Month: February 2009

How to eat grains

Our digestive system is designed to handle a high-quality omnivorous diet. By high-quality, I mean one that has a high ratio of calories to indigestible material (fiber). Our species is very good at skimming off the highest quality food in nearly any ecological niche. Animals that are accustomed to high-fiber diets, such as cows and gorillas, have much larger, more robust and more fermentative digestive systems.

I’m unclear about this. Fiber is allegedly good for our bodies.  But this article, called “How to eat grains” claims that the greatest health benefits come from semi-fermented fibers. So, things like soaking beans in water actually improve the amount of nutrients that our digestive systems can absorb from them. This is interesting, because in another post on this site, there’s a claim that whole wheat bread may actually be bad.

Based on my reading, discussions and observations, I believe that rice is the least problematic grain, wheat is the worst, and everything else is somewhere in between. If you want to eat grains, it’s best to soak, sprout or ferment them. This activates enzymes that break down most of the toxins. You can soak rice, barley and other grains overnight before cooking them. Sourdough bread is better than normal white bread. Unfermented, unsprouted whole wheat bread may actually be the worst of all. 

Given the numbef of cultures that eat a lot of rice, I might be digging in a bit more frequently. Good thing I like sourdough, too. 😀

Drumsticks for practice

A while ago, I made some practice sticks. They’re basically half-sticks that you can easily carry in a pocket, and use for practice whenever you’re not busy for a few minutes. Helps with practicing your handling, and reduces the amount of time you have to look like an idiot carrying a set of drumsticks through the grocery store.

This isn’t really a “how to make these” post, since they’re pretty simple. Just take a drumstick and saw it in half. Then, sand the ends so they’re smooth. Done.

Practicing drums, or “1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n”

I’ve been practicing the drums more, and I’m starting to have a few breakthroughs.

I’m noticing that a lot of it is about combining limb movements. I got a practice book that talked about “limb independence”, but I think it was leading me down the wrong path. Maybe at higher levels of drumming, I’ll be focusing more on independence, but since I’m still getting started, I think that “limb combination” is actually more important.

I used to look at music and say “okay, so here’s the pattern for the hi-hat, and then here’s the pattern for the snare, and here’s the pattern for the bass drum”. Then, I’d try and play each of them at the same time. This is a great way to drive yourself crazy.

Instead, I’m focusing on counting — the “1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and” beat counting thing. It makes it easier because I know at “1” I have to hit the hi-hat and bass, at the “and” I hit bass only, “2” I hit hi-hat, “and” is nothing, “3” is hi-hat and snare, and so on. So, it’s really like playing a single pattern of combined movements, rather than each limb doing it’s own thing.

After I do this for about 15 minutes or so, just playing and counting a few measures, I start getting that independence developed, but the independence goes away after a while and it’s back to a single pattern of combined movements. Doing the counting really helps keep it on track. I can totally see how this is the basis for a good foundation, however. After a hundred or so hours of this type of practice, I can see how someone could be really solid at picking new stuff up quickly.

One other thing that’s really helping is a piece of software called Guitar Pro. It seems good for learning either guitars, bass, or drums. There are a bunch of sites with tabs to learn from, so it’s a great way to make practice much easier. You not only get what the notes are, but also the rhythm. (Edit: runs on Windows or OSX, thanks Jason)

Also, in searching for info on this, I came across this paper, “A Perceptually Driven Dynamical Model of Rhythmic Limb Movement and Bimanual Coordination“. I have no idea what it means, but it sounds fancy.

How to sort, Math-style.

Thanks to Corey for this.

This guy, Evan Miller, put together some proper Math to produce a better way for ordering things with positive and negative ratings. You know, things like music lists, movies, products, anything that gets rated.

Also, I see his site says he’s a PhD student in University of Chicago’s Economics program. That’s supposed to be a good school for econ. Seems bright, got some good-looking writings on his homepage.

Science!!

Looking for things in all the wrong places

“The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.” – Thomas Merton, American Trappist monk (1915–1968)

Better append tip in Quicksilver, and faster file access…also in Quicksilver.

I’ve been experimenting with the Merlin Mann-popularized tip of appending text to a file from Quicksilver. And it’s cool. But, I like a good chunk of whitespace to separate some things. But how to get the whitespace in there? Hitting return just saves the text and closes the window, and putting a \n just adds those characters to the file.

The trick to getting new lines or blank lines in Quicksilver is to either press control or option while hitting return. Then, you can add empty lines to your heart’s content. It’s awesome.

Also, bonus tip: If you’re in Quicksilver and you want to browse your user directory/desktop, just press ~ after activating Quicksilver. Then you can use the arrow keys to browse starting at your home directory. I didn’t know that this existed until 5 minutes ago, but I want to start using it more.