So you’ve come across barefoot shoes,  you’re interested in minimal foot-ware or you are simply health concious.  Maybe you are on this page because I gave you a link to it. Actually I am only writing this, because I wanted to give you a link to it and because I can’t remember all the interesting things about bare-foot/minimal shoes, gait, all the research and scientists behind it. And I need to remember all that, because I’ll gladly have a conversation with every-one of you who have asked me over the last days, weeks and months about what’s on my feet.

It usually starts when you and your friend stick your heads together start whispering. Or you’re one of the genuinely delighted people who literally jump at the sight of the shoes and start asking high pitched questions in sheer delight. That makes my day, too! Those things are Vibram Fivefingers, and they are very very comfy shoes, if you ask me. My Fivefingers are actually the first pair of shoes that I don’t take off when I get home after a long day at work. With “smart shoes” as the fashionistas tend to call those pointy high-heeled pinky-crushers, my natural urge is to is to push them off my feet without even opening the laces as soon as I’m through the door.  The arch of my foot hurts, there a spot on the heels where the socks are wearing thin and my toes feel as if they were a single fused appendix of raw soreness. But not so with my thin-soled toe-shoes, and it’s not that to don’t take them off because I like wearing them so much, but because I forget that I’m wearing shoes in the first place. That comfy.

That is one of things we probably didn’t have time for when we spoke on the underground, or through the closing lift doors as it happened today. I also probably didn’t have the chance to tell you why they are so comfy. They are so comfy not because these shoes are great, but because they allow me to use my feet in a way which I have never used my feet my whole life. And I am 35 years at the time of writing this. The trick that I am learning be a lot more concious about putting my feet down when I walk and rather than using the heel as a contact point to use the forefoot to make contact. But don’t let me spell out what so many people have described so much better, I’d rather give you a few links and you make up your own mind. I am very excited (still) about my recent (2 years) discovery that takes the pain out of my walks, but I’m not trying to tell you what’s good for you, or what you should be spending your money on. It’s always good to read more than one source so here are few pointers to get started:

Daniel E. Lieberman et. al. on biomechanics of foot strikes: http://www.barefootrunning.fas.harvard.edu/index.html

And the same story rounded up on Science Daily: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100127134241.htm

Barefoot Ken Bob’s pages. He’s been running for years without:  http://therunningbarefoot.com/begin-here/

Barefoot Ted’s homage to “the book”:   http://borntorun.org/

And “the book” Chris McDougall: http://www.chrismcdougall.com/barefoot.html

Also feel free to search for “why barefood is bad for you” It’s good to get alternative stories.

As a last piece of advice if I may. When you buy some five fingers, don’t forget to buy some finger socks. You old ones won’t fit! My favourite are Injinji wool socks. Sooo soft and durable!

Fun things to do when you have minimal shoes:

• give yourself a foot massage every time you wait on the underground or a pedestrian crossing. The tactile paving (knobbly paving, often brightly coloured to aid visually impaired people) makes a tantalising foot massage when you rub the thin soles of your minimal shoes over them.
• you will get a lot of attention. Even months after first going to work in my fivefingers are they still subject of questions and debate.  Strangers will pounce on you in unadulterated excitement. Teenage girls will giggle. Mutters of disbelief be heard, fingers pointed. Blog about it!
• You will talk to strangers for no reason other than that they too, are wearing fivefingers.
• You will puzzle bouncers in clubs who can’t work out if you’re wearing smart shoes! Think about it, for a change these are really smart shoes!
• You won’t have to take them off at airports! Looks of disbelief, yes but not showing off the wholes in your feet.
• learn to wiggle your toes, and show off the skill when ever a fellow adult’s stare is transfixed on your foot. Works a royal treat with kids, too!

I thought I’d explore the UK’s south coast on foot this year, as I really enjoyed the BBC series “Coast”, I like being near the seaside, and the south coast is in easy reach with train services providing easy and convenient access.

But this walk from Brighton heading east, quite frankly sucks. Heading out of town and towards the marina, your feet and soul begin to ache at the sight of a generic out of town shopping/entertainment mall where the pedestrian access along the rising chalk cliffs should be the main attraction, but instead is marginalised and funnelled through a maze of concrete. The footpath winds through the left over spaces that emerged when the quickest (and laziest, in terms of imagination and planning)  vehicular access route from Brighton into the marina was designed. Or shall I say, engineered. The road comes high from the cliff tops, and its propped up lanes cut through the landscape with no regard to topography, landscape or urban design. Effectively it is a high-level box-section bridge that rests on cylindrical posts and slopes wearily down to the shopping/cinema complex, dissecting cliffs, beach and sea.

The trail crosses extensive car parks and a bland, repetitive cluster of predictable apartment blocks before the ending a shabby industrial section of the marina, where pedestrians are forced to double back on themselves because fences and a boat park obstruct clear access. From there on, you have no choice but walk for miles along a concrete enforced coastal path, that is more reminiscent of dismal military enforcements than the liberating junction of sea and land.

I shall certainly not return to this stretch of coast.

On the last weekend in (more or less) sunny September I went for a walk a long the Sussex coastline. I took the train to Eastbourne, then headed to the beach and followed it West towards Beachy Head. The beach is actually  a cliff face with boulders and other rock debris that has fallen from the soft chalk cliffs, and further down towards the waterline the ground consists of slippery plates of chalky rock-bed. It’s an enjoyable scrabble over the rocks, and during the receding tide you have to be careful not to slip as the chalky stone can be very slippery, so naturally my eyes where fixed on the ground to search for a good foothold on every step.

Then I saw something that took a few moments to process in before I could make sense of it. I saw what looked like “imprints” of limpets in the rock.  Shallow oval grooves the size of a limpet’s footprint covered the rock face as well as living limpets themselves.  Close-up many of these imprints showed the detailed ridges of a limpet shell engraved in the rock.

I am no scientist, but it appears, that the limpet stuck to the soft rock is causing the current of the tide to “hollow out” the rock immediately surrounding the limpet. Imagine you are standing on a soft sandy beach waiting for the next wave to wash over your feet. First the ground is soft, the wave comes and as it recedes the shape of your foot causes the water to change direction and this in turn affects the water speed. The sand “up-beach” from your foot is being washed away and your foot sinks into the ground.

The same change in current is what I believe is the cause for the erosion of the soft rock.  Other Limpets (in their hundreds) are actually “sunk” into the rock this way a good 5-10mm!

Then there are the “bug trails”. Little engraved dots, irregular in shape and only a few millimetres across. They look like petrified pre-historic bug footprints. Of course they are not, but they appear to occur in patches and carpets in the same way (and often near to) the sea-grass [sic?] that tries to get a foothold on the rock. Could it be, that the flimsy strings of sea grass cause (soft)rock to erode?

What do you think?

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A thick cover of duckweed floats on Regent’s Canal this summer. It forms such a thick carpet that even the occasional passing barge can only temporarily clear the surface in its wake, before the green carpet once more looks as undisturbed as if had been laying there for months.

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The weed slows down the water and traps all sorts of objects, mainly plastic bottles carelessly tossed aside by passers by. But this carpet of life clings onto them, not allowing the rubbish to be swept away out of sight, as if nature wanted to remind us that once rubbish has been tossed and forgotten it has not actually vanished, and this duckweed holds it in place for everyone to see.

At night however, when calm falls over the canal and is only interrupted by the occasional drunken mumblings of people staggering home this duckweed plays part in a beautiful play of light and shadow that is so faint, the casual passer by does not have time to adapt their eyes to take notice before the scene is passed. The tree lined canal, and the street lights that illuminate them cast fantasies of shadows, shapes, reflections and glitters of light in sulky sodium tones of light and darkness.

I‘m a fan of bread.  I love home made bread. I love sourdough bread, traditional loaves, Pumpernickel, Baguette, speciality breads, bread with cheese, seeds, onions, spices – this blog is small to list them all.  In short, there are enough types of bread around to keep anyone happy any day of the year. In short the word bread doesn’t do the varieties that exist no justice.

Wikipedia claims that there are  “About 600 main types of breads” in Germany alone. Which is (as a German living in the UK) I can’t wrap my head around why a large part of the English bread market is “stuff in bags”. And more importantly, I wanted to know what is in the stuff.  Let’s have a look.

Wholemeal Breads

There are a few things to look out for in food labelling. There are tell-tale so dodgy product around. Food labelling is a minefield, and the laws of food labelling are in my opinion not doing the consumer justice, because often the consumer doesn’t know what an ingredient really means. There’s a website dedicated to sources of MSG here: http://www.truthinlabeling.org/hiddensources.html

Tell-tale sign of bread cheating include caramelised sugars, which act as a colourant to suggest healthy “wholemeal” ingredients. Although I could not find reference for this it may be possible that the use of Molasses Sugar (Allinson) might serve a similar purpose.

Other tell-tale signs found in this list include*, Dextrose and Wheat Protein, which often contain glutamic acid.

Here’s what I compared:

• Kingsmill Tasty Wholemeal Medium 800G  Link
• Tesco Wholemeal Medium Sliced Loaf 800G Link
• Hovis Wholemeal Medium Link
• Warburtons Wholemeal Bread Medium Sliced 800G Link (Warburton’s website does not list ingredients at the time of writing.)
• Allinson Wholemeal  Link
• Sainsbury’s Medium Wholemeal, Basics 800g Link
• Waitrose wholemeal farmhouse batch 800g Link
• Asda Wholemeal fresh-for-a-week medium Link

Notes and thoughts

Across all breads, there is a total of 25 different ingredients listed. It’s quite staggering, if you compare that with traditional and old recipes such as a basic sourdough ingredient list. Wheat/Spelt flour, rye flour, water, salt. Which raises the immediate question what all those things are for. There are three different emulsifiers listed,

• E471, (Wikipedia, Veggieglobal)
• E472e (Wikipedia, Veggieglobal) and
• E481, (Wikipedia, Veggiegobal)

various types of fat and oils, sugars, Soya Flour, preservatives and in one instance a wholegrain ingredient: oak bran.

There are two main reasons behind this. Firstly the old fashioned way to make bread takes time, and requires skilled labour to produce. This results in higher production costs than industrial approaches such as CBP to make a loaf.  Secondly, according to this article the huge amounts of yeast used in the process result in a higher yield of bread per kg of flour than traditional processes.  The downside of course is that this brave new bread does not store very long, and is sometimes treated with preservatives. Dextrose in Warburton’s loaf could be added to aid the yeast, but it may also present a source of glutamic acid.

• The preservative Calcium Propionate (Warburton’s) should probably be declared as E282, which it is. It serves as an anti-fungal additive, and it is intersting to note that according to this article, is can be used as a pesticide!
• Potassium Sorbate is another E number hiding in the list, E202. (Wikipedia)
• Lastly, the loaf from Waitrose lists Plam Oil as an ingredient. Palm Oil is a likely to be sourced from unsustainable sources, there’s plenty to read about it everywhere.

“Often Derived from GM soya bean oil” according to the theecologist.org article.

One of my favourite travel web-sites is the fabulous Atlas Obscura. If it didn’t exist, one would have to invent it. Although I doubt I would be able of such great feat myself.

To make a long story short, it’s simply a fantastic sight to visit, for everyone interested in Landscape design, sculptures, overgrown gardens, romanticism, esoterica or whatever morbid fantasies may draw you there. Even a cold and cloudy Easter Saturday made a worth while trip. Entry is £7 for an hour-long guided tour. The guides are volunteers and the money goes towards funding restoration, which the place is in dire need of.

As the lady the lead my group noted:

We don’t receive any government money so it’s more of a case of managed neglect.

Below you marvel at my snaps, there’s more info at the Atlas Obscura Website

and the Highgate Cemetery Website here.

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I often tune into documentaries, radio programmes etc while at work. I work  in 3D graphics, which often involves almost mechanical tasks, like checking and converting endless iterations of data sets as assets for crating 3D environments.  They are mind-numbingly simple and should be automated, only, I’m not a good script writer, and secondly, until a script can handle the info in the required way for a one-off project, you’re better off doing it by hand. Anyway, I need to entertain my mind, and listening to info porn documentaries has become my latest obsession.

One of the first hits for the search term “documentary” on youtube brings up a wealth of entrainment, and no – this is not meant in an educational way. Take “New Swirled Order” as an example, a 2009 “crop circle documentary”. I doubt you sue your company for “injuries sustained at work” due to  “falling of your chair laughing” , because the corporate firewall didn’t prohibit you from watching it.

Anyway enter the genre of environmental documentaries.
There are quite a few, a lot of them interesting and system-shocking and wake-up-sad.

• Take FLOW (For the Love Of Water) as an example. some things we should know about the politics of water, and don’t blame me if you get a chilling effect of deja-vu.
• Or take End of the Line, a documentary that despite its “action buster” musical score leaves you very concerned about that state of our oceans. Never mind the politics of food in general.

But amongst gems and jokes, where a few films that caught my attention. And they involved the subject of Peak Oil. I had (I’ll freely admit) no idea what the term meant, but it immediately suggests the notion that all fossil fuels are a finite resource, and that they will run out at some point.  (You have to bear in mind how long it takes to make a fresh batch, vs. the current consumption). So films about this subject should make interesting watching (listening in my case).

The first candidate (Understanding Peak Oil)  indeed held up to expectations, rapid cuts between snippets of interviews of honourably looking gentlemen, overlaid historic footage, plenty of repetition to fill an hour of program  without dropping below the attention threshold, a few facts and numbers thrown in between to beef up the claims and keep any notion of critical approach firmly locked out.

The second one , Oil Smoke and Mirrors , was far worse. Pretty much a one to one clone of “Understanding Peak Oil” the experts that gave testimony to the camera crew waited until the middle of the film before systematically dismantling any of their white lab coat authority as they buried their arguments deep in the excavation pits of NY’s ground zero.  In its defence, if I had known that the film’s tagline is ” There is no war on terror ” I wouldn’t have bothered with watching it in the first place.

Now is the time to invest in micro-solar equipment:

From these two films I was intrigued as to how big the BS factor in these films really is, or if I’m the last person understand the problem. A quick search on google for “peak oil” throws up an unsurprising amount of hits, but domain names such as “lifeaftertheoilcrash.net”, “peakoil.com/net/org” and “oildecline.com” and “peak-oil-crisis.com” give the whole argument new interest. Naturally I followed “www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net”, goolge teased me with the meta extract “Examines the impact of the depletion of the world’s oil reserves and its consequences for the world economy and population”. Irresistible.

What greets you on the far side of the click is a heaven of subtlety, style and bulletproof research. The internetz is not made of tubes, it’s made of 1980′s home improvement catalogues. Read the Pulitzer Prize attracting introduction:

“Dear Reader,

Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse bible prophecy sect, or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the scientific conclusion of the best paid, most widely-respected geologists physicists, bankers, and investors in the world.”

followed on the side panel by:

Now is the time to invest in micro-solar equipment

It would be far stretched to accuse the owner of the website web-shop of hypocrisy or  scaremongering selling an array of post-apocalyptic survival tools such as “made from petroleum” solar ovens, torches, ponchos, photovoltaic devices, walkie-talkies, and a collection of grow your own veggies  books. Scout essentials such as the “US Army Survival Handbook” can’t be missing in this collection either.

The Freeze dried annual supply of dodgy food can’t be left out by those who take their survival seriously. Because even if oil runs out, and all supplies fail as lorries railways and merchant ships run out of fuel, you, your children and grandchildren can easily stave off any long term problems by opening up another can.

Well then, what’s the fuss all about?

Sapolsky’s outstanding Stanford lecture on “The Uniqueness of Humans”

Reblogged/Bookmarked from Boingboing.net

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/10/sapolskys-outstandin.html

It’s this time of the year of  intense colours,  the low warm ray of the sun streaking in jagged beams through windows, leaves and parks. The air humid and with a cool chill to the skin, the silence only broken by the bristle sound of beechnuts, acorns and chestnuts breaking the first fry leaves on the forest floor.

Bliss.

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From BoingBoing.net:
“The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind — fantastic new book about a how a Malawian teenager harnessed the power of the wind”