Combat the four whites!

The four whites are bread, pasta, potatoes, rice. These high-GL bad boys have been replaced in our diet by mashed beans (looks like mash, tastes quite a bit different), cauliflower rice (looks nothing like rice, tastes nothing like rice) and sweet potato (pretty much like potato - but a deafening chorus assures me it's OK).

 I think my favourite new diet element may be the Sauerkraut.

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Is it ever the same day at every location on Earth?

You need to be thinking about the International Date Line and the Midnight Line, the north-south arc where it's always locally midnight. Interestingly, the former is a coordinate of convention while the latter is coordinate-independent.

Crossing the IDL, you always transition to the day before; crossing the Midnight Line you always transition to the day after. When these two line coincide ... they cancel.

Visualising 3D spatial geometry is difficult, isn't it?

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Oh Lord, Emma Thompson and a chorus of luvvies want us in; George Galloway (Britain's answer to Mussolini) and a bunch of UKIPers want us out. What's a sensible person to do!

When I was young my father was baffled by my strange geekish persona and declared I had 'no common sense'. He sometimes called me 'goon' after a character in his favourite radio programme, 'The Goon Show'.

Neddie Seagoon - 'an affable but gullible idiot'

I have profoundly agreed with his general approach since I discovered that the genius John von Neumann wanted the US to launch a first thermonuclear strike on Russia in the window before the Soviets got the H-bomb.

That's why I'm less than impressed by the intellectual Michael Gove's high-minded and thoroughly rational fretting about 'sovereignty'.

Michael Mosley's Paleo-Diet?

Yesterday I had an epiphany: Michael Mosley's M-Plan Diet; the Mediterranean diet; the advice to shop around the edges of the supermarket, not in the middle; the injunction to keep off processed food; .. weren't these all instances of the paleo-diet?

There is nothing wrong with believing that an animal is most at home in its Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA), pretty much by definition. My argument with the paleo-diet is its simplistic idea of what that environment is for Caucasians. There's plenty of evidence for genetic adaptation over the last ten thousand years to neolithic innovations such as grains, milk and alcohol.

The real bad thing in contemporary food is over-processing, specifically sugar-boosting, and that dense, so moreish sugar-fat combination which packs on the calories at the expense of fibre. You know who you are, breakfast cereals and cookies. Bread has been compromised, not because of wheat, but through added sugar and denuded fibre.

By cutting these bad boys out, all the diets in the first paragraph put you back in the EEA for contemporary white Europeans. I looked at some paleo-diet websites and saw a lot of good sense .. along with faddy nickel-and-diming over whether bananas were authentically paleo or not.

Conclusion: I guess I'm happy to be tagged as paleo without sweating the small stuff and without having to attend prayers.