Procedural Knowledge Gaps, part 2
With Alicorn’s permission, I’m resurrecting this thread.
I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically—or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions—and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google “how to deposit a check” and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And—if I am correct and gaps like these are common—then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we’re good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking “how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?”—if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.
I’ll start off with one of my own: What kinds of exercise can I do at home (I do have 5- and 20-pound weights), and what are good ways to get motivation to do so regularly?
What type of exercise you do is less important than doing something. You can claim that optimality of the exercise contributes to motivation, but this seems like a common failure mode. People spend more time researching optimal exercise than doing anything.
The best way to get motivated for me is to quantify the health benefits. A generic “it’s good for me” is not motivating. A specific percent reduction in risk of a CVD event is.
That is why I am think the idea of fitness/exercise is fairly broken and we should go “back” to sports
When my dad was a boy, the idea of a gym (outside a school gym) was fairly unknown here. They were like, want to get stronger? Go kayaking. Want to lose weight? Play soccer.
Sports have big startup costs for most, but I agree that once they are paid a sport will tend to generate feelings of intrinsic motivation. Reducing those startup costs would be valuable.
I think covered here.
My problem is not having a good idea for what a long enough exercise session is. If I do something like 20 push-ups, and stop there, it feels like I haven’t done enough exercise for the day for it to be any good. Then I end up doing no exercise at all.
30 minutes/day has some evidence behind it if long term health outcomes is your main concern. I don’t recall if 3.5 hours per week broken up in different ways than daily is just as effective.
A somewhat old fashioned circuit of walking for 30 minutes interspersed with a few pushup and pullup sets is certainly going to be helpful. You sometimes see paths at parks purpose built for this with exercise stations scattered around the loop.
Yeah, that’s a problem. I can imagine myself doing 5 or 10 minutes of calisthenics at home, but not 30 every day. The exercises (push-ups, squats, burpees, kettlebell stuff) tire me pretty fast, and get boring fast.
I can manage 30 minutes jogging, and find it fun, but I worry that my knees will break up if I do it too often. They hurt several days after a weekend of running a 5K and hauling stuff up flights of stairs couple months ago.
As always, I suggest lifting weights. http://lesswrong.com/lw/d7h/minimum_viable_workout_routine/
Everyone does, but that seems to involve either a gym membership or owning a barbell set.
Though thinking about my “5 minutes” comment above, I realized I’d forgotten about the Tabata workout routine. I can do push-ups, squats and two sets of kettlebell swings repeated twice in four minutes, and end up feeling like I’ve had an adequate quick workout. I’ll see if I can install this as a habit.
I suggest gummy bears
You want to set up your home environment to afford exercise. You can keep free weights near tvs or computers, and use them while watching or reading things. You can put a pull up bar in a frequently passed doorway and do a pullup or two whenever you go through it. Similarly you can put weights on a table you walk by frequently. This is one of the ways I get myself to practice juggling: When I have clubs on the table on the way to the kitchen I often just pick them up and juggle a bit, but when I leave them in the car I never feel like going into the car to get them. You want to make it as effortless and fun to work exercise into your routine as possible.
Are there sites devoted to this? I think there should to be, especially for basic things required in modern society. I think aspects of personal hygiene aren’t discussed very openly when people grow up. Things like ‘clean yourself daily’ are too vague. How? I think I’m fairly clean, but I haven’t asked people their procedures for showering and using the toilet. I’ve seen a few things about washing hands, which weren’t bad, but they were about hands. People don’t like talking about other bits of the body much. I never got this lesson at school: http://paddyk.wordpress.com/2006/09/19/how-to-use-a-toilet/.
So, I googled for that, but it should be a necessary requirement in education, or something. Embarrassing things need to be talked about more to make them less awkward.
Of course, other ones discussed in the previous post are great too. I’m just pointing out that there’s REALLY basic stuff that nobody talks about. Anyone know a site for that?
Wikihow and Ehow are supposed to do this, but the articles are poor quality.
There’s LifeProTips on Reddit, but content there is extremely noisy and unorganized.
Running such a site would clearly be low status. Which means you have little competition.
Much of this data probably exists in scattered form on various travel websites. Collecting it would be useful.
How does one specify haircuts to the haircutter, and how much latitude does one have before they get more expensive or require uncommonly skilled haircutters to execute? How can one predict the robustness of haircuts to hair growth, messyness, variations in hair, etc?
I have recurring chapped, peeling lips. When I take a shower, the outer layer of my lips gets very soft and then rubs off. It then grows back hard and scaly, only to soften and rub off again the next time I shower. I have a tube of ChapStick by my bed but use it infrequently; it seems to have the same softening effect as showering. Any advice?
The softening is a feature, not a bug! The skin that comes off and rubs off was already dead.
When healthy, your lips—and indeed your whole skin—have oils in the outer layer, to keep the skin flexible and to act as a mechanical barrier (keeping the outside out and the inside in—in particular, water). When this oil isn’t there (whether your skin doesn’t produce enough, or it is removed by something), your skin dries out, and starts to flake. It typically gets very sore too, and prone to infections.
Drinking more might help, but frankly I doubt it unless you are chronically dehydrated and have other symptoms. It’s far more likely a dehydration problem local to your lips.
I recommend training yourself to develop a lip salve/ChapStick habit—particularly before you go outside (when you’re most at risk from lip dehydration), and before bedtime (when it has a good chance of staying on undisturbed). I also recommend training yourself out of any lip-licking habit you may have. Licking your lips a lot tends to strip the oil from them. This can become a vicious circle if you are licking your lips because they are sore.
Lip salve works because it (a) adds oil to the skin, making it more flexible and thus less prone to painful cracking; (b) provides a mechanical barrier to loss of moisture; and (c) provides a cue to help discourage you from licking your lips.
Some ideas for developing a lip salve habit: Buy lots of sticks and put them all over the place, so you are never far away from one. Put one in your outside coat pocket so you notice it when you go out. Put one on the shelf by the door where you pick up your keys before you go out. Develop a mental link between putting on a hat (to protect your head from the cold) with putting on lip salve (to protect your lips). Put lip salve in places that you can’t avoid: balanced on the outside door handle, on seats you use the whole time, inside your hat or gloves, etc. If you are avoiding lip salve because it tastes horrible, experiment with flavours until you find one you like. (If you are licking your lips more because you like the taste of the lip salve, or find it less aversive, you may need to make a compromise.) Set a reminder on your phone every hour (or at pseudorandom intervals) to remind you to put on lipsalve. Log how many times a day you remember to put it on and monitor yourself on Beeminder.
I’ve heard that if you use lip balm too often, your lips lose their ability to lubricate themselves. I don’t know if this is true or not, only that I can’t go more than a few hours without applying lip balm without experiencing the same symptoms CronoDAS describes, and this has been the case for as long as I can remember.
this was an unhelpful comment, removed and replaced by this comment
So, you are wary of lip balm, but you want to try lip balm with antibiotics instead..? X-/
Some of it, anyway. However I think some not-useless skin tends to come off with it; what’s underneath tends to be somewhat tender, as though I peeled off a scab.
Oops, sorry, I failed to spell things out here.
I suggest not rubbing off the skin when it’s softened. Some might fall off on its own, and that’s fine, but don’t fiddle with it. The analogy with a scab is a good one: a scab also gets softened and easier to rub or peel off when it’s wet, and a scab is also not alive, but the skin underneath is not fully healed yet. Removing a scab or the flaky skin from your lips before they are ready to fall off naturally doesn’t help the skin heal, and it hurts. As the old doctor joke goes, “Don’t do that, then.”
Skin heals faster and with less scarring when it’s hydrated. Lip salve keeps your lips hydrated so they can heal quicker. Lip salve also keeps your lips hydrated and protected with an oily barrier to reduce damage from chapping.
As an aside, ‘moist wound healing’ is a classic of evidence-based medicine. The evidence for a significant effect is pretty strong, and has been for decades. Wounds generally heal faster and with less scarring if you keep them moist and don’t allow a scab to form. Expert opinion in the field is now more or less agreed on that, clinical practice is patchy and lags a little behind, and folk beliefs are often even further behind that—most people still insist that it’s vitally important to dry out wounds to form as scab as soon as possible. Folk practice might have been good advice before the availability of antiseptics, antibiotics, and modern moisture-retaining dressings (e.g. hydrocolloid) but it isn’t now.
this was an unhelpful comment, removed and replaced by this comment
You look to be confused between petroleum and petrolatum.
It appears that some people are memetically opposed to using petroleum-derived skincare products — at least, that must be why some of them are advertised as “petroleum-free”.
Anyway, there is a large variety of moisturising goos one can use instead, based on such things as lanolin or cocoa butter. As Clarity is in Australia, he (I think) might try finding a local branch of the Body Shop and asking the advice of the sales assistants.
Could it be that you’re not drinking enough water?
Dunno. I tend to breathe through my mouth when going to sleep and my mouth is dry when I wake up, which may or may not mean anything.
How does one buy groceries?
The methods my parents used were very mysterious to me, and usually built a collection of edibles that were either filling or tasty or both. I don’t understand how they were choosing, but I know it wasn’t following any sort of plan other than their own tastes or simplicity of preparation, or cheapness. I’m not too into my food, so I was useless when asked what I would like. I also extremely dislike being in grocery stores or meandering in any store at all, so if I was sent out for groceries I would request a list that I could blindly follow. I would also be back in record time.
Are there certain groceries that it’s okay for me to buy online and have shipped to me? Can I at least research online to cross-compare, to avoid having to sit around and make up my mind in-store, or should I expect certain in-store details that are unmentioned on any website? For research, should I use whatever chain (Walmart, Target, Kroger’s, Sam’s Club, Food City, Big Lots, Dollar General) websites there are, or is there a website that compares across chains for me? I suppose it doesn’t have to be as wide of a search as the list of stores I just mentioned.
I do obviously have an interest in cheapness. But I also have an interest in doing as well as I can. I eat nearly no deserts, unless they are offered to me. Edit: Also, desserts. I’ve never eaten an entire desert before!
There’s only about one privately owned grocery store in this town, so I was wanting to visit it after I could compare from the chain stores. It’s especially easy to do so because it’s usually completely empty of other customers.
Also, the overwhelming number of brands. …I don’t like that. But I don’t know how to break it down. I look up “Plain unsweetened yogurt” and I get… that. Confuses the floop out of me.
I don’t know what else to ask about, save for serving sizes, food pyramids or whatever, coupons (wasn’t there a big post about coupons on Less Wrong?), and volume of purchases, that is, how much I can buy and therefore expand the time between having to shop anew. Edit: In the same vein, preservation. Canned foods, dried, whatever.
This problem sounds like it could be most effectively addressed by having someone go shopping with you and narrate what they’re doing. Where do you live?
Knoxville, Tennessee.
Edit: Um… or did you mean, the type of area in which I live? Suburbs, mostly chain stores, except for the one privately-owned one. Near a college / city. There are some “organic” stores, and also a few farmer’s markets.
No, I did mean specifically; if you were around here I was considering accompanying you to a supermarket and talking about brand-selection algorithms and stuff.
Aaaaahhhh. In that case, I should have asked sooner: I was in California for about nine days back in May. :)
Some supermarket chains offer home delivery services. You most likely still have to know what you want to buy, but at least you won’t have to enter the store itself.
Do you pay attention to what kinds of food you like more than others? Also, how much effort do you typically put into your meals/food preparation?
Yeah, I’m still figuring out what I want....
Uuuuuummm… admittedly, I often don’t pay attention, unless it’s at a restaurant, but even then I’ll probably just get the standard burger, because I don’t like to spend much time going over a menu. I tend to eat the same meals over and over, usually never for pleasure. Some style of eggs in the morning, maybe a bit of this granola / peanut butter mix the parents buy. and I just sort of stare into the fridge for lunch, or give up and go for fast food. I think I’ve been eating too much fast food. Eventually the three of us will come to some sort of agreement about dinner, usually throwing something into the oven until it’s done.
It doesn’t feel too healthy or well considered, but I apparently don’t gain weight. I don’t know what other health benefits to expect from improving my diet. More energy? Less… bad, ill considered diet consequences?
I think the two parents follow different purchasing plans. One buys for bulk, potential for leftovers, and taste, however they do query me for healthy-looking things, like fruit and yogurt. The other buys for cheapness and taste, how filling it may be, and simplicity. The only fruit they buy seems to be bananas, and maybe apples?
So, very little effort is put into the meals. I don’t know how to cook and often have little time or patience for it, and the one who does know how to cook has no time for it. The third buys the very simple meals that can be popped into the oven or microwave and require little intervention, but also has me prepare them. The simplicity is enough for my lack of cooking skills.
It’s nutritional value that seems to be falling to the wayside, and I was wanting to do better. I have grown used to the large meals that are only eaten thrice a day, but it’ll also definitely be easier for me to switch than for the other two to do so. If anything, I could buy groceries for myself.
I feel like I’ve completely failed to answer your question. Should I get a cookbook?
I’d recommend against getting (buying) a cookbook, as you can find recipes and food ideas for free on the internet. It sounds like you don’t mind eating more or less the same things every day (more power to you!), but want to pay more attention to diet and health? Other than eating a variety of food groups, it’s hard to give specific advice through the internet. This does sound like an issue best solved by finding someone knowledgable about food and learning from them, as Alicorn points out. It’s also a good way to familiarize yourself with the basics of cooking, which is something that recipes tend to assume you have already.
I’m not sure if this is a procedural knowledge gap, but I figure it’s close—and instrumentally important—enough to warrant some mention here. Basically, I’ve never really had to formally interview (whether for a job, or something similar), and I’m sure there are some things I should know that I currently do not. There are plenty of sites that purport to offer this information, but often they are neither as precise/specific nor as extensive as I’d like—given this community’s focus and high standards, I think we can do better.
Any tips to maximize the chances of winning an interview? Anecdotes are welcome, from either end of the interview process.
As RomeoStevens said, practice is your best bet, but even better is to practice with people who have a decent grasp of what prospective employers and HR people will be thinking while interviewing you.
There are surprisingly many community centers that offer direct training programs for finding good jobs and winning interviews, and they almost always include at least a little bit of interview practice. Up here in Canada, they’re almost always free thanks to government funding, but for U.S. it’ll depend on the local specifics, I’d wager. However, you want to be looking at the very local stuff, i.e. town/district or community newspapers, the city hall’s list of community organizations, the local section/version of the “yellow pages”, and so on. These are the places where you’re most likely to find or learn about the kind of places / community centers that offer these training programs.
But again, the key point is practice and experiments with good feedback (most honest feedback is good feedback, but much more so if the other person(s) are experts in this, which is much more likely in the aforementioned community centers).
Live practice, as RomeoStevens mentioned, was definitely on my list of things to do to improve interviewing skills. Your advice about seeking out direct training programs was something I did not even consider, so thank you! That would indeed seem very helpful.
Indeed, it’s something I had not considered until I was urged to try it and did it, and it proved extremely effective. My interview skills went from the equivalent of “Hurr Durr my resume iz shitty but plz hire me I need job!!!11one” to “Greetings. I have here an enticing offer that shall certainly prove beneficial to all parties involved. If you would please look at these numbers, I believe I can demonstrate how to arrange something that will exceed your expectations.”
Definitely glad I took that course. YMMV, but at the organization I went to they had very impressive satisfaction ratings and job-finding rates (which is probably the entire reason why they are surviving solely on government funding, since the government is probably getting more money from the additional employment than they are spending on these programs, judging by how impressive the numbers sounded).
I would do live practice as there really is no replacement for this. Find someone who can give you honest feedback without it being awkward and go through a bunch of times over the span of a few weeks/months.
Some exercises you can do with barbells.
Bicep curls.
Front and side deltoid lifts (holding the weights, keep your arms straight and raise your arms in front of you or to your sides respectively.)
Chest fly and reverse fly.
Add pushups, and pullups if you can do them, and together these exercises will target all your major upper body muscles.
Plenty of good abdominal exercises can be done without equipment, like the bicycle, crunches and variations like the vertical leg crunch or long arm or reverse crunches, and the abdominal plank.
There are fewer equipment free lower back exercises suitable for home (the superman isn’t bad,) but if you buy some exercise bands, you can tie them to some object near the floor, like the legs of a dresser, and do back extensions while holding the exercise bands. The bands are generally significantly cheaper than weights, and have the added benefit that you can adjust the resistance simply by standing further away or gripping a smaller portion of the band.
If you get the exercise bands, they’re also helpful for leg exercises. You can stand on them and grip them to add resistance to squats, and use them for leg adduction exercises (loop a band around a stable like a dresser leg, and put your ankle through the band while standing. Use your inner thigh muscles to pull the ankle with the band to your other foot. Switch legs after a set.) and abduction (while lying on your side, loop the band around your ankles. Lift one ankle away from the other, extending the band. Switch legs after a set.)
You can also use the barbells to assist lunges.
The downside of putting together exercise routines with barbells with a limited number of weights is that they don’t offer you as much room for progression as the exercise becomes trivial. A lot of pure bodyweight exercises can be performed in increasingly difficult variations though, and exercise bands, as previously mentioned, are better able to adjust levels of resistance.
One thing you might try is looking for a place in your area which might offer you tools to improvise an effective workout. Playgrounds which aren’t constantly occupied by kids are good for this. Not only does it give you the equipment necessary to carry out exercises, the act of relocating yourself to a specific place where you do your exercises helps improve motivation. When you’re in your room, you may have access to a bunch of exercise equipment, and be able to do plenty of bodyweight exercises, but you also associate your room with everything else you do there, all of which may distract you or tempt you to procrastinate. The advantage of a place like a gym is not just that it has equipment that you can use, but that it’s a Workout Place, and if you go there, you’re probably going to work out, because you expect yourself to, everyone else there expects you to, and your mind isn’t occupied by the other things you could be doing there. If you can’t or don’t want to spring for a gym membership, try turning some other location into a Workout Place.
It may also help to keep a journal, where you record the exercises and number of reps (and weight if applicable) you did. Do not skip a day and then fill in the next page the next time you do a workout, it’s there to be a physical reminder of when you work out and when you don’t, and missed workouts should be obtrusive when you inspect it. If you know that you will be continually reminded both of your effort when you do exercise, and your lack of it when you don’t, it can help you stick with the program.
If I drink water out of a cup, how long can I leave the cup sitting out before I should probably wash it? I’m in a dorm so I can’t just lazily stick it in a dishwasher.
Experience and mistily remembered microbiology classes both say that if it’s just water you don’t need to. I wash my water glass if evaporation has left mineral stains on it and that’s it. If you are the kind of person who would think to ask this question you’re fine. Neither water nor glass are conducive to bacterial growth.
If you’ve got a proper water bottle like cyclists or gym bunnies have and it starts to stink (happens more often and faster with plastic, enclosed containers and UV opaque stuff) just leave it in a dilute solution ofg vinegar overnight before washing.
What’s the theory behind why the vinegar works? I am one of those “gym bunnies”.
Yeah, I used to go to the gym too. Vinegar kills almost all bacteria purely by virtue of being acidic. Probably salt water or a baking soda solution would both work too. It’s all about making sure those bacteria are dead, and their stinky byproducts are gone. Both baking soda and vinegar will react forcefully with almost anything organic and on average they won’t smell as bad as previously. Don’t mix baking soda and vinegar. Not dangerous, messy.
How do I cook food that is at the intersection of cheap, fast to prepare, good tasting, and good for me? It is fairly easy to satisfy 3 of the 4 conditions with any given meal. All 4 are hard.
So far I only really have various soups/curries, and omelettes. I’m on the lookout for more, though it is tedious looking through “normal” recipes and trying to figure out which ones can be made to satisfy the conditions by cutting corners and still come out okay.
edit: I guess I should note that I have a definition of “healthy” some will consider weird. I don’t consider bread to be healthy food, it is nutritionally empty space. Most of the nutrients you see listed on the package come from enrichment which does next to nothing for you bioavailability wise. The carbs I require for physical activity come from potatoes.
Stirfry: Oil in pan, add meat (E.g. chicken), stir, add vegetables (most supermarkets do premade mixes), continue stirring. You can add your preferred flavourings during the course of this (e.g. bbq sauce, chili, soy). Most things cook quickly like this, especially when in small pieces, and you can normally tell by sight when its ready. Eat either on its own or with rice.
This. There are infinite possible variations you can try with various veggies and cooking styles, you can make it into a soup, and it’s trivially easy to test the effects of ingredients. EG, I added kale to my stir fries and after three days realized I started having intestinal troubles and then cut it out and they went away. You can make these arbitrarily “healthy” and high quality with ingredient choice variations. EG, I tend to use reasonably fresh veggies from the co op grocery, grass fed beef stirfy mix from same (though now I’ve purchased a quarter cow so I’ll be using that instead), and coconut oil. I often mix up by using a prepackaged seafood mix instead of the beef, but I never measure anything and the only prep I do is some cutting before I toss stuff into the wok.
95% of the time I do thai curry instead because it is easier. Half a can of coconut milk instead of oil and you can walk away instead of standing there stirring.
Cooking pasta is generally fairly simple and straightforward. You boil it for about 10 minutes, drain, and then add the sauce of your choice. This cookbook has tasty ones, although I don’t know which are healthy and which aren’t.
Free pdf cookbook I found a while back in which the recipes are all supposed to take 5 ingredients and 10 minutes to prepare. The majority of the recipes within meet your stated needs (by my standards)
http://thestonesoup.com/blog/2010/06/a-free-e-cookbook/
A lot of those are more side dishes than meals, but several of the recipes in the meat section look like excellent places to start. Thanks.
I suppose. My brain happened to file them under the reference class for “light lunch” rather than “side dish”. And no problem.
Another tip- you can steam vegetables in the microwave, and they turn out pretty well. I mainly do this with broccoli and cauliflower
put them in a lidded microwavable container, with about a centimeter of water and whatever seasonings you want (I use lemon pepper seasoning and coconut oil), nuke for two ish minutes (depending on preferences and microwave strength), drain.
Also coconut oil can usually serve as a more healthy substitute for butter, except for with baking maybe
I’ve used coconut oil in place of shortening but have not yet tried replacing butter completely in anything. I expect that due to different melting points coconut oil would not be good for anything where you have to cut butter into dry ingredients (biscuits, streusel, etc.) but it might well do just fine in cases where the butter is intended to be melted or softened only.
I agree that coconut oil is great, but butter is also fine. The problem is generally people using vegetable shortening/oils.
Pasta: Tasty, cheap and moderately healthy, and easy to cook. If you can make instant noodles, you’re mostly there already. Start a pot of boiling water, with a bit of salt (optional, I’ve never done this.) Put noodles in, stir occasionally once they’re mostly submerged in the water so they don’t stick to the bottom. Knowing when it’s done al dente requires a bit of experience, but you can always bite a little off the end of a noodle to test.
While that’s going, you can make your sauce on another stove slot. There’s a lot of variations here, but make sure not to add the actual sauce in until the very end, otherwise it takes a lot longer for the fresh ingredients to fully cook. (Tip: Add individual ingredients in order of how long they take to cook—generally, meats, then hard fibrous veggies, then soft veggies. May require some experimentation over time.) Prepackaged jars of pasta sauce work just fine, but a dash of herbs goes a long way, IMO.
When the noodles are done, drain the pot and move the contents into a bowl(s), then top with sauce when that’s done.
They’d better be completely submerged. The usual suggestion is to use 1 litre of water for each 100 grams of pasta.
The number of minutes they write on the pack is usually about right.
Or, drain the pot, move the noodles into the pan with the sauce in it, stir, and move into a bowl.
It’s entirely possible to cook pasta in very little water in a small pot. Since Procedural Knowledge is the context, I’ll give my mother’s recipe:
Use about 2 times the mass of the pasta in water. (Keep the lid on the pot as much as possible so as not to lose water.)
Boil the water.
Add salt if desired.
Dump pasta quickly into the water.
Return to boil; this generally consists of waiting for the resulting foam to try to lift the lid off the pot, then promptly removing the lid.
Stir the pasta, making sure it is all unstuck from each other and the pot.
Turn the heat down to a simmer.
Time the cooking, perhaps using the pasta package’s recommended “al dente” time or a little longer.
At the end of the cooking time, use the amount of remaining water to calibrate the amount of water used next time. If the pasta needs more cooking, add more water as needed to prevent sticking.
Generally, the resulting pasta is delicious_kpreid, and requires almost no draining (sauce goes right in the pot).
Addendum for spaghetti: It generally won’t fit in the pot raw, so put it in and put the lid on top as best as you can, then when it is sufficiently softened, stuff it the rest of the way. While returning to boil, about once per minute open the pot and stir the strands as much as possible until they have formed a tangle rather than lying parallel.
I just break the strands into two before dropping them into the pot. I assumes there must be some reason not to do this because I don’t know anyone else who does this, but I honestly can’t tell the difference when I eat it.
I think the only reason not to do this is that it’s “bad form”, i.e. I don’t think there is any actual downside. (I have stopped doing it because people make fun of it, but I don’t think there’s any actual reason not to do it.)
Sorry about the bad wording, I meant “once they’re soft enough to be able to be stirred”, which means they’re mostly or completely in the water. You do want to put enough water in the pot to submerge all the noodles.
Homemade bread is actually pretty fast (10 minutes prep, 12-18 hours waiting, 1 hour in the oven, 5 minutes of that requiring attention) if you do it no-knead (that is, instead of kneading it to mix up the proteins, you just let it sit for 12 hours).
I’m a big fan of crepes with apple or cheese, if you’re cooking for yourself or 1 other—you make them in a pan, and then you eat that crepe while you make the next one.
This might not be exactly what you’re asking for, but it’s worth noting the power of leftovers if you haven’t already! If you’re bothering to cook, most of the time it hardly takes any more time to cook twice as much as you’re going to eat right now, or even more. That’s at least one more meal for the next few days solved. If you have a freezer, developing a small stockpile of frozen leftovers in it is excellent for the fast-to-prepare dimension. Also note that preparation time speeds up a lot with practice.
Yeah I do this a lot with the slow cooker and highly recommend it.
Sushi salad: Cook 4.5 dl short-grain rice with 5 dl water for 10 minutes, mix sushi sauce made from .5 dl vinegar, .5 dl water and .5 dl sugar or sweetener to the cooked rice. Then mix in whatever extra bits you want to have, I generally put in chopped raw carrots and cucumber and bits of gravlax.
What is a “dl”? …Deciliter?
Yes.
I guess that’s better than when metric recipes measure everything in grams and I’m all “I do not have a kitchen scale!”
Using weights instead of volumes in recipes is weird. You need cups to cook, but not a scale.
Nitpick: grams are for mass*
And I’ve heard they do it because it is (arguably) more useful in evaluating nutritional value and hunger-satiation / stomach-filling power.
I can see getting by on estimates for lots of cooking tasks, but I’m sure I recall from somewhere that you bake… how on earth do you achieve that without a scale?
Volume measures. Measuring cups and measuring spoons. (I also eyeball a lot of stuff, but I do actually break out the cups and spoons for baking.)
Oh, haha, yeah. I had forgotten that’s how it’s done in America! I’m always a bit bewildered by American recipes (”...but my cups are all different sizes!”).
Scales are actually better for powders (i.e. flour); volume measurements can vary significantly depending on how hard you pack the stuff in.
(Having said that, it seems relevant that my plastic kitchen scale met a sad melty end on top of my toaster oven and I haven’t replaced it.)
Regarding motivation for exercise, I find competition & praise is particularly helpful, perhaps especially for those of us of the male persuasion.
Fitocracy is kind of fun and has various challenges. Last summer I did various cycling & running challenges and eventually ended up so motivated that I completed a 100 km ride and a marathon, essentially for fun.
Alternately you could make bets with a friend about some well-defined goal like being able to do 100 pushups at a sitting.
This is what I do when I workout to gain energy:
Recognize that I’ll be more productive if I go workout. There’s no point in trying to think lazily.
Put on my exercise clothes. Go outside.
Sprint (http://www.laststopfatloss.com/the-complete-guide-to-interval-training-infographic). Imagine myself doing something fun while doing it. Nicholas Taleb says that he imagines chasing wall street bankers.
Take a cold shower.
Post-workout meal. (Carbs. Protein shake. Creatine. D-Ribose. BCAAs).
Get back to my desk about ~40 minutes later.
How does one get a checkbook in the US? Are there usually costs associated with them? In the year and a half I’ve been in the US so far I’ve needed/wanted a check at most 5 times, most of them in the last few months, so is there a cheaper way to get a small supply I can use as needed?
You buy them from your bank where you have your bank account. On the bank website there’s sometimes an “order checks” form, and you can definitely get them if you go to the bank in person—though you do have to wait about 2 weeks before the checkbooks show up in the mail. The cost is usually 20$ for a few hundred checks.
If you really only anticipate needing one or two, you can have your bank print off what’s called a “money order,” which is like a one-time check, but those have a fee associated (usually 5$) and you have to go to the bank every time you want one.
When I opened a checking account with my bank, they automatically gave me a quite generous supply of checks. There were no fees involved.
I find your described experience surprising. Are you perhaps using some other type of account which is not primarily a checking account?
Nope, it’s a regular checking account which came with 3 free checks. I wasn’t sure if there are generally fees involved; I think that in Australia there’s some kind of ongoing cost to have a checkbook, but that’s fine since virtually none of us use checks there anyway.
Personally, I like Goodbye Couch, which is inspired to the 5BX, as is the fitness regime in The Hacker’s Diet. Each of these takes about 10-30 minutes a day.
I have a Beeminder goal to work on the Goodbye Couch programme 5 times a week.
Good for you Philip!
There are many body weight and light weight exercises you can do.
Of course, a good program depends on your goals and limits.
If you send me some more information (goals, body weight, height, any injuries, time availability per week) I’d be happy to create a program for you.
I was successful in keeping a strict (but light) exercise routine for a year. Here are the main things I think helped me form the habit:
Not worrying about quantifying, or optimizing. I would immediately get into the rabbit hole of analysis, when I knew that any exercise was much better than procrastinating until I found the perfect method. Once the habit is formed, then you can optimize it.
Reduce physical inconveniences to actually exercising. The thought of going to a gym immediately turns me off, so I knew it had to be a home. That meant obtaining equipment. To keep it simple, this consisted of a yoga mat and a resistance band.
Doing it right after waking up. I think this was vital to habit formation, as my mind isn’t very active, and it was easy to fall into routine. Only very rarely did I find myself considering not exercising.
Doing it every other day—not too often to get burnt out, and not too infrequently to form the habit. In order to keep a consistent sleep schedule and not have to wake up very early, I alternated morning routines—exercise days and shower days. My workouts weren’t intense enough to necessitate a shower immediately after. Also, I worked it in with my intermittent fasting routine on non-exercise days.
Tracking it. Noting days that I exercised did give me a couple of achievement hedons. The effect diminished, but not before the habit was formed.
All that said:
It only took a week-long vacation that disrupted my routine to convince myself that it was a good idea to stop the routine in order to see how it affected me. …That was about 4 months ago.
I don’t think my specific workout had much of an effect on me physiologically. The note above about optimizing after the habit was formed—well, I never took the effort to begin quantifying and tracking detailed progress or optimize the actual workout.
However, I do feel like I’ve become more stress-able, physically and mentally, so I do plan to restart a routine after holiday vacation.
Maybe a long shot, but does anyone know of a good way to give oneself a haircut?
Get a hair trimmer.
Set the distance to the longest setting. Cut the hair on top of your head. You might have to make several passes to get all the hairs. Use a mirror.
Set the distance to the middle setting (halfway between longest and shortest). Cut the hair on the sides and back of your head. Cut by placing the cutting part at the bottom of your hair pointing up and moving it upwards. When the trimmer approaches the top of your head (where you already cut), lift it gradually so that you get a smooth transition from middle to long length hair. Use two more or less parallel mirrors, eg the two mirrored doors of a bathroom cabinet.
Remove the distance part from the trimmer entirely. Cut the hairs on the back of your neck. Again use an upwards movement with the trimmer. Make sure that the top of what you cut is a straight line. Forming the straight line at the bottom of your hair is the point of this step.
Put the distance part back on and set it to the shortest setting. Do your sideburns and bottom of the back of your head. Start lifting the trimmer to transition almost immediately on the backside and just above your ear on the sides. Cut the hair behind your ears by running the trimmer backwards along the top of your ear, with the lower edge pressed against the ear base and the upper edge in the air.
Shower/rinse off the cut hair. Take a last pass with the trimmer or a pair of scissors on any hairs you may have missed.
This is basically how I cut my hair too.
For exercise, this is mostly going to come down to your personal preference- I like the “couch to 5k” plan http://www.coolrunning.com/engine/2/2_3/181.shtml
It’s a program that alternates jogging and walking to build endurance, and doesn’t require being in very good shape to start it. I haven’t really done anything else to exercise, and it seems like my blood flow and energy is a bit better.
I follow up my workouts with immediate positive reinforcement (in my case a tasty post workout meal, and/or netflix), and it seems a bit easier to do them now.
Also, wedrifid made interesting comments about using nicotine to help form a workout habit:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2cv/defeating_ugh_fields_in_practice/264j