Ben Takes on the Dog Food Nazis

Since I've had a puppy, I've been trying to decide what kind of food I should feed her. Lefty (my last dog) was pretty happy eating Science Diet, but I never did any proper research about dog food, so I tried to enter into the field with an open mind.

As it turns out, if you do a google search for "dog food comparison", you find mostly product comparisons between "our brand and Brand X"---in other words, I would believe these comparisons as much as I would believe a comparison between Coke and Pepsi on coke.com. If you really look hard for some unbiased information about dog food, you won't find any. Most websites are clearly biased towards ``natural'' or ``organic'' dog foods. There are even several websites that insinuate that feeding a dog kibble, as opposed to raw foods like whole raw chickens, eggs, and organ meat, is tantamount to a violation of human rights.

Now, this seems like a good question to ask some ``experts''. And by experts, of course, I mean dog owners on an internet forum. Let me post some actual quotes...

Poster: vets get little teaching in class on foods. And the majority they get taught is by science diet (and other "high end" dog foods) company, so its a little biased teaching.

BenTheMan: Do you have proof of this, or is it something you've just heard other people saying?

Poster: [Posts link to a 1 year program for assistant vet technicians]. in a 1 year program 15 "lessons" 2 are out of class placements and 2 are repeat type of courses. 1 is animal nutrition. in a semester with 7 different classes in it. it is obviously not a long period of time to learn all about dog food.

BenTheMan: This is NOT a vet program, this is not even a vet technician program. This is a one year program for people who assist vet technicians. You do know the difference between vets and vet technicians, right?

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Poster: Also, my dog recently ate a few kernels of boiled corn off the floor while we were cooking and the next day, she pooped them out completely whole and undigested. Which makes me question food with corn in it, if my dog can't digest the corn she 'stole' off the ground, what reasons do I have to think that corn meal can be digested by her?

BenTheMan: Haven't you ever noticed the same in...ahem...your poop? It doesn't automatically mean that corn is bad for you, even if it shows up undigested in your poop.

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Poster: Or once I heard somewhere that raw veggies make cancer grow slower so if I had cancer, even if it's completely unproven I would still try to eat raw veggies.

BenTheMan: And if you heard that making hats out of tin foil could prevent the government from reading your thoughts, would you try that, too?

Needless to say, the words ``logical fallacy'' are lost on these people.

More Daisy

Here's a few more Daisy pics. She is a cutie...





I still have a blog post to write about Amsterdam, where every day is April 20.

Puppy!

Yesterday we adopted a new puppy, Daisy. She is part beagle and part ``hound'', which sounds better than ``we don't know''. I think she's a keeper.


I spent the afternoon trying to teach her how to sit and take derivatives.

At least she can sit.


Either way, I'm looking forward to teaching her all kinds of things, like ``Go catch some squirrels'' and ``Go get me a beer.''

St. Nikolai Church: Hamburg

A few days ago, I took the train to see a monument that I had heard about: St. Nikolai's Church, in Hamburg:
St. Niolai Church in Hamburg (or Nikolaikirche) was finished in 1863, and was the tallest building in the world for a few years.
It was largely destroyed in July 1943 when Allied forces heavily bombed the city. While the city did house a naval base, many parts of the city (including some predominantly civilian areas) was leveled.
Today, what's left of the main spire and the nave are open to the public, and has been turned into a memorial.
The spire is covered in soot, and still bears the scars from Allied bomb shrapnel, and stands as a testament to the horrors of war.
For a few euro, you can ride an elevator to the top of the spire, where there's a small observation deck and some information about the church's construction, and the bombing campaign that destroyed most of the city. The view really is quite impressive:

I ask...

Why have Starbucks when you can have Balzac?


More German kultur to come...

Ich bin ein...Hamburger?

My first few days in Hamburg have been very nice indeed. I arrived on Thursday afternoon, only to find that I had left my laptop charger safely in the Columbus airport. So the first order of business was to track down a store that sold Apple products. This was a bit of a pain, and I had to take a cab across the city. All in all though, I am the proud new owner of a MacBook charger which will need an adapter if it is to work in America. So it goes, as they say.
The hotel was about as I'd expected, although the neighborhood is a bit...rowdy. The best way that I can describe it is a combination of 6th St. in Austin, the ``Lovely Ladies'' routine from Les Miserables, a Husler mail order catalog, and a Turkish street bazaar. If you're not sure, you should check out Reeperbahn on Wikipedia (this is the street where the hotel is located).

Apparently, the Beatles played several gigs here before they were discovered. The fact that they were actually from Liverpool seems to be lost on the locals, though. There is a nice plaza ``Beatles Platz'' adjacent to my hotel. I took this picture looking through Ringo's head, down the ``sinful mile'':
Yesterday I spent walking around on the waterfront, which is underutilized as it is in Galveston. This is a memorial to lost seamen, near as I can tell:
The port of Hamburg is pretty busy, and during business hours there was a lot of water traffic. The city is the third largest port in Europe, and has been for quite some time. Either way, the maritime tradition is evident, at least on the waterfront.
Yesterday and today I spent a good deal of time writing my talk for the conference next week, mostly enjoying German food and beer in sidewalk cafes...
Hopefully I'll have a bit more time to take better pictures once I'm finished writing this talk. Otherwise, all is well.

A Long Time Gone

I know I've been quite negligent in blogging---so many things have happened these past months. Here's a brief recap:

1. Ben gets a Mac. A good friend of mine, Dean, works for Apple. (He designed the little antenna in your iPod which lets you connect to the internet.) As such, he gets a pretty ridiculous employee discount, which made the MacBook affordable. Now, I typically hate it when people gush about how much better the Mac operating system (OS) is than Windows. And, believe me, it's not that much better. In some ways it's actually worse---for example, you have very little control over the places where you save things, and the power manager is pretty sub par. iPhoto and iTunes are easy to use, but you can only store music and photos where Steve Jobs says you can store music and photos. The "sleep mode" isn't very good, and it runs the battery down pretty quickly. There are several pluses, however. OSX (the Mac operating system) is just a front end for Unix, which means that executing stuff from the command prompt and ssh-ing into other computers is pretty easy. The apps that people have built are also very nice. For example, there's a program called Papers, which builds a database of all of my scientific papers for easy browsing. All in all, it's better than your average laptop. The operating system is good, the components are good, and it's easy to replace simple things, like hard drives and RAM.
2. The Trip Home from California. Bryanne and I drove from Palo Alto to Columbus in April, making a stop at the Grand Canyon for a spectacular sunrise and a plethora of Japanese tourists. The vistas were, of course, breathtaking: We also found other things of interest, including some dinosaur footprints in New Mexico:
3. Bryanne and I Celebrate 1 Year. ...by going to the zoo! (It's been a good year, in my opinion.) The Columbus Zoo is great, and they have some very good exhibits. These fruit bats look kind of like my dog Lefty: I made a new friend, with a goat: I really like the moose exhibit, although the mooses were pretty inactive: Bryanne's favorite are the frogs:
4. A Chorus Line comes to town. Bryanne's good friend Matt is the company manager for the national tour of "A Chorus Line". We'd seen the show in Detroit in January, but this time they came to Columbus. The production is very good. Typically the whole point of the chorus is to blend in, and be completely faceless, yet the show is about giving the chorus dancers some actual face. Some are looking for their first break, and some are looking to keep living their dream as a dancer, however low the pay, and however small their chances. Anyway, Matt and his husband Sandro were in town for the weekend, (which was our anniversary, too), and they joined us for drinks:
5. Ben Dundee World Tour 2009. Currently, I am sitting in the Columbus airport, about to embark on a European Adventure. I am attending a conference in Hamburg, and it was actually cheaper for me to spend two weeks in Europe, than to spend just 5 days in Hamburg. I fly into Hamburg today, and fly out on the 15th. The conference runs from the 6-10, so I'll have a few days before hand to spend exploring the city, as well as a few days after the conference ends to take a side trip to Amsterdam. I will be sure and keep the blog updated with pictures and accounts of my exploits.