Dr. Weil on Eating Well. The Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load

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Dr Weil is on PBS talking about food. I’m pseudo-live blogging the talk in a haphazard sort of way.    Andrew Weil is a leading proponent of combining “mainstream” science with natural foods and lifestyle changes to improve health and well-being.

He’s explaining why a puffy rice cake will raise your blood sugar *much faster* than table sugar, and noting that eating “high glycemic load” carbs like rice cakes regularly can lead to obesity and other health challenges like high blood pressure.

Generally, he says we should be looking to eat low glycemic loads stuff like beans, winter squashes, sweet potatoes.

Cooking oil? Like Kurzweil, Weil recommends “extra virgin Olive Oil” and says to stay away from my personal favorite, sesame oil among others.

Eat: Oily fish to get Omega 3 Fatty Acides. Also in walnuts, hemp!! seeds, flax seeds, sea vegetables.

Fat: Avoid it even though the ‘mouth feel’ is pleasureable. Nuts, avocadoes, olive oil are OK fats – these are monosaturated. Optimal levels of fat are far below the current average consumption of fat.

Protein: The need for this is exaggerated in our culture where protein deficiency is almost non-existent. Animal proteins are not as good due to density, saturated fats, and toxins.

Try to get your proteins from plant produce

Main source of vitamins? Fruits and vegetables! Eat a great variety. Eat fresh. Lots of fiber. Eat a LOT more fiber than you have been!

Phytonutrients are good!

Green Tea, White Tea, Dark Chocolate, Red Wine have health benefits.

Beware food marketing that encourages eating the nutrient rather than the vegetable that has the nutrient. e.g. broccoli and tomatoes.

Talent Oregon Real Estate

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Wow, Talent is for sale these days as hundreds of houses go onto the market at prices that appear to be coming down, down and I predict down more now that the winter doldrums are approaching.    Under normal real estate circumstances people would be pulling houses off the market now, but the sub prime mortgage fiascos have put a lot of folks in the terrible position of “having” to sell their house or lose it.    I’m not clear when we’ll hit the bottom but I think this winter will be a great time to buy and a bad one to sell.

I’ve got two friends now working the Talent Oregon Real Estate market.   Dave doesn’t have a site up yet but Jack’s Talent Oregon Real Estate website is  a good resource for some local information and houses.  Jack also covers Ashland Oregon, Jacksonville Oregon, and Medford Oregon Real Estate. However best to email or call him directly for the latest information since the market is changing rapidly around here.

Yahoo Mash

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Update: I’ve got a basic page up at Mash but you’ll need a (free) Mash account to access in this new social network. Email me at: jhunkins@gmail.com if you need an invite.

Scott’s annoyed that Mash is treating him like a … kid.

—— earlier ——–

Yahoo’s in the process of developing a new social networking space and it looks promising. I’ll hope to be on it within a day or so to check out the features. Yahoo is a little late to the party after failing to aquire Facebook, but I’m sure the Yahoo teams have come up with a great social application. After all, Yahoo’s been doing a lot of the best Web 2.0 work for some time and it’s about time they leveraged all the visitors to Yahoo properties into a social networking system.

The major challenge here is that many people, certainly me included, are suffering from sort of “social networking fatigue” from trying to follow and participate and understand even a handful of the many social applications out there. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn, Flickr,MyBlogLog, StumbleUpon, etc are all important places and offer the ability to interact with folks but there is only so much time in a day, even for those of us who spend a lot of time online.

I’ll write more about this after I get … Mashed.

Mash Blog

hmm – comments seem to be having problems. Maybe the TechCrunch coverage overload killed the form?

Hotel Booking Tip – day and date matter!

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Today’s travel tip is about booking hotel rooms, especially in big cities, especially Las Vegas Nevada. DAY and DATE MATTERS! The chart below is for rooms at the Palace Station Hotel and Casino. This moderately priced, off the Las Vegas strip Hotel gained notoriety today as the location of O.J. Simpson’s armed nabbery of some OJ Memoribilia getting sold by some guy at a room at the Palace Station.

But the key travel point is that if you have *any* flexibility in your travel plans you can save a bundle on the *very same* hotel room. In this example staying weekends at the Palace Station can cost you two or ever *three times* as much as staying mid-week at the very modest $39. New Year’s Eve in the same room is going to run you $189! I stayed at the Las Vegas Hilton two years ago at about $55 per night but then moved to a Fremont Street place for my final night, saving over $100 dollars over the Hilton’s weekend rate and getting to see the nittier and grittier side of Downtown Las Vegas.

Differences like this are greater in Las Vegas than in most places, but the midweek and flexibility rules often apply even in rural America. How to make sure you get the best rate? There’s no golden rule, but generally the best approach is to surf early and surf often and ask a lot of questions of the property itself. In the case of places like the Palace Station this could save you hundreds of dollars.

1 $99
2
$69 		3
$69 		4
$69 		5
$69 		6
$69 		7
$99 		8
$99
9
$49 		10
$49 		11
$49 		12
$49 		13
$49 		14
$69 		15
$69
16
$39 		17
$39 		18
$39 		19
$39 		20
$39 		21
$69 		22
$69
23
$69 		24
$69 		25
$69 		26
$69 		27
$69 		28
$99 		29
$149
30
$169 		31
$189

Hawaii Superferry

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Wow, the Hawaii Superferry is quite an amazing ship.  It’s a massive catamaran style vessel that will Ferry people, cars, and trucks between the Islands of Oahu, Maui, and Kauai (I think that’s the initial route though there are some big environmental protests going on and court actions.  Service is partially suspended pending environmental review).

National Geographic has a special about the building and testing of the ship, which attains a top speed of over 40 nautical miles per hour for the four hour trip from Hawaii to (Maui?).

Superferry Website for more information

Superferry at Wikipedia 

Improving Google

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Ha – it’s presumptuous to suggest improvements to huge companies like Google, but that is what the internet, and blogging in particular, is all about.    Master UK SEO  Dave Naylor has got five suggestions over at his blog and several others have chimed in.     I wasn’t sure why  Dave suggested clustering all the WordPress sites, forcing people to get a new domain, but this small inconvenience might be a good form of spam filtering because it prevents spammers from using free WordPress sites.       There’s now a conflict between the desire of search engines to screen out “junk” content and spammers and the desire to rapidly include new content.    It is not as easy as many like to think to even define junk content.    Last year I had a good talk with Brian White of Google’s search quality team about how to “value” content.  I posed a question along these lines:

What if you have two sites that are extremely similar in content and quality.
Both are about pet cats.
Both are of horrible quality with terrible grammer, bad facts, and spelling errors.

Site 1 is from  a spammer to boost rankings for a site selling pet food.
Site 2 is from a 3rd grade student working hard on her school report.

In this case site 1 is spam and site 2 is not, but how does Google tell the difference since they are virtually identical?

His answer was to suggest that the links structure in to these sites is likely to be different, and that through this you could probably determine which was the “real” and which was the “spam” site.

Of course this gets even more interesting when you make site 1 – the “spammy” site – of much higher quality.    In that case you might have a case where 99% of all users would prefer going to the site that is trying to manipulate Google but Google has removed that site and left the lower quality, natural one.

This is a very interesting case because I think search has recently devolved into many such ranking challenges.   Much of the content pouring online now is specifically designed to fool the search engines.

This would be an example of what  I’ve noted before – how linking relationships built the web and now the value of linking seems to be hurting it.

Here were my 5 suggestions to Dave / Google:

* Paid site reviews to identify simple problems or penalties. The subtle confusion Google spawns from ambiguous rules applied to mom and pop sites who have no clue is hurting everybody, including Google.

* Implement “site ID” where all sites showing adsense must have a contact person who is identified publicly. Forward site complaints to this person.

* Have more Google parties but drop the cold hamburgers from Google Dance 2007

* Transparency on publisher revenue share from Adsense

* MORE transparency on guidelines and penalties. Less vague references to “sites built for users not adsense”.

Is that a Neuron firing in your Neocortical Column or are you just happy to see me?

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The first major breakthroughs in AI seem most likely to come from a reverse engineering of our own human brains, leading to the holy grail of AI – a conscious, self aware computer. Alternatively they may come from some form of chip implants where we start to blend our own thought processes with CPU input and output, basically dramatically enhancing our own abilities. Least likely in my opinion will be a totally software programmed thinking computer, though that should follow soon after the first two innovations.

In the same way humans learned the basics of flight by observing the structure of bird wings, nature provides us with a lot of clues and an effective “blueprint” of how to create a thinking machine. In simple terms this blueprint is our neocortex, a vast but very repetitive assemblage of about 500,000 neocortical columns, each consisting of about 60,000 neurons. IMHO there is no reason to think that with some 30,000,000,000 neurons available to interact in quadrillions+ of possible ways we need nothing more to explain human thinking than a copy or simulation of an educated neocortex.

Places like the Brain Mind Institute are working to make this neocortical blueprint more readily readable and working on simulations of the brain on supercomputers. It seems to me that from a technological and a philosophical perspectivce this is the most interesting work happening on earth despite the fact that it’s not garnering much interest or funding. AI work in the 70’s somewhat dramatically failed to exceed expectations, especially as AI portrayals in film became increasingly clever and provocative. This early skepticism about the coming strong AI revolution continues to take a toll on the current state of AI research funding and interest, especially in the computer community where most new engineers are looking to populate the more practical, and more lucrative, job niches.

Big Ben, London, UK

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I was browsing some pix from my 2003 trip to England and France and thought this one was cool. We only spent a *single* day in London but made the best of our 11 hours there by hopping on and off tour busses and tearing around taking hundreds of pictures. Even though we spent about a week in Paris I think I remember more from the London visit partly because Paris was relaxed and London was intense and “goal oriented”. Can’t wait to go back and take more time to relax and visit the British Museum. I think my highlight of London was Westminster Abbey, that magnificent and fantastic bastion of modern English speaking culture and history.


Big Ben, London, UK

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.

Here’s more about England Travel 

Singularity Institute

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Given my recent almost obsessive interest in the coming Artificial Intelligence revolution I don’t know how I missed hearing about the recent Singularity Conference in Palo Alto, let alone missed hearing about the Singularity Institute.

Thankfully they’ve recorded all the talks so I’ll participate virtually when those go online.

I’ve been wondering why there has been so little fuss about the implications of a robust AI entity, since it seems fairly obvious to me that it will quickly dwarf our feeble human intellectual capacity and therefore usher in a new and very promising era of efficiency, hindered only by the human tendency to be skeptical of key innovations.   My working assumption based on talking with (mostly highly educated) folks is that AI “detractors” fall into two basic groups – the first is by far the largest and composed of those that are basically ignorant about how technology has affected human development over the past few thousand years.    They simply have not spent much time reflecting on how technology has been the key driver of humanity, especially over the past century as the industrial revolution and globalization have been the dominant forces shaping our economic, political, and societal landscapes.    The second group are those that are more familiar than I with programming and technology, are generally very accepting of how technology is revolutionizing the world, yet remain skeptical of the implications of the coming conscious computing and robust AI revolution.     I’m still puzzling over this but think it may be related to a failure to understand the limitations of human biology and neuroscience.   Even a brilliant computer programmer can be a prisoner to the notion that the human brain and human intellect  somehow remain “outside” of normal mechanistic explanations.  Programmers, especially those with religious leanings, may find it hard to accept the insignificance of our human intellects until the machines are already making this abundantly, and sometimes painfully, obvious.

The good news is that unlike previous sea change technologies a massively smart AI will be able to lobby for and explain why the innovations it will bring to the table are in the best interests of humanity, and presumably will quickly gain the wisdom needed to “outwit” those who will immediately and irrationally argue against human interaction with machine intelligences.

C’mon Yahoo, C’mon Yang! This investor is still optimistic!

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WSJ’s recent Yahoo story does not sound very optimistic about Yahoo’s potential to recapture the former glory Yahoo enjoyed in terms of stock price. The gist is that new CEO Yang is not going to “overhaul” the company, especially in the area of advertising sales where Yahoo clearly has enormous potential for bigger profits, and even a shot at eventually co-dominating the online advertising landscape.

It is this potential that interests me as a YHOO investor. Google’s done a fine job of monetizing internet activity in the search space, and GOOG’s capitalization of some 160 billion dollars reflects this fact. Yahoo was arguably too early to the PPC game with the purchase of Overture – the early leader in the PPC space. My assumption is that this kept Yahoo from innovating aggressively and allowed Google to sweep in with their contextual matching brilliancy and eat Yahoo’s PPC profit lunch. This feast continues despite the fact that Yahoo retains a significant portion of total online search activity and also remains in a position to monetize a large amount of other types of internet traffic.

Also, Yahoo’s making great strides in the Web 2.0 space thanks to a kick-ass developer team. Yahoo’s Flickr remains the best photo sharing application with a huge community. If Yahoo could use their 2.0 cleverness to crack the nut of better monetizing the traffic spawned by Flickr and even other non-Yahoo online communities like Myspace or Facebook it would be helpful to the bottom line.

Yahoo remains capitalized at a small fraction of Google – about 20%. This is consistent with the pessimism expressed in the WSJ article but does not seem consistent with Yahoo’s profit potential in the exploding world of online advertising.

There used to be a game where Yahoo employees would sneak into the Google lunch room to eat a free and delicious Google lunch. Jerry Yang, how about providing a free lunch at Yahoo and then focusing the employee’s attention on taking back all those free and delicious PPC profits?

Less glibly I’d suggest you focus on the Yahoo Publisher Network evangelism and monetization. So far Yahoo has failed – fairly dramatically – to gain publisher interest and loyalty in this lucrative sector of online advertising. Google adsense publishers are ripe for change and innovation in this space. Make it so!