Recently in Good Health Category

It must be difficult for people to change habits since they rarely do. When they do, it often takes considerable effort and time for them to do so. Try quitting cigarettes. You can be successful if you want. We've witnessed resistance to change with the advent of Web Search through the 1990s when habit was that people entered one word for queries. Imagine the results for [nutrition]. Those who were fascinated, driven by one spirit or another, decided to make a career focussed on Web technology specifically search for many because it was interesting, challenging and fun. It has since been viewed as a 'cottage industry' for a long time. It hadn't been recognized for years, decades, as the likely hero of the 'dot bomb' or the recent economic woes. Search was there. Search is there. Search is fantastic. Search is useful. Above all, search has become highly profitable. So profitable in fact, that Microsoft is freaked out entering the game in the biggest way it knows how. Microsoft is using its economic strength, its monopolistic, ubiquitous tentacles, usurping what it can from new media: The Web Revolution. It's taken a huge bite out of Yahoo! after snapping its jaws at it more than once. If it didn't gobble up some search, Microsoft would know that the train which left the station an hour ago, Google, will reach the prize alone without any competition. Google would otherwise dominate the future of everything connected.

Scary thought? Who knows. Google is quite literally the greatest software maker ad agency of today. Its hosted applications, its open source nature have ensured that Google is more than the search engine we knew. The search engine we knew is now unfortunately so littered with redundant spam, commercialism and terrible noise that it stinks. Google is polluted. Google may not have started that way. I turned my mom onto Google back in 1999. Now the Google legos are dirty in the search area. They need way more than Matt Cutts can do. The only thing Google is good for anymore is hosted software like GMail, Maps, Calendar, Docs etc. Google has become a Microsoft Yahoo! combination itself. The new Yahoo! dropped its investment in search, just like Google's search is junk, will continue to be junk. Google is a software maker (operating system!) re-inventing itself as the new Microsoft, taking Yahoo!'s lead neglecting search. Microsoft may actually win the search prize in the end. Particularly if Microsoft squares off and does a deal with technologies like WolframAlpha. WolframAlpha is quite literally the future of search. Forget what you've heard from marketers about their jaded "future of search" (they don't know anything except selling, selling themselves, selling out). The future of Web Search is to have an accurate engine for your purposes, not bookmarks to all possible answers from unchecked third parties. That's only good for comparison shopping.

Let me be clear. Altavista was my old favorite. It leaned more scientific. I miss it something awful. I'm going to mash up something fun at AltaDisa one fine day. I hope you like what I end up doing. I don't have uncanny aspirations to be a search engine. I'll just do something fun. Please be patient but don't wait. The future of search is here now. Take another look at WolframAlpha. The reason marketers are ignoring its real threat is because it doesn't lead to client sites. Marketers can't make any money with it. Why pay it heed? It can't be good for search marketers. It's the albatross that threatens their business. On the other side of the coin, they are right to say it's not a search engine as people know search engines to be. True. It's not a list of spam sites that try to sell you something you don't need. If you want something commercial, you can always Google it, or whatever. You will hopefully discover it at a reasonable cost, or you can always use a comparison shopping search engine. You might even navigate to a manufacturer's site directly, (if you know how to spell it). That's all a good thing. Spelling is fairly important, by the way. People that can't spell, can't use WolframAlpha. Search engines the way we know them aren't going to entirely disappear because people who can't spell aren't very smart. They're a dime a dozen with a dozen dimes to spare too. Shopping search engines like Google and Become spell for you. I think these are the successful shopping sites of tomorrow. That's not the Future of Search. That's the Future of SEO. That's the future for ad agencies like Google. Become works with merchants too. Typos are way different. WolframAlpha interprets what it can. WolframAlpha shows us the future of search, now.

Wikipedia has become one of the top visited sites. They don't sell anything. It doesn't pay Google to send people to Wikipedia. People tried to spam Wikipedia and list their clients in Wikipedia. Luckily, with enough effort, the thing survived. Wikipedia continues to be useful today. It's still a top visited site. That's the sort of resource that people can count on. It's like Amazon versus Crazy Joe Electric's wide screen TV sale. You may pay more at Amazon. Amazon is a merchant you know is not likely to have a breach of security that threatens your credit card number. With Crazy Joe Electric (I made the name up by the way), the business operator might either sell you the TV for less, or sell you a stolen TV, or worse. Your credit card might get stolen and sold. You never know. Unless you know Joe personally, you're at the mercy of the Wild Wild Web. That's the trick of the Web. There's not a bona fide way to tell one thing or another about what you're reading. People get in trouble. There are Web ratings for merchants, which make it possible at all to buy things, or else no one but big-box merchants would be doing e-commerce at all.

Now take information. How many sites are out there to provide free access to information? News sites might even try to charge for access to content (Rupert Murdoch, AP comes to mind). Other sites display banners and text ads (Google!) to make the information pay for itself. Google is the biggest ad agency in the world. In my opinion, they are not a search engine anymore. They are a software maker / ad agency looking to eat your lunch. This is not the Web which was how the Web all started. This is the Web we know now, which has transformed into a commercial enterprise (not necessarily a bad thing). There is a caveat, however. People learn how to do interesting things wrongly, or misdiagnose themselves rushing to the doctor, or are otherwise somehow misled by the utter junk that can be found on the Web. They are misled by people who can't spell, people that exercise hate. It's all in Google. Just go to Google, Google it. You'll get all the junk I've been talking about. You'll get spam. You'll get hate speech. You'll get misinformation. You'll get phishing sites, drive-by downloads, hackers, crackers, whacks and weenies complaining about each other, ad-infinitum. Search engines were supposed to help us sort through the mess. Google is the mess.

Enter WolframAlpha. It's not a search engine as you know it per se. It's just accurate. Accurate is all that it is. If you can learn to enter queries correctly, it will provide you information without leading you to any junk. Junk is not possible. It has information on the most interesting (non-commercial) things in the universe, which is what the Web is really good for in the first place. It does it in a clean, sterile room without a hint, without a germ of commercialism. That makes it utterly useful. I am anxious to watch WolframAlpha continue to evolve. It answers like Hal 9000 (the machine Craig Silverstein of Google famously invoked at a 'Future of Search' panel at a marketing conference). WolframAlpha literally is the future of Web search here and now. It's just not like a search engine the way people are used to thinking about search engines. It reminds me of the feelings I had using Altavista a long time ago. It requires decipherable input (it's somewhat forgiving for that) in order to coax what you want out of it. Try the sample queries. Try the tutorials. In the very least, get the information out of it that is more important than price information on a new digital camera. If you are going to query for medical or nutritional information, anything scientific, if you ever thought to use computations in a query, WolframAlpha is the winner. I think it's the Future Alpha Search Engine. I used it today, too.

Stay tuned.

We all want to look our best. I have some particular needs regarding health and beauty that I think any and all readers should get something from. I am writing this after doing some meal plans and reading up on the latest findings on food and nutrition as it affects bloating, water retention and other nagging things which undermine self confidence.

Don't skip breakfast. Drink things that contain lots of water, no alcohol. It's Sunday. I may break that rule on alcohol. The key is moderation in all that I do. Since I have goals, I sometimes really plan out what I'm going to have. I am lucky enough to have a grocery store in my building. I don't have to plan very far out.

This morning, I knew I had some wheat bread for toast, a tomato and a little yogurt in the refrigerator. That doesn't sound like much. It's fairly well-balanced though, all in all. I also had one serving of Kashi cereal left. That's actually all that I have save for coffee and tea. I tread lightly when I can.

Nutritionally, the wheat toast gives me carbs for energy and mood balancing serotonin. The cereal adds fiber and additional carbs from the grains. It also contains protein and omega-3 from flax seeds. The main thing I'm missing, I can easily make up for at lunch time. I'm missing protein.

Eating flax seeds is not the ideal way to get any of the nutrition, since they should be ground up and not whole. They are whole in the Kashi cereal. That's no good. Grinding causes them to deteriorate within 8-hours, and it's messy. I don't enjoy grinding flax very much these days. I used to a decade ago.

I still have a dedicated grinder for when I might use it for a meal. It goes well with yogurt, on cereal or salads. It adds good nutty flavor and a load of fiber and nutrition. The yogurt, with it's probiotics, is really good for digestion and reducing water retention weight. Avoiding sodium and eating Potassium rich foods will help balance this.

For lunch, I should prepare something like a baked potato and something that will add to the protein for the day. I'm actually looking at new recipes now, planning a trip to the store. It's too hot for Lollapalooza. Maybe next year. I want to stay in the cool building and do some development work today.

Stay tuned.