Cool things I've been reading

From a cool article on the renovation of an old farmhouse using as much 19th century technology and know-how as possible:

Architect Marina Huissoon tells the Star that people used to only heat the rooms they were occupying rather than the modern wasteful habit of heating the whole house. "We looked at the way the original settlers lived and tried to bring those concepts forward. "

Huissoon notes that earlier generations had little choice about practicing conservation ethics. "It's a very old-fashioned notion, taking care of what we have – we've gotten out of that practice in the last few decades. It's time to get back to that approach to living."
The Star.com

From Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food"

"*Glucose is a sugar molecule that is the body's main source of energy; most carbohydrates are broken down to glucose during digestion. Fructose is a different form of sugar, commonly found in fruit. Sucrose, or table sugar, is a disaccharide consisting of a molecule of glucose joined to a molecule of fructose....

*Fructose is metabolized differently from glucose; the body doesn't respond to it by producing insulin to convey it into cells to be used as energy. Rather, it is metabolized in the liver, which turns it first into glucose and then, if there is no call for glucose, into triglycerides--fat..."

When technological advances allowed for the mass production of white flour (removing the bran as well as the germ) white rice, and corn flour, which were far more popular, more long lasting, and less nutrient rich than their brown counterparts, devastating epidemics of pellagra and beriberi soon followed (caused by a vitamin B deficiency) Nowadays we try to add back in some of the things taken out that have proven necessary--fiber, bran, folic acid, vitamin #, phytic acid, iron, zinc, mangnesium, manganese...but with thousands of micronutrients in every natural food source how can we possibly believe we can add back in all the "needed" things?

Why try to remake a carrot? Why try to process foods until they are unrecognizable and then try to add back in the chemicals and ingredients you've destroyed? It is impossible. But no one got rich selling carrots, they got rich selling Vitamin Fortified Fruit flavored water.

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So Much... Too Much... and I'm a pirate.

I've had so much to say and have been thinking about blogging for several weeks about several different subjects but have seemed too busy to do so,and now (as I wait for the work day to be over so that I can begin packing for vacation) I find myself wanting to fill the time and wanting to "be busy".

But as I said, it's several different subjects, so I may not write on them all, I may defer posting some until I've had time to tweak them, and I may split this into several posts; so I apologize in advance for what may be a jumbled post and for the current run-on sentence.

To begin...I've been noticing lately that I am in fact, fairly happy at work. This is sometimes an odd realization considering how little I like my co-worker, how often I have to deal with lunatics and high-maintenance personalities, and how long I've been unhappy at work, but nonetheless it's true. It might just be that I'm happy because I've been busy in general, and that leads to being active and challenged, and that leads to me being happy--at work, at home, wherever. But I'm not sure. I certainly have felt somewhat dissatisfied with my interactions with dancers and Baha'is and with my social network in general, but with the exception of the occasional moments of dissatisfaction I've been happy in most all places.

And how did I get so "busy in general"? I took up piracy. (Is the government listening? I hope not.)

Yup, Piracy has made me a happier person. I've had my justifications for it-->I'm getting material I could easily get at the library, I'm watching television shows that were put out there for "free" viewing the first time, I never would have paid money for the things I'm pirating therefore I'm not depriving anyone of money they might otherwise have had, and I'm not contributing to wasteful and toxic production of cds, dvds, and books.

So far I've re-read (as most of them I checked out of the library either as books or audiobooks before) 7.5/10 of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. I've listened to the BBC recording of a Douglas Adams book and read another by way of a thrift-store-purchased tree-made-information-storage-depository as a follow-up. I've listened to another 3 audiobooks I can't recall the titles of at the moment, I've watched the entire 3 seasons of Battlestar Galactica, all the episodes of Trigun, and started in on The West Wing, I watched parts of several other TV shows, some of my favorite cheesy 80s movies, and a handful of newer films. I got a kick out of how watching 3 French movies in a row made me start thinking in French again and then how watching The West Wing made me renew my desire to get a law degree. (Reading all the Anne Rice however did not make me want to become a vampire, although it did make me appreciate the in depth study into the struggle between the relationships of right&wrong vs. good&evil.)

Piracy? Check.

Next topic: Environmentalism/ Sustainability & Consumerism

Too big a topic to not have it's own entry.

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Yay Women!

Happy Birthday to the National Organization of Women, who turned 40 today!

Also, a nice discussion on "Female Chauvinist Pigs" on Slate

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Change/External things=energy?

So I have been reading a book called "Life Types" which loosely reviews some of the principles of the Myers-Briggs personality tests.

What I've found especially interesting (please note I'm not even 1/2 through the book)was the idea that extroverts (ME, in EVERY aspect) don't just enjoy socializing with others and talking through our problems, we derive our ENERGY from these sources. That external focus means that just sitting around THINKING about a problem, although motivating for an introvert, does very little for an extrovert.

With that in mind I'm thinking I need to get more involved in more things, as I've always found I had plenty of energy while organizing for the Chicago Lindy Exchange, or trying to write a novel during NaNoWriMo, but that over the past 6 months or so I've had very little change, few new friends, and no real extra-curricular activities to spur me on and CREATE the energy I NEED!!!

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"Reading"

So I realize that it has been a while since I've posted and if anyone actually checks this blog, I apologize for the long absence of fresh content but since this blog was started as a way to put out random thoughts sporadic posting may actually be more appropriate. This post has actually been sitting waiting to be finished since the beginning of August.

I haven't been busy per se, but I have been using my computer for things other than surfing, chatting, writing, reading, and researching. What's left then? Games...no, I haven't been playing games... I've been enjoying downloading and listening to audiobooks of famous dead authors. Famous, Dead, Female authors primarily.

I went through Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austin), Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austin), Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte), and Anthem (Ayn Rand) in the same week and a half that I finished up The Odyssey (Homer) and a Business Law: Contracts (A college course with a Univ. of Austin Professor, and yes I'm a nerd) on tapes in my car.

I always have a hard time finding books that I really enjoy and so oftentimes when I find an author I like I will read all I can of their stuff. But with modern authors I've found that often their style varies too much and is inconsistent from one book to the next and I'm often dissatisfied with my choices; but with older novelists this doesn't seem to be a problem. Also I've found that the things I seem to enjoy most in novels: character developments, a dialogue-based movement through the plot and an emotional bond to the characters is much more common in older novels. It seems that a lot of newer novelists are either abandoning character development or abandoning plot and purpose all together.

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Library Audio Book Player

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The library now has these cool little audio book players that play a single book. You can even change the speed and set bookmarks. All you need are headphones and your library card! ROCK ON!

A tipping point?

I took a college course on Italian Art History from the 1400s-1600s several years ago, and as many interesting things as I learned about artists, and frescos, and technique, nothing stuck with me as much as the idea of the values of an Italian city. The city was formed and held three important positions: it provided protection, it provided city services (roads, water, etc.) and it provided for the beauty of the city. A city's pride was based on it's beauty and you could not get permission to construct something new without first having a panel of people evaluate the plans and agree that it would add to the beauty of the city. It was believed that the beauty of a city would lead it to greater peace and prosperity. I have felt since then that this is an overlooked aspect of urban planning and city government. I have always hated people who disrespect the environment around them by littering or defacing property. I have believed that the more rundown a place looks, the more people will treat it disrespectfully and believed in the value of art to elevate a place and the people that use that place. I've often thought government implemented mixed income housing must be so much more successful than low-income housing in single structures, or that is all grouped together; and it seems they are moving in this direction. Although it was often the city that got the blame for poor maintenance of public housing, I think it had more to do with the "tipping point" at which a certain amount of decline in the facilities (which could occur for any number of reasons) became a dramatic factor in the lack of pride or respect that people had in/for that property and led to an exponential decline in the safety, cleanliness, and livability of those areas.

I just listened to (an abridged version) of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and found it very interesting. In the book Gladwell talks about how epidemics are started--epidemics of style, thought, crime, and disease. He talks about how a single, or a small number of factors can become the "tipping point" that allows an epidemic to break out and spread more rapidly than anyone looking at one of those individual factors would ever imagine.

He discussed how New York City's crime rate in the transit system took a dramatic turn for the better when they began diligently removing grafitti and cracking down on farejumpers. Although those small factors seemed incredibly unimportant and a waste of time to many of the transit police at the time, changing the way they handled it and the seriousness with which they took it led to a change in the way people saw transit stations, trains and transit police, and the way they subsequently treated and acted in the system. These changes led to changes in the overall policing of the city, and eventually to dramatic drop in the murder rate in NYC.

Although it seems amazing that removing grafitti could contribute to a drop in murder rates, it is a definite contributor to the end result. We tend to put certain "logical" and "big picture" things much higher on the list when thinking about creating change, but more often than we realize it is the small changes that make the difference between something spreading one-by-one and something spreading exponentially.

These ideas are so interesting to me, and I've been cycling through different ideas that fit within this model, and thinking about change and how it works/can work. Expect a few more posts on this subject when I get those thoughts collected. :)

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