Changes

== Sugar Digest ==

== Sugar Digest ==

1. I spent some time working on the nutrition plugin for Turtle Blocks last weekend. I'm actually quite intrigued by the potential. So far, I have built a small database of foods (banana, apple, chocolate cake, and a chocolate chip cookie), where each object has an associated simple polynomial with value for calories, protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and fat. These values are inspectable on the help palette and there are inspector blocks that can get these values as numeric values in Turtle Block programs. You can do arithmetic operations on the object, e.g., banana * 3 + cookie / 2 and you can use the component values in other operations, e.g., forward by get_calories apple. Finally, there is an eat method that consumes the nutritional values fed to it and accumulates aggregate totals for each component. Using those values, I wrote a simple Weight Watchers(TM) "Points" calculator. You can play with all of this by downloading the plugin from [[File:Food-plugin.tar.gz]].

1. I spent some time working on the nutrition plugin for Turtle Blocks last weekend. I'm actually quite intrigued by the potential. So far, I have built a small database of foods (banana, apple, chocolate cake, and a chocolate chip cookie), where each object has an associated simple polynomial with value for calories, protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and fat. These values are inspectable on the help palette, and there are inspector blocks that can get these values as numeric values in Turtle Block programs. You can do arithmetic operations on the object, e.g., banana * 3 + cookie / 2 and you can use the component values in other operations, e.g., forward by get_calories apple. Finally, there is an eat method that consumes the nutritional values fed to it and accumulates aggregate totals for each component. Using those values, I wrote a simple Weight Watchers(TM) "Points" calculator. You can play with all of this by downloading the plugin from [[File:Food-plugin.tar.gz]].

Next up is to create a palette with foods that are actually meaningful within the context of a deployment. There is a nice database to map foods to their nutritional components available at [https://www.choosemyplate.gov/SuperTracker/] so the real work is coming up with a representative list of foods and the artwork for the blocks. Anyone one interested in exploring this further with me?

Next up is to create a palette with foods that are actually meaningful within the context of a deployment. There is a nice database to map foods to their nutritional components available at [https://www.choosemyplate.gov/SuperTracker/] so the real work is coming up with a representative list of foods and the artwork for the blocks. Anyone one interested in exploring this further with me?