The number 54

I don’t know how it came up, but yesterday at the dojo one of the women in class was saying, “I’m the oldest person who comes here.” “Really?” said Sensei Nolan, “Are you sure?” “Yes.” “How old are you?” “53″. And I said, “Um… 54.”

I’m pretty sure in fact I am the oldest student at the DeWitt dojo. There’s a cluster of us early-fifties, though — at least four of us, maybe more, and I think one of the white belts is 49. A while back there was a white belt in her sixties, but she didn’t last long.

It’s a little disconcerting, sometimes, training alongside (and sparring across from) kids a half, a third, in some cases hardly more than a quarter my age. Even the senseis are way younger — in fact one of them turns 30 on Monday. Then again, I do what the other students do with rarely the necessity to reduce or modify the workout; there are much younger students who have a harder time than I do with sit-ups and medicine ball tosses.

The possibility of being the oldest student bothered me a little when I first signed up, which just goes to show you can be as old as I am and still be somewhat stupid. There’s a cliché that says “age is just a number”. Like so many clichés, including “it’s a cliché but it’s true”, it’s a cliché but it’s true. Kind of.

Shortly before I started training I read a news story about an 88 year old man who was making his stage ballet debut with a community troupe. Sports Illustrated had last year an article (posted in our dojo) about Arthur Webb, who has run in twelve consecutive Badwater Ultramarathons, a 135-mile race through Death Valley, consistently finishing in under 48 hours and once coming in fourth; he’s 67 years old. Recently I learned about Bill Tapia, a guitar and ukulele player, who performs regularly and last year did a tour in Japan, at age 101. (He remembers playing for the troops going off to World War I.) These guys are extraordinary, and despite what certain motivational speakers may try to sell you, they don’t prove you can do anything if you put your mind to it. They do prove there’s no such thing as “too old”.

Look, obviously there’s a statistical correlation between aging (beyond a certain amount) and decrepitude. A randomly chosen 20 year old is more likely to be capable of earning a black belt than a randomly chosen 80 year old. But I’m not a statistic (there’s another cliché for you), and the question is not, Am I too old? but Am I, and Deb, and Mark, and Ivan, too far gone? And so far as I can tell the answer is, no, we’re not.

Losing

I’m down about 6 pounds of the 15 or so I want to lose, and I’m pretty confident I’ll get there. Keeping it off will be another challenge, of course, but I think I can do that too.

In the course of getting this far I’ve learned a lot and expect to learn more. I have a better (read: not-virtually-zero) understanding of how basic nutrition works; I’m much more aware of nutritional values of a lot of foods; I realize what was off kilter in my food intake until now; and I’ve learned some pleasant ways to get more balance in my diet.

I’m relying on four books. I went into B&N, and looked on amazon.com, and ended up buying a copy of The Diet Docs’^® Guide to Permanent Weight Loss by Joe Klemczewski and J. Scott Uloth. This is a quite recent book, so doesn’t have many reviews on amazon — but given my reaction to several of the books that have gotten a lot of positive reviews, that may not mean much. I bought it because my initial look at it, and the comments in the few reviews there were, convinced me — and cover to cover reading confirmed — it was the kind of book I wanted: no-nonsense, real science based, sensible nutrition advice. In a nutshell their program is: eat a good balance of carb, protein, and fat, in appropriate quantities to lose weight. Not exactly profound, is it? Well, compared to a lot of fad diets it certainly is. Furthermore they discuss the physiological reasons for keeping this balance (and not, say, reducing carbs to a minimum while letting protein and fat slide) and for such well-known ideas as not skipping meals and emphasizing whole grains and complex carbohydrates as opposed to white flour and refined sugar. I find having this understanding of physiology is helpful in motivating me to follow the advice. So is paying attention to macronutrient levels (it has how much fat?!)

The one thing that I found rather surprising, initially, was their protein recommendations. It didn’t take more than a day of tracking my eating to realize I’d been eating almost certainly less than what the US says is a daily minimum, while what Klemczewski and Uloth recommend is substantially more. (And then I was surprised at how little consensus there seems to be on ideal levels of protein intake.) In fact I’m finding it a challenge to get enough protein — without, of course, getting too much of everything else.

As for those other macronutrients, I think I was already doing fairly well at keeping fat intake fairly low. I put skim milk on my cereal, and I eat red meat but less of it than many people. Carbohydrates, on the other hand, I was probably eating way too much of — especially for snacks, and I did tend to reach for the pretzels or popcorn or chocolate in the evenings, not out of real hunger but more out of habit.

I dropped about 5 pounds in the first week. As I understand it, when dietary intake isn’t sufficient to maintain metabolism, the body starts using stored glycogen as well as body fat. Glycogen holds water, so you shed water when you use glycogen; that means the first week’s weight loss is a combination of fat loss and water loss. After the first week it’s mostly fat loss. At least that’s how it’s supposed to go on Klemczewski and Uloth’s plan: typically 5 pounds or so the first week, and after that 1 to 3 pounds a week, what they call a good safe rate of weight loss. Nearing the end of my second week, it seems I’m perhaps on the low end of that, so I may need to adjust my carb and fat targets down a little.

I mentioned there were four books. The other three are:

• Dana Carpender’s New Carb & Calorie Counter. This one’s aimed at low-carb diet adherents, but it does list calories and grams of fat and protein, and the format seemed the best to me of the various nutrient counting guides.
• A Moleskine notebook. There’s a whole Moleskine cult I’ve never managed to understand, but when I decided I needed a notebook to keep track of every meal and snack I eat, I bought a Moleskine. And it is a nice notebook, with a ribbon marker and an elastic closure and a pocket for storing loose papers. I’m being obsessive about tallying the macronutrients of everything I eat — and usually measuring what I eat rather than guessing — because I know if I start letting it slide, it’ll get away from me.
• And finally — our MacBook Pro! (Haw haw!) Keeping daily spreadsheets that add up what I’m eating — I also made a place to note my weight and another to mark how much exercise I’m getting, and, totally off the subject, how often I play music — and weekly summary spreadsheets. I also made a handy spreadsheet to calculate nutrients in a serving of a recipe based on values for its various ingredients. I have not started drawing bar graphs yet, but give me time.

I’ve also made some new friends. Like almonds. High in fat, but it’s good, unsaturated fat — you need the essential fatty acids to metabolize body fat, it turns out — and also a good protein source, low carb. And egg whites: I kind of hate paying for organic eggs and then discarding the yolks, but the yolks are where the saturated fat is. Turkey burgers and turkey sausages. Protein shakes. I’ll find others as I go.

Danse

A year and a half ago (really? wow) Neil Gaiman wrote, regarding the audio book version of The Graveyard Book:

We started talking about what kind of music we’d like on it. “The Saint Saens Danse Macabre,” I said, “…as long as it isn’t a version we’ve heard before.”

By which I meant not a standard orchestral version, or a piano version. Not the Jonathan Creek version either. We started talking about takes on the Danse Macabre that might be odd and interesting, how we should go and find … the Danse Macabre arranged for banjo and clarinet… and about how hard it would be to find versions like that.

Apparently a few days later, Bela Fleck called up. When the audio book came out, it had snippets of Danse Macabre arranged for banjo and cello, played by Fleck and Ben Sollee. How cool is that?

And as of yesterday the whole piece is available on iTunes. It’s wonderful.

Web pages

I’m trying out the idea of moving my web pages from their present location at doctroid.net to this site. (See the Pages tab above, if I haven’t changed the blog theme since writing this, or http://doctroid.wordpress.com/pages/.) In the process of moving them I’ve ditched some stuff that seemed like a good idea when I compiled it but which I’d rather not maintain any more. I’m not fully certain I’m going to go with this move but it seems likely. I think the doctroid.net hosting expires sometime this summer, so if it goes away it won’t be until then. I’ll try to remember to give another heads up a decent amount of time before it happens, assuming it does, but who knows if I actually will…

Goals 2010

Posting my goals and progress reports this year as friends-only notes on FB. The blog’s a little too public.

Haiti

Move your money

This could well be one of the most important web sites you’ll visit this year: http://moveyourmoney.info/ .

The big banks brought the present financial ruination upon us with their arrogance and callous disregard. Of course they couldn’t have done it without their symbiotes in Washington. But getting rid of a congresscritter who’s in bed with Citigroup may be difficult. Getting your money away from big banks is potentially easier.

In an earlier message on Facebook I said our family’s money was already moved, ten years ago, into a credit union. Myopic of me; that’s where our bank accounts are, but our credit cards are mostly with Chase (they started in several other banks, which one by one Chase swallowed). It may be time to see about moving our credit cards to smaller institutions.

I don’t think of this in religious terms, but I’m impressed by this piece by Paul Raushenbush, who does.

Money’s worth

Here’s an interesting chart.

There’s a profound flaw in it, of course, which is that longevity is not a good measure of health care quality. There are too many other factors: genetics, violence, and accident rates to name a few. (Then there’s lifestyle, but that’s more controllable, and the health care system can and ought to have some influence on that.) Nor is longevity the only outcome of interest. Quality of life is at least as important.

So the fact that longevity in South Korea is a few percent higher than in the US isn’t particularly significant. The fact that per capita health care costs in South Korea are four times less than in the US is, though. It’s the left side of the chart I find alarming, not the right. Even Switzerland pays only a little over half what we do.

What do we get for our 300% higher costs that South Korea doesn’t? The difference in longevity isn’t significant; the insignificance of the difference is significant. All that money isn’t buying us longer lives. Nor is it paying for more doctor visits. What does it buy us?

The accompanying comment here (which actually is the source of the chart, though they present it stupidly, hence the link above to FDL) suggests “The U.S. has a fee-for-service system—paying medical providers piecemeal for appointments, surgery, and the like. That can lead to unneeded treatment that doesn’t reliably improve a patient’s health.” I’d tend to put it this way: the US for-profit health care system provides both a carrot and a stick to increase costs. Carrot: More tests and procedures mean more profit for the health care provider — and then the insurance industry takes its cut too. Stick: Our litigious society punishes doctors with financial ruin if they make a mistake. The result is huge incentive to prescribe tests and procedures that do not significantly improve prognoses.

Stats

I rarely look at my blog stats, but I did today. In a near tie for all time most-viewed post are:

random link propagation (which is about alternate lyrics to Carmina Burana)

and

Generalized continued fractions and equal temperament

If anyone had asked me to predict these I’d've failed miserably. I do note, though, that John Baez’s “This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics” mentioned the continued fractions post last September.

The top four search terms leading to my blog:

Search	Views
you have five pirates, ranked from 5 to	83
second these so rude big knees	45
you have five pirates, ranked from 5 to	36
hot temperate cheese	26

Does anyone see a difference between the first and third? The second and fourth are from the Carmina Burana lyrics, so someone was searching for them.

Three day vanilla

Great moments in my ice cream career:

• ca. 1956: I try ice cream. I approve.
• 1987: I have a memorable ice cream cone in Rome, Italy. Italians being what they are, just buying it is an adventure: First we have to stand in line to buy a ticket. Then we have to take the ticket over to the actual ice cream counter and stand there in a mob, waving our tickets and yelling “Vaniglia! Vaniglia!” until we get served. But it was worth it.
• 1995: Heather and I receive as wedding presents two ice cream makers (one big, one little) and start making recipes from the Ben & Jerry’s cookbook.
• 2004: In a restaurant in Grenoble, France I have the best vanilla ice cream of my life. Anyone who uses the phrase “plain vanilla” has clearly never had this. Nothing plain about it.
• 2009: I try a vanilla ice cream recipe from Ann Hodgman’s Beat This — twice.  Heather is enthusiastic but I’m dissatisfied with the texture. Maybe I just did it wrong.
• 2009: I try another vanilla recipe from Michael Recchiuti & Fran Gage, Chocolate Obsession, a book Kenny gave Heather for Christmas. Not everything in the book is strictly chocolate related, and there are several ice cream recipes. (Burnt Caramel, Columbian Chocolate Malt, Meyer Lemon – Buttermilk, Roasted Banana, Cocoa Nib, and Vanilla.) Results are excellent, the closest I’ve come yet to the Grenoble experience. My new favorite recipe:

Day 1: Combine 1 1/4 cups milk, 1/3 cup sugar. Split 1/2 vanilla bean, scrape seeds into milk, add bean. Bring to boil. Cover w/ plastic wrap & leave in fridge overnight.

Day 2: Strain milk. Bring to simmer. Beat 6 eggs yolks and 1/3 cup sugar at med high speed with whisk attachment for 3-5 minutes. With mixer on low add milk & beat until combined. Cook mixture over med heat to 160F. Strain. Add 1 1/2 cups cream. Cover, refrigerate overnight.

Day 3: Churn that sucker in your ice cream maker.

That was condensed & paraphrased a bit. They do say you can steep the vanilla for only 1 hour at room temp but overnight in fridge is better.