a whirlwind engagement

We're getting married today! 

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Spanische Windtorte

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When I was young, my mother had a nearly-complete set of the Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks. Although the recipes in these were not, as a rule, very good, I was much taken with the photo on the cover of The Cooking of Vienna's Empire -- a Spanish Windtorte. I told my mother that I wanted one for my birthday cake. I had not grasped quite how difficult they were to build. I think we wound up with more of a Pavlova instead. The thing is, a Spanische Windtorte is almost exactly the same thing as a pavlova, only with a fancier-shaped meringue. So, when I set out to make one again yesterday, I used a combination of this Pavlova recipe and these Spanische Windtorte instructions . I increased the quantities in the pavlova recipe by about 1/3, and, in the final step, did not macerate the fruit but rather mixed it with sugar immediately before adding it to the whipped cream mixture... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Making the meringue was fairly straightforward, except that...
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Life and Death since the Paleolithic: Part 2

Demands of different lifestyles and adjustment stages . This morning I found myself thinking about the future of our species, and of life on earth. It followed from what I was writing about yesterday, the way we used to be just one species among many others and have expanded to conquer vast territories beyond our original ecological niche. We’ve made big, disastrous changes to the planet, and we might not survive that long, certainly not in our current numbers, with our current way of life. We’re at a transition between stages of our progress, and it’s a crisis that could prove catastrophic. I was thinking, too, about how some countries and communities are worried about declining birth rates. I don’t think it’s a problem, not in terms of species survival. If only a tiny percentage of us continue to reproduce, we will still go on. Homo sapiens were almost wiped out more than once in ancient pre-history ( https://io9.gizmodo.com/close-calls-three-times-when-th...
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Methods

How did I arrive at this plan? Basically, a lot of tooling around the internet, reading some good books, and experimenting. As I begin to write more posts, I find that I'm looking at human evolution and history as a way to discover what works best for human beings, but it's not my only source and I think that modern science has a great deal to contribute. It's also the best place to go for figuring out why  things work the way they do. Understanding something about the mechanisms behind health makes me far more likely to follow the guidelines I set out for myself. When it comes to research, I have generally trusted the more mainstream medical research, research coming out of universities, and articles in medical journals. Government recommendations from countries with robust public health systems, like the UK and Canada, are also good, as is the World Health Organization. Their guidelines that will work well for most people, most of the time, but they lack granular...
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