Eat, drink, and be healthy

Everything in moderation - which means you can eat that piece of chocolate or have that small glass of wine as long as you don't overdo it.

Here are some concoctions I've discovered have enough of a twist to keep things exciting but are also easy to incorporate into a busy day:

• easy + healthy: garbanzo beans (just boil) and little cheese squares on top of a salad
• fast + healthy: spinach (just cook in a pan) with fish or egg or anything else
• snack-ish + healthy: yogurt, blueberries, and granola with a few shavings of chocolate on top
• refreshing + healthy: water with a slice of lemon or a slice of cucumber in the morning
• universal + healthy: add spice to any dish to give it a different taste (turmeric, rosemary, dill, etc)
• just easy: water!

Fun fact: If you're like me and stubbornly decided not to trust that tomatoes keep their flavor better outside the fridge, I recommend just trying the experiment...

Put on your big-picture glasses

Say you're standing in front of a cliff, like the one below. All you can see is rock -- in front, above, all around -- and conclude that the path is dangerous, daunting, and can't be scaled. Perhaps you smile a little because looking closer you see someone has carved a cute little heart into the rock, but love is fickle man, and right now you just really need to get to unstuck.

So you step back and see all sorts of things... that there's actually a path around the cliff, that it gets less impressive farther down, and that there's a pleasant walk along the beach which might make you happier than the overhead climb... a panoramic solution.

"Look at the bigger picture" is not news (cf. [1], [2], [3], [4]) but it's easy enough to forget or take for granted. In addition to more easily re-assessing your options, when you step back, you can also re-asses your goals, and choose the best solution that gets you to the better goal. It's also pretty fun to try implementing the big-picture view in almost any activity. If you're reading a research article, think about how it applies to your work or to a peer's work. If you're coding up an algorithm for class, think about how it could work for another problem that, say, an architect would want to solve. Ask friends how they'd change their job, how they like it, how it affects the industry, the country, the economy, culture, people's lives. If you wear your big-picture glasses often enough, your eyes will adjust. Then when you really need it, you'll just see it.

Fun fact: "Panorama" was coined in 1792 by Irish painter Robert Barker. His panoramas were displayed in a London building built specifically for viewing large panoramic paintings.

[1] General life/work advice: When to give up on your goals

[2] In the lean start-up: employ rapid hypothesis testing and incorporate customer feedback earlier so that your goals change function of demand

[3] In chess: you plan a global strategy instead of looking at a single corner of the board

[4] In cells in the body: in addition to proximate motifs that signal for a gene to "turn on", there are also key distal regulatory elements many, many bases upstream regulating expression

[5] In the environment: if you set adrift a piece of wood on one side of the ocean, it eventually makes it's way to the other side (Japanese Tsunami Debris Reaches Alaska Shores)

Two roads converged

Two roads converged in a wood and I - I took the one I wanted to, and that has made all the difference...

[Modification of the original Robert Frost poem "The Road Not Taken"]

Forget about the light

A well-known anecdote goes like this: A drunk man is asked why he's looking for his keys underneath a street lamp even though he was more likely to have lost them across the road. He replies "Because the light is better over here."

This phenomenon seems to manifest in many ways: the streetlight effect in research [1], the way that brains evolve in formative years, and the flower we're forced to see because it is in the spotlight.

In research, especially medical research, in lieu of exact experiments, scientists are forced to rely on what they can readily get and see - proxies for the objective function, simplified models of the exact process, and a sample of the population as opposed to the population itself. Because the conclusion depends on the measurement, this leads to the current landscape of contradictory papers and differing medical recommendations (for examples and more discussion see e.g. [1]).

What about baby brains? By age 3, babies have about three times as many synapses as adults. Synapses help neurons pass messages between target cells, enabling the brain to store and process all the data being absorbed by the body. So babies have the ability to learn a lot of new things really quickly, but eventually a remodeling of the neuronal structure focuses the learning so that only important information is extracted (e.g. [2]). In a sense then, brains are actually being constrained as they evolve. Related is perhaps the claim that alcohol or opiates - which relax these constraints - have led to brilliant discoveries, or at the very least, creative thoughts that look beyond the reach of the streetlight.

And finally comes the spotlight on people... If a performer is on stage and the spotlight is on them, you look at the person in the spotlight and ignore the rest. If a student gets an A+ and is honored for it at a school assembly, they stand out. But perhaps as in the research scenario, the grade is just a proxy and here too there might be another way to look for success.

[1] Streetlight Effect
[2] Babies recognize faces better than adults

Today is all about this cock

What does one expect to find when visiting a winery in NoCal? A rooster, of course.

The thing about the universe is that there is always something good hidden in something bad. Sometimes it takes a while to find it - sometimes it takes forever to see it all - but there's always some way to spin a crappy outcome if we let ourselves imagine a little bit farther. Take this rainy day in Northern California. It was wet and cold and there were clunky umbrellas and scarves and hats and boots, but the rain made everything look the freshest it has ever looked. It also really made this picture. The "mandatory" 5% red per photo plus a lush green landscape of grape stalks trailing off into the horizon? Look right here and smile at the camera, because this sounds like a photo opportunity to me.

If the world is weighing too heavily on you today, then just take a lesson from this rooster. It had no problem with the rain; it was simply waddling around with its wattle swinging, tutting at the ground, minding the rest of the beautiful scenery.

Fun fact: There are more chickens in the world than any other bird species (on the order of 25 billion).

And that's the approximately-one photo of the week!