About gydle

Gydle, aka Mary Parlange, grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico. She has a BA in philosophy and an MS in atmospheric science. She has worked as a science writer, translator (French-English), editor, blogger, and media consultant in the US, Switzerland and Canada. Her independent company, Gydle Publishing, is currently based in Vancouver, BC.

Let the conversation begin

Posted on April 22, 2012 by gydle

Wow. It looks like I should turn this into a running blog, if the number of page views I got from that last post is any indication. Thanks for stopping by!

Or maybe people just liked the image of me as a marmot.

I ran twice this weekend – and both times I was clobbered with inclement weather. On Saturday I finished a long run in a cold rain, with salty water running down my forehead and into my mouth. After a run like that, a warm shower is such a comforting thing. Today I ran with a friend, and we were pummeled with hail for about ten minutes. We had a headwind, and it hurt. I pulled the collar of my fleece jacket up around my face to protect myself. By mile four, the sun had come out, my jacket was around my waist, and we were watching the sunlight sparkle on the water as we dodged the puddles on the trail.

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Spring running

Posted on April 15, 2012 by gydle

It’s spring, and that means one thing: running. The weather starts to warm up. The sun stays over the horizon past 5 pm. The sap in the ol’ legs starts flowing again. I think it’s appropriate that I’m living in Switzerland, because I think deep down, I’m really a marmot. Winter ends, and I feel the need to get moving again. I need to get out on my rock and squawk, run around on an Alp somewhere.

The races start to approach: the 20 km of Lausanne in late April. A 10-miler in Bern in May that’s advertised as the “ten most beautiful miles in the world.” Then, June 24th, the Aletsch half-marathon, touted as “Europe’s greatest half-marathon.”

(I know. It’s all uphill. That’s why I want to do it so badly! Just look at that picture! Don’t you want to do it, too? How can you suffer with that as a backdrop?)

Then, the pièce de résistance… the 31-km Sierre-Zinal on August 12th. Another run I want to add to my life list, despite the wicked horrible downhill finish. It doesn’t claim to be the greatest anything, but the “no high heels” image on the website speaks volumes. This is my kind of thing.

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A big fat F

Posted on April 9, 2012 by gydle

I’m reading “The Shallows” right now (thank you Matt, my local independent bookseller, for another eye-opening tome). It addresses how the Internet is changing our brains. Did you know that you read differently online? Eye-tracking studies have shown that the vast majority of people read the first two or three full lines of text on a web page,

and then

their

eyes

drop

down

a few

lines,

quickly.

Then they may once again scan about halfway across the page

for a couple more lines, before finally letting their eyes continue

down

the

left-hand

side

fast,

to the

bottom.

Their eyes

make

a “F”

pattern.

(“F” for Fail?)

Avg. time on ANY page?

19-27 seconds.

Bye.

Moment of beauty IV

Posted on April 3, 2012 by gydle

Lying on a bench, contemplating the heavens. Soon there will be leaves on these branches…

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Celebrating health

Posted on March 31, 2012 by gydle

Once a year Lausanne hosts a big natural/holistic medicine fair called “Mednat.” I went a couple of years ago and picked up some essential oils that smelled like the pine forests back in New Mexico. This year, the headline promised an “Agrobiorama Expo” which, to me, sounded like organic farm type stuff. (“Bio” is French for organic.)

Maybe the woman with heavy green eye shadow and ivy growing in her hair on the expo’s homepage should have clued me in …

Thanks to my friend Matt, who gave me a copy of “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer, I can no longer eat factory farmed meat (even in Switzerland, where rules and regulations are at least 300% stricter than in the US). So, thinking I would find some sources of organic produce, chickens, eggs and beef, I paid the 17-franc entry fee.

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Adventures in fermentation

Posted on March 26, 2012 by gydle

I’m making friends with my microbiome.

Seems the prudent thing to do. I don’t want it to decide that this body is badly managed and thus a waste of time, and chuck it for a healthier version. No, not just yet. I have some stuff to write still. So I’m treating my gut flora to a microbial playdate. I want the symbiotic ecosystem that is my body to function optimally.

Not long ago in one of my internet ramblings I stumbled upon kefir, a fermented milk product originating long, long ago in the Caucasus. The word kefir (pronounced keh-fear) is related to the Turkish word keif, which means “feel good.” Kefir is a drinkable probiotic made with either water or milk using a gelatinous matrix of yeast and bacteria that are curiously called “grains.” (They have no relation whatsover to real grains like wheat or oats.)

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Wanted: female lynx

Posted on March 19, 2012 by gydle

Today’s headline:

Jacqueline de Quattro demande aux chasseurs de l’aider à débusquer le lynx.

One of the canton’s elected officials (like a state senator in the US) is asking the canton’s hunters to help her thrush out a lynx. I read on, my pulse rising. I find the Swiss attitude towards wildlife very disturbing. This doesn’t look good for my blood pressure.

There are reportedly two female lynx in the “Prealps” region of the canton. Since April 2011, cantonal officials have been trying to trap one of them, in order to give it to Austria, who wants to reintroduce it to help control their deer-like game animal population (chevreuils and chamois).

“As of April 1, Vaud can still capture the lynx, but it will be competing with the cantons of Fribourg and Bern.”

So let’s get this straight. This lynx has evaded capture by cantonal authorities for almost a year. If Vaud doesn’t manage to nab her by April 1, the stakes of the hunt will go up a notch, because the other two neighboring cantons can join the fray. Huh? Is there some kind of bounty on her head? Is Austria paying for the lynx? What’s with the competition? The article doesn’t say.

On Saturday, the state councilor addressed a crowd of more than 300 hunters at the annual meeting of “Diana Vaud” – the canton’s hunting association. She asked them to step in and help find the lynx.

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10 reasons to get a good night’s sleep

Posted on March 16, 2012 by gydle

Today is world sleep day.

In celebration, I urge you all to drop everything and take a nap.

As I mentioned back in April last year, research has shown that getting 8 hours of sleep a night is important for optimal cognitive function. We all know how crappy we feel when we’re sleep-deprived. Brain fuzz takes over. We start to yawn uncontrollably in an effort to oxygenate our exhausted neurons. Our eyes start hurting and feeling dry, prompting us to rub them for relief. Every horizontal surface starts to look attractive. But there is a lot more to it than just feeling lousy.

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Weather bugs

Posted on March 11, 2012 by gydle

I mentioned in an earlier post that I have a sneaking suspicion that we’re being crowdsourced by bacteria. Remember? The human body has 10 trillion cells in it. We also each harbor about 100 trillion microbes. There is more microbial DNA in the human body than human DNA. That post.

We know relatively little about this huge population, but one thing we do know is that it’s not random. I claimed, back in May 2011, that perhaps humans are not so much organisms as we are ecosystems.

We thought we were the top guns on this planet! We thought it was all about us! We thought our bodies were vehicles for our splendiferous brains! No, silly. We are being maintained. We exist simply as biomes for colonies of established bacteria. Our brains probably just evolved as the best way for our bacteria to ensure that they will continue to have thriving hosts, generation after generation.

You might have laughed that one off, and I can understand your reaction. It’s a little unsettling to think that humans aren’t the center of the universe. Galileo encountered a little resistance, too. I can be patient.

But why? You might ask. Why would they want us to do their bidding? And what is their bidding?

Would it help you see my point of view if I told you that bacteria are controlling the weather, too?

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The seven-year itch

Posted on March 7, 2012 by gydle

Little things have been bugging me lately.

This post is pretty snarky, so please bear with me and try to read it all the way to the end.

I went to see a movie last weekend. Before the previews start, there’s an ad featuring a close-up image of the torso of a reclined woman wearing a dark brown bikini. She has one arm raised over her head, revealing her armpit, and the other hand is holding an ice cream bar. On her left breast there’s a light brown smudge that looks like spilled chocolate ice cream, until you look closer and realize it’s a palm tree. This ad has preceded every single movie I’ve watched in Switzerland, the whole time we’ve lived here. I can’t believe it. You’d think that by now they would have changed the ad, particularly since it’s so awful.

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