Six Ways

Blog

  • How Much Protein Is There In

    These are all from the British Heart Foundation article about how to get protein without the meat. The article decribes the amount of protein in a serving, so I converted the amounts to the protein in 100g of the food

    Baked beans 5g
    Chickpeas 7g
    Lentils 8g
    Tofu 8g
    Quinoa 5g
    Peanuts 25g
    Walnuts 13g
    Hazelnuts 13g
    Sunflower 19g
    Pumpkin 22g
    Wholegrain rice 4g
    Oats 10g
    Quorn 11g
    Cheddar cheese 29g
    Egg 12g
    Fish 19g

    The section that caught my eye is where it describes Quinoa, and says it is the seed of a green vegetable related to chard and spinach and that unlike cereals is has all the essential amino acids found in animal protein.

    So what does that mean for a person who does not eat quinoa? Where do they get those essential amino acides that are not found in cereals?

  • MarsEdit 5 Has Arrived

    When did I first start using MarsEdit to write blogs, and why did I even do it rather than post directly on the blog? As I recall, someone I knew from the Web recommended it and I thought is was a good idea because it meant I wouldn’t have to find the blog and start writing. Instead, I could just open the app and start writing. And then WordPress moved to Javascript and blocks, and then the degree of agreement in the way posts are written and how they appear when sent to the blog broke down.

    So now Red Sweater Software, which is just one person – Daniel Jalkut – has brought out a new version of MarsEdit and I am using it to write this post.

    You can read more about it here on his site under the titiel MarsEdit 5: Microposting, Markdown Highlighting, and More!

    I am using Mardown to format this post, and I can see the syntax highlighting on the link I just wrote, but I haven;’t figured out what microposting is, yet.

    So – as a careful reader might intuit, I am writing this as much as anything to test out MarsEdit 5, because i stopped using MarsEdit when WordPress went Block.

    OK, time to hit the go button.

    Update

    When I look at the post in the blog, I see it is writtin in the Classic Editor. If I change it on the blog, what will it do to the format recognition at this end?

    Further investigation needed.

    Enabling Markdown

    One more small gotcha is that in order for the blog to change Markdown to HTML formatting, the blog needs to be intstructed to recognise Markdown. That’s done in the WP Admin interface.

    To view the WP Admin interface,

    Go to Settings → Writing.
    Check the checkbox next to “Use Markdown for posts and pages.”
    Click Save Changes to activate Markdown on the site.

  • Teaching Advice


    Q: What’s the best teaching advice you’ve ever received?

    A: After you teach them, get the students to teach each other: It’s good for those teaching and it’s a whole different dynamic for those being taught.

  • Not Kurt Vonnegut’s Mind

    “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. One of the archeologists asked those kinds of ‘getting to know you’ questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, ‘No, I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes. And he went, ‘That’s amazing!’ And I said, ‘But I’m not good at any of them.’

    And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind: ‘I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.’

    And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could win’ at them.!’

    -Kurt Vonnegut

    Seen on Twitter.

    Did he really say it – perhaps so. Bizjournal thinks so and quotes a story in “Bits & Pieces,” that he spent a month working on an archaeological dig.

    But then in Wikiquote it is described as misattributed and gives a link to a website where one person quotes Vonnegut’s advice on writing, and someone else responds with the quote above. So it was never Vonnegut at all.

    But he did give advice on writing:

    Vonnegut’s Advice

    “Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

    I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

    What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

    Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

    Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

    Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

    God bless you all!

  • The Earliest Known Written Sentence

    From The Week 19 November 2022 p19


    The earliest known sentence 
    The Canaanite people are believed to have been the first to have used an alphabet. Now, researchers in Israel have for the first time identified and translated a sentence written in that script. Engraved on a 3,700-year-old ivory comb, it reads simply: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” The 3.5cm-long artefact was unearthed in 2017 at Lachish – a major Canaanite city in the Biblical kingdom of Judah – but it was only this year that the faint inscription was spotted.

    “The comb inscription is direct evidence for the use of the alphabet in daily activities some 3,700 years ago,” said Prof Yosef Garfinkel, who led the team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “This is a landmark in the history of the human ability to write.”

    In a design that is still in use today, the comb had two sides. On one, there were six thick teeth that would have been used to detangle hair; the other had 14 fine teeth, for the removal of lice and their eggs. Made of elephant ivory, it would have been a luxury item for a rich family; poorer people probably used combs made of wood. 

  • Food Poisoning Facts

    Reported in The Observer 16 October 2022 article by Jay Rayner

    According to a report from the Food Standards Agency, there were an estimated 2.4m cases of foodborne illness in the UK in 2018, 16,400 of which resulted in hospital admissions. Roughly 180 people died.