Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Just back from seeing the movie “Super-size Me” and it occurred to me that, in an age of limitedless wealth, cheap food, and universal private automobiles, nutrition is best not left to amateurs (i.e., us).  Consider the process of going to a restaurant.  You, a completely ignorant and probably somewhat fat person, walk in and they hand you a long menu of potential dishes.  For each dish the menu lists a tiny fraction of the ingredients but does not fully disclose sauces or overall calories.  Even if the content of each item were fully disclosed it wouldn’t do most of us much good because most of us don’t know how many calories are appropriate.  Finally there is the problem that everyone gets the same quantity of food.  If you’re a 5′-tall woman and order “Chicken surprise” you get the same quantity of food as a 6′-tall man who orders the same dish.

Here’s an idea for a restaurant…  You walk in and give them the following information:  (1) height, (2) weight, and (3) whether or not you have exercised today.  They come back to you with a few choices, e.g., “fish, chicken, steak, or vegetarian?”  You choose one of those and finally an appropriately-sized quantity of food shows up on your table.  This is, I think, how the $1000/day fat farms operate.  But in an age of computerization it doesn’t seem as though it would cost a standard restaurant anything more to operate this way.

Thoughts?

[P.S.  I went through a 3-month period in which I ate almost every meal at McDonalds.  This was in 1993 while driving to Alaska and back (see Travels with Samantha).  I was a graduate student and the 59-cent hamburgers, 99-cent chicken fajitas, and drive-thrus were hard to resist.  I was about 30 years old and a tiny bit pudgy when I started the trip.  I probably lost at least 5 lbs. during that period.  I didn’t order fries or regular (sugar) Coke and I was riding my bike every few days.]

Addendum:  It occured to me after posting this that existing menu-based restaurants could adopt this system without chucking out their menu.  You tell them what you want plus your height and weight.  They then size the portions of your appetizer, entree, and dessert so that the total calorie count is appropriate.

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Photos of Alex’s 11-week-old cousin Roxanne are available at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/knicholls/

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Just got my new airplane insurance policy.  Several pages in the front are devoted to excluding coverage for a nuclear attack on the U.S.  If a big bomb is dropped on the hangar in Bedford they don’t have to pay:  “the radioactive, toxic, explosive or other hazardous properties of any explosive nuclear assembly or nuclear component thereof”.  Not do they have to pay for a dirty bomb set off in a shipping container in the harbor:  “ionizing radiations or contamination by radioactivity from … any other radioactive source whatsoever.”

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Here’s what I learned on my trip to New York City:

• the old Continental-powered Piper Malibu is a lot quieter and smoother than the newer Lycoming-powered Piper Mirage (flew down from Boston in a couple of for-sale Malibus)
  
• the Petra exhibit at the Museum of Natural History is inspirational–it might be time to take a leaf from Indiana Jones’s book and head over to Jordan
  
• there are several good shows at the Metropolitan, as usual
  
• the Whitney Biennial was one of the best in a long time.  At least 20 percent of the works were charmingly creative.  The show just ended but it might still be worth taking a trip to the Whitney because they’ve concentrated the best of their permanent collection on the fifth floor and also brought in some Thomas Hart Benton murals from Connecticut.  [If you want to get into the Biennial for 2006 just take a page from one of Edward Tufte’s books and blow it up to wall size, then reverse it and stick it next to the first enlargement… that’s what one of the artists in the exhibit had done.. without credit to Tufte.]
  
• the RM seafood restaurant on 60th between Madison and Park is fantastic and for the summer does a weekday $20 3-course lunch menu that is as good as any meal I’ve had in Boston at any price, www.rmseafood.com
  
• seeing Shrek 2 with a 4-year-old girl is fun but the movie is disappointing after Shrek 1.

No New York experience is complete without at least one cabbie story.  The fellow who drove me to LaGuardia Airport was a Coptic Christian from Egypt (the Copts are the descendants of the original Egyptians who built the pyramids, etc.; after the Arab invasion of 640 A.D. they’ve survived as a minority within their ancient homeland).  Fully trained as a lawyer in Egypt, he came to the U.S. 12 years ago.  “The Muslims were making it harder and harder for Christians to survive.  I was just starting out so I decided to start in the U.S.  Of course the situation in Egypt is much worse now for Copts than it was back then.”  He couldn’t work here as a lawyer easily because Egyptian law is based on the Napoleonic code rather than cases.  “I got a degree in networking from NYU and worked at a French bank in mid-town until 2001 when they downsized their IT department.”  Since then he has been driving a cab.  How does he like living in New York compared to Egypt?  “I came here to escape the Muslims but now they are coming to America.  They may appear to accept American values but 15 years from now you’ll see that they haven’t.  They can’t stop fighting Christians and they hate the West because it represents Christianity.  Americans don’t understand anything about Islam.”

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Why is it that governments have so much trouble admitting that they’ve made mistakes?  Let’s take the U.S. government, for example.  Right now we have troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq.  We don’t seem to be achieving our goals or be welcome in either place.  Why can’t we apologize sincerely and go home?

In Afghanistan the U.S. spent a huge amount of effort trying to thwart Soviet control in the late 1970s.  Jimmy Carter sent all kinds of money and weapons to the Islamic rebels so that they could kill Russian kids in uniform.  In retrospect this seems like a bad mistake.  If the Afghanistan had been a Russian possession there would never have been a Taliban and perhaps never an Osama bin-Laden or September 11th.  Could we offer a sincere apology today to the Russians and offer Afghanistan back to them?

Saddam Hussein seems to be alive and well.  The Iraqi people don’t like us, if newspaper articles and armed resistance are to be believed.  Why not say to Saddam “We were wrong about your weapons programs and we’re sorry for invading and here’s your country back?”  Our troops could get on planes in Baghdad and wave goodbye to a restored Saddam.  (We might want to split off an area in the north and give it to the Kurds since we made them some promises back in the early 1990s and it would be good to keep them.)

[We could warm up by apologizing to the Vietnamese:  “We’re sorry that we got involved in your civil war.  We know that we can’t truly make it up to you but if you’re in the U.S. we’ll treat you to a three-day pass at Disneyworld and a day at Universal Islands of Adventure.”]

Governments do this with wrongly convicted criminals.  We say “Sorry for your 15 years in jail.  We didn’t have DNA testing back then.  Enjoy the rest of your life.”  Why not do this in foreign policy instead of trying to come up with contorted ex-post-facto justifications?

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Generally there is no point in voting if you live in Massachusetts.  The Democrats always win the state regardless of what happens in other parts of the U.S.  People who live in Boston might want to consider voting against John Kerry, however, due to the massive negative impact that his election to the Presidency would have on our lifestyle.  Being a peasant in the presence of royalty was never enjoyable.  Ever since September 11th, however, American royalty has been running scared from terrorists and that has made them far more difficult guests in a city.

Check out an article in today’s Boston Globe:  “Massive closing of roads set for convention week”.  Most of the useful highways and tunnels in downtown Boston will be shut down for at least 8 hours per day during the week of the Democratic National Convention (July 26-29).  The 200,000 commoners who travel on Interstate 93 every day are being encouraged to take the week off.  It is tough to calculate the economic losses but one aspect can be comprehended by looking at the $15 billion that was recently spent on roadwork in central Boston.  At 5 percent annual interest that works out to $2 million per day.  (If you decide to poke your way into work on local roads, take the weed out of your glove box because the government will have the right to stop and search any vehicle downtown at any time during the week.)  Fans of public transit should note that the North Station T stop will be closed during the convention as well.

If Kerry were to go to Washington, DC and work at his desk for 4 or 8 years that would be one thing.  But no doubt he will want to come home every couple of weekends to his fabulous mansions in downtown Boston and on Nantucket.  This will necessitate the closure of downtown Boston and Nantucket to the rest of us.  Of course the airspace for 30 nautical miles around Boston and Nantucket will also be closed, except to scheduled airlines and maybe the biggest corporate jets.  If President Kerry is running late back to Logan Airport commercial airliners will be kept waiting with the engines running for 1-2 hours (according to my airline pilot friends, this happens all the time with Bush and Cheney at airports around the U.S. but it hasn’t affected Boston much because W. very seldom comes here).

One bright spot in a post-George W future:  all of the restrictions on travel and building in Crawford, Texas are going to lighten up so we Bostonians could move down there if things get too constrained up here.

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In order to impress the ladies I’ve decided it is time to get a flashy new car.  My friends at MIT tell me that minivans are the height of fashion these days.  So I want to get a 2004 Toyota Sienna.  I’ll either trade in my 1998 Sienna (LE, 42,000 miles, leather, sunroof, fresh from $2400 of service) or give it away to an interesting charity (like the last one).  I paid $500 over invoice for the last minivan but the Boston dealers want nearly list price for the new ones, which leads to abusive $40,000 price tags

Anyone know a good Toyota dealer or a region of the country where you don’t have to donate a kidney in order to get a Sienna?  Or must one wait for the big interest rate rise?

Alternatively, does anyone know whether or not the new 2005 Honda Odyssey will have openable windows in the middle like the Sienna?  If so, and Siennas remain hard to get, I might simply wait for the new Odyssey which will presumably be a slightly better vehicle.

[My specs:  XLE Limited, either 2WD or AWD is okay, Package #6 (HO; navigation system), glass breakage sensor on alarm, Arctic Frost Pearl exterior, stone leather interior, no financing required.]

[Update:  Honda has released a new minivan in Japan called the Elysion.  It seems to be based on the Accord and has a V6 engine.  Honda says “The sliding doors feature power windows that can open fully”.  It sure looks as though this could be the new Odyssey.  The old Odyssey just barely beat the new Sienna in the latest Car and Driver magazine.  So the redesigned one should be noticeably better and just as dog-friendly with its additional openable windows.]

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Back in Cambridge now with 1500 photos from Ecuador and Peru.  All of the photos are in Olympus Raw Format, which Adobe PhotoShop CS supposedly understands.  Thus a few questions for those readers who are PhotoShop experts….

What I really like to do with my images is

1) make several sizes of JPEG from each original

2) wrap each JPEG in a black border

3) write a “copyright philg@mit.edu” note into the bottom right corner of each photo (within the black border but not at a constant x-y pixel location due to some pictures being horizonals and some being verticals)

4) maybe build a Web page showing thumbnails linked to other sizes (though I would be willing to do this myself afterwards with a Perl script)

Can this be done with PhotoShop CS batch processing or must I stick with ImageMagick and the almost-10-years-old Perl script that I’ve been using on Unix?

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It is often reported that many Africans believe that AIDS was intentionally created by the CIA or some other American government agency with an animus toward black people.  My week in the Amazon jungle among the macaws has raised the idea that perhaps these folks are partially right.

The fundamental problem facing wildlife worldwide is habitat destruction due to the growth of human population.  Ecologists have figured out that creating a handful of tiny reserves doesn’t actually do much to prevent extinction but merely delays the inevitable.  Each tiny reserve functions like a land-bridge island and eventually most of the species go extinct.

Scientists claim that humans contracted HIV from monkeys.  Monkeys in Africa are endangered by a human population that was/is breeding out of control.  Fundamentally the only way for monkeys to save their habitat and therefore themselves is to kill as many humans as possible and prevent the remainder from breeding.  It would be evolutionarily adaptive for a wild animal in Africa to create a deadly virus and pass it to the humans who are destroying his habitat.

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The most powerful tools for conservationists in the Galapagos turn out to be Viagra and helicopter gunships.  Introduced goats consume all of the vegetation that formerly fed the giant tortoises.  Efforts at eradication were unsuccessful until the authorities brought dogs over from Switzerland to herd the goats into headlands whereupon they were shot from helicopters.  Island after island is being declared free of goats and the tortoises are coming back.

Sea cucumbers are highly sought after in traditional Chinese medicine because they supposedly help us older guys, uh, “perform”.  With Viagra as close as one’s inbox, however, perhaps the illegal harvesting of these animals will stop.

(Off the boat now, in Guayaquil and headed for Peru…)

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