By popular demand, I’ve decided to post my favorite salad dressing recipe, until this point a personal trade secret. I experimented over the last year or so to arrive at this mix, and the inspiration came from a number of various delicious dressings they have at http://casadeluz.org, probably my favorite restaurant in the world. There’s still a lot that could be done to spice it up, literally, by trying out different kinds of fresh spices. I’m just not quite crafty enough to go to the trouble.
You need a normal 64-oz blender. Just add all this stuff together, blend, and store. Keeps and remains delicious for many weeks.
Yesterday I had all kinds of trouble reading tab-delimited text I had used excel to clean up and reformat. I scoured the internet, and had no luck for a long time either googling this problem or reading about the readline() function in python—because I didn’t realize that the solution was to change how I was opening the file, not how I was using readline. Hence the rare technical solution post by yours truly.
This morning my iphone alarm for the first time went off an hour early. Pissed, I reset it in the clock app for the right time, thinking it was a one-off strange event, but nope, it didn’t go off at the right time at all and I slept in a couple hours more than I intended.
Some sleuthing online proved it to be an ios 4 bug that lots of new zealanders started having trouble with almost a month ago.
I was just reading bits of a book about Waldorf education I found lying around. I agree with them almost completely about what’s wrong with education, but not quite with how they set about to fix it. Why the complete focus on creation limited to self-expression and exclusion of creation of things of use and purpose? Writing software, for instance, that helps you organize your friends, or your life? Or otherwise making tools, and not just art?
The school’s guiding values are a life-long love of learning, creative thinking and self-confidence, a sympathetic interest in the world and the lives of others, and an abiding sense of moral purpose. By creating a school environment that balances academic, artistic, and practical disciplines, as well as providing daily opportunities for both group and individual learning, Austin Waldorf School cultivates the faculties that allow our students to develop thesequalities.
Learning in a Waldorf school is an imaginative, enlivening, and creative process. The common thread in every subject is the artistic element - art, music, drama, storytelling, poetry, and crafts are woven into the curriculum. Our students learn with more than their heads; they learn with their heads, hearts, and hands.
The above links to an awesome brief overview in Nature News of where we stand in reaching for that goal.
I like Davidson’s (of Caltech) summary best:
Biology is entering a period where the science can be underlaid by explanatory and predictive principles, rather than little bits of causality swimming in a sea of phenomenology.
Davidson has been using systems biology to work towards a pretty complete understanding of the developmental system of the sea urchin’s skeleton, which is pretty complex.
There are many in the article voicing the basic opinion that biology just gets more complicated the more you study it, and the more we learn the farther we seem from a complete understanding. My opinion is that we’re understanding more and more, and quickly progressing towards being able to significantly interfere with human diseases and alter our own biology in positive ways. When you set a bar like that, measuring progress actually becomes more tractable.
In particular, I especially love the bit from Schekman of Berkeley, who shares my views about there being 2 kinds of scientists regarding the kinds of predictions and prognostications they make:
I’ve seen enough scientists to know that some people are simplifiers and others are dividers.
I agree completely. Some just like for things to stay complicated, and resist accepting any simplifying explanations. These “dividers” (though that’s a bit of a harsh word) are in it for the exploration and the mystery and the thrill of discovery. Others, the “simplifiers”, think in terms of forward progress in gaining knowledge that we can put to use in solving problems. You can immediately tell most scientists’ bent by talking to them about some pretty poorly-understood issue in any field, like say how memories form at a neuronal level—some focus on what we know and are learning, others on what we don’t know and still seems “beyond us”.
I’ve been reading up on biology recently—molecular biology as it relates to cancer and aging, in particular. I haven’t shared much about it, because I was busy getting myself up to speed for quite a while. Today I came across an interesting aging article published a few months ago that I guess didn’t quite make it up to the mainstream press, so I thought I should share.
A group in Austria succeeded in extending the lifespan of yeast (both chronological and replicative), flies, worms, and some human lab cells with a new chemical, spermidine. It sounds like it’s the first one to work so widely after resveratrol and rapamycin, both widely reported in the media in the last couple of years. It extends lifespan around 10-20%, on the order of but in a bit different conditions than caloric restriction.
Taken from the writeup by Matt Kaeberlein (one of the top couple dozen aging folks I keep an eye on) in Nature Cell Bio News (the mainstream media if you’re a cell biologist): His summary:
Identifying therapies to slow down ageing and delay age-associated diseases is a primary goal of ageing-related research. Resveratrol and rapamycin were first found to promote longevity in yeast, and their effects were then extended to several organisms. Spermidine is a new longevity drug that can increase life span in yeast, nematodes and flies, possibly through an effect on chromatin-mediated regulation of gene expression.
His conclusion paragraph:
What is the potential relevance of this study for human ageing? Clearly, if spermidine is found to increase life span or health span in rodents, it will join rapamycin and resveratrol as a leading candidate for treating age-associ- ated diseases in people. Of these, rapamycin is currently the only one known to enhance mouse longevity, but there are concerns that rapamycin may be of limited therapeutic value due to detrimental side effects such as immunosuppression13. No such side effects are known for spermidine. In addition, sper- midine is a natural component of our diet, and several foods are known to be rich in spermi- dine, including soy beans, tea leaf, and mush- rooms. Evidence suggests that eating a diet rich in spermidine results in increased blood spermidine levels14. Thus, it could be relatively easy for most people to obtain the benefits of spermidine through dietary modifications or by supplementation. However, there may be a darker side to spermidine with respect to mammalian ageing: oxidation of polyamines causes oxidative stress that can induce cell death, and high levels of polyamines are asso- ciated with malignancy15. Indeed, chemical inhibitors of polyamine metabolism are being studied as potential anti-cancer agents15. Thus a better understanding of the mechanistic details that underlie the pro-longevity effects of spermidine in simple eukaryotes, as well as careful long-term studies of dietary sup- plementation with spermidine in mammals, are needed before such a strategy should be pursued in humans.
As always, if you ever want any articles I reference and you can’t get access, just ask and I’ll help.
A final note: It has not escaped this author’s attention that spermidine supplementation may get a big boost just from the ridiculous name of the chemical.
Through a combination of trickery, detective work, months of research and hours of enjoyable experimentation, I present
Baby Acapulco’s Purple Margaritas
8 oz tequila 4 oz everclear ** 1 oz blue curacao 5 oz creme de cassis 3 oz lime **
+ Half a bag of ice per batch. Makes about 6 drinks I’d say.
** For a stronger batch (the last couple we had), make it 6 oz everclear and 4 oz lime. Seriously, be careful with this. I’d recommend against it unless you’re committed to taxis and walking only. =)
All together that’s about 22 oz, which is around a third of a blender full. Keep blending in ice until you’ve got about 2/3 of a blender full. It’s also best if all the liquors are really cold, so keep them in the freezer. Then the ice stays frozen for a lot longer—otherwise making them actually frozen drinks is pretty tough.
Brought to you through the collective efforts of Jacob, Jimmy, Carlo, me, and the dozen or so willing participants at our recent taste testing experiment/birthday party.
[Edit Jan 3 2011: For this past New Year’s party I ran the blenders making purples for the second time ever, and, perhaps unsurprisingly in retrospect, found this recipe to be a little…overly potent, at least for the first drink. So I toned it down to 3 oz everclear and upped the cassis to 6oz, and it sweetened it up and smoothed it out just enough.]
For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew. In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.
Thomas W. Malone, director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence
