Yay America

[ Posted by Janka Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:14:32 GMT ]

Ok, time for a crazy confession: I actually like Los Angeles. I am not sure if I like it enough to actually want to live here, and I definitely do not like all parts of it (see case highways), but I like a lot of places in it, and I like the atmosphere. Despite the fact that I could not stop bursting into giggles every time someone local opened their mouth when I was here for the first time, on account of everyone being hyper and speaking in a movie-accent, I’ve adjusted since. LA gets a worse rep than it deserves. Yes, it is a sprawl, and yes, the smog is terrible at worst, but then again, doesn’t that go for almost all big cities? At least the people are friendly here, and the sprawl has a lot of green bits in it.

One specific thing about LA reputation is the public transport. It gets terrible comments from everyone – you cannot take the bus anywhere, you just have to have a car, etc etc. First time I spend a couple of days alone in the city I figured that Santa Monica must be an exception to this. Second time over, and I think the reputation is just bullshit. The buses are clean enough, and cheap, and run on schedule, and those schedules are very nice—frequent enough for a tourist to not bother checking timetables. I am sure there are commuter routes that are not covered by public transport (isn’t there always?), but the situation is not nearly as bad as you are lead to believe. The trip planner is unable to give me all routes that provably exist, and in general totally sucks compared to the Helsinki area one, but, well, considering the quality of the latter the comparison is unfair to everyone else.

The USA is its own charming self, and some things have me giggling still, such as the fact that you get frigging potato chips with your sandwich in the University cafeterias, or that the locals consider income tax rate of 25 percent “high” (though considering what they get for it, it might actually be), or that practically every public building in California seems to have a sign somewhere by its front door warning that the location “contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer”.

But I giggle less and like it more every time I visit. And this time, I did not even instantly die when temperature passed 30 degrees C, at all. Apart from it turning out that thin-sole shoes on hot pavement are a bad, bad idea (in the “blistering heat is blistering” sense), I quite enjoyed myself walking around in that heat for hours. If you have a day to kill in LA, The Griffith Observatory is a nice place to see, and I especially recommend taking the trail (on your right when exiting the observatory via the main entrance) down to the Ferndell / Griffith park, which is a very relaxing place. (Thanks to the locals for the hint.)

(What? Oh. I was working. The vacation is in August/September, and yep, I will be back in the region then. Burner readers rejoice.)

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Don't you put on airs

[ Posted by Janka Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:47:02 GMT ]

Stealing a glance in the streetside windows I think I am pretty

But I can never say so

The only thing worse than being ugly is being stupid enough to not realize it

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Food is good for you

[ Posted by Janka Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:42:08 GMT ]

Lately, I have wanted to scream every time I hear the term “healthy food”, or see a food or nutrient pushed as healthier than something else. (And you see it all the time, which makes me want to scream way too often.)

Here’s a newsflash to all you intellectually challenged victims of health crazes: food is healthy, by definition. If it is bad for you, it is not food. If you do not believe me, try going without for, I do not know, say a month. If you after that still refuse to eat something that is generally considered food on the grounds of it not being healthy, I will do my best to have you admitted to a psychiatric institution and they can inflict an anorexia diagnosis on you.

And no, particular foods are not healthier than other foods, either. An apple is not by some absolute default healthier than a piece of chocolate. If you eat only apples you are likely to feel like crap, just as you are if you eat only chocolate. (I do not recommend trying either, but if you do not believe me, a month is probably a good length for an experiment, again.)

Particular diets are healthier than some other diets, I have to give you that. But even there, the effect is probably less than you think. Your body is brilliantly good at transforming things into other things, with just a couple of notable exceptions (the major one being vitamin C, the metabolism of which in humans, or rather the lack of essential parts there-of, is one of the best arguments there is against intelligent design). Sure the transformation might be somewhat more inefficient than eating everything in the exact required amounts, but last I checked lack of fuel for their bodies was not a problem for most Western humans. It is also crucial to understand that just because a diet consisting of nothing but pizza, fries, and sugared soft drinks is unhealthy, pizza, fries, or sugared water are not unhealthy as such. They are food. Foods are not unhealthy. Diets are. If you generally eat your veggies and so forth, eating a pizza every now and then is very likely going to do exactly nothing to your overall well-being (if anything, it makes you feel warm and fuzzy and adds to your mental health).

And no, we did not evolve to survive on a particular diet. I know, I know, in the stone age we ate berries and meat and not roots and grains and all the carbohydrate crap (says you), but evolution is not about what you do in your everyday. You can do a hundred sit-ups every day and your daughter will still be born the exact same abs she would have been without you taking all that trouble. Evolution is about whose offspring survives. And while I dislike making far-gone conclusions about the effects of our evolutionary history to our current day, if I believe one theory about the evolution of human nutrition, I believe the one that says there has been a huge pressure towards being able to effectively use whatever food happens to be available. If the diet of a nation consists of potatoes and gravy for a couple of hundred of years, the people unable to utilize the potatoes will die off and the rest of us will rule the Earth. If the diet of a nation consists of whatever hell is available and occasionally nothing for a couple of tens of thousands of years, how the hell did the stone age folks who need a carefully balanced diet of carrots and beef to feel good manage to spread their genes to all of us?

There is two major ways to construct an unhealthy diet (given that you have enough to eat in the first place, which we should not forget is still the major problem about food today): eat too much, or do not eat enough veggies. Do both of those, and you end up spherical and feeling like shit. Do not overdo it, and eat your rabbit food like mom told you, and you will in most cases be just fine. Yes, there are cases where special diets and special attention to diet are needed. Some people have actual diseases that kill them off or seriously disable them if they eat the wrong things. Some people are competing athletes who train for full weekdays and compete on the weekends. Pregnant women are recommended to take certain supplements. The likelihood that most people reading this who are very conscious about their diet have any of those conditions is not very great, however.

The ones who really need the special attention should keep on paying it. The rest of us need to stop fussing about it and eat some but not too much of what’s put in front of us, and be grateful.

(I could also use this post to rip apart the YLE newspiece about how “Finns eat healthier, but get fatter” (in Finnish, sorry), but commenter Ari T. did it for me already in the comments. The gist of it is this: 1) the results of the study cited probably mean that some Finns (say) they eat healthier, while some, very likely at least partly other Finns get fatter, and 2) even if point number one does not hold, if your diet makes you fat, it is an unhealthy diet, no matter what you eat, and 3) the questionnaire used in the study does not even ask about the amount of food consumed, so using it as any sort of indicator for the general unhealthiness of anyone’s diet is plain stupid.)

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Why I do not want to know if I would enjoy Facebook

[ Posted by Janka Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:15:38 GMT ]

This entry is for Yoe, who once asked on IRC if someone who is reasonably net-savvy and does not like Facebook and/or other new “social media” would write about why they object to those. I gave a lot of disclaimers, but she said I will do.

Here are the disclaimers. I do not know if I like Facebook or not. I have never tried it. I do not have an account. I have watched someone use it once, and did not get much out of that experience. I suspect that if I tried, I might like it well enough. I also by no means object to other people using it, and I do not find that they are potentially stupid or morally suspect if they enjoy it. (There are a lot of things that I do not object to when other people do it, even though I find them potentially stupid or morally suspect to do so, but Facebook is not one of them.)

I know some people object to Facebook because they worry about their internet privacy, because they do not like the idea of coming to contact with people they do not explicitly choose to be in contact with, because they think “virtual” socializing is (morally or in quality) inferior to “real” socializing, or because they simply do not enjoy socializing in general. I use my own name practically everywhere on the web, I have a public blog, I run IRC in a screen 24/7, I enjoy talking to people, and before the Long September I was practically addicted to Usenet News. I am not one of those people.

I also know that some people object to Facebook and the internet in general, because it is somehow “not real”. I am not one of those people, either. Internet is “really” there as much as a book, a movie, or a park is “really” there: it is something people made. I find it is very relaxing to take a cup of tea and let myself wonder into the wilds of the internet, marveling at its wondrous sights and curious inhabitants, stumbling upon fascinating knowledge and bizarre entertainment and the occasional oasis of real art. Exploration of one’s surroundings, virtual as well as real, is a sign of a healthy mind. This world humans make is a delightful place and there is nothing, nothing at all, wrong in indulging in exploring it.

My worry about Facebook, Twitter, Qaiku, blogs, text messages, newsfeeds, Usenet, IRC, and the web in general is a very particular feature of them: they work on a fragmented timescale. You poll your sites, you read something, you check your feeds, you do something else, an incoming message interrupts, you poll them again, you have discussion on one of your forums, you check your email, you read a bit of a news story here, you twitter it, you check your feeds, an incoming message interrupts, you answer that, you check your email, you do a bit of something else, you poll your webforums, you go back to the discussion you started an hour ago… and whoom, there was the day.

You do not have to do it this way, of course. You can read news only in the morning with your breakfast coffee, you can poll your Facebook and Twitter only once a day when you come home from work, you can only read your emails at lunch break. But a lot of the people who extensively use these services, and especially those who sit in front of the computer for work or free time do not limit themselves that way. The services themselves encourage fragmented usage, starting from the fact that most email programs have continuous polling for new messages and alerts for them turned on by default. Pretty much every communication gimmick we are marketed these days is geared for noticing stuff now, immediately, without delay, as soon as other people do. Being in constant touch so you will not miss anything.

Many people claim this constant staying connected and polling for new comments/articles/tweets/whatever does not bother them or impede their work or their life. I know at least some of them are mistaken or lie to themselves, and I know this because I know I do. It is easy to lie, because it does not feel like continuously reading IRC or polling blogs while I work bothers me – for gods’ sake, it is not like I do it “continuously”, anyway! Just when I have a slow time in my brain work anyway. Yea, right. But let me switch to a mode where I agree with myself that I either do one thing or nothing at all, even for as short a time as for 15 or 30 minutes, and boy does my productivity improve.

No, distractions are not inherently bad. We do not really need to be super-productive or super-focused at all times, despite of what your boss or the gazillion self-help books about motivation and getting rich, beautiful, and popular on a fast track tell you. In the Western world, most of us who have access to the services mentioned also have enough of everything else to get by; we do not need to work harder to get more. We just need to be happy with it. We need to do the things we like to do, and work towards the goals we really want to achieve, and to spend time with the people we really love. With a peace of mind, and no stress.

The danger of fragmentation is that the chopped-up socialization and the constant context-switches eats so much of your time and brain power that there is very little room for anything else. You are less productive at work, less effective in realizing your dreams, less focused on people when you really meet them. Fragment your attention enough, and you completely lose the ability to tolerate slow times. Lately, I have asked myself to spend five minutes every day doing nothing. Five minutes – how hard is that? Very hard. When I started, I had to stop myself about 25 times in that time, getting an impulse to check this or that web forum, or my email, or take up a book, or (in a fit of extreme desperation from my brain) do some laundry. I have a friend (actually, several) with whom it is very weird to have a face-to-face conversation, because if you stop to think about what to say for 20 seconds, they whip up their mobile phone and check their IRC and emails.

The scariest effect of this is that if you get get wrapped up enough in these constant distractions, even peace of mind will not have room, because if your brain slows down enough to feel that peace, the constant-polling sub-process in it pops up and starts screaming “I am not doing anything! I am bored! Do something! Feed me information!” And if you follow the urge, you are not spending your time relaxing and recovering from stress. You are spending your time being distracted from the fact that you need to relax and recover.

And that is why I do not want to know if I would enjoy Facebook: I have enough to do already, and more distractions than I need, and I am not willing to give up any of them, despite actually feeling that I would benefit from less.

Your mileage may vary.

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Hiljaiseloa

[ Posted by Janka Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:27:54 GMT ]

on jälleen kesä toimistot hiljenevät

minä odotan

ehkä syksy käynnistää kaiken, elämänikin

(runotorstai)

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Terapiassa

[ Posted by Janka Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:58:57 GMT ]

Ahaa, sanoo terapeuttini aina, kun ei oikein tiedä mitä seuraavaksi sanoisi. Sitten se asettelee kasvoilleen sellaisen ammatti-ilmeen: kiinnostuneen, mutta kohteliaan.

Ne ovat hyödyllisiä, se ahaa, ja se ilme. Niistä tietää, että ajatteli taas jotenkin väärin.

(runotorstai)

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