hiatus (and how smelling food makes flies die earlier)

After some thought, I've decided to put this blog on a hiatus of indefinite extent. It has been an enjoyable project, and I've learned a lot in the last year and a half, and accomplished many of the goals I set out for myself. Much of the reason I've decided not to continue this blog, at least in its current format, is that many of my goals are now being done much better by other people! Here are some blogs that I read and enjoy...

Some favorite food blogs:
Accidental Hedonist
Cooking for Engineers
Megnut
Slashfood

Some favorite science blogs:
Cognitive Daily
The Loom
Uncertain Principles
Language Log

Some favorite New York City blogs:
Curbed
StreetsBlog

(and, as always, my blogroll is publically available here.)

I'll still be cooking and taking photos (of food and other things). My photos are hosted at Zooomr, and feel free subscribe to my photo feed with the usual RSS tools. I'll try to link those photos to recipes, or otherwise to note the origin of the dishes in a comment.

I may restart this blog at some point in the future, perhaps with a different focus. But for now, thanks for reading!

And as a final science-of-food note, National Geographic has a story today about an article to be published tomorrow in Science.

Many animals—from monkeys to mice to microscopic worms—live longer when they eat less than their fill. ... The effect may occur because animals are genetically programmed with strategies for dealing with food shortages. During famines, for instance, they could put more their energy into repairing their bodies and living longer. But when a cornucopia of food abounds, the animals put their energy into making babies. At normal food levels, for example, flies live about 45 days. When they can eat as much as they want, the flies only last about 35 days. But when they're on the optimal diet, they live about 55 days—about 60 percent longer. The smell of food erased about a quarter of the gain they got from dieting, though.

(Emphasis mine...) So those harsh caloric-restriction diets are less effective if you're surrounded by the tasty smells of bacon, and baking bread, and sauteeing onions... How about that.

"saltimbocca seasoning"???

OK, this is weird. This blog's page view stats have spiked in the last couple of days, and something like half of my visitors are coming from Google. And not just any random search, but for the string saltimbocca seasoning. WTF? First of all, there isn't such a thing. If you search for the same string in quotes, so that Google looks for the entire phrase, you get no hits! And second, the only reason "saltimbocca" and "seasoning" show up on the same page for me is that I wrote a post about (fusion) saltimbocca, and on that page in the side bar is a link to a more recent posting about Italian seasoning. Google's usually smarter than that.

So why are dozens of people (and yes, I checked, they appear to be real web browsers, not a web spider) searching for "saltimbocca seasoning"? Did Emiril just mention the phrase on his show? And why are they ending up looking at this blog instead of the hundreds of other sites that Google ranks higher for that search?

Completely bizzare.

Guest Post: Uncle Ron on Heart Surgery

My Uncle Ron, an engineer living in Austin, TX, had heart surgery recently to replace an aging replacement valve that had been giving him trouble. He's recovering well, and wrote a great letter to his relatives about it. "I found the combination of low tech (sawing thru the bone, needle and thread) and hi-tech (carbon fiber valve and the computer with megabytes of mememory in my chest) very interesting," he said. He's given me permisison to post the letter here, and I hope you find both his description of the procedures and his personal reaction to them as compelling as I did...

Friends and family,
If you did not know, Wednesday I had heart surgery. I
am home and feeling great. I don't have a real blog,
so I'm sending this email about what happened.

The reason I had the surgery is that there were a
couple of indications that the aortic valve
replacement I had in 1988 was was getting worn and
caused my minor stroke in March. So we decided to
replace it with a new one of new design and new
materials.

When Dr. Oswalt opened things up on Wednesday morning
there was lots of scar tissue including some that had
grown over the artificial valve. So immediate proof
the the surgery was needed. Dr. Oswalt removed the old
valve and cut a nice opening to fit the new valve. He
stitched the new one in place making tiny stitches in
the muscle of the heart to hold the valve in place. In
a couple of places these stitches where in the scar
tissue, but all was fine until he was almost finished.
Then one of the stitches in the scar tissue tore
lose. Not good! So he took it lose and started over.
The only alternative was to make the stitches where
there was scar tissue a bit larger. Not a problem but
surgeons really take pride in their tiny stitches!

As it turns out the signal from the brain to cause
the heart to beat arrives at the upper chamber at a
transmission point and is sent to the muscle in the
upper chamber via some transmission cells. A nerve
runs from these cells to anther set of transmission
cells that delays about 1/5 of a second and sends the
beat signal to the lower chamber where the aortic
valve resides. In fact this second set of transmission
cell is right next to the aortic valve.

Dr. Oswalt had a quandary. If he made the stitches
larger he might injure this second set of
transmission cells. I did not want to live with a
leaky valve, so I voted we worry about that later and
get the valve sewed in. So he did, and the rest of the
surgery went well.

It is standard practice to attach a temporary
pacemaker during heart surgery just is case the
trauma of the surgery causes an irregular rhythm.
After surgery it showed that in fact the second set of
transmission cells in the lower chamber were not
functioning. The pacemaker compensated by sending a
beat signal of its own to the lower chamber.

There is a real possibility this condition is
temporary and the transmission cells are just stunned.
By Friday they had not improved. Huddle time. We
decided to put in a permanent pacemaker. This one is a
small computer only about the size of a silver dollar
and sits just under the skin next the collar bone.

Actually the device they put in is misnamed. It is
really not a pacemaker, it is a pacemaintainer. It
watches the transmission cells in the upper and and
lower chamber. If the upper transmitters fires and the
lower ones do not, it steps in and sends the signal to
the lower chamber for it (with the 1/5 second delay).
Pretty neat, huh?

Now here is the really cool part for a computer person
like me. As it watches the signals sent by the
transmitters in the upper and lower chamber, it
stores a record of it in the computer's memory. So it
maintains a history of every heart beat for the life
of the computer (it must be replaced every 2 years or
so). So if I go in to my doctor and say, last
Thursday afternoon I had this strange heart beat
sensation. They can just wrap a small wand around my
neck and plug it into a laptop and create reports and
graphs of just what was happening to to the heart last
Thursday afternoon. They can then search the
computer's memory for any other similar occurrences. I
can imagine a day when everyone has a similar device
connected to all your major organs.

Anyway, I am home now recovering not from the valve
replacement or the pacemaker install, but from the
injury they had to do to my lungs and chest to make it
happen. It is already starting to happen, but one
day soon this will all be done without they bone
breaking they do today. Bypass and valve replacements
will be done with only a few days recovery.

As a repeat customer, I can notice the improvements
they have made in the last 18 years. I don't remember
to many specifics, but I know I am feeling much better
than I did one week after my first surgery. I walked
three brisk miles in the hospital yesterday. I'll have
to have someone haul me to the mall to do my walking
today. 100+ degrees is too much for me.

I hope this finds you well. I am going to have plenty
of time to answer email, so don't hesitate to respond.

The really neat thing about this is, I am feeling
great but can't do any work, so I am just forced to
catch up on my reading. Darn!

Waiting to hear from you,

Cyborg Ron

hot

Looks like three days of 100 degree humid weather here in New York. Hooray. On the way into work this morning, I snapped this cell photo of a road construction area near my apartment....

Doesn't it look happy, next to the 8 foot tall concrete thing that's been parked on the street for six months?

power outage in Astoria

Although the outage is not as widespread as the one in St. Louis, the outage here in Western Queens has been going on for six days, and parts of it may last for several more. Which blocks have had outages and which haven't has been very hit-or-miss, and I've been very lucky. Some disruptions to my cell phone and cable modem, but I've had full power, even as people just a couple blocks in each direction have either had nothing or just a tiny bit of low-voltage power to light some light bulbs.

This afternoon I went for a walk to take some photos, and got a few shots of workers repairing the electrical system a few blocks from my apartment. In addition to ConEd workers, there are people from all over the Northeast here working on the wires. I've seen trucks from DC and Ohio. Here are my photos of the workers:











There have been a lot of cops around, traffic cops where stoplights were out, as well as a bunch of beat cops who were sent to "prevent looting". Apparently, there's been basically none. Squeaky clean people, we Astorians are...

I'm in Seattle and Vancouver for a week, visiting relatives and going to a conference, so this blog will be taking a week's vacation as well! Enjoy the rest of the Internet without me...

New camera means better food blogging

I got a new camera this weekend. It's a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ20, a so-called "ZLR" camera with a big impressive-looking lens, but without the through-the-lens feature of a true SLR and without the ability to replace the (big impressive-looking) lens. On the other hand, it's a lot cheaper and lighter than a true SLR. It's a 5MB digital, with lots of cool features, including 12X zoom and optical stabilization to reduce blurring with hand-held shots. The above photo is the first food pic I've taken with the camera; an egg (hard-boiled). (36 mm equiv, ISO 100, 1/80 s, F 8.0, natural light.) I'm sure there will be crappy cell phone photos of food on this blog for the forseeable future, but there may be some better photos too... 

forgetful

To paraphrase Heraclitus, no man may read the same article twice, for although it is the same article, he is not the same man. This is my thought as I discover that, once again, I have re-read a journal article without even recognizing it or considering it familiar. About every six months I read a paper, think "oh, that was quite interesting, I learned a lot", then go to enter in into my bibliography database only to find it already there. And since I note the date that I add entries to the database, and I write a paragraph of comments about each paper, I can look and see that, lo, I last read this seemingly novel paper just eight months ago, and had rather a different point of view then. I think the alternatives are either that (a) I'm kinda dumb, or (b) my extensive experiences in the past eight months have changed me so much that identical 15-page papers don't register as familiar. I've got a vested interest in voting "b", supported by mangling the words of a pre-Socratic philosopher, but you may draw your own conclusions...

wordy t-shirt

A web company called SnapShirts has this thing where you give them the address of a web site and they make a "word cloud" of all of the frequently used words on the site. You can have the resulting image put on a t-shirt. Here's the result if you give them this blog:



Pretty cool. I'm mildly tempted...

blog consolidation

I recently subscribed to two newish science magazines. One is Scientific American Mind, which is, well, what you'd expect from the title. Scientific American-style coverage of psychology and neuroscience. It's pretty good. Last issue had a good article on Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys as a case study of executive function (and disfunction), and an interesting article on possible drugs to prevent consolidation of traumatic memories.

The other new magazine I subscribed to is Seed. Seed is interesting. Its tag is "Science is Culture", and it's sort of a pop Discover. A bit like Wired, but for science instead of technology.

In addition to their magazine, Seed just started a new umbrella for science blogs, called, uh, scienceblogs.com. ScienceBlogs will have a couple of dozen major blogs about scientific topics, some new, and some former independent blogs. I'm subscribed to Cognitive Daily, about cognitive science, and Uncertain Principles, about physics, and I used to subscribe to Gene Expression (until their RSS feed got screwed up and I stopped seeing new articles).

This is an interesting new trend in the blogosphere. Blogs, which used to be fun little sites where people talked about their work or their pets or horribly dull stuff like that, have now become a real and significant business, and a way for new professional writers to be exposed to the world. Bloggers are getting book contracts. This sort of quasi-independent blog, published under the umbrella of a larger organization, but with independent editorial content, seems to be the way of the future for the larger blogs.

It's true in the other two topics of this blog as well. In food, last month saw the unveiling of an umbrella for several new food blogs by well-known bloggers. The Well Fed Network has blogs on desserts, spirits, the food media, and the food industry, and will be expanding. In New York City, there are conglomerates such as Curbed, a snarky NYC real-estate blog, that also runs Eater, a snarky high-end NYC restaurant blog, and The Gutter, a snarky NYC architecture blog. (Curbed, in particular, is highly recommended!)

I've seen a couple of instances of growth making blogs noticibly less good. DailyKos, a left-leaning political group blog has gotten noisier as the number of participants has grown exponentially. The quality is still there, but it's harder to find. One of the first blogs I read, The Amateur Gourmet, is noticibly less creative and fun to read than it was a year ago. It'll be interesting to see if consolidation makes blogs less good, or if they're perceived as being less authentic because they now have budgets and staff and revenue.

Fortunately, my loyal dozen or so readers need not fear losing me! I'm not about to get a book deal, but unlike in other media, I'm not going to be pressed out of the blogging universe because some people are turning pro. Because of the long tail phenomenon, there's room for people like me, who write as a creative/expressive outlet, who have no desire or hope of ever being paid. And really, that's probably a good thing. I enjoy a few high-end classy blogs, with budgets and staffs and revenue. But I also like low-end random blogs, written by friends and random people whose sites I've just run across. We're not going to get consolidated....

What's this all about?

There are a lot of blogs out there. Almost all of them are read by like 3 people, tops. People even study that phenomenon. I'm not going to try to be Instapundit, but I am going to try to be interesting. I think my goal is that someday, someone I don't actually know will read my blog more than once. That's not too ambitious, is it? Anyway, people have recommendations about how to make a blog interesting, and I'm going to try to follow them as best I can.

Here is what I intend this blog to be about:

• Talking about new developments in science, and particularly cognitive science, and explaining why I think they're interesting and important.
• Talking about new developments in science that are getting a lot of press, and suggesting why I think the media is missing the point. (This happens a lot...)
• Talking about cooking and food in an amusing, informative, and personal way. This isn't going to be the type of food blog where I post beautiful food porn of the $300 dinners I have, nor will there be a lot of recipes. More likely, I'll talk about mistakes I've made...
  
• Talking about New York City events that I think are interesting even to people who don't live here.

Here are some things this blog isn't going to be about:

• My life, except as it pertains to science, food, or NYC events interesting to non-New Yorkers.
  
• The news and politics. I have opinions about politics, of course, but I don't think I'm likely to have very much to add that you can't get at other blogs. (Which I can recommend... See the links in the sidebar, once I get around to figuring out how to set that up.)
• Technology. Ditto. (Ditto.)
  
• "Thought this was interesting" with no additional perspective. That's boring.
  

My goal is to write interesting posts a few times a week.

Incidentally, I recommend blog aggregators. They inform you of when there are new postings at all of the blogs you read, so you don't have to store bookmarks and check each of them. I use Bloglines, which is a web-based aggregator, so it works from any of the computers I use. Very convenient, really...