Lifehacker has a good pointer to a free (Linux and Windows only) reminder of stretches and breaks, Workrave.

I like the idea of how to store the boneless, skinless chicken thighs. From Slashfood:

I love chicken soup, especially tasty, low-fat versions full of tons of different vegetables. I make big batches and freeze it in one or two portion containers for easy use during the week. Originally I put it into Tupperware, but they were expensive and actually didn’t last too long under my use. Or is it abuse? Then I switched to zip lock baggies, but you had to defrost them first, pour into a bowl or pot, then reheat the soup. Ever since the disposable, reusable plastic containers came out, I use them instead. They go to fridge, freezer, and back again. I can pop them in the microwave, and then into the dishwasher, and they go through multiple uses before wearing out.

Skinless, boneless, chicken thighs have become my poultry part of choice, and I keep several pounds in my freezer handy for quick dinners. I separate the individual thighs, remove excess fat (I freeze that separately for later use), and place them on a plastic covered baking tray in the freezer, so they freeze individually. Then I put them in large freezer zip lock baggies for storage. I slice them when they are fully or partially frozen, and if you are careful, they are actually easier to slice than when unfrozen, and you get uniform pieces which look good and cook more evenly.

Here’s my relatively quick recipe for a very low fat, chicken vegetable soup. I use only dark meat for the most flavor (I loathe the flavorless chicken breast), and boneless for ease in preparation and consumption. I also use a combination of fresh and frozen produce, depending upon the season and what’s available.

Forester’s Chicken Vegetable Soup

• 1/2 lb. of skinless, boneless chicken thighs cut into 1/2″- 1″ pieces
• 1/2 bunch of celery cut into 1/2″- 1″ pieces
• 1/2 - 1 lb. carrots rough cut into 1/2″- 1″ pieces
• 2 large, sweet onions cut into cut into 1/2″- 1″ pieces
• 1/2 lb. of slow cooking vegetables of your choice cut into 1/2″- 1″ pieces: rutabaga, turnips, parsnips, etc.
• 1/2 lb. of quick cooking vegetables of your choice cut into 1/2″- 1″ pieces: summer squash, zucchini, green beans, frozen corn and/or peas, edamame, etc.
• 1 tablespoon or more to taste of chicken bouillon cubes, powder, or paste like “Better than Bouillon” and “Bear Creek” [or Penzeys chicken soup base - LG]
• Splash of soy sauce (for the umami factor)
• Squirt of ketchup (for even more umami factor)
• Assorted fresh and dried herbs and spices to taste: rosemary, sage, thyme, fresh ground pepper, etc.

1. Place the long cooking vegetables like celery, carrots, onions, and rutabaga; plus the herbs, bouillon, soy sauce, ketchup, in an 8 -quart stock pot and then fill 3/4 with water.
2. Bring to a boil, and then drop to a low boil, covered for fifteen minutes.
3. Add chicken pieces and bring back to a low boil for ten minutes.
4. Add the quick cooking vegetables like the squash, corn, and peas.
5. Add water to fill stockpot to within 1 1/2 inches from top, and bring to a simmer for five minutes.
6. Taste and add more spices, soy sauce, bouillon, ketchup, and last of all salt if needed, to taste.
7. If there is any grease of oils floating on the surface you can easily skim it off, but I don’t find that necessary.
8. Serve in big bowls the size of your head, repeat until full.
9. Let the remainder cool, ladle into containers, express all the air, and freeze. Take frozen to work, school, etc. and microwave to reheat.

I just used Fitday’s little browse function to find foods high in iron compared to calories. The first ones up were puzzling, but then I realized that they were foods with zero calories. The first real payoff was beef spleen:

Low in sodium
No sugar
Very high in iron
High in niacin
Very high in phosphorus
High in riboflavin
Very high in selenium
Very high in vitamin B12
Very high in vitamin C
High in zinc

A six-ounce piece would have 246 calories, with 64 from fat, and would provide 372% of the daily iron requirement. I’ll have to ask the butcher if he carries beef spleen.

Other possibilities: dried thyme (1 Tbsp has 70% of the daily iron requirement), lamb spleen, goose liver, cucumber kim chee (1 cup = 85%). Something to think about.

Via Rustyblade on ShaveMyFace, these amazing trompe d’oeil murals.

But we won’t see the effects for another 1,000 years. (They were destroyed 6,000 years ago, but they are 7,000 light-years away.) Photo and explanation here.

At least, that’s what the doc told me. I’m a little bit anemic. I imagine that I’ll fight it directly, with beef liver (fried with onions, of course). But a steak or roast is a possibility as well: doctor’s orders.

Other orders: double the amount of water I drink each day, and put some sort of fruit juice in the water—e.g., squeeze a lemon in it—to make it easier for my body to absorb. And exercise more—quite a bit more, probably given that most of my exercise is typing.

Other than that, a clean bill of health.

Good news:

Oral insulin may be one step closer to becoming available to people who now have to take shots for their diabetes. Scientists in Taiwan report success in early tests of an oral insulin solution in diabetic rats. The solution hasn’t been tested in people yet.

Currently, insulin can be taken by injection or, as in the case of the recently approved Exubera, by inhalation.

“Multiple daily injections of insulin are currently the standard treatment for insulin-dependent diabetic patients,” write the Taiwanese researchers, who include Hsing-Wen Sung, PhD, of Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University.

An oral drug would be “by far the most convenient and comfortable way of delivering insulin,” Sung’s team writes.

But there have been roadblocks. “Protein drugs, like insulin, are readily degraded” in the stomach, preventing pure oral insulin from reaching the bloodstream to do its work, the researchers point out.

So Sung and colleagues bundled insulin with chitosan — a chemical derived from the shells of shrimp, crabs, and lobsters — into tiny particles called nanoparticles. They then put these nanoparticles in an oral solution, which they tested on diabetic male rats.

Lab tests showed the insulin reached the rats’ bloodstream and lowered their blood glucose (sugar) levels.

Further work is needed to see if the oral insulin solution works in people. Other scientists have also attempted to make an oral insulin solution, but none have reached the market.

The Taiwanese study appears in the journal Biomacromolecules.

I earlier posted an observation on disciplining children. Now WebMD has an interesting article on the same topic:

Parents may be in need of a time-out — if not a do-over — when it comes to discipline. A new survey shows more than a third of parents use the same discipline methods with their children their own parents used on them — despite the fact that nearly a third say their disciplining strategies aren’t working.

Researchers found 38% of parents say they use the same discipline their parents used, such as removing privileges, yelling, sending the child to the bedroom, and spanking.

However, 31% said they thought their discipline methods were either “never” or only “sometimes” effective.

Having experienced yelling or spanking as a child made the parents more likely to use the same approach with their own children, regardless of whether they thought it actually worked.

In fact, parents who reported yelling at their children were the most apt to say their discipline was ineffective.

“There was actually an inverse relationship between self-reports of yelling at children and perceived effectiveness of discipline,” says researcher Shari Barkin, MD, chief of pediatrics at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, in Nashville, Tenn., in a news release.

In the study, researchers surveyed more than 2,000 parents nationwide of children aged 2 to 11 who were waiting for a well-child visit with their pediatrician.

The results showed parents used a variety of discipline techniques with their children. For example:

• 45% reported using time-outs
• 42% said they used removal of privileges
• 13% reported yelling at their children
• 9% said they used spanking “often or always”

“But we strongly suspect that both yelling and spanking might be underreported, because we know when parents perceive their methods are not working, as a third reported, then emotions can quickly escalate,” Barkin says.

Researchers found the age of the child influenced the type of discipline used.

By the time children reached the 6- to 11-year-old age range, parents were 25% less likely to report using time-outs and spanking as they were with younger children.

Once the children reached school age, parents were more likely to use taking away privileges and yelling, despite the perception that this discipline method may not be effective.

A fascinating character. His biography is worth reading. I blogged earlier about an anecdote from that biography. Now read about his simian dictionary.

This is quite an interesting article.

Researchers have identified a personality trait that makes some individuals much more likely to behave aggressively than others: egotism. Irrational belief in one’s own qualities and talents, also known as narcissism, has been associated with aggression, especially following a threat to that belief.

Note that we’re not talking about self esteem; narcissism is different from self esteem because narcissistic individuals typically have a highly inflated view of their personal qualities like intelligence and status; not communal qualities such as caring and empathy.

So if threats to narcissistic individuals can lead to aggression and violence, then what can be done to temper this behavior? After all, won’t reassuring narcissists that they’re more intelligent and attractive than everyone else only exacerbate the problem when they do inevitably receive criticism? The reverse tact, trying to diminish the narcissist’s inflated beliefs, might actually incite aggression.

But several divergent lines of research have suggested that increasing connections between individuals decreases aggression. These connections can be as superficial as sharing a birthday. In one study, participants even thought more favorably about the notorious Rasputin after learning they shared a birthday with him. A team led by Sara Konrath decided to see if telling a narcissist they had the same birthday as their critic would lead to less aggressive behavior.

Read at the link to see what happened…

I blogged about this previously, and now MSNBC has another story on it (below). The Army’s stance on this is callous, immoral, and depraved.

In September, NBC News first reported on a fierce debate within the Pentagon over an Israeli-made system that shoots rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) out of the sky. The Army seems intent on killing the system, but officials in the Office of the Secretary of Defense believe it can save American lives.

Over the last three years, U.S. commanders in Iraq have issued a series of urgent pleas for a system to counter RPGs — a favorite weapon of insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Pentagon’s Office of Force Transformation (OFT) scoured the world for a solution and thought it found one in “Trophy,” which was developed over the last decade in Israel.

Trophy works by scanning all directions and automatically detecting when an RPG is launched. The system then fires an interceptor — traveling hundreds of miles a minute — that destroys the RPG safely away from the vehicle.

OFT subjected Trophy to 30 tests and found it is “more than 98 percent” effective at killing RPGs. Officials then made plans to battle-test the system on some Stryker fighting vehicles headed to Iraq this year.

But the U.S. Army blocked that testing. Why? Pentagon sources tell NBC News — and internal Army documents seem to confirm — that Army officials consider Trophy a threat to their crown jewel, the $160 billion Future Combat System (FCS). Under FCS, the Army is paying Raytheon Co. $70 million to build an RPG-defense system from scratch.

Read the rest of this entry »

They knew:

An Army private charged with the slaughter of an Iraqi family was diagnosed as a homicidal threat by a military mental health team three months before the attack.

Pfc. Steven D. Green was found to have “homicidal ideations” after seeking help from an Army Combat Stress Team in
Iraq on Dec. 21, 2005. Green said he was angry about the war, desperate to avenge the death of comrades and driven to kill Iraqi citizens, according to an investigation by The Associated Press.

The treatment was several small doses of Seroquel — a drug to regulate his mood — and a directive to get some sleep, according to medical records obtained by the AP. The next day, he returned to duty in the particularly violent stretch of desert in the southern Baghdad suburbs known as the “Triangle of Death.”

On March 12, 2006, Iraqi police reported a break-in at the home of a family in Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles from Baghdad. The intruders shot and killed the father, mother and two young daughters. The older girl, 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, was raped and her body set afire.

The carnage first was assumed to be the work of insurgents. That changed in late June when two members of Green’s unit told their superiors of suspicions that soldiers were involved in the killings. Now the Army believes Green and four other soldiers are responsible. One of them has confessed and provided information to prosecutors; in testimony at his court-martial, the soldier identified Green as the ringleader.

If the charges are true, the attack would be among the most horrific instances of criminal behavior by American troops in the nearly four-year-old war. It also would represent a worst-case scenario for the military’s much-criticized practice of keeping mentally and emotionally unfit personnel in the killing fields of Iraq.

Read the rest of this entry »

Via ThinkProgress:

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow admitted yesterday that Congress had funding control over the Iraq war but said “the president could ultimately do what he wants.” Snow told reporters, “The President has the ability to exercise his own authority if he thinks Congress has voted the wrong way.”

It’s difficult to read this in any way but that Snow is saying that Bush is a dictator with absolute powers. Bush, Snow states, can do as he wants and ignore Congress if Congress has the temerity to disagree with him. He actually says that. Read it again, and think what it means for the country and for our democracy.

From ThinkProgress:

In Monday’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Tony Snow said, “The vast majority of breakthroughs right now, virtually all, have involved those other than embryonic stem cells.”

In fact, however, over the last year there have been a large number of medical breakthroughs involving embryonic stem (ES) cells:

– June 20, 2006 — CBS reports that ES cells have been used to help paralyzed rats walk.

– July 5, 2006 — Science Daily reports that ES cells have been used to create T-cells, which could lead to a cure for AIDS.

– July 11, 2006 — The Guardian reports that ES cells have been used to create sperm that successfully fertilize mouse eggs, which could aid those with infertility.

– Sept. 21, 2006 — The Washington Post reports that ES cells have been used to slow vision loss in rats.

– Oct. 23, 2006 — The Washington Post reports that ES cells have been used to reduce the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in rats.

– Oct. 31, 2006 — New Scientist reports that ES cells have been used to create insulin-secreting cells, which could be used to treat diabetes.

– Nov. 10, 2006 — Nature reports that ES cells have been used to make a vaccine that protects mice from lung cancer.

– Nov. 22, 2006 — New Scientist reports that ES cells have been used to create cardiovascular “precursor” cells, which could be used to treat heart disease.

Embryonic stem cells remain the most promising type of stem cell due to their ability to become any type of cell in the human body.

I weigh on Saturday, but since I was so near to being overweight rather than obese (i.e., BMI less than 30.0), I’ve been peeking. This morning, I was 226 lbs, giving me a BMI of 29.8, comfortably below 30.0. I’m overweight! I’m overweight!

I do know that there are problems with the BMI, but still, it serves as a rule of thumb, and a BMI less than 25 (for me around 185 lbs) makes sense for me. So I’m using it.

I see that when you have a 0.5 Terabyte hard drive, chkdsk takes a while. I didn’t think it would check all the free space, but it did. I’ve rearranged the automatic disk check/defragment schedule for the weekend now.