Conversation with a Foodie and New Theory

“Always eat the brightest colored vegetables\fruits since those are the ones that are best for you”

I think this has a dangerous undertone because it is not really explaining what you need and leads to confusion. In a personal example I know someone who eats lots of kale and spinach and because this is a “dark green” and they think they are really healthy. – (FU buy the way I enjoy iceberg, it is a texture thing.)

Now I know where he was going, yes there is a correlation between the darkness of the inner flesh of the fruit aka the density of pigmentation and its nutritional value but that is not key advice you want to give people.

So I replied does that mean cauliflower, bananas, onions, garlic, and turnips are not as good for you? I mean the meat of these plants is almost completely devoid of color?

With a really vague response I had to go in for the kill. He knew it had to do with pigment which shows that he knew or at least read the concept but lacked the understanding of why. He was parroting a set of statements but didn’t understand the data and assumptions that make it up.

So if I eat Larry (Caucasian man) is he more nutritious with a tan then without a tan? And by how much? Now I know this is a ludicrous questions but I know besides the fact that we could agree eating Larry is wrong he didn’t know.

Once you know the answer to why cauliflower and tomatoes are both good for you the advice that gets created is you want people to eat a variety of colors and shades within those colors, the variety is more important health wise then eating in a particular shade, while there is a correlation between the pigment that case does not always hold true.

I also proposed an alternative theory that the closer a fruit or vegetable is to the color of my poop the less health value…this one still has to be tested so let me know if you need a thesis.

WNBA

I think it is doubly fitting that the only professional sports team that has a winning record is the WNBA Lynx’s. All we hear is the stadium BS and whining from the Vikings, the excuses from the Twins the incompetence of the Timberwolves and the decline of the Wild.

In the midst of all of this hoopla a team that regularly plays for a crowd of 300 and an entire organization that makes less than one year’s salary of Michael Beasley has managed to become the winning-est team in the state. I love it.

Reading List for the Next 12 Months

Keeping a mix of business, fiction and no fiction


Books

Black Boy- Richard Wright
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - David Eggers
Maus- Art Spiegelman
A Supposedly Fun Thing I will never do again - David Wallace
The Closing of the American Mind - Allan Bloom
The Excutionors Song - Norman Mailer
The Emperor of All Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee
Nickled and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich
Runaway - Diary o a street kid -Evelyn Lau
Beauty Pays- Daniel Hamermesh
The Manager Pool: Patterns for Radical Leadership - Don Olson
The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt
Design for Community – The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Communities – by Derek Powazek.
Blind Spot - Charlie Feld
Left Turn How Liberl Media Bias Distorts the America Mind - Tim Groseclose
Damned- Chuck Palahniuk

Random Thoughts on the Double Sided Nature of Myth Busting

Random thoughts that will probably get me in trouble one day. In refereeing a particularly heated religious debate where a staunch supporter of some unspecified branch of Christian faith was proclaiming the literal nature of the bible only to be refuted by examples from a staunch atheists using experts from Leviticus and Deuteronomy on the “correct” methods to discipline an unruly child. A few things occurred to me.

1.)It seems like atheists tend to know more about religion then most “religious” people.

2.)These books of harsh standards of religious practice in the old testament make a up books 3 and 5 of the Torah as well. Yet you never see someone openly criticize the Jewish faith in the same manner.

3.) The Jewish tradition plagued by it oppressive suffering past has somehow made it a sacred cow when it comes to ridiculing it’s silly beliefs. (The same core beliefs that people openly ridicule Christians for)

4.)If you ridicule or mock these beliefs you will be called an anti-Semite. Taken to a extreme this can actually be considered a hate crime and be prosecutable.

5.)This has some interesting consequences. Such as government support for Zionism (the creation of a Jewish national sovereign nation) or the creation and backing of Israel.

6.)Why is it so unacceptable to challenge the Jewish belief system or seen as so taboo?

7.)Should suffering exempt your claims of faith from examination?


Just an interesting observation that I would open to receiving feedback on.

Passive Aggressive =Guilt Tripping?

Is passive aggressive and guilt tripping the same thing?

Guilt trips don’t work if:
A: You don’t feel guilty
B: You don’t give a shit or think the person trying to do it to you is stupid
C: You recognize they are doing it and see their weakness and disregard it
D: All of the above

Perfection

“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I have removed cigarettes and feel wonderful…albeit nowhere close to perfect, I do feel that I am headed in the right general direction. Now for my next removal…..french fries. No more French fries. Ever. I hear by challenge the notion that a value meal, burger, fish fry has to be complemented with French fries. It is a waste of calories I am going to learn to live without. One more stoke of taking away rock off the sculpture of my life on its way to perfection.

Magic Number for Deleting People from Your Feed

How many times a day does it take for someone to post something before you block their feed?
(S / N) = D (IF D<=1 DELETE USER)
S = Stimulation = Average Number between 1-10 that I have assigned how much I enjoy the content they add to my feed. (Yes this is a subjective value, but necessary to prioritize my time and make sure I am reading content that I enjoy)
N = Number of Postings = Average Number of postings per day.
D = Deletion (Hide\ Block) Threshold

For example if someone posts an average of 5 on the stimulating category and posts five times to my social network feed 5/5 = 1 they are blocked from my news feed. The content posted has to be on average more stimulating then the number of postings.
If not you are blocked\hidden\deleted depending on the SMN (Social Media Network)

I smell Nobel Prize

"Update" The calculation is being modified to the following:

S+(A*B)/N = D

Where A = Attractiveness of the person and B = the perceived benefit of the relationship. (Think likely hood you will sleep with them or value their company or need them to bail you out of jail) I will set A as a value 1-10 and B as a value 1-5. This however makes it impossible to delete all but the worst offenders. Unfortunately it is necessary since this is the way things work in the real world.

GELP or FELP

What if you could review people the way you could review businesses? Take the concept of Yelp and extend it to allow people to anonymously review people on face book? You could get reviews of who to date, who to hire, past results with how they handled secrets, decisions ect. I wonder if we could do that with each other if it would make people strive to be better people?
Remember way back when we were told this would go down on your permanent record? What if you really had one? A personal one?

Good for the goose is good for the gander right?

Wonder why no one reversed Michelle Bachman’s comments? She “jokingly” stated that Irene was a sign from God trying to cleanse Washington. Wonder if she thinks the wildfires in Texas are God trying to cleanse Texas from the Christians? Wonder why no one asked Perry this question? Although I am relieved to see she is slipping in the polls. If only Perry would start declining too my faith in humanity might be restored. At least a little bit.

Sacred Cow One - Benefits for Vetrans

Recently the president was in Minneapolis giving a speech on Veterans affairs at the American Legion. This brought up some interesting side conversation and left me with a trailing thought. As the crowd was applauding the following statement, “I will not balance the budget on the backs of our veterans” I thought to myself well then on whose back are you going to balance it?

It leads through that the more groups you exclude from having the balance spread across the more the burden falls to the remaining.
I was having trouble following the train of thought of some of my friends who are of the mindset that, “I risked my life for this country so now you owe me what you promised me.”

While I think that promises made should be kept I recognize the enormity of the problem in front of us. A problem we are all going to have to balance across our backs.

I wonder if we are so patriotic, if we love this country so much we are willing to trade our lives for it, why are we not willing to give up some of the entitlements received so that it makes the country people fought for solvent into the future. I mean isn’t the definition of patriotism sacrificing self for the benefit of the greater good? Why does the offer physical suffering or possibility of death get traded so easily and yet we will fight tooth and nail over basis point funding on a VA pension?