I just read about this cool initiative in Maine called the Maine Learning Technology Initiative that provides use of laptops to 7th and 8th graders in public schools, and is now expanding to include high school students. They just ordered 64,000 Macbooks for this reason! I think it is awesome that they are so seriousRead More
Month: June 2009
The ever elusive…balanced diet?
One main point that Michael Pollan brings up is the general shift from complexity to simplicity. He means that nutritional quality is eventually sacrificed because the complex interactions and combinations of nutrients are being simplified by industrializing and processing food. Biological and ecological interactions that culminate in the plant and animal products that we consumeRead More
California Academy of Sciences
While on my trip last week out to the West Coast to visit my cousin before attending a wedding, I had the opportunity to check out the new building for the California Academy of Sciences that opened last September in San Francisco.
Nutritionists at work, one nutrient at a time
A good quote from page 62 of In Defense of Food: “The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,” points out Marion Nestle, a New York University nutritionist, “is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the contextRead More
Nutritionism
I just started reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma about a year and a half ago and found it very perspective-changing so I am looking forward to what this book will have to say. The first few chapters have focused on discussion of the ideology behind “nutritionism.” Pollan pointsRead More
Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha is a really cool “computational knowledge engine” that a friend (Nat) showed to me. Here is the demo video: http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html Check it out and play around with it! http://www.wolframalpha.com/ It is capable of pulling out information and analyzes it in different ways. It can produce graphs and make complex calculations, and a lotRead More