Recently in Personal Category

A few of you know that since early last winter I've been working hard on losing weight. I've been counting calories and fat and exercising more. Since July I've been using my Garmin 405CX to keep track of mileage, heart rate, and cadence when I run. The map above is a screen shot of this morning's run.

It's neither my longest run, nor my fastest, and it's sure not going to win me any medals. But at 7 miles and 8:18 per mile (with a couple of the splits at less than 8:00, including the last mile),  it's not bad for me. It's not much to brag about, but I can't help myself.

If you're a glutton for punishment, you can click on the image above. It will take you to the Garmin Connect site where you can look at the elevation change, my heart rate, and my cadence. You can even watch an animation of the whole run.¹

Attention, multitaskers (if you can pay attention, that is): Your brain may be in trouble.

People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found. (source)

Interesting, the study, which was published last August in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that habitual media multitaskers "are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory." It's not clear whether habitual multitasking causes people to be more susceptible to irrelevant information or whether those who are more susceptible to irrelevant information are more prone to be media multitaskers, but it is clear that the minds of multitaskers work differently from the minds of those who aren't.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding of all is that multitaskers are worse at switching tasks than non-multitaskers.

On rare occasions you read a story that reminds you how reslient, how resourceful, and how amazing some people are. This morning was one of those occasions. I read Nicholas Kristof's column in the New York Times about Tererai Trent who recently defended her Ph.D. dissertation at Western Michigan University and will receive her degree next month.

What's so remarkable about her? I can't do her story justice. You'll have to read Kristof's column. I will give you a taste of what's in store for you when you do.

Any time anyone tells you that a dream is impossible, any time you're discouraged by impossible challenges, just mutter this mantra: Tererai Trent.

I've never reviewed a restaurant here before, but I wrote about Hook a couple of months ago, and my partner and I are in DC this weekend. I made reservations over a month ago to make sure we got a good table, because I really wanted to try it -- and I'm very glad I did. If you live in DC or you visit and you're looking for an excellent seafood restaurant, Hook is much more interesting and creative than Legal Sea Foods or McCormick & Schmick, the fish comes from sustainable sources, and the produce comes from local sources. It costs a little more, but it's worth it.

It starts with the decor, clean and modern. The downstairs bar is busy and loud. If you want something quieter, be sure to make a reservation and ask for a quiet table. They'll probably seat you upstairs where the colors are warmer and there's a lot less noise.¹

A meal consists of three courses, portioned so that you leave feeling satisfied but not stuffed.

The crudo is bite-size portions of raw or house smoked fish with three accompaniments. My partner started with the king salmon. I had the house smoked selection (salmon, mackerel, and bluefish). I had always thought of mackerel as a cheap fish. No more. Prepared well, as it was here, it has a pleasant salty tang and is a perfect way to prepare for the main part of the meal.

For the second course we both had the beet salad with goat cheese, crushed pistachio, and pickled watermelon. The yellow beets had a wonderful mild flavor that perfectly complimented the pistachio. Pickled watermelon was new and delightful. The dressing was red beet puree with olive oil. The menu changes according to what is available in the market, but our very knowledgeable server told us that the beet salad has been on the menu since Hook opened. I highly recommend it.

My partner had dorade (wood-grilled, served whole, bone in) over roasted yukon gold potatoes with grilled sun-dried tomatoes and kalamata olives. He let me taste it. The dorade had a wonderful delicate flavor enhanced by fresh thyme and slices of lemon stuffed inside during grilling. The potatoes had a nice crunch and rich flavor that played off the powerful sweetness of grilled sun-dried tomatoes. I had striped bass, simply grilled on a bed of pureed butternut squash with sweet potatoes and yukon golds. The bass was firm and moist with oil, more body and flavor than the dorade, but it was the tiny sage pgnoli tarts that I will remember longest. Just a pastry shell filled with pignoli, sprinkled with fresh chopped sage and baked until the crust was flaky and the pignoli were golden. Wonderful.

We finished with decaffeinated coffee.

There's only one thing they could do to improve Hook. Open it in a new location closer to a Metro stop. It's in Georgetown a very long walk from the nearest Metro (either Foggy Bottom or Farragut West). We took a taxi from our hotel on Dupont Circle only about $8 each way, but I prefer public transit when it's available.

Commenting on my Happy Birthday wishes to DotEarth Danny Bloom writes:

But one thing, dear blogger here at UConn. Let's not play the same ugly game Rush plays and wish for his head to explode! That's the same sickness and ugliness that Rush plays by and you should have more class, sir. Please remove or edit that part to sound more humanistic. Something like [edit] "And you might take a moment to see how Rush Limbaugh attack Andy in a very ugly way {here LINK]."

Point taken. I could try to explain why my words are less offensive than Rush's, but it would be more of an excuse than an explanation. I won't remove what I wrote, not because I'm proud of it, but because I don't believe in hiding my warts.

When I said I was boring, too literal minded, and a lousy storyteller. Well, now I have evidence to prove it.¹ Wired has a short test you can take online to test your autism quotient.Here's how they describe it:

Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge's Autism Research Centre have created the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, as a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults. In the first major trial using the test, the average score in the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher. The test is not a means for making a diagnosis, however, and many who score above 32 and even meet the diagnostic criteria for mild autism or Asperger's report no difficulty functioning in their everyday lives

OK, so average is 16.4, and 80% of those diagnosed with autism score 32 or higher. My score? 31.

'Nuf said.

Leave it to Google to come up with yet another new way to read news over the Internet. Click on the image below to see Google Fast Flip in action.

I don't think of the typeface as dull or boring, I think of it as neutral, but not in a colorless, noncommittal way, but in a way that's helpful and intentional. It's almost like there is a sort of Zen in the way Helvetica is perfectly, beautifully bland (and yet, not bland).

I like to think of myself as "helpful and intentional", but I'd never go so far as to claim that there's any sort of Zen about me.

If you'd like to know what typeface you are, head on over to [i]ndependent lens and take the quiz.