LA Times registration policy

I registered for the electronic edition of the LA Times ages ago, and have their login stored as a cookie. Thus it was a bit odd to find the LA Times asking me for a login after I'd reached one of their articles via a Google search, especially since my old login didn't work.

Even more baffling was that even after creating a new login and logging in, the LA Times still didn't show me the article I was looking for, instead they just gave me an error message saying that the article couldn't be found. This seems like the essence of sleazy web design: forcing a user to register before telling them that the content they're looking for doesn't exist.

Here's an example of what they're doing to some of their new users:

Let's say a user is looking for information on the recent California budget. The user googles for articles on the 2005 California budget in the LA Times, and finds a few articles of interest.
Some of the articles, such as this Jan. 6, 2005 article detailing how the governor is reneging on his promise to fund education properly, are freely available without registration (the LA Times does have some taste, I will admit). No problem here.

However, some of the articles, such as an interesting-looking article from Feb. 8 talking about the GOP and the state budget (the second purple link in the image above), bring the user to a page asking them to register:


Assuming the user doesn't have a login, they have to go through the LA Times's full registration process, which asks for the following information:


After the user has confirmed their e-mail (by following a link the LA Times sends them) and logged in, the LA Times boots the user to the Times's homepage, which is useless if the user is trying to get to the article they had googled for. Now that the user has logged in, following the Google search link gets them the following screen:


So, the LA Times forced the user to hand over lots of (very accurate, I'm sure) personal information, and never once bothered to tell the user that the page they were looking for wasn't available anymore.

Debian troubleshooting - shutdown problems and a static IP

It turns out that I missed one problem caused by my upgrade to Debian's testing (3.1) release when I wrote my prior post on the upgrade: on shutdown my machine froze after printing the line "Deconfiguring network interfaces". This meant that I had to do a hard power-down every time I wanted to restart the machine, causing mandatory disk checks on startup. Even though one of the benefits of Linux is that the machine hardly ever needs to be rebooted, this was still annoying, so I set about trying to solve the problem.

Unfortunately, the system log daemon terminated before the system lock was occurring, so there was no log of the freeze. Thus, my first step in diagnosing the problem was to add "-v" to the ifdown command in the /etc/init.d/networking file on the line after the "deconfiguring network interfaces" echo command (causing the ifdown command to print verbose output). After shutting down in a terminal window, I discovered that the machine was freezing after printing the lines "run -ports /etc/network/if-down.d" and "pump -i eth0 -r". I looked all over, and got help on the Debian IRC channel, but couldn't find what would cause Debian to freeze after this pump line.

I then found this message on an e-mail list describing a nearly identical problem. The message's suggested hack was to try deleting the components of the /etc/network/ifstate file before shutting down. I tried this, it worked, and thus I did as they suggested and added the line "echo -n > /etc/network/ifstate" to the /etc/init.d/networking file just before the ifdown command that was being run on shutdown. After making the change the system rebooted multiple times without a hitch.

A few days after enacting this workaround I decided to look into pump to see if it could use a static IP, and realized that since I was behind a router I likely didn't need pump (or any dhcp service) at all. To get rid of the dhcp service I removed the "iface eth0 inet dhcp" line from the /etc/network/interfaces file and replaced it with "iface eth0 inet static", following it with configuration options to use a static IP I knew was available on my home network (192.168.0.x); the man/info page for "interfaces" lists the various options. Since I already had pump running, I was able to use "pump -s" (which gives the status of pump's connection) to discover the proper settings.

After configuring the static IP address and restarting the network, I was able to remove the line I'd added to the /etc/init.d/networking file, and the system rebooted without problem.

Crepes with a savory chicken and cheese sauce filling

This week has been a good one for food here at Rhosgobel; chocolate tortes, truffles, jambalaya, and crepes were all on the menu. My SO hasn't divulged the recipe for the truffles yet, so this week's end-of-the-week recipe blogging post will feature the crepes.

I first learned about crepes in a junior high school class called "Introduction to Languages." The class covered Japanese, French, Spanish, and German (if I remember correctly), and during the French unit we watched a video on French food that featured a recipe for crepes. I scribbled the recipe down, made it at home with my folks soon afterwards, and have been making variants on it ever since.

The recipe I now use for the crepes is modified from Joy of Cooking, and the chicken filling I include below is a modified version of the one I learned about way back in junior high. The chicken sauce is nothing fancy, but both my SO and I agree that it makes a great savory filling for the crepes.

Included below are recipes for the crepes and the chicken filling, along with detailed cooking instructions for the crepes.

Crepe batter:
1 cup flour
1 cup milk
1/2 cup water
4 large eggs
1/4 cup (4 tablespoons) butter, melted
1 teaspoon sugar
Pinch salt

Filling:
1 pound chicken (we use boneless skinless thighs)
6 tablespoons butter
6 tablespoons flour
3 cups milk
Salt and pepper (~1/4 teaspoon each), plus some salt to sprinkle on the chicken
2 cups grated cheddar cheese

To make the crepe batter:
1) Add all the ingredients for the crepe batter to a blender or food processor and blend or process until smooth, scraping down the sides as necessary.
2) Refrigerate the mixture for at least 30 minutes before cooking.

To make the filling:
1) Bake your chicken as appropriate for the cut you have on hand. We typically use frozen boneless, skinless thighs, and bake them according to the package directions (30-35 minutes from frozen at 400F, covered with foil for the first 20 minutes). I like to sprinkle the chicken with a little salt before it cooks.
2) Once the chicken is cool enough to handle, cut it into small cubes (approximately 1 cm^3).
3) Make a white sauce with the butter, flour, and milk, using your own method or following the directions in steps 3a, 3b, and 3c.
3a) Melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, then add the flour and stir until it forms a paste-like consistency.
3b) Cook the flour-butter paste over medium-high heat for a few minutes, until it smells a bit nutty and gets a bit browner (but doesn't burn).
3c) Add the milk in several small increments, stirring constantly and not adding more milk until the milk from the prior addition has been fully incorporated. At the end of this you should have a thick, creamy sauce; if you want the sauce to be thicker, let it simmer for a bit. One of the fun things to observe is that the butter and flour mixture should actually get thicker after adding your first bit of milk, not thinner.
4) Add the chicken, grated cheese, salt, and pepper to the white sauce, mix until the cheese is melted, and check the salt level. Maintain over low heat until ready to serve.

To cook the crepes:
Cooking crepes takes a bit of practice, so don't worry if your crepes don't look like a professional chef's on the first try; what's more important is that they taste good, aren't burned, and can be filled with tasty fillings.
0) Get out your supplies and arrange them around the stove. You'll need a pan, the crepe batter, a measuring device for the batter (a 1/8 or 1/4 cup measurer works well), a spatula to flip the crepes with, a plate to put the crepes on once they're cooked, and a paper towel or two to clean up the inevitable drips of crepe batter.
1) Heat a small to medium non-stick pan over medium or medium-high heat, adding a little butter or oil to the pan before cooking the first crepe.
2) When the pan is warm, add about 2 tablespoons (1/8 cup; half of a 1/4 cup measurer) of crepe batter to the pan, then rotate the pan to distribute the batter into a circle. To do this I have the crepe batter on my left, and my pan on the stove to my right; I hold the crepe pan in the air with my right hand while simultaneously pouring the batter into the pan from the 1/8 cup measurer in my left hand. Then I swirl the pan using primarily my right wrist and put the pan back on the heat to cook. All combined, this step should take only a few seconds.
3) Once the top of the crepe is no longer liquid and shiny, flip the crepe with a spatula; the crepe should be nicely browned on the first side. I find it often helps to slide the edge of the spatula under the edge of the crepe around its entire circumference before attempting to flip the crepe.
4) Once the second side is lightly browned, slide the crepe out of the pan onto a waiting plate. Look the crepe over to see how it turned out, and adjust the cooking time and the stove's heat level based on this inspection (e.g. if they're browning too quickly, turn the heat down). I have an electric stove with only a few heat settings, so I often find myself switching between two heat levels on the stove to maintain the optimum cooking temperature.
5) Continue cooking (steps 2-4) until you've made as many crepes as you want.
6) Bring the cooked crepes and the sauce to the table, and let everyone fill their crepes as they desire. Having preheated plates can be nice, as the crepes are thin and cool quickly.

When I cook the crepes I use two pans simultaneously, to help speed up the process, but I'd recommend sticking with just one pan until you have the technique down.

These crepes are good with both savory fillings (like the one above) and sweet fillings (e.g. jams or preserves); we'll often finish our meal by having a few crepes with a jam filling. If you want to fill the crepes with only sweet fillings, you can make sweet crepes by increasing the sugar and decreasing the salt in the crepe batter.

This recipe makes enough crepes and filling for my SO and I to have two full meals. We'll commonly cook up about half the crepe mixture the day we make the dish, and then save the rest of the batter to cook the next day.

Who says scientists read only science books?

PZ Myers posted this, via ProfGrrrrl:

1. Grab the nearest book.
   
2. Open the book to page 123.
   
3. Find the fifth sentence.
   
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
   
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

I'm on my Linux box, and the closest book is actually a graphic novel: Cardcaptor Sakura: Master of the Clow, Volume 3.

"He's very kind to her."

And that was the last sentence on the page, too. Of course, a lot of the page is taken up by art, primarily Tomoyo and cherry blossoms. For those who know the series, Tomoyo is talking to Syaoran about whether Eriol likes Sakura (sheesh, when I put it that way it sounds like a soap opera).

Why I hate brick and mortar stores

My SO and I were planning to tile our bathroom floor this holiday weekend. There's a cold joint in the concrete floor we're going to be tiling, so we need a crack isolation membrane to go under the tile. Through discussions on a message board we've discovered a highly recommended crack isolation membrane (Schluter Ditra), which we planned to purchase this weekend from one of the many local dealers the manufacturer listed on their website.

So, yesterday I called a number of the local dealers to see if they had the membrane in stock. Most stores either didn't have the membrane, didn't know what I was asking for, or stocked it in 100-foot rolls (we need about 10 feet). I finally found one store that sold the membrane by the foot, but it was closing shortly after I called so I couldn't pick it up until today. The Ditra membrane also requires a waterproofing strip (Schluter Kerdi-band) that covers the joints between the Ditra sheets, but the store that sold the Ditra didn't sell the Kerdi-band, so I had to continue calling around until I finally found a store that had a 100-foot roll of that in stock (nobody sold Kerdi-band by the foot).

Most of the stores closed by noon today, so I got up early and headed out to the two stores in the rain. The closest store on my outing sold only the Kerdi-band, and I was able to get that without incident. The second store was significantly further away; when I finally arrived, I had the following interaction with the young woman busily playing solitaire behind the desk:

Me: "Hi. I'd like to get 12 feet of the Schluter Ditra membrane."
Unhelpful clerk: "What company are you with?"
Me: "None."
Unhelpful clerk: "Are you a contractor?"
Me: "Nope. Just working on my bathroom."
Unhelpful clerk: "We don't sell to the public. You'll have to go somewhere else."
Me: "I only need 12 feet of this, and you're the only nearby store that sells it by the foot."
Unhelpful clerk: "We only sell to contractors and companies. You'll have to find someone who can buy it through us. Try calling a few places."
Me: Growl.

Nobody from this company had bothered to mention that they didn't sell to the public when I called them yesterday.

There was one other store in the area that sold the Ditra membrane by the foot (even further away, and more expensive), so I drove home and gave them a call to check that they still had it in stock (which they had confirmed yesterday) and get directions. Today, however, it was a different story. The employee I talked to said that they were out of stock, they didn't know when they'd be getting more stock in, and, to add insult to injury, they quoted me an even higher per-foot price than they'd given me yesterday. Oh yes, and they close at 3pm and won't be open until Monday.

A quick search online has found two stores (TileExperts and InstallerTools) and one eBay seller who are happy to sell Ditra by the foot to the public (and in rolls shorter than 100 feet). All the stores are quite conveniently open right now, tell me the exact price they're going to be charging, and will likely be more than happy to take my money. They're also cheaper than any of the local brick and mortar stores for the amount I need, including shipping.

I think I'll go place an order right now.

Skeptics' Circle #2

The second Skeptics' Circle is now online at Respectful Insolence / Orac Knows. It's written in a great style, is filled with neat articles, and yours truly even plays a part in the post.

I will be hosting the third Skeptics' Circle here at Rhosgobel in two weeks. Submissions are welcome anytime until the evening of Wednesday, March 2.

The anti-juice campaign?

OK, this is ridiculous. In less than a week, CNN has featured not one, but two articles bashing fruit juice for children. The first CNN article focused on a recent journal article, and I've already described how deceptive that report was. The second article, "Doctors say kids should lay off juice", doesn't focus on any particular studies, but instead uses quotes from three doctors to show how awful juice is for children. The introduction of this recent article is just about as good as the introduction to their first article:

"Soda in a sippy cup?

"Most parents wouldn't dream of it. But researchers say that when a baby's bottle or cup is filled with juice -- even the 100 percent, all-natural, no-sugar-added stuff -- parents might as well be pouring Pepsi."

This is at best sensationalist, and at worst completely inaccurate. Those who've read my recent review of Welsh et al.'s paper (2004; the subject of the first CNN article) know that the study found differences between juice and other sweet drinks, and didn't even show that sweet drinks were bad for all children.

More specifically, Welsh et al. found that children's consumption of any sweet drinks (soda, juice, Kool Aid, etc.) was related to the likelihood of overweight and at-risk-of-overweight children remaining or becoming overweight, but was not associated with normal-weight or underweight children becoming overweight. When Welsh et al. looked at just 100% juice consumption, they found no statistically significant associations between children's weight and juice consumption for any weight class of child. So, not only is there not a strong link between sweet drinks and weight gain (normal-weight children didn't demonstrably gain weight), but the study also shows that there is some quantifiable difference between juice and other sweet drinks. Thus, pouring a glass of juice is not the same thing as pouring a glass of Pepsi.

The article only gets worse:

"'All of these beverages are largely the same. They are 100 percent sugar,' Dr. David Ludwig, an expert on pediatric obesity at Children's Hospital Boston, said recently. 'Juice is only minimally better than soda.'

"The trouble is that parents who are quick to limit a child's soft drink consumption often overlook or even encourage juice indulgence thanks to the beverage's good-for-you image.

"But that image can be overstated. Though healthy in moderation, juice essentially is water and sugar. In fact, a 12-ounce bottle of grape soda has 159 calories. The same amount of unsweetened grape juice packs 228 calories."

There are a number of problems with the statements above; I'll go through them one at a time.

1) Grape juice is not 100% sugar. In fact, its macronutrient breakdown is 96% carbohydrate (including 0.3 g of fiber in an 8oz serving), 3% protein, and 1% fat, though actually a glass of grape juice is mostly water (~84%). Grape soda's macronutrient breakdown, on the other hand, is indeed 100% carbohydrate.

2) CNN got their Calorie counts correct, but they failed to mention that grape juice is one of the highest-Calorie 100% juices available. 12 ounces of orange juice and 12 ounces of grapefruit juice have 168 and 152 calories respectively, right in the range of grape soda (see Table 1).

3) A major difference between fruit juice and soda is that 100% fruit juices have many vitamins and other nutrients, while soda does not. All four fruit juices I acquired nutritional data for (see Table 1) have decent amounts of many vitamins (e.g. thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, vitamin B6) and minerals (e.g. magnesium, phosphorous, potassium), whereas the grape soda had no vitamins and very few minerals (and was lacking in all the items I've listed here). See Table 1 below for a full comparison of the nutrients in soda versus the nutrients in a number of common juices.

The CNN article also oversimplifies the regulation of hunger:

"Part of the problem is that the calories in juice are so concentrated. Just half a cup (4 ounces) of apple juice has 60 calories, the same as a whole apple, but without the fiber that makes fruit filling."

This post is not the place to delve into the regulation of hunger and feeding behavior in humans, but suffice to say that there are plenty of studies showing that hunger is regulated by a far more complicated system than one that simply measures the amount of fiber in the intestines at any one time, as this statement implies.

The article also has a sidebar, which gives this deceptively titled summary of the juice literature:

"JUICE ABUSE
Science: Contrary to the healthy image of unsweetened juices, research increasingly links sweet drinks of all kinds to childhood obesity. Doctors say juice isn't much better than soda.
Reason: Like soda, juice is mostly water and sugar, and it doesn't have the fiber of whole fruit.
Advice: Children under 6 months should never have juice, and there's no nutritional reason to give it to kids before their first birthday. Kids under 6 can be allowed about a half-cup; plump children should avoid it altogether.
Source: Associated Press"

The "science" portion of the sidebar yet again confounds juice with all sweet drinks (a common problem in both CNN articles). Notice also that there's not a single reference in the sidebar (there are no references in the rest of the article either). What studies are they citing? My guess is that the article's author is probably including the 10,000-child Welsh et al. study in their research category, which, as I've said above, doesn't support their implications that juice causes overweight in children.

Where can we find actual research into the topic of juice consumption and overweight? The Welsh et al. introduction nicely summarizes some of the research into sweet drinks' and juices' effects on childhood weight. Welsh et al. list six studies that all show a link between sweetened drinks (sodas, Kool Aid, etc.) and overweight in humans. However, Welsh et al.'s section on the link between 100% juice and overweight paints a less-certain picture:

"Among preschool children, previous studies have focused on the association between consumption of fruit juice and overweight. Dennison et al [1997], in a cross-sectional study, found that children who were aged 2 and 5 years who consumed ≥12 oz/day of fruit juice were more likely (32% vs 9%) to be obese (BMI ≥90th percentile) than those who consumed less. However, longitudinal studies reported by Skinner et al [Skinner et al. 1999 and Skinner and Carruth 2001] and Alexy et al [1999] suggested that juice consumption has no association with the incidence of overweight."

So, based on this introduction, we have one paper that shows a link between juice consumption and overweight, and four papers (including Welsh et al.) that show no association between juice consumption and overweight. In fact, the one study (Dennison et al. 1997) cited as showing a link between drinking juice and overweight did not take total Calorie intake into account, so it is possible that this observed link between obesity and juice consumption is solely due to overweight children consuming more Calories, some of which came from juice. In sum, these studies constitute good evidence that juice by itself does not lead to overweight, and most certainly do not justify the statement that juice is equivalent to soda. In fact, one of the papers (Skinner and Carruth 2001) found that "As juice consumption decreased, intakes of less nutritious beverages increased", indicating that parents are most likely not substituting milk or water for juice, as the CNN articles suggest they should.

But ignoring the deceptive writing and possibly bad science, the article does have some good points. The article suggests that parents should have children drink milk or water instead of juice and sweet drinks. Milk is certainly a very healthful drink for children, and it's hard to go wrong with water. The pediatric association's recommendation not to give nursing children juice also makes perfect sense; juice is no substitute for breast milk or formula.

However, the article fails to clearly delineate a number of key conclusions that can be drawn based on the literature summarized above.

1) If your child is overweight, it may be worthwhile to look at how many Calories they're getting from juice. If the child is getting a large number of Calories from juice, then consider switching the child to drinking milk or water. However, the same goes for any food or drink that overweight children are consuming, so there's no reason to single out juice for special attention (e.g. drinking milk in excess could easily lead to overweight).

2) 100% juice in moderation will not harm your child, so if your child enjoys juice there's absolutely no reason to cut it out from their diet. Even for overweight children, the Welsh et al. study shows no statistically significant relationship between juice consumption and remaining overweight, and for normal or underweight children there's not even a statistically significant relationship between consumption of all sweet drinks and becoming overweight.

3) 100% juice is a more nutritious choice for children than juice "drinks", juice "beverages", Kool Aid, lemonade, or soda. So, if a parent has a choice between any one of those drinks, they should almost always choose 100% juice over the alternatives. About the only more nutritious drink for a child is milk, and the ideal low-calorie drink for a child is water.

Unfortunately, parents don't get these messages from the two CNN articles, and thus it's likely that they'll just settle on soda or Kool Aid as drinks for their children, since juice is more expensive and, after all, just "soda in a sippy cup."


Table 1: Nutrition data for 12 ounces of four 100% fruit juices and grape soda. Units for most numbers are in the column to the left, and percent daily values (%DV), where available, are in parentheses after each value. %DV are for "adults or children aged 4 or older, and are based on a 2000 Calorie reference diet." (Data for canned or bottled grape juice, orange juice from concentrate, pineapple juice from concentrate, grapefruit juice from concentrate, and grape soda)

	Orange juice (%DV)	Pineapple juice (%DV)	Grapefruit juice (%DV)	Grape juice (%DV)	Grape soda (%DV)
Calories	168	195	151.5	231	160
%carbs	94%	97%	92%	96%	100%
%fat	1%	0	3%	1%	0
%protein	5%	3%	5%	3%	0
-
Protein	2.55 g (4.5%)	1.5 g (3%)	2.1 g (4.5%)	2.1 g (4.5%)	0 g
Tryptophan (mg)	7.5	-	-		0
Threonine (mg)	29.85	-	-	60.75	0
Isoleucine (mg)	26.1	-	-	26.55	0
Leucine (mg)	48.6	-	-	45.6	0
Lysine (mg)	33.6	-	-	37.95	0
Methionine (mg)	11.25	-	-	3.75	0
Cystine (mg)	-	-	-	-	0
Phenylalanine (mg)	29.85	-	-	45.6	0
Tyrosine (mg)	15	-	-	11.4	0
Valine (mg)	41.1	-	-	37.95	0
Arginine (mg)	168	-	-	178.5	0
Histidine (mg)	11.25	-	-	26.55	0
Alanine (mg)	52.35	-	-	327	0
Aspartic acid (mg)	268.5	-	-	83.55	0
Glutamic acid (mg)	119.55	-	-	417	0
Glycine (mg)	33.6	-	-	45.6	0
Proline (mg)	157.5	-	-	60.75	0
Serine (mg)	48.6	-	-	49.35	0
Hydroxyproline (mg)		-	-		0
-
Vitamins
Vitamin A (IU)	399 (7.5%)	37.5 (0%)	33.3 (0%)	30.3 (0%)	0
Retinol (mcg)	0	0	0	0	0
Retinol Activity Equivalent (mcg)	18.75	3.75	0	0	0
Alpha Carotene (mcg)	11.25	0	7.35	0	-
Beta Carotene (mcg)	63.45	22.5	14.85	19.05	-
Beta Cryptoxanthin (mcg)	340.5	0	3.75	0	-
Lycopene (mcg)	0	0	0	0	-
Lutein+Zeaxanthin (mcg)	429	0	37.05	132.9	-
Vitamin C (mg)	145.35 (241.5%)	45 (75%)	124.8 (208.5%)	0.45 (0%)	0
Vitamin D	-	-	-	-	-
Vitamin E (mg)	0.75 (3%)	0 (0%)	0.15 (0%)	0 (0%)	-
Beta Tocopherol (mg)	0	-	-	0	-
Gamma Tocopherol (mg)	0.15	-	-	0	-
Delta Tocopherol (mg)	0	-	-	0	-
Thiamin (mg)	0.3 (19.5%)	0.3 (18%)	0.15 (10.5%)	0.15 (6%)	0
Riboflavin (mg)	0 (4.5%)	0.15 (4.5%)	0.15 (4.5%)	0.15 (9%)	0
Niacin (mg)	0.75 (4.5%)	0.75 (3%)	0.75 (4.5%)	1.05 (4.5%)	0
Vitamin B6 (mg)	0.15 (7.5%)	0.3 (13.5%)	0.15 (7.5%)	0.3 (12%)	0
Folate (mcg)	165 (40.5%)	41.25 (10.5%)	14.85 (3%)	11.4 (3%)	0
Food Folate (mcg)	165	41.25	14.85	11.4	0
Folic Acid (mcg)	0	0	0	0	0
Dietary Folate Equivalents (mcg)	165	41.25	14.85	11.4	0
Vitamin B12 (mcg)	0	0	0	0	0
Pantothenic Acid (mg)	0.6 (6%)	0.45 (4.5%)	0.75 (7.5%)	0.15 (1.5%)	0
Vitamin K (mcg)	0.3 (0%)	1.05 (1.5%)	0 (0%)	1.5 (1.5%)	-
-
Minerals
Calcium (mg)	33.6 (3%)	41.25 (4.5%)	29.7 (3%)	34.2 (3%)	11.2 (1%)
Iron (mg)	0.3 (1.5%)	1.05 (6%)	0.45 (3%)	0.9 (4.5%)	0.3 (2%)
Magnesium (mg)	37.35 (9%)	33.75 (9%)	40.8 (10.5%)	37.95 (9%)	3.7 (1%)
Phosphorus (mg)	59.7 (6%)	30 (3%)	51.9 (4.5%)	41.7 (4.5%)	0 (0%)
Potassium (mg)	709.5 (21%)	510 (15%)	504 (15%)	501 (15%)	3.7 (0%)
Sodium (mg)	3.75 (0%)	3.75 (0%)	3.75 (0%)	11.4 (0%)	55.8 (2%)
Zinc (mg)	0.15 (1.5%)	0.45 (3%)	0.15 (1.5%)	0.15 (1.5%)	0.3 (2%)
Copper (mg)	0.15 (7.5%)	0.3 (16.5%)	0.15 (6%)	0.15 (6%)	0.1 (4%)
Manganese (mg)	0 (3%)	3.75 (186%)	0 (3%)	1.35 (69%)	0 (2%)
Selenium (mcg)	0.3 (0%)	0.45 (0%)	0.3 (0%)	0.45 (0%)	0 (0)

References:

Alexy U, Sichert-Hellert W, Kersting M, Manz F, Schoch G. 1999. Fruit juice consumption and the prevalence of obesity and short stature in german preschool children: results of the DONALD Study. Dortmund Nutritional and Anthropometrical Longitudinally Designed. J Pediatr Gastroenterol Nutr 29: 343–349 (abstract)

Dennison BA, Rockwell HL, Baker SL. 1997. Excess fruit juice consumption by preschool-aged children is associated with short stature and obesity. Pediatrics: 99 : 15–22 (abstract, PDF)

Skinner JD, Carruth BR, Moran J III, Houck K, Coletta F. 1999. Fruit juice intake is not related to children's growth. Pediatrics 103: 58–64 (abstract, PDF)

Skinner JD, Carruth BR. 2001. A longitudinal study of children's juice intake and growth: the juice controversy revisited. J Am Diet Assoc 101: 432-437 (abstract)

Welsh, JA, ME Cogswell, S Rogers, H Rockett, Z Mei, and LM Grummer-Strawn. 2004. Overweight Among Low-Income Preschool Children Associated With the Consumption of Sweet Drinks: Missouri, 1999–2002. Pediatrics 115: e223-e229. (Abstract, PDF)

A post in praise of truffles

Today was a rather hectic day, made worse by the fact that my lab was not properly set up, forcing me to delay the start of lab (and skip lunch) while I frantically found what was missing. The day, however, ended about as well as a day can when my SO gave me my belated Valentine's Day present:


Oh yummy!
These aren't just any truffles; they're handmade by my SO. From top to bottom we have milk chocolate blackberry truffles rolled in granulated sugar, milk chocolate blackberry truffles rolled in cocoa powder, dark chocolate hazelnut truffles rolled in powdered sugar, and dark chocolate hazelnut truffles rolled in ground hazelnuts. They taste absolutely marvelous.

I've got to be one of the luckiest guys around ...

Happy Valentine's Day

I don't teach on Mondays this semester; instead, I typically spend the day in the office preparing for the week ahead. However, since it was Valentine's Day, I stayed home and have been cooking and relaxing with my SO.

The highlight of the day so far has been watching Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust for the first time. My SO and I have drooled over art from the movie for quite a while, but had never gotten around to actually watching it; the completed movie did not disappoint. The art is some of the most beautiful and detailed I've seen in anime (possibly excluding Studio Ghibli's work), very textured and moody.

Another highlight of the day, however, was learning from Wolverine Tom that there's a recipe for trilobite cookies available online. My SO and I have got to make these for a biology gathering at some point.

Lest you be too envious of my day, I have to spend much of this evening editing labs (as I've been doing most of the weekend), so it won't be a completely relaxing day (though there is a rumor that a chocolate hazelnut torte might be on the schedule as well ...)

Skeptics' Circle Announcement

The second Skeptics' Circle will be coming out this Thursday, and Orac wants to know who's interested in participating. To be included, send your best skeptical writing to orac_usa at hotmail-dot-com; see here and here for guidelines.

Roasted asparagus with garlic and olive oil

Several years ago my SO decided to try roasting asparagus in the oven, instead of steaming it as we had always done in the past (probably inspired by Joy of Cooking). We added a little garlic and olive oil for flavor, and soon discovered that we had a new favorite way of preparing asparagus. The garlic pieces crisp up and take on a wonderful flavor, accentuating the natural flavors of the asparagus.

Our local vegetable market recently had asparagus on sale, so we picked up a few pounds and roasted some for dinner, making this a good end-of-the-week recipe blogging post.

1 pound asparagus, rinsed and patted dry
3-4 cloves garlic, pressed with a garlic press or finely minced
~2 tablespoons olive oil
~3/8 teaspoon salt
~1/4 teaspoon fresh ground pepper

0. Preheat the oven to 500F.
1. Snap off and discard the tough ends of the asparagus. Arrange the spears in a single layer in a shallow baking dish (we use a rimmed cookie sheet lined with foil).
2. Mix the garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper in a small dish or cup.
3. Brush the olive oil mixture onto the asparagus, distributing the garlic pieces across the vegetables.
4. Put the asparagus in the oven and roast until the spears are tender and the tips are getting crispy, approximately 8 minutes (be careful of overcooking, as the garlic can burn).

Having some fresh bread on hand can be a good way to soak up any leftover oil and garlic on your plate or in the pan.

The proportions of ingredients in the olive oil mixture are flexible; vary them to your taste. This dish can produce a lot of smoke in the normal course of roasting, so be prepared for that (though we've never had it burn, even when smoking a lot).

Ah, rain ...

We've had yet more rain here in Southern California these past two days, which was great (I love rain) except that I had a field lab scheduled. The idea of the lab was to have students test hypotheses relating to microclimate variation across campus. Yesterday's night lab got drizzled on while they were working, but everyone stuck it out. This morning it stopped raining just as the students in my first lab section of the day finished designing their experiments, so I sent the groups out with the instruction to come back if it started raining.

Of course, 20 minutes after the students left it started pouring, so I soon had a bunch of very wet students returning to the lab (though one group stuck it out and finished collecting all their data). I apologized profusely, and let the students out early as a reward for their soggy work. It was still raining for my afternoon lab, so after the students in that lab designed their experiments I gave them a choice: they could either do the lab during the rain, or wait and do it next week. This seemed to work quite well, as some groups shot out the door for the parking lot, ecstatic at getting out early, while other groups were excited by comparing a rainy to a non-rainy day, so they slogged out and got some data which they will compare to data they get next week.

So, despite the best attempts of the weather to foil my lab plans, all worked out well. In fact, the students were generally surprised by the amount of variation in climate variables (e.g. air temperature, soil moisture) that they were able to observe even though it was cloudy and raining.

No, fruit juice will not make your children fat

A recent study that got a lot of media coverage was billed as showing a link between fruit juice and obesity in children. The study, by Welsh et al. (2004), was published in Pediatrics.

A typical article on the study was the CNN (via AP) article, "Study links juice, chubby children" (Feb. 7, 2005). The article starts off by summarizing the findings of the study:

"Sweet drinks -- whether Kool-Aid with sugar or all-natural apple juice -- seem to raise the risk of pudgy preschoolers getting fatter, new research suggests.

"That may come as a surprise to parents who pride themselves on seeking out fruit drinks with no added sugar.

"'Juice is definitely a part of this,' said lead researcher Jean Welsh of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"While fruit juice does have vitamins, nutritionists say it's inferior to fresh fruit. The new U.S. dietary guidelines, for example, urge consumers away from juice, suggesting they eat whole fruit instead.

"The bottom line, though, is that 'children need very few calories in their day,' Welsh said.

"'Sweet drinks are a source of added sugar in the diet.'

"She said preschoolers were better off snacking on fruit or drinking water or milk."

The article goes on to discuss some of the study's results in more detail, but it is this introduction that is particularly worthy of note. After reading this, it sounds as though juice has been shown to be just about one of the worst things you could give your child to drink, as it's equivalent to Kool-Aid (functionally uncarbonated soda), and is just added sugar that will cause your child to gain weight.

The study's results are quite different. In their study Welsh et al. acquired height, weight, and diet data on more than 10,000 2-3 year olds, re-sampled the same children a year later, and then looked to see if there was a correlation between weight gain and sweet drink consumption. Note the terminology - the primary correlate that Welsh et al. examined in their study was not juice consumption, but instead sweet drink consumption, which they define as

"all sugar-sweetened and naturally sweet drinks listed on the HFFQ: 'vitamin C juice (orange juice or juice with vitamin C added),' 'other juices,' 'fruit drinks (Hi-C, Kool-Aid, lemonade),' and 'soda (soda, soft drink, pop [not sugar-free]).'"

It is true that Welsh et al. also examined the correlation between weight gain and sweet drinks excluding soda, and just pure fruit juice, but the CNN article focuses on the sweet drink results.

One of the methodological problems in Welsh et al.'s study is that children who consume more juice are likely to consume more calories, and thus any weight gain observed might be due solely to the excess calorie intake, not due to juice intake by itself. Welsh et al. did, in fact, find that children who consumed more juice consumed more calories overall in their diets: "Energy intake increased as the consumption of sweet drinks increased with mean calorie consumption for those who consumed 0 to <1, 1 to <2, 2 to <3, and ≥3 drinks 1425, 1596, 1771, and 2005, respectively (data not shown)." To control for this possible confounding effect they used a logistic regression analysis that included many possible variables, including (in their most controlled analysis): "age; gender; race/ethnicity; birth weight; and intake of sweet foods, high-fat foods, and total energy." With this analysis they found:

"Normal or underweight children who consumed 1 or more sweet drinks daily were 1.3 to 1.5 times as likely to become overweight as the referent group (<1 drink daily), but these results were not statistically significant. Children who were at risk for overweight at baseline and consumed 1 to ≥3 sweet drinks daily, however, were significantly more likely to become overweight than the referent. ... Similarly, overweight children who consumed 1 to ≥3 sweet drinks daily were more likely to remain overweight"

As I've mentioned before, when a result is not statistically significant you must say that there is no effect of the treatment. So, a translation of the above paragraph would read, "Sweet drinks had no significant effect on the liklihood of normal or underweight children to become overweight, but children at risk for overweight and overweight children were more likely to become or remain overweight if they consumed sweet drinks." So, only if your child is overweight or at risk of being overweight does consumption of sweet drinks have a demonstrable effect on their weight.

The CNN article does include this result, saying,

"The link between sweet drinks and being overweight showed up for all three weight categories, although it wasn't statistically significant for the normal and underweight children."

However, the CNN article does not translate the statistics for their readers anywhere nearby in the article. Thus, anyone not well-versed in statistics will likely not understand the last portion of that sentence, and may erroneously come to the conclusion that sweet drinks cause weight gain in all weight categories of children.

Remember, however, that the authors define sweet drinks as being any sugary drink, including sodas, Kool-Aid, and the like. Thus, this result has no bearing on the consumption of fruit juice alone. So, what did the authors find regarding fruit juice?

"With fruit juice only, we found no significant associations for at-risk or normal/underweight children (odds range: 0.8–1.2). Among children who were overweight at baseline, the association with overweight was positive, although the strength was diminished (odds range: 1.3–1.5), and the results were of only borderline significance."

Generally, when something is statistically significant, authors say so, so "borderline significance" can probably be translated as "not significant" for our purposes. Thus, the results of Welsh et al.'s study when examining solely fruit juice consumption are exceedingly simple to summarize: consumption of fruit juice was unrelated to the risk of children of any weight becoming or remaining overweight. Alternately, if we wanted to be generous with our statistics, we could say that fruit juice may have had a difficult to detect effect on the weight of already overweight children, but no effect on any other weight class of child. In either case, pure fruit juice has not been shown to be correlated with children becoming overweight.

The CNN article ignores this distinction, however, and goes on to discuss how a school banned fruit juice (implying that it was a good thing), and to discuss why drinking sweet drinks might cause overweight:

"Sweet drinks are high in calories and low in fiber. Nutritionists believe that calorie-dense, low-fiber foods may lead to overeating because those foods are quickly consumed but less filling than foods higher in fiber.

"The authors suggest that limiting sweet drinks may help solve the growing problem of childhood obesity. One in five American children is overweight, according to the National Institutes of Health."

To be fair, by this point in the article, the article's author has mentioned that sweet drinks were defined to include things other than juice, but the article never clarifies that when examining solely juice there were no significant effects. So, while what the article says here is true, by failing to clarify that these results don't apply to juice alone, they leave parents with the implication that even drinking pure fruit juice is bad for their children. Then the article reinforces this erroneous conclusion with its ending anecdote:

"But Dr. Rebecca Unger, who evaluates overweight children in private practice and at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, said the study backs up what she sees in the real world.

"'We do see kids do well when we cut out juice,' she said. 'Sometimes that's all they need to do.'"

So, even though most of the CNN article is technically correct, the implications that permeate it regarding drinking pure fruit juice are entirely without basis in the published paper. Children have to drink something when they're thirsty, and this study shows that 100% fruit juice is likely a better alternative than many of the other drink choices out there (<100% juice, lemonade, Kool-Aid, soda, etc.). I doubt many parents will get that take-home message from this article, though.

As a final note, I find the nutritional proclamation to eat a piece of fruit instead of drinking fruit juice to be nonsensical. When I'm thirsty, I want a tall glass of something liquid, not a crunchy, solid piece of fruit.

Citation:

Welsh, JA, ME Cogswell, S Rogers, H Rockett, Z Mei, and LM Grummer-Strawn. 2004. Overweight Among Low-Income Preschool Children Associated With the Consumption of Sweet Drinks: Missouri, 1999–2002. Pediatrics 115: e223-e229. (Abstract, PDF)

Tangled Bank #21

Tangled Bank #21 is now online at About Town, posted by Xavier.

I haven't had a chance to read all the posts yet (lots of multi-part ones this time), but I found Orac's post on the time commitments of an academic surgeon to be quite enlightening. The post reminds me much of the time constraints put on academic teaching faculty at many "Research I" universities; these faculty have to pull in grant money and publish papers to get tenure, but teaching sucks up as much time as they'll give it, often to the detriment of their research program. It is true, though, that life or death does not usually rest on the academic teaching faculty member's proper allocation of time ...

Tangled Bank Announcement

The next Tangled Bank is coming out tomorrow at About Town, so get your submissions to Xavier or host@tangledbank.net by tonight if you want to be included.

A relatively painless upgrade to testing

Over this past weekend I decided to upgrade my new install of Debian from the stable 3.0 (r4) release to the testing release. While the stable release is supposed to be "rock solid", it also happens to mostly include programs last updated in 2002, and thus I was finding myself unable to install much of the software that I wanted (R commander for a statistics GUI, Firefox, AbiWord's latest version, etc.). The name of the testing release implies that it's rather unstable, but since packages have to go through some testing before they get to the testing release, it's actually supposed to be quite reliable for the average user.

The upgrade itself was very easy to do. I updated the sources.list file to include the testing release, updated apt.conf (in /etc/apt) to include the line "APT::Cache-Limit "25165824";" (since without some specification of a cache apt-get failed), and then ran "apt-get update" followed by "apt-get dist-upgrade". After a long download, and a few configuration screens of slightly confusing questions, the machine was ready to go.

The primary problem I encountered was on reboot; the machine didn't auto-reboot (failed to finish the shutdown process), and then on restart stopped at the Lilo bootscreen showing just "LI". I discovered that this meant something was wrong with my boot loader/record, so I booted into Linux using one of the stable release 3.0 CDs as a rescue disk. As a side note, I was happy to find that even though the Lilo loader was freezing, I appeared to have access to everything on my system by booting via the rescue disk. I reran lilo, which rewrote the boot loader/record, and since then have been able to boot just fine.

The only other problem I encountered was that printing stopped working. To fix that I upgraded CUPS using apt-get (it had not been upgraded to the testing release's version), put a new PPD file from LinuxPrinting into the proper directory (/usr/share/cups/model/), and then had to restart ("/etc/init.d/cupsys restart") and reconfigure CUPS (using http://localhost:631/admin) to use the new PPD file.

The difference between Debian's stable and testing releases is quite large; I can now use Firefox 1.0, the Gnome desktop environment is much cleaner, and the newer versions of the office-suites (Abiword, Gnumeric) are more professional. The speed is also quite impressive - I'm using an ~3 year old box with an ancient video card, and the system is very responsive. The more I use Debian on this old machine, the more I can see using Debian as the operating system on my primary machine at home (though I need to explore how the Word and PowerPoint replacements interact with my lecture files and work versions of the programs). That all this professional-grade software is open-source and available completely free of charge is extremely appealing.

Teff - a whole grain breakfast

Teff is an extremely small a tiny grain native to northern Africa; the seeds are oval and typically measure only 1mm x 0.5mm. For comparison, millet with the hull removed is a sphere approximately 2mm in diameter, and wheat berries are an oval approximately 7mm long and 3mm wide (note: measurements are from grains I had on hand; I have no idea how typical these are for these three species).

My SO and I enjoy trying various whole grains, and so when we first saw teff (which can apparently also be spelled tef) in the store a few years ago we couldn't help but give it a try. Handling teff can be somewhat challenging, as it has the consistency of fine sand, but other than that it can be treated like any whole grain. Teff cooks up into a soft porridge, and has a pleasant whole-grainy taste. To be honest, when simply boiled and eaten plain teff isn't very impressive, but once you doll it up a bit it's quite delicious (much like oatmeal, in my opinion).

This past week we broke out our teff and made a quick and simple breakfast with it, and thus I thought it would make a good end-of-the-week recipe blogging post. Here's the recipe we used to make enough for the two of us for breakfast.

3 cups water
3/4 cup whole teff (I don't even want to consider how many seeds this is)
Pinch salt
Brown sugar and butter, to taste

1. Bring the water and salt to a boil
2. Add the teff and simmer, covered, for 20 minutes (less if you want it chewier, more if you want it softer)
3. Transfer into bowls and serve with butter and brown sugar.

We topped each bowl of teff with a few slices of butter, and then mixed in a few spoonfuls of brown sugar to make a somewhat sweet and hearty breakfast. You could easily mix in whatever toppings you wanted (treat it like oatmeal or cream of wheat).

Being a whole grain, teff is inherently healthful. A single serving (3/8 of a cup) of plain teff has

• 240 Calories
  
• 7.5 Calories from fat (no saturated fat)
  
• no cholesterol
  
• 2mg sodium
  
• 50g of carbohydrates (not for the low-carb eating diabetics among us)
  
• 9g of fiber (36% of your day's fiber)
  
• 9 grams protein
  
• 30% of your daily iron
  
• 12% of your daily calcium

Of course when you add in your toppings (e.g. butter and sugar above) you will increase the fat and carbohydrate content respectively.

Teff is typically available in specialty markets; we've often found it produced by Bob's Red Mill, which has an online store you can order it from (or, if you live near Portland, you could probably just drive to their store).

Lamenting the lack of pedagogical training

PZ Myers has a post describing the lack of teaching-related training he received in graduate school (and some commenters have echoed the sentiment). When I entered graduate school there were a few professors who encouraged new students to teach well, but the majority of faculty were clearly of the opinion that teaching was a necessary evil. The acting head of my department when I entered graduate school even went so far as to say something to the effect of, "Don't spend time on teaching; it doesn't get you anything" in his first talk with new graduate students. I went into graduate school with the mindset that my primary goal in academia was to be a researcher, so I thought that this was relatively sane advice.

As many readers can guess by my current choice of teaching at a community college, my research mindset didn't last long. I quickly found that I enjoyed my role as a teaching assistant (TA), and eventually decided that I wanted to focus my career on teaching rather than research.

There were two major influences that changed my mind regarding teaching as a career, and both are instructive regarding the teaching of pedagogy in graduate school (a convenient pretext for some navel gazing). The first influence was that I had stumbled into a department where there was a top-notch biology education professor in charge of the non-majors introductory biology course that all new TAs got thrown into. This instructor was (and still is) the best teacher I have ever seen; he truly cared about helping students learn biology, and had an excellent grounding in research-based pedagogy. All new TAs were required to take a three- or four-day workshop on pedagogy with him before they taught, and throughout the semester we had weekly meetings where we discussed pedagogy and how to deal with the classroom problems we were all encountering. It was during this first semester that I started to learn how to teach.

However, many of my fellow graduate students despised this pedagogical training, actively voicing their criticism of both the instructor who led it and his pedagogical ideas. Many tried to avoid using his ideas in their sections, and virtually all tried to get away from this instructor as quickly as they could, many saying that their time was being wasted.

A number of the faculty who taught pedagogy were from non-science disciplines, and thus a common complaint used by my peers to dismiss learning about pedagogy was, "Sure, maybe those techniques work for the humanities, but they'd never work for teaching science. They just don't understand science." Personally, I've never gone to a lecture on pedagogy where I didn't find at least something I could use (or something I should avoid using) in my own science teaching, regardless of the discipline of the lecturer.

The second influence was that my graduate school had a very active Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program. Preparing Future Faculty is a nationwide program that introduces doctoral students at research universities to faculty roles at a variety of academic institutions (community colleges, private universities, etc.), and also discusses practical things like pedagogy and how to look for an academic job. The PFF program at my campus met weekly for a year, and through the PFF program I was introduced to community colleges. Before PFF I generally thought of community colleges as the backwaters of academia, but after PFF I realized that the community college faculty role perfectly fit my preference for teaching, and that community colleges had the potential to be the best and most innovative higher-education institutions in the country. The PFF program also brought in guest lecturers who discussed pedagogy, including a talk by the best peer-instruction / group-work instructor I have ever seen.

So, at my campus there was this incredible opportunity available for graduate students to learn about pedagogy and faculty roles. Since the program was somewhat space-limited, students had to apply to get in; as far as I know I was the only member of the graduate student cohort from my department to even apply, and I was the only member of my department from my year to attend. I think there were fewer than five or ten science students in the entire program when I took it, out of probably thousands of potential students.

The lack of participation in PFF was likely due to the conflicting demands of teaching and research. The PFF courses took up hours of precious time that could be spent doing research, and since most students were already spending more hours a week on teaching than they felt they could afford, nobody wanted to participate. Additionally, since teaching was rarely an acceptable goal for graduate students in my department, I imagine that some students didn't want to appear as though they were too interested in teaching (I had one committee member tell me that I should not teach at a community college, and that he was certain I'd be back within a year or two wanting to do research).

So, the problem with training science graduate students in pedagogy is not necessarily that the training is unavailable (though this may be the case at some institutions), but rather that there is little incentive for students to avail themselves of such training. Most science graduate students know that to keep a faculty position at many institutions you must be a productive researcher pulling in grant money regularly, yet you need be only a mediocre teacher. As long as that mentality persists, it seems as though pedagogical training will never be predominant in graduate programs.

Rem is perking up!

I'm happy to report that Rem, our sick mouse, appears to be on the way to recovery. She's been gaining back some of the weight that she lost, probably helped by having ad lib puppy chow, sunflower seeds, and twice-daily doses of our special antibiotic ice cream.

A few days ago we started to notice that she was becoming more active, including coming out of her nest area to explore on her own, a behavior that had stopped while she was sick. Last night we even let her back into the cage with her daughters, and within a few minutes Rem was being lovingly groomed. Afterwards everyone curled up to sleep together, as before.

Here's Rem eating ice cream from the comfort of her nest a few days ago:


Breakfast in bed ... what more could a sick mouse want?

Department heads

Jill/txt has just been elected to be the head of her department (congratulations!), and she's been blogging about her time commitments in the new position. In yesterday's very cute post she showed that becoming a department head doesn't give you some magical power of self-confidence and protocol knowledge, which is slightly reassuring to this untenured professor.

The first Skeptic's Circle

St. Nate has posted the Skeptic's Circle #1, a collection of recent skeptical blog posts, including my FSU Chiropractic article. It's a great idea for a carnival.

The Nasonex bee

While collapsing on the couch Tuesday night after my first day of teaching (and burning my hand while making dinner), I caught the tail end of an ad for Nasonex, an allergy medicine. The ad caught my attention because it was using an animated honey bee as its spokes-organism, though, of course, it didn't catch my attention for the right reasons: what stood out were the glaring errors in their animated hymenopteran. The first problem is that the bee in the ad was talking with its mouth. This would be very difficult physiologically, as the bee respiratory system (the tracheal system) is not connetected to the mouth at all, and thus the bee could not easily pass air over structures in its mouth to make noise.

A quick visit to the Nasonex website found two good images of the bee to critique.



1) The eyes are clearly vertebrate-style eyes. Insect eyes do not have an iris, pupil, or sclera, and instead have compound eyes containing many ommatidia.

2) The legs are in the wrong place. All insect legs and wings arise from the thorax (the middle tagma), but instead this bee has been drawn with two pairs of legs coming off the abdomen. Only certain other arthropods (e.g. crustaceans) have appendages on their abdomens.

3) The mouth is wrong, wrong, wrong. Insects do not have teeth and do not have a jaw (both of these are uniquely chordate characteristics). Bees also do not have chordate-style tongues, which it appears that this bee has. Instead, bees have both mandibles and a tube that protrudes from their head and contains a tongue-like structure (formed from modified arthropod mouthparts; two maxillae and the labial palps wrapping around a glossa). The jaw and teeth this bee has been drawn with would be decidedly useless in consuming nectar and honey, two of a honey bee's primary food sources.

4) The bee is alternately drawn with one or no pairs of wings. When the bee first loads on their site, it somehow flies across the screen with a complete lack of wings. When the bee reappears, it has only one pair of wings. I'm sure the bee would be highly insulted by this, as the primary insect lineage that has only one pair of wings is flies (not that I have anything against flies, but I suspect bees would); bees and most other insects have two pairs of wings.

5) Whatever they've drawn over the eye: it looks like it's supposed to be an eyebrow, and I could see it as a Pitot tube, but it sure doesn't belong there.

6) There're no pollen baskets (corbiculae) on the hind legs; bees use these baskets to carry pollen back from flowers to their hive. Considering that the bee is busy visiting flowers during the commercial, and thus is most likely a foraging worker, it should definitely have pollen baskets.

For some great closeups of what honey bees actually look like, take a look at these SEMs or these videos of a bee feeding. Aren't they far cuter in real life?

Coming up next on Rhosgobel: rabbits don't really clamor for sugary cereals.

PZ on the Iraq elections

PZ Myers (of Pharyngula) has a very nice piece on his thoughts regarding the Iraq election.

First day ...

Today was the first day of the spring semester, and it was rather uneventful as I have no classes on Monday. I spent most of the day preparing for my first lecture and lab, both of which are on Tuesday, and interviewing a student assistant who will likely be helping in our stockroom.

The difference between this semester and last semester could hardly be greater. Last semester at this same time I was, well, panicking; I still hadn't written most of the labs that I would run during the semester, and had only about a week or two of lecture slides created. Now, of course, I've got all my materials from last semester to work with, and thus I can take the time to revise them and actually think critically about what I'm going to say.

From a technology perspective, not much is changing, as I'll still be using InterWrite's in-class response system and Moodle as my online course management system. Why do I somehow feel guilty about not trying out some new technology?

Sick mouse

On Friday we noticed that Rem (aka Mom Mouse) was looking a bit thin and was breathing and walking a bit more laboredly than usual, so we took her to the vet on Saturday morning. The vet diagnosed an unknown respiratory infection (no surprise there), and after cautioning us that recovery rates aren't great for this sort of thing (again, no surprise there), he gave her an injection of an antibiotic (Baytril) and gave us some of the antibiotic to feed her twice daily for the next two weeks. Of course, the infection could very well be viral, but it's the best he could do.

The antibiotic was supposed to be flavored so that Rem would eat it, but she was more interested in trying to climb on the dispensing syringe than lick the end of it, so we went to plan B and are now mixing the antibiotic in with some melted ice cream (Ben & Jerry's ... nothing but the best for our sick mouse). She is now happily licking up the antibiotic ice cream.

Rem's looking a bit better today than she was yesterday, so hopefully the antibiotics and prolific treats are doing the trick, but we'll just have to wait and see.

Apricot scones

While we were in London my SO and I did a lot of cooking, partially because my SO was sick for a week and wasn't in any shape to go anywhere, and partially because we enjoy cooking and wanted to avoid paying for meals at all the expensive London restaurants. However, my SO's brother's kitchen was rather small, and also rather under-equipped (in fairness to him, the apartment came with only limited cooking supplies and he doesn't have much time to cook), so we weren't able to make a lot of our usual dishes.

One dish we did make three times, however, was apricot scones, so they seem like a perfect end-of-the-week recipe blogging post. We hadn't intended on making the scones three times, but by the end of our trip we realized that we had the cream, butter, and apricots necessary to make them, and thus if we didn't make them the ingredients would just go bad.

These scones are relatively easy to make (less than half an hour from start to finish), and they store and reheat well. If you've never had scones, they're basically a sweet biscuit made with cream; they're quite moist and flavorful right out of the oven. As my SO's brother and I like to say, "The secret ingredient is fat."

2 cups flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons cold butter, unsalted, cut into pieces
1/2 cup dried apricots, cut into small pieces
1 large egg
1/2 cup heavy cream

0. Preheat the oven to 425F.
1. Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt together in a large mixing bowl.
2. Add the cold butter to the flour and mix with either a fork, a pair of knives, your fingers, or (preferably) a pastry blender until the butter is well distributed through the flour, being careful not to melt the butter. I typically work the mixture until most of the butter is in very small bits (like coarse sand), with the largest butter clumps no larger than peas.
3. Add the chopped apricots and mix well.
4. Mix the cream and egg together in a small bowl, add to the flour/butter mixture, and mix until reasonably well combined. The dough will likely not be entirely cohesive (there will probably be some dry mix at the bottom of the bowl and a few large clumps), but if the mixture is not holding together well at all you can add a bit more cream.
5. Knead the dough in the bowl or on the countertop a number of times (I usually do around 10 kneads) to complete the dough mixing and get a single cohesive mass of dough.
6. Roll the dough out on the counter until it is approximately 3/4-inch thick. The dough is usually soft enough that I just press it out with the palm of my hand.
7. Cut the dough into approximately eight to twelve pieces, place on a cookie sheet, and bake until the tops are browned, ~12-15 minutes. If desired, you can brush the tops of the scones with milk and sprinkle them with sugar before putting them in the oven, but I usually don't do this.
8. Serve the scones immediately, with plenty of butter or jam.

Notes:

Virtually any dried fruit will work well in place of the apricots, such as blueberries or currants, though our favorite alternate is probably dried cherries.

One variant of this recipe we enjoy is blueberry almond scones. To make these, add 1/3 cup of dried blueberries and 1/3 cup of slivered almonds in place of the apricots (in step 3), doing everything else as described above. The almonds add a pleasing crunch, and would go well with most dried fruits.

To store the scones we let them cool to room temperature and then wrap them in plastic wrap or put them in leftover containers and leave them at room temperature. To reheat the scones we put them in a 350F oven for approximately 10 minutes, or until they're heated through.

Reference:

Rombauer, I. S., M. R. Becker, and E. Becker. 1997. Joy of Cooking. Scribner, NY.

[Update July 2007: Added blueberry almond variant.]

The British Museum - part 1

We visited a number of museums while we were in London, but the most enjoyable time was our two days at the British Museum. The museum was founded in 1753 (the US was still a colony then!), and since that time has been amassing a collection of "art and antiquities from ancient and living cultures."

The museum is gigantic, and has a huge number of items on permanent display. In our two days we saw much less than half of everything; we could have happily spent many more days poring over the items. Like many of the London museums, entry is completely free (though they suggest a three-pound donation).

The museum has artifacts from an astounding array of cultures and time periods, including ancient Egypt (they have the Rosetta Stone), ancient Greece & Rome, Britain & Europe (with a large section on Roman Britain), early and later Mesopotamia (including ancient Assyria), China, Japan, southeast Asia, Africa, and Islamic countries.

The diversity of cultures contained enhances the experience, and encourages comparisons between the different time periods and regions of the world. For instance, while the Egyptians were building huge pyramids and carving incredible artwork in huge slabs of stone, the people of Britain were mostly just chipping arrowheads from rock and etching their artwork on bones.

We focused our time on the Egyptian, Greek/Roman, Asian, and historical British galleries, though we also tried to browse around a few others before we were kicked out by the guards.

Like everyone else who visits the museum, we took the obligatory pictures of ourselves standing in front of the Rosetta Stone. Reading up on the history of the stone was depressing (like it so often is with items from human history); apparently it was discovered only after it had been broken out of its original location and used in the construction of a military fortification.

Once we pulled ourselves away from the crowds around the Rosetta Stone, we found the cutest little slug hieroglyph:


Hieroglyphs on a limestone false door from the fifth dynasty (~2,400 BC)
It was neat to see that 4,000 years ago people actually appreciated mollusks (though I didn't see any snails or cephalopods, sadly). I wonder what the slug means ...

More good (if not entirely anatomically correct) biological-themed sculpture was made by the Assyrians:


Human-headed winged lion from Assyria, ~865-860BC
The neat thing about the lion sculpture is the number of legs: it has five. The statue looks anatomically correct (ignoring the human head and wings) when viewed directly from either the front or the side, but not from an angle. Apparently this chimera (and its twin) was supposed to protect the entry to the throneroom of Ashurnasirpal II's palace. There was also a winged bull version, one of which had a little game board scratched into it (likely used by bored guards).

The museum's (now rather controversial) Parthenon sculptures were in a spacious room. Each piece of sculpture (panel of the frieze, statue fragment, etc.) had a detailed description along with it, and it was educational to just walk along the entire length of frieze and read the story that was being told.


The display gallery holding the actual marbles collected by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon
The frieze details a procession honoring Athena, including a wide variety of participants such as riders struggling with their horses, charioteers, women carrying offerings, and even a few gods. There were even marshals positioned between segments of the procession to stop them from appearing to run into each other (or off the end of the building). It was something like reading a volume of manga carved into stone.

What was even more impressive, though, was the amount of detail on the Parthenon marbles. Take, for instance, the image in the picture below – you can clearly see, among other things, the veins on the horse's leg. The detail is especially impressive considering that these frieze pieces were designed to be installed more than 30 feet above the ground.


Plaster cast of a portion of the Parthenon's frieze (Elgin made plaster casts of the portions of the Parthenon's frieze that he did not bring back to England, some of these are also displayed)
The museum is chock-full of beautiful things, which often surprised us when we came across them. For instance, when we were trying to get upstairs after looking at the Greek sculptures, we found that the stairway was lined with gorgeous mosaics.


Mosaics in a staircase at the British Museum
The face in the mosaic on the left of the picture above was impressively realistically done, with very believable skin tones and facial features created using exceptionally small pieces of tile.


Close-up of a face in a mosaic
The museum also had some Roman mosaics displayed elsewhere, and this mosaic of seafood from the Mediterranean caught my eye:


Roman mosaic of seafood from ~100AD, including an octopus, lobster, eel, and many fish.
Most of the fish in the mosaic are apparently identifiable down to species, and the museum lists the probable identifications next to the mosaic. Seeing all these mosaics makes me want to do a mosaic in one of the rooms of our house (but then imagining all the work quickly banishes the thought from my mind).

They also had more food in the museum, and not just the kind served in the museum's restaurants:


Preserved food offerings from tombs dating to ~1,500BC
Pictured above are loaves of bread, pomegranates, a cake made from dates, and duck (on the basket, along with more loaves of bread), all more than 3,000 years old. With so much detailed art, and even some preserved specimens, it would be interesting to compare the varieties (and species) of food items used in ancient times to those used presently. It would probably be a neat study of the effect of artificial (and natural) selection on plants and animals.

We also saw a number of cuneiform tablets while we were there, but those will have to wait for another post, as this one has gotten quite long.

The Skeptics' Circle - announcement

If you like the Tangled Bank, then you'll probably also love The Skeptics' Circle, a new "carnival" started by Saint Nate's Blog that will be collecting posts from a skeptical point of view on a monthly basis. The inaugural post will be this coming Thursday, Feb. 3; read all about it here.

FSU chiropractic school rejected

The Florida State University board of governors voted yesterday to reject the proposed chiropractic college addition to FSU. I've written about the topic before, and am pleased at the sanity shown by the board (though seeing a copy of the minutes of the meeting would be nice so I could see exactly why they rejected it).

"Legislators last year guaranteed $9 million a year for the chiropractic college at FSU, but the Board of Governors asserted that it alone has the power under the state Constitution to approve or deny any new degree programs at the state's 11 public universities. The board was created by a constitutional amendment that voters approved in 2002.

"The board voted against the college by an 11-3 margin, as a majority of members questioned the need for the program and whether it fit into FSU's mission to become a nationally recognized research university. Board members said they were disappointed that FSU's own board of trustees did not take a stronger vote in favor of the school two weeks ago." - The Miami Herald (note: other reports cite the vote as being 10-3)

To explain the last sentence of the quote, the FSU board of trustrees (which is separate from the board of governors) voted to send the chiropractic college proposal to the board of governors with no strong statement of either support or rejection (read more here, here, or here).

(via both 2% Company and Confessions of a Quackbuster)

Back from London

It's been a long day, but we are now back home from our two-week visit to London. We were picked up and driven home from the local airport by a colleague, which was quite luxurious. Our house was welcoming and comfortable after 15+ hours of traveling, and it was nice to see that our mice had made it through the two weeks without us, even perking up on our return (a generous friend stopped by to care for them while we were away).

Unfortunately, right now it feels like it's 3:00am (and we woke up at 6:30am), so tales of London will have to wait for another time.

While you're waiting for more on London, be sure to head over and read Tangled Bank #20, posted by Jasmine Cola.

Observations of London

My SO and I have enjoyed making the inevitable comparisons of life in London with life in Southern California. Here are a few of our observations:

1) If only they'd replace that pound symbol with a dollar symbol when listing the cost of items, everything would be reasonably priced. Unfortunately, however, the exchange ratio is a miserable $1.85 US per pound, so everything is expensive. We saw some KitchenAid mixers for around 300 pounds in a department store; they sell for about the same number of dollars back in the US. While basic foodstuffs seem similarly priced to those in the US, restaurant food is relatively expensive. For example, individual-size pizzas at a small restaurant were about $15 each here, much more than the $5-10 we'd expect back in the US.

2) We've been able to buy Cadbury creme eggs in January, which is odd because the only time we're used to seeing them in the US is around Easter, when they're sold as Easter candy. Cadbury also has vending machines in tube stations.

3) We've only shopped at one grocery store (Sainsbury's), but what we've seen of food labeling has been extremely user-friendly. Bags of fruits or vegetables list what types of cooking they're good for (e.g. potatoes list recommended uses of the variety of potato in the bag, be it chipping, mashing, boiling, etc.). Meat and cheese labels are also more informative, with clear information on storage, expiration (both purchase-by and use-by dates), allergy information, suitability for vegetarians, cooking directions, and contents (e.g. sausages list the percent meat included).

4) Nutrition labels are somewhat different than their US counterparts. I haven't seen a wide enough variety of foods to have figured out the entire system, but it appears that each food lists macronutrients contained per 100 grams, which allows a person to determine the fractional composition of the food without a calculator (and once you know the fractional composition of the food, you can easily calculate the nutrient content of any serving size you may be eating). Separate from those data, they have an area displaying the number of calories and grams of fat for a specified amount of the food (which looks like one serving, e.g. 30 grams of cheese, 1 sausage). The labels don't typically list vitamins and minerals (other than salt), though some do. It appears, however, that not all ingredients are required to be listed in the ingredients field, as one type of cheese we bought did not have any type of milk included in the ingredient list (though it did have a milk allergy warning on it).

5) Fat. Ahh, delicious fat. The grocery stores here are so enlightened: they have single cream, whipping cream, thickened double cream ("good for spreading!"), creme fraiche, sour cream, whole-milk yogurt, multiple types of butter, pork fat, beef fat, and goose fat, all ready for the buying. To get all of these in our area of the US would certainly entail going to a specialty store.

6) I never realized how ingrained it was to look left before crossing a street until I came here, where looking left initially does you no good at all. Thankfully they have instructions painted on the ground at most crosswalks telling us dumb Americans which way to look. Even so, my SO and I have been a slave to crossing-meters, which the majority of people here seem to ignore. Most people seem to ignore crosswalks altogether, though since many of the streets are a measly two lanes wide (one in each direction), jaywalking is significantly safer than it is in the US. Even after more than a week, though, I still can't help but look to my right once I'm halfway across the street.

7) I'm very glad I'm not driving, because street signs seem to be lacking at some intersections, and aren't in the same locations as they are in the US (they're typically on buildings, instead of on special poles). My SO and I have already taken one unintentional walking tour of London due to misreading a sign (I still say the Charing Cross Road sign in Trafalgar Square actually points to Strand Street). I'm very glad that my SO's brother has loaned us a copy of A to Z (a popular map book), which has been critical in finding our way around.

8) Cute cars! I've never seen this many cute small cars before, and I've seen only one or two SUVs in the entire time I've been here, which is refreshing. There are also a ton of motorcycles and scooters, which is great since they're some of the most fuel-efficient vehicles around. I used to think the Mini Cooper was my favorite small car, but it now has a very strong contender:


Could it be any cuter?
Even the police cars are adorably small, and some of them are even brightly painted (purples and the like). When the police car sirens echo in the streets, it sounds exactly like the sirens in a Mystery! series on PBS.

9) While the police cars may be cute, the police themselves certainly mean business. I've walked by officers who had submachine guns (or some similar assault weaponry) slung across their chests, which is rather imposing, especially when the officer's index finger is right next to the trigger.