Vancouver Day 3: Granville Island, UBC, Museum of Anthropology, Japanese Garden, and Richmond Night Market

My route for this day took me far south and west of downtown Vancouver. Don't worry -- I didn't walk those 39 miles it lists; I took a lot of public transportation.

As the photos I took demonstrate, I started the day with a walk through Yaletown to catch a ferry to my first major destination.

Granville Island Market
It would be hard to use too many superlatives to describe the scale and diversity of the Granville Island Market. Instead, let me give a recipe: take a farmers market; mix in a few heaping spoonful of the small artisans and craftspeople that usually show their wares at street fairs; add a block of fish market, meat market, specialty food shops like cheese, chocolate, and bread; sprinkle on a few clothing boutiques and a hefty portion of art galleries from areas as diverse as painting, ceramics, and furniture; drop in a selection of restaurants and casual counter joints; adorn with a handful of specialty machine shops / industrial art studios that can perform tasks like rebinding old books or creating a scale model of anything; finally, grab many cultural institutions from the metropolitan area and transplant them here, being sure to include at least half a dozen theater companies, a musical group or two, and a couple small museums. Then place the conglomerate somewhere with a 270-degree view of the water (and the associated docks for yachts, places selling yachts, and marine recreation shops in general), add a park with a water playground for kids, and connect the whole area to miles of walking trails leading in every direction.

If that description didn't give you an idea of how big the market is, maybe this list of items I liked seeing will:

• Hamantashen
• Salmon jerky
• Turkey figs
• Pirogis
• Stained glass place mats (functional and art!)
• A bookstore that only sells cooking/food books
• A coffee shop on a wooden pier that sticks out in the water

If you still don't believe me, browse the web site above or look at the list of businesses on page two of the Granville Island map. You'll see that not only am I telling the truth but that I omitted some types of businesses, like hotel, spa, cobbler, jeweler, ...

Incidentally, the museum I spotted, the Model Trains Museum, looked cool. Sadly, I didn't have time to enter. It's on my list of things to do in Vancouver if/when I return.

Lunch
Wandering around Granville Island and seeing all the food on sale at the market made me hungry. (Could you tell from my list of interesting things? :> ) But I resisted enough to make it to my planned lunch destination, Go Fish, a seafood shack on the nearby coast. Here's my review.

Heading to UBC
Stuffed, I left the waterfront and walked through Kitsilano / South Granville, one of the neighborhoods I'd previously visited and been impressed by, to catch a bus westward. En route, I spotted the only Mexican restaurant I'd see on the trip that actually looked authentic.

The bus ride to the University of British Columbia was nice. The bus soon left the density of Vancouver proper to pass green spaces and parks, heading through a more suburban landscape. Sorry, I couldn't take any pictures as the bus was moving.

Museum of Anthropology
My reason for going to UBC was to see its Museum of Anthropology, devoted to what Canadians call the "first nations" / "first peoples," our equivalent of Native Americans. While at the museum, I got to hear a kentongan, a nice sounding Indonesian instrument. I also spotted a fairly hidden ceramics gallery that contained a wide variety of European ceramics from the past five centuries. Although a bit out of place compared to the rest of the museum, it was notable because it felt so comprehensive, showing the breadth of European ceramics and how they've changed over time. The gallery was too dark to photograph. Other than those few pictureless comments, my experience at the museum is well documented by the pictures I took and their captions.

Nitobe Garden
With extra time after the museum before my evening plans, I wandered around UBC. I ducked into the library to use a computer to check a bus route map. (Glad I could enter without a student id!) I also spent time at a traditional Japanese garden, Nitobe Garden. It wasn't quite as tranquil as it was probably meant to be, as one could still hear street noises in places. To explore the garden, the front desk lent me a surprisingly detailed guide map. It's impressive how much thought and symbolism went into every little decision when planning and building the garden. You can get a sense of it from browsing the "For the Scholar" section of the web site, especially the sections on symbols, religious imagery (especially the last paragraph of each section), and lanterns.

Bus (Mis)Adventures
I found my way back to the main UBC bus station at the perfect time to get on the bus back east. Once in downtown Vancouver, I transferred to a southbound line and disembarked when it turned onto the road on which I knew the Richmond Night Market was located. Since that bus only runs along the road for a quarter of a mile, I figured I'd get off and walk until I found the address.

Boy was that a mistake. Richmond is suburban. The blocks, if you can call them such, are far apart and the house numbers increase very slowly. I was a bit worried about hopping on another bus because I wouldn't easily be able to tell when to get off.

After probably forty minutes (three miles?) of hiking in the sun, I gave up and waited for a bus. It was easy to know when to get off because mostly everyone on the bus was going to the market and got off at the same stop. I followed them. And it's a good thing I grabbed the bus, as I think I was only halfway from where I got off my first bus to where the market was. Still, the experience gave me the opportunity to burn some of the excess calories I consumed at lunch.

Richmond Night Market
The Richmond Night Market is located in the back parking lot of a big box retailer. The retailer isn't even directly on the main street on which I walked in Richmond. Thus, getting there gave me the feeling of being in on a secret.

Most booths sold amazingly cheap, mass-produced, possibly knock-off goods like sunglasses, dvds, cds, clothes, and even printer ink cartridges. There were a few unusual ones such as one selling an "ultra light magic bra" and another offering hand sewn portraits.

The market was fairly crowded, especially the space between rows of food booths. Standing room only, I think it took me half an hour to push my way, eyeing the selection, from one end to other.

I noshed the whole time (several hours) I was there. I ate a variety of unusual items (see pictures): a BBQ duck wrap, a pork bun, some takoyaki (Japanese octopus dumplings), a Korean pancake, some barbecued squid, a shrimp dumpling, some spicy fish balls, some shu mai, a baked curry puff, some hot and sour soup, and a fried pork bun. I also had but didn't photograph a pineapple smoothie. There were more items that tempted me but, as one can guess, I think I had enough to eat. These items included a Japanese seafood pizza, fondue (yes, at an Asian market!), and shaved ice.

Regarding entertainment at the market -as if seeing all the stuff for sale wasn't enough-, after much bad adolescent karaoke, some guy with a great voice came on stage to sing some Elton John. That was nice to listen to.

In the amusing t-shirt category, someone wore one that said "I'm out of my mind (be back in five minutes)".

I returned to my hotel without difficulty, stuffed and a bit tired by my hiking in the sun. (I followed people back to the bus stop, and caught a bus that ran straight to downtown Vancouver.)

Vancouver Day 2: Stanley Park, the West End, and Downtown

Thursday started off on the right foot with some complimentary orange juice and tasty (whole grain?) toast served in my hotel.

Or, I suppose I could focus on the negative: that the hotel's computer with internet was occupied throughout the time I was awake and so I couldn't look up the addresses I desired. This didn't turn out to be a serious problem then or throughout the rest of the trip. Indeed, I found the lack of internet on the whole trip quite refreshing; the inconvenience caused by not knowing some addresses, hours of operations, or phone numbers caused only minor alterations in my plans and no problems so memorable that I can recall them now.

After breakfast I explored a small unremarkable underground mall near my hotel, then headed off to Stanley Park. I thought I'd wander through downtown as I walked to the park but quickly realized if I was going to spend hours walking around the park itself, it'd be easier to hop a bus. And so I did.

This route map shows my combined walking and bus route for the day.

These pictures also accompany the day's tales. In fact, they're the primary source of my observations -- the rest of this blog entry is simply a motley assortment of high level observations along with niggling remarks on unphotographable items.

Stanley Park is Vancouver's answer to big city parks like Golden Gate Park or Central Park. As the photographs demonstrate, it's a huge peninsular park with verdant greenery inland and many miles of beautiful shoreline and beaches. It has a nice free park bus that drives the perimeter (where nearly everything interesting is). After briefly wandering around the inside of the park (see route map), I hiked the six mile perimeter counter-clockwise, occasionally grabbing the bus when the distance between sights I wanted to see was large.

It was a nice peaceful hike, especially when I left the main trail and all the people behind and hiked through a deep forest along the coast on the way to Siwash Rock on the west side of the park. It was just me, crashing waves, and my ipod, carrying intellectual public radio discussion programs.

After hiking past many nice beaches, I managed to leave the park in time for a late lunch. I wandered briefly up and down Denman Street and was greatly impressed by its diversity of restaurants, further supporting my similar reaction from a different part of Vancouver on the previous day. Within six blocks I counted: two Ukrainian places, two Irish ones, four Greek ones, a Russian one, a Mongolian BBQ joint, four gelato places, and an African fusion place, not to mention many standard cuisines like Japanese and Italian. (The only notable lack was Mexican. This street only had one place: Canada's Original Steamed Burrito. I'd see this chain later elsewhere in Vancouver but still generally observed a dearth of Mexican food.) And again, a few steps from these dense commercial areas were leafy residential streets.

In fact, as it was nearly two pm, I didn't ponder the restaurant selection problem for long and instead chose one with a name I recognized from my research: a sushi place called Yoshi's. Here's my review.

After lunch I took a winding route through the West End, the part of Vancouver I was in. I spotted many rainbow flags along Davie, giving me an additional idea of what kind of district it is. Heading north on Jervis, I found many single family homes, a surprise appearance in the heart of a city.

Nearby, I explored Barclay Heritage Square and picked up a wonderfully detailed pamphlet describing the history of each of the more than a dozen century-old houses there. After much work (no thanks to Google), I found Barclay Heritage Square's official web page, which has a broken link that ought to lead to the brochure I acquired. Other than that, the best I can offer is this web page which merely has pictures of some of houses but no history.

In downtown proper, I have a few comments that don't appear in picture captions.
* Robson Street has lots of Asian stuff (clothing stores, boutiques, etc.). It also has everything you'd want, from timeless fashion to trendy: Banana Republic, Armani Exchange, Tommy Hilfiger, Guess, ... . They were all having big sales; I wonder if it's because of all the tourists in town for the fireworks.
* The Vancouver Art Museum has a gourmet restaurant with a lovely outdoor balcony. It would have been very pleasant to dine there.
* I was amused to see many full-sized statues of bears in costumes throughout downtown (e.g., "darth bear"). After seeing a few, none of which I photographed, I regretted my choice, thinking it be really nice to have a gallery of all the bears I spotted. Happily, the bears in the city exhibit, apparently a combo tourist attraction, art showcase, and auction for charity, has an online gallery displaying every bear. There's a lot! I must've only seen a fraction.
* Somewhere in downtown I was handed a free sample bag of Chris & Larry's Cookies and Clods. It was good enough that I'm mentioning it here.

Cananda Place, a combined cruise ship terminal and convention center, had many interesting plaques about Vancouver's history. Two I found worth writing down:
* One plaque discussed the history of the cannon in Stanley Park (that I took photo of) that is now fired to indicate 9:00pm. It noted that one should use the flash, not the sound, of the cannon to set one's clock. This actually made a difference (30 seconds) to ships far away.
* Two mountains were renamed after a judge said they looked like lions. How odd. Here's a brief explanation of the story (search for "Coast Mountains").

Eventually I wandered to Chambar, a Belgian beer and food joint. Here's my review.

After dinner, I returned to my hotel. It had been a nice day with lots of walking. I must've walked for about eight hours, judging by how many radio programs that I'd downloaded to my ipod I devoured during the day. The walking must've made me tired, as I slept ten hours that night.

Vancouver Day 1: Yaletown, False Creek, South Granville, and Fireworks Competition

I took a five day vacation to Vancouver from Wednesday, August 2nd 2006 to Sunday, August 6th 2006. Why? Partially I went to generally get away and explore somewhere new. Why those dates in particular? Vancouver runs an international fireworks competition called the HSBC Celebration of Light in late July and early August. The fireworks are synchronized with music broadcast simultaneously on the radio during the show. Each year four countries compete, one each Wednesday and Saturday evening. I figured if I was going to make a trip, I might as well squeeze in two shows. Hence, I arrived on a Wednesday.

Let me take a moment now to record my general impressions of Vancouver. It's a clean city, very diverse (including both ethnicities and cuisines), very safe, very walkable, and with a tremendous park. It's a very new city with countless skyscrapers, for both apartments and offices. It felt like everywhere I went I found myself by a body of water with a fantastic panoramic view of the city and water. And the transportation grid is awesome. I never thought I could like a public transportation network without subways. I was wrong. Unlike many systems, the network is designed with a few primary lines that run extremely often (every three minutes at times); once these deliver you to the vicinity of where you want to be, you transfer to a more local secondary line. The bus system and the quantity of vertical housing lead to a nice city design with dense retail along main arteries and very quiet leafy side-streets everywhere else. A few steps away from the arteries and suddenly you forget you're in the middle of a busy city.

The remainder of this and the next few blog posts will describe in detail in a daily fashion what I saw, what I ate, what I did, what I thought, and what gave me the impressions I have about the city.

Flying to Vancouver (direct) was pretty uneventful. (This was before the British terrorist scare.) Lunch was a bagel bought from Noah's that was handed to me in a Izzy's bag. The bagel was very good, so I think it's likely that it was Izzy's. How odd.

I spent most of the train ride to the airport and the flight reading my guidebook (previously bought after a long time at the bookstore examining books and deciding which was the best) to decide what to do when I arrived. I'd arrive in mid-afternoon and wanted something I could comfortably fit in within the few hours before the fireworks competition.

When I arrived, I had my camera charged and ready and began taking pictures. These photographs accompany my narrative for the day. In fact, I'm trying to use the pictures and the captions to elaborate on my experiences in Vancouver and thereby make this blog entry less verbose. I've also uploaded my rough walking route. It starts from my hotel.

With that in mind, all I have to say is Vancouver airport is cool. See my pictures for more. Some signs were in French, a fact that somewhat surprised me given the largest non-English language spoken in Vancouver is certainly some form of Chinese. (At the time I hadn't yet thought about Quebec.) Customs was amazingly smooth and efficient.

I took a private airport bus from the airport to my hotel. Riding it went through suburbia and then a nice downtown that wasn't even in Vancouver proper. I didn't realize at the time that I'd actually be walking that part of Vancouver (South Granville) later in the day. While going over the bridge into Vancouver proper I saw nice mountains in the distance but wasn't quick enough with my camera to capture them.

Once at my hotel, I checked in. I stayed at the Kingston Hotel for the whole trip. It was a great choice: conveniently located downtown, clean, and surprisingly cheap for the peak of the holiday season (~US$50/night). The hotel probably had less demand for rooms because the bathroom/shower was down the hall, not within most rooms. The bathrooms were private and were available every time I needed them, so this wasn't a problem. My room itself was small, reminding me of my college dorm rooms. The only serious point of disappointment was the only form of internet connectivity was one computer, which was seemingly always in use. Over the course of the trip I figured out how to do things and plan without the internet. I think it was good for me and after two days I barely missed it.

After settling into the hotel, I headed out to explore Yaletown. Yaletown isn't near the top of any list of things to do in Vancouver (nor should it be), but I knew I wanted to walk through it at some point and it was a convenient start for a route given the amount of time I had and where I wanted to be around dinnertime.

Although Yaletown was supposed to be a hip, fashionable neighborhood, I found it thoroughly disappointing. Aside from a few blocks of a main commercial street which frankly didn't look cool (see pic), everything was residential. Happily, every other downtown-ish place I found throughout the trip was cool and certainly better than Yaletown.

From Yaletown and as I circled False Creek (see route), I saw many fairly tall high rise residential buildings, more than I've seen elsewhere. (New York has many also, but there are many office buildings to go with them. Vancouver has its office buildings mostly in a part of town I couldn't see from my walk today.)

I very much enjoyed the route circling False Creek, and not simply because it was a stunningly perfect day as my pictures clearly show. It's also that the path is well designed for cycling and pedestrians. In addition, the path passes many parks and residential buildings of widely varying architectural styles, ranging from apartment towers to cottages to mediterranean villas.

After False Creek, I headed south down Granville Street. It's a nice street, filled with many hip clothing stores, boutiques, chocolate stores (yes, stores that only sell chocolate), art galleries, and, of course, it being Vancouver, countless coffee shops.

At 6:30pm -an early time for dinner- I found myself as planned (but reservation-less) at a fancy Vancouver restaurant called West. I got seating and spent the next couple hours eating; here's my review.

It was still light outside when I left West Restaurant around 9:15pm. I love being in northern latitudes during the summer! As I headed to the beach for the fireworks show, I walked down 4th Avenue, a street densely packed with a diverse selection of restaurants and shops. Since it was still twilight and such a pleasant day, some restaurant patios were overflowing. And as I turned onto a side street, I was pleasantly surprised how quickly the atmosphere became a clean, green, and comfortable residential neighborhood.

The beaches were packed with people ready to watch the Czech Republic's entry to the fireworks competition. I found a grassy spot and settled down, ready to watch, to photograph, and to record videos (available from the photos link). The show itself was decent though certainly not particularly special. Personally, I enjoyed the music selection, including pieces like the Pink Panther theme, Rhapsody in Blue, and other jazz selections, much more than the fireworks. But if this show were the only reason I'd visited Vancouver, I'd certainly be disappointed.

After the show, watching the lights of hundreds (maybe thousands) of boats head back to their moorings in False Creek was pretty amazing.

The walk home, past dark beaches, over the bridge to Vancouver proper, and down Granville Street (not the section I'd previously walked which was outside Vancouver proper), was quite pleasant. This part of Granville has many clubs and theaters and was clearly the place to go for that kind of nightlife. Although the walk home took me a bit over an hour, the city still felt small and walkable as I was constantly passing through clean, safe, active, and interesting retail districts and parks.

What A Waste of Gas

I left work in Mountain View, drove south for Sunnyvale to my evening ultimate league, hung around there for half an hour while waiting for enough people on my team to show up to play a full game, got bored of throwing, drove north to San Francisco for a film festival movie, waited in the rush ticket line because the movie was sold out, managed to be be in the last group of five people allowed to purchase tickets for movie, realized I would have to sit in the front row on the side, asked how far the screen was from the front row, received the answer "six feet," decided I didn't want to watch the movie under these conditions as I'd recently seen a good movie from the front row and still found the experience unpleasant, and drove back south to home in San Mateo.

One might think I'd be irritated by all this. But I'm not. Really, I wasn't that excited today about either activity so I don't mind missing them. And the driving isn't that big a deal.

Westfield and Hillsdale Mall Pre-Christmas Shopping

Over the Christmas "holiday," I went on a shopping spree, looking for a coat, a television, a bookcase, and some other minor items. I put holiday in quotes because I spent more time shopping over the course of these four days than I work in a normal week.

Since I went without a coat the previous winter and vowed not to do that again, buying a coat was my highest priority. I figured the best way to do it would be to go to the Westfield Mall, the new flagship mall in San Francisco. Many major department stores have their regional headquarters in the mall, along with many mid and high end retailers.

For the first day of my holiday, I drove to a BART station, took the train into the city, and spent ten hours on my feet (except for two twenty-minute breaks for meals) exploring the Westfield Mall, trying on jackets, and taking countless notes. The next day, I spent a similar quantity of time browsing the web sites of every major clothing retailer, attempting to find jackets I hadn't seen and discerning whether jackets I saw and liked but that weren't in stock in my size were available elsewhere in my size. The third day, I returned via BART to the city, reevaluating items I liked and tracking down items I saw online but originally missed in person, eventually buying three jackets. At the end of the day, I had trouble with my credit card, as the number of purchases in addition to jackets over the last week was so anomalous, the credit card company worried my card was stolen. It occurred to me earlier that my account might get flagged and indeed it was. Finally, on the fourth day, I went to Hillsdale Mall to return and repurchase one jacket, since the price dropped after Christmas. And since I was in the habit, I explored this mall as well.

But the point of this blog post isn't to describe my purchasing experience in detail; rather, it's to serve as a repository of hopefully interesting thoughts I had while shopping.

Random Observations While Shopping:
* Looking around Abercrombie & Fitch's store was unpleasant because the music was so loud and bassy it gave me a headache. Don't they realize it drives customers away?
* Painted With Oil is a cool store. One doesn't usually see high-end art stores in malls. It makes me wish I had a place in which it'd be appropriate to hang paintings.
* A store named Chico's only sells women's clothing?!
* I stumbled upon the Rosetta Stone booth, with an enormous quantity of software designed to teach you any language you want to learn, including ones like farsi and tagalog.
* In a similar vein regarding an absurd variety of items, Lupicia Tea specializes in teas. It has insanely many teas, including some flavored with unusual ingredients like lychee.
* Further in this vein, I found a store that seems to only sell calendars. It had piles of animal calendars, even one for each breed of dog. Not that I'm a calendar user, but I was surprised to notice they only had two food-related ones: one of peppers, the other of assorted fruit.
* Brookstone sells a ball-shaped, wireless, rechargeable speaker called Podz. It made me want to play catch or soccer with it. Probably not the intended use.
* A vending machine in the basement near the food court sells iPods and digital cameras! The last time I saw something like that was in one of the big shopping centers in Manhattan.
* Nordstrom sells some jeans for $300. That's absurd.
* No one carries pants in my size! I'm not that unusually sized, but most stores don't carry pants shorter than 30 inches. Sure, most stores sell my size over the web. But they don't carry my size in their stores. (And I hate buying clothing without trying it on...) Lucky Brand, with its unusual sizing, might be one of the few stores at which I can buy pants.
* I'm particular. And peculiar. Usually I don't like buttons near the end of sleeves (because it looks too formal), but a few times it's fine because I don't notice. Sometimes a jacket is too suit-like that it puts me off. Another I discarded because of an inch-long green line. Wrong buttons are common. Zippers often don't feel right. And a few I can't believe I have to admit I skipped simply because I didn't like the look of the stitching.
* I spent some time paralyzed with indecision. After I'd already bought a leather jacket and a long wool one, I was tempted to buy a particular top-coat. It was the only top-coat I've ever seen that I liked and fit me. And they had it two colors: gray and brown. I couldn't decide which. And it was on sale. But I found out that meant it couldn't be returned, meaning if I showed it to friends and they disapproved, I'd be stuck with it. I debated about paying full price so I could later return it. In the end, I passed on it. As in the last few months I've never felt the need for a coat in that style, I don't regret it.

Food:
One day for lunch I headed to 'wichcraft, a semi-fancy sandwich shop in San Francisco. I had the only sub-eight-dollar sandwich, its version of grilled cheese: cheddar, mustard, pear slices, ham on cranberry rye. They worked well together; I enjoyed it.

At another time, I managed to make my way to Beard Papa, a popular chain that specializes in cream puffs. Originally from Japan, it's now expanding into North America and getting the same sort of press and buzz that Krispy Kreme did when it started expanding. I'm not normally a fan of cream-filled items like eclairs, but I really liked this one and now understand what all the talk is about. My puff was hot and light and made a wonderful and messy contrast with (also light!) cool vanilla filling.

For dinner one day, I headed to Wolfgang Puck Express because someone I know whose taste I trust swears by it. I had a good pesto chicken sandwich on focaccia, a huge side Caesar that was almost a meal in itself, and a large amount of water because I was seriously dehydrated by the end of the day. I was satisfied with the quality. They have much better quality control than chains of similar size.

Westfield Mall:
Westfield Mall has a nice, ornate dome, only visible from the top two of its five or so stories. It'd be nice to sit at one of the tables in the space, read, and enjoy a break from the shopping commotion. Sadly, I didn't have time for it.

In another part of Westfield Mall, there's a columnar atrium with circular escalators spiraling up the perimeter. Think about that. Yes, the escalators are curved. It's a subtle but cool engineering feat. I wonder if I'm the only person shopping there that thought about it.

Pretty lights on cords over twenty feet long dangled into the atrium. I thought this was impressive until I went into Nordstrom.

Nordstom's central atrium had blue lights on cords over a hundred feet long. I know; I counted stories. Now that was impressive! Bulbs were spaced every six inches or so along each cord.

Hillsdale Mall:
Hillsdale was remarkable to me for two reasons.

One, I'd normally have thought Hillsdale was a respectable mall given its size and variety. However, after shopping at Westfield, I now see all the things I'm missing in a non-headquarters mall. All the department stores are a quarter to half the size of their Westfield counterparts. And Westfield has the general bonus of having some uncommon, primarily European retailers.

On the other hand, Hillsdale has a Lego retail store. I didn't know these existed. Among all the kits in the store, it also has numerous bins of pieces of whatever shape one needs. This would've been unimaginably useful when I was a kid building stuff with legos.

Interesting Articles: January 23rd-March 11th 2007

For all the Science News links, if the article isn't freely available online, I try to provide a link to the original article on which the Science News one is based. If you want a copy of the Science News article itself, feel free to e-mail me and I'll get you it to you.

Food and Health:
* Food smells reduce diet's life-extending benefits (Science News). An amazing result seems to demonstrate that it's not calorie restriction that extends an animal's lifespan but rather exposure to fewer smells of food. The abstract of the source article, Regulation of Drosophila lifespan by olfaction and food-derived odors (Science), is available online.
* Heating releases cookware chemicals (Science News). The evidence is mounting against non-stick pans, even when used properly (i.e., no high heat and always only heated with food in them). The most disturbing aspect of the study to me was that two of five pans leeched a chemical when simply being used to boil a liquid. The abstract of the source article, Quantitation of gas-phase perfluoroalky surfactants and fluorotelomer alcohols released from nonstick cookware and microwave popcorn bags (Environmental Science & Technology), is available online.
* A Trans Fat Substitute Might Have Health Risks Too (Science News). Food producers are thinking about substituting one non-naturally-occurring fat that's been proven to be unhealthy for another non-naturally-occurring fat for which the case hasn't (yet) been proved. hmmmm...
* Folic Acid Dilemma: One vitamin may impair cognition if another is lacking (Science News). A friendly reminder that overdoing anything is a bad thing. It's true even for vitamins: don't supplement one vitamin without increasing others in similar proportions. And this is part of the law of unintended consequences, as the vitamin in question that can have negative effects is, by law, added to grain products in the U.S. The editorial, Folic acid fortification: The good, the bad, and the puzzle of vitamin B-12 (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition), reviews the science and the situation.
* Unhappy Meals (New York Times). Decries the reductionist approach to nutrition, looking at each food item as the set of nutrients that it contains. Also filled with appropriate warnings about the power of the food industry and its lobby, and generally good advice on what to eat.

Urban Design:
* Weighing In on City Planning: Could smart urban design keep people fit and trim? (Science News). I always presumed that having more walkable cities made for healthier people. This article reminds me the science isn't so clear about the possible causal relationship.

Environment:
* Big footprints (Science News). Most of the arguments I heard for being a vegetarian or vegan involve ethnics (animal cruelty) or health. This piece describes a new one: the environment. It calculates the environmental impact of livestock production, along with the agricultural requirements to feed all the livestock. It's large. The source article, Livestock's Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations), is available online.
* Longer work hours may warm climate (Science News). An unexpected though not surprising result. In short, Americans are roughly as productive as Europeans but work longer hours, meaning they use more energy, requiring more fossil fuel to be burned. The source article, Are Shorter Work Hours Good for the Environment? A Comparison of U.S. and European Energy Consumption (Center for Economic and Policy Research), is available online.

Medicine:
* Vice Vaccines: Scientists give a shot in the arm to the fight against smoking, drug abuse, and obesity (Science News). Vaccines for addictions. What'll they think of next?
* Counterintuitive Toxicity: Increasingly, scientists are finding that they can't predict a poison's low-dose effects (Science News). Although obvious in retrospect, it never occurred to me that small doses of poisons, radiation, etc. could have a positive effect in the same manner as vaccines.

Technology:
* Open Call From the Patent Office (Washington Post). The patent office will call for public comment on patents before they're issued. It seems like a smart idea to me, helping to clean up the patent system by preventing the issuing of non-novel patents by overworked patent officials. If you don't want to read the article, listen to Marketplace's story (American Public Radio).
* Digital Fingerprints: Tiny behavioral differences can reveal your identity online (Science News). Patterns abide everywhere. It's easy to verify someone's identify. On the other hand, you have no privacy. Corollary: anonymous comments aren't really anonymous.

Science and Religion:
* Darwin’s God (New York Times). A decent though long-winded piece about the possible adaptive nature of belief in a higher power. Although it starts off slow, it's at least worth scanning through the entire piece. There's nuggets, such as the section on cognitive tools.

Physics:
* The mystery of the missing mass (Science News). One subatomic particle, the phi meson, weighs less (whatever that means) when part of a nucleus than in free space. Other particles likely exhibit similar effects. I must admit I don't understand it. Judging by the Science News article, most physicists don't either: "If [it is true], 'it's a paradigm shift in the way you view nuclear structure.'" The abstract of the source article, Evidence for in-medium modification of the j Meson at normal nuclear density (Physical Review Letters), is available online.

Astronomy:
* There's a photo I found striking. While I can't link to the Science News article that has it, I found the photo duplicated in this press release, better titled Astronomers Discover Eye of Mordor. You can download a huge (around 4000 x 4000 pixel) version of the image if you want...

Reheating Pizza

Many bulletin boards on the web debate the best technique for reheating pizza. One evening a few weeks ago, I had half a pizza left over, medium-thickness, and decided to do some experimentation. Here's the four techniques I tried, listed from best to worst, and how each turned out.

1. Heat a skillet on the stove top on low or at most medium-low heat. Place the slice of pizza cheese-side down. Pushing it around occasionally so it doesn't stick, leave it there for as long as possible. i.e., don't let the cheese melt off the pizza or otherwise let the slice lose structural integrity. Flip the pizza so the crust is down and loosely cover the skillet with aluminum foil. This reflects the heat, helping keep the top warm even though it isn't in direct contact with the skillet. Push the slice around occasionally so it doesn't stick. When quite hot, remove the aluminum foil and flip the slice once again, heating the cheese side directly for as long as possible. Then eat! Although it takes a while and requires some attention, this makes a good slice with a slightly crispy crust, without any of the flaws of the other techniques.
2. Place a cookie sheet in the oven and turn the heat as high as it can go. Once it's preheated, put in the slice of pizza. Remove when the cheese is bubbling. This method is as close as one can get to how pizza is made. It yielded a decent slice with a very crusty, browned bottom, a bit too crusty/crunchy for my tastes.
3. Preheat oven to 325. Put in slice. Remove when hot. This slice ended up with dough that, while not dried out, had no crispness anywhere. Perhaps a compromise between this technique and the previous one would would work quite well.
4. Microwave. Microwaving pizza produces a too-soft slice with dried-out dough. Not good.

Interesting Articles: December 26th 2006-January 22nd 2007

Culture:
* Searching for Dummies (New York Times). An op-ed that argues the web has made us dumber, or at least lazier and less experienced at finding and processing information.
* Adam Carolla's genius -- spoiled (Los Angeles Times). The first half of the article is about Adam Corolla's astute observations on social class and culture. I've listened on and off to his radio shows for years, enjoying them, and I definitely agree.

Biology:
* Not so Silent: Mutation alters protein but not its components (Science News). DNA mutations that don't change the amino acid sequence can change a proteins function! This violates a commonly accepted assumption in biology and will require some serious rethinking of the field. The abstract of the source article, A "silent" polymorphism in the MDR1 gene changes substrate specificity (Science), is available online.

Health:
* Restricting calories keeps immune system young (Science News). A study reporting one possible reason calorie restriction makes mammals live longer. The abstract of the source article, Delay of T cell senescence by caloric restriction in aged long-lived nonhuman primates (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), is available online.
* Sniffle-Busting Personalities: Positive mood guards against getting colds (Science News). Freely available online. This may seem like a novel result until you realize that it's been well known for a long period of time that stress impedes many bodily functions, including immune response. That may be a mediating factor. Still, I like the idea that if I think I'm happy and healthy, I will be. It's very empowering.

Finance (well, and psychology and economics):
* Investment no-no's not just for novices (American Public Media's Marketplace via NPR). Contains the usual warnings to beware of fees on mutual funds. Only posted because it cites a study I may want to refer to later on how people tend to neglect or ignore mutual fund fees.

Miscellaneous:
* The Persistence of Memory (WNYC's On The Media via NPR). If you've been paying attention, you'll notice I feel the need to document memories. From this interview, you'll see Gordon Bell has the same compulsion. These interviews explore this and the ways in which technology can help.