Counting calories is fun, but not many people know how. As a semi-professional, I was always wondering how much I am eating everyday. Last night, I decided to give it a try. I used USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference (release 19) for my nutrients computation (http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=5720).
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Recently, Chinese surgeons made a significant contribution to the plastic surgery. They successfully transplanted a penis for a man who injured his penis during an accident. However, after 14 days, the team regretfully reported that they had to cut the penis off because of patient’s psychological problems.

According to the report, the man complained that his quality of life was suffered greatly after the accident. He wanted to urinate in a standing position and have a satisfactory sex life.

Now he had what he had asked for— a new and young penis with which he can urinate in a standing position, and possibly have sex in the near future (God forbids). Why did he want to take aback what he had requested?

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This evening, I felt sleepy. My head was dizzy, my body was exhausted, and my mind went completely blank. I wanted to lie down right after dinner. But, as a family man, I couldn’t.

No, it is not because I ate too much. I am carefully controlling the amount of foods for each dinner. OK, I confess I have stuffed 80% of my stomach. But that is not the reason. I always ate that much. It was not because of foods, I was sure.

After about an hour’s doze, I figured that I was kind of in a blue mood.
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Tea is a drink. The art lies in how people prepare it and drink it. Unfortunately, the art of tea has been distorted.

The biggest tormenter is the invention of bagged tea. Western people, unable to fully appreciate the oriental culture, drink the tea like eating fast foods. You dip an ugly paper bag into the hot water and, bingo, without actually seeing the tea leaves, the smell of tea fills in the room, the water turns into brown or red, and the tea is done. You never know what is inside that bag. It is said that cheap tea bags may contain really low grade tea leaves and even dregs. The smell of tea and jasmine might be flavored, i.e., made by artificially additives. But people still drink it, enjoy it, and feel being invigorated by it.

Bagged tea is now a multi-billion business. Commercialized anything is a sure way to destroy its inherent art. On the other hand, the tea ceremony has been claimed to replay the old art of tea drinking. Thus, the tea ceremony in modern tea houses becomes popular in China recently. However, the tea ceremony also twists the art of tea in some subtle ways .

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A netter recently informed me that the Atkins diet was effective in losing his weight. In each of the two week sessions, he successfully lost more than ten pounds without feeling too much uncomfortable.

How could this happen? The Atkins diet has been criticized by all kinds of nutrition societies and has gone bankrupted after Dr. Atkins died. Market has proved that the Atkins diet is a failure. So the netter’s story puzzles me.

When we eat something, to some extent, we intake nutrients because human body (except for stomach and intestine) doesn’t care about the shape or texture of foods. All the body wants are nutrients, and cells work on these small molecules.

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200 years of history is surprisingly short for a staple food. Potato was a miscellaneous prize when Spanish Conquistadors subdued the Inca empire during the 1500s. However, this ugly vegetable tube didn’t receive warm welcome from Europeans except from Irish peasants who were cheap, daring, and always in hunger. Even in Ireland, potato was considered unholy because it was not mentioned in the Bible. Queen Elizabeth’s chef once served the Queen not with the edible tube but with the leaves which sickened the Queen. Nevertheless, later the potato was adopted by French and eventually was spread over the whole world. Now in the northern China, people never question the belief that potato is their native food.

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Minamata city (水俣市) is by no means a beautiful city, but it has a nice bay. Located on the west coast of Kyushu island (one of the four large islands in Japan), the city is still quite remote even by Japanese standard.

This little town in the spring of 1956 looked not much different from that in previous years. Walking in the street, you could see cats rolling or dancing madly, and occasionally people stumbled stupidly. Not far away, there were dead fish floating in the bay. Residents had gotten used to these bizarre things.

But something was strange this year. It seemed more and more people behaved like a mad or drunk person. Rumors had spread all over the town. There was an infectious disease circulating in the town. Superstitious people suspected that those affected people had committed sins, or were haunted by ghosts.

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Medicare part D—the prescription drug coverage plan of Medicare has been on show for several months, and the enrollment deadline, May 15, has been passed. More than 31 million beneficiaries have enrolled in one of their local plans or government standard plan, though more than 8 million people are still left behind.

Given the pessimistic prediction mostly by democrats that many beneficiaries will have trouble in enrolling in the drug program, the above news is great. The new drug plan is, by and large, rolling on.

So in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, the administrator of Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) presented an optimistic report to cheer the American public[ref 1]. The figures, numbers, and phrases are as encouraging as one can get. However, in the same issue, state-women Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY) reviewed the struggles during the unforgetable drug bill fight, and harshly criticized the republicans in abusing the legislation process[ref 2].

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This picture is taken from the Jan 27 Science Magazine. The woman is not sexy in the most fashionable way, and not a beauty by the traditional standard. But she has melancholy eyes, a distinctive trait once I liked.

The window to the heart is our eyes. Does the blue in her eyes tell us that her mood is not optimal, or is it merely a sign crying for love?

In the Jan 27 issue of the Science Magazine, its News Focus reported the problem of suicide in China. It is well known that China has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. The suicide is as prevalent in the rural areas as in the urban areas, affects equally men and women, and those with high and low education. Nevertheless, the Science news report noticed a discrepancy. The high suicide rate was not matched by a high depression rate. Thus, it concluded that in China, many suicides were due to impulsive behavior rather than the endpoints of depression.

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When R. A. Fisher put down the phrase “p=0.05, or 1 in 20” in his famous book, Statistical Methods for Research Workers, very likely with a cup of tea besides his elbow, he might not realize that this p value has become so magic that it is as influential as the e in mathematics and engineer.

However, Fisher himself didn’t stick to that number. To him, p value sort of measures the evidence against a hypothesis. For example the usual p value for type 1 error is used to against the null hypothesis. He was very liberal in interpreting the p values. He sometimes treated p=0.08 as significant and sometimes he did not. On the other hand, Pearson and Neyman thought that we should use a fixed cutpoint for statistical tests, probably for the sake of simplicity.

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