Results for health

Some interesting things I bookmarked on del.icio.us on January 16th, 2008:

• Mark Richards – Core Memory – An unprecedented combination of computer history and striking images, Core Memory reveals modern technology’s evolution through the world’s most renowned computer collection, the Computer History Museum in the Silicon Valley.
• iGoogle Themes – Can’t live with Google’s bare looks? Check the iGoogle Themes directory for more colorful interfaces.
• Um, Whoops. – Dreamhost mistakenly billed their customers $7,500,000 after one of their guys made a little typo. Yikes!
• 7 Technologies that will Save the Earth in 2008 – EcoGeek is here to keep you informed of the latest technologies that are making our lives better while also ensuring that we don’t spoil the Earth at the same time.
• MAKE: Blog: DIY laptop stand from an Ikea paper towel holder – Budget laptop holders, just make one yourself
• Food: Eat Cloned Animals, FDA Says – Hmm, no matter how I look at this I can’t help but feel it’s wrong…

Some interesting things I bookmarked on del.icio.us on November 15th, 2007:

• ASCII Rave in Haskell – Using words to control the articulation of a physical modelling synthesiser based on the elegant Karplus-Strong algorithm.
• Cosmopollus – Collection of great paintings by Chris Reccardi, who has worked on the Ren & Stimpy Show, The Powerpuff Girls, and Samurai Jack to name a few.

Op 2 by Chris Reccardi – part of the Cosmopollus collection

• Fast Food Restaurants & Nutrition Facts Compared – Good to know if can’t stop eating fast food…
• The Art of Jim Denevan – Beautiful art painted in sand.

Some interesting things I bookmarked on del.icio.us on November 12th, 2007:

• Spam One-liners – Linzie Hunter paints illustrations that incorporate the subject lines of the spam she finds in her inbox.

Some of Linzie’s wonderful illustations

• How To Make a Speaker – A homemade speaker using a plastic cup, business card, wire, magnet and some Lego blocks.
• freemagenta.nl – A social movement to protect the free use of the magenta colour in communication materials.
• Health vs. Pork: Congress Debates the Farm Bill – Why does a salad cost more than a Big Mac?

Some interesting things I bookmarked on del.icio.us on October 4th, 2007:

• Chilli-based anaesthetic won’t leave you drooling – Clifford Woolf and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School have discovered a way of blocking just the pain neurons using capsaicin – the active ingredient in chilli peppers – along with a version of lignocaine that can’t diffuse through cell membranes unassisted.
• Big Daddy Hands – The bigger version of the soldering tool, useful for holding more than a small circuit board.
• InfraRecorder – a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration.
• Sketch Furniture by FRONT – Pen strokes made in the air are recorded with Motion Capture and become 3D digital files; these are then materialised through Rapid Prototyping into real pieces of furniture.
• Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century – A Daily Celebration of The Golden Age of Upper Lip Hair.
• Ryan McLennan – Beautiful acrylic on paper paintings of wildlife.
• Mike Leavitt – Action Figures – These are articulating, miniature, interactive sculptures, aka. “action figures” or “toys”, each hand-sculpted with synthetic polymer clay, wood and elastic by Leavitt.

Fresh² claims to be a revolutionary light bulb that safely breaks down odors, while providing energy-efficient light. A healthy alternative to traditional, chemically based air fresheners.

Fresh2 light bulb

According to their website, the Fresh² bulbs have a titanium dioxide coating which creates extermely strong oxidizers when exposed to the fluorescent light given off by the bulb itself. This oxidization process should breaks down odors completely.

Check the Fresh² site for more information.

Link via Gadgetgarden.nl

I spent the last 2 weeks on a beach resort in beautiful Tunisia, doing pretty much nothing, just like I had planned.

Taking it easy on the beach in Tunisia

Tunisia is a perfect place to relax, as long as you stay away from the Medina‘s where people will try anything to get you into their store to buy their overpriced junk. Souvenir shopping in Tunisia involves lots of bargaining so don’t be afraid to counter their offer with like a 10^th of their original “special price for you my friend” offer. (Some shops have fixed prices, which is a good indication of what the “right price” would be).

Most days involved breakfast, a game of tennis, beach, lunch, more beach, dinner, entertainment. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Suffice to say I got plenty of rest and time to read some books. One particular little book I would like to share about is The Little Food Book: You Are What You Eat by Craig Sams.

Here’s a short description of what this book is about:

30,000 Americans a year die of obesity, more than the total annual toll of motor accidents, firearms, drugs and alcohol combined. The World Health Organization estimates there are 500,000 pesticide-related poisonings a year. Who controls what we eat? What happens to it before it gets to us? The Little Food Book will help you understand how by tackling the issues that affect the way we eat. Craig Sams writes with authority in this collection of mini-essays, explaining the mechanics of food production and related subjects such as organics, nutrition, hormones, pesticides and GMOs.

Do you ever really think about the food you buy in the supermarket? Where it comes from, how it was made, what’s in it?

When you get fresh vegetables and cook up a healthy veggie dish, do you know how much pesticide residue you’re eating? How about the antibiotics and hormones used to keep sick animals from dying so they can become profitable enough to be slaughtered to end up on your plate?

It seems this is one of those “people don’t know about this” issues… Then again: Obesity (not just from eating fast food, but chemical and hormone induced imbalance of our bodies), cancers, animal diseases like BSE, foot and mouth disease and avian flu. When you think about it, you just know that there is a problem with our food.

We’re messing with the food, in a way it isn’t meant to be messed with.

Just to name a few concerns:

• Food additives: E numbers, artificial flavors (even when they call it natural flavor it’s chemical), etc. How safe are they really?
• Intensive farming: destruction of soil for short term profit, unhealthy for both environment and consumer.
• Genetic modification: do we even know what we’re doing here?

Unfortunately, food is big business, and when there’s money involved things tend to get messy. Organisations like the FDA are supposed to look out for consumer health interests, but it is politically outgunned because corporate campaign contributions and powerful lobbyists speak louder voice than even clearly documented science (link).

So what can we do?

Well, I’m trying to buy fresh or processed Organic foods (also called biological food in Europe).

Organic food (and no, it’s not just vegetables)

I’m already seeing a steady increase of organic foods in my local supermarket, and I’m happy to buy it to voice my opinion (you know how loyalty cards work right?), even though it’s more expensive for most products (up to 50% even).

In my opinion governments should subsidize organic food (instead of subsidizing burgers, a burger without subsidies would cost about 3 times the price you pay now…). Healthy people benefit a country immensely, if only for the gigantic reduction in health costs.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it. Investigate! Check the labels on your food and look up what’s in it. It’s important to know vegetable fat is not the same as vegetable oil, and a bio chicken is not just a chicken with more space to run around.