Twelve Black Code Monkeys

The U.S. Potato Board seeing a decrease in potato sales, is reacting by starting a new campaign to try to get their numbers back up They attribute the slow sales to new low-carb diets which restrict carbohydrates, the macronutrient that the potato is almost entirely made up of.

I don’t have anything against potatoes There’s nothing inherently wrong with them, at least in their organic state. However, the huge monstrosities served at chain restaurants are so loaded with empty carbs that their skins, with the actual nutrients, are hardly worth all those added calories and carbs from the actual pulp.

The problem lies more in using them as a staple food. It’s fine to have a small potato once in a while, even for someone on the strictest beginning stage of a low-carb diet. But part of the reason so many people are insulin resistant or even diabetic to begin with revolves around the abuse of potatoes and other starches. Huge baked potatoes added on top of a healthy meal just add a lot of extra calories and not a lot of nutrients And the most popular forms of the potato as eaten by Americans (french fries, hash browns, tator tots, etc.) are not only low (or zero) in nutrients, but are often fried in trans fats, making them actually harmful!

The U.S. Potato Board would no doubt love it if we were to eat a large potato (or three – since they are claiming a potato only has 9% of the recommended daily allowance of carbs – whose recommended daily allowance they don’t say, perhaps it is the Potato Board’s?) at every meal. Of course they want people to eat as much of their product as possible – that’s what it’s all about. But how do you reconcile that with what even low-fat advocates would consider to be a food that one should at least limit to some extent?

I know little of farming economics, so my comments may be incredibly naive, but I just wonder – if your market is shrinking in one place, what about trying to find markets in other places? Overseas? What about switching to other crops? Why must a farmer stick only to one plant? Many farmers don’t, they have many different crops. It just baffles me a little that there should be a marketing group for a single plant and I wonder if we will soon see similar announcements from a U.S. Carrot Board, a U.S. Peas Board, a U.S. Lentils Board, a U.S. Corn Board, and a lobbying group for every conceivable individual plant that happens to be going down in sales now that low-carb diets are popular

A Lobbying group for Bread and bakeries I can understand The National Bread Leadership Council is doing something similar, but at least they represent bakers that have one product, and can’t easily change to a completely different one Even so, many smart bakers are actually catering to the trend and offering more whole-grain and low-carb versions of their baked goods Farmers can switch to an entirely new plant Perhaps not easily and with some added expense, but with the same trend that is deemphasizing carby foods like potatoes, other lower carb vegetables will surely see an increase, in particular both cauliflower and turnips both of which can easily be used to make a facsimile of mashed potatoes

Or perhaps farmers could experiment and try breeding new varieties of potatoes or other tubers that are lower in carbs and higher in other nutrients? Maybe creating a potato with a very thick skin (which is mostly nutrients and roughage) that could be used in place of bread for sandwichiches, wraps, etc?

It’s almost as if some electronics manufacturers formed a lobbying group to try to promote VHS tapes despite the onslaught of DVD. Your market is drying up, but instead of understanding the new market realities and catering to them (and perhaps hoping things will eventually come back), you tell people they are wrong for wanting this new thing and that they should really be going back to something they used to use I hardly think you’re going to convince anyone by telling them, directly or indirectly, that they are wrong.

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Bang! Getting Your Message Heard in A Noisy World, is a book by the CEO and vie president of the New York advertising firm KTG, Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, plus a third author, Delia Marshal, who was not identified so I assume she was a “ghost writer” of sorts. The book is billed as a manual of sorts for advertising agencies to be affective at creating memorable ads that actually increase business.

I listened to this book as audio via Audible.com, but by the language, and conversational tone, I feel like it would have been a very quick read on paper. The authors throw a lot of humorous analogies at the reader, although some of them are a bit trite and so fall a bit flat. It was a fun read, listening to all the war stories behind different famous ad campaigns (KTG did the AFLAK commercials and one of the authors worked on other very famous ones like Kodak moments, Toys are Us Kids, Herbal Essences Totally organic experience, etc.), how they got from initial ideas to the final product.

Although there was some good general advice in the book, I felt a lot of it was fairly common sense. Take risks, be nice, make ads that are different enough to be noticed but not so out there as to only be understood by a small group of elitist ad connoisseurs, etc. I suppose they are good things to hear about as reminders, but it would have been interesting to learn about somewhat less obvious and more “insider” details. For example, my mother used to be an award-winning advertising copywriter, working at some large New York ad agencies in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, including Bill Bernbach, Leber Kats, Footcone Belding, and more. However, by the mid 80’s when she was in her mid-50’s, she was pushed out of her job and could not land another one no matter where she went. The reason? She was too old. Ageism is one of those things that is rampant in advertising even more so than many other professions – at least for the creative people. It is assumed that if you are older than 35, you are not in touch with the youth culture, and we all know how companies and advertisers faun over the young. Yes, there are products geared towards older people, primarily drugs and other health remedies, and perhaps with the baby boom generation getting older this will mean more advertising firms keeping their creative staffs longer. My mother was actually lucky, looking 5 or 10 years younger than her 55 years.

Perhaps such things were beyond the scope of this book, meant as more of a general treatise on advertising for those who have little or no knowledge or experience with the field. Even with the somewhat general approach, as I mentioned, it was interesting to hear about the stories behind the ads and even stories behind ads that never came to be for one reason or another. So definitely some light, entertaining reading which might be useful to some extent for some, but not any significant resource for all but the most beginning uninitiated.

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Startup.com will be familiar to anyone who worked at or knew someone who worked at an internet startup in the crazy days of the late 90’s, early 00’s. The film is a documentary which follows a pair of childhood friends, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman, who start a company called GovWorks that seeks to become a serving house for municipal governments – handling traffic tickets, providing discussion forums, etc. As the story plays out, it becomes more of a human drama of how relationships can change under the extreme pressure of running a company in the internet age.

We learn about what was a very typical story. A bunch of 20-somethings think of an idea for an internet site, travel around the country to various venture capital firms, most of which are more than happy to throw money there way without much in the way of a business plan. They get many millions of dollars of funding and their company grows from eight partners to a high of over 200 employees. But the site of course has not been built, that is what the funding is for. While the site is being built, the competition launches which puts even more pressure on them and their funders start demanding enhancements that were not initially in the scope of their site so that they might offer something value added. This results inevitably in working their programmers to extremes, producing a product that was buggy and not within the time constraints for all the features wanted. During this time the crash occurs and funding starts to dry up and… well, the rest of the story goes down hill from there.

That is the story of the company, but there is an equally interesting one around the relationship between the two main partners of the business, Kaliel, the CEO, and Tom, the CTO. They have been friends from childhood, but being the head of a company together, and one in the wild world of internet startups changes their relationship, putting incredible stress on it. These two are really the stars of Startup.com. They are the ones the camera follows and few others are given much dialogue, but this is completely appropriate given the story.

The film was made by Jehane Noujaim and Chris Hegedis and D.A. Pennebaker helped produce it. Noujaim was actually a friend of Kaliel’s. They went to Harvard and several years later when both living in New York found each other again when Kaleil was looking for housing so actually moved in with her. Noujaim, who had recently filmed another project in Egypt where she grew up decided to trash plans to go back their on to film another movie and instead started filming Kaleil when he quit his Goldman Sachs job to start GovWorks. Seeking funding, a friend of Noujaim introduced her to Chris Hegedis, a filmmaker with some impressive work under her bealt (such as War Room). Hegedis, it turned out, was actually looking for an internet startup story but hadn’t found one, so fate brought them together and the collaboration became an amazing one in which they followed Kaleil and Tom’s adventure. They traveled around the country with them, followed their every (18-hour) waking day as they struggled to bring their dreams to fruition. They ended up with 800 hours of video which they had to distill down to a mere 90 minutes!

Noujaim used a mindv digital camera to film, so the video is not spectacular, but not bad either. It is, after all, a documentary. The video is in standard TV 3:4 aspect ratio, but thanks to Hegedis’s more sophisticated audio equipment, the soundtrack is in Dolby Digital 5.1. The DVD comes with cast and crew bios and production notes which help one to get a better understanding of what isn’t said outright in the documentary – there is no narration, so they rely on the “actors” to tell the story, so inevitably answers to obvious questions the viewer might have aren’t always volunteered. But even more than these, the directors’ commentary track does an excellent job of filling in all the gaps. We learn more background about the personal lives of Kaleil and Tom, as well as some of the other more “minor” characters like their parents, girlfriends, partners, etc. I think it’s the only commentary track that I listened to from beginning to end right after watching the film itself, and this was at 2am on a weekday morning.

Although the film might not be as fascinating to those who haven’t worked in a startup or have some other fairly direct experience with them through friends or family, I think most people will be entrigued by the story, the human element, and the subcoulture that produced this type of situation which repeated itself in many varieties throughout the late 90’s and early 00’s in New York, Silicon Valley, Washington DC, Boston, Austin, and many other towns that were havens for new startups.

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What a cool little book this is! Although it’s only 53 pages, the information is so densely packed and insightful that it’s worth more that a lot of 300+ page books. It is from a series of books on evolutionary science and by a scholar of the London School of Economics by the name of Colin Tudge..

Tudge’s basic thesis is that early humans practiced agriculture on various levels from a much earlier time period before the Neolithic age started and current large scale agriculture is said to have started – about 10,000 years ago. However, the theory goes, this was done on an occasional basis to supplement their hunting and gathering – a kind of safety net of sorts. However, once the ice age ended, this decreased the amount of habitable land, forcing humans into smaller areas and the resulting competition for a more limited food supply drove them to using agriculture less as a “hobby” and more for survival. This then became a vicious cycle as agriculture provides more food and thus fuels population growth, which than requires more foods and so on.

I do not know a great deal about prehistoric anthropology, only a few main ideas, but Tudge explains things succinctly but clearly enough that I was not lost in the least. Others whom I’ve lent the book who had read much more than myself still got a great deal out of it. It does leave you wanting more, but I suppose is where one can start one’s journey or simply add a bit of an insiteful theory to one’s knowledge

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This book, by a journalist (Mary Frost), not a doctor or nutritionist, is a sort of review of various books and a few articles surrounding nutrition and nutrient supplementation. Although I enjoyed reading it, and it certainly made me think about whether the vitamins I sometimes take are really helping me or not, there are also a few problems with the book which tarnish what otherwise might have been a great resource.

Lets go through some of its strengths first. It is very straightforward and is not very technical, but also doesn’t gloss over things so much so that the reader feels insulted. It covers fairly wide ground and references some of the well known sources of information or opinion in the field of nutrition, including Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price, Empty Harvest, by Dr. Bernard Jenson and Mark Anderson, Protein Power by Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades, and Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution by Dr. Robert Atkins. So in this way it is a good introduction to many of the ideas contained in these books. The ideas are mainly about how eating traditional diets (that which our hunter-gatherer forebears) is much healthier than the over-processed diet that modern humans consume. Attached to this is the idea that modern farming techniques have polluted both the plants and the animals that eat them (both of which are consumed by the public) with harmful chemicals and depleted them of natural nutrients.

I can’t complain too much about the content of this book, since I come to it already with opinions that are very close. I am a big fan of the Eadeses’ Protein Power and the philosophy of eating as much of my food from organic sources, including free-range or grass-fed meats, raw dairy, etc. The new information for me in this book was the contention that many vitamins sold in stores are produced in the lab from otherwise inedible substances such as coal tar. The production converts this, but the criticism is that the conversion does not account for 100% of the original materials, which are potentially harmful. The Eadeses actually touch upon another issue involved in nutrient supplementation, but Frost adds some information that the Eadeses cover other parts of. What I’m referring to is the notion that vitamins are not one chemical, but actually groups of compounds that act together symbiotically. The main part of Vitamin C may be Ascorbic Acid, but there are many other “cofactors” that allow it to do it’s job more effectively. If one consumes only one or even just a few of the cofactors and not all of them, the body cannot regulate its levels of that main compound and there is a danger of it rising to levels that actually cause harm.

So, what is my problem with this book? Perhaps it is a minor one, but it is a bit nagging for me because I feel like this book could have been much better. The one thing that jumps out immediately is the actual look of the book. It looks like it was published 30 or more years ago, or by a very substandard press. In fact the publishers are The International for Nutrition and Health. Unfortunately they have produced a “book” that looks pretty amateurish. The type is not just oversized, but in many different sizes. It has so many quoted, bulleted, bolded, italicized and indented entities that these stylizations lose any and all meaning. Frost also refers to her “upcoming book” at least half a dozen times. Going Back to the Basics of Human Health was published in 1997 and I still cannot find ANY other book by Mary Frost other than this one. Although she references some authoritative sources, if you look in her bibliography, you will quickly see that probably 80% of her references are to 3 sources. I really think this book could have been a great resource itself if the author had included more of a variety of articles and studies, and if the typesetting hadn’t been so poorly done.

Another thing that bugged me was that Frost makes several references to a source of more naturally produced vitamins, and while it’s helpful to have this information, it creates the appearance that the book is merely an advertisement for the product. I’m sure that there are other suppliers that provide similar products but they are not mentioned. I’m also sure that there are some nutrients that can be had in a form that is produced in a lab (minerals, for example, like magnesium perhaps), but this is never pointed out. In other words, in such areas there doesn’t seem to be any balance, but rather just a sales pitch, albeit not a egregiously cheesy one.

There is yet one other thing that makes me a bit uncomfortable. Perhaps it’s an unjustified prejudice, perhaps not. Much of the book surrounds figures who are not medical doctors. Dr. Lee, for example, was trained in dentistry. Dr. Jenson is a Doctor of Chiropractic and Dr. Weston A. Price was also dentist. Some of the tools mentioned in this book are standard for chiropractors or “neuropathic” doctors, including the “acoustic-cardiograph machines,” reflexes, and “kinesiology.” I won’t speak to the first two of these, but I once saw a demonstration of the third that impressed me as so easily manipulated as to be useless – akin to a parlor trick. Perhaps some of these tools do provide useful information and I do not want to besmirch entire professions because they do not involve going through a standard medical school (which we all know can be shamefully deficient in some areas, such as nutrition), but still there is a sense that much of the information or advice surrounding these alternative medical methodologies are questionable to say the least. The Eadeses, at least, use hard science, including many studies, scientific journals, and so forth. This gives their books an air of solidity that Getting Back to the Basics of Human Health, as well as some others, can lack. Perhaps this is the aspiring scientist in me that causes doubt, and I realize that mainstream medicine has failed in many ways due to its own arrogance and collusion with industries and government that provide a great deal of monetary influence. At the same time, though, science should be used throughout in an effort to gauge how accurate theories are and we always need to be vigilant that claims that are being made should not simply be accepted because they sound morally right or logical or make us feel better.

Too often, people adopt an all-encompassing ideology when it comes to health and nutrition and refuse to listen to things that might prove to be a chink in their philosophy. I believe that ones view on such matters should not be set in stone, but be a very flexible mesh that allows for contradictions. Contradictions don’t have to weaken a theory, but rather may point towards ones still not devised that present a more accurate picture of things. A continual process of honing our understanding means theories building on previous ones and not fixing all of our ideas in cement and rejecting anything that might get in the way. Instead, that kind of approach will only prevent any future progress.

In any case, Going Back to the Basics of Human Health is an interesting read and a good introduction to some of the ideas out there regarding a more traditional/natural diet and environment. If one ignores the poor print quality and some of the sales pitches, one can get some good and intriguing information.

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