I promised to post updates about my experience with my CHAP diet scheme. I am now eating according to it since three months and there are some preliminary points to be made:

• It’s comfortable: there is never persistent hunger, I have no cravings, diversity is high enough that I do not feel constricted, there is enough quick options when there is little time for extensive food preparation (the latter was my biggest worry).
• It’s incredibly efficient: never before have I lost fat so quickly and kept lean so easily, while preserving muscle/strength at medium sports level (more is not possible right now because of my damaged knee) – and I have experimented with most different approaches in the past.
  I would say, after all those years, I had not believed anymore inducing such metabolism behavior was possible at all!
• It feels good. There is a holistic feeling of it being good.
• It’s sustainable: I am quite sure, I can keep to it until the end of my days.
• It’s expensive: The cost of that diet is at least twice as high as my former standard diet, although the latter already was not really cheap.

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Because many people ask me about it, I will post the CHAP diet scheme here already now.

You can read about the latest science in:

“Food and western disease”

I will write more about this topic in a few months, but even the preliminary results of the effect on myself show clearly: This is It! After 15 years of trying all the different common stuff, I finally stumbled over the truth, found the functioning concept.
Click on “read more” for a look onto the scheme.

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I have to say, I am no Harry Potter fan. And thus, the name Dobby, especially considering that character is surely a bit pejorative. However, although it is surely a little dumb, which lead to its name, this new floor cleaning robot really compensates all dumbness fully with its effort. As a roboticist, I am of course a bit reserved about the practical state of the of the field. And reviews of floor cleaning robots are often quite reserved as well. Yet, when having the right flat configuration, such a robot can be a marvel of technology. The flat really is a lot cleaner now, with a lot less effort. Hopefully, more capable service robots can push the limits even further one day, beyond floor cleaning.

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In the year 2011, a computer is just an appliance, even I have come that far . And still, my third workstation W3 (Athlon 700 CPU), acquired in 2000 and my first laptop M1 (Celeron 550 CPU), acquired in 2001, have served for a decade in such diverse circumstances and under such diverse operating systems, that their retirement is still worth a special note. W3 served shortly under Win 2000 and then FreeBSD as a main workstation, before becoming the main local server under Debian GNU/Linux in 2005. It provided some mail server functionality until the very end. M1 was mostly active until 2006 as my main laptop, first shortly under Win 2000, then under Debian GNU/Linux. I remember soldering WLAN antennas, used at this laptop in 2003 over 10km ranges, when WLAN was still something new and fresh. Those were the times .
And now they are gone, dumped onto  the disposal site a few days ago.

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Since my teens I have claimed, that learning is playing and todays school system is a totally ineffective and imbalanced way of generating useful experience for individuals. Although I usually fell into the high end of benchmarking systems used in school and university, I always had the feeling that I learned the important stuff in my free time.
Today, I stumbled over an interesting article which gives evidence why this feeling is most probably completely true.

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Yesterday, the Pirate Party (PP) entered a parliament in a German state for the first time. Berlin was “raided by a boarding party” with astonishing 9% of the votes, leading to a total of 15 seats. As a passive supporter of the PP at state and federal level since its beginning, recent developments create mixed feelings with me. The challenges of the PP have been a) the extension of its program beyond the core idea of “digital liberty” encompassing freedom of information and privacy of the individual and b) its dubious personnel.

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For most people, recovery from ACL replacement goes fine and they can return to an active lifestyle after 6-12 months. Sadly, that seems not to be a case with me. Probably because of a combination of bad luck and not absolutely perfect treatment directly after surgery, I have developed scar tissue within the joint which can lead to quite serious complications. Thats is at least the most likely indication with me at the current state of investigation. Scarring in the joint following surgery can have very different types of expressions but has one common biological factor: the inflammation within a healing process. The general condition is called Arthrofibrosis (AF) and there are several, often difficult to distinguish sub-types called localized, secondary generalized and primary generalized AF.

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After a short burst of skiing posts, this site became suddenly silent again. The reason was an anterior cruciate ligament rupture that I caught myself at the slopes of the skiing resort Obersaxen-Mundaun on 18th of February, within my first hours of being there. Not only the skiing season, but also those grand mountain tour plans for the summer came to a sudden halt with that and after surgery on 21th of April (replacement of the ruptured ligament with an autograft of the hamstring tendon), recovery is still ongoing and will be for some time. The recovery towards the final state will take around a year, although this final state will not be completely as before.

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Grand plans for mountain tours with significant altitude differential and mixed means of locomotion (hike/bike/ski) require more than ordinary training strategies. My usual hour of running or iron sports in the morning is not sufficient for that anymore. But the list of tasks the research environment demands does not leave that much space on the timetable. Yet as a true engineer by heart I know that there is some sort of solution to any problem whatsoever. You just have to find it!

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As mentioned in the previous post, I returned to skis from exclusive snowboard use after 14 years. Admittedly, before doing that step I had checked the internet for opinions as I heard quite many good boarders – especially mountain locals had switched back in the past years. A fashion trend ending is surely one important reason for that observation, but how can the situation be assessed beyond that? I really do not care if it is fashionable or not, I am looking for more tangible aspects. Interesting enough, discussions on the web did not bring any insight at all, just deeply entrenched opinions or even with people doing both, the inability to precisely state the core aspects seems to be prevalent. Thus, I will try to frame it here for and by myself.

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