Thursday, June 05, 2008

Take a Hike !


Trails of the South

Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

THE FOREST WAKENS A misty morning on a section of the Appalachian Trail outside Blairsville on Blood Mountain, the trail’s highest point in Georgia.

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By DAVE CALDWELL
Published: June 6, 2008

THOUSANDS of hikers invade the Appalachian Mountains south of the Mason-Dixon line when the weather turns warm, eager to buck the daily grind — not to mention the heat and haze — by tackling trails that cross rivers, pass refreshing waterfalls and often lead to breathtaking vistas shrouded in mist. These escapes are cool, literally.

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Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

FLORA A wild azalea on Blood Mountain in Georgia.

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MOUNTAIN PASS A glade on the West Fork Rail Trail, which runs near a branch of the Greenbrier River outside Durbin, W. Va.

Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

SAFE KEEPING Hiking boots stowed at a trail shop on Blood Mountain.

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FOR NATURE LOVERS Wild Geranium maculatum on the West Fork Rail Trail in West Virginia.

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Hikers at the summit of Sharp Top in Virginia.

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A hiker on the Neels Gap to Woody Gap section of the Appalachian Trail on Blood Mountain in Georgia

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Hikers admired the waterfalls along the Greenbrier River during a rainy hike on the High Falls Trail.

Over six decades, Allen de Hart, a professor emeritus of history and cultural affairs at Louisburg College in North Carolina, has hiked many of the trails in the Southeast, and he has written several books and trail guides on hiking in West Virginia, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

Below are five two-day hikes in the Southeast recommended by Mr. de Hart.

West Virginia

FIRST DAY The West Fork Rail Trail, created about 20 years ago from an abandoned CSX line, is a moderate hike of about 25 miles (or bicycle ride or cross-country ski jaunt) that partly runs parallel to the West Fork of the Greenbrier River. Mr. de Hart recommends the trail because it offers spectacular scenery by traversing forests, pastureland, rock slopes and wildlife areas, including beaver ponds. The West Fork Rail Trail and the 300-mile Allegheny Trail pass through the town of Durbin, which is on U.S. 250, less than 10 miles from the Virginia line. Within a few miles of Durbin, the southern terminus of the hike, is a stretch that has fishing pools, wildflower meadows and rock formations.

SECOND DAY The High Falls Trail is a 2.9-mile hike that ascends Shavers Mountain. The High Falls Trail leads hikers to panoramic waterfalls that Mr. de Hart, who wrote the “Monongahela National Forest Hiking Guide” with Bruce Sundquist, considers to be among the most outstanding in the state. The trail starts on relatively flat fields but becomes steeper and rockier. The descent is gradual, then leads to an old logging road, and a trail ventures through a forest of cherry and birch trees before descending to the falls.

WHERE TO STAY The Hermitage Inn (304-456-4808; www.hermitagemotel.com), on the banks of the Greenbrier River, is in Bartow, two miles east of Durbin at U.S. 250 and Route 92. Rates range from $69 to $89. The Durbin & Greenbrier Valley Railroad (304-636-9477; www.mountainrail.com) runs a passenger rail route along the river.

MORE www.destinationdurbin.com.

Virginia

FIRST DAY Between Roanoke and Lynchburg, the Peaks of Otter — Flat Top, Sharp Top and Harkening Hill (sorry, no otters) — form a triangle, with a lake and a visitor center in the middle at the Blue Ridge Parkway. The peaks offer a network of 15 miles of trails that have magnificent scenery and a multitude of varieties of trees, shrubs and wildflowers. Mr. de Hart recommends a 6.1-mile hike of moderate difficulty that includes the Fallingwater Cascades Trail, the Flat Top Trail and the Cross Rock Trail.

SECOND DAY Suggested is a hike of 10.7 miles that combines Sharp Top Trail, Elk Run Trail, Harkening Hill Trail and the Johnson Farm Loop Trail. The Sharp Top Trail, a three-mile round trip, is the region’s most popular trail peak. The trek is strenuous (and shuttle buses are offered), but those who make it to the top are treated to views of Bedford, Va., and the Piedmont to the east, the Shenandoah Valley to the south and the Blue Ridge Mountains to the north and south. Buzzards Roost, on a half-mile spur trail off Sharp Top, also offers picturesque vi ews. Not surprisingly, a restored farmhouse, with a barn and garden, is the highlight of the Johnson Farm Loop Trail.

WHERE TO STAY The Peaks of Otter Lodge (800-542-5927; www.peaksofotter.com) is in Bedford, at Milepost 81 of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The lodge has 60 rooms and overlooks Abbott Lake. Deluxe double rooms are available for $109 to $120 a night. A $26.99 Friday night seafood buffet (with frogs’ legs) and a $14.95 Sunday country buffet (with Southern fried chicken) are offered at the Lake View Restaurant in the lodge.

MORE www.nps.gov/archive/blri/peaks.htm.

North Carolina and Tennessee

FIRST DAY According to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the Boulevard Trail got its name because the rocky area, in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, looked nothing like a boulevard before the trail was built. Mr. de Hart, who wrote “North Carolina Hiking Trails” for the Appalachian Mountain Club, recommends entering the Appalachian Trail from the Newfound Gap parking area, hiking north on the trail for 2.7 miles, then turning left on the Boulevard Trail, which crosses the Tennessee border. The five-mile trail leads first to Mount Kephart, to an overlook called the Jump-Off, then to Mount Le Conte, elevation 6,593 feet.

SECOND DAY Charlies Bunion is about a one-mile trek north on the Appalachian Trail from the junction of the Boulevard Trail. Horace Kephart thought the peak looked like a bunion on Charlie Conner, his hiking companion to Mount Le Conte. Conservancy guides say the views from Charlies Bunion are extraordinary. There is a loop trail south of Charlies Bunion that passes around the west side of Fodder Stack that provides the best vistas, with Mount Kephart, the Jump-Off and Mount Le Conte to the west and north; gorges and the Great Valley of Tennessee and Cumberland Plateau to the north; and a jagged formation of bare slate known as the Sawteeth Range to the east.

WHERE TO STAY The LeConte Lodge (865-429-5704; www.lecontelodge.com) is open late March to late November, although the lodge and the conservancy say that reservations can be difficult to get. The cabins have no electricity, but meals are served. The nightly rate for a three-bedroom lodge, which can accommodate up to 12 people, is $768 plus meals.

MORE www.nps.gov/grsm. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park headquarters are in Gatlinburg, Tenn.

South Carolina

FIRST DAY Table Rock State Park, in Pickens County, S.C., northwest of Greenville, got its name from the legend of a Cherokee chief god who used a flat granite mountain as a dinner table in Sah-ka-na-ga, the Great Blue Hills of God. Table Rock Trail, which begins at the nature center in the park, is a 6.8-mile loop that Mr. de Hart described as strenuous in “Hiking South Carolina Trails.” Of particular note on the trail is an ascent through an open forest in which large boulders are perched on the side of the 3,124-foot-high mountain, as if they could roll down at any minute. Just beneath the summit of Table Rock Mountain is an area that has views of Table Rock Lake and smaller foothills.

SECOND DAY There are two options that begin and end at the nature center: the Pinnacle Mountain Trail, a difficult seven-mile hike, and the Carrick Creek Trail, a 1.9-mile hike considered easy to moderate. On the descent of the first hike, hikers are treated to a view of farms and forests south of the pinnacle, with wild quinine and blackberries growing on the damp rock face of the mountain. Hikers cross Carrick Creek a number of times on the second hike. “Sheets of water seemed to slide through the flumes, lightly from rocky lips, and cascade over one another at rugged strips of rocks,” Mr. de Hart wrote in “Hiking South Carolina Trails.” The creek is a wonderful sight, but it is not a swimming hole or a sliding board.

WHERE TO STAY There are 15 furnished cabins of varying sizes with screened porches and fireplaces at Table Rock State Park. Bed linens and basic cooking utensils are supplied. Nightly rates are $60 to $119. Reservations can be made at (866) 345-7275 or through the South Carolina State Parks Web site.

MORE www.southcarolinaparks.com.

Georgia

FIRST DAY According to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy’s hiking guide for North Carolina and Georgia, Blood Mountain is the highest point of the Georgia part of the trail and, as a result, has become very popular. Mr. de Hart recommends a 10.6-mile stretch from Neels Gap, off U.S. 19-129, southwest to Woody Gap, off Route 60. The trail ascends Blood Mountain, elevation 4,461 feet, over 2.4 miles from Neels Gap. The summit is open and rocky, but the views make it worth the trek. In the spring and early summer, the mountainside is covered with flowering rhododendrons, mountain laurels and azaleas. Summer temperatures are cool, and waterfalls abound.

SECOND DAY The Slaughter Creek Trail cuts 2.5 miles west from the Appalachian Trail near Blood Mountain to the Lake Winfield Scott Recreation Area, which has tent sites, swimming, a picnic area and restrooms. The lake, built in 1942 by the Civilian Conservation Corps and named for the 19th-century Army general who was known as Old Fuss and Feathers, is also accessible from Route 180 and via the one-mile Jarrard Gap Trail, which leaves the Appalachian Trail farther south than the Slaughter Creek Trail. The two trails, plus a portion of the Appalachian Trail, can be combined into a moderate eight-mile hike through the Chattahoochee National Forest, near North Carolina and Tennessee.

WHERE TO STAY The Blood Mountain Cabins and Country Store is on U.S. 19-129 at Neels Gap, near Blairsville, Ga. There are 14 cabins and 12 vacation homes for rent near Blood Mountain. Cabin rates are $79 to $99 a night and $389 to $469 a week, depending on the view. The country store sells maps, snacks and groceries.

MORE (800) 284-6866; www.bloodmountain.com.

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Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Cell phone freebies

State Of the Art

Cell Services Keep It Easy, and Free

Stuart Goldenberg

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By DAVID POGUE
Published: June 5, 2008

You hear it all the time: “These cellphones are too complicated, by cracky! I don’t want to play music or surf the Internet. I just want to make phone calls!”

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Ask ChaCha any kind of question and it will send an answer to your cellphone by text message.

It may turn out, though, that these complaints are misdirected. Maybe the real problem isn’t new features — it’s the complexity added to the phones’ designs.

But what if there were a way to add features without changing the phone itself?

There is. Several super-simple cellular services are so sweet and satisfying, you can’t believe they’re free. They work by recognizing your voice, so you don’t have to master anything new on the phone itself — all of the complexity is hidden from you.

Certain voice-driven freebies, in particular, have earned a permanent place on my phone’s speed-dial keys. All work alike: you dial an 800 number, speak your request and get the results in seconds, usually in the form of a text message on your phone.

(Yes, the sort of person who uses the phrase “by cracky” may be unfamiliar with the glories of text messaging, and may bristle at having to pay 10 cents a text message, or $5 a month for hundreds. But remember: the services described here don’t require you to master sending such messages — only receiving them, which requires no skill at all.)

800-GOOG-411. Cellphone carriers have plenty to be ashamed of. Case in point: when you dial 411 to look up a phone number, you’ll be billed $1.50 or $2.

If it’s a business or store you’re looking up, for heaven’s sake, dial 800-GOOG-411 instead. It’s a voice-activated, national phone directory run by Google. It’s fast and efficient, and there are no ads or charges.

A typical transcript goes like this. “GOOG411. What city and state?”

You: “New York, New York.”

Google: “New York, New York. What business name or category?”

You: “Empire State Building.”

Google: “Empire State Building! Searching. Top listing: Empire State Building on Fifth Avenue. I’ll connect you.”

And your call is connected, just as though you’d dialed yourself. Or you can interrupt by saying “details” (meaning, “read me the phone number and address”) or “text message” (meaning, “send that info to my cellphone, so I’ll have it in writing”).

For residential listings, you can dial 800-FREE411 (not a Google service), although you have to listen to a 20-second ad. And don’t miss Google’s free SMS service, which offers business phone numbers, weather, sports, flight info, and more (details at tinyurl.com/ymeupk). But neither of those services compares with the spectacular speed, convenience and reliability of GOOG411.

ChaCha. Here’s another voice-activated service (800-2CHACHA) — but this time, you can ask any question at all. “What’s that German word that means, ‘pleasure from other people’s pain’?” Or “Who ran against Abraham Lincoln for president?” Or “What’s on the front page of today’s New York Times?” Or “How do you jump the battery in a Prius?” Or “Where’s the cheapest gas in southeast Connecticut right now?” Or “What’s the last flight to New York out of O’Hare Airport?” Just about anything, in fact, you could find on the Web.

After 30 seconds, you get a text message confirming that ChaCha is working on your question. A minute or two later, you get the answer, typed out in friendly English (“Thanks for asking!”), as though there were a real person on the other end.

That’s because there is a real person. ChaCha employs thousands of amateur researchers across the United States to field your questions, find the answers online and shoot them back, with a link to the Web page where they found the information.

They’re paid $5 to $10 an hour, which may explain the occasional unhelpful replies. (Q: “Why do British and American cars drive on opposite sides of the road?” A: “Because the British have their steering wheels on the other side.” Gee, thanks.)

Even so, ChaCha does a tantalizingly good impersonation of a personal concierge who caters to your whims, and saves the day with amazing frequency. Best of all, there’s no fee, no software, no signup or registration; you can dial it right this instant.

Jott. What do you do when you get an idea you want to remember? A brainstorm, a to-do item, a reminder you want to set for yourself? Writing it down is the only solution — so most of the time, you don’t, because you’re driving, or you have no pen, or you’re away from your computer.

Meet Jott, your personal transcription service. You sign up at Jott.com by providing your cell number and e-mail address.

If you’re a Verizon customer, you must also request that your carrier’s “premium text-message block” be removed from your account. That safeguard is meant to protect people from racking up bills using premium texting services (which Jott is not). Votes to “American Idol” by text, for example, cost $1 a vote. (I found that out by asking ChaCha.)

From now on, Jott is your personal transcription service. Speed-dial 866-JOTT123, and the conversation goes like this:

Jott: “Who do you want to Jott?”

You: “Myself.”

Jott: “Jott yourself.”

You: “Great idea for Act 2! Doing the laundry, Minna finds lipstick on her husband’s collar and sues the detergent company.”

Five minutes later, the transcribed, typed message appears in your e-mail in-box, complete with an audio attachment of the recording — and, if you like, also on your phone as a text message.

You can also fill your Jott.com address book with other people’s names, or even add them to groups. That way, you can text your spouse by saying, “Hi, honeybones — can you turn off the oven at 6:30?,” or alert everyone on your team that you will be late for a meeting by placing a single phone call.

More advanced features: after you speak, the Jott lady says, “Do you want a reminder?” If you say yes, then you can speak the date and time when you want the transcript sent to your phone — a brilliant, free way to set a wake-up call, remind yourself to file quarterly taxes, buy a gift for your anniversary, whatever.

Reqall. Reqall is the same idea as Jott, but it’s primarily a reminder system — it even recognizes words like “buy” and “meeting” and stores transcripts as separate lists on the Web.

You can dictate reminders by calling 866-9REQALL, or send them by instant message, e-mail, text message or Web browser plug-in. Later, Reqall tries to remind you of things at the right time, using e-mail, text message or instant message (your choice).

Alas, the accuracy of the speech recognition (which, as with Jott, is done by a combination of humans and software) leaves something to be desired.

All of these services are so good, so efficient and so free, you have a right to be suspicious. How will they make money?

GOOG411 is technically still in testing, but even once it’s fully baked, Google has no intention of charging for it.

ChaCha is trying to sell its services to cell carriers and syndicate its system to other information providers, and one day intends to attach relevant ads to its text-message answers. (The company insists it will not spam or repurpose your phone number.)

As for Jott and Reqall: technically, they, too, are in beta testing. When they go live, the companies plan to charge for the advanced features, but they will always offer a free basic service.

The bottom line: There’s a new Internet bubble blowing, folks, and at least in the short term, it means freebies for all. All of these companies, and more, are beginning to party like it’s 1999.

So yes, it’s conceivable that the free ride may end someday. But in the meantime, enjoy it while it lasts. There’s no reason not to start using these life-changing freebies this very day.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com



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Sunday, June 01, 2008

Time & Gardens

Home Work
Time Presses the Gardener, if Not the Garden

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By PERDITA BUCHAN
Published: June 1, 2008

LOOKING out the window to see who was at the bird feeder, I noticed buds on the Carolina jessamine. It was one of the first things I had planted in the garden; when I found it at the nursery, I was transported back to an island off the Georgia coast where it climbed high into the trees, perfuming the air and showering me with golden petals. That was eight years ago, and it had never bloomed.
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I rushed outside to be sure, and, yes, there were quite a few delicate pale yellow buds. I was thrilled, but eight years is a long time, and that thought brought a faint chill to the bright spring afternoon. Time hovers over me and the garden. Time does that a lot these days.

Gardeners will tell you smugly that you can’t have a garden overnight, although I have seen them put in pretty fast, mature trees and all, in upscale California developments. But for the rest of us the garden is a process, and our relationship to that process depends on our own age.

Eight years ago, when I started to garden, I wouldn’t have bought a parrot. Parrots are extremely long-lived and get very attached, and one would easily outlast me. Of course, gardens are meant to outlast their creators; world-famous gardens can be centuries old, and I well remember the poignancy of finding clumps of lilacs near the old cellar holes of long-vanished houses in the Vermont woods. Just as I can imagine a life in which I would grow old with an African gray parrot, I can imagine what it would have been like to garden in my 20s and 30s, translating to my flower beds that unhurried youthful horizon. I could have experimented more because I wouldn’t have seen every lost plant as lost time, simply as an interesting experiment. There would have been plenty of occasions to plant it again or to plant something else.

I would have taken the chances I avoid now, just as I took chances then with transient jobs and transitory people. I could have planted an acorn and looked forward to an oak. A sapling planted when my daughter was born, for instance, would be huge and bowery now, and my grandchildren could play in its shade.

The great English gardeners Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West began designing gardens when they were in their 30s. In my 30s, I borrowed other people’s gardens — large gardens like the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, especially on Lilac Sunday, when I wandered drunk on the fragrance of hillsides of lilac; small gardens belonging to city friends; and everything in between.

I spent most summers in England and, with everything from Kensington and Kew to family gardens, there was plenty to admire. Staying with my cousin Emma, shuttling between her gardens in Herefordshire and Scotland, I learned about 19th-century roses and the charm of mixing flowers and herbs.

However, the garden I really considered mine was the chapel garden of the school where I lived and worked. Stone steps led down through mountain laurel to a sweep of lawn bordered by beds of peonies, poppies and other perennials against tall dark hedges of arborvitae. It had been planned to bloom in June for graduation ceremonies, but when snow fell and the lamp by the chapel was lit, it looked like the entrance to Narnia.

Propertyless, I squandered decades, and now here I am, seduced by the selective tangle of gardens pictured in magazines, a carelessness that I know takes years to achieve. I guess you could use annuals to similar, if brief, effect, but a garden full of cosmos, zinnias, morning glories and the like would have no structure. A garden needs shrubs and trees. It needs bones, and bones take time.

My garden in coastal New Jersey, when I finally acquired it, had trees and shrubs, but except for two white lilacs and a native cherry, they are not ones I would have chosen. Yet I know if I took out the Norway maples, it would take 20 years to grow shade trees of similar size. So I live with them and their endless seedlings.

There is no question that time has shaped, and will continue to shape, my garden. Time tells me that I will never have allées of anything, that copper beeches need many years to mature, bluebells spread slowly, peonies can take seasons to flower, even lavender is slow to produce bushes the size of the ones in Emma’s borders. At some point in life, you realize that certain avenues are closed to you. If you haven’t become a doctor or a ballerina, you probably never will.

I no longer buy those mail-order perennials in the three-inch pots; I go for gallon containers. Reading the catalogs, I look for “vigorous grower, flowers in first season.” My heart sinks at “slow to establish.” Even “vigorous but well mannered” is doubtful. I consider fruit trees that flower young, but flowers on a spindly sapling, despite their adolescent bravura, don’t have much presence.

I want to plant Baptisia “Purple Smoke,” but when I read “mature plants in three to five years can bear over 50 blooming stalks,” I move on to Baptisia “Twilite Prairie Blues” — “long lived, easily grown, quickly maturing.”

I have had slow starters in addition to the jessamine. For five years, I got no blooms from either the blue “President Lincoln” lilac, a favorite from Lilac Sundays, or the trumpet vine I had planted. I tried everything — applications of phosphorous, girdling the roots of the lilac. Finally I was rewarded. The trumpet vine bloomed for the first time last summer, and this year “President Lincoln” came into its own. But I have decided to pass up “Adelaide Dunbar,” the gorgeous dark purple double lilac I covet; five years seems too long a wait.

If you could be sure of your garden’s permanence, you might take the long view, in the spirit of seeing beyond your own earthly years. But over the fate of a garden you have no control. My mother had her garden for 40 years, and it already had mature plantings from the 1920s. When the house was sold, the buyer tore out the box hedges and much else.

So I live in the garden present, resisting the temptation to plant an overnight forest of bamboo or the royal paulownia tree, advertised in the back pages of magazines, that grows 10 feet in one year and is listed as invasive in a number of states. There are even days in summer when I am staggered by how much I have managed to cram into the space and time my garden has occupied. So I am willing to garden for a limited future, hopeful that something, like the lilacs in the Vermont woods, will remain.

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Post Workout Recovery

Phys Ed
Swallow This

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By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS
Published: June 1, 2008

From the perspective of an athlete, few things top the virtuous satisfaction that comes from a hard workout. That 10-mile run, that 1,500-meter pool sprint, that hour with the free weights. Makes you feel great, right? You’ll do it again tomorrow, for sure. But then it hits — the aftermath.
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Within a few hours, your muscles begin sending vicious little reminders about your impressive efforts. Delayed-onset muscle soreness, as it’s called, settles in roughly 12 to 24 hours after an intense bout of training, especially if it involved unfamiliar or extreme movements. The affected muscles become so tender and strained that the process of rising from bed the next morning becomes a challenge.

Even if you haven’t arrived at this sorry state, repeated hard workouts can tax the body in insidious ways. Muscles, over the course of an hour or so of serious work, use up most of their stored energy. Without remediation, those muscles won’t respond as well during your next workout. They’ll be more prone to injury. You’ll be slower. The 70-year-old from down the street will pass you on the running path.

Completing a hard workout, then, is just the first step. You also have to undo all the damage you’ve just done.

Start with your postworkout meal. The regeneration of your muscles begins, improbably as it may seem, with that. “Back in the early ’90s, most athletes, especially runners and cyclists, were preoccupied with carbohydrates,” says John Ivy, the chairman of the department of kinesiology and health education at the University of Texas in Austin and one of the pioneers of research into exercise recovery. This was in the heyday of carbo-loading, when athletes were convinced that the more pasta and bread they ate before a hard workout, the more stored energy they’d have.

But carbo-loading in advance of exercise is not the most efficient way to stock muscles with fuel, physiologists now know, thanks in large part to research conducted by Ivy. When reviewing studies of diabetics, he became intrigued by similarities with his own tests on cyclists: for both groups, insulin in the blood was more effective at carrying energy into the muscles if those muscles had recently been active. “Exercise makes your muscles more responsive to insulin, and this insulin, in turn, increases glycogen muscle uptake,” he says. In other words, exercise prompts your muscles to absorb more fuel — glucose, which is stored as glycogen — from the bloodstream. (Carbo-loading can’t take advantage of this insulin response because it precedes, rather than follows, a workout.) Your body is actually primed by the exercise to help itself replenish lost fuel.

This improved insulin response, however, lasts only for a brief time after a workout. “You have a window of about 30 to 45 minutes,” Ivy says. After that, muscles become resistant to insulin and much less able to absorb glucose. Drinking or eating carbohydrates immediately after a strenuous workout, at a level of at least one gram per kilogram of body weight, is therefore essential to restoring the glycogen you’ve burned. Wait even a few hours and your ability to replenish that fuel drops by half.

It’s also crucial that you take in some protein. Though it poses challenges to strict vegetarians, the latest research shows quite definitively that protein spurs even more of an insulin response than do exercise and carbohydrates alone. “Protein co-ingestion can accelerate muscle glycogen repletion by stimulating endogenous insulin release,” says Luc van Loon, an associate professor of human movement sciences at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and the author of several important studies about recovery. Translation: coupling protein with carbohydrates prompts your muscles to store even more glycogen for use during your next workout.

“I’d advise people to have their recovery drink ready and waiting for them before they leave on a run or long bike ride,” Ivy says. Ivy himself often drinks low-fat chocolate milk, but any food or drink that includes both carbohydrates and protein — a recovery drink, a smoothie, yogurt — will work.

Then have a real meal within two hours. “You can maintain increased insulin levels and accelerated rates of recovery for about four to six hours if you continue eating,” Ivy says. Of course, you can also get by without such diet timing. “But you won’t recover as well,” Ivy continues. “You probably won’t be able to work out as hard on a daily basis.” The old guy who chugs his milk and Hershey’s syrup will not only pass you — he’ll lap you.

Meanwhile, there’s the physical damage inside your muscles to consider. Skeletal muscle is a unique kind of tissue, made up of long, thin fibers composed of several different proteins. These proteins interlock like Legos inside fibrous compartments called sarcomeres. Sarcomeres can stretch, but only so far.

During certain kinds of movements, some sarcomeres are pulled past their tolerance. The proteins inside separate, resulting in micro-tears throughout your muscle tissue. After a few hours, this leads to inflammation, swelling, stiffness and pain. (Eccentric muscle contractions, which lengthen muscles, are the main culprit in delayed-onset muscle soreness. Concentric contractions, in which muscles shorten — the upward motion of a biceps curl, for instance — cause less damage. That’s why running downhill makes you more sore the next day than running on flat ground.)

“This soreness is actually a good thing,” says Thomas Swensen, a professor of exercise and sports science at Ithaca College in Ithaca, N.Y., and a leading researcher into exercise recovery. “You want to stress the muscles. They will adapt positively.” The muscles will rebuild themselves, becoming stronger and more pliable. “That’s the whole point of hard training,” he says. “But it’s only effective if you recover fully.”

Which is another reason it’s important to up your protein intake after a workout; that same protein will also help speed muscle repair. “Exercise stimulates muscle protein synthesis and protein breakdown,” van Loon says. “However, without protein or amino acid ingestion, the net balance between protein synthesis and breakdown will remain negative” — i.e., your workouts, in the long run, may do your muscles more harm than good. But eat enough protein immediately after exercising and your muscles will repair themselves fully and become stronger.

Other postworkout recovery strategies, including many that athletes swear by, have far less scientific backing. Take massage. A 2000 study of British boxers showed that postworkout massage made the athletes only feel as if they were recovering quickly; they did not perform any better than those not massaged. Swensen’s own 2003 study of massage and recovery produced similar results as the British research.

These studies, however, like many others that have examined massage and exercise, were small and short-term. “It’s possible that if you followed athletes over the course of several months,” Swensen says, “you might see some benefits from massage. Those studies haven’t been done.”

Similar ambiguity clouds the use of ibuprofen after exercise. Although advertised as an anti-inflammatory, ibuprofen doesn’t always work as expected. A 2006 study of the drug’s use among ultra-marathoners found that it did not lessen muscle damage or soreness or reduce inflammation. And although most users do not experience side effects, ibuprofen has been associated with kidney damage and gastrointestinal bleeding.

Finally, there are ice and heat. Many elite athletes swear by a limb-numbing ice bath, and others prefer a soak in a hot tub — although little scientific evidence supports either remedy. Ice will effectively block the swelling associated with a serious injury, such as a sprain, but has not been proven to speed the healing of muscle tissue stressed by a workout. In a study published last year in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, people treated with ice after strenuous exercise later reported more pain upon standing than people immersed in tepid water. The study’s authors bluntly concluded that their research “challenges the wide use of [icing] as a recovery strategy by athletes.” Similarly, a study published in March in the European Journal of Applied Physiology found that, when it came to muscle recovery, a hot bath was little better than merely sitting quietly for a while.

So where does that leave you, the athlete who has just worked out so diligently? Mixing a smoothie or glass of chocolate milk, the one recovery strategy that satisfies both your inner physiologist and inner child. .

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Sunday, May 25, 2008

The Human Difference

Idea Lab

How Are Humans Unique?

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By MICHAEL TOMASELLO
Published: May 25, 2008

Human beings do not like to think of themselves as animals. It is thus with decidedly mixed feelings that we regard the frequent reports that activities once thought to be uniquely human are also performed by other species: chimpanzees who make and use tools, parrots who use language, ants who teach. Is there anything left?

You might think that human beings at least enjoy the advantage of being more generally intelligent. To test this idea, my colleagues and I recently administered an array of cognitive tests — the equivalent of nonverbal I.Q. tests — to adult chimpanzees and orangutans (two of our closest primate relatives) and to 2-year-old human children. As it turned out, the children were not more skillful overall. They performed about the same as the apes on the tests that measured how well they understood the physical world of space, quantities and causality. The children performed better only on tests that measured social skills: social learning, communicating and reading the intentions of others.

But such social gifts make all the difference. Imagine a child born alone on a desert island and somehow magically kept alive. What would this child’s cognitive skills look like as an adult — with no one to teach her, no one to imitate, no pre-existing tools, no spoken or written language? She would certainly possess basic skills for dealing with the physical world, but they would not be particularly impressive. She would not invent for herself English, or Arabic numerals, or metal knives, or money. These are the products of collective cognition; they were created by human beings, in effect, putting their heads together.

When you look at apes and children in situations requiring them to put their heads together, a subtle but significant difference emerges. We have observed that children, but not chimpanzees, expect and even demand that others who have committed themselves to a joint activity stay involved and not shirk their duties. When children want to opt out of an activity, they recognize the existence of an obligation to help the group — they know that they must, in their own way, “take leave” to make amends. Humans structure their collaborative actions with joint goals and shared commitments.

Another subtle but crucial difference can be seen in communication. The great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans — communicate almost exclusively for the purpose of getting others to do what they want. Human infants, in addition, gesture and talk in order to share information with others — they want to be helpful. They also share their emotions and attitudes freely — as when an infant points to a passing bird for its mother and squeals with glee. This unprompted sharing of information and attitudes can be seen as a forerunner of adult gossip, which ensures that members of a group can pool their knowledge and know who is or is not behaving cooperatively. The free sharing of information also creates the possibility of pedagogy — in which adults impart information by telling and showing, and children trust and use this information with confidence. Our nearest primate relatives do not teach and learn in this manner.

Finally, human infants, but not chimpanzees, put their heads together in pretense. This seemingly useless play activity is in fact a first baby step toward the creation of distinctively human social institutions. In social institutions, participants typically endow someone or something with special powers and obligations; they create roles like president or teacher or wife. Presidents and teachers and wives operate with special powers and obligations because, and only because, we all believe and act as if they fill these roles and have these powers. Two young children pretending together that a stick is a horse have thus taken their first step on the road not just to Oz but also toward inhabiting human institutional reality.

Human beings have evolved to coordinate complex activities, to gossip and to playact together. It is because they are adapted for such cultural activities — and not because of their cleverness as individuals — that human beings are able to do so many exceptionally complex and impressive things.

Of course, humans beings are not cooperating angels; they also put their heads together to do all kinds of heinous deeds. But such deeds are not usually done to those inside “the group.” Recent evolutionary models have demonstrated what politicians have long known: the best way to get people to collaborate and to think like a group is to identify an enemy and charge that “they” threaten “us.” The remarkable human capacity for cooperation thus seems to have evolved mainly for interactions within the group. Such group-mindedness is a major cause of strife and suffering in the world today. The solution — more easily said than done — is to find new ways to define the group.

Michael Tomasello is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.



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Friday, May 23, 2008

booklist

Books

Volumes to Go Before You Die

By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: May 23, 2008

An odd book fell into my hands recently, a doorstopper with the irresistible title “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.” That sounds like a challenge, with a subtle insult embedded in the premise. It suggests that you, the supposedly educated reader, might have read half the list at best. Like one of those carnival strength-testers, it dares you to find out whether your reading powers rate as He-Man or Limp Wrist.

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The book is British. Of course. The British love literary lists and the fights they provoke, so much so that they divide candidates for the Man Booker Prize into shortlist books and longlist books. In this instance Peter Boxall, who teaches English at Sussex University, asked 105 critics, editors and academics — mostly obscure — to submit lists of great novels, from which he assembled his supposedly mandatory reading list of one thousand and one. Quintessence, the British publishers, later decided that “books” worked better than “novels” in the title.

Even without Milton or Shakespeare, Professor Boxall has come up with a lot of books. Assume, for the sake of argument, that a reasonably well-educated person will have read a third of them. (My own score, tallied after I made this estimate, was 303.) That leaves 668 titles. An ambitious reader might finish off one a month without disrupting a personal reading program already in place. That means he or she would cross the finish line in the year 2063. At that point, upon reaching the last page of title No. 1,001, “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro, death might come as a relief.

Two potent factors make “1001 Books” (published in the United States in 2006 by Universe; $34.95) compelling: guilt and time. It plays on every serious reader’s lingering sense of inadequacy. Page after page reveals a writer or a novel unread, and therefore a demerit on the great report card of one’s cultural life. Then there’s that bullying title, with its ominous allusion to the final day when, for all of us, the last page is turned.

I appreciate the sense of urgency because I feel it myself. But when Professor Boxall brings death into the picture, he sets the bar very high. Let’s have a look at some of these mandatory titles. Not only is it not necessary to read “Interview With the Vampire” by Anne Rice before you die, it is also probably not necessary to read it even if, like Lestat, you are never going to die. If I were mortally ill, and a well-meaning friend pressed Anaïs Nin’s “Delta of Venus” into my trembling hands, I would probably leave this world with a curse on my lips.

If the “1001 Books” program seems quirky, even perverse, it’s no accident. “I wanted this book to make people furious about the books that were included and the books that weren’t, figuring this would be the best way to generate a fresh debate about canonicity, etc.,” Professor Boxall informed me in an e-mail message. And how.

The tastes of others are always inexplicable, but “1001 Books” embodies some structural irregularities. Arranged chronologically, it begins with the novel’s primordial period — everything up to 1800 — and then marches century by century into the present.

More than half the books were written after World War II. Already I feel my hackles rising. Does not the age of Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy dwarf its earnest, fitfully brilliant but ultimately punier successor? And if the 20th century can put up a fight, the real firepower is concentrated in the period of 1900 to 1930. Like many others, I admire Ian McEwan, but does he really merit eight novels on the list, to Balzac’s three?

Something is wrong here. Paul Auster gets six novels. Don DeLillo seven. Thackeray gets one: “Vanity Fair.”

Because nearly all the contributors hail from Britain and its former colonial possessions, there is a marked English-language bias and a tendency to favor obscure British novelists over obscure Spanish or Italian ones. Fair enough. A French or Russian version of “1001 Books” would impose its own prejudices. In fact, prejudice is what you want in a book like this, which works best as an annotated tip sheet for hungry readers on the prowl for overlooked writers and neglected works.

The United States gets a fair shake, and there may even be some overcompensation. Philip Roth shows up with no fewer than seven novels, including “The Breast,” and Edith Wharton is honored for four novels in addition to the two big ones, “The House of Mirth” and “The Age of Innocence.”

A little more Anglophilia might have been in order. Anthony Powell shows up with “A Dance to the Music of Time” — which is actually 12 novels, so Professor Boxall cheats — but I would have made a play for a few of the pre-“Dance” novels, like “Venusberg” or “Afternoon Men.”

On the other hand, the 20th-century bias eliminates Americans like Stephen Crane and William Dean Howells entirely, and a certain weakness for postmodernism squeezes out novels like “An American Tragedy” by Theodore Dreiser and “The Octopus” by Frank Norris. Drop a couple of Austers, and there would have been room.

As an experiment, I picked three novels, more or less at random, to see how they might change my quality of life: “Castle Rackrent” by Maria Edgeworth; “Tarka the Otter” by Henry Williamson; and “The Invention of Curried Sausage” by Uwe Timm.

Two of the three definitely provided a lift. “Castle Rackrent” (1800), a rollicking satire about trashy English aristocrats who bring ruin to an Irish estate, is worth reading just for the name Carrick O’Fungus, although literary historians prize it for being the first regional novel. That’s fine. Bonus points for getting there first, but the real reason to pick it up is Edgeworth’s slyly vicious picture of slovenly aristos on the loose.

Uwe Timm, a contemporary German writer unknown to me, now flies very high on my mental Amazon rankings. “The Invention of Curried Sausage” (1993) is an offbeat quest novel. The narrator, seeking the origins of currywurst, a German fast-food specialty, quizzes an elderly vendor and winds up with a big, fat history lesson. The issues are big, the prose brilliant, the execution deft. Eternal gratitude to Andrew Blades, theater reviewer for Stage magazine, who convinced Professor Boxall that this novel belonged on the list.

Tarka turned out to be too much otter for me, even though the back story is compelling. Williamson, returning from the trenches after World War I, took up a hermit’s life in north Devon, where he lived among the plants and the animals, observing closely and shunning humankind. “Tarka,” published in 1927, tells the story of a young male otter and its day-to-day struggles for food, a mate and security in a world populated by baying dogs and evil men. T. E. Lawrence loved it. I didn’t.

Since Professor Boxall is keen to start an argument, let me oblige. Drop the bloated, self-indulgent “Ada” from an otherwise correct Nabokov list (“Lolita,” “Pale Fire,” “Pnin”) and insert “Laughter in the Dark” or “The Gift.” J. M. Coetzee, with 10 novels, can afford to lose 1 or 2. That would open up space for “The Cossacks” by Tolstoy and “A Hero of Our Time” by Mikhail Lermontov. There should be another five Balzacs. I could go on and on.

One problem with drawing up recommended-reading lists is the urge to show off. No one gets points for proposing “The Brothers Karamazov.” Credibility comes with books like “The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein” by Marguerite Duras, or the reverse-chic audacity of insisting that “The Godfather” belongs on the same list as “The Trial.”

A little humility is in order. Easy for me to bring up “Envy” by Yuri Olyesha because I happen to have read it, or Jakob Arjouni, a German writer of Turkish descent who counts as one of my latest discoveries, largely because I was seduced by the title of a recent story collection, “Idiots.”

As a reality check, I opened “1001 Books” at random and beheld “A Kestrel for a Knave,” by Barry Hines, which I have not read, followed by “In Watermelon Sugar” by Richard Brautigan (ditto) and “The German Lesson” by Siegfried Lenz (started it, put it down, meant to get back to it, never did). No matter how well read you are, you’re not that well read. If you don’t believe it, pick up “1001” and start counting.

In his novel “Changing Places,” David Lodge — not on the list — introduces a game called Humiliation. Players earn points by admitting to a famous work that they have not read. The greater the work, the higher the point score. An obnoxious American academic, competing with a group of colleagues, finally gets the hang of the game and plays his trump card: “Hamlet.” He wins the game but is then denied tenure.

That’s the thing with reading lists like “1001 Books.” There’s always that host of the unread.

Come to think of it, I have a personal white whale: “Moby-Dick.” I really must read it before I die.

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Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Chores

Home Work

The Drudgery of Chores, and the Comfort

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By AKIKO BUSCH
Published: May 18, 2008

IT’S the pointlessness of it all that gets me first. First thing every morning, I am bound by habit to sweep off the porch — leaves if it is autumn, possibly snow in the winter, muddy footprints in spring, and, whatever time of year, the dust, the dog hair, the debris of daily life. The uselessness of the exercise never escapes me, because it seems to exist only to be done again. And again.

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Like so many chores that get done around the house, it lies in that category of work that needs to be started almost as soon as it has been completed, coming at us with a ruthlessness typical of all petty things; it’s done only to become undone, then done again. But I have come to accept that home is the place where I am expected to repeat myself, and stable domestic life seems to depend on a multitude of such tasks. Those countless cycles of labor, whether daily, weekly, seasonally or yearly — whether making the bed, folding the laundry or raking the leaves — are carried out for no other reason than to return me to some base line of domestic order.

While I know such chores may be the glue that keeps family life intact, they take me to a meditation on futility that drifts all too easily toward thoughts about the worthlessness of human enterprise. Emerson said, “Sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.” But it’s unlikely that the dull mechanics of housekeeping were on his mind; habit and destiny don’t seem like much of a match when it comes to washing the dishes or doing the laundry.

Besides, there is something inauspicious about beginning the day with the tedium of removing the imprints of daily life only so they can be made again. It sometimes seems like a perverse insistence on turning back the clock just a bit, as though to say none of it ever quite happened: My husband never came up the steps in his dusty boots, there was no breeze last night that blew the pine needles across the porch floor, nor did we leave the wineglasses on the table when we sat outside later listening to the owl. Which is to say, sweeping off the porch, along with all the other humdrum habits that follow throughout the day, seems simply like some kind of material effort to unravel the day before, some sort of ceremony to sameness.

Maybe the repetition of such mindless, rote tasks makes for some kind of intuitive calculus of hope: If I do something enough, it will start doing itself during those times when I don’t have the energy or the drive to keep on doing it. Or maybe it is just about putting things where they belong, some illusory notion about the order found in small things leading to an order in larger things. Most of us have some knowledge about how things can turn up where they don’t belong all too quickly and all too often.

And I remind myself how quickly the ordinary can be upended. People grow, things change, and life comes and goes in the most unexpected ways at the most unexpected times. Although I don’t live in a place where the spring of 2007 brought rising rivers and monstrous floods, it was clear from all reports that it happened fast. How quickly the common spring rains became something more; how quickly the expected slipped into the cataclysmic. The images on television showed a chair hooked on a treetop where the current had carried it, a bed washed two miles downstream, an entire house shoved off its foundation, its own front porch rearranged near its rooftop.

The solace of continuity is surely a factor when I make certain the coat is on its hook, the salt in the salt dish, dinner at 7. Maybe our efforts to impose some symmetry on domestic life are simply gestures to fend off the anarchy that surely lies at the next bend. A power failure, an intrusive house guest, a limb that has crashed through the kitchen ceiling — whatever disrupts the routines also informs us how vital they are. Order can be undone in an instant, the lawlessness of family relations exposed. And if it is not a wayward house guest or tree limb, it could just as easily be a late train or a missed phone call, an illness, an accident, the curious mind of a child, the reckless behavior of a teenager, the errant nature of the human heart.

ALBERT EINSTEIN famously proposed that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity. Oh, really? I doubt the professor ever did much around the house; if he had, he would have known the opposite is true. Domestic life is all about doing things over and over in the same way, with every hope and intention that you’ll get the same result, and knowing in your heart of hearts how easily you could get a very different one.

Family life is the heartland of the unknown, and it only takes a moment for the plates to shatter, the crystal to crack, the bed to become unmade; the landscape can become foreign terrain in an instant, the familiar unrecognizable in a heartbeat. And if one is to be found doing something so ordinary as setting the table or folding the linen, it is only because such habits are nothing but an effort to establish bedrock for the seismic changes that so easily can follow.

Which is likely why I clean off the porch every morning, brush the leaves off the floorboards, sweep the dust off the railings, erase the dusty footprints left there the day before. In May, the phoebes nesting in the eaves cause their own minor disturbance, a tiny mayhem of twigs, feathers, bird droppings. A spider has attached its web to the light fixture, and I notice, too, that the paint on the balustrades is flaking. As I attend to one insignificant detail after the other, I realize none of it has anything to do with the way the day begins, but rather, with how it ends and the hope that my concerns then will be on the same minor scale.



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