Cholesterol may be the most misunderstood substance in most people’s minds. And it’s all wrapped up with fat.

For years our mothers have been telling us to eat a diet low in fat, with lots of fibre-rich fruits, vegetables and whole grains. The problem with fat is that it has high calories (bad for most urban Canadians) and in the old days we believed that eating fat was a serious cause of heart disease.

In the old days we thought that eating fat boosted cholesterol in the blood, and cholesterol deposits in the bloodstream cause narrowing of the arteries. In the heart’s supply arteries a blockage causes a heart attack. We know that is bad. So we existed for many years with this view: eating fat causes heart attacks.

It’s understandable that people are a bit confused right now, because the view has become a bit more complicated. But it’s not so complicated that you can’t understand it. Just think about it a bit.

There are two types of cholesterol: HDL (we’ll call it good cholesterol) and LDL (we’ll call it bad cholesterol). Having lots of good cholesterol is good, because it cleans up bad cholesterol. You want more good than bad cholesterol, and preferably lots more. If your good cholesterol cleans up the bad cholesterol, then it doesn’t deposit in your arteries, and so you avoid a heart attack.

The evidence for the benefit of good cholesterol is getting stronger every day, to the point that today it was reported that keeping good cholesterol high is important even if you take drugs that artifically lower your bad cholesterol. In other words, it may have benefits beyond just cleaning up.

So where does this leave us with fats? Well, we need to realize that there are four broad classes of fat (for our purposes) and they have different effects on the good and bad cholesterol.

The worst fats are trans fats. They raise your bad cholesterol and lower the good cleaning-up kind. Most are in convenience foods. I try not to eat artificial trans fats at any time, and don’t worry about eating the trace amounts in milk and meat products.

Then comes saturated fats. They raise your bad cholesterol, but also raise the cleaning up good cholesterol. Best to limit them where possible, but I don’t declare war on them.

Unsaturated non-trans fats are the key! Eating unsaturated fats lowers your bad cholesterol and increases your good cholesterol. By doing so they reduce your risk of heart attack.

Of course, unsaturated fats are still high in calories, but as long as you don’t overeat, replacing trans fats with unsaturated fats is the way to good heart health!

 › health     2007-09-27 14:38   ...0 comments

The CFL has had a long history in Ottawa, but no one cares about football here these days. Recent team revivals have failed because Ottawa just can’t get too excited about sports. Sure, we all have fun if the Sens make the playoffs, but we are not a devoted team town.

That’s what is so annoying about the Mayor’s latest backroom deals with developers to see off Lansdowne Park. Trade a few hundred houses for a failure waiting to happen in the shape of another stab at the CFL. What is lost? A jewel of a site that everyone agrees is in poor shape.

The will is there to do something spectacular with that space, so why hand it to a developer on a silver platter?

 › letters     2007-09-26 12:18   ...0 comments

It is done.

It is almost as long as a thesis… Here are some stats: 58 single spaced pages, 27 604 words, 171 422 characters, 584 paragraphs, 2 201 lines. I wrote it over 23 days which is an average of 2.5 pages per day, or 1200 words per day. Of course, I didn’t write every day, but probably did something most days in that period.

Automated readability tests are quite funny. The fairly standard Flesch score is 24.37 (anything below 30 requires a college education). The grade is 17. The amusingly named Gunning fog index scores at 42, meaning the document requires 42 years of formal schooling to understand. Of course, I hope these are wrong as I tried to write clearly, but I guess it’s a hazard of the document type.

 › school     2007-09-20 23:47   ...3 comments

If you read people’s opinions about proportional representation in Ontario then you will very quickly find people arguing about whether it is democratic to vote blindly for a list of people, not knowing who or how many will get into power. They say that the list people will be beholden only to the party, and will not be accountable.

People in this debate are ignoring that we have a party system in Parliament in Ontario, and all the nitpicking about details is missing the big point. The party system will NOT change here, and once any MPP gets to Queen’s Park they will vote with their party almost always.

In our current “First Past the Post” (FPTP) system, the truth is that the “list” concept is here already. It’s called “who the parties are running in each riding”. Once people are elected they have to do what the party tells them to. The vast majority of people are casting a vote for the party, not the candidate. And even those who cast a vote for the candidate are truly casting a vote for the party in terms of where government decision making comes from once if they get to Queen’s Park. Once elected, all MPs VOTE WITH THEIR PARTY.

The proposed “Mixed Member Proportional” (MMP) system doesn’t stop you from considering a local person, you still do that, but it puts control of the party system into the people’s hands, whereas before the party was this murky thing that hijacked power in Parliament. It does this by putting in more MPs from a pre-defined, pre-ordered list, who then VOTE WITH THEIR PARTY.

Anyone who believes they are being disenfranchised by losing local candidates to list candidates is ignoring the fact that individual MPPs do not make decisions in parliament based on their local constituency. They ignore the fact that FPTP is the artificial reason that 40% of the public can elect a premier who makes all the decisions, and if that is not disenfranchisement then I don’t know what is.

A large number of ordinary people studied this to death and found MMP is better. I think it is too, so MMP has my vote.

Pledge to vote and learn more:

 › political     2007-09-15 10:42   ...1 comment

For those of you following along at home, the university with no notice determined that I am out of time on my degree.

The upshot of this is that I have probably got an extension for one year, but I must finish by then. Also, to have a hope of that I really need to formally propose the thesis by the end of the month. This means that I am writing really really fast, work all day at work and write at night when I get home. I’m recently starting to write before work too. Write write write write write.

Who knows if I am writing anything good, but it will likely be in the neighbourhood of 60 single spaced pages by the time I’m done. (On a side note I hate that everyone thinks in terms of double spaced pages. Double spaced pages look dumb and are hard to read.)

I believe that everyone must grapple with some aspect of their personality in order to complete a Ph.D., and I think that in some ways this grappling is what you really learn from doing one. I am grappling with perfectionism, and — at least for me — perfectionism comes from a fear that I will attacked for imperfect ideas, and that people will think my stuff is no good.

I found a list of suggestions for writing fast, and many of them are good. I’m trying not to let myself proofread or re-read as I go along… It’s tough, but it seems to be working.

 › school     2007-09-07 22:43   ...0 comments

I’m trying to come to terms with the fact that my new camera has so many more pixels than the old one.

At first you might think that that was nothing but a good thing. After all, I can make bigger prints should I want to. That 11x17 print that I loved and framed would be so much sharper if taken by my new camera. That is a cool thing.

The problem is that my monitor has stayed the same size.

The fact is that I review my pictures onscreen. I look at them there, and seldom if ever print any of them. How should I deal with the fact that, when resized, the monitor is throwing out heaps of data to fit the picture on the screen? My pictures are 3888 x 2592 pixels which is 10 077 696 pixels in the image. The screen is 1024 x 768 pixels which is 786 432 pixels. There are almost 13 times more pixels in the image than there are on the screen. That’s 12 pixels thrown away for each pixel displayed. How am I supposed to decide if it’s a good image?

Of course, the true answer is that a good image is made first from a good photograph. Good composition, good exposure, appropriate depth of field, etc. Capturing something worthwhile should always be the first goal of taking photographs. Resizing an image doesn’t affect any of this, so there is no need to worry about assessing these factors in a resized image.

There are other concerns, though, that should be taken into account. How about: is the image in focus?

What I have been doing to answer the focus question is called pixel peeping. This means that I open the photo in a picture viewing program and zoom it to 100%. I am now looking at all 10 million pixels, one pixel on the screen = one pixel in the image. Now I can see the full picture, right? No data lost, right? I can now judge whether the picture is a good one, right? I simply scroll around and look at areas of detail, right? This seemed to make a lot of sense at first, but it has led me to feel disappointed with my equipment because the pictures never look really good at 100%. I decided to do some math to see what I’m really looking at when I zoom to 100%, and decide what level of zoom I really should be looking at.

The basic idea is to figure out what “size” of print I’m looking at when I zoom to view a part of the image at 100%. My screen (11½ inches wide and 1024 pixels across) has about 90 pixels per inch (ppi) and when zoomed to 100% this represents 90 dpi as well. With simple arithmetic we discover that my 3888 pixel image is 44 inches across at this magnification. Repeating the calculations for height we have a total size of 44 x 29”. That’s the equivalent of magnifying a 6 x 8” print over five times. I don’t think most of us look at our printed photos that way.

So, how much should I zoom in, if 100% is not the goal. The answer I’ve come up with for myself is to trust that the computer will be as good at throwing away data as my eye is able to blend the microscopic dots in a printed image. An image is typically printed at 150-300 dpi, with image quality being considered to increase as the printer packs in the dots more tightly.

At 150 dpi my image is 26 inches wide. At 300 dpi my image is 13 inches wide. It seems as though I need to zoom in on the computer so that I will be looking at a picture at that same scale. For my image size and monitor, a 60% zoom will be “actual size” of a 150 dpi print (90 ppi monitor divided by 150 dpi print = 0.6). For my image size and monitor, a 30% zoom will be “actual size” of a 300 dpi print (90 ppi monitor divided by 300 dpi print = 0.3).

I believe most computer resize algorithms work best when reducing size by factors of 2, viewing the image at 50% is probably the highest magnification I’ll ever look at, giving me “actual size” of a print made at 180 dpi. This is just about as low as I’d like to go for a large enlargement of one of my pictures. Such a print would be 14½ x 21”. An image that looked sharp at that size would be very sharp indeed. And thinking back to film days I think you would agree that few pictures would have been good enough to print that big.

A more reasonable choice would be to look at the image at 30% zoom. This would equate to a print at 300 dpi, which is a magazine quality print. An image viewed at this resolution is 8½ x 13. This is the size of a reasonably big home enlargement, certainly an appropriate size to be judging an amateur photo at. From now on I’ll look at photos at that level on an everyday picture.

Try my Image Zoom Calculator for yourself

 › photos     2007-09-02 14:18   ...2 comments