Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Fast food versus Healthy Food

Came across a discussion of food perception on wise bread. I take issue with fast food restaurant versus healthy restaurant, where french and italian food is included in healthy. Replace 'healthy' with 'fancy' in the article, and it is all more sensible. Anyone who goes to a restaurant that doesn't publish nutritional information can't assume that the food meets or doesn't meet any dietary guidelines. What's in the salad dressing? Are they using whole milk cheese or skim milk cheese. Just how much oil or butter was used to pan fry that dish? For example, american's tend to think of asian food as healthy. Having cooked chinese food for the last eight years, knowing what my recipes call for, and assuming short cuts on the part of restaurants, I'm no better off than eating typical american fare. If it's creamy soup, it being Thai doesn't mean the cream will have fewer calories.

Monday, June 21, 2010

The logic of paleo diets

I am sympathetic to the idea that we return to hunter-gatherer diets, but I find myself thinking about what that actually means. How did we happen to start farming? How did we decide as gatherers what was edible? Was it starvation that drove us to try new foods? I like the idea of climate change driving early agriculture. "Gee, these grass seeds are hard to eat, but I'm hungry. Gee, look at that, I survived the winter eating grass seeds and roots." I'm afraid the logic that some paleo-philes present as to the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer feels very weak to me. I think that without that transition, perhaps humans would have come close to extinction, if we didn't disappear altogether.

Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Security Vulnerability = Sexy Bug

Watching Billy Hoffman's JSConf talk, "Javascript, the Evil Parts". A favorite point he makes: security flaws in software are unintended software behavior, that is, they are bugs, albeit sexy because they relate to security. When a developer says security is not their problem, they are declaring that they are not responsible for bugs that happen to affect security. Fail.