Community Building Tip: Infrastructure T-shirts

For my current set of tips, I'm using the list "101 Small Ways You Can Improve Your City.

17. Turn infrastructure into t-shirts. It’s a simple way to achieve instant street cred. German art group Raubdruckerin uses a "pirate printing" technique that, in essence, screenprints manhole covers, a process that creates graphic T-shirts with a clever connection to different European cities.

Keto Flu

The Keto diet is notorious for making people sick.  Symptoms usually clear up after a couple of weeks.

One reason for the problems is because, unlike most diets, this one forces the body into ketosis, burning fat instead of carbohydrates for energy. 

However, I wonder if part of the problem is making a sudden change.  Any pet owner can tell you that sudden dietary changes tend to cause gastric distress and other problems.  In some species, a switch like that can be lethal.  So while keto doesn't sound like a good approach for most people, if you have strong reasons for trying it, consider making the shift gradual rather than abrupt.

Fighting the Obesity Epidemic

... is a popular debate.

( Read more... )

Many of the solutions are actually straightforward. We've simply built a society that is terrible for humans, and we'd need to rip out most of it and replace it with healthier things.

* People used to grow their own food. Now most don't. They should, because gardening is exercise and produces healthy food. While most people don't want to be subsistence farmers, at least try for a garden.

* The commercial foodstream is downright unhealthy. Some big improvements could be made by dropping subsidies on unhealthy foods like sugar, and adding them for healthy foods like spinach. Use zoning to move the least healthy restaurants toward the fringes of town, and the healthier ones toward the busier areas; you can still have your junk food, you'll just have to go out of the way for it. Ban companies from using addiction science to create food that people can't stop eating. Flip the labeling requirements so that things like organic food don't need a special label, but foods that may contain toxic residues need warning labels; that will help reduce the cost of healthy food.

* Jobs used to be a lot more active. Now most are sedentary. Automation is greatly increasing this trend. That just makes matters worse. We need to have more physical jobs again.

* People used to have more time for physical activities. Now they scrabble just to get by. 8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will! Nobody can exercise if they spend all their time working or sleeping. Throw in a living wage while you're at it, or you won't get the workload down.

* Dancing used to be a communal activity. Now it is something most people watch on television, if at all. The same is true for sports and most other physical activities. It would help if people just went back to including these in their social plans, and unlike many of these ideas, it's something anyone can do.

* Many other physical activities have been either banned outright, discouraged, or otherwise put out of reach. You want people to move? Add bike lanes and sidewalks and mixed-use paths. Make big buildings like malls and office complexes include bike garages, cleaning and repair stations, and locker rooms. Strike down laws against biking, skateboarding, rollerskating, freerunning, and other forms of human-powered locomotion.

* Children used to be either working, or free to roam. Now they are imprisoned in their own homes most of the time they are not imprisoned in school. If parents disagree, their children can be taken away and imprisoned by someone else. Free the children! You can't trap them indoors for 18 years and then bitch because they're fat. Just letting them walk or bike to school would give them more exercise, better health, and less fidgeting.

* High school used to teach home economics with a variety of practical skills including nutrition and cooking. Put that back, and encourage boys as well as girls to take the class. You can attract the boys by including sports nutrition as well as the historic emphasis on feeding children.



* College students are routinely banned from cooking their own food, forced to live in dorms where they either eat industrial slop in the cafeteria or packaged snacks in their rooms. Either put a kitchenette in every room or a common kitchen on every floor, and let students live outside dorms if they wish. The habits they form in the first years of adulthood will stick, and right now, most of those are bad.




* People used to live in rural areas with lots of room to move. Now most live in cities that are cramped, dirty, and often dangerous. Gym memberships are too expensive for many people, but it helps if businesses and apartment buildings have their own for folks to use free. We need a lot more parks, and they need equipment that encourages everyone to move, not just kids. Climbing structures, adventure paths, skateable sculptures, exercise equipment, it's all good.

* Resist the temptation to make everything faster and easier. Grocery shopping in person takes an average of an hour, most of that spent walking. If people switch to shopping online or even just ordering things to pick up at the curb, there goes one of the last great opportunities for natural exercise.

These are changes that modern society does not wish to make, and so people will likely get fatter and unhealthier.

(There are other possible causes, like pollution and antibiotics, but fixing those problems is not straightforward at all.)

Remembering Dreams

This article has some good ideas.  

Some others include:

* Pay attention to your thoughts as you fall asleep.  Most people find that theirs slow down and drift further apart.  This dissolution is the reverse of what happens when you wake up, because then your thoughts coalesce.  Studying the downward, outward motion helps you understand the upward, inward motion so you can retain more.

* When you dream, pay attention to the symbolism.  A dream dictionary can get you started, but they're usually quite mainstream.  Dreams have cultural and personal variations.  A snake does not mean the same to a Christian as it does to a Pagan!  Thinking about the messages in your dreams will help you communicate with your subconscious.

* If you know other folks who are interested in such things, make a habit of sharing your dreams.

* Understand that modern Americans suck at dreaming.  Other cultures are much better at it.  Consider exploring those, because they have a LOT more information.

Comfort Food Recipes

... grandmother style, so mostly from scratch. 

Read "Your Heroic Nemesis Was a Teenager"

 This is brilliant.

Chocolate-dipped Strawberry Meringue Roses

 This looks delicious.  Regrettably, there is no actual rose flavoring in the recipe, but this is easily fixed by replacing the vanilla extract with rosewater.  You could also dip them in white chocolate or ruby chocolate, or even make Candy Cane roses with a drizzle of both.

Bird Nests

 ... are more sophisticated than they look.

Yeah, I figured that out trying to replicate them.  I could only ever get the approximate shape, not the structural stability.

Nature Art

 ... with meditative landscapes.

Spring Flowers

 ... for pollinators.  My grape hyacinths are starting to bloom.

Wherever you live, check you list of native species for early bloomers.  Those are most valuable.

Climate Change

 ... means choosing stress-tolerant plants for your current growing conditions.

Today's Smoothie

Today we made a smoothie with:

1 cup mango nectar
1 cup vanilla yogurt
1 cup frozen strawberries

It came out okay, only a little thick and on the sour side.

Self-Identification

 ... is a hot topic in the trans community.

It's not okay to attack people for being different, or holding different opinions.

However, there's a very fraught dilemma -- how do we balance between personal autonomy and enough backchecking to minimize ghastly mistakes?  Many transpeople suffer because gatekeepers prevent them from reaching the care they need, and some of them die from it.  Not to mention the damage of knowing it's not really  your body anyway, because you don't get to make the decisions about it, someone else does.  On the other hoof, transition is a challenging process, not something to rush into or through.  People can get hurt that way too.

How do we find the path that does the most good and least harm for the highest percentage of people?

I was glad to see another perspective on the topic of genderspace, too.  A lot of feminine people really don't feel comfortable sharing a bathroom or locker room with someone who has a penis, regardless of how that person identifies.  Transpeople are far more likely to get attacked in or near bathrooms than anyone else, but it happens to women too.  And beyond that, everyone is subject to another issue that appears when people resist using bathrooms because they are unsafe or unclean -- it runs up the rate of certain health problems.

The best solution for this that I've seen is dotties.  A single lockable cubicle is available to everyone who doesn't wish to use the gendered bathroom.  They really need urinals, though.  Put it behind a screen if people don't want to look at it, but that's better than the problems caused by men who can't hit a toilet.