Dear Cia Column

Hi avocado,
I'll issue a raincheck on that answer, lol.  XD

Dear Avocado,

Well not to say I'm a big education expert, but if the primary objective of compulsory education is to teach kids obedience and uniformity through constant repetitive tasks and the complete annihilation of creative expression, than music is one way to kind of temporarily break from that mold of uniformity as it's purely creative in nature.  It's no surprise then that Music and art are one of the first things to be jettisoned from compulsory schools whenever a budget doesn't allow for it, as it's really only there as a kind of "nice-to-have" to continue the illusion that schools are a great place for kids.  (In college it's not really an issue because these are paid courses, so they get money out of teaching you music either which way.) 

At the least, a creative expression like music helps broaden your perspective and knowledge of the world so it doesn't necessarily revolve around repeating useless facts learned in school or TV -- granted a job, volunteer work or a hobby could do the same thing, but absent any time to devote to these pastimes (given all that horrible homework), a music education program is often the only outlet available for kids to escape the duldrums of mediocrity.  At most, it stimulates brain function and it helps improve your multi-tasking abilities, all great things to help you learn better.  Like a hobby, it gives you something to do with passion, assuming you like it.  ^^  

I won't go so far as to say it can make you smarter, as I don't believe that the music itself (or even reading) is what necessarily improves academic performance by itself... it's more likely that kids who learn music at home or school are more likely to be in more stimulating learning environments than kids who don't engage in any such pastimes. ^^


--Cia

Dear Cia,

What is Aspartame and why are you telling us not to eat it? :3

Dear Avocado,

Aspartame is one of several artificial sweeteners in the market, and a particularly-nasty one that has been spared a lot of well-deserved scrutiny thanks to a lot of, shall we say, political and economic pressure.  >v>

I could explain more, but I think this video does a marvelous job of explaining it...




--Cia

Dear Cia,

How long should one sit before getting up and taking a break?

Dear Avocado,

Short answer... minimum, once ever hour; ideally, every half hour, with a good deal of walking or stretching.  It's another reason I despise school... they basically force kids to sit all day and make it a lifelong habit.  

Long answer... same as the above, but accompanied by this cute video....



..although now I can also suggest standing desks as another good alternative to getting work done AND protecting your health.  ^^


--Cia

Dear Cia:  
I was going to look through all 30 pages of questions to make sure this question wasn't taken, but that would take too long and I don't have that much time so here I go!  I've tried to do YouTube for quite a while, but I decided to quit after that bit of time for many reasons.  I've also been looking for any videos that are actually on the channel.  For Example, a Let's Play series on the server.  I was just wondering if you've ever considered doing YouTube on the server.  I think it would be a really cool way to show off the server.  That's my opinion though and I know a lot of people have busy schedules.  Sorry if this was a bit long!

Dear Sith

That's fine, if you do have a duplicate question, I would let you know (or re-answer it if it's a fun [food] question).  

As to your question, we do not have any Let's Play videos that I know of, other than the occasional fan video...










I'm personally not a fan of making videos on Youtube, so you can count me out of this.  Nor do I necessarily see a need to make TOO widespread a promotion of our server, since that will inevitably lead to more headaches on the whitelisting front.  

However, i certainly don't discourage people from making their own videos if they want to.  ^^



--Cia

Dear Cia,

Do you have any tips that can help remind me to stand up after sitting for so long? [I'm very forgetful, so I have troubles remembering when to get up.]

Dear Avocado,

Worst person to ask as, unless I'm using my standing desk, I often forget to stand up as well (especially when work gets intense). XD

Best thing to do is get an app on your phone or computer to remind you to take breaks every once in a while -- they not only exist, but are plentiful too.  Its best you do it for your phone... search for them in Google Play.  ^^


--Cia

Dear Cia,

Do you think frozen vegetables can be a decent replacement for fresh vegetables?

Dear Cia,

Is it true that almost everything we eat now a days has suger in it?

Now I know I know Q&A's are overwhelming and I'm usually being a goof ball so here's a question for you :3

Question: How many people does it take to learn?
Answer: You and you yer self only you can cause yourself to learn in fact you are learning right now

Now the serious question:
If you found a small person IRL what would you do about it? Would you help? Would you torture? Would you keep as a pet? Just tell me what would you do with the tiny person. I thought you might like this question as it has a little bit to do with the server(Ha pun totally intended[Not really]).

Welp that's the road good ol' 'Murica is takin'.

Dear Lom,

Not only do I think they can be a decent replacement to fresh vegetables, but sometimes they are the freshest vegetables you can get.  Unless you have access to a farmer's market or a vegetable garden, chances are you're not getting the freshest produce imaginable, as supermarkets may need to ship "fresh" vegetables over incredibly-long distances, requiring their produce to be picked unripe or with added chemicals to make them last longer.  I know for a fact that coconuts can often be left sitting unsold for weeks, developing cracks, sour water and ultimately spoilage without the purchaser even being aware of it.  Therefore, just because they're freely pickable from a produce aisle doesn't mean they're at their peak nutrient density... more often than nnot, with some exceptions (i.e., mushrooms), they're just there to make you feel healthier.  

They are still way better than canned vegetables, of course, but as a matter of practice frozen vegetables are frozen during peak ripeness to help improve the appearance of their products.  There may be some nutrient loss during the freezing preparation, either through the practice of blanching or salting (depending on the brand); and of course nutrients do continue to degrade slowly even while frozen.  Even so, the degradation may pale in comparison to the nutrient loss of old produce, and most of the nutrients initially lost are water soluble vitamins such as vitamin C (which is abundant in other things).  So if frozen vegetables are your most economical source for good produce, don't feel too bad -- besides, the technology is pretty old too, since at least as long as freezers have been in existence, and certainly since it's first widespread adoption during the 50's.  The main issues come from frozen junk foods or fruits and veggies with needless additives (such as sugar), and those are easy to pick out.  ^^


--Cia

Dear Tex,

That's a broad definition of "everything we eat", since I don't know what you specifically eat.  If you're talking about the average American schoolkid eating daily servings of breakfast cereal, toast, a banana, orange juice, chocolate milk, marmalade, Sunny-D, Sun Chips, P&J sandwiches, mashed potatoes and gravy, peaches in syrup, breaded chicken, dinner rolls, pasta, pizza, a Kit Kat Bar, a Coke and some Oreo cookies... then yes, pretty much everything I described there is a carbohydrate either in part or in whole, and mostly digested down in the body as sugar.  A piece of bread, for instance may list only 1.5g of sugar (sucrolose< or table sugar) and 2g of fiber, but between 30g to 50g of total carbohydrates -- that HUGE remainder is mostly a collection of other carbohydrate structures (such as starch) that can break down into different simple sugars in the body, such as glucose or fructose (or lactose in the case of milk products).  

A little glucose is good for the body, certainly your brain needs some of it; but the quantites described above leads to MASSIVE amounts of sugar that our bodies are not equipped to handle, even if we were to run 13 marathons immediately after consumption -- and since excess blood sugar is toxic to the body, insulin is released to try to channel this excess blood sugar into a non-toxic form your body can better handle... body fat.  Of course if this is repeated over and over again throughout one's life, eventually one's sugar control mechanism grows less effective at protecting our bodies from the toxic effects of glycation, leading not only to diabetes, but also joint conditions such as arthritis, brain conditons such as Alzheimer's, likely some cancers and a whole slew of other metabolic problems.  

This is not necessarily because we're gluttons... it's simply because sugars and grains (another great source of blood sugar) have huge shelf lives and are very versatile ingredients for making whole new food categories (such as cereals and candy bars), so it's more profitable for companies to get people to eat junk food than it is to eat wholesome fruits, vegetables and meats that spoil sooner.  So of course they'll do their darnest to paint sugar as either a harmless friend or a rascally-wittle wabbit, and everything else as forbidden food that will kill you if you so much as sniff it... even though from a biochemical standpoint, the exact opposite is true. 


--Cia

Dear Creative,

*smacks you upside the head*


--Cia

Dear Cia,

Why is college tuition so expensive?

Dear Avocado,

Well you should specify why college is so expensive... in the USA.  The trend is not universal, and some countries even offer free colleges. Consider it an odd combination of social-economic forces and political finagling that have caused the ridiculous rise in college tuition in the States, to the point where it almost no longer makes sense to send kids through college.  That is, if not for the obsession with financial success, and the belief that a shiny piece of paper (or two or three or four) will magically earn you enough riches to pay back the debt incurred paying this academic bribe.

It's important to note that the staggering cost of tuition is not an old phenomenon,... if you travel back 50 or 60 years ago, college tuition, while no drop in the bucket, was certainly extremely affordable.  Adjusted for inflation, you could conceivably have paid the equivalent of between $5000 to $8000 a year in today's money, a far cry from the $45,000 to $60,000 a year paid today for functionally the same kind of education (if not worse).  If the price was still too high for you and your family, colleges were a lot more generous in their scholarships too, allowing non-rich people the opportunity to obtain some higher level education. Even as far as the 1980's, college tuition was already getting high, and student loan debt started to crop up, but these were mainly to cover shortfalls (as opposed to paying for the whole thing).

So why was college tuition so cheap then, and why was student debt all but unheard of?  

First off, we have the usual supply and demand.  Due to the abundance of American jobs back in the 50's and 60's, ranging from low-paid factory jobs to decent middle class salary wages, it was not altogether impossible to piece a comfortable life without anything more than high school education. College was simply not seen as a prerequisite to a good life but simply a "nice-to-have" and a curiosity for rich kids.  Starved for a source of income (since they ARE still for-profit institutions), colleges were a lot more eager to keep tuition costs low, and offer scholarships and grants, in order to attract more prospective students. This combined with an increasing-glorification of college, ultimately led to more enrollment and more clout to increase prices gradually, as college started to take the role of a necessity rather than a curiosity. 

Job loss played an important role too; in the 50's and 60's jobs were so abundant in this country that sometimes the teenagers themselves could pay their own college tuition with part-time labor, and certainly didn't have to feel pressured into getting a good job or die.  Once the US became eviscerated of its factory jobs and other cheap labor, leaving only specialized service jobs available, this equation changes. Young adults can no longer earn their own money, and in fact are often discouraged to do so... AND they have far fewer job prospects awaiting for them after college.  In essence, the labor market becomes one big game of musical chairs, with each prospective job seeker having to outcompete the others for chairs, leaving the "losers" chairless, penniless and futureless [in their mind].  This further fuels the feeling of necessity of a college education, and even a postgraduate education, despite the fact that at this point we come across supply and demand again... mainly that now the country is full of over-educated and over-indebted students too posh to turn a knob, and expecting to become highly-paid medical professionals in a market already saturated with them.  I half-expect that a lot of the artificial health problems created today, leading to the ridiculously-high healthcare costs we face today, are partially there to help fuel this tuition bubble in order to give all these suckered brats something to use their pieces of paper for.  

With no choice to turn to in the minds of many young adults fooled into relying on others, of course the colleges will feel no remorse in gradually increasing their tuition fees to a) avoid swamping their facilities with too many students, and b) gain a hefty profit.  Even so, this has always been a very gradual shift and largely market-driven.

The real jolt to tuition prices of the 1990's and 2000's came when certain tax cuts to make the electorate feel marginally richer were largely paid for with cuts to social services, including state funding of public universities.  Unable to subsidize costs for students applying to these institutions, the students soon had to assume more and more of the true cost of tuition, until we get to today where they practically have to assume the entire cost.  And since the private universities feared being out-priced by the public universities, they raised their own prices as well in the hopes of maintaining their perceived value in the eyes of gullible students expecting something out of a big price tag.  

This is how we get to the current mess today with a $1 trillion student debt bubble on the verge of collapse, supplemented by emerging bubbles in the form of super-expensive early learning programs and private schools. Everyone expects that our problems can be solved by throwing more money at them, when in fact this only makes the situation worse.


--Cia

Dear Cia,
What causes microsleepS, what exactly are they?

Dear Hannah,

We already talked at length about this via chat, but for the uninitiated, microsleeps are temporary sleeping states that occur when a person is extremly sleep-deprived, either due to actual lack of sleep quantity, or a lifestyle/nutritional diminishing of sleep quality (e.g., stress, wheat, etc).  I've experienced these before, in fact, where for only a few seconds I'll lose consciousness and literally sleep on the spot, only to be jolted back later either voluntarily or by an external stimulus (ie, someone talking to you).  I once even fell asleep standing while waiting for the train, it was very unnerving).  XD


--Cia

Dear Cia

How can one fight against insomnia and force oneself to sleep?

Dear Avocado,

Well you already know a dietary method for fighting insomnia... although sadly, till you have the power to make your own food decisions, or influence those that make food decisions for you, that's not going to be a possibility for a while.  This is especially sad because certain foods that impair the production of serotonin will inevitably impact the production of the derivative melotonin, which is what helps you sleep.  :<

Short of that, there is no real way to FORCE yourself to sleep, except with the use of drugs which create dependencies and addiction, and only aggravate your insomnia.  You can however take some actions to "negotiate" with your insomnia and not have it be as big a problem...

- Take some herbal teas such as chamomille (safe, but only mildly effective) or valerian (a bit more effective, but can also cause the reverse effect in some people).  This is sadly not a good long-term solution.

- Avoid caffeine or foods/drinks that can unintentionally keep you awake, such as coffee, black tea, soda, or chocolate.

- Avoid rollercoaster blood sugar fluctuations while sleeping... a spiked blood sugar could keep you awake, and conversely a sugar low can cause your body to produce adrenaline to artificially prop up your blood sugar, causing you to wake up in the middle of the night.  Eating low glycemic foods with plenty of fat, protein and fiber is a good way to avoid this being a problem.

- Consume foods that contain plenty of L-Tryptophan (such as meat and poultry), which is used to create serotonin, which is used to create melatonin

- Understand how the body produces melatonin, making sure to research this online.  Although they exist, I'd advise against melatonin supplements since its a hormone, and adding more hormones into your body nilly-willy isn't always the best idea.

- To assist with natural melatonin production, avoid watching TV or using your computer one hour before going to bed.  The white or blue glare from these devices can trick your brain into thinking it's daytime, and force your pineal gland to postpone production of melatonin.

- Conversely, get plenty of bright sun exposure during the day to help with your day/night cycle.

- If you MUST use electronic devices at night, consider getting special eyewear that filters out blue spectrum light:
http://www.safetyglassesusa.com/nl-n60.html?utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords&id=18283950120&gclid=Cj0KEQjwmqyqBRC7zKnO_f6iodcBEiQA9T996M-Stn3VV_07TKKbnYOhfq3P5mhBkvFo6Xt-XhjrGmYaArCK8P8HAQ

- Always sleep in complete darkness as much as possible -- don't use night lights, block the glow of clock radios or computer tower lights, and use heavy window drapes to block off street light.  If you can't, consider buying a comfortable eye mask and put it on when you sleep.

- Sleep at cool temperatures if at all possible... warmer temperatures may make it very uncomfortable to fall asleep

- Take a bath or shower at least an hour prior to bedtime, to lower your internal body temperature and cause your body to want to sleep.

- And finally, consider supplementing magnesium, since it helps ease your nerves and reduce blood pressure (and we still don't know if your well water has any). Tellingly, an effective time to take magnesium supplements is shortly before going to bed.

I hope these quick guidelines can help you.  ^^


--Cia

Dear cia, how do you pronounce .GIF?

Dear A4,

It's pronounced...

"ohb-so-leet"


Lol!  XD


--Cia

Dear Cia

Why do you have a monocle as a blacksmith? .3.

~Night