Back to work today. After working through the post-holiday email queue, various crises took up a lot of the day: a problem with Netatalk, a problem with printing, and various folk with diverse problems. I spent 45 minutes debugging some Netlogo code for students in my class. They have a great final project in the making!
We continued on the low carb adventure. I felt a bit fuzzy and vague at times today -- probably as much caffeine withdrawl as anything. I tried to drink a lot of water, which helped. I was hungry at dinner, but not uncomfortably so. It is hard with the kids around eating rice and macaroni and candy. One think I like about the diet is the structure: the rules are very simple. But I can see why it's hard for people to stay on the diet long term.
I did some reading about low carbohydrate diets this afternoon. There have been several recent studies that support the contention that low carbohydrate diets are at least as effective as low fat diets for losing weight. One suggested that they're more effective at 6 months, but there was no statistical at 12 months. What was striking was that at 12 months the mean loss was less than 10 kilograms. Another interesting observation I saw was that in one study, where they had artifically restricted calories in the low-fat diet and not in the low-carb diet, the subjects in the low-carb diet tended to eat about the same number of calories.
I created a login to Muppyville for one of Charlie's friends over the weekend, who was able to independently log in and create a description of himself. Excellent! I'm just about ready to make the system generally available to the kids. I'm looking forward to the Christmas holidays to work on it more and provide a mechanism for the kids to stay in touch.