Tuesday is for Technical Difficulties. And Twitter. 1 November 2011 3:28 pm
Posted by Tracy in : cross-posting,events,food safety,food snobbery,geekery,hot mess,Michael Pollan,random,Twitter Tuesday,whoops,writing , add a commentWell, readers, I’m sorry to report that my NaBloPoMo effort is off to a very frustrating beginning, as the Tumblr I created and registered for the event seems to be a nonstarter—I haven’t been able to confirm my registration with BlogHer and on top of that Tumblr doesn’t support fun and easy imports from other sites anymore, so I’m going to have to cross-post by hand for the time being. Whine, whine, whine.
But enough of that, on with Twitter Tuesday. Like the name suggests, my thought here is to aggregate various and sundry amusing tweets that catch my eye over the course of any given arbitrary period of time (since I can’t keep up with them, it pretty much has to be a quasi-random sampling, that’s for sure). (more…)
Random old news of awesomeness. 2 February 2010 5:50 pm
Posted by Tracy in : diet stress is a health hazard,eating,geekery,Harold McGee,health,health at every size,nutrition,pictures,random,reading,science,weird,whoops , add a commentSometimes it’s especially good to celebrate good things, and today’s post is dedicated to just that. I am supposed to be reading about the role of women in the invention of food science during MIT’s early years, which makes thinking good thoughts all the more important. Sample bit o’grumpy-making:
In his autobiography… Ellen [Henrietta Swallow Richards]‘s husband, Robert H. Richards, stated that “Ellen Swallow wanted a Doctor’s Degree, but although she worked hard for two years, she had to give up the idea. This was probably one of her greatest disappointments in life. It seems to me possible that some of the difficulties may have arisen from the fact that the heads of the department did not wish a woman to receive the first D.S. in chemistry.”
—Richards, R.S., His Mark, cited in Goldblith, S.A., Of Microbes and Molecules: Food Technology, Nutrition, and Applied Biology at M.I.T., 1873-1988, pp. 20-1
Graaaar! (Also, way to write about your partner like she’s a stranger, dude.) As far as I can tell, Ellen H. Swallow Richards was a stupendous badass and entirely too awesome for the jerks at MIT who wouldn’t admit her to the faculty (she was the Institute’s first female student—a Special Student category seems to have been made up entirely for her—and the first female member of its Instructing Staff), let alone let her complete a Ph.D. Also, if I read one more “Ms. X married Prof. Y, so he was probably her thesis advisor,” I may have to go into hysterics or something. Sigh. Hence my need to write about some good news!
Most of the stuff in this post isn’t particularly new, because I’ve been behind on all kinds of news for basically a year now, but if you’re like me, and have trouble keeping up with stuff, or just want to read about stuff that’s happy once in a while, then you’re in luck. Geekery ahoy! (more…)
Belated Monkey Monday: winter solstice 2009 edition. 22 December 2009 1:48 am
Posted by Tracy in : geekery,health,health at every size,monkeys,politics,random,school,seasonality,sustainability,whoops,writing , 2 commentsSo I know tonight is officially the longest of the year, but I’m also subjectively sure that my longest night of 2009 was last Thursday, when I finally came up with a way to organize my sociology paper into a more-or-less coherent whole. That was at 11 PM, and of course it took a few more hours for the writing to really start to gel. Whee. I ran into a spot of technical difficulties at 2:40 PM the next day, when I had settled on a conclusion and all that was left was cleaning up, cutting the big block quotations down to size, and so on… Google Docs sent me the error message that it couldn’t save my changes, and I noticed it hadn’t been able to do so since 2:15 PM. Eeks. I’m still not sure what caused the choke-up, but I managed to work around it by opening the most recently saved version of the paper in a different web browser, and rescuing the last few paragraphs into it by cut and paste, but the confusion did cost me a bunch of editing. So the final mess ended up way longer than intended, and I may yet revise it to satisfy my obsessive-compulsive superpower, but not today. Today is for the policy portfolio, which I had hoped to have turned in by now, but self-imposed deadlines be danged, sleep is more important.
Here’s my one-page summary of the issue, the stakeholders, and my strategy about what I think should be done about it. Can you dig it? (more…)
The weird, wild world of childhood obesity statistics. 18 November 2009 5:48 pm
Posted by Tracy in : geekery,health,health at every size,news,politics,school,society,weird,whoops , 1 comment so farSo I knew I was going to have trouble with the reading for next week’s Food Sociology class when on the very first page I read the statement:
“We suffer from widespread obesity, particularly among children…”
Karl Weber, preface to Food, Inc.: How Industrial Food Is Making us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer — And What You Can Do About It (New York: Public Affairs, 2009).
Oh, really? Last time I checked, I thought rates were way higher in adults than in kids…. oh, sure enough. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, “Results from the 2005-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), using measured heights and weights, indicate that an estimated 32.7 percent of U.S. adults 20 years and older are overweight, 34.3 percent are obese and 5.9 percent are extremely obese….” That’s with your standard BMI >24.9 kg/m2 for overweight, BMI > 30 kg/m2 for obese, and BMI > 40 kg/m2 for extremely obese, and it’s a grand total of 72.9 percent of the adult population weighing in (har, har) as overweight or obese. Compare that to the CDC on childhood overweight and obesity, which says, “The most recent NHANES data (2003–2006) showed that for children aged 6 –11 years and 12–19 years, the prevalence of overweight (BMI ≥85th percentile) was 33.3% and 34.1% respectively.”
Holy cats! Adulthood makes you fat!
Ok, but seriously. First of all, at first glance those kid numbers don’t look nearly as bad as the numbers for adults. But wait — how the hell can 33.3% or 34.1% of a population be at or above the 85th BMI percentile? What in the name of monkeys does that even mean? (more…)
Monkey Monday: mysteries and more. 12 October 2009 12:16 pm
Posted by Tracy in : books,eating,friends,monkeys,nyc,politics,random,restaurants,reviews,weird,whoops , add a commentThe Vegan Brunch saga just took a turn for the weirder, party people. Saturday’s mail was a sad package with a pre-printed note from the U.S. Postmaster, apologizing for the inconvenience and the delay and so on and so forth.
Inside the package was a British Royal Mail envelope redly stamped “RECEIVED WITHOUT CONTENTS.” The customs form showed that the package was sent as a gift by the fantastic Megan H., the mastermind who pointed me to Cathy’s Vegan Brunch giveaway back in May. Here’s my post about getting lucky in that and one other contest, and here’s my late August whining about how the book hadn’t yet arrived. Pout, pout, pout… as I emailed Megan earlier today, it’s like the universe is punishing me for cheating the contest or something. So weird. (more…)
