I only started getting seriously interested in non-video visual art in Oct. 2011. For a month, while reading books about art etc, I had flashes of artworks (not artworks I’ve seen before, but new ones, created by my head). I stopped being that interested in visual “static” art around November, and the flashes disappeared. Started getting interested in visual art again in April 2012 (collages etc). The flashes returned!

I get some astonishing *abstract* visuals flashing in my head, usually when I have intense thoughts about random stuff (3-5 times a day). No, I’m not into drugs btw. I’m certain that these flashes are healthy, my brain is simply deep into creative mode (I’m left handed btw). Another artist I asked about it told me he has the same kind of flashes too!

Only problem is that I don’t know how to materialize these visuals, especially since I can’t paint in canvas, and my Photoshop skills are mostly about sketching and photo-manipulation. If only there was some hardware we can hook our brain up to capture these images! As much as my collages might look lame, my art flashes look really amazing! I wish there was a practical way to bring these to life and share!

One of the superfoods of the Paleo/Primal diets is the bone broth. Drinking it as-is, or cooking stews with it will provide the individual with a lot of minerals and other nutritional advantages: from calcium, to phosphorus, and collagen and Magnesium. Mark Sisson has a great article about the how and whys of bone marrow broths.

However, I have a little known secret about how to get a good bone broth, at a fraction of the price of grass-fed beef bones. See, the few times I bought grass-fed beef bones (and they were not even marrow bones), cost me $22 here in the Bay Area. I’m sorry, but that’s an excessive price for a bunch of bones. Unfortunately, since bones (and liver) are the mirror of how the animal lived its life, I’m not willing to buy non-grass-fed beef bones, and I’m definitely not going to use chicken bones. The quality of the animal must be top-notch to make a bone broth (or eat its offal).

Speaking of chickens, it defeats the whole purpose of the bone broth if it is made from chickens that are younger than 2 years old. We have a saying in Greece: “it’s the older hen that has the extra juice”. Young chickens, especially those that have never walked in their lives, are near-useless when it comes to extracting nutrients out of them. They are sick, and undeveloped. Free-range, older chickens, ducks and turkeys are the better choice.

So if most chickens are unsuitable, and good beef bones are too expensive, what to do? My suggestion is that you go for lamb and goat bones! They are just as nutritious as beef (if not more, especially goats), and the great thing about them is that 90% of them in the US are pastured-raised! Exactly because most Americans don’t eat much sheep/goat, the meat industry hasn’t put its claws around these animals yet to industrialize them. So when you buy meat from these animals, you have a huge chance of actually buying healthy meat!

The best place to buy such meats (including their equally nutritious offal) is Mediterranean shops, but some Mexican markets also carry them. Avoid Chinese markets, unfortunately they carry the cheapest, dead-looking meat I have ever seen (in my big, local Asian market, the only good quality meat I found was duck gizzards and fresh fish).

From lamb, go for lamb shanks ($3.99/lb in my local shop, dirt cheap). From goat, go for a whole leg (not boneless, includes cartilage for extra collagen/gelatin, $6.99/lb). You can also get lamb/goat stew meat if their bones are intact ($6.99/lb). The cheapest deal is of course the lamb shanks. Just make sure you ask the butcher to cut the shanks in two (on the short side), so the marrow is exposed (otherwise, use a sledgehammer at home just before preparing for the bone broth). Basically, you get the bones for cheap, and essentially you get the meat that comes with them “for free” (since a bone broth is the main purpose of the purchase). Financially and nutritionally, they’re the best deal overall!

After you cook and eat the meat, or you remove the bones before cooking, you can freeze the remaining bones, until you have enough to make a bone broth.

Ingredients
* 1 to 1.5 lbs (450-700 gr) of lamb/goat bones
* The juice of a small lemon OR a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar
* 1/2 of a large onion, wedged (avoid if on Fodmaps diet)
* 1/2 cups of celery
* 1-2 chopped carrots

Method
1. Fill your slow cooker with water. Put the bones in. Juice the lemon (helps with extraction of the nutrients). Cover and let simmer for at least 12 hours.

2. 3-5 hours before turning off the heat, add the onion, celery, carrots.

3. If your bones had been cooked before (e.g. in a stew, or roasted), let the bone broth simmer for 20-24 hours, otherwise, 15-16 hours is enough.

4. When done, turn off the heat, uncover, and let cool. When cool, pass the broth through a strainer and discard the bones/veggies. Do not discard the fat. If you have been cooking marrow bones, eat the marrow!

5. Fill up 1-2 big glass jars with the clear broth and store it in your refrigerator for up to 1 week. From that glass jar, you can either cook with (e.g. in stews), or you can pour a cup, add a bit of lemon, microwave it, and drink it as-is.

6. For the rest of the bone broth, using a large ladle, pour 1-1.5 cups of the broth into plastic bags. Seal them well, and place them carefully in your freezer, for up to 3 months. When you want to use some for cooking, you can easily remove the plastic bag by tearing it, while the broth is still frozen.

Artificial Intelligence. Or just a wanna-be service. It doesn’t matter really, Siri and Voice Actions are running the show today when it comes to “intelligent” assistants. But Siri is bound to be left behind, eventually.

Of course I had the suspicion for a while now, but after checking out the WWDC keynote today, it becomes clear to me that Apple does not aggregate the Internet to present information in a tight manner, but it rather bonds deals with big web sites. Then, they have to provide Apple with an API that provides access to specific data, and present that information in a beautiful UI.

As cool as this looks, it doesn’t scale. Sure, for year 2012 it might be good-enough (since we’re coming from an era that had nothing like that before), but by year 2020 this would be the wrong way to do AI. Apple can not possibly hard-code support for this decades’ 500 new major web sites. It’s too much work, error-prone, and “500” is still a small number of the web sites that people would be interested in. Apple will hit a wall with this type of engineering.

Even the opposite doesn’t work (every web site adding API hooks specifically for Siri, on a special URL with an API key). Do you remember, Mac OS’ Sherlock (and its third party equivalent “Watson”)? Old Mac OS users should remember this app! This would be the same thing! But also remember how often these APIs were broken on the various plugins consisting these apps, eventually leading to their demise. They didn’t scale because people running the various sites didn’t care to keep compatibility!

The only way to go forward with an AI that scales, is for the AI itself to aggregate the internet by hooking itself into a search engine in a more specialized way, find the right info, and present it to you. And because Google already owns and operates a “smart” search engine, is in the unique position to prove a much more useful service later on. Sure, it looks bad now UI-wise, and it’s way less attractive or interesting (it doesn’t make me wanna use Voice Actions), but it’s got more potential than Siri in the long run.

If any of the two reach the Singularity, it would be Google’s solution. I called it. Unless Apple acquires a bunch of startups, plus acquiring or licensing Bing. Then it can get interesting.

Wow! As much as I can’t stand Bill O’Reilly, he got it right about the no-wheat diet on his show. If that was not enough, io9.com had an article today that eating like a caveman is the way of the future. Paleo is going mainstream big time, and this is not because it’s a more efficient weight loss diet than calorie restriction (it’s not, at least for me it wasn’t), but because so many people found their health back that it makes them advocate it strongly. I do so too, since I got my life back because of Paleo, and this has put me at odds with people who are not open to the possibility that this is not a fad diet, but rather a cure for many diseases of civilization (from immune, to inflammatory, to hormonal, to mental conditions). I know how this makes us, Paleo advocates, sound crazy to many people who expect science to find a “magic pill” for them to get cured, but I know when I’m right, and I know when to shut up when I’m wrong. This Paleo (+fermented goat/sheep dairy) thing, it fucking works better than any drug (for most situations).

When I decided to go public describing all my health problems on my blog, it was a difficult decision, because admitting publicly and eponymously that I had alopecia, IBS-D, situational depression, and a gazillion other illnesses (I was with one foot to the grave), is not an easy thing. But I thought to myself that if in the process my story helps ONE person in this world, it’s worth all the ridicule I can get. From what I’ve been told, my story helped a number of people. This fills me with joy, it’s a wonderful feeling to know that you helped someone getting healthy again and living their lives to the fullest.

As for the people who don’t necessarily doubt Paleo’s health-healing abilities, but they didn’t follow through with the diet because “giving up grains is too difficult”, then one thing is clear: “you are not desperate enough”. When you get desperate enough, as I was, giving up grains will be the easiest thing in the world.

I will close this admittedly annoying blog post by sharing a little story. September 7th 2011. Just 4 days of Paleo at the time. JBQ and I we are on the plane from Paris to SFO, a full flight. Everyone looks like a zombie on the plane. Babies are crying, parents are pissed off, and everyone is looking so freaking tired. And then it was me. iPod on my ears, volume jacked up, and I’m seriously headbanging. I had more energy than anyone else in that plane, heck, I had more energy than I had in the last 10 years of illness put together! Later, my husband told me: “seeing you in that plane so alive, that was the moment I knew that this diet, at last, would change our lives”.

I’ve been thinking today about super-hero movies, and what they represent in our situation today. Basically, these are modern fairy-tale stories. In reality they’re under the fantasy genre, rather than true sci-fi.

But that’s just a classification detail. What bothers me with these movies is that they’re too character-centered, individualism reels in them. And not the good kind either. I mean, you think Tony Stark or Batman have problems? They’re billionaires, living the life. Captain America has problems, for jumping into the future? Boo-hoo, sorry for being viewed as a hero. Heck, Loki has problems? It was his decision to not go back to his adopted family that still loves him. Their personal problems sound like they’re all fucking cry-babies.

I’m sure that the reason these movies are so successful today is exactly because they’re so character-centered. But their personal problems are stupid, they’re shallow. And this says something about the people today, and how small they think. I mean, how about making Batman a drug addict, how about making Peter Parker keeping some of the money he rescued from a bank robbery in order to pay his rent? Interestingly, such plots and twists have been explored from time to time in the comics, but in the movies, the heroes remain “clean” most of the time. In fact, Wolverine’s character was always one of the most popular in the super-hero universe, exactly because he’s not always the good guy. Also, The Punisher is one of the most interesting Marvel stories. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Frank Castle doesn’t have any super-powers, so the rules of the game are different?

As for the mortal threats that the heroes are facing from enemies are meant to sound grand (and in practice they are), but at the end these are all simple stories of good vs evil. It’s the known recipe of fairy-tales. Instead of having super-baddies who simply crave for power and glory, how about battling a race or person who MUST consume the Earth’s resources, or otherwise it will go extinct? At some point we should be asking questions that don’t have an obvious answer. It’s the way to move forward as a society.

This doesn’t mean that there’s no good or evil in the world and that everything is gray. If there’s gray, by definition, other… colors exist too. But my point is that we should raise our standards. We should make serious movies that explore more complex situations and characters. Characters that aren’t so sensational over nothing, and situations that are more believable, gray and grand.

Basically, I say, enough with fantasy, let’s go hyper-real. This is the 21st Century, we ought to do better than that, rather than rehashing traditional fairy-tale stories in new clothes.