Thursday, November 21, 2013
Photo ... Practical Advice ...
I read something about the new “microgreen movement” and I had to get on board. There’s nothing that much to it; the idea is to plant some veggie seeds somewhere in your home and let them grow for maybe 10 to 14 days, then wack them and eat the little plants with soup or in a salad. They add a fresh green taste, and they are loaded with vitamins. Pretty simple, right? Sure. Except when it’s not.
I looked up some microgreen instructions and then set up a growing tray near a window. As per the instructions, I got a aluminum food tray (the kind you bring home from restaurants when you don’t finish the meal but it’s too good not to take home — plastic trays are good too), and found a plastic water tray big enough to encircle the growing tray. I punched small holes in the bottom of the metal so that water could seep between the metal and plastic trays, then poured in some potting soil. Then I sprinkled on the seeds that I had bought especially for microgreen growing, sprayed some water over them, placed the clear plastic lid over the tray to keep it warm and moist, and I was in business!
Or so it seemed at first. The sprouts shot up quickly after a day and were soon pushing off the plastic dome. But after 5 or 6 days, something went wrong. The shoots » continue reading …
Monday, November 18, 2013
Music ... Society ...
I was thinking today about my religious heritage, and it reminded me of a song. For the most part, my religious heritage is . . . well, nothing and everything! I grew up in the Roman Catholic tradition, and I remained loyal to that faith well into my 30’s. For various reasons, I became a “roam-in catholic” after that, roaming from religion to religion. I committed myself to the Episcopalians for a few years (not much of a commitment, I guess), sat with a Quaker congregation on and off for about a year, went to a Unitarian church for a few weeks, visited a few Buddhist groups, and for the past 3 years have been a part of a Zen sangha. Furthermore, my initial DNA ancestry results indicate that my paternal grandfather may have hailed from a Jewish family. If this evidence holds up, I may need to somehow honor the Jewish tradition in my old age.
I’ve also read quite a bit about all of the major world faith systems, and include many of their sacred writings within my evening prayer routine. I even give atheism it’s due; I feel that faith and doubt are two sides of one coin; they are part of a yin-yang complementarity, like the quantum wave-particle dualism of light. Without a legitimate atheist shadow in our lives, we could never take God seriously. I think that God wants us to have our doubts, even though it causes a deep existential longing, a sometimes painful longing. No pain, no gain.
But that aside, the song that came to mind today was “Universal Soldier“, which was originally written and recorded in 1964 by Buffy Sainte Marie, a Canadian folk singer that I’m not otherwise familiar with. I remember “Universal Soldier” because » continue reading …
Friday, November 15, 2013
Health / Nutrition ... Practical Advice ...
I decided to join the “consumer DNA testing” revolution not long ago, and my results just came in. Yes, I joined the crowds that have went with 23andme.com, currently the most popular consumer DNA testing service (although I might also do business with FamilyTreeDNA in the near future, given the respect they appear to have from the genealogy community). With 23andme, you get a double DNA whammy — you get both a health report AND a genealogy report. All for $109 bucks ($99 plus $10 shipping for the spit sample). Most of the competitors right now focus on one or the other.
I’m going to share some thoughts right now on how to “take” the DNA health results (not on how to “take the test”; that isn’t too hard, although you do need to be careful about getting enough spit in the tube and closing the vial properly before you put it in the shipping box). This is new and weird stuff, i.e. the idea that your body characteristics and your present and future health can be predicted by certain single nucleotide polymorphisms (“snips”) from your genes. It has the potential to be both upsetting and reassuring at the same time. Unless you are really at peace about your life and totally reconciled to whatever your future is (and my hat is off to those of you who have actually attained such a state, whether thru meditation or religious faith, or just-don’t-care-no-mo), there is going to be some stress when you get the results. 23andme even displays a page asking you before you look whether you are ready for this, or do you want to just ditch the whole thing and pretend it didn’t happen (you would still get your genealogy reports, which is really why I got tested anyway).
Next, there’s another blood pressure raiser: for certain conditions, including the BRCA gene, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinsons Disease, your results are initially » continue reading …
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Photo ...
In the Edward Hopper tradition, some store dummies at night, Montclair NJ.
Saturday, November 9, 2013
Economics/Business ... Politics ...
I hate to say this, but I actually agree with something that Senator Ted Cruz is saying. A recent article in Forbes quotes Cruz from a recent political dinner:
I think that we ought to be relentlessly, tirelessly, exclusively focused on growth, because every other priority we have depends on growth.
This article goes on with some math regarding the relative long-term impact on the federal budget from the spending cuts currently being urged by the GOP (i.e., going beyond the present sequestration and including some entitlement reductions, but not big enough to eliminate any major federal program); and from the tax increases currently being urged by the Obama Administration. I agree with the Forbes author’s conclusion: “in terms of impact on federal finances, both spending cuts and tax increases pale in comparison with economic growth”.
If the USA could get growth back up to steady 3% rate, versus the average 2% over the past 4 years, a lot of the stuff that we are arguing about today (i.e. entitlement and program spending cuts, plus reductions in the military; along with eliminating various tax deductions, ending corporate tax incentives and increasing taxes on the wealthy) wouldn’t seem so important anymore. If we could get back above 3.35% (which the US economy averaged from 1988 to 2000), many things would just fall into place without any major changes to our tax code or military spending or entitlement programs. Oh, and let’s not forget about job growth and getting the unemployment rate back below 5%. A whole lot of working people, and more importantly people both young and old who want to work but can’t find jobs right now, would feel a whole lot better in a 3+ growth situation.
Ted Cruz has a list of things that he prescribes to get economic growth rates going again, which I mostly disagree with. His main cause is to eliminate Obamacare, because he says that » continue reading …
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Current Affairs ... Technology ...
I’m seeing a lot written these days about “Big Data”. I’m not fully versed with it yet, but the concept seems to be grounded in the fact that many people today (especially younger people) put a whole lot of info about themselves on the Internet via social network sites, and through buying stuff on-line, banking on-line, and doing business with government agencies. And there are even more data sources, especially the smartphone: it monitors your calls, figures out your location with GPS locators, and otherwise snitches on what you are doing to some central command, like it or not. Furthermore, businesses (and even government agencies, albeit slowly) do more and more of their business via on-line mechanisms, exposing themselves to data collection.
All of this has not gone unnoticed by the big communications companies and web site corporations (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.); they are compiling huge databases with extremely detailed info about the day to day doings of individuals and corporate entities. And it’s not like all of these databases with all kinds of private information about almost everyone get used only by the compiling company or agency; they put this info out there for sale, so that the info gets amalgamated into mega-databases.
Obviously, a lot of people get upset about erosion of privacy due to these big databases. But a lot of young people don’t seem » continue reading …
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Aspergers ... Brain / Mind ...
I’m not a psychologist or therapist, and I haven’t made much use of their services in my lifetime. But I still try to keep up with what goes on in “shrink world”, i.e. within the realm of the mind and brain, with the theories on how they work and the practices meant to help make them work better. From what I can see, one of the biggest fault lines and sources of tension in the whole field right now revolves around the old classic “nature versus nurture” issue. And it’s not just a dry, academic debate amidst the trained elite anymore; it’s becoming a matter of what the consumers of these services demand from shrink world.
For most of the time since Freud, psychotherapy and applied psychology has mostly involved talking; i.e. the good old “couch method” where the therapist and patient discuss what’s going on in the latter’s head, e.g. fears, compulsions, desires, frustrations, envy, attraction, etc. Sure, psychologists also perform some behavioral observation studies and surveys, plus they administer and analyze the results of standardized written tests as to gauge what is going on in the minds of their subjects. But for the most part, the whole thing revolves around Freud’s paradigm of “the talking cure”, i.e. a long-term interactive process through which the therapist figures out what the patient’s hang-ups are, and slowly directs the patient toward attitudes and behaviors meant to overcome negative, harmful patterns (neuroses), so as to develop healthy patterns that allow personal growth and positive achievement. At least that’s the theory.
In the past generation, talk therapy has become less and less prevalent; » continue reading …
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Personal Reflections ... Photo ...
Ah, Halloween, that secular celebration of impermanence. People in my town do up their lawns will all sorts of cheery things like mock tombstones and skeletons. It’s mostly for the kids of course, a celebration of “spookiness”; a reflection on the return of early darkness, sunset shadows, long nights and cold weather. That the decorations relate to human decay and death is irrelevant to them; they are young, and they are going to survive every winter and live forever. At worst, they might need to ponder the possibility of tooth impermanence from all the trick-or-treat candy.
For us adults, however, especially those like me pushing past the 60 marker, it’s not a game anymore. Impermanence is staring us in the face. The Buddha said that “all conditioned things are impermanent — when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering”. So, the Buddha with all his wisdom could walk the streets of my town in late October with perfect equanimity; the skeletons, spiders and black cats wouldn’t bother him in the least. (And who knows, with his yellow monk robes and begging bowl as a “costume”, someone might give him some Halloween candy!) For the rest of us . . . oh well, just keep whistling past the mock graveyards. And Happy Halloween!
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Philosophy ... Photo ...
Yes, the mighty have fallen. Mighty trees, that is. I took a little stroll recently thru the local county nature reservation, and began to ponder all the trees that got blown over by “superstorm” (semi-hurricane) Sandy, almost a year ago to this date. Some of the trees here were fairly old; you can see all the yearly rings on one of the cut cross-sections. I guess-timated over 100 rings / years for some of these trees. So over a century went by and life went on quite successfully for these strong living objects. Then one day, quite unexpectedly, a “superstorm” came along, and nothing was the same again.
Yes, that is something to ponder. No matter how well things seem to be going, no matter how abundantly one is blessed with success, no matter how much a person “just seems to have the knack” . . . in a moment, it can all come crashing down. We do need to heed the lesson of humility that nature is offering here.
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
History ... Politics ...
I still can’t understand why so many Americans think that Ronald Reagan was a great President. A recent Harris poll indicates that Reagan is considered by 25% of Americans as the best President since 1940, beating FDR (at 19%) and Kennedy (at 15%). A 2012 survey by Nate Silver of 4 presidential scholar polls found Reagan to be the 10th greatest Prez, just behind JFK (and ahead of Lyndon Johnson, at #12).
I lived through the Reagan years, and to be honest, I think that the Gipper is one of the most overrated leaders of all time. Actually, he was one of the luckiest. The economy started in slump when he was first elected in 1980, but then achieved significant growth levels for the balance of his two terms. People still attribute this to his tax cuts and “Reaganomics”, but actually, oil and energy prices dropped significantly during this time (due to technical factors on the world level and not due to anything Reagan did or didn’t do), and inflation was tamed by the initially painful restraint on money supply growth by Fed Chairman Paul Volcker (who, remember, was appointed by President Jimmy Carter).
The US’s major enemy for the past 50 years, the Soviet Union, had also lost its strength and began its collapse by the end of Reagan’s term. Part of this could be attributed to » continue reading …
