My 5$-A-Day Pasta Diet

Ode to Food

   Weight gain,
   Financial strain,
   Feeling lame, and
   Cloudy brain.

That summarizes my feelings towards over-eating. Nonetheless, maintaing a healthy diet and exercise routine remains a constant struggle for me. I developed the following plan to address my lifestyle needs.

It’s based on the concept of intermittent fasting, whereby you spend the majority of the day not eating, and then do all of your eating at once in a few hours.

This is a pretty controversial dieting style, so take it or leave it. The research I’ve done into the matter supports that intermittent fasting helps dieters stick to their diets, which is one of the reasons I like it. I find it easier to not eat at all than to eat responsibly, especially when I’m at work or otherwise stressed. I also find it easier to stick to eating at home if I’m only eating in the evening, after I get home.

I will add the disclaimer that some research suggests women may not respond very well to intermittent fasting. Again, research is preliminary, so make your own choices.

The Diet

The plan is simple. Once a day, in the evening, cook a big batch of pasta, make it taste good, make it nutritious, and eat it all within a few hours.

I buy all my ingredients from Walmart, because moral qualms about their evil corporate structure doesn’t change the fact that they do have the cheapest prices for just about everything. The total cost for one day’s worth of food comes to $5 for about 2,650 calories. That’s a reasonable number for me, but you can scale the recipe up or down to fit your needs.

Concerning spices: you can do all of this without adding spices, but I don’t recommend it. Spices have no calories and can turn even the blandest foods into something palatable. If you’re crazy enough to try a diet where you’ll be eating the same meal every day, you had better make sure that meal is damn tasty. Buy your spices in bulk whenever possible, as they are much cheaper that way.

Ingredients

• 300 g dry pasta
• 15 frozen meatballs
• 1 can of pasta sauce
• 4 tbsp of olive oil
• 50g shredded cheese
• Spices (e.g. cumin, chili pepper, dill, or whatever you like)

Preparation

Total cooking time should be under half an hour.

1. Preheat the oven to 400 °F.
2. Put a large pot of cold tap water on to boil. Optional: salt the water.
3. The water should reach a boil just as the oven is finished preheating. Add the pasta to the water and put the meatballs in the oven.
4. Add 2 tbsp of olive oil to a frying pan and place on medium-high heat.
5. When the oil is hot, throw in all your spices.
6. After a minute, add the cheese to the pan.
7. When the cheese is melted, pour the pasta sauce into the pan and mix.
8. Set the pan aside on low heat.
9. When the pasta is cooked to taste, turn off all elements including the stove, and drain the pasta.
10. Add the sauce to the pasta.
11. Remove the meatballs from the oven and add them to the pasta as well.
12. Eat all the pasta within 4 hours of preparation.

How Websites Work

After an enlightening conversation with an anonymous benefactor, I feel obligated to summarize my newfound understanding of how website ownership works. I’ll write this as a high-level walk-through from the point of view of somebody trying to create a new website.

Buying an Internet Property

The first thing you need is a domain name. That’s the address of the ‘house’ where your website will live. You need to buy this from the domain name ‘police’. They call themselves ICANN, and they are an international organization that regulates domain names. You can imagine the shenanigans that might arise if nobody was making sure domain names were only used once at a time. You might go ahead and buy a ‘house’, only to find that somebody else is already living there.

In practice, many (if not most) domain names have already been bought up in bulk by companies such as GoDaddy. Think of these as landlords. You will probably end up buying or renting your address from one of these companies, who will in turn inform the ICANN that your website is now ‘living’ at that domain name.

Managing Your Internet Property

You just bought an empty house. Now you had better put something there! Your domain name is like the street address of the house, and typing the domain name into your browser is like driving to that address. At this point, visitors would arrive and find only an empty house. Things would be rather boring.

You need to ensure that somebody is home to answer the door when people come a-knockin’. Since you can’t do the job yourself, you need to hire a ‘butler’. When people visit your domain name, the butler will answer on your behalf. It will greet your visitors, and guide them through the house.

Visitors can ask the butler to show them a room of the house, and it will, if you have instructed it to do so. Visitors can deliver messages to your butler, and it will write them down and pass them along to you, if you have instructed it to do so. Visitors can ask the butler to show them a picture of a cat wearing a hat made of bread, and it will, if you have instructed it to do so, and if you have such a picture somewhere in the house.

The butler is controlled by a computer program that you will create. It has access to any files you have given it. You need a computer, known as a server, to run your butler.

You can use a personal computer as your server, if you like. However, whenever your computer is off, the butler will be asleep. Visitors may come to the house and knock on the door, but nobody will answer. This is known as the server being ‘down’.

The other option is to rent a server from some company that will ‘host’ your website. Again, GoDaddy is one of the major players in this business. When you rent a server to host your website, you’re ensuring the butler is always ready to welcome your guests.

Everything Else

So now you have hired a butler. It will answer whenever someone comes to visit your website. The final step is to decide what your butler will do with the visitors once they enter your website.

You give your butler instructions by writing them in files, and then storing those files on the server. Anytime a visitor arrives at your website, the server will read those files, run the program they describe, and relay the output to your visitor’s browser.

You also need to fill the rooms of your butler’s house with any images, videos, or other documents that your butler will need. These data files are also stored on the server, and the butler will access them when your instruct it to do so.

The butler program, in combination with your data files, form the heart and soul of your website. From this point onwards, website design is a matter of choosing what data to store on your website, and when and how your butler will relay that information to your visitors. This can get as complicated as you like, and I won’t say anything else on the matter for now.

Summary

A website has an ‘address’, called a domain name. Visitors come to your website by typing the domain name into their browsers. You need to buy a domain name on which to locate your website, just like you need to buy a plot of land on which to locate a home or business.

The website you build will have two parts: a ‘butler’ program designed to meet and greet visitors, and a ‘house’ filled with data files needed for the operation of your website.

Finally, you need a physical computer to run the butler program and store your data files. This computer is called a server. You can use your own computer as a server, or you can rent a server from a website hosting company.

Taking the Plunge

Today, I have finally decided to start a blog.

I mostly stumbled into the decision. I was playing around with , and I noticed that the most highly sought-after skill was WordPress. Having no idea what WordPress was all about, I googled it. One thing led to another, and here we are…

It’s actually quite a nice experience so far. Give it a shot, if you’re as bored as I frequently am.

Turbulent Economy Hypothesis

In the study of fluids, propagation of energy from large scales to small scales occurs when the diffusion of momentum is small.

Can we extend this to economics? Might the propagation of wealth from large scales (the rich) to small scales (the poor) occur when the diffusion of economic momentum is small?

In the current system, economic momentum diffuses very quickly. If a good investment is discovered (e.g. a promising stock), many large scale players will chase after it together.

A small-diffusion system, then, would be a system where economic individuals (people, companies, industries) find their economic motivations independently, not through the study of other people’s economic actions. Is this not innovation?

In other words, might an economy that stimulates innovation intrinsically lead to an equitable distribution of wealth?