Upcoming talk: Your Microbiome, Your Health

If you’re in the Seattle area on April 29th, I hope you’ll come to a talk I’ll be giving for The STEAM Vent, a local science event organizer. I’ll present the latest that I’ve learned about the microbiome, including the results of a bunch of self-experiments I’ve done since last year to understand more and learn how to manipulate my own microbial environment.

I’m super-excited that uBiome has generously offered a bunch of prizes for attendees, including free uBiome gut kits (worth $89) and some t-shirts.

The event will be held at T.S. McHugh’s, an Irish Pub/Restaurant near the Space Needle. They’re offering a special “microbe-friendly” meal beforehand, an entrée that includes fresh sauerkraut and other healthy bacterial cultures for those who want to feed their microbes.

My talk starts at 7:30, and The STEAM Vent charges an admission fee of $10. But I strongly encourage you to come a little earlier for the meal ($25, including admission).

Find out more at the Meetup page.

Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room

It’s as impressive as you’d expect: full-blown Probat roaster right out in the open, a long line of Clovers at the main bar, 

As a tourist attraction it doesn’t disappoint: even in a city known for gourmet coffee shops, you won’t find a better example of showmanship and art. They obviously spent a great deal of time and money planning all the details. But it also means long lines (you’ll wait at least 20 minutes to get a coffee) and impossible parking. (Although I noticed they offer valet parking if you want to go that way).

 

I tried the Ethiopian Konga, which my understanding is another name for Yrgecheffe coffee, which became my favorite after trying it at Terroir in Boston a few years ago. Yes I asked for it Clover-brewed rather than a hand-pour. 

 

Andy Raskin’s book tour at Queen Anne Bookshop

Andy Raskin and I first met in graduate school, where both of us were interested in Japan, and over the years we somehow keep bumping into each other, often in strange, coincidental ways.  There was the time, for example, when he wrote an article for Wired about the country of Tuvalu and WebTV Networks, which (unbeknownst to him) just so happened to be the company where I was working. 

A year ago, while in San Francisco for a press tour, my PR colleague and I found ourselves with some extra time in the middle of the day.  Knowing that Andy was a writer with ties to the high-tech world, I thought it might be nice to look him up so my colleague suggested we stop at the Apple Store downtown for a bit while I tried to find his contact info.  Of course, right at that moment, who should happen to walk into the Apple Store?  (this photo was taken that day)

He told me he was working on a new book, that he had just signed a contract with Penguin and would be writing about some experiences he’d had with Japan and the inventor of instant ramen (who had died a few years ago). 

Well I was pleased to hear that the book is now finished and that Andy will be in Seattle for a book signing at Queen Anne Bookshop on Tuesday, May 26th at 6:30. [iCal  or Google Calendar ]

Andy’s book, The Ramen King and I, looks very interesting, and has already hit the  San Francisco Best Seller list.  I can’t wait to see him and hear more.

Do It Yourself Biology in Seattle

I finally was able to attend one of the DIYBio meetings this weekend, and now my mind is reeling from all the interesting possibilities I heard.  DIYBio is an organization of people who like to study and do amateur experiments in biology.  Like me, most of the members think state-of-the-art biotech is becoming more accessible to normal people and want to take advantage of it.

The meeting was organized by a guy who has set up his own private lab at an industrial building he rents for $250/month in a rundown part of Seattle.  He’s stocking the lab with used, but usable equipment he buys from eBay:  a $40 PCR machine, for example, plus incubators, reagents, centrifuges, and much more – all at very reasonable, amateur prices.

Here are some of the ideas for DIYBio:

• “Bio Beer”, just like the real thing only with specially engineered properties to make it glow in the dark, or with built-in resveratrol  (the anti-oxidant that makes red wine so healthy).
• Abalone shells: a substance so strong the US Army wants to use it as armor.
• Biodiesel, made from specially-engineered high-fat algae.
• Bacteria that eat polyethylene, making any plastic biodegradable.
• Theyshallwalk.org, an organization that is making devices to let paraplegics walk.
• Artificial meat: go after the $1M PETA prize for growing chicken breasts without chickens.
• Personal genomics: learn more about – and maybe manipulate -- your own genetic code.

The concept reminds me of the original Homebrew Computer Club, from California, which I attended a few times myself before its own success caused it to peter out in the mid-1980s.  Just a bunch of amateurs, all with day jobs doing something else, but convinced that the plummeting prices of technology are making for a revolution that we want to join.

 

[flickr photo from dullhunk]

The Battles of Tim Eyman

Although I first heard about this documentary film back in February, when the director Paul Fraser came to a Global Warming lecture at the Mercer Island library, I didn’t get around to watching it until yesterday, after seeing it mentioned in the paper last week.  As you know, I’m a fan of all things local:  I think everyone in Washington state, at least anyone interested in state/local politics should watch it too.

Tim Eyman is an activist famous for leading numerous state-wide ballot initiatives (referendums), mostly in the name of lowering taxes and limiting the power of government.  His claims to fame are various initiatives over the past ten years that ended up lowering car licensing fees and requiring a 2/3rds majority in state legislature to raise taxes.  He says his initiatives have reduced taxes over $11B, but he doesn’t just fight taxes. He also successfully led an effort to reduce the size of the King County City Council, and his organization, Permanent Offense, has fought for various issues related to transportation, including the I-985 (“reduce traffic congestion”) bill that will be on the November 4th ballot.

Although it’s clear the director thinks Eyman is an intriguing, newsworthy guy, this is not a propaganda film, and I find it hard to tell which side he’s on. There are interviews with Eyman himself and supporters like Mercer Island’s Michael Medved who portray him as a “man of the people” trying to “take back the government”.  But these are nicely balanced with persuasive arguments for how citizen-led mass referendums can lead to a lack of accountability.  The film includes lengthy personal interviews with opponents like State Senator Ken Jacobson (D), radio personality BJ Shea, and even David Goldstein, whose popular far-left blog is actually named after an initiative started expressly to have Tim Eyman declared a Horse’s ass.

The film’s not perfect.  I wish there had been more biography for example; I kept hoping there’d be a segment explaining Eyman’s non-activist background (where does he get his money?  what’s his day job?)  At nearly two hours, I found it a bit long; a tougher editor could have turned this into a shorter made-for-TV film that would be more widely watched – as it deserves.

It’s on Netflix, so put it in your queue right now.  Don’t vote in November until you’ve seen it.

 

Konga at Trabant Coffee

Mike at Trabant Coffee and Chai saw that I was looking for more Ethiopia Yergcheffe Konga coffee (it’s sooo good!), and let me know that a new batch is now available from 49th Parallel Roasters and it’s in stock now in Seattle.  So I rushed over to their Pioneer Square store and picked up a fresh 12-oz bag and this morning I enjoyed another, heavenly-wonderful, handmade raw milk latte with those excellent beans.

I even gave a cup to the piano teacher at our house this afternoon.  She’ll be back, I assure you.

My Vitamin D shortage

We don't get nearly enough sun in the Northwest, but we continue to read and believe advice from the rest of the country about the dangers of too much sun exposure, even though that advice may not apply to us.

Doctors say most people get too little Vitamin D, and here in Seattle at the University of Washington, Dr. Donald Miller says it may be worse:  of the local patients he tested, 78% had low levels, and 10% were "severely deficient".  He says deficient levels are correlated with all kinds of nasty things, from cancer to multiple sclerosis. (Washington's rate of MS is one of the highest in the country).

Looks like I'm one of the deficient ones too.  I had my blood tested and today found out that my Vitamin D level is 16.8 L ng/mL, far below the minimum 32 that many doctors recommend as minimal for good health. 

Note: for years I've been taking a multivitamin that has 100% of the US RDA for Vitamin D (400 IU), but obviously that hasn't helped.  So now I've upped that to 2400 IU/day of Vitamin D3 (the effective kind), and I'll test myself again in a few months to see what happens.

One good reason to keep your bottled water

Today's Seattle Times describes bottled water and mentions that many of the the nation's mayors are suggesting we use tap water instead.

But missing from the discussion is the one difference between bottled and tap water that might matter: tap water contains fluoride (at least here in Seattle and Mercer Island).  Adults with healthy teeth don't need fluoride, and young kids can get it plenty of other ways.  Scientific American and others point out that many of us get too much, mostly thanks to tap water.

I just checked with Aquafina (and I'm sure the other mainstream waters are similar): they don't contain fluoride.

So my advice to anyone in government who wants to force us to give up bottled water:  turn off the fluoride in the tap water first.

Seattle Cheese Festival

We love cheese as much as we like good tofu, so of course we also dropped in on the Seattle Cheese Festival, held this weekend at Pike Place Market.  The best part of course is the sampling (suggested donation $5), though the crowds are disorganized and the lines are long, so you really have to want your samples.

Here are the ones we liked best:

• Marin French Cheese Company (try their malange brie)
• Sierra Nevada Cheese Company (excellent traditional and garlic cream cheese, available at PCC)
• Sartori Reserve (SarVecchio parmesan is best)

 

Seattle's Best Tofu

Most of my friends don't like tofu, and I don't blame them. The stuff you buy at the grocery store is so dull it tastes rancid. But I remember the tofu I used to eat in Japan, made fresh by the local tofu-ya, or the excellent blocks from San Jose Tofu in Silicon Valley.  It's a completely different flavor, more like fine cheese than anything else.  Since moving here a few years ago I haven't had much tofu, since even the local Uwajimaya doesn't stock the really fresh stuff as far as I can tell.

Well that all changed this morning when I discovered Northwest Tofu, just east of Rainier on Jackson street in Seattle.  It's right around the corner from the Seattle Japanese Language School where I take my daughter each Saturday morning.  The make it fresh every day, throughout the day.  You can buy it for the unbelievable price of 80 cents per one pound pack.

On colder days I sometimes boil it, but on a hot day like today, I just eat it cold right out of the bag.  I served it to my 6-year-old, who loves it with a touch of soy sauce. If you like, sprinkle it with some chopped ginger, or Japanese seasonings like furikake or katsu-ou-boshi (available at Uwajimaya). Another option is to cut into slices and pan-fry with some butter (and garlic if you like).  Finally, during the summer I often keep some around for grilling, right there with the hamburgers and hotdogs.  Again, a touch of soy sauce and the kids love it.

One catch: thanks to the outrageous high price of soybeans lately (thanks again, you ignorant biofuels people), the owner has lately been finding it hard sometimes to get the ingredients.  He told me he buys from Minnesota, but the price has doubled in the last year and occasionally his supplier can't get him anything.

 

It's part of a Chinese restaurant that apparently specializes in tofu and caters apparently mostly to Chinese--I was the only native English speaker inside when I visited.  Here's the exact address:

1913 S Jackson St
Seattle, WA 98144
(206) 328-8320

But if you just want tofu, drive your car all the way around the back and go through the (clearly-marked) door where you can buy it straight from the guy while he makes it.  Mmmmmm!!

Edible Magazine

"I want farmers to be as famous as rock stars", says Jill Lightner, the editor of the new foodie quarterly, Edible Seattle.  As the grandson and son of Wisconsin farmers, this sounds like my kind of magazine!  So I rushed over to Metropolitan Market near the Space Needle, as soon as I heard it was on the newsstands.  (They don't yet have it at Whole Foods or PCC, at least when I called this weekend).

They focus on locally grown food, which of course always comes down to farmers like the people behind wooly pigs (featured in the first issue), or chickens (how to raise them in your back yard!). I can't wait till they do something with dairy farms and raw milk (hey maybe they could get my 90-year-old grandma to tell them how to milk a cow by hand--the way she showed me when I was a kid). It appears that most of the contributors have web pages and blogs, making it easy to follow up if you see something really interesting.

The $5 price tag is worth it for the excellent summaries of the local food calendar (which foods are in season and when), the farmers markets (they list Mercer Island's too), and various gems like the Tofu Restaurant on Jackson I didn't know sells its own tofu fresh every day.  (Unfortunately, an apparent typo in the magazine didn't list the shop's name, so I'll have to try calling or visiting them, maybe when I'm near there next Saturday).  I liked the "news bites" summary, which among other things was the first place I'd heard that distillery laws are changing this year, enabling smaller producers to get into the business.

The publisher has been putting out regional food magazines for a long time in other parts of the country for a long time.  I think I first heard about them in San Francisco, or maybe it was Portland, so it's nice they finally have one for us too.

Theo Chocolate Factory Tour

This month is my turn to host our local Y-Guide boy's club, so I arranged for everyone to visit the Theo Chocolate Factory in the Fremont Area of Seattle.  What a wonderful way to see (and taste) how chocolate is made!   I highly recommend it as a place to bring out-of-town guests.  Although they offer tours to the public each day, they are happy to arrange private tours as well at a cost of $10/person ($100 minimum).

When we arrived at their retail store, they warned us not to get carried away with all the free samples -- you'll get plenty during the tour, they said and I realized I was going to like this place already.  Then they started us on a short lecture, with plenty of props (and tastings) to give you a feel for how cocoa beans are harvested and shipped to their warehouse.  After everyone donned hair nets, they marched us through the factory where we watched the beans go from the destoner (which cleans them) and roaster, through the mill and refiner, where everything is crushed and then mixed with sugar and/or milk powder, to the conche (which circulates and oxidizes the mix), through a holding tank and tempering machine where finally it is deposited on special molds and through a cooling tunnel into your chocolate bar.  Yes, we were offered generous samples all along the way.

By the time the tour is finished, you'll be full enough that you'll better appreciate all the wonderful items for sale in the retail shop, including my favorite, the $6 Theo Venezuela Limited Edition Dark Chocolate Bar 91%.  The retail store also sells various wine pairing kits and other gourmet items that every foodie will love.

Throughout the tour you get a dose of the organic and Fair Trade philosophy of the company, which prides itself on how much they go out of their way to help local cocoa farmers and the environment.  I asked how much of that $6 chocolate bar actually goes to the farmer...and the answer is 2 or 3 cents, maybe double if it's really special beans.  The other $5.90+ goes to help all the distributors, marketing people, retailers, entrepreneurs -- everyone else who is making what is otherwise a foul-tasting and ugly tropical fruit into a wonderful pleasure to eat.

Realtime 911 dispatches

The City of Seattle has a web site where you can see constantly-updated reports emergency 911 dispatches. 

The site Public911 also mashes that same data onto a map like this one:

I'm still working on my map project, but this is another example of how nice it would be to have the ability to map local information in real time.

How safe is that bridge?

Neal pointed me Bridge Tracker, a site that uses Virtual Earth to let you know the level of safety (or danger) for public bridges near you. Here's what it says I face when traveling to Espresso Vivace (where I must go this weekend to pick up some fresh beans):

The blue markers on the map indicate bridges which have passed inspection recently. Looks like I'll be okay. Whew!

520 Bridge falling apart

I live on an island, and I don't own a boat, so I'm completely dependent on the bridges that get me from home to everywhere else. What happens when those bridges fail?  Here are two simulations from the SR-520 bridge:

via Metroblog Seattle

 

Northwest Food and Wine

Celebrating Food and Wine in the Northwest is a short (9-min) podcast from NPR last week worth listening to if you like food. From the description:

Weekend Edition Sunday, January 13, 2008 · Northwestern cities such as Seattle and Portland are experiencing an explosion of new restaurants and wineries. Braiden Rex-Johnson, author of Pacific Northwest Wining and Dining, talks to Liane Hansen about why she loves Seattle's food and wine scene, how to shop for seafood, and what makes a good wine pairing.

Here's the book

 

My sound bites:

• Portland chefs are more daring because the real estate costs are lower.
• See Etta seafood: cold-smoked salmon with shiitake mushrooms
• Best recipe is on p.34 "wild king salmon with cherries"
• Kevin Davis at Steelhead Diner in Pike Place Market is "taking the city by a storm"
• Recommends the virginica oyster

Tea and Taiko at Sponge

Want to expose your kids to a foreign language while they're very young -- the best time for their young brains to soak up the sounds and grammar of Chinese, Spanish, French, Japanese?  Bring them to the Sponge School, run by my good friend, Jackie Friedman Mighdoll.   I first met Jackie more than 10 years ago, in Japan, where she moved after college because she loves languages so much.  A few years ago, when she had her first baby, she set up a school to help small children get started with languages.  Classes are 55 minutes long, full of games, music, and play designed for 0-4 year olds. 

Sunday, January 13th is a good time to learn more about Sponge.  Jackie's hosting a tea party, featuring a Japanese taiko drum performance by YushinDaiko.  It's free, and your toddler will thank you (in some other language, no doubt).

Where: 3107 S Day Street, Seattle
When: Sunday, January 13th 3-5pm
RSVP (not required): events@spongeschool.com

 

Clover Factory

A big treat today: while visiting Seattle I stopped by the world headquarters of the Coffee Equipment Company where Zander Nosler gave me a personal tour of their factory and explained the history of the company. What a place!  The machines are hand-assembled by  the engineering team that designs the product.  These people definitely know how to build hardware, and it shows in the flavor you get from the coffee. Besides Trabant (which I visited last month), Clover machines are also in use at Zoka and a few others places in Seattle.  So much excellent coffee, so little time!

Goodbye Anita

Very sad news in my inbox this morning.  Anita Rowland, a blogger friend, passed away yesterday after a long bout with cancer. Her death is especially sad because, although I only met her face-to-face a few times, I felt like she was my neighbor.  I knew her as the organizer of a blogger meetup at Crossroads in Bellevue each month, often attended by people like Robert Scoble and Dare and many others who through their blogs feel like close friends but whom I rarely, if ever, see face to face.  Although Anita had been ill for a long time, you wouldn't have known it unless you paid close attention -- she was just always friendly, nice, and a true connector who liked blogs as a way to put people together.  I know she read my blog, and I read hers, like neighbors who keep in touch just because they're neighbors.  It's so awful to hear that she's gone.

How to Improve Schools

The (always interesting) Seattle Public Schools blog points to an Economist article from last year about a large McKinsey world-wide study, "How the world's best-performing schools come out on top".  When you systematically compare successful versus unsuccessful school systems, which policies work and which don't? 

Here's the executive summary:

The experiences of these top school systems suggests that three things matter most: 1) getting the right people to become teachers, 2) developing them into effective instructors and, 3) ensuring that the system is able to deliver the best possible instruction for every child.

Things that don't matter:

• School funding (best schools often have the lowest funding, most well-funded schools are often the worst)
• Class size (in fact, lower class sizes can hurt a school if it results in lower teacher quality)
• Testing (this is neutral -- sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't)

Look at the (mostly anonymous) comments on the Seattle blog and get a sense for why I'm glad to be in the Mercer Island school district instead of Seattle.  Many of those commenting seem more interested in ensuring employment for existing teachers than in looking their problems straight in the eye and fixing them.  No wonder even die-hard supporters of Seattle-style politics have to flee when their kids leave elementary school.