Brian Elliott

If you take all the products in the supermarket and sum their collective weight, 25% of that weight is derived from corn. At least, that’s the statistic reported by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Not hard to believe when you look at the ingredients list of all the processed foods.

• Your sodas are corn.
• Your cereals are corn.
• Your pancake syrup is corn.
• Your oatmeal is corn.
• Your yogurt is corn.
• Your beef is corn.

…and so on, ad nauseum.

Everyone knows the saying, “You are what you eat.” So by this logic, people these days are largely derived from corn. But is that so bad? I mean, isn’t corn healthy? We have in our mind endless cornfields in the Midwest growing on rich, black soils, but that’s not the modern situation.

The lifecycle of corn these days begins in an oil field. Petroleum is refined to create synthetic fertilizers that provide just enough nutrient content (NPK) to make damaged topsoils viable for growth. Farmers can skip crop rotation knowing that synthetic fertilizers will make the land produce corn for yet another year. The cost of this process is damage to the soil itself, toxic fertilizers draining into the waterways, and low nutrient content in the food itself.

Of course, describing this type of genetically modified corn food is a bit of a misnomer. Most of the “grain” corn grown in mass quantities is actually unfit for human consumption without additional processing. It is used in:

• CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) - also known as feedlots!
• Processed foods - Also known as everything in the supermarket.
• Ethanol - Oil begets oil! David Pimentel, a professor at my fine alma mater, published this paper arguing that production of ethanol nets a -29% energy balance.

This is the world our government and industrial farming practices have created with cheap corn. If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.

Suppose you avoid all the processed foods in the supermarket and begin to feel good about yourself. Maybe you buy extra produce and imagine that you’re getting a quality product. Labeling produce “conventional” is an interesting euphemism to describe produce grown with synthetic, petroleum derived fertilizers and pesticides in nutrient-starved soil. It might be more appropriate to name it “chemical” produce.

Organic food, by comparison, is portrayed as the saintly opposite of the convential produce. These foods are a big improvement because pesticides and synthetic fertilizers are not used, but are still not ideal. Industrial distribution processes dictate that even organic foods are delivered from places like New Zealand, California, and even Argentina. The nutritional and taste qualities of perishables generally do not benefit from being hauled halfway around the globe.

What’s the answer to all this madness? How do people obtain sane foods that won’t hurt their families, the environment, and farmers? The answer is simply to go local. Reduce the length of your food chain to the point where you know exactly where the food came from. Buy from local farmer’s markets, CSAs, or even grow it in your own garden. Ask the farmers about their growing practices. Enjoy seeing and eating foods that celebrate real biodiversity. The food you can get locally is literally not the same thing you can get through industrial food chains.

Opt out of the industrial system. It sucks for you and your family.

This post is about a month late in the coming, but I had to give it a brief write up to pay appropriate homage to both Intelligentsia Coffee and Hacienda La Esmerelda.

The Millenium Park Intelligentsia store maintains a short list of coffees you can order for brewing on the Clover. I love the Clover as an alternative to espresso shots because it emphasizes the more subtle flavors of the beans that are usually lost in a drip or french press brew without sacrificing the body. Anyway, Intelly typically has a small menu listing 5 to 6 coffees you can order on the Clover at a given time that cost $2-3 for a 12 oz. cup.
I walked in one day and coffee listed on the Clover menu with a price tag in excess of $10. The baristas confirmed that it was indeed the Esmerelda Special from La Hacienda Esmerelda that won at the 2006 Best of Panama auction. It’s not every day you can drop $10 on 12 oz of liquid and not be purchasing wine, but on the other hand, a $10 wine is nothing to write home about. Coffee prices, on the other hand, haven’t ballooned the way wine prices have. Call me crazy, but being able to taste what is literally the best coffee Panama has to offer for such a low price is a deal.

So I ordered up my unusually high priced coffee, which was served with a great degree of care and awe. (It’s likely there weren’t too many consumers there buying this stuff.) The taste was really excellent, as was the mouthfeel. Any description of the taste profile that I could give would fall short, but the overall sensation imparted was one of perfect balance. Sipping that stuff suffused my spirit with a sense of warmth and joy.

I like to think that I have a decent palate, but drinking Panama’s finest was an experience that had me out of my depth. I could tell that the coffee was exemplary, but my tasting skills were probably not equipped to identify the winner from any of the close runners up. That type of fine differentiation is best left to more qualified judges. Suffice it to say, I really enjoyed the cup and even dragged my buddies in to try it themselves, but it also made me appreciate the taste buds of the experts.

On Wednesday morning, I headed out to Colorado for a couple days of chillin’ and minimal altitude acclimation before Team Evergreen’s Triple Bypass. For those unacquainted with some of cycling’s more obscure events, the Triple Bypass is an invitational bike tour for amateur roadies who love to climb mountains. It’s a road ride, 120 miles in length that crosses 3 major mountain passes. The climbing, at over 10,000 feet resembles a stage of the Tour de France, although there is no peloton going by at inhuman speeds.

I prepared mentally for the ride Wednesday to Friday by camping out in Lucy and Matthias’s Boulder apartment being a total bum. You never know when couch surfing and gluttony skills will come in handy during a long ride. Merle flew out to join me as my support team on Friday night and we crashed in preparation of Saturday’s long ride. The alarm clock went off at 4:30 am, and we drove down to Evergreen for the start of the ride. Arriving at the busy starting area, Merle smiled attractively to obtain us a nice temporary parking spot where I could get my kit together. Merle used the opportunity to wield her shiny new Canon 5D. In spite of some technical troubles, she managed to get off a shot or two.

Weather conditions at the start were seriously overcast, with a strong likelihood of rain and snow in the mountain passes. I wore my summer gear and carried my favorite shell with me. The bike computer’s sensor snapped off the frame before I even got out of the parking lot, so I was in for a data of data-free biking. That can be good or bad, depending on your point of view! Anyway, the first section of the course was a climb that slowly worked its way up to Juniper Pass at 11,000+ feet. The road steadily got steeper and I discovered that I could out-climb a lot of people that definitely appeared stronger when they left me behind on the flats. An hour into the climb, the heavens opened up, and I pulled over to put on my shell. From there it only got colder and wetter…

The summit at Juniper Pass was cold, wet, and anticlimactic. It was marked by nothing more than the corpse of a roadkilled deer and some orange spraypaint on the sidewalk. Not much to see after an hour and a half of climbing. Shortly after the summit, I saw the rest stop, which was a pit of wet bikers and mud. With my teeth chattering and extremities going numb, I decided to push through it without stopping and try to reach Merle’s SAG-wagon at the bottom of the mountain. That descent was a bit scarier than I’m accustomed to because my core temperature was dropping so much and my hands were too numb to work the brakes efficiently. It’s fairly difficult to slow the bike heading down a steep mountain with numb appendages! A lot of the locals whizzed by me here, but I did see a couple of the numbskulls having crashed out on the side.

By the time I got to Merle in Idaho Springs, I was well and truly frozen through. She helped me hop off the bike, warm up in the heated Jeep, and pumped me full of hot coffee. A ton of other cyclists were either heading back to Evergreen at this point or dropping out with the help of private SAG vehicles at the parking lot in Idaho Springs. The hot coffee and clothing reinforcements from Merle helped me hop on the bike because I could certainly make it as far as the next stop in Georgetown, a mere 15 miles away.

The road to Georgetown was less crowded with all the dropouts, a bit warmer, but no less wet. It followed some rolling hills and generally provided a break before the beginning of the climb to Loveland Pass. After an excellent nature break and another warmup in the Jeep, I continued on the road to Loveland, some 15 miles further away. Loveland is the highest pass, at 11,990 feet, and the road out of Georgetown to Loveland climbed sharply for several miles before dumping us poort, wet riders out onto the shoulder of I-70. This part of the ride sucked pretty bad because it continued to climb steadily, while adding in the joy of sucking in the exhaust of all the cars. I was delighted to get off the highway at the SAG stop at mile 56 and hang out with Merle.

Merle later told me that she knew the next four miles to the summit of Loveland Pass were brutal, but didn’t have the heart to tell me at the time. Given the 56 miles climbing in the wet and cold so far, I’m glad she didn’t even mention it. My energy levels were still good, but I think it was best to approach this section of the course completely ignorant. The road up and over the pass is pretty much the sharpest and unrelenting ascent of the entire ride. I spent all of the climb in the grandma gear and still had to make two stops to catch my breath. The top was beautiful, though, with a panoramic view and a sign marking the Continental Divide. The descent on the far side was also a lot easier, too, with nice straight road. In general, the temperature continued to rise slowly and it was cool to see the Snake River whip by as I cruised down the mountain.

The descent carried me through some Colorado ski resort areas before winding over to the bottom of Swan Mountain, a mini bonus climb on the route. I was amused that this climb was discounted as one of the peaks despite the fact that it’s about two solid miles of climbing. Anyway, Swan Lake was quite beautful, and I soon arrived at the next of Merle’s excellent SAG setups at mile 75. We relaxed for a little bit before I set out for the final climbing segment of the ride up Vail Pass. A hilly trail wound its way up there, passing through the Copper Mountain ski resort. This part of the course was a set of rolling hills that slowly arced up towards Vail. There were a handful of very sharp and short climbs that really tested my remaining energy levels coming into the 95th mile of the climb before I finally saw Merle up ahead snapping photos of her very wet and tired husband rolling into the SAG stop.

Merle crammed me full of food and drink before I set about tackling the 25 mile descent to the finish in Avon. Despite being tired I cranked my bike up into the big chainring and rocked downhill as fast as possible. After being on the bike all day, I simply wanted to finish. Without a computer, I can’t tell how fast I was going, but it was pretty quick. The downhill section was nice on tired legs and I quickly passed through Vail and other tourist towns before finally arriving in Avon. There was a crowded gauntlet of people at the finish line and it was gratifying to hear them cheering.

We headed back to Boulder after that, where Lucy and Matthias had prepared a feast of champions for Merle’s birthday. The girl spent all day sagging for me in the rain, but did at least eventually get a cake and tasty dinner. The meal had many tasty bits including salmon, veggies, and sparkling wine, though Merle clearly enjoyed the chocolate cake. The cake was a formidable combination of chocolate with a dark chocolate frosting with strawberries tucked into the center. Yummy.

The next day we left the People’s Republic of Boulder, but not before running into one of my co-workers at the airport. I found out that my two co-workers who also did the ride bailed out at Idaho Springs. Maybe they were the sane ones, but I’m glad to have finished. One more notch on my belt of oddball endurance events.

*Edit: The course map for TB. (Shon, it apparently is Juniper Pass, not Squaw, but you were right that I had put Loveland too high.)

This post is late to the punch, but I promised to write up a summary of the race. Merle and I decided to run Grandma’s in order to hang out with our friends Jess and Chris from school. Nothing like four Cornellians deciding to take on a race in northern Minnesota. (Wood chippers, stand ready.) The race was both my 6th marathon and an good cross training event to build up cardiovascular endurance for the Triple Bypass in July.

We flew into Minneapolis on Friday morning, joining up with Jess and Chris within the bowels of the airport jungle. From there, we drove the three hours up to Duluth. There really isn’t much to see en route from Minneapolis to Duluth except exits on the highway. As we approached Duluth I got my first look ever at Lake Superior, which didn’t have the endless majesty of Michigan. At the point where Superior touches the shore of Duluth, it is only a thin channel that spans Duluth and Superior, Wisconsin. In spite of this, the presence of the impassive waters still imparted a sense of permanence on the place.

Duluth is an industrial port city with a small, growing downtown area. Some storefronts are vacant, while others appear profitable. There is a nice lakefront park with a walking trail aquarium, convention center, and shops that promise a bright future of tourism dollars, but the industrial roots of the city are still clear in the background.

Upon arrival, we fought the crowd to negotiate packet pickup and had a nice dinner consuming buckets of carbohydrates at a local cafe place on the waterfront. From there, we crashed out for the night in preparation for the Saturday morning race.

The alarm clock went off early the next morning and the four of us took the big yellow bus twenty-some miles north on the highway along Superior to Two Rivers, MN where the race started. The weather was a muggy 80 degrees with humidity up around 90%. The morning was thick with race excitement and fog. A foghorn could be heard off in the distance as we did the pre-race ritual of stretching, hydration, and port-o-potty patronage. Jess and Chris looked pretty keyed up to get rolling on their marathon and Merle looked ready for a powernap.

The race traced the shoreline of Lake Superior for about 22 miles, heading south back to Duluth. I took the four miles easy, hanging out with my lovely and talented wife. From there I amped it up a little bit to a medium pace, clock miles in the 9-10 minute/mile range. The heat kept amping up and there was little shade to hide in. As the race progressed, the “drop out here” signs were in evidence, there were cases of heat stroke, and people puking on the side of the road. I tried to keep cool by running through peoples’ sprinklers and consumed plenty of electrolytes along the way. The crowds of cheering folks helped the miles roll by, as did the thought of finishing and eating literally everything in sight.

I pretty much cruised along until about mile 21 when my legs were getting heavy and the heat began to wear on me. The last few miles weren’t my fastest ever, but I finished the marathon in better physical condition than any of my previous attempts. The final chip time was something like 4:14:56, which was my second fastest flat-land marathon time. Also, I’ve now completed 6 marathons. That’s one performance in Washington D.C., two Chicago Marathons, two Pikes Peak Marathons, and now Grandma’s. I’m not sure if there are more marathons in my future or if I’ll move to more oddball endurance events…

My finishing time wasn’t too bad considering the heat and how little I really trained for it I didn’t really run more than three days a week, and sometimes not even that, but I made sure to get the long runs in. Next time I do anything in that kind of heat, though, I will effect a more aggressive body refueling strategy. Electrolyte replacement capsules seem to be insufficient fuel for those kind of conditions. I’m definitely going to have to mix it up with a bit of Perpetuem or Sustained Energy.

Anyway, all four of us finished, and went out to a tasty, fat laden dinner at the local brewery followed by malted milkshakes. I probably consumed as many calories as a sled dog at the Iditarod and fell asleep no later than 8:30 pm that night. (Such a party animal.) It was a nice weekend; It’s a treat to hang out with Cornell buddies and squeeze in a wee bit of exercise at the same time. Plus, it was a nice warmup event for the Triple Bypass!

Having recently made the transition to an all Macintosh household, I decided to compile this list of must haves to help my buddy Matt along:

Development:

Xcode 2.3 - Free download from Apple, it provides gcc, Interface Builder, and most of the basic GNU essentials.

iTerm - Terminal.app replacement. More feature rich, supports multiple windows and tabs, etc, etc.

TextMate - Slick lightweight text editor with features supporting every language under the sun. Customizability is its killer feature. It supports user-supplied bundle commands that allow the user to add features by scripting in their preferred language.

Python 2.4.3 - A lot of cool Mac-only Python packages are out there! Be sure to install the Universal 2.4.3 package from pythonmac.org.

ipython - Slick enhanced shell for the Python interpreter. (Requires the GNU readline library.)

Appscript - Python to Applescript bridge makes Mac scripting a breeze.

matplotlib - Matlab-like plotting package. Produce real plots without dirtying your hands on MS Excel.

Multimedia:

Handbrake - Very nice DVD => MPEG4 converter

iSquint - For making iPod video friendly movies.

MPlayer OSX - Plays just about anything.

VLC - For when MPlayer flakes out inexplicably. (Yay)

Net:

Bittorrent - Can’t live without it.

NetNewsWire - Sweet RSS/Atom fat client.

Adium - nice iChat replacement.

Fun:

Netflix Freak - Netflix fat client.

tickr for Flickr - scrolling picture collage on demand.

Compatibility:

Parallels - Cheap new VMWare competitor that allows you to run Windows in a box. That’s preferable to Boot Camp, if you ask me. Plus, this one is a real hit with wives and girlfriends because your Windows box can be removed to a closet.

Keynote - Powerpoint killer. Make killer presentations just like Jobs, and export to PPT for the losers at your job.

My rabid comparison of HDTV specs turned out to be way less useful than simply doing a visual comparison of various high def sets in the local BestBuy. The Westinghouse model, while cheaper than the other vendors, did a poor job of rendering skin tones and true blacks and whites. Sony, Sharp, and Panasonic boasted nice sets, but none of them were in the same visual league as the Samsung models. Another discovery was that LCD sets are still not in the same league as the plasmas. Compared head to head, the plasmas simply had more lifelike colors.

With this information in hand, I spent quality time researching Samsungs and comparing prices. It turned out that I could get the brand new 2006 Samsung HP-S4253 42″ plasma online for about $600 cheaper than in the store. We’ve had this set now for 4 days and no longer feel guilty about shelling out a major fortune for a television.

I am, however, angry at the pathetic state of consumer choice with respect to HD cable service. My requirements for upgrading to HD cable comprise only two things:

1) Must have an HD DVR.

2) Must have OLN (Outdoor Life Network) so we can watch cycling.

This doesn’t seem too complicated, so my initial reaction was to check with DirecTV about upgrading to HD with a new TV. For some idiotic reason, though, their HD Tivo is incapable of receiving the local HD channels. How…unimpressive. That left Dish, Comcast, and WoW. Switching to Dish was unattractive due to cost and the annoyance of switching the dish tacked onto my home. WoW got ruled out due to not carrying OLN, which only left Comcast. I have called those fools twice now, only to discover that they can’t manage to put my address into their broken computer system. Hence, at least for the moment, they are unable to take my business. At one point their customer service representative actually asked me if I was sure that Comcast serviced my area. I calmly informed him that I was certain Comcast was indeed a local provider because I received their junk mail all the time.

Bottom line, though, is that the new TV is great, even if the cable providers leave a lot to be desired.

My 28th birthday comes soon. That means it’s time to focus my technolust on the acquisition of new material possessions! Normally I’d be drooling over new computer gadgets, but this year I’m thinking HDTV.

Our aging 27″ Zenith CRT has come a long way since the Pyramid Mall in Ithaca. Its lovely rounded tube shows only the finest pixelated images. Heck, the SDTV picture is sharp enough that you can distinguish one team from the other when you watch football! For a while that seemed like acceptable quality until I realized that my video iPod literally has half the resolution in a device that fits in the palm of my hand.

Upgrading to HDTV on the surface sounds like an obvious win. However, the prices are ridiculous and the technology itself is a confusing pile of committee-designed standards and poor vendor implementations. There are multiple types of display technologies, different resolutions, and DVR support for HD content is still evolving.

The choice of display technologies is a simple one for us because LCD is the only technology where vendors are creating offerings smaller than 40″. The downsides to LCDs are weaker black levels, ghosting effects, and oversaturation of colors. On the upside, LCDs are the only displays I see that support the full 1920×1080 resolution of HD. The other technologies, including plasma screens, appear to cap out at 1366×768. I’m not sure why that is, but it seems foolish to scale the picture while claiming to support 1080 line video signals. (Go LCD)

As we are currently addicted to Tivo, any upgrade to HD must include a DVR system. Tivo the company currently does not offer an HD model, which is odd considering that DirecTV does have a Tivo-branded DVR that DOES support HD content. A quick call to DirecTV revealed that they would happily upgrade my equipment to their HD stuff for a mere $500. When I pointed out that I could switch to Comcast essentially for free, the sales rep offered to take $100 off the price, but a $400 tax still seems a bit unreasonable when the original Tivo unit cost $50 after rebate.

Comcast, on the other hand, definitely wants my business and will happily rent me an HD-capable DVR box as part of their monthly HDTV package cost. It is likely that such a box will not have the intuitive software interface of a Tivo, but at least Comcast’s box can ACTUALLY save HD content. It’s a bit sad that Tivo sacrificed their market leading position in this space in favor of SCO-style legal wrangling, but I digress. My research boiled me down to the following conclusions for HD:

1) If I want a DVR, I have to either pay DirecTV a fortune or switch to Comcast. That means losing my NFL Sunday Ticket!

2) LCD is the only dang thing that will actually fit in my living room. Now all that remains is to go to some store and do some visual comparisons. I’m fond of the new Westinghouse 37″ TV for its 1920×1080 support and reasonable price, but we’ll see how the specs hold up to the eyeball test.

I still feel a bit ridiculous about the prospect of spending so much money on a television, but the technolust is picking up strength…

At 60,000+ employees, Microsoft is the biggest mainstream software development shop that I’m aware of. For the last few years, the behemoth has been focused on delivering its successor to Windows XP. That project was first called Longhorn, and is now called Vista.

The word “vista” is a noun used to describe a pleasing view. With Windows Vista, there’s nothing to look at it, so I recommend that Microsoft does another name re-alignment and dubs it “Vapor.” That seems appropriate considering that the CorporateSuits just announced this week that Vista would be delayed until the end of 2006.

After multiple delays, no one is really surprised to see it slip again. However, I do find one thing interesting about this particular slippage:

Microsoft is cutting scope!

That’s right, they are eliminating pesky features like 64-bit computing and the media center options from the first set of Vista releases. What!? Aren’t these the things that people actually want and that their own marketing machine is carping about? It’s no wonder they can’t be bothered to support EFI…

Previous accounts I’ve read suggested that Microsoft has roughly 20,000 people involved in the development of Vista. I don’t know how factual that number is, but it’s safe to assume that the actual number of developers is VERY high. Now suppose that only a 25% of those are doing actual software development work when you factor out QA folks and miscellaneous process monkeys.

To the layman, it might seem that an army of 5,000 software developers could create a mountain of software, but the truth is that their mountain would probably just be a landfill. I’d say organizing programmers is like herding cats, but that would do a disservice to the feline population of this world. Have you seen the crazy cat ladies with 5+ cats in a single household? They’re a bit batty, and cats do not hold a candle to programmers.

Microsoft gets a lot of press for the use of agile development methodologies and XP in particular, so something is amiss when you take that many developers and fling them at a project. In my own experience, any more than 7 developers on a single team and the process becomes less productive. The integration of change sets and communication become more difficult as the number of developers involved increases. No matter how many teams those 5k developers at Microsoft are broken into, that’s an awful lot of overhead.

Suppose that Vista development is broken down into many efficient teams, each consisting of 7 highly motivated developers. That’s a whopping 714 teams. Suppose you round down to 700 for the sake of simplicity. Does anyone really believe there are 700 sub-projects that Vista development can be broken into? I don’t think so. As a result, one must infer that Microsoft has aggressively ramped up the number of developers per team. In a project as complex as Vista, that pushes the barriers of sanity into the red zone.

In the immortal words of Fred Brooks:

“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

The size of the teams and overall complexity of the project have already induced multiple release slips. Now take in account the announced “reduction in scope.” It seems likely that the programmers whose features got cut from the release will be reassigned now in order to help stop the other teams from slipping even further. I can think of no better way to guarantee the software ship evens LATER. I wonder if it’s possible derive a lemma from Brooks’s law to say that “Late software will be bloated, buggy and counter-intuitive to the user?”

I wonder how many bugs this version of Windows will have at the time of its release. I remember when 2000 came out with approximately 60,000 bugs and a service pack was available immediately. That’s a high standard to contest, but I feel that Microsoft is capable of producing a product that has a known bug count in excess of 10^5. They have the technology.

But more importantly, will anyone care when Vista finally arrives? If you’re a Windows user, XP (or even 2000) probably does what you need already. If you’re a Mac user like me, the idea of running Vista probably makes you shudder.

Honestly. And no, it isn’t what you think. I didn’t make a vain attempt to read the three part Art of Computer Programming. That would be impossible even with an unlimited supply of my favorite espresso. No, I got hung up on Donald’s other masterpiece, that bastion of intuitive programming known as LaTeX. I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Knuth and do believe that TeX is still the best typesetting system in existence, but easy to use? It is NOT.

Being the picky (read: anal) person I am, I decided to update my resume using that fine tool. Multiple days and several bursts of uncontrolled profanity later, I finally arrived at a resume format that looked beautiful. The only problem was that I had NOT yet written the content. Oops. In my quest for the perfect layout, I totally neglected the entire point of the process, which is to actually transmit information about one’s skill set onto a piece of paper. (err, tex/pdf file)

The act of writing a LaTeX document is so similar to writing actual source code that I spent brain cycles wondering about proper markup idioms and best practices. Sure enough, after the first successful iteration, I realize I had violated the sacred DRY principle. Not to worry, though, because LaTeX allows you to define our own fancy macros.

Tasty.

Ultimately, I wasted too much time on what should have been a simple task, but who can resist the lure of running their prose through a compiler!? Anyway, it looks great now and I can go back to a more normal existence.

(PS: Did you know that the seminal work has a volume 4 on the way?)