To Do: Cook Beans!

For anyone who thinks that going vegan is expensive... totally not the case.

If you are vegan and don't already own one, or if you're considering going vegan and have no idea where to start, investment #1 should be a pressure cooker. Not very many people (in Canada?) own one, but they're soooo common in India, and I've got my indian friends to thank for turning me on to mine.

You can buy massive dried bags of lentils of various colours (dal), kidney beans (rajma), chick peas (chana), or black beans for next to nothing. Compare the contents of one bag ($4 maybe?) to the same mass of beans in 20 (?) cans of water for >= $1 each!

And due to the simple equation from high school that most have forgotten, PV=nRT [1], you can cook dried gram at a much lower temperature if the pressure is increased (V, n, & R are held constant). This saves on electricity (or gas as the case may be). I'll be the first to admit, I used to cook dried beans like a complete idiot and soak them overnight, and then boil them for 5 hours or something. With a pressure cooker, there is no need to soak legumes overnight and cooking them takes about 1 hr. Most importantly, it completely seals in the flavour for whatever meal you have planned: burritos (like me), kaali, masoor, or tadka dal - or good, old-fashioned soups (e.g. lentil, split-pea)!

A nice side effect: dried legumes take far less energy to transport than cans of legumes that are 60% salt and water; you're going green [2]!

Naturally, not everyone has the proper body chemistry to be able to go vegan with great success, but here is one attractive figure that might catch your eye:

Marathon runners should consume about 1.5 grams of protein per kg of body weight per day [3].

For a 180 pound guy like me (~80kg according to Google's conversion), that's about 50g of chick peas. What is that for a total protein bill per day - about 25¢ ??

Not bad at all :)

[1] The Ideal Gas Law (Influences amazing things! E.g. how fast a pot of water takes to boil)
[2] Vegetarian Diets Help Protect the Environment
(As if you didn't already know how green a vegan diet is!!)
[3] Sources of Protein for Runners: Spring Marathon Training Plan Part 5

Disclaimer: I'm not totally vegan these days (I now eat fish & other seafood), but I was for ~8 years or so. It was personal preference and the evolution of my diet. I like the great perspective it gave me on international foods though, along with environmental and even spiritual perspectives. I just want to feed my family well, and sometimes (really just for my little man) that does include some animal products 

More From Computex. The Green Revolution of Computing Begins

One word: Wow!

For basically as long as I can remember, I've been interested in low-power computing. The combination of environmental awareness, plus the ability to understand how things work (i.e. engineering), essentially equates to my urge to want to make the universe more energy efficient. This is the reason why I've been such a big fan of ARM cores for so many years, and also why I've been following the progress of ARM and Linux together. Linux is basically the only publicly-available, fully-featured OS for alternative architectures such as ARM(ok, BSD too), which is why I consider Linux as pivotal for the recent achievements of ARM and their licensees. Having seen the Qualcomm-powered Netbook only a few days ago, I am no longer hesitant to say, that

Linux has enabled ARM to potentially overcome Intel in the PC market

Slashdot posted this yesterday, and I see no shame in admitting I read it there first. Computex has yet again unveiled what I consider to be the future of mobile computing and traditional workstations. Take a few minutes and please watch these videos. What you'll see is that several well-known semiconductor companies (Freescale, Nvidia, Qualcomm, ... Samsung?) plus many new and established manufacturers, have decided that it is time to bring ARM devices to the desktop.

As many engineers are already aware, ARM chips generally use < 1W of power, and entire systems often consume < 5W. These ARM chips run in the GHz range and offer more than enough computational power for day-to-day tasks, multimedia applications, and now even 3D gaming. When we compare the power consumption of about 5 W for a power-hungry ARM system, with the power consumption of a 300W office computer, the greener choice is clear.

A typical Intel-powered laptop or workstation (see x86 architecture) can often consume power in the range of 250-400W, when hard disks, optical drives, and expansion cards are taken into consideration. The most power-efficient x86-systems can run at about 30W. Therefore, the power savings using an ARM-based system can be between 100 times (in the most optimistic case) and 10 times (in the most conservative case) - but always in the favour of ARM systems.

Although the economy is on everyone's minds these days, energy is probably going to be one of the hottest markets in the next decade (and arguably now). I predict that we are likely to see the Green Revolution of Computing within the next few years. Power-efficient chips, such as those based on ARM, MIPS, and PowerPC architectures, will likely start replacing Intel chips on a massive scale. It's likely that this will first happen in the home, and then it will make its way into businesses. Businesses typically rely on 'legacy' applications and the cost is just to high to redesign most programs right away, so we will likely see the business adoption of Green Computing later on, hopefully driven by some kind of government incentive program.

ARM chips are typically designed for a single-user-load, and aren't necessarily the best thing for professional video editing, high-demand servers, extreme gaming, or scientific computing - at least not yet anyway. Of course, adding optical or magnetic-disk drives to any ARM system would increase the average power consumption of the device, but not as much as it would in the case of a PC, as most of required components for ARM are integrated onto a single chip, and not contained in a different chipset altogether. But isn't physical media becoming almost irrelevant these days, with the increased tendency toward cloud computing?

The 2008 Election

It looks as though Canada will again be under a minority conservative regime until we hold our next election. The results of our 2008 election are almost identical to that of 2006 (300 000 000 #$!@#^@!ing dollars later) but with a few notes. Voter turnout was only 59% - the worst in the history of Canada - with only 13832972 of 23401064 registered electors casting a ballot (that does not include unregistered voters). However, I'm happy to see that the Liberals, NDP, Bloc Quebecois, and Green Party managed to prevent a majority conservative government disaster.

It's terribly tragic that Canadians were seduced into voting for the conservative party out of fear for our economic situation - a situation which the conservative party must take a large part of responsibility for. Please let me take this opportunity to apologize to the rest of the world; Canada had her chance to show the world's developing nations how we, the developed nations, deal with environmental issues. By allowing ourselves to continue subjugation to Harper's slippery oil-mafia, we have basically written an environmental cheque that our asses cannot cash.

Green party results by province

Province	Number of Votes	%
Alberta	111505	9
British Columbia	168723	9
Manitoba	31723	7
New Brunswick	22683	6
Newfoundland	3274	2
Northwest Territories	752	6
Nova Scotia	35022	8
Nunavut	675	8
Ontario	411444	8
Prince Edward Island	3488	5
Quebec	126299	4
Saskatchewan	23279	6
Yukon	1880	13
Green Votes	826747 The size of a metropolitan city...	6% and we still don't have 1 single seat in the house of commons

I hope that the Harper government acknowledges that poor voter turnout had a huge hand in their minority victory yesterday. There are many Canadians who were unable to make it to the ballot box due to extenuating circumstances - the working class in particular - a huge contrast to Harper's generally upper-class representation. On the other hand, there are probably a lot of Canadians who have such little confidence in our system that they choose not to vote. Some vote because they have not been following the debates.

One thing that was very interesting to observe is that None of the metropolitan cities in Canada (Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal) were won over by the Conservative party. My guess is because we are the ones who primarily have to deal with the smog. People in urban environments are usually have the lesser addiction to oil.

In any event, the Green Party has achieved such an amazing increase in voter turnout from previous years. However, of the ~ 14 million people who voted, ~ 1 million of those voted for the Green Party, yet we still don't have a single seat representing our interests in the House of Commons due to the MP system.

Seriously, we need to reform the way that we vote in this country - why not assign a score to each political candidate instead of voting for a single one? Also, account for "no-shows" and "no-confidence" votes. Mathematically, proportional representation just makes more sense. Account for the loss of power by rural communities by giving rural areas more municipal and regional power, while the interests of the greater public are represented proportionally.