In ``Sugar blues'' by William Dufty, one of my previous blog entries reviewing the name sake's book, i discussed the very likely possibility that sugar (as well as related highly refined ``foods'') is really quite harmful and possibly the cause of a wide range of health related problems that are facing our civilization. Wouldn't it be a whole lot easier to give up sugar if there were some alternative?

Shortly after reading the Sugar Blues book, i spent some time researching various opinions on the book, and while doing so, happened to stumble across some weird plant from South America that i had never heard before: Stevia.

Stevia, having been used by natives for centuries, grows incredibly sweet leaves. Incredibly adequately describes the effect, which is between 20-30 times sweeter then table sugar (with extracts as high as 200-300 times sweeter then sugar). On top of that, Stevia basically non-nutritive, especially in the way of calories: perfect for diabetics. Disbelieving, i went to the local health-food store here in town and bought some, and i was amazed! Just inhaling some of the powder while transferring it between containers made my mouth sweet--a dusting on the tip of a spoon left sweet residue for at least an hour.

So why had i never heard of Stevia before? After reading and digging around (confirming what i'd read) i discovered that the FDA has been keeping it off the market for quite a few years, and it is only now allowed (though somewhat ironically) as a health food supplement; even though its been used for many years with no problems by both natives as well as some Asian nations such as Japan, including in products such as Diet Coke. But why would the FDA want to keep it off the market? Nobody really knows, although there is a strong belief that it may have had something to do with money and Aspartame (which is widely known to be toxic and cause numerous health problems, yet somehow manages to keep its FDA approval). Conspiracy theories aside though (founded or unfounded), it is sad that it was held off the market, and still is to a large degree (as it can't be used in prepackaged foods).

Cooking with Stevia is a little different from my short but sweet (<cough> <cough>) experience with it. Since it is non-caloric it won't help yeast rise, and it doesn't have the body needed to make SOME candies (fudge), cookies, and cakes and won't caramelize. The hardest part is trying to learn how much to use: as it is much MUCH sweeter then sugar, and if too much is used a very slight bitter taste can be left in the mouth (somewhat comparable with the liquorish roots that i used to suck on as a child).

Summary: there are healthful sugar alternatives in existence, there are no compelling reasons to eat sugar, and there is a lot of interesting things left to discover and learn about the world.

For more information about Stevia see stevia.net, The Bittersweet Story of the Stevia Herb, Sinfully Sweet?, as well as many other sources available courtesy of Google. Visit your local health food store to try Stevia for yourself.

A few thoughts on XML were expressed on the Arch mailing list some weeks back.

Paul Graham, of A Plan for Spam fame, has a number of very interesting, very insightful, and very thought provoking Articles. One that is a must read is Beating the Averages which describes how him and a single partner were able to hold competition at bay using a ``secret weapon''--Lisp. The article describes why Lisp is such a valuable asset; the reasons seem compelling enough.

After reading some more articles (such as What Makes Lisp Different, Succinctness is Power, Lisp in Web-Based Applications, and The Hundred-Year Language) i found myself horrified a few nights later when i was hacking away with Python, and ran out of power; i wanted to add a Lisp like "cond" support to the language, but realized that i would either need macros or to hack the language to get my desire.

My new quest is to work my way through On Lisp and eventually make an educated decision about the real usefulness of Lisp.

I have tried hard in the past to dislike Lisp, but its becoming much harder.

How to be a Programmer, by Robert L. Read, PhD, is a very good article which covers very briefly a lot of facets of programming, as well as the professional conduct, decisions, and actions involving software and programming.

As Larry Wall stated in his Second State of the Onion, the virtues of a programmer are: laziness, impatience, and hubris. This is exactly the combination that motivates a number of weird hacks i've found myself performing. The most curious part is that the times i have been the furthest from doing CS types of activities, my hacks have been ever the more elaborate.

While teaching English in Moscow, Russia, my director decided that we needed to update the song list and overheads for our international church. We had a piece of paper that matched English songs to the Russian equivalent. Song books were already distributed at the church, so all we needed to do was enter the words to create the English overheads. And, as luck would have it, us teachers were chosen to do the data entry. (Data entry, by the way, is not a task that man was intended to waste his time with.)

So here i was, sitting in the office, faced with the daunting task of being stuck for most of a day, entering the words of songs--not cool. It is such a time as this that laziness, impatience, and hubris kicks in. Frantically whipping out my laptop i set to work, while the others started trying to organize themselves and chose who was going to type which songs.

I almost had to keep from laughing as they whispered among themselves about how rude i was being. Here they were trying to get work done while here i am frantically playing around on my laptop and ignoring them. Very quickly i located a hymn site with sufficient payload and a consistent enough formatting. Wget became the first in a pipe-line of tools which quickly included Python, w3m, CHORD, and make. After a few test runs on some random samples, i set the scripts to work generating the Postscript output. Jaws very much dropped when i turned around and announced that i had overheads for about 4000 songs and which ones should i proceed to print.

Somehow or other i got chosen to pick the songs to sing at church each week; it wasn't such a stretch since i was already playing the musical instruments anyway. The problem is that i have not perfected the art of habits: when i think of habits the first thing that comes to mind is a cron entry. The result of my duty was that i was getting routinely called by a frustrated bulletin secretary and being asked what the songs were going to be, of which i would randomly pick some so that the publishing could continue--never-mind that we would sing completely different songs when it came time to sing.

After this ritual had continued for about a month, i decided it was time for action, it was time for some automation.

Back in college a friend of mine had built a small FM transmitter and we decided to start a dorm radio station. Having grown frustrated with the ``random'' on all of the mp3 players around, i decided to roll my own. The outcome was a small Python database which kept track of plays in such a way that no song would be repeated on average more then any other song, and none would be played more then once every so often.

After some thought i realized that the mp3 scheduler had exactly the properties i needed. Using the list of the songs i had printed of the earlier 4000, i populated the database. The next step was to doctor the script to return 3 songs for that week. Wrap that into a script to generate and fire off an email to the secretary, and i was in business. Fear of being detected compelled me to additionally have a pool of email headers and footers and subjects which would be randomly used. For further detection insulation i had the script sleep for a random amount of time (up to two days) before sending the email, so that the email would get to her at different times each week.

The problem is that laziness doesn't always work forever. In my case i was detected when they decided not to print the hymns in the weekly bulletin anymore. It took a good month as well as several reminders before i got my script turned off so that it would stop sending a list of unneeded hymns to the secretary each week.