21 Dragons

The Digital Clutter

Alvin — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 07:07:55 +0000

I’ve always thought of myself as a devout declutterer; I regularly prune away old books and clothes, I throw junk away the moment I get it and I like to keep my desks empty and clean. I even tend to err too much on the side of decluttering by throwing away stuff that I regret later.

But I realized something about myself today. While I may be a physical declutter bug, I’m a hoarder in another realm, the one with ones and zeroes. Just a quick glance at my iTunes library tells me that I have a grand total of 2765 songs, most of which have not been listened to, and which iTunes helpfully tells me will take 9.3 days of non-stop 24-hour listening to finish.

That doesn’t include the other media I have, like podcasts (306 unwatched TED talks), ebooks (that I bought even!) and the articles (Instapaper Pro rocks!) I saved on my iPhone.

And you know what the best part is? The collection keeps growing.

Good God.

Why this incessant need to keep collecting media? There’s no way that I could ever consume all of it. And while the illusion is that digital media is free (yea right, tell that to the $300 external HDD I just bought), it consumes the only nonrefundable resource of all: time.

We’re smart animals right? We’ve solved the Information Age. Now we need to get to the Information Management Age and make sense of all this info-junk. I’d declutter it all but then I’d get really recursive; spending extra time managing stuff that consumes my time so I’d spend less time on it.

I could delete it all, but strangely enough, while throwing away old clothes is easy for me, throwing away old media is not. What the frak is up with this double-standard?

The 3 Decluttering Boxes

One Man. One Hill. Six Cameras. One Discovery.

Alvin — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:16:06 +0000

One of the perks of being a tech reviewer is getting the newest toys and trying them out for free. One of the non-perks is doing a ‘shootout’, getting a bunch of said toys together and trying them all out at the same time.

So there I was, trudging up Bukit Timah Hill at an unprecedentedly early hour on a weekend (yes, working weekends, woot), trying to get decent photos for publishing with six cameras. A couple of them were excellent; easy to use, fast and responsive, like extensions of my eyes. A couple were average. A couple were bricks; using them to take photos was like using a rock to write.

(At some point, I wanted to hurl said bricks down the hillside, just to see them go crunch against the rocks.)

About halfway up the hill and over a hundred pictures later, I discovered something interesting: I was actually taking better pictures with the cameras I enjoyed using. Big duh right – would you do better using a big granite slab to write or a pencil – but you know what? It brought home closer to me that using the tools you love not only help you love what you do so it makes you do more, it also helps you do it better.

For Brenda & Yezhong

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

Alvin — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 11:00:29 +0000

It isn’t easy making facts and statistics interesting. Lots of things fail at it: textbooks, movies, teachers. But Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals makes a smashing job of it.

There are 2 reasons why I love this book: one, it’s made me smarter. It’s taught me more about my food and it’s made me think more about my food. Two, it’s damn good reading. I’ve added Pollan to the list of writers I want to be when I grow up.

Michael Pollan is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and Knight Professor of Journalism at Berkeley, he wrote both The Omnivore’s Dilemma and its sequel, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. I read them out of order (sequel first), but discovered it doesn’t matter.

In Defense of Food was written as an answer to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it was written as a practical guide for the person who wants to eat consciously, whereas The Omnivore’s Dilemma centers around Pollan’s quest story to understand food. It tells a story about walking in the cornfields, being knee-deep in cow manure, working as a farm-hand, and hunting for dinner. It’s what makes this book so much fun. And personal. Pollan isn’t a distant observer, he reacts and responds to what he sees and how it changes his perspective on food, and I couldn’t help but do the same as I read along.

Cleverly inter-weaved within this personal story are nuggets of facts and statistics, so you learn at the same time you’re entertained. Pollan pulls it off masterfully in The Omnivore’s Dilemma; even though it’s twice as long as In Defense of Food’s 200-odd pages, I found it harder to put down.

If you’re looking for a one-stop read about the source of your food and the consequences of what you choose to have for lunch, or you just want a darn good yarn, you can’t do worse than The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Check it out.

P.S. As a Singaporean, I can’t say how relevant some of the chapters are (I doubt that I’ll be shooting wild boar on Pulau Ubin anytime soon), but until we have a Michael Pollan of our own, I still recommend The Omnivore’s Dilemma for my local friends.

Reading – 19th October 2009

Alvin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:38:38 +0000

No related posts.

A Question about Psychological Self-Defense

Alvin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:03:39 +0000

Caveat: If I sound like an experienced authority on self-defense, you should know I’m not. I’ve only been attacked once in my life and then managed to talk my way out of it. The other parts of my personal experience come from books, teachers and simulations. I actually consider it a blessing not to be an experienced authority on self-defense, as I like living a peaceful, happy life where people don’t try to change my lifestyle for me without my permission.

Where a lot of martial arts fail is in not addressing the mental and emotional aspects of self-defense before, during and after the fight. Nobody gets attacked in a vacuum, everybody gets attacked in a context. Nobody goes through a violent attack with the same mental and emotional response they go through a kata drill. And nobody goes from normal life, to violence, then back to normal life the same way again.

I trained for years without even once addressing the mental and emotional response to being attacked, then I donned a High Gear suit and had a partner go at me high speed, strength and intent and experienced the “oh fuck!” freeze for myself. It wasn’t as pretty as the kung-fu movies. Even though they were real fake training simulations, I went through the whole gamut of surprise, shock, fear, lock-up, despair, anger, aggression, indignation, all the while trying to defend myself physically. Conclusion? It wasn’t as easy as I thought it’d be.

And yet.

Real-world physical violence will be rare for most of the people I know, including myself. Yet I suspect we experience real-world mental and emotional violence more frequently in our daily lives from toxic people and relationships, some more than others. But how? Why? And how do we defend ourselves?

Wolves choose their prey; they don’t challenge the strongest in the herd, they go for the weakest. They’re not looking for a fight, they just want food as quickly and as easily as they can get it. Predators choose their victims in the same way, they want to get what they want with as little injury to themselves as possible. And as ugly it is to say, and as hard to admit, I’ve seen that abusive relationships really are a two-way street. A toxic person looks for the type he knows will suffer his abuse, and the victim allows the toxic person space in their lives for the abuse to take place.

I know it’s not as easy as that makes it sound. And it’s not about placing blame. It’s about personal responsibility – the personal ability to respond – while recognizing that the distribution of responsibility lies in shifting degrees. In a perfect world, the toxic abuser will exercise responsibility for his thoughts and actions, and act to create mutually beneficial relationships instead. In a perfect world, the victim will exercise responsibility for keeping herself safe from toxic people and act assertively. But it ain’t a perfect world.

If you can teach someone to overcome mental and emotional barriers to keep themselves safe physically, can you teach someone to overcome mental and emotional barriers to keep themselves safe psychologically? How would you do it? Especially for people who have had a pattern of playing the victim role in an abusive relationship?

Martial Arts is Dealing with Self-Defense Failure

The Writer’s Ego

Alvin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:03:37 +0000

There’s a difference between writing for yourself and writing for your reader, one that’s as clear as night and day.

It’s the difference between what the very smart Kathy Sierra describes as a company that kicks ass, versus a company that helps its users kick ass.

In one, you write to satisfy yourself. In the other, you write to satisfy your reader.

In one, you read your words with your eyes. In the other, you read your words with your reader’s eyes.

In one, you write staggeringly works of heartbreaking genius, and you don’t ever edit dammit because it’s all so mind-numbingly breathtakingly good. In the other, you slay your babies ruthlessly if they don’t serve your reader.

If you’re writing in service of your ego (this blog), anything goes and your ego’s free to write checks your body can’t cash. But that kind of writing is entirely different from writing in service of your reader (my magazine writing day job), where only what’s 100% useful for her gets printed.

As a technology writer with an overinflated opinion of himself, I have to be especially careful not to indulge in verbiage just to stroke my own ego while pushing my dear reader’s head below the heady waters of information overload just one more time because she really needs to know that digital camera sensors only record in black and white, color is added with a overlying color filter, the most common of which is a Bayer filter.

Stroke, stroke, stroke. Push, push, push.

Screw that. If any word doesn’t serve the reader, if it’s not essential, it goes out. Gone, deleted, fucking slayed.

Because you have to decide: are you out here for your ego, or are you out here for your reader. You can’t play both sides with your balls hanging on the fence.

Pick a side.

Write.

My Food & I

Alvin — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:06:01 +0000

If you’re wondering about it from my vegetarian posts, no, I haven’t become a vegetarian.

What drew me to explore vegetarian restaurants is what I’ve learned about food these last few months, which made me look for places that serve nutritious and environmentally friendly foods.

This post is about that learning journey, but I want to warn you that it’s slightly over 2000 words long. If you don’t want to go through all that, Mark Bittman summarizes the important points in his much more entertaining TED talk, which will only take you 19 minutes to watch.

Living the Life

It all kick-started for me when a friend introduced me to British chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s TV show River Cottage. I instantly fell in love with it.

In 1997, Hugh moved from the big city to the countryside for an experiment in self-sufficiency. He learned how to grow his own crops, rear his own animals and every episode he took the best advantage of these beautiful harvests, using his culinary skills to whip up delectable dishes. Here’s a taste of the first episode:

Watching River Cottage made me realize how far removed I was from where my food came from. Whereas Hugh grew and slaughtered his own meat for example, I thought of my meat coming from the supermarket in clear plastic wraps. The sources of my food were intellectual facts in my head, but never something I had experienced firsthand, and it made me interested to learn more about food and where it came from.

In Defense of Food

It was around this time that I finally bought myself a copy of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, a book I’d been meaning to read for a while.

Nutrition vs. Nutritionism

Why does anyone need to defend food, of all things? In the book, which grew out of an article Pollan wrote for the New York Times called Unhappy Meals, Pollan argues that mistaking the science of nutritionism – which breaks food down into its chemical constituents – for actual nutrition has its costs.

Pollan, an investigative journalist, found that whole foods behave differently from the nutrients they contain. While fruits and vegetables help to protect against cancer, when the antioxidants are removed from the context of the foods they’re found in to be taken as supplements, they don’t seem to work. In other words, if you find yourself choosing between a vitamin supplement and a salad, eat the salad.

The Perils of the Western Diet

He also wrote about the perils of the Western diet: a diet full of processed foods and meat, fat and sugar. It seems that people who eat a Western diet suffer substantially higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity than people eating any number of different traditional diets.

Pollan describes an experiment undertaken by ten middle-aged Aborigines in 1982. Since leaving the bush some years before, they had all developed type 2 diabetes and risks of heart disease. The ten Aborigines returned to their homeland, and were forced to rely exclusively on foods they hunted and gathered for themselves.

After seven weeks in the bush, all had lost weight, blood pressure had dropped and according to Kerin O’Dea, the nutrition scientist who designed the experiment; “all of the metabolic abnormalities of type 2 diabetes were either greatly improved or completely normalized in a group of Aborigines by a relatively short reversion to hunter-gatherer lifestyle.” Since then, a series of comparable experiments with Native Americans and Hawaiians have produced similar results.

In short; lay off the processed foods and meat, fat and sugar, eat as natural as possible and there may be hope for you yet.

So Pollan isn’t defending food as much as he is defending real foods; foods that don’t contain a laundry list of ingredients but are ingredients in themselves, foods that actually grow in nature and our ancestors would recognize, like a potato from the ground versus a potato chip that comes out of a can. The message of the book is simple and summarized on its front cover: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

But Not in Defense of White Rice

While reading In Defense of Food, I discovered that not all foods I thought were good for me really are. It turns out that refining grains lengthens their shelf life but removes important nutrients like B vitamins, fiber and iron. And one of the staples of the modern Chinese diet is a refined grain: white rice. We eat it with almost every meal, every single day.

If that wasn’t enough, eating a lot of refined carbohydrates, which include white rice and other refined ‘white’ foods like white bread and white pasta, may increase the risk of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Plus, it turns out that a high carbohydrate diet may also make you fat.

I have to give up white rice? Say it ain't so! Picture by MR+G

I’d grown up eating white rice almost everyday, and it was as unquestionable a part of my diet as water, but now it turns out to be bad for me? It was unsettling to accept, but I bit the bullet and started cutting down my consumption of white rice to little or none, which earned me questions and curious stares from family and friends. It also made me wonder about how much I thought I knew about food that I still needed to learn more about.

The Problem with Meat

But I did discover a great side-effect from skipping the rice: I had a lot more space in my stomach for fruits, vegetables and meat, glorious meat. Gotta get my protein right? I really enjoyed myself, but then I started thinking about the bigger effects of eating lots of meat.

Oh yes. Picture by TheBusyBrain

The Environmental Problem

A 2006 United Nations report called Livestock’s Long Shadow found that “the livestock sector is one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global” and that “livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport.”

The problem doesn’t arise from the practice of meat-eating per se, if you grow your own cattle and hunt your own food like Hugh, that’s fine. The problem comes from the modern factory farming system. These factory farms consume enormous amounts of energy and create large amounts of greenhouse gases. When I think greenhouse gas, I usually think of carbon dioxide. But methane, another greenhouse gas, is 20 times more powerful than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere, and the United States Environmental Protection Agency reports that animal agriculture (of cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, and camels) is the number one source of methane in the world.

The Health Problem

And those are just the environmental effects of meat production. Cattle raised industrially are fed cheap corn (mixed in a feed which may include animal products, it was the feeding of cattle to cattle that caused mad-cow disease), but because their stomachs are meant to digest grass, not grains, they get sick. Which is why as much as 70 percent of antibiotics used in the United States is given to livestock, a practice that leads to the development of bacteria that are immune to many treatments.

Feeding cattle grains also makes their digestive tracts more acidic. Because of this, a strain of acid-resistance E. coli has developed that’s more likely to survive the acid that usually kills it in the human stomach. If you’re an adult, infection can give you severe diarrhea. For children under 5 years of age and the elderly though, it can cause kidney failure and death.

The Ethical Problem

It gets better. The life of an industrially raised animal is not a good one, this is the life of a typically factory farmed chick in 39 days (warning: graphic):

Nearly 280 million laying hens in the United States are confined in cages so restrictive the birds can’t spread their wings. “Broiler” chicken (young male chickens sold when still young) rearing facilities, on the other hand, are extremely overcrowded, with tens of thousands of birds crammed into a single closed broiler house, where the chickens’ excretions pile up and the ammonia fumes burn their eyes, making them blind. The growth of abnormally heavy bodies for more meat causes crippling and deformities, some chickens can’t even walk because their bodies are too heavy, and some simply die of heart failure.

Unfortunately, inhumane treat isn’t just reserved for chickens. Other factory-farmed animals like cattle, ducks and geese, and pigs have it bad too.

This Time it’s Personal

This is the part where I man up to an embarrassing confession.

Like a lot of things, change doesn’t come until there are real costs and benefits attached to it. I started reading about diet back in the late 90s, but it still took me a long time to change.

What really pushed me over the edge this year was how fat I was becoming. If you know me, you’ll probably think I’m going anorexic, but what you may not see on this skinny-fat guy is the extra flab growing on his waistline.

I’ve been trying to lose these love handles ever since I overdosed on food in my 20s, but it never worked. Things came to a head when I gorged myself silly on holiday foods during the end of last year and the beginning of this, and I saw myself fatter than I’d ever been in my holiday photos. This had to end!

The point of this confession? Knowledge about diet is nice, but it’s all in the head. You’ll never get it in the body unless there’s a personal price tag involved.

Making it All Work

We’ve covered many topics about food. Now the question is: how do we pull it all together and make better choices about what to eat?

Books tend to make change sound easy – do this, do that, here’s a 6-step formula. But when I tried to put what I’ve learned into practice, I found that real life isn’t so clear cut.

Real Life is Messy

Having a steak may be healthier for me than a bowl of white rice, but what about the environmental cost of that steak? Organic ingredients at the supermarket are healthier and more environmentally friendly, but what do I do when it can cost two to four times as much as its non-organic equivalent? For that matter, which is less harmful to the environment and healthier for me; a non-organically grown local vegetable or an organically grown vegetable that’s been flown all the way from Japan, eating up fossil fuels for transportation along the way?

How about when the boss buys the office chocolate cake, richly laden with sugar and white flour, and insists I have a slice? What about family gatherings where I don’t get to decide what’s cooking? What do I eat at work, if I have no idea where the meat and vegetables in my cafeteria come from?

And most of the research cited in this article are from the United States. Do we have the same concerns here in South-East Asia? Do our chickens come from local factory farms? Are our cattle fed grass or grain?

These are real questions to a complex problem, and to be honest, I don’t have the answers. In the end, I don’t think there are any easy, one-piece-fits-all solutions, just best choices we each have to make every time we choose something to eat.

Making Sense of it All

I’m neither a doctor nor a nutritionist, so I can’t recommend what you should eat. That also means that I can’t objectively evaluate nutritional findings. And when I try to decipher it, it all seems like one big mess: somebody claims eating this will save you, somebody else says it’s the worst thing ever, and every year a new miraculous super-food arises that will save everyone.

The only sane way I can find out of all this confusion is simply a good dose of common sense. Eat more vegetables and less meat. Makes sense? I think so. A real potato is more nutritious than a processed potato chip. Yup, sounds good. Eat more supplements and skip the real fruits? Maybe not. An organic salad is healthier than a non-organic salad, but a non-organic salad is still healthier than deep-fried chicken? Definitely. Give up ice-cream forever for health’s sake? No way!

Besides common sense, In Defense of Food’s simple manifesto shines through as a useful principle: Eat food (real food, preferably organic, fresh and humanely raised). Not too much (don’t eat till you’re bursting at the seams, it’s not good for you). Mostly plants (think of meat as side-dishes, for your health, the environment and the animal’s sake).

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Picture by Sancho Papa

Things have certainly changed from when “what do you want to eat today?” was a much simpler question to answer. When I started learning about food, I never thought that what I chose to eat would not only have nutritional consequences, but also environmental, economical and political as well. I never thought that I would have to think so much about such an essential, and mostly unquestioned, part of my life.

But I like to think that even though I’ve still never slaughtered a chicken personally, I am closer to the source of my food now than I used to be.

Recommended Watching

1. The Meatrix. Sustainable Table, Free Range Studios, 2003. Link

2. Kenner, Robert, dir. Food Inc. Participant Media, River Road Entertainment, 2008. Trailer | Website | Amazon

3. Spurlock, Morgan, dir. Super Size Me. Kathbur Pictures, Con, The, Studio On Hudson, 2004. Trailer | Amazon