I'm a GP doc about 120 days into my own diet. I'll try to keep this to my own observations, but the method is controversial, so let me lay it out up front: I eat one meal a day. I skip breakfast and substitute lunch with a 1-hour run or swim. On Sundays I work out for about 3 hours, usually a 20 mile bike ride, a 1 mile ocean swim, and 20 miles home.

==The tipping point==

I started this because my work-out partner trounces me on the run in triathlons. I can out-swim and out-bike him, but he gains all that time and more on the run. My BMI at the start of this was 29.1. Normal range for my height starts around 190, the average runner of my height is probably closer to 165-170. I'm picking 180 as a goal, it's a nice round number. It's pretty clear dragging around an extra 43.5 lbs makes running harder.

==Reaching the tipping point==

A pile of observations, from medicine and elsewhere, have helped along the way

1) Excess carbs are stored as fat. Lots of the foods we eat are cheap carbs (pasta, rice, bread, potatoes, beer, breakfast cereal, crackers, cookies, candy),

2) Fructose does not make you feel full,

3) You don't really burn fat until you burn down glycogen,

4) Men and women both tend to eat more around women,

5) Obesity spreads over social networks,

6) The movies King Corn, Food Inc, Forks over Knives, the BBC's The Century of the Self and since I started, HBO's The Weight of the Nation has also come out,

7) It's easier to make simple changes than complex ones,

8) Willpower can be exhausted,

9) I am always and will always be on the see-food diet,

10) In a prior job, I had a hand in the weight-control program at the US Naval Academy. The nutritionists kept the midshipmen on a 2 lb/wk glide slope. They felt any faster was between unsafe and impossible (we're talking people who needed to loose 20-30% of their body weight),

11) Leptin levels remain low for years after dieting. If you decide to diet, you will be accepting a new baseline level of hunger for a very long time, or certainly rebound,

12) starving cancer patients on hospital wards seem remarkably peaceful,

13) people who weigh themselves daily are more successful in keeping weight off,

14) Sometimes I would bike to work (21 miles each way), and I usually wouldn't eat lunch or breakfast on those days. I was always a couple of pounds lighter the next day. This proved to be a bit of a distractor, but it was a kernel of my thinking,

15) One of our chief residents when I was an intern, very lean herself, once quipped, to the department head, regarding the bariatric patients tending to have normalized blood sugar just before surgery "Anorexia is garunteed to work!" (they have to fast for 24 hours before surgery).

16) I asked my mom what diseases people in the family had: a lot of diabetes and heart disease.

17) My brother came to visit. He used to be noticably overweight. This time, he obviously qualified as "thin". I asked. He weighed 180 lb. He's an inch taller than me. And became a vegetarian several years ago.

==A solid base==

You get in shape, and more importantly stay in shape, by accumulating significant, but livable, improvements to your lifestyle over time, and building on that. Not by going through some horrible ordeal requiring Olympian willpower. (http://liamrosen.com/fitness.html)

For me, A pile of small modifications added up over time

1) My wife recently got her first yoga teaching certificate and has been working with me to move to a more vegetable-based diet.

2) I moved to California and met a great work-out buddy

3) My daughter, a gymnast, moved to a gym next to a climbing gym. My son and I started climbing. Lifting an extra 43.5 lbs is even harder than running with it.

4) I happen to work in an office that is far removed from any source of calories. The only stimulus to eat is when other people break out their brown bag lunches: good time to run.

5) We had two big bottles of multivitamins that seem to never get opened.

6) I have weighed myself religiously for years, haven't gained weight, but haven't lost any either.

7) I'm not stressed out in medical training for a while

8) my kids are old enough that we're not routinely waking up to take care of them at night.

9) I clinically examine the nutritional status of young, otherwise healthy people, all the time. Good habits lead to good health, bad habits lead to bad health (back pain, knee pain, infections, injuries, diabetes, etc), and there's a lot people with bad habits.

10) My wife threw away our TV 4 years ago.

11) In an effort to stay out of the dry staples pantry (where cookies and things lurk) several months ago, I took to keeping a couple of big, gorgous bowls of roasted, unsalted nuts on the kitchen counter: almonds, cashews, pecans, something. Right next to a big fruit bowl. I keep some Ghirardelli dark chocolate squares hidden behind a bookshelf.

==The plan==

I really need to actually loose weight. To do that, I need to burn down the glycogen, burn more calories than I eat. In addition to my 2-3 lb weight loss after bike-to-work days, I had tried doing this on a small scale: exercising in the morning before breakfast, but it wasn't enough to make a dent. I did *not* make a New Years resolution. But about January 17th, I just decided to do it: skip breakfast and lunch, work out to preserve muscle, take a daily multivitamin, and eat whatever I damn well please for dinner. The plan went into effect January 18th

==Execution==

In reality, without some stimulus to eat (no TV, no cafeteria at work, etc), fasting doesn't really lead to hunger. It took a couple of weeks to really get out of the habit of thinking about eating. And I still do. It's 1155 right now, and I'm very aware it's lunch time. But I feel calm, not ravenous. Breakfast and lunch are habits, like anything else. Instead, I'll go for a run.

The first week was awesome, I dropped about 5 lbs. Then 3, then 2, then my first plateau. I sat at 212 for over a week. Another plateau at 209, another at 204. There's this effect where I fixate on the low number and get really hard on myself if I don't see it again or beat it. Here's a sample: 204, 203.5, 206, 204.5, 205.5, 206, 207, 204, 206, 205, 204.5, 206, 206, 201.5.

Special events are special. I'm not going to skip the big easter egg hunt and dinner with friends on Sunday. On Saturdays, if I'm home, I still eat bacon and eggs with the family. I eat like a champ at parties, everyone loves cooking for me because I always love what they made, and I usually wish I hadn't when I step on the scale for the next few days. If I had stuck with this every single meal, I probably could have lost more but the cumulative strain might have broken me. I can't imagine eating less but still eating three meals a day. I am definitely a see-food eater. But I've dropped from 223.5 lb down to 192.5 yesterday before dinner.

I have gotten in the habit of weighing myself 3 times a day: before bed, in the morning, and when I come home, just before dinner. From 5 pm to 10 pm, I'll eat and drink 5 lb. That struck me. Another lesson learned: always measure against the end-of-fast weight. The others are more variable. Even if you diet with 3 meals a day, you'll still be most consistent at the end of your longest fast, eg, just before breakfast.

==Side benefits==

I don't have to pee as much. I used to have to get up in the middle of the night. Basicly, blood sugar osmotically retains water. As you burn it off at night, you undergo volume contraction, and have to pee. The same thing happens during the day. You eat a lot, ergo you drink a lot, ergo you pee a lot.

Incidentally, I also sleep better, and don't spend as much money during the day (none really) on diet coke or snacks.

Congestion is way down. Mucus is basically mucopolysaccharides: long sugar chains attached to a thin protein core. One way to burn off excess sugars: build something with them. Your body is, at the end of the day, an equilibrium machine. More in equals more out. No extra sugar, no extra mucopolysaccharides. Less snoring probably helps too, but the decrease in mucus was swift, impressive, and durable. Has to be linked to blood sugar.

My run times are down. My usual loop is 4.5 - 5 miles. I used to do it in 45-48 minutes. Now on the longest version, I can do it in 38. Interestingly, my swim times are also down. I'm finally able to tolerate 100 m intervals below 2 minutes (in high school it was closer to 1:15-1:20, so still a ways to go)

==Side effects==

I started taking a daily multivitamin after I got some labs (I'm doc, I gotta know!). LDL was 98, HDL is 53, normal CBC, normal chemistry, but calcium was 8.8, low end of normal, so DMV for me. Follow up labs showed stable lipids, calcium returned to normal, and my blood glucose was 86.

I'm always cold. One thing your body does with excess sugar is burn it in a waste heat cycle in mitochondria. That's what makes brown fat brown: mitochondria. the less energy your body has, the less they can burn. There's some thinking that this can actually be leveraged to induce weight-loss, but I don't recommend trying to loose weight by cranking up the A/C! Global warming is a big enough problem, thanks.

Having left 30 1lb cans of crisco behind me, I have to work out more to burn as many calories. I literally have to run further to get the same work out.

==Risks==

The risks of malnutrition are non-trivial, but I'll leave them as an exercise to the reader. Suffice to say, I haven't seen as nearly as much malnutrition in skinny ritalin kids as I have in the hundreds of obese young adults I see in clinic.

Anorexia is one horrible disease I'll entertain briefly. Technically, I'm anorexic for about 18-19 hours a day. I don't know what it would take to become truly anorexic. I think I'd fall off the bandwagon too quickly. It probably helps to have met a few though. However, it is weird, because to loose weight, you have to tell yourself "You are carrying too much fat." As you approach your goal, you can actually become proud of yourself for doing it. And it doesn't really seem ... harder, on a day-to-day basis. It might take longer to drop a pound, but once you've reorganized your life to eat less, you can maintain that mental state indefinitely. So I think it is very important to plan out an end game.

==My end game==

I still have 15 lbs to go. But I think it's doable. We'll see. There were some dark days around that first plateau. and again around 193.5, my old college weight. I just passed that after bouncing off it for a month.

I am trying to get to know this ... not hunger ... but not always satiated feeling. I've been loosing about 2 lb a week, which makes 7000 Calories, or a 1000 Calorie/day deficit. Based on Carson Chow's more sophisticated calculator at NIH, my actual caloric deficit is probably only 500 calories a day now, and falling. Interestingly, that calculator suggests I'm consuming 3986 calories a day! That seems like a lot to me, but maybe. My work outs are burning around 750-800 calories, so if I didn't work out, I might actually gain weight at this point. So, I think I can probably add lunch back in, but it's going to have to be a pretty skinny lunch. I think I'd rather add breakfast and keep the lunch workouts. 

According to Chow's NIH calculator, I have another 90 days to go. 210 days total. It's mid-May. The entire summer. Still.

==Epilogue==

If you are seriously considering changing your eating habits, do it! Don't wait for a doctor's visit, that's just another excuse. But do bring up your plans and methods with your physician.

Chief,

You suffer the affliction of being American. Based on your cholesterol profile, you have too much fat circulating in your blood. This generally points the way to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Considering your newly diagnosed hypertension, this is a bit more urgent. We aren't yet compelled to start you on lipid-lowering medications, but that's the next step if you can't turn it around on your own.

The central issue is every American is in America, where we have 100 years of food policy bent on feeding you the cheapest calories possible, and 100 years of psychological research on how to make you feel good about eating all those calories.

Earl K Butts was Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon and rewrote the farm bill in a way that made it much cheaper to bring corn to market, basically we subsidize farmers. We send our tax dollars to Iowa so they will plant more corn and wheat. Which we all buy. This has created downward price pressure, which incentivizes advertising by the food industry. The Green Revolution made it even cheaper. The patterrn of history started before Secretary Butts, and the consequences far outlasted his tenure. But that was the knee in the curve. Shortly after his policy changes, no one went hungry, but the obesity rate started increasing and has only accelerated since. If you think this is a conspiracy theory, think again.

So long as you are in America, you will be surrounded by messaging that it's okay to eat more. Have you ever seen a diet article that said "Get lean: eat more spinach/bread/pork/lard!" Rare is the article that says "eat less". It's just too easy, right? Well, that's what it comes down to. Eat less. Be hungry.

If you want to do that in America, you will need to arm yourself with a steady stream of counter-messaging. As I recall, you aren't clinically obese, you're overweight. Use these calculators to get some insight into where you stand:

It sort of doesn't matter, though. You're in America. By 2030, probably the time your kids are in college, 42% of America will be obese. Not overweight, obese. It will be hard to even understand what normal looks like.

Here are some great movies to learn about what you're up against:

King Corn
Food, Inc
Forks Over Knives
The Weight of the Nation
BBC: The Century of the Self

Here's the best condensation of the whole problem in one essay:

Michael Pollan, Unhappy Meals

Finally, what to avoid. In a word, carbs: breakfast cereal, bread, potatoes, rice, pasta, tortillas, crackers, cookies, beer, candy, processed anything. Anything that if you dry it out and crush it, would be a white powder. You will find it near impossible to avoid these things. Try to limit yourself to treating them all like candy, which is what they are. Stick to small, infrequent portions.

Funny thing is, if you do your homework (above), you'll find out that most of our meat is just as stuffed full of corn as we are, and it has its own adverse metabolic signature on top of that. Eat red meat like it's candy: infrequently, in small portions.

As hard as this is, one immediate payoff is that your grocery bill will be amazingly small if you focus on vegetables.

There are plenty of Americans who have it worse than you. But take that as a warning: it gets worse from here if you don't change. It can be done. Watch those movies, read that essay, do your best to cut out those foods, be hungry, and see if your lipids don't improve.

I want my tablets to have red monochrome on black at night.

I frequently read in bed. Usually a journal article in PDF form on Kindle for iPad, while my wife is asleep. I usually want to look something up in the browser at some point. So instead of using Kindle's white-on-black view option, I have invert-colors set as my triple-click option for the home button.

I like to look at stars. I love SkySafari Pro. I especially enjoy it's red monichrome night vision and equatorial coordinates. Occasionally, I want to look something up in Safari.So instead of using ... Oh, I guess I'm just hosed.

What do the pilots do with their charts on iPad if they want to switch to a new app?

Folks: people use tablets at night. Night vision is not the inverse of day vision. Activating a single set of color pigments (red OR green OR blue) is not enough for your brain to really constrict your iris or wash out your pigments (the ghost images you see after seeing something bright). Serious people, like pilots, soldiers, sailors, astronomers, depend on night vision. These are often the very people for whom the weight savings of a tablet may be absolutely critical. Not Facebook-girl critical. life-and-death critical.

In  the Navy we often use thick red-tinted plastic over screens on the bridge so as to filter the light down to a monochrome red. It's not perfect though: lots of light leak around the velcro. I really think, having used flux and nocturne, software plays a major role here.

Performance pressure is going to drive some of these folks to use an iPad at night. Inverting colors in the OS and a hodge podge of apps trying to hack the problem is insufficient.

If they switch to inverted-colors then accidentally land on a page or in an app with a black background, which is now white, instant night blindness caused by white light could be a life-threatening error.

Blacktree has done a pretty good job with this on the Mac with Nocturne, except no one is using a Mac in a mission-critical application like navigation. Lots of people want to use an iPad for nav and I'm sure there are other applications, like astronomy, or just every person laying in bed trying to read next to a sleeping spouse. And the browser. Everybody wants to use the browser. And they may well be looking up something in a secure forum, checking "what is that tower on the hill that's not on the map", using the browser like hackers use the browser: for real-world problem-solving.

I propose there should be some setting wherein if you drop the brightness all the way down, the OS should automatically ask "would you like to go red?" and all apps should either be aware of that preference and switch to their day mode so the OS can do the right thing on top of their colors, or be shut down if they can't honor that request. Angry Birds doesn't need to be played if you're worried about land nav.

Edit: Hi HN! I cleaned up some bits and clarified a couple of points, thanks for reading! I have used flu.x, that's not exactly what I'm looking for, but definitely the right method. Just tak it all the way to monochrome red.

My initial review of a chromebook was pretty damning. Having explored it extensively over the last year, I feel compelled to offer a revision. The ChromeOS is still a failed paradigm. My central complaint stands: offline access and applications remain fundamental in a lot of interesting places, like other countries, the ocean, or Mars.

The machine itself, with the right software, is killer. To the point that I have no desire to purchase a macbook, thinkpad, or any other notebook, despite not having purchased a laptop since 2008.

What swung me on the machine was Ubuntu, and specifically, open source support for the 3G driver. Along the way, I also got my first SSD (upgrading the Cr-48's paltry 16 gb to a spacious 40 gb), and became a fan of Ubuntu's Unity interface. "But that's all software!" I'll discuss the machine too.

After realizing a stock chromebook is a paperweight on foreign travel, when I returned to the States, I promptly added Ubuntu. I used Jay Lee's install originally, which relies on the Chrome kernel. I promptly decided this would work well enough, and since my 2008 MacBook still stored data on spinning rust, a $100 for a 40 GB Motorola SSD seemed palatable and made the Cr-48 under Ubuntu very useful to me. Lee's 11.04 build allowed me to still use Gnome, and I was, if not happy, sufficiently productive that this was the best thing going, especially since my work machines are under the Navy's famously broken networks.

The major downside is that while a variety of hacks were devised to get the Gobi card up, they all required reboots. Those turned a 10 second boot into a 1 minute penance five times a day. Whether you were fully emancipated from ChromeOS, or using Jay Lee's chimera, you still had to reboot to get 3G working. This was exceedingly painful if you wanted to use the Verizon wireless because you needed ChromeOS to renew your subscription, and the online renewal every month would invariably get gummed up, necessating a call to "advanced Cr-48 tech support". That's the menu option. I kid you not. Using Lee's chimera, you may have to cycle through several ChromeOS versions before getting Ubuntu back. And every once in a while, google would overwrite the stateful partition, forcing you at a minimum to rewrite the reboot shortcuts.

It was one of these times, when I mistakenly wrote a lowercase -s instead of a capital -S in a reboot shortcut, and accidently all the operating systems, when I finally found Todd Vierling's recipe, 4 months after he published it.

While Lee's work was first on the scene, and remains admirable, and no doubt influenced other critical players in this saga, I will not link to it here, because Todd Vierling's recipe is now far superior. Todd installed straight Ubuntu from a thumbdrive and leveraged Brad Gearon's work on the Gobi 3G driver and firmware, allowing Ubuntu to directly and completely manage the device even after reboots and suspend/resume cycles. 

I would be remiss if I omitted the extraordinary value of the Cr-48 wiki. If you own a chromebook and haven't found the Cr-48 wiki, go there now. If you're interested in following Todd's recipe, you'll need the wiki's directions on flashing your BIOS, switching to developer mode, etc.

"But you mentioned Unity, too! That needs some explaining!" Yes, yes it does. During this same period, a friend of mind was looking at a trip to Afghanistan. He got an Acer netbook (cheap and small) and asked me to put Ubuntu on it, because Windows XP was intolerably slow. So, I did. And, wow, was the utility of Unity's space-saving obvious. With the release of Oneriec, I decided to experiment with Unity on my Chromebook as well. I definitely prefer the form factor of my Cr-48 over an Acer, and actually I like it more than my 13" MacBook as well. Now that Google has discontinued support for it's Google Desktop product (the quick search bar was roughly a Quicksilver for Linux, incidently written by Quicksilver's Nicholas Jitkoff), Unity's dash fills the keyboard-accessable launcher function, certainly better than Gnome Do or even Jitkoff's quick search bar. And the Cr-48's screen, a bit smaller than a 13" Macbook's, still manages to gain nicely from spacesaving features. The Unity dock works well for me when I want it, and stays out of the way when I don't. The designers are also doing a good job polishing the dock's hinting methods as well.

I now have a lightweight, reliable, 3G laptop with an SSD, CAC card support (critical for anyone in DoD), Citrix (critical for anyone in healthcare), Wacom support, NFS support, and great app launchers. Did I mention it's matte black plastic (great selling point for the military), and has a battery life well north of 5 hours? I have taken notes on it in conferences for up to 7 hours with all the radios off. The soft plastic finish still peels off, and I'm sure there are folks for whom a dual-core 1.67 GHz CPU is not sufficient, but I can't complain. Such things were supercomputers when I graduated college. Certainly it's plenty fast enough for most of what I do: word processing and web access. Oh, and access to the largest store of free software, ever.

I felt a little bit bad publishing my last review, seeing as Google gave me a free laptop on my birthday. But this review is not really about that. See, you can get an equivalent Lenovo, but it costs several times the Cr-48's $225 on eBay and the 40GB SSD is about $120. So for about $350 and a couple hours installing Ubuntu (which you'd still have to do with the Lenovo) and some software packages, you can get what I consider the most magical mobile workstation on the planet. That seemed like news worth sharing.

This is an old book. I read it as a member of the Hacker News parents group.

John Holt was an educator who came at the subject from an alternate angle. He had been an officer on a submarine in the Pacific during the second world war; decided that nuclear weapons were a bad thing, followed, I suspect, Einstein's lead in calling for a world government, and by 32 was the executive director of the New York branch of the United World Federalists. Frustrated by the ineffectiveness of volunteer-funded NGOs, he decided to teach fifth-graders in Colorado and then an elite private school in Boston, where he fell under the influence of one Bill Hull, who encouraged him to journal his observations. Some of those observations formed the basis of some memos which were circulated among other teachers, and parents, who encouraged him to publish. How Children Fail is the result. Published in 1964, it catapulted him to the national stage and remains his most widely read work. Presumably in recognition of that, he revised the text with further commentary in 1982, three years before his death. That's the version I read.

In the intervening years, Holt migrated further out on the educational spectrum, ultimately advocating unschooling, where children are allowed to live and develop among adult peers, exploring their interests and learning what interests them. These are my observations having read the book.

He organized the memos into four sections: strategies, fear and failure, real learning, and how schools fail. A persistent prop in these short reports of crushed souls is cuisenaire rods. The ghost of these rods can be seen in any primary school workbook, in their tiny diagrams of blocks, sticks of ten blocks, flats of 100 blocks, and giant blocks of 1000 blocks. I admit, I got some of the rods for my daughter, who had been struggling with math despite being in NAIS schools since the age of 3. She hasn't used them and has make pretty significant gains this year in a public school 

The strategies he describes are the strategies children use to survive in the classroom. The winners, the "best kids" obviously play by the rules as set out by the teachers. Unfortunately, Holt reports, your kid is probably not the best. Your kid is probably employing adaptive behaviors to hold their social position: the "mathematically challenged" kid is probably bad at everything, but got identified in math, and is now developing very high-level social strategies to trick the teacher into giving them hints at the answers, or has learned to accept constant beratement, discipline, anything, to at least hold steady in the remedial class, so as to avoid the greater perceived pain of advancing. They learn develop Stockholm syndrome, anything. There are dozens of memos in each of the four sections. The memos become a source of repetition by which the reader is trained.

He follows with a discussion of how teachers rule the classroom with fear, and how failure becomes an acceptable strategy to survive in the classroom society. He describes how adults of all kinds use fear to influence children, and how, through close observation of particulars, anyone can see this in operation. The cuisenaire rods become a central actor in this observational study as they provide a very discrete, measurable thing for the observer to observe: how much more complicated the problem is, how many times the child attempts to solve it, how many ways the problem can be solved. How intimidation slows down their work. How flawed logic is revealed and furtively covered up. The original 1964 text sounds like an ad for cuisenaire rods, but in his 1982 comments, he makes it clear that they are not great teaching tools, but good tools for teachers who want to observe students.

Recognizing fear as a fundamental stimulus, like sex, food, and money, he goes on to elaborate how to observe the withdrawal of fear, and some micro-outcomes he attributed to the absense of fear. This thread becomes a bit hard to follow at times as the anecdotes often focus on various positive actions that led to positive outcomes. He also does a good job showing how random, or apparently random, demands of teachers create a great deal of anxiety among children, even those who are doing well. Thus, if even the best are performing at a sub-par level, then the whole system has sub-par standards. Which makes room for more fear and anxiety.

He rounds out his evidence with descriptions of children up against the constructs of the school: standardized tests, teachers with their own external motivations (paychecks, other teachers), and how these too lead to children who, trained to respond to stimuli by showing their indimidation, act intimidated. He relates instances where they find themselves torn between seeking approval and having self-respect. He seems convinced that many teachers secretly hate their charges, and the children, lacking any other experience by which to formulate an alternate social construct, have no choice but to accept their role on the other side of this strained relationship. There are several references to Greek tragedies. At this point, it sounds like the pathology that in an adult would meet the criteria for clinical depression.

He wraps up the book with a synthesis of his observations. Adults like kids who are "docile, deferential". Adults "destroy their disinterested (I do not mean uninterested) love of learning." He pulls back our language and behavior, from gold stars to beatings, to reveal a pathological subtext of fear, rage, hate, and shame that flows through the modern education system like lava.

This is a good book for any parent or teacher to read. I like the ideal of unschooling (I confess, John Taylor Gatto is also on my bookshelves), unfortunately, our society has done a really bad job of making that possible. Short of that, learning to recognize the pathology and taking steps to mitigate it is hugely helpful. One also has to wonder if the "elite, private school" route is the way to go, at least in the younger years. I have heard from private school students that they were amazed at how nice their private school colleagues were compared to the public schools they'd come from. Having gone to a private medical school, and seeing my daughter in the first few years of private school, I think that is more an effect of the demographic than the institution.

On the flip side, drawing from modern medicine: perhaps the small, private school is to a large public school system as the private practitioner physican is to a large hospital system. A large public school system has access to more specialists: psychologists, occupational therapists, drawers full of PhD educators. Systemic changes are made slowly and deliberately. There's less room for the individual teacher to defy the evidence.

We have been struggling with how to get our kids to do chores through positive reinforcement. No small problem is that our 6 year-old son responds differently to in negotiations than our 9 year-old daughter. Parents start thinking about allowances and chores while their first kid is still in utero. I suspect society has molded us all to fall into similar logical ruts on this issue. For example, many, if not most, parents, seem to have pretty strong opinions on allowance by the time the first child is 3, which is entirely too early. Three-year olds generally love to help around the house. I think what you're seeing is a young child's simple desire to please. Barring catastrophe, they will grow beyond that.

Matt Murphy had a great insight on the "young individual's" perspective on the hn-parents list (paraphrased here), 

... in assigning a child chores without compensation, one is training the child either to develop a neurosis about messes (based on shame), to submit to authority, or simply to enjoy pleasing others' arbitrary whims.

A few dollars could go a long way toward making them enthusiastic. In refusing to pay, the work is coerced, there's an attempt being made to change the child's view on how unpleasant a bit of clutter should feel or how satisfying a clean room should feel.

Money is a way of mapping between two separate individuals' utility functions.  As young individuals with their own utility functions, children deserve to benefit from this as well.

Don't get me wrong, our kids help around the house. But they are also getting old enough to realize they have goals of their own unrelated and at times in conflict with the family's plan, especially our 9 yo daughter. She's getting crafty, clearly willing to negotiate. Which warms my heart. But, rather than negotiating every single chore, which can be extremely time-consuming and often counter-productive, I thought it made sense to negotiate a settlement. How much do you pay? Enough to take money off the table. 

Several months ago, we attempted to itemize the steps of individual chores, resulting in several large index cards, each with a price. Most of it caused no change whatsoever. Two signals we did get:

• Our kids will pick up dog poo for $4/lb
• Our kids will not fold laundry if the incentive is watching a video while folding. They'll fold one t-shirt and then watch the video

Under that system, they at least had the opportunity to save money. My daughter managed to save over $100 (over several months) just from picking up dog poo. I didn't save $100 inflation-adjusted dollars by the age of 8: that's about $50 when I was a kid, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics, which I didn't save until I got a paper route in the summer after 4th grade.

Coincidently, I recently returned from a month helping in Japan, during which time my wife and kids got a rescue puppy to replace me. So now we have two dogs. A week or two after I got back (that is, after mowing the lawn and paying out record sums for dog poo), my wife and I decided to re-do the incentives for chores.

Over a week or so, we did our own little skunkworks project. We recorded our observations of the pseudo-natural rhythm for the week (make beds every morning, put away dishes every night, baths on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and once on the weekend, gymnastics on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, etc). We brainstormed various incentive schemes. Screen time was clearly out. My wife favored an allowance because she wanted the kids to be members of the team. I favored paying for chores because, clearly, they were eager to pick up dog poo at $4/lb. After much debate and Googling, we went with a mix.

We sorted chores into inevitable daily chores (making the bed, doing the dishes), and extras (cleaning the bathroom, picking up dog poo, etc). As we went, we added a few chores, and merged some others. We assigned values to a weekly allowance and each extra chore. Then we called the kids in to negotiate. Just like a contract, we went back and forth, initialling each paragraph as we went. My six year-old son was actually bartering prices down from our starting points, clearly responding to my wife's efforts to resist my daughter's bid to increase prices. The kids managed to argue us up to $2 per bathroom, and $2/lb for dog poo (we had re-aligned that to $1/lb as part of the ground-up program)

My daughter had a real stroke of genius: they could roll dice before dinner to see who would set the table, and again after dinner, to see who would do the dishes. This was further refined so the person who rolls higher gets to pick: dishes, Khan Academy, or Synthesia. So now dishes still suck, but it's thoroughly fair, and the "winner" is thrilled to spend the time on serious, self-paced learning. There was a good deal of angst the first couple of times the dice were rolled. After dinner on Sunday, when our son had already set the table, and our daughter rolled an 11, it was pretty tense, until he rolled a 12!  She was pretty cranky but got over it as she worked, and actually did some extra work to mend her reputation (one rule is you have to do your work with dignity and respect). Yet they both unabashedly look forward to the dice.

We framed the negotiated settlement, initials, scratchouts, and all, and hung it in the kitchen, next to the chalkboard. Directly underneath that, we hung a clipboard with worksheets to keep track of the week's chores. Really, if they do everything, we get a clean house daily for about $20-30 a week. Find a maid that will work at those rates.

This gives them a framework for more sophisticated negotiations, and provides them an object lesson in the contracting process, and some experience with the difference between salaried work and fee-for-service. This also gives us privileges we can take away, so, like timeouts, it's a negative reinforcer if necessary. Not the main goal, but a potentially useful side effect, e.g., the prime rule at the top of the list is that chores will be done with dignity and respect, or no payment will be rendered.

These are living documents, and we've already been making and recording changes, but it has been surprising just in a day to see the turnaround in how our kids approach their housework now that we have buy-in. Who knows, this could all go out not with a bang, but a whimper, but, for now, for me, this is shaping up to be in object lesson: if kids are more influenced by peers than parents, avoid paternalism and treat them as peers (earthshaking, I know, I know).

The Cr48 is good for about 20% of what I do: personal email, browsing the web, and occasional system administration. All of which I can do with an iPad. I like the hardware, presumably a larger SSD is just a matter of time, and it wins in a few interesting use cases, but the lack of peripherals and lack of software for it are major downers. The lack of reliable access to my work product when I'm off the grid will prevent me from ever relying on the central thesis of this device.

I really like the machine itself. They nailed the form factor for a laptop perfectly. It feels solid. I know a lot of people like the macbook brick, and so do I, but the Cr48's plastic shell is solid enough to be reassuring. The keyboard is very nice, especially the chiclet keys and the big ctrl and alt keys, though I would switch the alt and ctrl keys relative to each other, because my left pinky is trained to the Apple cmd key, which lives next to the space bar. The rubberized coating needs to go, but they adapted well by issuing us a giant sticker to go over the front lid, and then a bunch of little stickers to decorate the big sticker. My kids loved decorating my laptop. The rubberized coating has still worn off at the corners, but the big mess on the front lid has simply not occurred.

The Cr48 was somewhat useful at a major conference. It's long battery life made it very attractive, but its almost complete lack of offline functionality is a big downer. I used it at the week-long AAOS convention to take notes, and it performed much better than a tablet or standard laptop. The iPad is inadequate for serious note-taking keyboard use. A standard laptop doesn't have sufficient battery life. And, really, the Cr48 was a serious fail until I figured out how that qemacs was available. The web apps are worse than useless at a convention where 3g is spotty at best: I actually lost some work when trying to save when the web app dumped after I had lost my connection. As most people won't be interested in "flipping the dev switch" to use a command line utility like qemacs, I don't forsee this being a selling point for the Cr48.

The Cr48 does not have Citrix support or CAC card support, and it's not FIPS certified, so I can't remote into the clinical applications I use as a physician, including work email. I have no love for Outlook, but I have to use it. The Cr48 doesn't have a wired ethernet port, so neither I nor anyone else, can use it on a military network.

The Cr48 was a net loss of carry-on space on a flight from LA to Tokyo. By the time I flew back, I'd figured out that I could pre-load a book in google books, which is nice for casual reading, but if I'm reading something, I intend to be learning something, so I want to be able to do markup, which isn't possible in Google Books even when it's online. The Cr48 has a bare-bones media player, but isn't well adapted to storing a few movies and playing them. While in Japan, aside from not having 3g, I also found Google has a real issue believing that even in Japan, English is my primary language.

One plus of the Cr48 was that I had an incentive to really dig through the less common Google resources, like the Chrome App Store. I found some gems, like SourceKit, a text editor in the browser, which syncs to Dropbox, and DeviantArt's Muro. Muro is an online graphics editor, and supports Wacom tablets. Unfortunately, the Cr48 does not support Wacom tablets. I was also motivated to use Google's new cloud print service, al biet using an unofficial python interface, installed on a server I happen to run in the house. Again, not a selling point for the masses, but, since I'm learning python, I liked it.

A fairly non-trivial thing about using a Cr48 is that I find myself trying to use Chrome anywhere I can, and to that end, the Chrome Alternate Installer has been clutch on more than one occasion. It basically allows you to install chrome, including its flash player, for the current user, instead of fussing with admin rights. Unfortunately, Chrome's bookmark sync has not worked well for me, so I currently sync without that and use Xmarks for bookmarks management, along with lastpass for password management.

My mom, in a house with four computers, is buying an imac specifically for the quality of Skype (and presumably facetime). The Cr48 does not support Skype.

My kids can use Khan Academy on the Cr48, but the trackpad is still finicky, especially the right-click, er, two-finger click. The other truly educational gaming experience my kids have taken to is Synthesia. I haven't tested a MIDI controller on the Cr48, but, then again, what program would it control?

My wife's favorite use of the ipad is to watch a show online with her headphones, or read a book, curled up on the couch, after the kids have been put to bed. The Cr48 does not support netflix, and doesn't do Hulu very well either. Google Books has challenges.

I have a few O'Reilly books, like Mark Lutz's Learning Python from O'Reilly books. How can I read these on my Cr-48? I have tried 

uploading the epub to a server and then grabbing it via url through MagicScroll, but MagicScroll has had mixed success on the Chrome beta channel. I figured the O'Reilly eBook would have the best chance, but the APK, DAISY, ePub and Mobi formats are all unrecognized. The PDF downloads and opens, but I can't annotate, highlight, bookmark, or any other ebook function. I bought the book again through Google Books but have the same problems: no sync*.

As a nerd, it has been interesting getting somewhat more personal service from Google. These are clearly smart people working hard on some deep challenges. That said, as a person just trying to get through the day, "We have escalated your issue to our Engineering dept" usually means I won't be accomplishing that any time soon.

One slightly bizarre experience was the forum for Cr48 testers: There's no organization of the threads, so it's a bit like trying to talk to random strangers on the sidewalk who are walking the other way.

Somethings I hadn't foreseen contemplating, like how cloud services interact. This was something Vint Cerf was talking about at Stanford: the lack of APIs between cloud services is a real problem: how can google docs retrieve your document from S3, do things to it, and put it back? What about version control of that document? Should versioning go with the document? One thing I never used before but really enjoy on the Cr48 has been sidetabs. I find they are a much better use of pixels for the form factor. I just wish the top bar would roll up so those pixels reserved for top tabs could be returned to the content.

I wanted to hold off on my review of the cr48 until I had some original contributions to add. I think I'm there. The Street recently cited ChromeOS as Apple's biggest threat. My biggest complaint is that this is not a viable laptop for productive work when it's off the grid. The lack of peripherals is close behind. Storage can be fixed. Given the above, and numerous other luke-warm reviews of the Cr48 concept, I can't see this coming to pass in the next 5 years. Maybe in 10, but the relative penetration of some underlying technologies may well affect the outcome more than Google or Apple themselves.

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*The Google Books problem is actually worse: it needs high number ports (3489 or something nearby), which precludes reading any books from many military, and probably corporate, networks. Looking into the future, as a military physician, I would like to have electronic textbooks available, but for now, Google Books is off the table.