<i>Mindless Eating</i> by Brian Wansink

I read about this book somewhere online. Wansink is a food researcher and completes experiments to asses what effects how much and what we eat. The food labs he uses include the standard one-way glass and a full service restaurant on campus.

It is very sobering to see how much influence advertising has on us. I suppose it shouldn't be much of a surprise, since modern advertising has been figuring out these things for a number of years. Wansink gives a number of examples of this: printing the number of servings in large text a package contains causes us to eat less; having an emotion tie to a food influences us like it that much more; etc. He used his lab to prove these and a number of other behaviors that modern humans have with food---a serving is how much we have in front of us (proved, in part, by an experiment with a never-ending soup bowl; that would've been an awesome Course 2 UROP).

Wansik outlines a diet based on this research. The idea is to generally reduce the amount you eat---not drastically, but by only 100 calories a day (i.e. if you normally eat 2100 calories a day, aiming for 2000), otherwise you fell hungry or deprived---to slowly lose weight. Since thought the eating behavior you develop becomes a habit over time, you tend to keep the weight off that is lost in this manner. The goal: mindless weight loss.

The strategies are basic: split big meals; pick two: dessert, drink or appetizer; keep food out of sight and distant from you; use smaller plates; don't eat straight from the bag. I like the advice a lot, as it doesn't tell you: "NO! Don't eat THAT!" You don't have to feel deprived, you just need to adjust your habits slightly to lose weight over th long term.

This book was interesting for three reasons: (1) it offers reasonable advice for a better diet; (2) it explains (at least partly) why we tend to overeat; (3) it includes some great annecdotes about the results of studies completed in Wansink's food labs. An educational, quick read.

8/10

<i>Stages to Saturn</i> by Roger E. Bilstein

It took me an extremely long time to read this book---over a year, I believe, with month-long periods where I didn't pick it up at all. It is a very good book, though easy to put down because it is dense and incredibly fact based.

I have read a few books on the US space program. This one was very different from the others. The others tended to concentrate on the human aspects---on the experiences of the astronauts. They were very good books (particularly Riding Rockets, which includes a very sober account of the bureaucracy of the Shuttle program), but this book offered a very different view: that of the technical project management required to get those few people to the moon.

Indeed, sections of this book should be used in project management classes. There are excellent examples of how to decrease overall time spans (the "all-up" test of the first Saturn V) projects and how to integrate external contractors into a project while maintaining communication to home base on critical issues (by assigning a local representative).

I enjoyed most, though, the various engineering solutions to problems encountered during design build and test. I learned about explosive forming and the fundamental operation of the engines with the "new" cryogenic fuels. Unfortunately, due to my protracted reading of this book, my memory is best for the last 200 or so pages versus the first part.

It is a book I will have to go back to at some point. Despite the dense fact-based nature of the topic, Bilstein does a reasonable job giving a story arc to each of the elements of the engines and stages. He is particularly good at including elements of the engineering story where things didn't go as planned and an interesting solution resulted.

It was a tough read, but worth it.

7/10