A few months ago, though, some people on a mailing list that I participate in (including the author of the gnolls.org blog) started sharing their experiences with paleo diets, and in particular a few people reported somewhat remarkable results from cutting down on non-rice grain consumption. The author of that blog recommended the book Perfect Health Diet (and its companion blog), so I gave that a read.

Which was quite interesting. A lot of it meshed nicely with what I’d been trying a few years back: in particular, they agree that many fats are just fine, and that many carbohydrates are bad. A lot of the details differ, however: the Perfect Health folks don’t think that it’s good to avoid all carbohydrates, they focus more on specific ones (non-rice grains, fructose, probably others that I’m forgetting) but not all. (In particular, they don’t have much truck with glycemic index, and prefer white rice to brown rice, claiming that the latter can leach nutrients.) Also, there are some other details: they don’t like a lot of standard vegetable oils (though they’re fine with olive oil), but quite like some less common ones, most notably coconut oil.

Spurred by that, I decided to cut down a bit more on my wheat consumption. (Though I’m certainly not going to give up bread entirely, I like it too much!) Which raised the question: what to do about breakfast, if my previous habit of oatmeal wasn’t recommended? At first, I alternated between eggs and bacon or salmon (if I had time), plain yoghurt and fruit (if I had less time), and reheating leftovers. But then a funny thing happened (which other people had predicted): I found myself feeling a lot less hungry in general in the mornings! Before, I would eat a full breakfast and feel like I wanted to start snacking again at around 11am; these days, though, I’m fine not eating anything until lunch time, and in fact on two days at Defcon I didn’t eat anything until around 2pm and felt great. (Which was convenient, there weren’t great food options and the mediocre ones were crowded.)

Also, I’m finding myself feeling full more often. Which is one of the big points of gnolls.org: your body has a feeling for what nutrients you need, and if you feed it the right stuff, you just won’t feel as hungry. The idea of paying attention to signals your body is sending makes a lot of sense to me; and if those signals mean that I’m not eating as much because I’m not feeling as hungry, I’m willing to take that as a sign that I’m doing something right!

I’m not planning to go all-out paleo—like I said, I like (good) bread too much! But it’s also great to not have to worry about eating breakfast, and to not feel hungry as often, so I do think I’ll stick with these changes, and possibly go further with them than I have been.

Miranda Pasta

Ingredients:

4 oz. prosciutto
1 1/2 lb. tomatoes
fresh basil
1 lemon
6 Tbsp. olive oil
salt to taste
4 oz. goat cheese
1 lb. pasta

Instructions:

Sliver the prosciutto and basil; seed and chop the tomatoes. Juice and zest the lemon. Crumble the goat cheese, and mix the non-pasta ingredients in a large bowl. Cook the pasta, combine, and serve.

I started the day by finally getting to meet Roger Travis in person! I’ve been hearing his disembodied voice weekly for ages now at the VGHVI gaming sessions that I feel like I know him rather well, but it was great to finally get to meet him in person! (Incidentally, I spent the previous evening hanging out with Jordan; great to see him where he’s now living, looking forward to seeing his family tomorrow.)

I then spent the rest of the morning at the Mobile Learning Summit. This was structured around coming up with a game idea; my table’s brainstorming sentence was: “create an engaging game about playing piano for parents in an artistic/social context”. (We ended up ditching the parent idea, though.)

And, after a fair amount of chatter, we ended up with a game idea, a sort of musical version of foursquare which we called Starter Culture Sounds. It’s location based; if you’re at a location, you can upload a snippet of music to that location. These pieces of music get classified (to detect similar themes, or even moods; we thought it might be cool to find a way to algorithmically merge them, though that sounded pretty hard to me), resulting in a visual representation of popular themes at that location. You can also vote for other people’s tunes, and upload edited version of people’s tunes; either of those actions increases the prominence of that theme in the visual classification. (Maybe those would feed into some sort of badges/achievement system, too.) Votes age over time. Once you’ve been to a place and contributed to hit (just voting is enough), you get a virtual mic that lets you later listen in on the music there. (But you can only contribute if you’re physically present.)

After that, Michael Abbott showed up; great to see him, as always! (A pity that Roger is on the East coast, Michael is in the middle of the country, and I’m on the West coast…) We went off to lunch, where Kurt Squire gave a keynote on Games and Education.

He started off talking about Sid Meier’s Pirates! as an educational game. Here, he mainly discussed the various short-, medium-, and long-term goals that the game gives you: for the first several hours, you always have something clear to do, enriching your understanding of the game’s mechanics, and eventually leading to more free-form experimentation with those mechanics.

He then moved on to social spaces: World of Warcraft and a discussion of MUDs, where a fifth grade teacher he knew had discovered kids in her class were participating in one, and she ended up joining (serving as a Jane Jacobs-style “watchful eye”) and incorporating this into the classroom work. (For example, kids produced versions of the Hundred-Acre Woods and of their school in the MUD.)

He wove these examples into a taxonomy of progression: controls -> basic knowledge -> systemic expertise -> tools/tinkering -> fundamental design, plus another branch systemic expertise -> social control of play.

He also presented a rubric for quality of games:

• Interesting choices, good progression
• Enable systemic understanding
• Scope for transgression
• Immersive possibilities
• Room for socialization
• Does it inspire creativity?
• Smooth ramp from consumer to creator?
• (One or two other things – he talks really fast…)

I only have sporadic notes for the rest. He listed some educational game genres: microworlds, linear action, role playing, open-ended sandbox, persistent worlds. He had an interesting discussion of Civilization as a learning tool, including the biases it has: management is good, technology is good, people will attack you for oil, geography is destiny. He said some nice things about Montessori, and showed bits from a cool game about saving the lake that students had made.

At 2pm, I went to a presentation about a game called WolfQuest. Which was billed as a “Chat and Frag”, but was a straight lecture; too bad. Still, the game sounded interesting enough – you play as a wolf trying to survive in Yellowstone. I’ll mention it to Miranda, maybe she’ll like it?

And at 3:30pm, I went to a talk about Unity. Which was also misleading: it was labeled as a workshop, but it was really just a straight talk. Or at least I think it was: I seem to be incapable of going to a conference without sleeping through one of the sessions, and that session was today’s choice.

After that I wandered around the poster session, and then had dinner with Michael and Roger. (Where I got to eat green jackfruit for the first time in almost 17 years; it continues to be very good stuff.) A lovely way to end the day.

The original recipe says that boneless sirloin is also acceptable, but I prefer flank. If you don’t have mushroom soy sauce around, don’t sweat it, regular will do fine. Do get a decent kind of lettuce, though: I doubt this would work well with iceberg.

Loc Lac, from The Elephant Walk Cookbook

Ingredients:

7 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 tablespoons mushroom soy sauce
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons black pepper
1 1/2 pounds flank steak, cut into 1 1/2 inch squares
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 head green leaf lettuce, separated into leaves, washed and drained
2 tablespoons lime juice
1 teaspoon water
A loaf / baguette of good bread

Instructions:

Combine the garlic, soy sauce, sugar, and 1 teaspoon of the black pepper in a bowl. Add the beef and stir to coat. Set aside for 30 minutes.

Heat the oil in a skillet over high heat. Saute the beef until medium-rare, 3-4 minutes.

Combine the lime juice, water, and 1/2 teaspoon of the pepper in a small bowl. Slice the bread. Use the lettuce to pick up the beef, use the lime juice mixture as a dipping sauce, use the bread to mop up juices.

We used 70% chocolate for it, which worked well. And we used a 10-inch round pan for the water bath; a 9-inch one might have worked in a pinch, I’m not entirely sure. We mostly stirred rather than folded the first third of the eggs. The unmolding didn’t go at all smoothly, but nobody complained about the way it looked after eating it.

Bittersweet Deception, from Bittersweet by Alice Medrich.

Ingredients:
5 ounces bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, finely chopped
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
Pinch of salt
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons water
1 tablespoon rum or cognac
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 cold large eggs
1 cold large egg white

Equipment:
An 8-inch round non-springform pan
A larger non-springform pan to use as a water bath, at least 2 inches deep
Parchment paper

Optional Toppings:
Powdered sugar for dusting
Lightly sweetened whipped cream
Raspberry puree or fresh raspberries

Instructions:

Position a rack in the lower third of an oven, and preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease the sides of the cake pan, and line the bottom with parchment paper. Put a kettle of water on to boil.

Place the chocolate into a large bowl and set aside. Combine the cocoa, flour, 1/2 cup of sugar, and salt in a small heavy saucepan. Whisk in enough of the water to form a smooth paste, then whisk in the remaining water. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly (especially around the edges of the pan) to prevent scorching, until the mixture begins to simmer. Simmer very gently, stirring constantly, for 2 minutes. Pour the hot mixture over the chopped chocolate, and stir until chocolate is melted and smooth. Whisk in the rum and vanilla.

Beat the eggs, egg white, and the remaining 1/2 cup sugar with an electric mixer at high speed until nearly doubled in volume, 5 to 6 minutes. (The eggs will be very foamy but liquid rather than thick.) One third at a time, fold the eggs into the chocolate mixture. Scrape the batter into the cake pan and smooth the top.

Put the cake pan in the larger pan. Pour enough boiling water into the larger pan to come halfway up the sides of the cake pan. Bake until the cake rises and crusts slightly on top and the surface springs back when gently pressed, about 30 minutes. (The cake will still jiggle in the center, like very firm jello, and the interior will still be quite gooey.) Remove the cake pan from the water and cool completely on a rack. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight before serving.

To unmold, run a thin knife around the edges to release the cake from the pan. Invert onto a plate, and peel off the parchment liner. Optionally, dust powdered sugar over the top and/or add whipped cream and/or raspberries.

Make sure not to stint on the beating time, it’s important. (Just be glad that, unlike Liesl’s grandmother for most of her life, you have an electric mixer…) I don’t think I’ve ever actually tried it with the nuts.

Brownies

4 oz. unsweetened chocolate
2 sticks unsalted butter
4 eggs
2 cups sugar
2 tsp. vanilla
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp. salt
2 cups chopped nuts (optional)

Melt chocolate and butter together in a double boiler; let cool to room temperature. Meanwhile, beat eggs and sugar for 10 minutes. Add chocolate mixture and vanilla; mix well. Add flour and salt; mix until creamy. Fold in nuts. Bake in a 9″x13″ pan in a 350 degree oven for 25 minutes. Top with glaze, below:

Glaze

2 Tbsp. cocoa powder
1 2/3 Tbsp. water
1 Tbsp. oil
1 Tbsp. light corn syrup
1 cup confectioner’s sugar

Cook and stir cocoa powder, water, oil, and corn syrup until smooth. Remove from heat. Beat in sugar.

On the reading front, I figured I’d take a look at the Atkins book, since he has the most experience with diets of this sort. And, frankly, I wasn’t too impressed: if I’d read that book first, I probably would never have started on this path.

Which is a bit unfair: that book is primarily targeted at people who want to lose weight, and I have no particular desire to do so, so I’m simply not in its target audience. But there was too much propagandizing, and too many recommendations that didn’t fit my core beliefs of “eat good food” and “don’t pretend that X is a substitute for Y”.

I am largely unwilling to eat sugar substitutes, and I’d be quite surprised if the low-carb flours that he mentioned were a good substitute for the real thing. Also, I roll my eyes at the notion that wild rice could be considered a substitute for other forms of rice. (Not that I have anything against wild rice, it’s a fine food, but you want to pair it with an almost completely different set of foods than you’d want to pair white rice with.) Most of all, my eyes rolled every time they encountered the phrase “Dr. Atkins’ Vita-Nutrient Solution”.

The book also didn’t go very far in terms of answering my questions about the science behind the diet. For example, he recommends an induction phase where you eat almost no carbs: is the claim here that this phase is useful somehow to cause your body’s metabolism to change paths (i.e. is it the case that the sequence 1) lots of carbs, 2) almost no carbs, 3) moderate carbs will have your body processing food differently than if you skip step 2) in that sequence?), or is it just useful in the context of a diet, to prove that you can lose weight this way? Also, Good Calories, Bad Calories suggested that it’s not just the number of carbs that matters, it’s the way that your body processes them (so, for example, brown rice is better for you than white rice), while Atkins didn’t make any such distinction (other than between fiber and other forms of carbs); what’s the deal there?

And, finally, it didn’t give me as much practical advice that I’d like, given that I’m not trying to lose weight. For example, the single area where I find it hardest to avoid carbs is at breakfast: I don’t have a lot of time weekday mornings, so ideas like cooking eggs or bacon are a non-starter. So what should I do? He had a few suggestions that fit my constraints, but not nearly as many as I’d like.

The above paints an overly bleak picture of the book: on the whole, I’m glad I read it. But I’m also glad I checked it out of the library instead of buying a copy.

So that’s my reading. As to eating: we did try brown rice and whole-wheat pasta. We’ve stopped using whole-wheat pasta: it tastes pretty different from regular pasta, and Liesl and I both felt that it went significantly less well with our pasta recipes than regular pasta. (For what it’s worth, pasta turns out to have a better glycemic index than most grain products, by the way.) Brown rice was a pleasant surprise, though: yes, it tastes different from white rice, and has a different texture, but I actually perhaps prefer its taste and texture. It’s not for all situations—I wouldn’t want brown rice sushi, for example—but I’m quite happy to eat brown rice with Indian food. The only drawback is that it takes longer to cook than white rice (we’ve been cooking it for 45 minutes and then letting it sit uncovered with the heat off for 5 minutes), but it’s usually easy to work around that with scheduling. And if not, the occasional white rice won’t kill us.

In general, our dinners are less pasta-heavy than they were; we’re cooking it twice most weeks, but that’s less than we were before. When I started this, we were only cooking pasta once a week; maybe we should get back to that more often?

Lunches have been a big change for me: instead of packing a big tupperware full of pasta, I pack it only half-full of whatever dinner leftover I have (still usually pasta, because pasta meals are easy to double and hence overrepresented as leftovers), but I now always pack three side dishes as well. Exactly what the side dishes are varies, but my most common selection is some form of cheese, some kind of nuts, and a veggie. This only adds a couple of minutes to my morning routine, which is no big deal, and I’m extremely pleased with the results: while I wasn’t complaining before (I quite like the main dishes that we cook), the extra variety really improves my lunches. (Especially the cheese. Fresh mozzarella, yum.)

As I mentioned above, breakfasts are the biggest problem: on weekday mornings, I still don’t see any good alternative to cereal. I took a look at my cereal cabinet and decided that I should try to avoid refined sugar almost entirely (fortunately, I’m just not that big a sugar fan), and the more whole grain the better. What I’ve settled on for now is plain instant oatmeal, topped with cream and fruit. That’s a bit of a shot in the dark, but I will say this: I really like having an excuse to have cream every morning.

Desserts have stayed the same: we still eat a lot of chocolate. I haven’t changed the food I eat when going out very much, though I do try to avoid potatoes now.

As far as my health goes: while I haven’t noticed any particular difference in my day-to-day experiences, my doctor’s reaction to my last blood check was “Your cholesterol levels are excellent. They are so good that I am actually wondering if you’ve changed the way you take the medication or changed your diet or exercise. Whatever it is that you are doing, keep doing that.” I don’t want to ascribe all of that to the diet: my previous results were only a month or so after I started taking simvastatin, and for all I know it may take more than that amount of time for the drug’s full effects to be known. But I am pleased that my triglyceride level has plummeted compared to where it was before: triglycerides are apparently pretty important (rather more so than, say, LDL levels), and one of the claims of low-carb diets (or low-glycemic-index diets) is that they specifically help triglycerides.

But even if I can’t ascribe all (or conceivably any) of the improvements in my cholesterol level to my new diet, that is at least strong evidence that my eating less carbohydrate and more fat (see the cream and cheese mentions above) isn’t hurting me in the way that low-fat diet proponents claim that it should. So I’m sticking with it for now: I’m enjoying what I’m eating, I see no sign that what I’m eating is causing me any health risks, so what’s not to like?

Whipped Chocolate Ganache

24 ounces semisweet chocolate chips
4 cups heavy cream
1 teaspoon corn syrup

Put chocolate and cream into a medium saucepan. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly with a heatproof rubber spatula, until thick (30-35 minutes). Remove from heat. Stir in corn syrup. Transfer to a large, wide metal bowl. Refrigerate until frosting is cool enough to spread, about 2 hours, checking and stirring every 15 minutes. Use immediately.

In my first game, I took one stone, and the only reason why it was particularly close was that my opponent made a stupid mistake in the endgame that cost him about 10 points; I should have resigned earlier. Judging from conversations I overheard, I got the impression that he normally plays as 3 dan but his rating has slipped recently; I’m quite willing to believe that, it felt like he was 2-3 stones stronger than me.

My second game was frustrating in that the score on the board was 61 to 54, and the AGA rules have a rather large komi of 7.5. Oops.

The way my third game ended was instructional. We were fighting a ko; I made a ko threat. At least I thought it was a ko threat: my opponent started looking at it, and I realized that, because of a snapback, it wasn’t actually a threat to capture the stone it seemed to be threatening.

And then I looked more closely at the ko, and got really nervous. If I’d given in and connected, it would have only cost me a point. If he won the ko, rather than connecting, he’d capture four of my stones, which could be a big amount at some points in the endgame, but I had (despite my misreading of this one) several ko threats on the board that were bigger than that.

But then I realized that his capturing those four stones wasn’t all that was going on: it created a serious threat on my group adjacent to them, and in fact I wasn’t completely sure that my group would survive if I tenukied. (Which I would have to do to make good on any ko threat I would play.) This is something I hadn’t really thought of when doing ko fights: it’s not enough to just calculate the value of your opponent’s first move if he ignores your ko threat, you also have to figure out if that move is sente. And, if it is, you have to play ko threats that are enough larger to make it worthwhile to ignore that sente move.

Despite all of that, it turned out well. My ko threat wasn’t a threat in the way I thought it was; fortunately, when I read it more carefully, there was a more subtle shortage of liberties there. Which my opponent missed, so he won the ko; he captured four of my stones, lost twenty of his, and didn’t manage to capture the other ten of mine that were threatened! (In our post-game review, we decided that the best play after his initial capture lead to my group living in seki, but as it was it lived outright.) A very odd result: we both misread my ko threat, and the result was that, as an outcome of a ko fight that I’d initially miscalculated as small, the game turned from a close game to one where he resigned!

My fourth game was really weird. My opponent’s grasp of large-scale structures was even worse than mine, but he constantly wanted to get into fights with me. And, in doing so, he left himself weak, so I was constantly attacking him! Really bloody, and we both misread situations in significant ways; I misread more than he did, and lost. I really shouldn’t have misread some of those situations; the flip side is that I should probably look for clever attacks more often, because if he can find weaknesses like that in my positions, I’m probably missing some in my opponents’ positions.

One big takeaway from my first two games, which jives with my memories from other recent tournaments: I’m probably doing a better job of building up influence than I did a few years ago, but I’m also being far too cavalier about letting my opponents getting significant territory on the sides. In particular, I really underestimate how valuable it is to have an entire side of the board.

The nice non-go-related aspect of the tournament was that it was in the SF Japantown. I had lunch at Sapporo-ya, which doesn’t look like much from the outside but which we discovered has quite good ramen when we tried it out because we NEEDED FOOD NOW the last time we went to Japantown. And I did some shopping at Kinokuniya; they didn’t have what I was looking for (more Puzzle Nikoli books; fortunately, the ones I have will last me through the only upcoming trip we have planned), but I found a go book I didn’t already own.

And I browsed through the instructional language section, and acquired more inventory there. Which doesn’t entirely thrill me, but I’ll be finishing my Japanese textbook in about half a year, I’m not sure I’ll go to a Japanese bookstore between now and then, and I could use ideas from browsing in a bookstore. And if I learn about books that I want to buy while browsing in a bookstore, I’m going to almost always buy them there, instead of noting them down and buying them elsewhere. The haul:

• Collections of essays and fiction with “translations of all the complex passages”, copious notes, and a dictionary. (And a CD and profiles of the authors.) I’m really excited about these: they look like a great way to make the transition from book learning to reading real Japanese.
• Two volumes of Japanese in MangaLand: I liked the other introduction-to-Japanese-via-manga book that I read, so I figured I’d give these a try as well.
• A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. I bought this partly because I figure it might be a reasonable thing to read once I’m done with the textbook and/or a reasonable reference, but mostly because there’s an intermediate grammar in the same series, which I expect will be a good follow-up to the textbook.

All in all, if I’m going to accumulate inventory, it doesn’t look like too bad a choice: I have specific triggers coming up in the not-too-distant future that I expect will cause me to start reading all of them, and I’ll probably start reading the manga volumes sooner than that: the first one would be a good candidate to bring on vacation.

A quite pleasant day. I even got some studying done over lunch, so I didn’t particularly fall behind in my regular activities.

So, for now, I’ve been mostly sitting on the sidelines, watching amused as the fat evidence changes over the last few years. Olive oil is now not only not bad for you but actively good for you; high-fat fish, ditto; while trans fats are now demonized as uniquely bad for you. All of which fits well with my personal preference to eat good food: I’ll take butter over margarine any day and will happily avoid processed junk food where partially hydrogenated vegetable oil is high on the list of ingredients. I was very happy with the “chocolate is good” studies, too; I’m eagerly waiting for somebody to show that cheese is similarly beneficial, though ice cream seems like a bit to much to hope for even to me.

Still, my cholesterol is high, and was a good deal higher when I got it checked a year ago than it was back in my grad school days. My doctor didn’t like that, so she put me on simvastatin; my cholesterol level responded quite nicely to that, yay.

But I perked up when I read about Taubes’s book. I’m pretty sure I read this New York Times article, which discusses Taubes’s claim that the evidence for a link between high fat consumption and heart disease is not very strong.

Which is the subject of the first part of the book; reading it, it looks to me like he’s done a pretty good job of gathering his evidence. His reasoning seems sound, his critiques of others’ reasoning seems sound. Maybe he’s misrepresenting the evidence, I’d like to see an equally well-done refutation of his points, but right now I’m not very convinced at all by the “fat is bad” claims.

What I wasn’t expecting was the rest of the book. One of Taubes’s points is that studies frequently focus on links between cholesterol and death from heart disease. And heart disease is bad, no question, but what I really want to do is increase my (enjoyable) life span, not decrease my chance of dying from heart disease while increasing my chance of dying from something else. (I also don’t want to increase my life span by two months at the cost of having to eat mediocre food for decades, but that’s a separate matter! Not an unimportant one, though.) After talking about fat, he turns to a range of other diseases (diabetes being the one that stuck in my head the most) that, apparently, are completely unknown in many populations before they start moving towards more western lifestyles. (And not unknown solely because of lower life expectancies, either.) So there really is reason to believe that dietary changes over the last century have had significant negative impact on our health; fat, however, doesn’t seem to be the smoking gun.

With which he turns towards presenting a case against excessive carbohydrate consumption. I’d assumed that the Atkins diet was just another fad diet; apparently, it has a rather long history, and the science behind it is a good deal more interesting than I’d thought. (Including links between it and some of the bad kinds of cholesterol; I’ll pay more attention to my triglyceride levels in the future.)

I’m not completely convinced by either the “fat is ok” or “carbohydrates are bad” parts of his argument. (And I don’t think he expects readers to be; the impression that I got is that he’d like a lot more research in certain areas and a lot less reflexive going along with the crowd.) But this doesn’t mesh too badly with my experience; in particular, one of the big changes in my diet since moving out here is that (partly because of the best cookbook ever), we eat pasta all the freaking time. And, going back to my “eat good food” mantra from above, I have a hard time supporting the notion that our diet isn’t rather too pasta-heavy; I’m sure Italians would look at our family menus with horror. So it does seem time to reconsider that part of our diet. And also to ask some basic questions: I’d never seriously considered eating brown rice or whole-grain pasta; maybe I should try them out and figure out if I like them? (The answer turns out to be that I actually seem to prefer brown rice in most contexts; I’m not completely sold on whole-grain pasta yet.)

So we’re experimenting, and our meals have gotten more varied. I’ve done some googling to try to figure out if Taubes is a crackpot or not; so far, I’m not seeing much reason to reject him. Take, for example, this article on carbohydrates from the Harvard School of Public Health. In one section, it talks about measuring the effects of different diets, including the Atkins diet, and says “it looked as though the women in the Atkins group had lost the most weight … and 3.5 for the Zone group. (18) Levels of harmful LDL, protective HDL, and other blood lipids were at least as good among women on the Atkins diet as among those on the low-fat diet”. Note the use of “looked as”: already, we see a rhetorical anti-Atkins positioning in an attempt to mute what sure sounds like good news for Atkins.

They justify their skepticism by saying “If you read the fine print of the study, though, it turns out that few of the women actually stuck with their assigned diets. Those on the Atkins diet were supposed to limit their carbohydrate intake to 50 grams a day, but they took in almost triple that amount. The Ornish dieters were supposed to limit their fat intake to under 10 percent of their daily calories, but they got about 30 percent from fat. There were similar deviations for the Zone and LEARN groups. What this and other diet comparisons tell us is that sticking with a diet is more important than the diet itself.” And, frankly, they should be ashamed of that conclusion: they’re trying to pretend that all of the diets would be equally effective if people stuck with them, without a shred of evidence presented in favor of that, while simultaneously brushing away what evidence the study actually presents.

This is exactly the sort of thing that Taubes mentions over and over in his book, where studies are interpreted in as anti-fat a method as possible. And there’s more of it later in the article: they admit that certain studies give evidence that certain low-carb diets are good for you, but present this in a tone of “well, if you go the low-carb route, you probably aren’t consigning yourself to early death, but who knows” rather than “you know, maybe these low-carb people really are on to something”.

If nothing else, being kicked out of a diet rut is to the good. And I’m happy to no longer have to feel guilty about eating bacon.

• It’s the most wonderful place in the world, but I’m actually not feeling particularly compelled to visit it again any time soon. Some of this has to do with the fact that I’ve been there eight times; some of this has to do with the fact that I rather enjoyed spending the week between Christmas and New Year’s at home, and am not sure how much I want to do any vacationing for the sake of vacationing. Of course, this is all subject to change at any time, and Liesl and Miranda may have different opinions.
• We’ve had bad hotel luck in the past; based on recommendations from comments on this blog post, we decided to try renting an apartment this time. We went with absoluliving; not as cheap as a cheap hotel, but for the same price as a decent hotel, we could get two bedrooms and a living room, with a clothes washer, a stove (not that we used it), a fridge. Or at least we thought that’s what we were getting; the day before we were supposed to leave, they e-mailed us to tell us, with no explanation whatsoever, that they were changing apartments on us; we ended up in a one-bedroom apartment, which they had the gall to call an upgrade because it was in a trendier neighborhood. To be fair, the apartment wasn’t a complete unknown, since we’d marked it as acceptable from the list of apartments they’d initially proposed to us, but I still didn’t appreciate the bait-and-switch, or whatever it was, at all. (Also, to be fair, I’m happy enough with the area we ended up in, and will consider staying near République in the future, but I didn’t like being in the middle of a very long block on a side street.) The other problem with the apartment was that one window kept squeaking open and closed all night when it got really windy; I’m not really mad at them about this, because I’m not sure how they would have discovered it by inspection, but it does point out a problem with an apartment agency that you don’t have with a hotel, namely that you can’t just complain about a maintenance problem and have them move you, because they might, say, be closed on the weekend. (Fortunately, it happened on a Thursday, and they managed to get somebody in on Friday who eventually stopped the squeaking by duct-taping it shut.) Anyways, one separate bedroom (Miranda was in a sofabed in the living room) is vastly better than everybody sharing a bedroom, so the general idea was a good one.
• Poor Liesl was sick some of the time; fortunately, it wasn’t nearly as bad as when we were in Amsterdam, but she stayed in the apartment for three (two?) of the days because of that. Partly because of that, we didn’t go to as many restaurants as we might, but we still got some good food out of the trip (including one from a restaurant that apparently changed hands about a week after our last trip and was completely, surprisingly different this time); visiting salons de thé in the afternoon may have been my favorite part of the trip. (The pizza at decent Italian restaurants in Paris is quite nice, too.)
• Why had I never heard of Lovis Corinth before? My first reaction is that I’d rather look at his art than, say, that of Van Gogh or Gaugin or Seurat. Looking at labels suggested that part of the reason is that his art is scattered around museums in Germany instead of clustered in museums in Paris; glad I’m aware of him now.
• The baboons at the zoo in the Bois de Vincennes are a hoot.
• Having internet access in your apartment is a good thing. And no, this is not a sign that I need to relax and tear myself away from the internet: this is a sign that I don’t feel compelled to spend every vacationing hour traipsing from site to site and can, instead, spend time in my hotel just enjoying myself without feeling guilty that I should be doing more on vacation.
• Having a washing machine in your apartment is also a good thing. And points out another benefit to the internet: if your washing machine is refusing to wash and just blinking when you hit a number, you can google the model name and get a manual. (Answer: you accidentally hit the child lock button; hold it down for four seconds to unlock, and what you thought was the off button is actually the start button.)
• Miranda’s favorite museum turned out to be the sewer museum.
• Sacré Coeur is distinctive to look at from a distance but boring on the outside. Not so Notre Dame: there’s something to be said for thousands of people working for hundreds of years to produce something glorious.
• I really am not impressed by the current Orangina ad campaign: large-breasted zebras just don’t do it for me. Sex, fine; animals, fine; combining the two, ick.
• We forgot to buy a power converter; fortunately, the basement of BHV had them for sale. (They had one that went both directions, 110-to-220 and 220-110.)
• Traveling with several puzzle books from Nikoli was an excellent idea: not only are the puzzles top-notch, but the narrower-than-US form factor meant that I could slip one into my jeans pocket, which is very useful when walking through museums where I’ve had to check my backpack, finding myself a room or two ahead of Liesl and Miranda because we go through them at a different pace, and needing to amuse myself. I’m getting a bit burned out on Nurikabe (though I still think they’re an excellent puzzle variant), and Number Link isn’t my fave (once the puzzles get out of the easy range, I have a hard time proving my solution is unique, which frustrates me), but I’m still a big fan of Masyu and Slitherlink. I’ll have to try some of their other puzzle types.
• I really can dial down the number of books that I take on a trip these days: I have enough other entertainments that I don’t need to carry nearly as many to avoid running out of them. (And there are always bookstores if I guess wrong.)
• Heavy curtains are great for the first night or two after getting off the plane, but in retrospect I should have stopped closing them completely after that: I never really got my clock adjusted to Paris time. The flip side of which was that lying awake at night gave me lots of practice in going over my Joyo kanji…

Jordan, have you eaten there? If not, we should take you there the next time you’re in town. For locals, the new place is basically right across the street from the old place. (Same block, a few storefronts closer to the train tracks.)

The former were quite yummy, in a relatively uncomplicated way. The latter, though, were different in a somewhat interesting way, but not really what I wanted to snack on for dessert.

After a few weeks, though, it turns out that I was taking the wrong approach to the latter. You see, we keep the Trader Joe’s plastic containers of chocolate (as opposed to the bars of chocolate) in the shelf on the cabinet where the garlic lives. So whenever we cook a meal involving garlic (in other words, whenever we cook a meal), we temporarily put the chocolate on the counter. (Digression: have I mentioned here my notion that any food goes well with either chocolate or garlic? And a quiz for my readers, what foods go well with both?) At which point we, of course, snack on the chocolate.

Which works well with a wide range of chocolates (including the cocoa-covered almonds that started this all off; a great time for Milk Pail dutch mints, too!), but in particular the chocolate-sugar-salt covered almonds turn out to be just the thing to snack on while, say, preparing some sort of garlic-laden pasta dish. The salt is just the thing to tie the chocolate to the other aromas that are wafting through the kitchen, to balance against the other bits of ingredients that you’re nibbling on while cooking.

I’m still waiting to find the right time for their chocolate-covered crystallized ginger, though. I think it might actually work fine as a dessert for some people, I just don’t like crystallized ginger enough…

(Hmm, have I posted the recipe for ginger chicken from the Elephant Walk? I should do so. But does anybody read those recipe posts? Not that that normally stops me…)

• T tokens are no more. Which made me a little sad, but I was very happy that, when arriving Tuesday evening for a trip where we’d be leaving the next Tuesday morning and would spend three days outside of Boston, there was a week pass available that was a good value. And I now know that kids under 12 can ride for free, but didn’t know that when buying the passes…
• I was surprised that we got a good rate at the Park Plaza for a couple of days – is it normally affordable, or did we get lucky with a Tuesday/Wednesday request? Good location (though it took us a little while to find it, because we were confused by the construction at the Arlington T stop), and I could live without free internet access for two days. And an Amino set-top box on the TV – just like being at work!
• Hampton Inn has decent internet access at no extra charge. Though I was pretty annoyed at the fake nameserver at the Norwood one that sticks in an ad page if an address doesn’t resolve. Especially the one evening when, for whatever reason, a fair number of lookups were timing out, poisoning any future requests to those domains for the next 15 minutes or so. Not good if you’re reading blogs and can’t get to feedburner.com any more…
• I was impressed how we could get from downtown Boston to a turnpike entrance three short blocks away to out of town almost immediately. Especially since it doesn’t feel like there’s a turnpike cutting through downtown Boston, though I realize that I have walked on bridges over it several times.
• Sturbridge Village turned out to be a really good choice for a place to spend much of a day. Enough stuff to keep us interested, very low key, we got to see 1820′s welding technology in practice, Miranda liked it too.
• The suburbs that aren’t in the inner ring seem to kind of suck, at least near the arteries. I was not pleased with being stuck traveling at 5 miles an hour on 128 at 5pm, and route 1 in Norwood was not a place where I’d want to spend much time, if largely for aesthetic reasons.
• Got to see a couple more retirement communities. I’m glad these things are around. (Though I’m sure there are bad ones out there, too.)
• Didn’t get to see almost any friends or old haunts: we were too busy doing other stuff. Which is fine, actually: almost all of my Boston-area friends have moved away. I wish I’d had another day to just putter around places, but I can live with that.
• The MGA is still active. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it on a Tuesday or a Friday, so I didn’t get to see any of my old friends from the club, but you can get together a few people to play go on a Sunday at the Diesel Cafe. Which apparently opened about a year after I left the area; it’s a long narrow space (running all the way through the building from one street to the next), with good food and pleasant decor.
• That day, about 75 percent of the people in the cafe were using laptops, and about 20 percent of the people were reading the latest Harry Potter. (Which had come out the day before.)
• I enjoyed meeting blog reader Chris Ball in person (and other MGA members and Chris’s wife Madeleine), and we had a couple of exciting games – we turn out to be quite close in strength, conveniently! And I got to see the OLPC laptop in person, too.
• Harvard Square is doing okay; a few stores I like closed, one out-of-place building has appeared, but no wholesale destruction. Wordsworth’s has closed (though their children’s book store still exists, didn’t go in to see what it’s like these days); Harvard Book Store is still open. (I also didn’t go into the Coop to see what it’s like these days.) I’d be willing to believe that the square is declining, but I’d also be willing to believe that it’s at a steady state.
• And Schoenhof’s is still open. I broke my rule and bought several books that I don’t plan to read immediately, that indeed it’s not completely clear that I’ll ever read. But I was just so happy that the store is there! One book on learning kanji that I actually have started, a general Japanese grammar, and small individual books on verbs, particles, and connections (“Making your Japanese Flow”.)
• Grammar and verbs are pretty basic concepts, but I like the ideas of books on particles and connections. I was going to say that those seemed like “only for Japanese” sorts of things, but of course there’s The Greek Particles.
• We went to a couple of old favorite restaurants. The food at Chez Henri is still good, but the waitress we had drove me crazy. When I go out to eat, I do so for exactly two reasons: the food and the company of people I’m eating with. The waitress apparently thought that I had several other goals for the evening, prioritizing (among other things) her comedy routine above, say, getting us dessert menus. I am pleased to say, however, that the Elephant Walk still has both excellent food and excellent service. (Though it’s not that much better the food we make at home from their cookbook.)

Not sure when we’ll visit again, but I’m glad that we’ve managed to make it back every four years or so.

Anyways, we cooked this recipe tonight, as we do every month or two, it’s really easy and good (waiting for the water to come to a boil is the longest step), and I’m in the mood to food blog. So here we are again. We actually ate at the Procope restaurant when we were last in Paris; nothing like this recipe on the menu that time. Good food, though; not sure I’ll make a point of going back, but I’m happy to have gone.

One caution: this recipe leans heavily on oil-cured olives, and good oil-cured olives are hard to find. Actually, oil-cured olives in general are hard to find, unless you patronize high-end grocery stores; and many places that have them only have one kind, which may or may not be any good. So be warned: you may have to go through a bit of searching before finding some that you like. I suspect the recipe would be okay with, say, kalamatas, but I won’t guarantee it.

You don’t really need 1/2 pound of prosciutto, but we regularly use about 6 ounces when making this, and I’m sure the extra two ounces wouldn’t hurt. I’m not the biggest thyme fan; fresh thyme isn’t the sort of ingredient that we measure carefully, but I suspect that the amount I prefer is less than the 2 tsp called for below.

Pasta Procope, from Patricia Wells’ Bistro Cooking

1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
salt to taste
1/2 cup olive oil
8 oz prosciutto
1/2 cup oil-cured black olives, pitted
2 tsp freshly snipped thyme
grated zest of 2 lemons
black pepper to taste
1 pound thin pasta (capellini, angel hair, etc.)

Mix lemon juice, salt, olive oil in a small bowl. Combine everything else. (Except for the pasta, of course!) Cook the pasta, mix everything together.

And I played several games of go today at KGS. I’d only played one other game in the last two or so years (other than the recent games against Miranda), and I hadn’t played online in more than a decade. But I had several quite pleasant games, people were very nice, I didn’t mind the online aspect as much as I’d feared (though I would hope I wouldn’t have lost one of the games in such a boneheaded fashion on a real board, but who knows), and I now have an official rating there. Of 6k, while information elsewhere suggests that, based on my AGA rating of 1k, my KGS rating should be about 4k. So, with luck, I should be able to bump it up a couple of stones.

My joseki knowledge has largely flown out the window. I should probably remedy that, but so far it doesn’t seem like a big deal – my other competitors’ joseki have also been a bit off, and they probably wouldn’t know how to punish my mistakes even if they did have joseki memorized. I’ve been surprised at how well I’ve been doing in the openings of games: that’s my traditional weakness, and even though I’ve probably been sandbagging a little, I wouldn have expected to come out of the openings more or less even at best.

We are, alas, moving to the main Menlo Park office – no more horses and beautiful scenery around. But maybe I’ll be able to occasionally get games against real players over my lunch break. I should see if there’s some Sun Menlo Park social mailing list where I can ask about that.