Hand Coding

Researchers at Saint Louis University have discovered what may be one of the primary causes of obesity. The hormone leptin normally tells the brain to stop eating but triglycerides may block leptin from reaching the brain:

The scientists used mice to look at how leptin, a hormone secreted by fat cells that tells us to stop eating, gets into the brain. They found that in obese mice, high triglycerides, a type of fat in the bloodstream, prevents leptin from getting into the brain, where it can do its work in turning off feeding and burning calories.

“High triglycerides are blocking the leptin from getting into the brain. If leptin can’t get into the brain, it can't tell you to stop eating,” says Banks, who is principal investigator and a staff physician at Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Louis. […]

Before reading about this study, I hadn’t even heard of triglycerides. But, this sounded like a significant discovery and so I looked for more information on them. And, I found this page at the Duke Student Health Center which offered some tips on lowering triglycerides:

Lifestyle changes are the key to change:

• Reduce intake of saturated fat and cholesterol in your diet. (saturated fat should account for no more than 7-10% of total calories and cholesterol intake should be reduced to < 300mg/day).
• Increase physical activity to 30 minutes of moderate intensity activity on most days.
• Increase intake of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats such as those found in canola oil, olive oil and nuts, while decreasing intake of saturated fats such as those found in butter, red meats and bakery foods.
• Consume the majority of your carbohydrate calories in the form of whole grains, vegetables and fruits.
• Keep in mind that substituting carbohydrates for fats may actually raise triglyceride levels and decrease HDL levels in some people.
• Include fish high in Omega-3 fatty acids at least 2 times per week. Fatty fish such as salmon, swordfish, mackerel, and sardines are good sources of omega-3 fatty acids.

After reading more about it, I feel better about my triglyceride outlook — I watch my saturated fat intake, I eat fish (a tuna sandwich) every day, and I exercise regularly. And now that I’m aware of their impact on general health, I’ll keep an eye open for more research on triglycerides.

I’ve been busy with freelance work over the past week and I haven’t been able to post as many entries as I’d like. In any case, after heading home from the office on Saturday evening, I suggested to Mike that we could head off to Cafe Brazil for some cake or ice cream (what better way to end the workday?).

My initial plan was to go for some cake, though I hadn’t quite decided on chocolate cake or cheesecake at the time. However, after looking at the menu their Brownie Espresso Sundae caught my eye as a dessert encompassing both chocolate and ice cream. Mike wisely noted that the espresso could keep me up at night and so I ordered the sundae sans espresso.

Mike was much less hungry than I was and he was initially going to order just a cheese potato from the side-orders section. However, I suggested to him that he needn't limit himself to just smaller dishes as I could always split a larger entree with him (in addition to the sundae, natch).

So, Mike decided on the Seafood Club from the Sandwiches side of the menu. They describe it as a club sandwich with salmon, bacon, lettuce, tomato and mayo. I was concerned a bit about how a fish-based club sandwich would turn out, but we decided to give it a try.

It wasn’t much of a “club sandwich” in the traditional sense — it only had two slices of bread (not three), it was cut in half (not quarters) and there was only single layer of meat (not interleaved with bacon and tomato). Delusions on club-sandwichness aside, it was actually a delicious sandwich. Really, the salmon made the sandwich — the flaky pink filet would have been suitable as part of any salmon entree.

After enjoying half of Mike’s Seafood Club, I moved on to my Brownie Sundae. Though the salmon was stupendous, the sundae was a bit less than I expected. For one thing, the menu boasted that the sundae was drizzled with Hershey’s chocolate sauce — and it was — but Hershey’s corn syrup chocolate sauce doesn’t exactly raise the bar of chocolate excellence.

And though the ice cream was mostly fine, the brownie had room for improvement. Now, maybe it was just me — Mike actually really liked the brownie. My brownie of choice tends towards a dense and fudgey brownie. On the other hand, this brownie was more crumbly and almost crunchy. It was the type of brownie that, when heated, would probably just become brittle rather than melting into a pleasant chocolate ooze.

In the end, I was still pleased with my meal. Sure, the brownie sundae didn’t quite turn out as I had expected, but the salmon club more than made up for it. Dessert-wise, I’ll probably stick to cakes at Cafe Brazil. And I won’t hesitate to order that Seafood Club again sometime.

USA Today has an article describing what I had suspected for some time — if Bush loses the Wall Street Journal, he loses a strong base of Republican support. Ever since the PATRIOT Act, I’ve not had a good feeling about Bush and I had suspected that others may have felt the same.

This week, there were signs that some of President Bush’s biggest boosters in the media are becoming disillusioned with his handling of Iraq. The Wall Street Journal, the country’s second-largest-circulation newspaper, took these two swipes at Bush:

• On Monday, a long, critical story followed this Page 1 headline: “Early U.S. Decisions on Iraq Now Haunt American Efforts.”

• On Tuesday, a WSJ editorial chided Bush’s June 30 Iraq transition plans with this subhead: “The U.S. drops the Iraqis who've been with us from the start.”

To paraphrase LBJ, if Bush loses the WSJ, he will not necessarily lose Middle America, but he might lose “Upperville.” The ultraconservative Wall Street Journal is a bible for upscale or rich, rock-ribbed Republicans. […]

Though I’m not sure I’d say that the WSJ is Republican “bible” — its main content isn’t usually political — I will concede that its editorial pages lean to the right a good portion of the time. In any case, I hope to see more coverage about this topic (from USA Today or elsewhere) as I’d find it fascinating if the WSJ were an accurate barometer of mainstream Republican support.

I heard about this an intriguing HTML Altimeter bookmarklet via Asa (or “Topographic View”, as the author calls it). It’s a bit hard to describe, but it essentially reassigns the CSS background for each element on the current page to represent the number of nested elements at that point.

Level zero starts at black and each additional nested element gets closer to white (with 16 shades in total). To make use of the bookmarklet, visit the author’s page and drag the “Topographic view” link to your Personal Toolbar. Then, just click that link to see the effect applied to the current page.

As you might expect, well formed CSS-based sites barely get out of black, but table-based layouts can easily approach pink (the color designating nesting past 16). All the same, though this bookmarklet is good for an easy laugh at the expense of poorly built sites, I’m not sure if it has any practical development applications :-/.

It seems to be wedding-season here in blogger-land :). I went to Jason & Julie’s wedding at the end of March and I’m going to Bryan and Lyn’s wedding this Friday. Though Jason and Julie live in Colorado now, they had the wedding in Austin, at the Austin Children’s Museum.

I had a great time and I’m so happy for both of them. I remembered to take my camera along as well and I’ve finished processing the photos. In all, I took 44 photographs that evening and I’ve posted 8 in the gallery. Why so few? Well, the interior of the Children’s Museum — while charming and playful — was rather dark. And, with only a built-in flash, many of my shots didn’t come out.

As usual, all my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. Also, I’ve resized all the images to 1024-width before uploading them as it can be a bit hard to get your head around a full 5 MP image. However, if you want the full-resolution version of any images, just ask.

I’m a member of the Dallas Camera Club and, even if I neglect to read up on the latest digital camera news, I generally hear about the latest cameras just from other members of the club. And, I learned of the Nikon D70 when the club's former president and his wife each bought one (though they’ve only received one so far since there’s a waiting list).

The D70 is Nikon’s foray into the sub-$1000 DSLR market. And, from reading over this D70 review at DPReview, it more than holds its own against its chief competitor, the Digital Rebel from Canon:

Nikon have achieved three major improvements with the D70 (compared to the competition / the D100): (1) They have improved the performance of the camera, with its instant on availability, very fast shutter release, superb continuous shooting and image processing speed and smart use of its buffer. (2) They have maintained build quality while still delivering a smaller and lighter camera, the D70 doesn't feel much less well built than the D100 but is lighter, it certainly feels much more like $1000 worth of camera than the EOS 300D could. (3) They have improved image sharpness and detail, while we could niggle about moiré the compromise between artifacts and sharpness is worth it, in many instances the D70 delivering more detail than our previous benchmark, the EOS 300D / EOS 10D CMOS sensor. […]

Though the review’s comparison section focuses primarily on the (Nikon) D100 and the (Canon) Digital Rebel, I was hoping for a comparison against Canon’s EOS-10D as well (which costs more, but the comparison would be interesting nonetheless).

In any case, I’m not particularly in the market for a new camera. I bought a Nikon Coolpix 5700 last spring and I’m still pleased with it. Granted, it doesn’t have through-the-lens metering which annoys me a bit and makes the camera less useful in low-light situations, but I think I can live without that for the time being.

You may already be familiar with the Badger Badger Badger Flash animation. In case not, it’s a silly animation consisting of a pack of cartoon badgers bouncing to a song whose lyrics consist primarily of “Badger, Badger, Badger” with occasional interjections of “Mushroom Mushroom” and “Snake!”. It can only be enjoyed in small doses ;).

In any case, I was reading a rather inane Slashdot parody about installling Linux on a badger and one of the comments pointed a group of knuckleheads (“badgerheads”?) who decided to act-out their own real-life rendition and videotape it (complete with mushroom & snake). There’s no need to bother with the Slashdot article but, if you liked the original Flash, you may appreciate the effort put into the enactment as well.

And, the best part is that this managed to somewhat derail the Slashdot discussion as some posters commented on the relative badger-badgering skill of the video participants:

Perhaps the saddest aspect of this video is the fact that most of them do the badger dance so… poorly. The tall one on the right has the right instincts for synching up the arm waving and knee bending, so I give him credit for that, but it&Rsquo;s not how the badgers actually do it. And the rest of them do very little to dispel certain stereotypes about the lack of rhythm in the heterosexual caucasian male. […]

PS I’m heading off to Pittsburgh for the weekend (leaving Thursday), so updates may be a bit sparse until I return Monday.

I'm subscribed to The Word Spy’s mailing list — they feature new words and phrases used in print (though only those that can be substantiated across multiple sources). And I was amused by their recent entry for the “man cave”:

man cave
n. An area of a house, such as a basement, workshop, or garage, where a man can be alone with his power tools and projects.

Example Citation:

The basement or garage has become such a special place for special man-projects that DIY is even devoting special programming to it: “My Ultimate Workshop,” a one-hour special scheduled for May, looks at tricked-out garages and basements where guys hone their crafts, be it woodworking, car restoration, wine collecting or model-train building.

So how did the man cave make such a transformation? The experts said there are several factors at play: more disposable income, better gadgets on the market for trading up, keeping up with the Joneses and the post-9/11 cocooning factor.

— “Cave dwelling,” Chicago Tribune, March 23, 2004

I can really relate to the idea of a man cave. After all, with two geeks living here, just about our whole apartment is an extended man cave. Just last weekend, I transformed our living room into an impromptu computer assembly station — I built my new PC beside the sliding glass door there so that I could make use of the available light.

On Friday, Mike decided to make himself a root beer float. At the time, I resisted since I was about to eat dinner soon (it was about 6pm at the time). Mike made his float with a half-full IBC that had apparently been in the back of the fridge for quite some time. And, even though it was a bit flat, Mike said that the float still turned out well.

I went to an autocross on Saturday and, after returning, I thought that a root beer float could be rather tasty. And, I recalled that I still had a can of Diet A&W in my mini-fridge. I wasn’t sure how the float would turn out with diet soda, but I figured that I could always pour it out if I needed to.

I ventured to the freezer and took out a frozen beer mug along with some Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream (the same ice cream that Mike used for his float the day before). I grabbed an ice cream scoop and added two scoops to the mug. I then added the root beer and, as root beer floats tend to do, it foamed up easily and so it took me several careful pours to get all the root beer in the mug.

It had been years since my last root beer float (perhaps ten years), and I was really looking forward to drinking it. After all, root beer and ice cream are two great tastes that taste great together. As I lifted my glass, I pondered for a moment whether the lack of sugar would have any effect on the float; but, I set that thought aside and took a big gulp. Man, it was awful.

Somehow — and perhaps due to the combination of the frozen mug along with the frozen ice cream — the root beer had frozen into chunks of rootbeersicles. It was as if I had a mug of ice cream with some caramel-colored ice tossed in. And, the full-fat/full-sugar nature of the Blue Bell only served to emphasize the watered-down quality of this pathetic root beer.

In the end, I really wanted to like it. I even tried grabbing a spoon so that I could just extract the ice cream bits. But, the root-ice had permeated the beverage and infected all of it. I had no choice but to pour it all down the drain. So, I not only didn’t end up with a tasty beverage, but I’m still itching for a good root beer float (or even a decent one). Perhaps I’ll have to buy a real root beer so that I'll be ready for next time.

Reading over a Slashdot article on Google’s new look, the discussion somehow turned to quoting conventions and cardshark2001 pointed out that British and American quoting styles differ.

The site points out that in the US, “periods and commas go inside quotation marks regardless of logic”. However, the British apparently include punctuation such as commas and question marks inside the quotation when it makes more sense to do so. For instance, there’s an entirely different meaning (to me) between these arrangements:

• I’d rather not rent “Dude, Where’s My Car?”.
• I’d rather not rent “Dude, Where’s My Car”?

Eric S Raymond also talks more about this in the section on Hacker Writing Style of the Jargon File where he confirms that “Hart’s Rules and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors call the hacker-like style ‘new’ or ‘logical’ quoting”. In any case, this “logical” style is one that I’ve adopted for some time and I’m pleased to learn that it has a grammatical backing as well.