Fortunately, cooking is acceptable for a real man if he sticks to the following principles:

1. Never measure anything.
2. Avoid reading.
3. Be very impatient.
4. Use a big sharp knife.
5. Drink lots of beer.

I’m here to help you with steps 1, 2, and 3. These recipes require only a 4th grade reading level and a 2nd grader’s patience. This lets you devote all those other years of physical and spiritual maturation to performing steps 4 and 5.

FRIED RICE
Crack egg into hot canola oil. Let sit, then scramble briefly. Add chopped scallions and stir. Add cooked (leftover) rice, a few drops of soy sauce. Loosen rice with spatula, while alternating between stirring and letting food sit and brown. Add salt, sugar to taste. Eat with chopsticks. Then do 50 pushups.

STEAK
Get a steak. Ribeye and sirloin are good, or get them combined in a porterhouse. Salt, pepper, and olive oil the meat on both sides. Preheat oven to 500. Put a dry pan on high heat for 10 minutes. Throw the steak on, leave it for 30 seconds, turn it over, leave for 30 seconds, then put steak and pan in oven for a minute. Flip the steak, put back in oven for 30 seconds. Take out and eat.

ASPARAGUS
Wash asparagus, cut off tough ends, then cut the rest into 2-inch pieces. Toss into hot olive oil in pan over medium-high heat. Leave for 5 minutes, stir around, leave for another 5 minutes, then salt and pepper. Eat.

ROASTED TUBERS
Cut red potatoes, parsnips, onions and sweet potatoes into 1 inch chunks. Toss in olive oil, salt, pepper, and some combination of herbs. Put in a metal pan in oven for 30 minutes at 400 degrees, stirring / detaching vegetable chunks from metal once or twice in between watching the Simpsons on surfthechannel.com. Let cool and eat.

HOME FRIES
Microwave 2 medium red potatoes on high for 5 minutes. Let cool, cut into half-inch chunks. Pan-fry in half butter, half vegetable oil for 10 minutes, turning and stirring to brown on all sides. Salt, pepper, ketchup to taste.

There are not enough stars in Boston. Stars, which depending on your vantage point could resemble the icy tips of invisible stalactites or mutilated balls of burning gas floating impossibly through the black. Fortunately, we are very, very far, and the air outside is — without fail in this neck of Maine — very, very cold. So cold it feels like a different shade of cold every time I step outside, the combination of the stars and wisps of clouds and the dry, clear night eliciting a sensory amnesia, a short term memory loss brought on by feelings of metaphysical insignificance before the looming face of infinity above.

I want to record every drop of sensation in words, in calculable thought, in action. But what performance of a verb could possibly capture frost? Or the cruel bent of a tree branch? I can tell you it’s hardly cruel at all in the daylight, and that bodily ache of mine for a word or a sentence, a tome, a treatise on my right to be here, all but disappears after I’ve digested breakfast.

This is the time of day when more than just thought comes into the light: revelations; a remedy for hate in other people’s countries, or for love in mine. No, nothing nearly so important: whims; insights.

For a moment, words seem a delusion, a false celebration of our mastery of experience. Tapping on keys is an unlikely, maybe hopeless act of self-preservation, securing a nameless corner of humanity against the blank wall just beyond our crystalizing breath.

The critic T.E. Hulme hated romanticism, thought it mystical nonsense. But when I’m standing here, home but not home, the trees empty, having given their way to the freedom of spacious leaflessness, I wonder if he was just missing the point of his own insight:

By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic…You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.

Here’s to spilt religion: futile metaphors and wordless mumblings: prayer, expression, and the failure of both; to leaves, trees, the grass and the birds; quiet despair, rambling exultation, and the faint vibrations of stars in the firmament, in the dark, on cold, cold nights.

I love Gmail. It is simple, and I can do things with it that would usually take 10 to 10,000 times longer on anything else–Thunderbird, Outlook, other webmail systems, passenger pigeons, and corporate groupware (in order of decreasing efficiency).

I love Gmail so much that I use it to send, receive, and organize emails for 5 different addresses. Gmail makes this easy to set up. However, due to workplace policies, the simplest method–forwarding my work email straight to Gmail–isn’t allowed. Not to be deterred (but mostly because I’d rather die than use Novell Groupwise) I searched for workarounds to let me use Gmail anyway.

The result, as you can see, is an esoteric hack that probably nobody else will ever need in its exact, complete form. But until someone invents a time machine to transport all of the world’s corporate IT departments out of the 90’s, you might find some of these tricks useful.

PROBLEM: You want to use gmail to send/receive work emails

i.e. you want to login to “yourname@gmail.com” but use it to manage all emails from “yourname@work.com” and never deal with the clunky interface at work.com.

SIMPLEST/TYPICAL SOLUTION: Add yourname@work.com to your Gmail account.

This will allow you to use Gmail to send emails that are labeled as from yourname@work.com. Also, the same instructions above show you how to set up Gmail to send from your work’s SMTP servers. This makes the emails more official (and less likely to be blocked by overzealous spam filters), because not only do the emails say they are from yourname@work.com but behind the scenes, they will also legitimately show up as being from work.com’s email servers.

Then, to receive the work.com emails in Gmail, contact administrator of work.com (or find an option somewhere) to forward the email for yourname to yourname@gmail.com.

But life wouldn’t be interesting if it stopped here, right?

SIMPLEST SOLUTION DOESN’T WORK BECAUSE:

1. The emails servers for work.com block any emails whose originating server isn’t work.com.
This is a problem if you want to use Gmail to send emails as yourname@work.com to a recipient such as coworker@work.com, but easily fixed by making Gmail send emails using your work’s outgoing mail servers, UNLESS…

2. Your work blocks its SMTP servers, i.e. doesn’t let you use outside clients to send email from its servers. Then you’re shit out of luck. Fortunately, you only really ever need SMTP sending if your recipient actively blocks “spoofed” emails–ones that have a From: field with a different domain than the originating domain of the email. This is rare. If your work blocks these, just use an alternate account (like your gmail) to contact your coworkers. The oddity of your address will be a daily reminder to them of the error of their ways (or of your own stubbornness).

3. Your work doesn’t forward emails, and your administrator is unwilling to help you out, BUT your work email server supports POP access. Use POP3 fetching from Gmail (elaborated on below). No POP3? Quit your job. Seriously. And find a time machine so you can travel into the 21st century and join the rest of us. And bring your IT department with you.

4. You are lazy. Then how did you make it this far reading this?

3. POP3 fetching from Gmail: trials and tribulations

The solution I hit upon for getting my work emails through Gmail was to fetch the mail using Gmail’s Mail Fetcher. This is different from setting up mail forwarding because Gmail is pulling your mail from your work servers, rather than your work servers pushing them to Gmail. Unfortunately, the latter is still far superior, because it happens instantaneously when an email is received, whereas Gmail (and any other mail client) can only poll the server for new mail at some interval, causing delays.

In fact, the delays can get pretty bad–I can miss an entire morning of work emails because Gmail forgets to check the POP3 servers for mail for 6 hours. This is due to the algorithm Gmail uses to optimize polling frequency–if your work email goes a long time without receiving mail, Gmail will start checking it less and less frequently to save resources. This is a problem for me, in a newsroom environment, because I tend to get lots of time-sensitive emails in bursts throughout the day.

The solution? Set up something to automatically send email on a regular basis, say every 10 minutes, to yourname@work.com, so Gmail’s fetcher keeps the polling time low (in this case, between 5-10 minutes). Lifehacker and TINYenormous suggest using Automator to do this, but this only works on Macs. Here’s a more classic solution, using good old cron, the Linux task-scheduling tool. Unfortunately I can’t think of a simple way to do this in Windows, but perhaps more knowledgeable Windows hackers can suggest something.

I’m also going to assume that anybody who wants to use Gmail this bad is probably also geeky enough–like me–to have access to a webserver. Here are the steps:

1. Set up a script to send the email. I prefer this simple php script, reproduced below:

<?php
$to = "yourname@work.com";
$subject = "Sent by cron";
$body = "Hello world!";
if (mail($to, $subject, $body)) {
echo("<p>Message successfully sent!</p>");
} else {
echo("<p>Message delivery failed...</p>");
}
?>


Save this in your home folder, e.g. as /home/yourname/scripts/email.php

Make sure to enable execution on it, by typing this at the command prompt: chmod 755 email.php

2. Set up cron to run your script every 10 minutes (or 5, or whatever). Do this by making a file called cron.txt anywhere that is convenient, containing the line:


*/10 * * * * /home/yourname/scripts/email.php >/dev/null 2>&1


Change the “*/10″ to “*/5″ if you want it to run every 5 minutes, etc. Note the addition of >/dev/null 2>&1: this just suppresses the email that cron usually generates whenever it completes a job. You don’t need to be receiving TWO emails every 10 minutes.

After you save this file, set it as your crontab (i.e. the file that tells cron what to do) by typing:


crontab cron.txt


Now wait a little, and you should start getting this email every 10 minutes (provided the script itself isn’t having trouble sending mail). This tutorial on cron and this more detailed documentation can explain what these steps all mean, and tell you how to customize it more.

3. Set up Gmail to filter out emails from your cron job, so you can go back to productively going through work emails. Since you’re going to be getting the same email every 10 minutes from now on, you really need to automatically get rid of them or your inbox will be swamped. Fortunately Gmail makes this easy–just set up a filter and have it recognize the subject line (or sender) of every one of those automatic emails, and delete those emails as soon as they’re fetched. Instead of deleting them, you can also archive them immediately and assign them to a label, so you can at least verify that they’re coming through.

There, now your Gmail will fetch emails at least as often as your cron job sends out emails, and you have been able to stick it to the man by not using your company’s awful groupware. Hooray!

Now get back to work.

The United customer service agent at the counter in front of me is expounding on his life experiences. “Let me tell you,” he tells you, you being the tired, irate traveler in front of me, “I’ve worked with this airline for 15 years, and whenever I go on standby for a flight blah blah blah blah…”

I don’t need to finish listening to know that he didn’t even come close to answering the man’s question. And watching the questioner’s eyes gradually open wide, his arms throw up in exasperation, and his feet stomp off in the middle of the service rep’s sentence, I nod ruefully. The line is 10 people long, and this jabbering penguin has spent 5 minutes giving off-topic life-ruminations to each person. I’ve been waiting for over half an hour.

Thank god, another service rep walks up to the counter with a grumpy swagger. He looks taciturn. Efficient. Motions for me to come over. Everything is a blur. I don’t hear what’s going on around me, only the sound of Shostakovich’s 7th string quartet. It’s going into that furious part in the third movement after the adagio for his dead first wife and starts to become dissonant, angry, sublime. How I feel while traveling.

I turn off my Ipod and go up to the counter.

“Hi, I lost my wallet on flight 975 from Dulles. Can you help me find it?”

He can’t, apparently. The plane’s left the gate, I can only file a claim with baggage services. That was efficient. 1 minute response, after a 36 minute wait.

I walk what seems like half a mile to baggage claim, on the way stopping at a diner to order a bacon cheeseburger, fries, and a milkshake.

“Will you be paying with cash or card?” asks the helpful cashier.

“Oh fuck,” I say, patting my empty pockets, “Sorry.”

I walk away cursing some more. The only food I’ve had all day are some leftover lentils and a $9 turkey sandwich on the flight. Only $1 goes toward the ingredients. The other $8 pays for the special motivating power and energy that only an unsatisfying meal brings.

The baggage claim lady could use some of that motivating power. She’s friendly but no more efficient than the United man. I file a lost and found claim, after waiting in line and having someone else cut in front of me. Being an only child teaches you nothing about how to get attention. I resolve to cry loudly in public more often for the Chinese New Year.

I should explain. I’m in SFO (that’s San Francisco International airport for you newbs who weren’t paying attention during “Up in the Air”). I’m trying to get to my hotel so I can get a good night’s sleep for my PhD candidate interviews at UCSF tomorrow. I was supposed to be here 10 hours ago (and out at a dinner with the other young hot people–er, scientists–right now) but a 10,000 ton pillow of coagulated fluffy ice crystals rolled off God’s bed onto our nation’s capital, compounding some poor infrastructural decisions made in the 70’s and creating one giant freezing-melting clusterfuck of a travel itinerary for me and a couple thousand other people.

Earlier this afternoon I flagged down a cab, the first brave driver after 3 cowards, to get me from the outer reaches of the Washington DC metro system to Dulles airport. I made it to the gate with 10 minutes to spare. But not before, as it now seems, leaving my wallet at the security checkpoint.

This is now a problem, because I need money to get from the airport to the hotel. Even the least expensive option–printing out a shuttle voucher that UCSF sent me weeks ago but I never remembered (or was able to go to the office) to print–costs $6 at the airport. Paper is expensive these days.

“I need your help, man,” I say to the cashier at the airport travel agency, where the only printer in the entire airport lives. “There’s no other way I can get out of here.”

He looks at me, hesitates. “Sorry man, I’m a nice guy, but this would get me in trouble.”

I try to smile and look charming, managing not much more than a worried grimace, but a middle-aged-Asian-woman-melting grimace nevertheless. I offer him some Ritter sport alpine milk chocolate bars. “Look, they’re made with real milk from the Alps. They’re legal tender in Switzerland. No?”

Unfortunately I’m dealing with a more recalcitrant demographic, a non-middle-aged, non-Asian man who doesn’t take candy from strangers.

But he gives in, because he’s a nice guy. I keep the chocolate. I promise to come back with the cash on my way out of the city. We talk about video games.

I make it to the hotel, but by this point I have half a mind to throw the rest of my belongings out the 6th-floor window, including the clothes I currently have on, and walk natural and naked into the balmy North Californian winter.

But I’m too tired. So I will only say this: always get window seats. Because you don’t know the next time you’ll find yourself in a gorgeous midwinter sunset over an expansive exurban airport, one of those rare moments once a year when the wind and water vapor conspire to form a perfect arrangement of prussian blue clouds against a buttermilk and tangerine sky, only to realize you’re 4 seats away from the window in both directions and there’s nothing you can do except hold your Canon snapshot (which you’ve hacked just for the occasion) and whimper softly the words “Flickr” and “opportunity”.

Always get window seats. And always, always carry enough cash in a secure place for a cheeseburger and milkshake. Good night.

Flying from DC to Boston reminded me how much I love airplanes. That, in turn, reminded me how much I love Flickr. Exhibit one, two, three.

Mr. Raeburn wondered why news outlets didn’t give this study very much attention, considering how dramatic–more to the point, how publicly funded–its results were. He also criticized what little coverage there was for being too credulous and not asking a few obvious methodological questions. I know this is old news now, but since I was one of the reporters who dropped the yoga ball (so to speak) with this story, I’ll try to clear up a few facts that were lost in Monday’s deadline shuffle. Info that wasn’t previously reported is in bold.

(You may want to read my original article and the study’s press release to get a few basic details. Don’t worry, both are short.)

The main result of the study was a 47% drop in the number of incidences of heart attack, stroke, and death in the treatment group relative to the control group. The abstract also gives a statistically significant p=0.03 for this result. That’s a big drop, comparable to “a new category of potent medications,” according to the study’s lead author, Dr. Robert Schneider of the Maharishi University of Management. I wasn’t able to attend the American Heart Association meeting, where this was presented (a paper is still forthcoming), and it seems like nobody else writing about the study did either. However, I was able to later obtain the data presented in the talk, which indicates that there were 31 “events” (i.e. heart attacks, strokes, and deaths) in 102 patients in the control group, versus 20 events in 99 patients in the treatment group.

You might also wonder if there are clinical differences between the two groups of patients at the outset which could skew the results; this can happen by chance even when patients are randomly assigned to the treatment group. Dr. Schneider acknowledges that there were certain “minor differences in psychosocial factors” between the two groups, but doesn’t think this “affected the results substantially.” In this case, “psychosocial” refers to demographic and psychological factors such as education, stress, depression, hostility, and so on.

So what does this all mean? It doesn’t mean the study is bunk–we really can’t say for sure until the paper comes out, and other experts get a chance to look at it. But I’d be hesistant to claim, as my original headline did, that “Meditation Halves Risk of Heart Attack,” or at least meditation alone. This is not some new kind of miracle therapy, and certainly doesn’t replace normal drugs and lifestyle interventions for treating heart disease. And fortunately, I think any journalist more experienced than I knew this from the start, so there wasn’t the sort of overanticipation that has accompanied more hot-topic biomedical research in the past.

At the same time though, meditation in itself is a really simple thing, and if it works, then it’s a valuable adjunct to conventional therapies. You could think of it as a key to unlocking the relaxation and stress relief mechanisms that are inherent in your body. And if it doesn’t, then what’s the harm? (Assuming you don’t, as some commenters on ScienceNOW pointed out, shell out $3000 to learn Transcendental Meditation®–whether that’s necessary is a story for a different blog post.)

Anyway, that was resolved about two months after I started looking, more than a year ago, and the only reason I even remember to bring it up now is a new mystery tune.

Today I was watching TED videos again–surprise!–and spotted another ad with a sparse, modern, electric string soundtrack, this time for Barclays Wealth. It was at the very end of Devdutt Pattanaik’s talk, “East vs. West,” and unfortunately, this time I don’t even have a YouTube video for the spot. Assuming TED won’t randomly switch the ads after its videos, you should be able to see the Barclays ad by watching (which I recommend, because it’s a great talk) or simply skipping to the end of the video.

UPDATE 11/26/2009: I’ve ripped the track from the ad on the Ted site so you can listen here.

Let me know if have any ideas about the music. Generic instrumental compositions, especially when they’re not intended for popular consumption, are very hard to pin down!

NASA's L-CHEESE spacecraft, a state-of-the-art space exploration vehicle made from unleavened dough.

On Friday morning, scientists will finally have an answer to a question that has plagued mankind for millenia: is the Moon made of cheese?

Many experts say that finding the fermented dairy delicacy is the first pre-requisite to future colonization of Earth’s natural satellite.

This is why NASA launched the LCHEESE mission, which will culminate tomorrow morning when a spacecraft propels a 2-ton saltine cracker into a frigid crater on the south pole of the moon. In the tremendous explosion that results, scientists hope to detect the spectroscopic signature of at least 10 kinds of semi-soft cheese.

“It’s too soon to tell what’ll come up, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed,” said a senior NASA official. “It might be a cloud of dust, or some pieces of pork paté. But what we’re really hoping for is a nice triple-cream brie, and maybe, just maybe, with a few slivers of manchego mixed in.”

After LCHEESE, NASA’s next step will be operation KMILK, a probe that will search for traces of milk ice hidden in lunar craters, according to the official. “Thirst will be a big problem for our astronauts. Cheese is well and good, but astronauts won’t be able to enjoy colonizing the Moon if there’s nothing to wash it down with.”

More info about LCHEESE can be found here

Note 2nd suggestion.