The NYtimes has a good piece on new dietary guidelines and why they are changing from what you were used to: Behind New Dietary Guidelines, Better Science – NYTimes.com. You will likely be surprised by some or all of it.
Some people have very serious and specific dietary needs, and if that is the case, consulting your doctor is the best thing to do. For others, the best advice may be the most common sensical, which is to eat a wide variety of food in moderation.
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Posted in advice, food, nytimes.com
Tagged advice, diet, food, nytimes.com, science
Scrambled eggs are so easy to make that you might not realize you can make them better. While noshing on eggs and nibbling on toast, check out 5 Common Scrambled Eggs Mistakes from Bon Appétit to see if you can improve on your most recent rendition of them.
(Photo: Lisa Hubbard, via link to the article)
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Posted in food
Tagged bonappetit, breakfast, eggs, food
Saturday night music, on Friday. Here’s Florence + The Machine – No Light, No Light (Live on SNL)
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Posted in music
Tagged music, nightmusic, SNL, youtube
The NYTimes.com dips into the latest slang with this: Language Quiz: Are You on Fleek? It’s fun to give it a try: I got 9 out of 12 and I have no doubt most people can do better. If you do worse, well by the end of it, you’ve learned a few new common slang terms.
If you want a better source for translating slang, you might want to head over to a site like this. Or wait long enough until The Oxford English Dictionary folks add it to the latest and greatest version of their book.
My kids spent many years going to summer camps in Toronto. If you have to or want to send your kids to summer camps, you might find these notes useful.
The first two things you need to do: 1) get out a calendar and 2) determine your budget. Do this in February. Really! When you get out a calendar, you will likely see that the kids have 9 weeks off in the summer (for some reason I used to think there were only 8 weeks off for the kids). Next, get a budget, because you will need to account for camp costs as well as transportation costs and extra costs like if you have to pick your kids up late. When you have a calendar and a budget, your camp options will come into clearer focus. Also, you can start thinking about other things happening in the summer, like vacations, visits from family, work assignments, and other things that will affect you.
As far as organizations offering camps, the cheapest camps by far – by far! – are the ones run out of community centers from the City of Toronto. They also fill up really fast. By March, if I recall. Book those first.
North Toronto Soccer had relatively lower costs than most camps. Great if your kid loves soccer. Note: ask how much time the kids spend outside. That can be a very tough camp in the middle of summer. (Not just NT but any outdoor camp.)
My kids liked the film camp at NFB, and it was indoors and so good during some weather, but one year was enough. Also, doing it with kids under 10 was better.
If your kid loves to do art, the AGO camps are great. If you are thinking of becoming a member and signing up, do both: members used to get a break on camp costs.
Harbourfront had some of the most interesting camps. DD loved them, but DS did not. Also, Harbourfront has buses that take your kids to and from camp from various locations around the city. Saves time, costs money. Can be a lifesaver.
Hockey camps are the most expensive, some going for $600 a week. UCC had relatively cheaper ones, but they fill up really fast too. UCC has lots of good camps, and they are in line with camps at places like AGO and NFB, but the hockey ones always filled up right away. Sign up for those first! Also there were hockey camps at Larry Grossman arena that were good and not as expensive.
Another benefit of hockey camps: the kids spend alot of time in not hot facility. Great experience during the hot days of summer.
To save some money, put your kids in camps with long weekends. That one day can save 20-50 bucks
To save more money, take time off and spend time with your kids. Note: this may not be cheap, either. If you plan to take a week off and plan to take your kid to a different venue every day, you will see it will add up. If you want to do this to save money, your goal should be to find activities you both like that aren’t too expensive, be it going to the Islands, having picnics, bike rides, kite building and flying, etc.
Don’t be too dazzled by camp promises. You might think: wow, my kid will learn SO much at this camp. They will learn things. And they will likely have fun. But think of camp as really good babysitting/daycare. Camps are mostly run by teens, and alot of camp time is getting kids to and from locations, feeding them, tracking them, etc. My son hated that. Also some councillors are really great, others are just there to do the minimum. One week my son went to a hockey camp and loved it because the councillors were great. He went to the same camp a few weeks later and didn’t because the councilllors had changed.
See if you and your kid’s friends can go to the same camp. Talk to other parents and try to make this happen, especially if your kid is not extroverted. Camp can be stressful for introverted kids: having old friends can help. Some kids thrive on camps and love them. Others can’t wait to be old enough not to go.
Try to pick up your kids on time. Once camps are done, usually around 4, the councillors will likely round the kids up in one place and more or less have them sit around until you get there. It is super boring, and it will likely make it harder for you to send your kid to such camps in the future.
My kids were done with camp by about 11. I know there were camps that go well into the late teens, but that wasn’t for mine. Likewise, overnight camp was not really an option for mine. Yours may be different.
Keep receipts for all camps. Keep them in one spot. You should be able to get a significant tax break from them, assuming you are paying taxes.
The one company? Apple. How dependent are the hedge funds? According to Bloomberg Business:
A group of companies representing the most popular long positions for hedge funds is up just 0.2 percent in 2015, compared to a 2.3 percent gain for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, data compiled by Goldman Sachs show. A 19 percent year-to-date increase for Apple, which is owned by one in every five hedge funds and is a top-10 position for 12 percent of them, has provided a needed boost, the firm said.
That’s a bad thing. A similar thing happened in Canada when fund managers held large holdings in companies like Nortel and RIM. It didn’t end well.
For more, see this: The Performance of Many Hedge Funds Just Comes Down to Owning Apple – Bloomberg Business.
What do you get when you combine a ridiculously jam packed array of talent in a visually rich feast of imagery? You get this version of God Only Knows, produced by BBC Music.
▶ BBC Music – BBC Music, God Only Knows (BBC Music).
A must.
I just cleaned up an environment I had set up in Amazon years ago for a client. (The client wanted to use Amazon, so we did.) In doing so, I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave anything behind which would cause me to continue getting billed even though I was no longer actively using EC2. I believe that the following checklist was useful in insuring this.
My EC2 cleanup checkist:
After following this checklist, my EC2 environment was cleaned up. Depending on how you are using EC2, you may have more things to delete. Checking your account balance will help there: if you left things behind, they may incur charges. An increase in your account balance will help flush them out.
One thing to consider: you may delete something, but it doesn’t show in admin console. If that is the case, logout and then in. I did that when I was having trouble deregistering my AMIs. I logged out and then in and when I checked them, they were now deregistered.
Domaine makes the case on this page and here on this one .
Can you spot the IKEA in this photo?
How about in this one?
Of course, it’s the composition and layout of all the furnishings in the room (and the room itself) that makes the spaces look great. However, you can also see the IKEA pieces, as the centerpieces, more than hold their own.
Tagged chairs, cool, decor, design, diningroom, furniture, home, livingroom, rugs
I am not sure if wall stickers are passe or not, but this one, from Retro Basic Custom Wall Sticker – Spin Collective UK, appeals to the computer geek that I am. If you know one or are one, and you want to get this, the link has all the details you need.
That’s what this piece in the Globe and Mail says (Five key traits of successful consultants – The Globe and Mail), and as a long time consultant I find it hard to disagree. The traits?
You could argue successful consultants have more common traits, but these are a good basis for anyone who want to provide such services to clients. If you want to become a consultant, ask yourself if these apply to you. If you want more details on this, click on the link to the Globe.
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Posted in advice, globeandmail.com, work
Tagged advice, consultant, globeandmail, work
I’ve eaten much of the food on this Buzzfeed list, more than I should admit. All the ones I have eaten were delicious. That’s my way of saying that if you get a chance to eat any of the 23 Most Delicious Cheap Eats In Canada, then you should. 🙂
(Image via their article)
Oy. First we had the minimalist running shoe. Now comes this: Forget Barefoot; New Trendsetter in Running Shoes Is Cushioning in the NYTimes.com. Yep, we are swinging from minimalist shoes to maximalist shoes. Should you get them? I agree with Lauren here:
Lauren Fleshman, a national champion in the 5,000 meters, likened the maximalist upswing to past footwear phenomena, now rejected as passé.
“To me, maximalist shoes fall right in the line of every other shoe trend,” she said. “There’s some good reasoning, but we don’t know enough about how it affects the body longer term, and we won’t know until everyone has been using it a while and all the other research comes out about how it destroys your body or whatever, and then there’s a lawsuit, and then there’s a campaign about how to use the technology properly, and then in the midst of all this confusion the next trend takes off. There is no shoe savior coming for us.”
Bill Gates has a strong post on Piketty and inequality and I think it is one of the better ones I’ve seen. That doesn’t mean I agree with everything Gates argues for. For example, to counter Piketty at one point in the piece, he refers to data from the Fortune 400 records. I think the data that Piketty has gathered is much more significant than that and it is not something Gates accounts for. Still, it’s clear that Gates has thought hard about the book and his comments seem to reflect that.
Gates is on stronger ground when he points out areas concerning inequality that Piketty has left out or not touched upon. His assumption there, though, is that Piketty’s book is the end of the discussion on capitalism in the 21st century, when the better assumption is that the book is the start of a new and better discussion. I expect Piketty or followers and supporters of Piketty will be expanding into those areas based on the material in this book.
I am not surprised that Gates has wrote about this – Piketty uses him as an example at one point! Plus Gates is no stranger to wealth and capital and what to do with them. He’s a natural to write about inequality and the French economist.
All in all, a good read.
It is hard to know what to expect when someone you love is dying of cancer. I know that was my experience when my mom died of cancer a few years ago. There is no What to Expect when you are Expecting books to give you an education or a perspective. Yet just like we need information for when loved ones are at the start of their lives, we need information for when loved ones are at the end of their lives, too.
Here are three essays that I believe can help you with this.
When someone you love is dying of cancer, your life becomes much more difficult. Knowledge can help with that difficulty.
If you see someone in Toronto who appears to need help in dealing with this cold weather, and you aren’t sure what you can do, this page is worth reviewing: the City of Toronto’s Extreme Cold Weather Alerts page. It has numbers you can call and other information, including links to TTC Token Distribution Locations and information on 24-hour drop-ins available during extreme cold weather alerts.
Beyond resources related to cold weather, the city of Toronto has additional material on how to get involved to with the problem with homelessness in Toronto.
Obviously there are many more ways to help the homeless in Toronto throughout the year. These links are just a starting point if you are looking for information.
Here’s a place you can start: Hadoop For Dummies.
. IBM (my employer) is providing it. Once you get through this, there are lots of places online and in bookstores to get more information. But this is a good place to start.
…according to Chatelaine. You can enjoy them right from the produce section, or you can make some amazing dishes with them. If you lack recipes, here’s Martha with over a dozen great recipes. Enjoy!
There’s a nice story here about how some University of Alberta students build an igloo in their backyard over at canada.com.
You want to check it out just for the video on that page. The video is a little over 4 minutes, but the time it takes to build the igloo is many hours. Now if the builders didn’t stop to take so many selfies, it might have gone a little faster. 🙂
Fun!
Vox has a good piece on the mistake that Obama recently made (“Randomgate”) and how the resulting follow on stories about that mistake illustrates why we can’t have interesting politicians. Their conclusion?
Long-term, the problem here isn’t just news consumers find themselves listening to bullshit gaffe stories. It’s that politicians learn the same lessons over and over again: unscripted moments are dangerous and generally to be avoided. Don’t give interviews and don’t stray from talking points.
The media will bemoan lack of access and robotic, scripted answers. But it will also punish deviations from the script. And it will do so in the most trivial ways. No minds were changed during Randomgate and nobody learned anything. A couple of spokespeople had a bad afternoon. Some websites (including this one) got some extra pageviews. And every politician learned to be that much more boring in the future.
I think this way of dealing with politicians doesn’t just make them uninteresting: it also make our politics dumber. Here’s hoping this changes, though if anything, I think it will get worse before it gets better.
In the winter, I think one of the nicest forms of white noise is a fire. It’s not the same as having an actual fire, but if you have a computer or big screen you can Chromecast this to, I recommend this video:
I’ve watched quite a number of these videos, and this one is my favorite so far: really good sound, and it looks realistic. (Oddly, this matters to me, even though I know it merely a video).
If you want the feeling of being warm and cozy inside while it storms outside, I recommend this video for white noise:
Right now there are many adults around you doing science experiments on large populations of children. Here are three examples.
#1) The city of Calgary is currently doing a science experiment by removing fluoride from Calgary’s water supply (Dental decay rampant in Calgary children, pediatric dentist says | CBCNews.ca Mobile). The results from that experiment:
Dentists and dental hygienists are seeing an increase in child tooth decay and Dr. Sarah Hulland says the decision to remove fluoride from Calgary’s water supply three years ago is playing a big role.
“I’m seeing a lot more children having a lot more cavities,” she said. “I’m seeing a lot of decay on 19- to 20-month babies, and this is even before they’ve got all the teeth in.”
#2) We have a rise in measles and other infected diseases because of parents decided to experiment and not vaccinate their children. That experiment is not going well either. According to the CDC, measles cases in the United States reach 20-year high:
Two hundred and eighty-eight cases of measles were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States between Jan. 1 and May 23, 2014. This is the largest number of measles cases in the United States reported in the first five months of a year since 1994. Nearly all of the measles cases this year have been associated with international travel by unvaccinated people.
“The current increase in measles cases is being driven by unvaccinated people, primarily U.S. residents, who got measles in other countries, brought the virus back to the United States and spread to others in communities where many people are not vaccinated
#3) Climate change. This is potentially the biggest science experiment of all, affecting the largest population of children. See Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet: Evidence, if you haven’t seen enough evidence of this.
I think, and likely you agree, that performing these experiments is wrong and unnecessary. Somehow too many people do not. Too many think there is a need to disagree with the science behind fluoride in water, vaccines, and climate change. It is true that science is not dogma, and it needs to be challenged. But the way to do that is scientifically and in a way that minimizes or eliminates harm to the subject of the experiment. I would think that would be especially true when it comes to children.
I understand people having concerns and worries about technology. The way to deal with those thoughts about technology is to become better educated and to developer numeracy so that you can have a better understanding of the science involved. If you can’t do that, at least develop better sources of information, so that if you have to depend on authorities, make them the best ones you can find. I would think that is especially the case when it comes to science that has to do with children.
I joked that when this article by Jonathan Chait came out, I would wait three days, and then comment. My joke being that in three days the whole story would have blown over and there would be nothing left to comment on.
I was clearly wrong here, and instead it has gone on for some time. If you click on this: chait political correct – Google Search, you’ll see what I mean. Given this, I feel I should say something. 🙂
I don’t have much to add to the content of the argument going back and forth, and there are much smarter people than I who have commented on the topic: if you go through some of the results of the search, you can find them.
However reading the various pieces, instead of the content, I had some thought on the format and structure of the pieces. Specifically, I had four impressions:
It’s important to stress these are impressions. I read roughly 6-10 pieces, including the original one by Chait. I’d be happy to be corrected on these.
The things about the impressions is that while I didn’t find the argument that Chait made had merit, but it wasn’t because of the pieces critical of him. If anything, it was just the opposite. Maybe I should dislike him, but even if I did, if he had a good argument I should listen to it, and if he doesn’t have a good argument, then it should be enough to dismantle it to discredit him or his supporters. This may be naive, but it is what I look for when someone is making an argument for or against something. If anything, name calling and invective towards someone tends to persuade me to go in support of that person. In this case, perhaps I am not the audience, and the writers do not care if I am persuaded or not.
This had me thinking about a bigger thing that I have been thinking about for some time. And that is the topics of influence and attention. I think influence and attention are the key attributes writers want to have associated with their work on the Internet.
This idea of the importance of influence and attention requires more thought though. For now, I wanted to jot this down, to get it off my mind, if anything.
Thanks for your attention. I hope this influenced you in a positive way.
As digital technology gets more and more compact, expect to start seeing it combined with new and unexpected things. Wearables will not just be watches and sports-bands, but clothing and jewellery. For example: Meet Ear-o-Smart The World’s First Smart Earring.
Anything you wear, anything you touch, anything you own: all of it will soon have sensors and digital technology in it to talk to your computer and your phone. This is just starting.
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