A Typical Weekend Mish-Mash

To my fans (family), I apologize for going over a whole week without posting. It was just one of those weeks, yah know. Work all day, then a few precious hours to unwind before bed, and I don’t want to spend them looking at a screen.

A lot has happened in that time … Last Monday (An Irish national Holiday weekend for halloween) we took a tour out to see Newgrange, a Megalithic Passage Tomb that is over 5000 years old — older than the Egyptian Pyramids. The doorway aligns so that once a year, during the dawn of each winter solstice, sunlight penetrates the darkness and illuminates the internal chamber. Otherwise, it is pitch dark inside. There are old megalithic ruins lying scattered all over Ireland. A co-worker shared with me a website, http://www.megalithomania.com/ with a database of all of the known sites, and GPS coordinates. Once I get my GPS I just might have to do some exploring and find some. It sounds more fun than geocaching…

In the news, we saw several interesting announcements and articles this week. The New York Times had a front pager on Calorie Restriction. I saw another mouse study with more evidence on CR’s preventative effects for Alzheimer’s Disease. As well, two more mouse studies bore results linking resveratrol and lowered body temperatures to longer lifespans. Resveratrol is found in red wine, and is linked to the same genetic pathways involved in the Caloric Restriction effect (sirtuins).

Don’t go crazy with the red wine just yet though. The dosage of resveratrol in a glass of wine is miniscule. Higher doses can be ordered in expensive pill forms, but the optimal dosage and long term safety in humans is as of yet undetermined. I suspect it will be a compound we’ll all be popping each morning in 5 or 10 years time, but it’s too early to tell.

I ate fairly well today with 1580 calories. I normally eat more than that, but Friday night Christine & I had a romantic gourmet dinner with a bottle of wine, so there was a caloric imbalance to correct. I did some grocery shopping and found what is considered Cottage Cheese. It’s nothing at all like the Cottage Cheese I’m used to. It’s far more sour and not nearly as chunky. It is not really all that tasty. I used to have 100g of cottage cheese as part of my quotidian lunches, as it’s a decent source of light protein along with a modest dose of B12 and calcium.

I worked a wee bit on CRON-o-Meter this weekend. It still doesn’t give DRI recommendations for calories or protein/carbs/fats. The reason I never hooked those up in the first place was that you need to know the person’s weight and activity level in addition to the gender, age, and height. I’ve been adding the UI to the user preferences so that it will be able to give full DRIs in the next version. Also, I will add a simple UI to pick your desired Protein:Carb:Fat ratios and have it calculate the appropriate targets based on your calorie setting.

And I think after getting this posted I’m going to do some reading. Proper reading. I’ve been so busy that I’m still reading the same novel I was reading on the plane trip to Dublin 2 months ago (Accelerando by Charles Stross). That’s outrageously slow for me. I normally chew through books, but I’ve just been too busy.