About four months ago, an epidemic broke out here in Sydney. The disease stuck only females of around fifteen to twenty-five years of age, and was characterised by sighing, distant looks and frequent conversational reference to vampires and somebody named “Edwardo”. It was communicated via contact with any book in the “Twilight Series” by author Stephenie Meyer.
From what I have gathered, Edwardo is the main attraction of this series, a position he holds by virtue of being some kind of vampiric super-boyfriend. He cooks, he cleans, he shares his feelings, to be honest I haven’t actually read the books but I assume he does a lot of other things very well too. The point is, he is raising the bar ridiculously high and all us real world males just can’t compete. When one of my Edwardo-besotted friends told me that Meyer was so upset over a leaked early draft of her new book, Midnight Sun, that she decided to stop writing, I cackled with schadenfreudian glee. My friend seemed to think I would go against my natural interest by spreading the word about this petition to Meyer begging her to continue writing. The fool. So please don’t follow this link and sign this heartfelt plea from some very upset fans. That’s right, don’t click here and sign now.
The problem is, almost no one likes tofu initially. It’s an acquired taste, like caviar or asparagus, though for the opposite reason–it has barely any flavor, so you focus on the consistency. And most people don’t care for the consistency.
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I know, I know–you won’t try it. You don’t LIKE tofu, and you won’t be MADE to like it by some vegan nuthatch. But a girl’s gotta try. If I can just convince one person to grill a few slabs of tofu along with their steaks, I’ll feel its all been worthwhile.
It’s worth checking out the rest of Megan’s post just for the coooking tips. I started eating tofu a few years before I became a vegetarian and can’t really agree that it’s an aquired taste – the flavour isnearly non-existant, and the consistancy is no different to scrambled eggs or fish. Like any food, it would be a surprise if it was universally loved. What I consistantly find gobsmacking is the sheer visceral horror with which some people react to it. I’ve never been able to determain if the occasional tofu bashing diatribes I am treated to on occasion from family and friends (and not a few times from complete strangers) are directed at the food itself, or are part of the wider class of “slightly-scary-over-reaction-to-the-very-idea-of-vegetarianism”. I’m sure every vegetarian knows the kinds of reaction I’m talking about. Incidentally, meat eaters, we’re not judging you and most of us really don’t care what you eat any more than we expect you to care what we do. Every other carnivore we’ve ever met has claimed to be “the biggest meat eater in the world” who could “never possibly give up meat”.
I used to keep a sandwich press for frying up blocks of tofu whenever I needed a quick snack. Just three minutes or so, no need to turn, then onto a plate with some leftover stirfried vegetables or plain with a little peri-peri sauce. Delicious.
Daniel Florinridicules the easily-ridiculed notion that the world can be divided into the “natural” and “unnatural”:
It used to be the counterculture that was confused about this, but now it has seeped into consumer culture. Thus almost every bag of food now says “all natural ingredients,” which means nothing.
I don’t entirely agree. Consumer culture has always cared about what is “natural” and what is not. It’s just the categories themselves which have changed. As Daniel and countless other have noted, things which are considered natural have no inherently unique properties; they are imbued with “naturalness” by our own minds. The natural has connotations of both the expected and the familiar, as well as the untainted and the pure. Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory attempts to explain why these matter so much to us, and why we often go as far as to make moral judgments based on perceived naturalness. He proposes that our moral judgements differ depending on the value we place on the following “foundations”: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity.
The purity aspect of naturalness slots easily into the purity/sanctity foundation. Haight links this directly to the primal disgust response, which possibly explains why we seem so concerned with naturalness in substances which come in close contact with our bodies: food, cosmetics etc. Mobile phone companies do not bother to hide the fact that their phones are made of “unnatural” ingredients, but shampoo advertisements constantly tout the “natural” credentials of their products.
The aspect of the expected and familiar – “the natural course of action” – falls under the ingroup\loyalty and authority\respect categories. Things feel natural and familiar because we are used to doing them, and this is usually because we have been told to do them or seen everyone else do them.
Here’s where things get interesting. According to Haidt’s empirical research (pdf), liberals (that’s the left for my Australian readers, not the Liberals) tend to value harm/care and fairness/reciprocity much higher, while conservatives value all five foundations, placing more emphasis than liberals on the last three. According to popular stereotype, left-liberals are organic legume munching, all-natural soap rubbing greenies, while conservatives are happy to eat whatever crap they can get their hands on and would bathe in crude oil if it wasn’t so expensive. Apart from fair trade and similar niche movements, the liberal image seems to have little to do with harm/care or fairness/reciprocity, while the conservitives’ concern for purity/sanctity doesn’t quite make it through to, say, environmental policy. Is the stereotype, Haight’s model or my association of “naturalness” with the last three foundations of it wrong?
For what it’s worth, I scored low on all axes when I took Haight’s test. I’m not sure that this would be a universal result though. A lot of libertarians are social conservatives with religiously derived notions of purity; they just believe in not forcing this morality on others.
Via boingboing. As much as I love, respect and admire Dawkins and his work (both in biology and in atheism), he does have a tendency to come across as patronising. It’s no surprise some atheists see him as an alienating burden on the cause. Incidentally, my favorite Dawkins clip of all time is one in which he addresses this:
Only five per cent of cases were caused by organisms that would require more expensive and broad-spectrum antibiotics, and these cases were nearly all in patients who’d had frequent hospital admissions or were residents of nursing homes.
“The study results show that current Australian guidelines for prescribing antibiotics for pneumonia are appropriate,” Dr Charles said.
“It shows that Australian doctors should resist the push which is occurring in some parts of the world – particularly the US – to prescribe broad spectrum antibiotics to treat essentially all possible causes.”
Golden Staph: It's coming to get ya
If you don’t think antibiotic resistance matters, you’re not living on the same planet I am. About a week ago, a friend went to the doctor with a racking cough. He was given a cursory examination and proscribed a course of amoxicillin. He took it for a few days, gave up when the cough improved mildly, then went back when it started again and was prescribed clarithromycin. At no point was a microbial workup ordered, although he’s now had the cough so long he could have had four with time to spare. To cap it off, he declared yesterday that he was cured and that he was ready to ‘throw out the pills’. Horrified, I asked if the doctor had warned him to take the full course, for his own sake as well as to minimise the risk of acting as the unwitting human incubator for a deadly resistant strain. Of course not. (If you don’t know about superbugs, check out this Wikipedia article).
I’m not a doctor. I’m sure that thousands of antibiotics are prescribed for thousands of coughs all over the world every day, and I’m sure that doctors have good reasons for what they’re doing. But there is no excuse for not telling a patient not to take the full course of antibiotics, and to make damn sure they remember. There is no practical reason why they can’t at least offer a microbiological workup if the disease is more than a common cough, if only for the patent’s piece of mind. If you’re a patient who regularly insists on antibiotics to treat common colds and coughs which are almost certainly viral, shame on you and your doctor. (Again, if you don’t know already: antibiotics do not kill viruses!) Antibiotics are fantastic things which have had a large part to play in our increasing lifespans and quality of life. If you need one, then by all means take one. Just remember to take the full course. If you don’t think you need one, or think your doctor is writing a prescription just to get you out the door as fast as possible, ask.
Don’t take an anonymous blogger’s word for all this; take it from the experts. Misuse of antibiotics: Just Say No.
In the days after Firefox 3 was released, I thought something like this:
“Well, that’s about it. They’ve solved all the memory hogging issues, tweaked tabbed browsing to as good as it’s going to get, and added a few little touches like a decent bookmark manager. Sure, the awesome bar is awesome, but there really isn’t anything Mozilla could add to this that would improve browsing without getting in the way. I guess the future for Firefox will be keeping up with the latest standards, and maybe restyling the interface every now and then.”
Turns out I was dead wrong. Ubiquity, although only in a barest of bare-bones alpha release, proves that there is still a vast untapped space of cooler and shinier – not to mention faster and more powerful – ways of interacting with the internet.
Ubiquity is a text command tool not dissimilar from quick launching utilities like Quicksilver or Gnome-do, but with a vastly greater power and integration into the web. Quick launching tools tend to act as intermediaries: they take your command, figure out where you want to go and send you there. Ubiquity is more butler than messenger. You can highlight a section of text and tell Ubiquity to translate it into French, then tell it to email that same section of text to a friend. You can look up a term in Wikipedia and do a word count on the article. Admittedly, these examples are not all that impressive or novel, and the current selection of commands is quite small. However, Ubiquity includes a simple authoring tool and language which lets you create and share custom commands to do pretty much anything. Cool.
After I installed Ubiquity for a test run, the first thing it asked me to do is map a keyboard shortcut to call it into focus. I chose ctrl + spacebar and happily started testing. I spent a few minutes looking through the list of commands (accessible by telling Ubiquity “command-list”), playing around with them and trying to see how many I could use in the course of some normal browsing. I quickly realised two things: firstly, ctrl + spacebar is a very awkward shortcut, and secondly, the need for having a shortcut at all was not entirely clear. If you type a string of text while browsing, most of the time it will just float off into the ether. It’s rare that you would have a text box or some other kind of input selected. Moreover, a lot of Ubiquity commands act upon text you have grabbed with the mouse, which automatically means any text input into the keyboard will go nowhere fast. So why can’t Ubiquity accept text input without calling the command line first? Interacting with Ubiquity doesn’t have the same feel as interacting with, say, the Linux command line, where there is no distinction between the command entry space and the output space. Ubiquity feels more like a utility that you have to call upon than a direct interaction with the browser.
The main flaw with Ubiquity is the same one that has confounded many of the previously mentioned quick launching tools, as well as pretty much any other piece of software that attempts to turn your unbounded input into useful action. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly unique about Ubiquity in the way it handles natural language commands, which make the eventual universal access dreamed of by its developers seem a little disconnected from the actual software. Without a well-implemented parser or a clear idea of how to subtly force users to make their input machine readable, the ability for Ubiquity to act upon natural language commands will be strictly limited by the foresight and contingency of the commands’ designs. When I first installed Ubiquity, I selected some text and told it to “translate into french”. It took the highlighted text and replaced it with the words “into french”. I tried “translate english into french” and got a similar result. When I read the dropdown menu the third time I typed “translate”, I saw it telling me to enter (text to translate), (to language) and (from language). Typing “translate this english to french” finally got me what I was after, but by this point the original text had long since been “translated” out of existence. Hardly intuitive.
All this having been said, Ubiquity is still a brilliant idea and a groundbreaking piece of software. If Mozilla makes this the centrepiece of Firefox 4 (or whatever it is going to be called), it will probably be their most significant contribution so far to the average user’s experience, not to mention a “into french” against Internet Explorer. Ahem, that’s a “coup de grâce”. They’re not quite there yet.
Because of the feedback on my minireview, and in the interest of honesty and trying out a new thing, I’m giving the Ubuntu Dust theme a spin on my main desktop. So far I’m still very underwhelmed, but I suspect this is mainly becaue I have not yet tweaked my way to the optimal set-up. Please share your own themes and convince me that Dust is all it’s cracked up to be!
Mnemosyne is da bomb. This is the closest thing humanity has ever had to sticking one of those Matrix cables into the back of your head and streaming info in on a broadband line. Sure, the GUI might not look quite that cyberpunk, but the functionality is all there.
The basic premise of Mnemosyne, according to its creators, is to combine a flashcard viewer with an algorithm that shows you exactly what you need to know at exactly the right time for it to get seared into your gray matter. True, the boilerplate about “spaced repetition” with its vague references to “memory research” and people with long European surnames sounds a little like pseudoscientific babble. Regardless, it seems to work, and damn well.
After viewing each card, Mnemosyne asks you to rate your recall on a scale of 0, “totally forgotten”, to 5, “remembered with ease”. If the card is a new one, it asks using you to rate how familiar it has become on the same scale. These ratings go into the magical black box of the algorithm, and cause the cards to pop up again after a certain period of time. A typical session might involve a good dose of cards you have learned recently but do not yet have entirely memorised, a sprinkling of older cards to keep them fresh in your mind, and five or so brand new cards which you will see several times during the session until you’re confident you have them for a few days. Learning ensues.
Mnemosyne has an interface to put a Spartan barracks to shame. Just below the surface, however, is a treasure trove of handy little features such as three-sided cards, easy categorisation, tweaks to the appearance of cards including a handy feature which blows up the size of foreign script, and more. Once you have used Mnemosyne for a while, you start to get the impression that the developers are heavy users of the program themselves: every time you think “gee, I wish there was a way to -”, you realise that a solution has already been implemented. If not, there’s a small family of plugins, and of course you can always write your own. Want to add a sound file for the pronunciation of some foreign vocab, or an image to identify? Easy. Import a tab separated or XML flashcards database from your old flashcards program? No problems. It also exports cards, which is handy for mobile card viewers like the iPhone’s iStudy.
The only real downside is that it takes a little while for your mind to ‘get’ working with Mnemosyne. If you’re dedicated to learning your content motivation should get over this hump easily. Otherwise, it is easy to see how somebody giving this app a 10-minute test run could dismiss it as a lightweight flash-card flasher and nothing more. It’s not.
Head on over and check out the freshly minted blog of my good friend freeze43. Subway is a fine establishment that has managed to occupy the intersection of fresh, cheap and convenient. McDonalds is sitting atop a nearby peak where freshness has been substituted with an appeal to our primal need for fats and sugars. Unfortunatly for us vegetarians, there is an interesection between all the inedible meals on the Subway menu {Vegie Pattie} and all the vegetarian meals {Vegie Pattie, Vege Delight}. Such is life.
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