Sunday, June 7, 2009

Chocolate facts

Watched this video today:

Wonder how much of that is true. Video provides the following information.

* Chocolate comes from a plant that is native to central america. Cacao beans or coco beans are processed to get coco butter and sugar will be added. white chocolate is sugar added to cocoa butter. Milk chocolate is milk plus sugar and coco butter.
* History of chocolate goes back to 1400 BC. Aztecs made a drink out of coco beans. Chocolate comes from the Aztec word XOCOLaaTL, which is actually two words that mean bitter water. They brew coco beans like a coffee and so name is from its taste.
* Average american consume about 22 pounds of chocolate every year. That is equivalent to 2.8 billion pounds every year for entire country.
* 92% of them eat milk chocolate that does not have any anti-oxidants.
* Hershey produce 45%, Mars produce 15%, Nestle produce 15% and most chocolate is produced from America.
* It takes 27000 square miles of land to produce that chocolate. That area is equivalent to three times size of NJ, a little larger than west Virginia or little bit smaller than south Carolina.
* Hershey standard bar has 20% coco. Coco percentage goes down, when sugar percentage goes up.
* Dark chocolate is better than milk chocolate. Dark chocolate has anti-oxidants.  Anti oxidants help fight cell damage, fight cell deterioration and combat stress. They have benefits.
* Most chocolates on the market are processed with alkalites that causes loss of anti-oxidants.
* Consuming 40gm of dark chocolate causes anti oxidants to stay in blood for six hours.
* Chocolate contains stearic acid, a fatty acid. Stearic acid does not cause to rise cholesterol level. It is similar to coconut ingredients.
* Dark chocolate has also some minerals in it, magnesium, copper, iron and zinc.
* Chocolate has readdictive drugs and substances, out of which two are drugs, sugar, caffeine and theo-bromine.
* Caffeine and Nicotine are natural pesticides developed by some plants to keep bugs from eating those pants.
* Theo-bromine is stimulus substance deadly to horses, dogs, cats, parrots and rodents.
* There is no living animal on earth that would eat raw coco bean.
* Humans have ability to metabolite and eliminate theo-bromin.
* Giving little bit of chocolate to pets make them sick and too much of them can cause them to die.
* Pet clinics are overwhelmed during the Halloween times because owners gave their Halloween candy to their pets.
* It is outlawed to give chocolate to race horses, because it causes unfair advantage and is going to speed up the racing ability.
* Plants have bitter flavor in taste as survival mechanism.
* Theobromine is considered to be a contributing factor to acid reflex, since it relaxes the muscle between stomach and aciphex.
* Chocolate has high calorie content. Standard Hershey milk chocolate with serving size 55gm contains 270 calories, 140 calories from fat and 16 gms of total fat which is equal to 25% of total fat for the day.
* Milk chocolate has 33gm of carbohydrates and 31gm of those are from sugar, that is equivalent to 7.5 tea spoons of sugar.
* Chocolate has no vitamins, fiber and enzymes.
* Average chocolate has 220 calories. That is equivalent to calories from one whole apple, one and half oranges or a cup of whole strawberries.
* Chocolate has very few healthy benefits but is not as good as eating fruit.

Friday, January 16, 2009

Firefox is not free!

See firefox snippet in Townhall meeting to announce the QDDR.

MS. GREENBERG: Okay. Our next question comes from Jim Finkle:

Can you please let the staff use an alternative web browser called Firefox? I just – (applause) – I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was surprised that State doesn’t use this browser. It was approved for the entire intelligence community, so I don’t understand why State can’t use it. It’s a much safer program. Thank you. (Applause.)

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, apparently, there’s a lot of support for this suggestion. (Laughter.) I don’t know the answer. Pat, do you know the answer? (Laughter.)

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: The answer is at the moment, it’s an expense question. We can --

QUESTION: It’s free. (Laughter.)

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: Nothing is free. (Laughter.) It’s a question of the resources to manage multiple systems. It is something we’re looking at. And thanks to the Secretary, there is a significant increase in the 2010 budget request that’s pending for what is called the Capital Investment Fund, by which we fund our information technology operations. With the Secretary’s continuing pushing, we’re hoping to get that increase in the Capital Investment Fund. And with those additional resources, we will be able to add multiple programs to it.

Yes, you’re correct; it’s free, but it has to be administered, the patches have to be loaded. It may seem small, but when you’re running a worldwide operation and trying to push, as the Secretary rightly said, out FOBs and other devices, you’re caught in the terrible bind of triage of trying to get the most out that you can, but knowing you can’t do everything at once.

SECRETARY CLINTON: So we will try to move toward that. When the White House was putting together the stimulus package, we were able to get money that would be spent in the United States, which was the priority, for IT and upgrading our system and expanding its reach. And this is a very high priority for me, and we will continue to push the envelope on it. I mean, Pat is right that everything does come with some cost, but we will be looking to try to see if we can extend it as quickly as possible.

It raises another issue with me. If we’re spending money on things that are not productive and useful, let us know, because there are tens of thousands of people who are using systems and office supplies and all the rest of it. The more money we can save on stuff that is not cutting edge, the more resources we’ll have to shift to do things that will give us more tools. I mean, it sounds simplistic, but one of the most common suggestions on the sounding board was having better systems to utilize supplies, paper supplies – I mean, office supplies – and be more conscious of their purchasing and their using.

And it reminded me of what I occasionally sometimes do, which I call shopping in my closet, which means opening doors and seeing what I actually already have, which I really suggest to everybody, because it’s quite enlightening. (Laughter.) And so when you go to the store and you buy, let’s say, peanut butter and you don’t realize you’ve got two jars already at the back of the shelf – I mean, that sounds simplistic, but help us save money on stuff that we shouldn’t be wasting money on, and give us the chance to manage our resources to do more things like Firefox, okay?

Yeah.