual writer didn’t actually know how to operate the battery charger.  Fortunately, the worst thing that could go wrong is the battery exploding in my face, removing vision and my extraordinary good looks.

Here is a better description of WET/GEL/AGM, but still I had to read that several times and I’m still not sure how to tell what kind of battery is on my kitchen floor, threatening to explode because I selected the wrong battery type on the charger.

All I can say is it is entirely unfair that electrical engineers can make their devices explode in the faces of users that don’t understand the instructions while programmers like my self can only give users insulting error messages.

Topicals/Exclamations.  Catlang’s working vocabulary is mostly variants of [m][e][w] and [r][o][w], however there are certain words that do not fall in the general phonetic pattern. These are, chatter (introducing discussions about food), purr (introducing discussions about socializing), hiss (introduction to discussions about great danger, also a prelude to insults).  It is grammatically and semantically incorrect to switch topics until either a period of silence or a new topicalizer has been introduced.  Words may completely change their meaning based on the topicalizer, so “meow” in one context might mean catlang, while in the context of a hiss, it means “stinky” or “grimy” a dire cat insult.

Signs.  Tail signs are important for standing speech, but when sitting, in catlang, cats still talk and switch to using words and grammar to express what they’d express with their tails. In standing catlang, honorifics may be dropped in favor of the corresponding tail waves.  Humans speaking catlang have no choice but to vocalize the honorifics or wave one’s arm around in the suitable approximation of a tail wave.  Tail waves without vocalizations generally have the same semantic content as with vocalizations.

Went to restaurant meetup, turned away at the door by the guy who swore there wasn’t a group that arrived at 2PM and he convinced me I was at the wrong place.  Sigh.

Late to cooking class.  Tried to drive there, but electrical system in car is malfunctioning, again.

At least I wasn’t stabbed.

I’d report the good news from the weekend, but I don’t want to confuse the theme of my story.

Dietary advice is a mixture of fad diets, science, tradition and market driven commerce. Fortunately, Matthew Martin, middle class non-professional nutritionist is here to sort things out for everyone. Sit back and let me over simplify things for you.

Eating too many calories will make you fat. What “too many” means depends on how much you exercise. Now how do you need to modify your life style and diet so you don’t have an uncontrollable urge to eat too many calories? Jury is out on that one.

Eating too few calories will make you lose weight. This is usually not a problem, but studies of large populations show that taller heavier people do better than shorter skinnier people.

There is an optimal weight. Add the two facts above and we find out there is an optimal weight to height ratio, which works out to be a BMI in the low 20s.

Losing Weight. Diet will keep you from gaining weight further, but exercise is what gets rid of the excess weight you have now. Keep in mind that once weight is put on, it goes away slow, maybe 2 pound a week at best. Also, people tend to overestimate the impact of exercise–the human is a very fuel efficient machine.

Macro Nutrients.

The jury is out on the optimal mix of fat, protein and carbohydrates in the diet. If the life extension research is true for humans (as it is true for mice), then the mere act of eat any calorie tends to wear out the body. On the other hand, eating extremely low calorie life extending diets means your body switches to a low temperature, low activity metabolism that wouldn’t make life much fun.

The key finding in current macronutrient research is that the mix of macronutrients you eat affect the ‘mode of metabolism’ you body is in. It appears depending on the food we are eating, we switch to fat burning mode, fat accumulation mode, starvation mode, etc. The macronutrient mix also affects how powerful our desire to eat will be. Furthermore, the predominant macronutrient we eat will put different strains on different systems. Low fat diets stress out the pancreas, high fat diets stress out the arteries, high protein diets put stress on the kidneys. Something is going to break- no one know if we are better off wrecking our pancreas in the effort to live longer or if it is better to wreck our arteries to live longer.

Protein is extremely good if you are doing any activities that require it, such as being pregnant or weight lifting. Extremely high protein diets mean your body has to take extra steps to turn that excess protein into fuel. So there is an optimum amount of protein to eat.

Fats can be ordered from bad to very bad. This is not very useful advice, especially now that carbohydrates are getting a bad reputation. If we don’t eat fat, carbohydrates and only an optimal amount of protein, we don’t get enough calories. What gives? Well, at best the macronutrient research can tell us what types of fat and carbohydrates we should try to eliminate all together, and which we should disproportionately favor.

Dietary cholesterol is either bad or neutral, so on average animal fats aren’t helping any.

Saturated fats (those solid at room temperature) are bad, but not deadly bad. On the other hand transfats, fats that are made solid by bubbling hydrogen through them are poison.

Low saturated vegetable oils are not as bad as the other fats. That said, be less bad than the other doesn’t mean they are good, like I said, the jury is out on that.

Transfats are poison. ’nuff said. Don’t even eat trace amounts of transfats if you can help it.

Carbohydrates can be ordered from bad to very bad. Refine starch and sugars are bad. Whole grains are not as bad. Fructose and the other simple sugars are not as bad as sucrose, but being not as a bad as sucrose doesn’t mean it’s good. In fact, gratuitous simple sugars in the diet appear to be wrecking our pancreases.

Animals. Jury is out on the effect of eating animals, milk and eggs. Vegetarians typically do a better job of controlling weight, which is supposed to be good for preventing or deferring degenerative disease. Also, just like diets that target one macronutrient over another, a vegetarian diet has powerful incentives involved. Many vegetarians stick to their diet because they have strong political, environmental and ethical reasons for sticking to their diet. Compare this to a low fat or low carb diet, where there is no similar consequences to abandoning the diet.

Diverse Diet. Eating a little bit of everything is a good idea.

Vitamins. Not getting enough is catastrophic. Getting extra vitamins appears to be a wash–no dramatic benefit or harm. Consider vitamins to be an insurance policy against accidentally eating an undiversified diet.

Single factors. No single behavioral or nutrition factor explains health or lack of it. We know that dropping transfats and dietary cholesterol is good, but other factors– like how many well-patient visits you make to your doctor might out weight all those factors. Also, focusing on easy to measure single factors, like oat-bran, grams of carbohydrates will distract us from possibly more important things, like exercise, smoking, alcohol, risky behaviors and many other issues whose presence can swamp the effect of a single factor behavior like eating more oat bran.

Appropriate skepticism. Be skeptical of brand new claims. Back in the day when bleeding was the state of the art treatment for microbial diseases, people would have been better of with no medical care at all, but if people had rejected all medical care would have been worse off, as even medieval medicine sometimes helped!

We are in a new age where things are more complicated. The low fat and the low carb diets are probably both right and probably both wrong depending on how future research pans out. There is a correlation between certain components of fats, such as transfats and certain types of cholesterol and heart disease. Similarly, there is a correlation between carbs and diabetes. And both carbs and fats have calories which are correlated to weight which is correlated to diseases. Holding an idea as tentatively true and acting on it is difficult, but we have no other choice if we are to progress in a scientific manner.

A slow day at the office–it was a semi-holiday and lots of people were out.  I somehow kept busy, busy meaning not doing nothing.

Funny: my Icelandic flash cards have a phrase– Where is the train station– Hvar er járnbrautarstöðin?  But there have only been two trains in Iceland, the first is shut down, the second was for moving workers and materials to construction site and the third is in planning but not build!  Obviously, this is for tourists visiting the vester-islensku who live in Canada.