| Graph Databases - Neo4j and OrientDB |
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Saturday, August 15th, 2015 17:52:30 GMT |
| Programming |
Lately, I've been feeling increasingly stifled by ordinary SQL databases, and have been wishing I had an easier, more natural and intuitive way to deal with very interconnected data.
So, I started reading about NoSQL and MongoDB, and soon stumbled across the concept of graph databases, which seem like a huge improvement on SQL in a lot of ways. (MongoDB isn't graph database software, but it might be useful too somehow - I'm still considering using it for something.)
Graph database maps look very similar to maps from the wonderful VUE concept mapping software, which I love. So, that gave me the idea that perhaps VUE could be modified to serve as a GUI for viewing and maybe even editing graph databases. I posted that idea here on the official VUE forum. I'm a Java newbie, as well as a graph database newbie, so I don't expect at all to be able to figure out how to build that myself in the near future - but, hopefully others will like the idea enough to do something with it.
I've scarcely used either one for anything yet, but, they're both really cool, and I'm thinking maybe a graph database is exactly what I need for my imagined CMS (content management system, for lack of a better term), among other projects.
So, hopefully I'm now at least one step closer to having a satisfactory CMS and being able to give all my websites a much-needed renovation.
It might be good, but, I'm terribly picky, so no matter how good it is, I probably will still want to write my own CMS.
The graph database software I've looked at most closely so far are Neo4j and OrientDB. Both are Java software, and free, libre, and open source (with a commercial version). Neo4j is just for graph databases, while OrientDB supports additional kinds of databases.
I found a CMS called Structr which uses Neo4j, but I haven't yet tried it.
The official Neo4j website currently is providing legally free (as in price) downloads of the book Graph Databases, 2nd edition, by Ian Robinson, Jim Webber, and Emil Eifrém, published by O'Reilly Media:
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| The Epidemic of Too Much Omega 6 and Not Enough Omega 3 in Our Diets |
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Monday, August 17th, 2015 18:03:50 GMT |
| Health |
This post is about health-related topics, so, I should probably point out this disclaimer, and also point out that I'm not a dietitian, nor a doctor, nor a nurse, nor a health care professional of any kind.
I'm just a layperson who sometimes likes to read, think, and sometimes even write about, health. (And maybe I was a doctor in a previous life in the early 1800's. :-) )
I'm 34 years old, never attended college (partly for financial reasons, and partly because of my sleep issues and shyness), and I have a GED instead of a normal high school diploma.
So, please don't blindly assume I know what I'm talking about, and please don't blindly assume that my ideas or personal health habits necessarily have any merit.
Also, this seems like a good place to point out the wonderful, fascinating book Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - who isn't a health care professional, and if I recall correctly, he didn't write about Omega 3 and/or Omega 6 at all in that book. And health isn't the main theme of the book.
But, he has a lot of interesting things to say about iatrogenics (problems caused by unnecessary, misguided intervention and tampering with nature), and many other fascinating things.
Again, I'm only a layperson, and I read that book so recently that I haven't even had much time at all yet to put ideas from it into practice. But, to me, it appears to be an excellent book.
It actually happens to answer a lot of the questions and concerns about Omega 3 fats I posted at the NHLBI Strategic Visioning Forum website back in May!
And I find it very sad that the issues the book pointed out way back in 2007 (the year the book was published) are still, as far as I know, not very common knowledge.
The Ultimate Omega 3 Diet book claims that even vegetarians are commonly affected by the Omega 6/Omega 3 imbalance problem, and surprisingly often even have it worse than meat-eaters do.
The book also points out numerous adverse effects of too much Omega 6.
Quoted from Chapter 1: "The problem with eating too much omega-6 fats is that they are disease promoting. In fact, the NIH's Essential Fats Education program makes a profound declaration on its website: excessive omega-6 fats in the diet trigger a rise in health problems, including heart attacks, blood clots, arthritis, asthma, menstrual cramps, headaches, and tumor metastases."
Unfortunately, Omega 3 and Omega 6 compete with each other for absorption by your body.
So, even if you get a lot of Omega 3 in your diet, it's possible that it's not doing you as much good as we would hope, because, depending on how much Omega 6 you consume, a lot of the Omega 3 might be getting crowded out by all the Omega 6 in your diet.
But our modern, industrialized diets commonly have Omega 6/Omega 3 ratios ranging from 10:1 to 20:1.
One problem is the common use in our modern food products of certain vegetable oils and other ingredients which have a terrible ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3, such as soybean oil, cottonseed oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, corn oil, palm oil, hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated stuff, margarine, etc., etc., etc.
And another problem (which primarily affects meat-eaters and dairy consumers, as well as the poor animals) is our modern, industrialized, sick and twisted farming practices - where our farm animals and farmed fish are raised in cruel and unhealthy ways and fed the wrong foods, resulting in meat and dairy products with more Omega 6 than Omega 3.
Meanwhile, wild fish and pastured or free-range farm animals naturally tend to have a better Omega 3/Omega 6 ratio.
I compiled the below list based on info I read throughout The Ultimate Omega 3 Diet book. Anything that caught my eye that the book said Omega 3 (or appropriately balanced levels of Omega 3 and Omega 6) seems to help with, I tried to note it below.
A quote from Part 1: Omega 3 fats "are to your brain as calcium is to your bones."
Again, sorry if I missed mentioning some important things.
Those studies frequently found many positive effects of increased Omega 3 in combination with decreased Omega 6.
The book also points out that you can look up a lot of nutritional information for free on the web.
The book provided this link:
But, the link the book provided doesn't work. Here's the non-working link anyway: http://efaeducation.nih.gov/sig/kim.html
Luckily, that web page and even the software itself are available from Archive.org:
It's apparently only for Windows or Macs. Macs with OS 9!
I didn't try it myself and don't yet know whether or not it's free, libre, and open source.
Maybe, maybe not, judging by a page I found about the copyright status of works by the government and/or found on government websites: USA.gov - U.S. Government Works.
There's the "short-chain" ALA form of Omega 3, which is found in plant sources. (One of the easiest ways to get a lot of ALA Omega 3 is to eat ground flax seed. More on that below.)
Possibly ALA can be converted by our bodies to other forms of Omega 3, but maybe only in insufficient amounts - unfortunately and inconveniently for vegetarians.
The Ultimate Omega 3 Diet book also mentions that purslane - a human-edible plant I had never heard of - is "one of the few plants known to contain EPA".
The book says this form of Omega 3 is rather rare, and one of the few foods it exists in is hemp. However, the fact that hemp is so related to marijuana, and might even contain some amount of the mind-altering chemical found in marijuana, is enough to repel me from ever consuming hemp.
But, many people have no objection to hemp, so I thought I'd point it out despite my personal disliking for it.
I already mentioned purslane and hemp above - but the book's main recommendation for vegetarians is to take an Omega 3 nutritional supplement containing the EPA and/or DHA forms of Omega 3.
Such supplements will probably contain algae oil, and if you're a really strict vegetarian, you'll have to be wary of any brands whose capsules contain animal-based gelatin.
The book mentions in Chapter 12 just before Table 12-4 that DHA can "retroconvert" into EPA, but I didn't see any mention of how helpful or not that is as a source of EPA.
Here's a page from Prevention.com (the website of Prevention Magazine) about carrageenan: The Natural Ingredient You Should Ban From Your Diet
The bottle of Ovega 3 I bought in November 2014 said it had 500 mg in all of Omega 3, with 320 mg of DHA and 130 mg of EPA - which add up to only 450 mg, not 500 mg, so I assume the remaining 50 mg necessary to add up to 500 mg is maybe some unmentioned ALA Omega 3?
Meanwhile, the bottle of Ovega 3 I got in early July 2015 says it has 270 mg DHA, 135 mg EPA, with 500 mg Omega 3 total.
So, compared to my previous bottle, that's 50 mg less DHA and 5 mg more EPA. And 270 +135 only adds up to 405 mg.
(Addition, Aug. 18/19, 2015: Another reason I like Ovega 3 is because the algae in it, according to Ovega.com's What is Ovega-3? page, is grown "in stainless steel fermentors within an FDA-inspected facility". It's nice to know it didn't come from a pond or something.)
The best price for Ovega 3 I currently know of as of August 17, 2015, is on Amazon - $26.40 for 60 capsules - and that's where I buy mine, despite Richard Stallman's page on Reasons not to buy from Amazon. Can't really afford to buy it anywhere else.)
Which seems pretty sneaky, if you ask me. Nature Made's label (in the picture on Amazon, on August 17, 2015) says it has "540 mg EPA+DHA per serving" - but a serving is 2 capsules, and there are only 60 capsules in the bottle. So, you only get 30 servings total per 60-capsule bottle for $23.56 (Amazon's current price on August 17, 2015).
Meanwhile, Ovega 3 is said to contain 500 mg of Omega 3 in just 1 capsule - and you get 60 capsules per bottle. So, 60 servings total per 60-capsule bottle for $26.40 (Amazon's current price on August 17, 2015).
So, Ovega 3 is definitely the better deal. (At least as of August 17, 2015.)
Even so, I'm still not going to go back to eating fish, even though I actually quite like the taste of some fish. My favorite (until I gave up fish) was salmon. I miss it a lot sometimes.
The edition I read of the book The Ultimate Omega 3 Diet was published in 2007 - before the Gulf of Mexico oil spill of 2010, and before the Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011). So, the edition I read says nothing on those topics.
A short summary in my own words: short-lived fish which don't eat other fish might be less contaminated than fish with longer life spans which do eat other fish (and which therefore consume all the mercury consumed by all the fish lower down in the food chain).
The higher up in the food chain the fish is (for example, predators such as sharks), the more mercury contamination it might have.
And, again, the book recommends wild fish over farmed fish. See the book for more info.
Which doesn't really surprise me, because I greatly mistrust any animal product industries, and I think that anyone capable of cruelly slaughtering or otherwise abusing animals might easily not really care what harm they do to humans, either.
Farmed fish, or any other farmed animal, fed the wrong diet and raised the wrong ways, might not have very much Omega 3 at all, or the Omega 3 might be dwarfed by the amount of Omega 6.
So, the book recommends wild fish over farmed fish. And free-range or pastured meat. (But bear in mind that "organic" doesn't necessarily mean it's free-range or pastured.) And Omega 3-enriched eggs.
Even some things that naturally have significant amounts of Omega 3, such as walnuts, also have a lot of Omega 6 too.
(Walnuts sure are tasty, though. Roasted walnuts from Nuts.com are among the best-tasting things I've ever eaten in my life. Too bad my financial issues prevent me from buying from them more often.)
Flax seeds are also pretty low-cost. I get flax seeds from Nuts.com - currently only $2.99 a pound. Flax seeds are very easy to grind yourself with a coffee grinder.
Ground flax is a pretty unobtrusive addition to oatmeal, cereal, toast, etc. Not very noticeable to me. I find it neither bad nor notably good, though I like it a little bit. In a lazy mood, I could probably tolerate eating a spoonful or two without even bothering to go to the trouble of mixing it into anything else.
(Despite Richard Stallman's page on Reasons not to buy from Amazon.)
The grinder is about 6 inches tall, so, being inexperienced with coffee grinders and mechanical contraptions in general, I was surprised to find that the top compartment where you put things to grind up is smaller than I thought it would be - only around 2 inches deep.
But, that's not really a problem for me, since I think it's best to grind up small amounts of flax seeds frequently (for freshness) rather than large batches more seldom.
The author likes fasting and engages in it himself, on the theory that it's more natural and thus possibly healthier for humans to not eat as regularly as many modern people do. (At least the ones who are lucky enough to be able to afford to eat regularly.)
I suspect there might be some merit in those ideas, though I could probably easily be wrong.
I don't know if there is definitely any merit in this idea, but, from now on, that's probably going to be how I'll take my Omega 3 supplements.
It will be easy for me to do, because I so often end up fasting unintentionally, usually due to getting lost in more interesting tasks than eating or food preparation.
I don't want to use up my overly expensive Ovega 3 capsules that fast, though, so I will probably only take one per day, or maybe every other day or so.
Don't know if that's enough, though. A pity that poverty forces me to make tradeoffs like these. (Donations and microdonations are welcome.)
(Addition, Aug. 20, 2015, 4:26 PM EDT: But, on the bright side, at least I'm not so regularly getting a dose of carrageenan, which Ovega 3 unfortunately contains.)
Don't know - just some ideas, which again, might or might not have any value. Again, I'm a layperson, not a health care professional.
I'm pretty sure avoiding Omega 6 altogether would be a bad idea, because it is considered an essential nutrient. So, I definitely wouldn't try to go that far. Just thought I should point that out.
Also, apparently it's possible to overdose on Omega 3 fish oil, according to this page from Livestrong.com, so again, please be careful.
By the way, the only reason I haven't been putting a link or iframe to comments threads in my blog posts lately is because I wanted to automate that somehow, and I didn't get around to that yet. (Addition, Sept. 5, 2015, 6:07 AM. Still didn't get around to it, so I finally added an iframe and comment thread manually.)
Also, I keep neglecting to even log into my forums to check to see if anyone has tried to post anything.
Apologies in advance for the long delays people posting will quite possibly experience when I procrastinate about maintaining the forum.
(And, since I still have been avoiding my email, and am still preoccupied with my own projects - services and goods still aren't really available yet.)
Please use common sense, and for hopefully trustworthy information, consult people such as health care professionals who are probably much more likely than me to know what they're talking about.
Thanks to my local library's (or Clevnet's) collection of temporarily-borrowable ebooks, I recently stumbled across a book called The Ultimate Omega 3 Diet: Maximize the Power of Omega-3s to Supercharge Your Health, Battle Inflammation, and Keep Your Mind Sharp by Evelyn Tribole, M.S., RD - a dietitian.
The benefits of Omega 3 fats are relatively frequently espoused. But, I think in general, on the web, the importance of the balance between Omega 3 fats and Omega 6 fats probably tends to be less often mentioned or not strongly emphasized enough, and many people are not aware of that issue at all. (That included me for a long time.)
However, despite Omega 6's adverse effects when you have too much Omega 6 - both Omega 3 fats and Omega 6 fats are considered essential nutrients.
According to the The Ultimate Omega 3 Diet book, possibly the optimal ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3 in our diets might be as low as 1:1, though perhaps something like 2:1 or 4:1 might be OK too.
If I understand correctly what I read in The Ultimate Omega 3 Diet book, this might be the result of two main problems.
The proper balance and proper amounts of Omega 3 and Omega 6 might be able to help with a huge variety of health issues. So many that it's a chore to even try to list them all - so, sorry if the below is probably missing a lot of important details.
Part 2 of the book The Ultimate Omega 3 Diet recounts lots of info from health studies done with both humans and (sadly) animals, about many of the issues listed above.
In Parts 3 and 4 of the book, there's info on how you can change your diet for (hopefully) the better, with a bunch of recipes, some meal plans, and lists of the Omega 3 and Omega 6 content of foods, etc.
http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search
The Ultimate Omega 3 Diet book also points out a software program called KIM2 (which stands for Keep It Managed 2).
One confusing and lesser-known fact about Omega 3 is that there are multiple forms of Omega 3, and consuming only one form of Omega 3 is quite possibly not good enough.
And then there are the longer-chain DHA and EPA kinds of Omega 3, which come from sources such as fish and some other meats (but, unless I'm mistaken, only if those fish and animals had enough Omega 3 in their own diets), algae, and grass.
There's also a variant of Omega 3 called SDA - short for steardonic acid. (I had never even heard of it before reading The Ultimate Omega 3 Diet book.)
Distressingly, the The Ultimate Omega 3 Diet book says there are hardly any ways for a vegetarian to get enough DHA and EPA.
I take the vegetarian Omega 3 supplement Ovega 3, even though I find it uncomfortably expensive, and I wish it didn't contain carrageenan.
Also, something that confused me a little about Ovega 3 was the unexplained fluctuation in the amount of EPA and DHA provided by Ovega 3.
But, other than those issues, I like Ovega 3. But if anyone knows of anything better, I'd be happy to hear about it.
I considered Nature Made's vegetarian Omega 3, but, this helpful Amazon review pointed out:
"There's nothing wrong with these pills, except you need to take two of them to get a full dose, so they're twice as expensive as you'd think!"
Though The Ultimate Omega 3 Diet book has some meal plans, recipes and other info tailored for vegetarians, the book strongly emphasizes eating fish. :-(
However, the book does point out some suggestions for minimizing the amount of mercury contamination you might be getting from fish.
According to this page from ScientificAmerican.com, even farmed fish might be contaminated with mercury, dioxins, PCBs, and various other bad things.
It's worth re-mentioning here that The Ultimate Omega 3 Diet book points out that another thing to be wary of is the fact that fish and other animals aren't necessarily guaranteed to provide much Omega 3, because their Omega 3/Omega 6 levels, like ours, are greatly dependent on their diets.
The Ultimate Omega 3 Diet book cautions you not to assume that something enriched with Omega 3 is necessarily low in Omega 6.
The Ultimate Omega 3 Diet book suggests replacing commonly-used vegetable oils which are overloaded with Omega 6 (such as soybean oil, cottonseed oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, corn oil, palm oil, hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated stuff, etc.) with things like:
Flax seeds are quite healthy - here's an article about them from WebMD.com.
I actually haven't been using ground flax seeds at all lately for many months now. But, when I do, I prefer to grind some every few days, and refrigerate or freeze any leftovers in a jar. Also, I keep my not-yet-ground flax seeds frozen too, even though I've read that they don't need to be frozen.
Around Dec. 2013, I bought this coffee grinder from Amazon - KRUPS F203 Electric Spice and Coffee Grinder with Stainless Steel Blades, Black
With that coffee grinder, I'm easily able to grind up not only flax seeds, but also roasted peanuts, which resulted not in peanut butter, but peanut dust. :-) Never tried grinding up coffee beans, but I assume it would probably handle that fine too.
The idea of fasting is mentioned in the fascinating book Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (which contains a lot of stuff related to health, even though the author is not a health care professional and health is not the main topic of the book).
Anyway, though - since I was so recently reading about fasting in Antifragile, that got me wondering if perhaps another approach to the Omega 3/Omega 6 balance problem might be to fast a little (like a couple hours) before and after taking Omega 3 nutritional supplements, in the hope of making sure the absorption of Omega 3 won't be interfered with by any recently-consumed (or soon to be consumed) Omega 6.
I guess maybe I could also try taking an Omega 3 supplement before bed and after waking.
And perhaps some ground flax sometime before a meal might give the Omega 3 a head start to be absorbed before the Omega 6 in the meal?
Though I've neglected to mention it for a while - as always, comments are still welcome at the Eryss.Com Forum.
Again, donations and microdonations are welcome.
Addition, Aug. 18, 2015 at 10:58 PM EDT: In this blog post from Non24.Com, I wrote (and quoted) a bit more stuff on this topic, but with more of a focus on sleep issues.
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| Fixing the Broken Wings of Maxi Pads |
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Friday, August 21st, 2015 02:35:00 GMT |
| Humor With a Genuinely Practical Tip |
The maxi pad "wings" idea is good in theory. But all too frequently, the wings - and all h*ll - break loose. I'll leave it to your imagination what that results in.
So, I finally got tired of that design flaw, and took a drastic measure to correct it. Instead of just one maxi pad - I decided to use two.
I applied the first one the normal way. Then, to compensate for the first one's inadequate wings, I laid the second one horizontally at a right angle across the first one, aligned with where the first one's wings were.
Then, to secure the second one in position, I simply folded each end of the second one down and around, and attached it to itself. This arrangement holds itself in position far more securely than any flimsy wings.
Note: It's more amusing you don't read the scrolling transcript.
Also, if you don't like dark humor or other dark/dramatic things, you probably shouldn't watch it, nor most of that guy's other videos.
Let us all have a moment of silence for all the undergarments that could not be saved, simply due to my failure to even think of this idea for so many years.
And, let's have a moment of non-silence, too, in the form of this video (which is not by me, but by this incredibly talented YouTuber):
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| Apollia's JSON Prettifier v1.0 |
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Saturday, August 22nd, 2015 20:06:13 GMT |
| Programming Software Release |
Today, in about a half hour (or really less than 10 minutes for the basic idea; the rest was just some slight user interface polishing), I made this really simple JavaScript thing:
I made it so I could make readable text out of JSON-format database exports generated by OrientDB.
But hopefully it will work with any JSON code, such as these examples from JSON.org.
In other news, Astroblahhh.Com continues to be a cluttered mess. But, I'm still really excited about graph databases, so, hopefully I'll be able to build something with them that will enable me to fix the mess around here at some point.
| The Death of George Boole (1815-1864) |
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Tuesday, September 1st, 2015 04:00:24 GMT |
| Philosophy |
Lately, because of my newfound obsession with trying to design graph databases, I've been reading about formal logic.
And I found out that the great George Boole (1815-1864), of Boolean logic fame, died not only a tragic but also ironic death.
According to this page from GeorgeBoole.com, Boole got sick after walking about 3 miles in pouring rain and then giving a lecture in wet clothes.
And, according to Wikipedia, his wife had the peculiar homeopathic belief that "remedies should resemble their cause".
(Addition, 4:08 AM EDT: That belief is more clearly described in Wikipedia's Homeopathy article:
End of addition.)
So, she put him to bed, and then drenched him with more water. After that, he died of pneumonia.
Maybe it's an example of why it's a bad idea to believe that any particular group of people (such as women) doesn't deserve to be educated.
Perhaps Boole's wife wouldn't have fallen prey to homeopathic fallacies if she had been better-educated, if her society had a more widespread belief that women should be educated.
And then maybe George Boole would have lived many more years, and would have been able to contribute even more than he already did to the field of logic, etc.
(Addition, 12:23 AM EDT: On further reading, I just found out his wife Mary Boole was actually somewhat educated, and even had an interest in and influence upon the field of education. But, evidently none of that rescued her from an excessive and dangerous belief in homeopathy.)
But, maybe the connection between getting sick and having your immune system weakened by exposure to cold temperatures hadn't been discovered (or widely acknowledged) yet? I don't know.
Also, I wonder why George Boole let his wife do such a stupid thing to him? Maybe he was too sick to think straight enough about it to refuse? Or did she do it without asking?
In any case, whatever the causes, it's really sad that that happened. As well as also quite sad that illogic in its multifarious forms remains widespread, and dangerous enough to literally result in people's deaths."Homeopathy" [...] "is a system of alternative medicine created in 1796 by Samuel Hahnemann based on his doctrine of like cures like (similia similibus curentur), a claim that a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people would cure similar symptoms in sick people."
It would be a tragic form of death for anyone - but, it's particularly ironic that one of the leading figures of the field of logic died probably at least partly (though perhaps not entirely) because of someone's (or perhaps multiple people's) shocking illogic.
Not that those are the only possible factors to blame. Perhaps George Boole should have been sensible enough to always carry an umbrella around with him when he went on long walks. According to Wikipedia, umbrellas had already been invented long before the 1860's.