Phytic, not Phallic Acid

First, being ignorant on what that p-something acid is in beans, kale, and a bunch of other plants was, I tried to guess "phallic acid" - to which Google replied with bored confusion.

Eventually I found it was "phytic acid" and plays a very interesting and complex biological role, with very bad and very good effects on people.

http://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/living-with-phytic-acid/

http://evolutionarypsychiatry.blogspot.ca/2011/09/phytic-acid-mineral-grubbing-nuisance.html

Both sites are well-worth exploring if you have any interest in the wide-ranging and significant role of phytic acid, but the second ties directly into another strong interest of mine - mitochondrial health.

Things that make mitochondria happy and promote efficiency and clean energy:
1) A high-fat diet and utilization of ketones
2) A ready supply of energy and mitochondrial cofactors such as the animal flesh-derived carnitine, creatine, and carnosine, and the cholesterol buddy buddy ubiquinone (CoEnzymeQ10), vitamin A, and the football crew of B vitamins are also utilized in the respiratory chain.
3) Protein and/or calorie restriction which promotes the activation of PPAR (that is peroxisome-proliferator acttivated receptors).  See, the mitochondria have two major types of garbage containment facilities, the lysosomes and the peroxisomes.  They are the waste clean-up crew, and they become more active in states of protein restriction and ketosis.  In addition, the old and inefficient mitochondria spewing more reactive oxygen species than they ought get properly decomissioned in states of protein restriction and ketosis.  This is one part of a positive clean-up process called "autophagy."
4) Aerobic exercise seems to stimulate the creation of new, shiny, efficient mitochondria (2).
http://evolutionarypsychiatry.blogspot.ca/2011/02/basic-science-energy-is-everything.html

Topsoil

While thinking about biofuels and how much land is now used with no regard for the safety of human consumption, I also thought about topsoil loss.  So, as I am want to do, I asked the Goo Ghoul what others have written about.  Below are some notes and quotes:

[As an aside: It always amazes me when I see mountains, knowing that it took many millions of years to push up, yet they are eroding so quickly. How is it that they don't erode as fast as they are pushed up? ]

Around the world, soil is being swept and washed away 10 to 40 times faster than it is being replenished,

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2006/03/slow-insidious-soil-erosion-threatens-human-health-and-welfare

A rough calculation of current rates of soil degradation suggests we have about 60 years of topsoil left. Some 40% of soil used for agriculture around the world is classed as either degraded or seriously degraded – the latter means that 70% of the topsoil, the layer allowing plants to grow, is gone. Because of various farming methods that strip the soil of carbon and make it less robust as well as weaker in nutrients, soil is being lost at between 10 and 40 times the rate at which it can be naturally replenished. Even the well-maintained farming land in Europe, which may look idyllic, is being lost at unsustainable rates. 

http://world.time.com/2012/12/14/what-if-the-worlds-soil-runs-out/

Farming takes half the world's available freshwater, much of which is used for irrigation. And all that activity — plus the deforestation and degradation that tends to go hand in hand with farming — helps make agriculture the single biggest source of manmade greenhouse gases, more than industry or transportation or electricity generation. "We are running out of everything," says Foley. "We are running out of planet."

http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2115423,00.html

Solutions?

Solutions he [Foley] proposes include, but are by no means limited to: new crop varieties, drip irrigation, greywater recycling, and smarter diets.

http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/john-foleys-ted-talk-calls-agriculture-the-other-inconvenient-truth/

So, no solutions until it gets more serious.

Climate Change

What a charmingly complex, political, and heated topic.
I will enter the fray with foolish ignorance, stating, "Hey, I heard CO2 concentrations is at more than 400 ppm, which is about 30% higher than any of the former variations we can measure over the last 800,000 years. And we can tell from the carbon isotopes that most of it is from fossil fuel burning."

CO2 produced from burning fossil fuels or burning forests has quite a different isotopic composition from CO2 in the atmosphere. This is because plants have a preference for the lighter isotopes (12C vs. 13C - See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/how-do-we-know-that-recent-cosub2sub-increases-are-due-to-human-activities-updated/#sthash.VQ8yuQE1.dpuf

Hypothetically, let's say there are two possibilities: True or False that imminent severe anthropogenic climate change is in full swing.

If False, then what? Then we continue to build roads, drive cars, raise more livestock, burn coal, sit in traffic, clear more trees for farm land, etc. because people have to live and the economy must continue to grow.

If True, then what? Then we will continue doing the exact same things until agricultural failures of coastal flooding cause an economic collapse.


We ain't gunna change. We will continue to grow or we will collapse, or until we collapse. 

Four

While refreshing my memory of what the basic emotions are, I was surprised to find that there are now only four rather than six.

Written all over your face: humans express four basic emotions rather than six, says new study

Four seems to be a magical number (not too simple, not too complex?):
 
Mad, Glad, Sad, and Surprised.
Hot, Dry, Wet, Cold
Air, Fire, Earth, Water
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter
Artisan, Guardian, Idealist, Rational
Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Choleric, Melancholic
Parietal, Frontal, Temporal, Occipital
Acetylcholine, Dopamine, GABA, Serotonin
sanguine (pleasure-seeking and sociable), Social SP
choleric (ambitious and leader-like), Ruling NT
melancholic (analytical and quiet), Avoiding NF

phlegmatic (relaxed and peaceful), Getting SJ

But what interested me most was that anger and disgust are now grouped together.
It could be fun to re-frame my own and other people's emotions: I'm not angry, I'm disgusted.
Or maybe I'm not disgusted, I'm angry - this dirty plate angers me.
Changing the number of basic emotions disgusts me. 

Creative Drive is not Identical to Skill

I was looking through some articles on dopamine and creativity and found some interesting titbits.

It is interesting to re-frame creativity as a creative drive and then as a drive to communicate. Having a strong urge to share an idea or impression, to relate, to make contact... I like the idea of struggling to communicate something and coming up with creative means to do so.

This reminds me of a quote from Voltaire:
Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. (not that I speak, read, or write French any better than a three year old)
The best is the enemy of the good.

I have adopted this quote as a guiding precept. With enough quantity, possibly there may be some quality.
This idea is discussed in one of these papers.

Notes from
1) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2571074/?tool=pmcentrez

Creative drive is not identical to skill—the latter depends more on neocortical association areas. However, drive correlates better with successful creative output than skill does.

For the purposes of this paper, a creative idea will be defined simply as one that is both novel and useful (or influential) in a particular social setting (Perkins, 1988; Csikszentmihalyi, 1999). The definition captures the cultural relativity of creativity (using a lever to move a rock might be judged novel in a Cro-Magnon civilization, but not in a modern one), and it also captures the distinction between the creative and the merely eccentric or mentally ill (novelty without utility).

...creative drive has the advantage of being a simpler, more tractable phenomenon than creativity itself. Creative drive links to better understood systems, such as the drive to communicate...

2) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4041074/

...judging from the visual details depicted by the artists and the quantity of works they produce, some researchers have argued that the art has a strong obsessive-compulsive feature (Finkelstein et al., 1991; Lythgoe et al., 2005; Chatterjee, 2006; Schott, 2012; Midorikawa and Kawamura, 2014). 

Wrong Side of the Continuum

I have a bit of an issue with labelling a trait or quality that is really just one end of a continuum - the tail of a normal distribution.  

For example, is ADHD really just low conscientiousness?

Conscientiousness is a fairly stable personality trait for how much care and deliberation is taken to do something "right".  People who are very conscientious tend to be hard-working, neat, and meticulous, while people who are not very conscientious tend to be impulsive, scattered, and unmotivated.

People with ADHD tend to be impulsive, restless, disorganized, and have difficulty completing tasks.

My hope is that despite it being a stable personality trait, coping skills could be learned that would ameliorate the negatives...

Hope springs eternal, eh?

Want to be happy? Be a conservative.

Notes from:

"Why are Conservatives Happier than Liberals?"  
(J.L. Napier and J.T. Jost)

--> The short answer: because they are less troubled by inequality

* In three studies, using nationally representative samples from the United States and nine additional countries, we consistently found that conservatives (or right-wingers) are happier than liberals (or left-wingers).
* Political conservatism is a system-justifying ideology in that it is associated with the endorsement of a fairly wide range of rationalizations of current social, economic, and political institutions and arrangements.
* System-justifying beliefs are generally associated with high personal satisfaction.
* System-justification tendencies could provide a kind of ideological buffer against the negative hedonic consequences of social and economic inequality.
* The presence of inequality poses a potential threat to the legitimacy of the status quo
* The American emphasis on meritocratic ideology renders economic inequality less aversive to Americans than to Europeans

* Research suggests that highly egalitarian women are less happy in their marriages compared with their more traditional counterparts, apparently because they are more troubled by disparities in domestic labor.

A Taoist Tale

Buddhists tell us to act as if the future of the universe depends on everything we do, while laughing at ourselves for thinking we can make the slightest difference.
This idea resonates with me - I am as powerless as any of the other ignorant masses, but morally, it strikes a discord to throw up my hands in helplessness and turn, instead, to simple pleasures.

Here is another idea with a clear, vibrant no

In a Taoist story, when a farmer’s horse
runs away, his neighbors offer their sympathy. The farmer merely
shrugs: “Who’s to say what’s good or bad?” He turns out to be
prescient, for the very next day the horse returns with a herd of wild companions. Now the neighbors rejoice for their friend, but his
reaction is the same: “Who’s to say what’s good or bad?” Sure
enough, on the day after that, his son tries to ride one of the wild
horses. He breaks a leg. “Too bad,” say the neighbors, but the farmer
will have none of it. The very next morning an army comes, drafting
recruits. They spare the farmer’s son because of his broken leg.

Sexual Selection Theory Babble

There is probably not much of a fundamental structural difference between a human mind and the mind of a "lower" creature like a canine.  Even our intelligence (most of us) is not that much greater than a crow except that we have language. In the development of language, everything else that we value as being human followed. But, in my view (heavily influenced by sexual selection theory) the only reason we have language is because it is sexy and dangerous.

Some birds sing to attract mates, as do some whales. Almost all animals and insects communicate in some way to attract mates and/or to cooperate. Humans are no different in this respect - we communicate at some level to cooperate, but at a far more flowery level to attract mates. What we say is only slightly more important than how we say it - the timber of our voice reveals much about our hormonal, emotional, sexual, and immune states. But what we say reveals our intelligence and mental strength - our mental status.  


What we say about other people and what they say about us can be very dangerous. 

Helminthic Therapy

Notes on helminthic therapy:

Companies, such as Danone (Paris, France) and Yakult (Tokyo, Japan), known for their probiotic milk drinks that are marketed to promote their beneficial bacterial content, have already expressed an interest. Incorporating the 'old friends' into food products could therefore become a new type of 'vaccine' against faulty immunity. “It's not that vaccines [against microorganisms] are doing any harm,” Rook said. “I think that we need new kinds of vaccines that are not targeting any specific infection, but are targeting immunoregulation.”


The disappearance of intestinal parasites from humans in developed countries may be responsible for the upsurge in many diseases including Celiac Disease, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, asthma and hay fever. A parasite's survival relies on its ability to interfere with the host's immune response. The mechanisms employed to do this are similar to those required by a person to regulate against the so-called autoimmune disorders, diseases in which the system turns on itself. The investigators suspect that when parasites are excluded from the environment, some individuals become sufficiently self-reactive to develop an autoimmune disease. American researchers have successfully treated patients with Crohn's and ulcerative colitis using a pig whipworm (Trichuris suis). The investigators have undertaken a similar preliminary study using a human hookworm in Crohn's patients.

Livestock and Insects

Last year a major report into the environmental impact of meat eating by the Food Climate Research Network at Surrey University claimed livestock generated 8 per cent of UK emissions - but eating some meat was good for the planet because some habitats benefited from grazing. It also said vegetarian diets that included lots of milk, butter and cheese would probably not noticeably reduce emissions because dairy cows are a major source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas released through flatulence.

http://www.ewg.org/meateatersguide/a-meat-eaters-guide-to-climate-change-health-what-you-eat-matters/climate-and-environmental-impacts/

Lamb production creates the more CO2 per kilogram of meat than any other protein source: 39.2 kg of CO2 per kg of consumed food; beef comes in second with 27.0 kg CO2 per kg. Cheese (13.5), pork (12.1), salmon (11.9), turkey (10.9), chicken (6.9), tuna (6.1), and eggs (4.8) round out the common animal based proteins.

Breeding commonly eaten insects such as locusts, crickets and meal worms, emits 10 times less methane than livestock

http://worldcrunch.com/food-travel/china-039-s-maggot-factories-hoping-to-feed-the-world/china-insects-maggots-foodie-entomophagy/c6s9713/

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2011/10/24/141661332/bugs-bugs-everywhere-even-on-your-dinner-plate


http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00207519/43/3

Thank God for taxes.

In my youth, I was libertarian for a while, a couple of years actually, until I realized a several things... i.e., I grew up a little bit.  I read Ayn Rand as a kid and was sold... for a while.
Fundamentally, the whole notion is an illusion. The only way it could possibly work is if everyone thought exactly the same way - everyone was a staunch libertarian. Which, of course, is a complete fairy tale.
After I rejected the philosophy, I have continued to distance myself further and further on a number of other grounds. More recently, it occurred to me that the fundamental difference between feudalism and a relatively democratic society is the redistribution of wealth imposed by the State.  Without taxes and redistribution, the rich would quickly become the 0.001% and the rest of us would live in abject poverty - like it was in the good old days of kings and queens.

Thank God for taxes.

Lifted From Poverty

When I was libertarian, I was also vegan. These views complemented each other because the government is implicit in the meat and dairy industry.  Government subsidies are creating a huge environmental and public health disaster.

While the government is also an invaluable way to provide welfare to the common people, it is heavily abused by special interests with deep and influential powers to cause a great deal of harm to the common good.
But, as some guy following the wig-wearing style said, Liberty is to faction as air is to fire.

Notes from the edge:

meat is subsidized, making it appear much cheaper than it actually is
meat consumption has doubled over the last 50 years
Going vegan has more impact than changing from an suv to a hybrid.
700 million acres for animal crops, 40 million acres for human consumption
meat consumption will continue to rise
more farm land will be used to grow food for meat

As billions of people are lifted out of poverty by globalization, they will increase the demand for meat. 

We pay for meat directly at the market, indirectly through taxes, and even less directly through resource depletion - ie depleting the greenhouse balance, rainforest coverage, biodiversity, antibiotic usefulness, etc.

Alligator (and Bird) Lungs

In trying to determine if there are crocodiles or alligators in Florida, I found a freaky fact: air flows one-way through alligator lungs.

Thanks to one-way airflow, birds are far more efficient breathers than mammals. When they breathe in, air does not go directly into the lungs. Instead, it enters the air sacs, where it is stored briefly before passing into the lungs at the next inhalation. In this way, air enters and exits a bird's lungs at different points – in via the air sacs, out via the windpipe – allowing them to maintain near-constant, one-way airflow through their lungs and extract up to two-and-a-half times as much oxygen per breath as a mammal.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18392-alligators-bird-breath-may-explain-dinosaurs-triumph.html

Please Join My Cult

I would like to invite you to join my cult.
If you do, you will soon be drawing pentagons, burning candles, and screaming, "Sugar is the devil!", just like me.

Below are links to information about the effects of a very low carbohydrate (ketogenic) diet on everything from blood sugars to Alzheimer's, cancer, Parkinson's, and cardiovascular disease.

Media:
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/healthscience/2012/december/starving-cancer-ketogenic-diet-a-key-to-recovery/
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201104/your-brain-ketones
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2004-06-09/news/chi-040609lard_1_weight-loss-and-recovery-lard-optimal-diet

Resources:
www.ketogenic-diet-resource.com
http://www.bloodsugar101.com/

Technical reviews:
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/80/3/550.long
http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~brandt/Chem330/Ketone_bodies.pdf

*And it could even be good for running, cycling, swimming, etc:

http://www.runnersworld.com/nutrition-for-runners/do-low-carb-diets-improve-endurance-performance

Wigglers and the Immunological Consequences

It occurred to me that blocking the normal exit of "little wigglers" might result in certain unwanted re-absorption of the things.  After the clip-clip, you (men) still produce little wigglers, testosterone, and the milk & honey concoction that feeds the wigglers in their lemming-like pursuit of the golden egg. The only difference is the wiggler tube doesn't join the milk & honey tube they get forced into a dead-end tube, where they slowly leak into the surrounding tissue, stimulating a strong immune response from the rest of your body...
http://vasectomypain.org/immunologic_consequences

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/healthlibrary/conditions/mens_health/vasectomy_85,P00731/
Immune system reactions.
After vasectomy, the testes continue to make sperm. When the sperm cells die, they are absorbed by the body, just as they are in a man who hasn't had a vasectomy. Sometimes, however, men, following a vasectomy, develop immune reactions to sperm.
Sperm usually don't come in contact with immune cells, so they don't elicit an immune response. But, vasectomy breaches the barriers that separate immune cells from sperm, and men can develop antisperm antibodies after the surgery. Some doctors and researchers are concerned that these immune reactions against parts of one's own body could cause disease. Rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile diabetes, and multiple sclerosis are some of the illnesses suspected or known to be caused by immune reactions of this type.

Immunological consequences of vasectomy.
 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7283529
Abstract

In more than 50% of men, vasectomy leads to auto-immune pathology. The auto-immune response to sperms following vasectomy is triggered by the phagocytosis of sperm in the epididymis. In the humoral immune response, sperm agglutinating, sperm immobilizing, and antibodies to sperm nuclear protamines occur, as early as 3-4 days after vasectomy. The incidence reaches 60-70% within 1 year and remains almost the same even after 20 years. Presence and effects of circulating immune complexes following vasectomy are discussed with reference to reported increased incidence of atherosclerosis and auto-immune orchitis in experimental animals. There is no positive conclusion whether vasectomy leads to cell mediated immunity to spermatozoa.

Status Anxiety

Notes from
-- Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton

*people tend to be nice to us according to the amount of status we have.

*we’re not good at remaining confident about ourselves if other people don’t seem to like or respect us very much.

*For most of history, low expectations were viewed as both normal and wise.


*It is perhaps as unlikely that we could rival the success of Bill Gates as that we could in the seventeenth century have become as powerful as Louis XIV. Unfortunately though, it no longer feels unlikely.

Pareto and the 1 Percent

I've heard of this before:
Income is distributed according to a Pareto distribution with index a > 1, but I came across it again in my reading of Antifragile by Nassim Taleb (highly recommend).

Two things struck me this time:
1) Half the population controls only 1 part per 100 of the wealth.
2) 20% of 20% of 20% is the 1 percent all the Occupy fuss was about (not that I disagree with the fuss, just that I didn't connect 80-20 to the 1 percent)

The 80-20 rule. :
20% of the people control 80% of the total wealth.
20% of those people, or 4% of the population, control 64% of the total wealth.
20% of those people, or 0.8% of the population, control 51.2% of the total wealth. The 1 percent.

Likewise, 64% of the population controls only 4% of the total wealth.
And 51.2% of the population controls only 0.8% of the total wealth.


"You might expect the balance between the rich and the poor to vary widely from country to country. Different nations, after all, have different resources and produce different kinds of products. Some rely on agriculture, others on heavy industry, still others on high technology. And their peoples have different backgrounds, skills, and levels of education. But in 1897, an Italian engineer-turned-economist named Vilfredo Pareto discovered a pattern in the distribution of wealth that appears to be every bit as universal as the laws of thermodynamics or chemistry."


http://hbr.org/2002/04/wealth-happens/ar/1

Cherry Picking

Why weep and moan when I am a dog?
I bark at the moon as 10-mile wide rocks
Whip by, in between, at 20,000 km/hr

It is so much more fun to jump around shouting, "Doom and Gloom!"

But it is hard to separate the truth from the opinions and cherry-picked ideas.

I could say:
A) Birth rates are levelling off because the financial burden of children is too great, ie our economic system is becoming more fragile;

B) Human birth rates may be levelling off, but livestock is increasing exponentially;

C) One pandemic could kill billions and destroy the global economy;

D) Gas, coal, and oil are cheap and abundant - green energy has very little chance of saving anything;

E) Our material culture (food, clothing, shelter, transportation, entertainment, personal space) would become cheaper and in greater demand if the energy to produce it were cheaper;


F) Without economic growth, loans become impossible and the entire economic network that supports agriculture, medicine, education, sanitation, etc, etc falls apart - all of these are essential for maintaining a population of 7, 9 or 11 billion people.

Nutzlosen Informationen

Worse than being filled mit nutzlosen Informationen is being filled with information that is potentially very useful, but is regarded as far-out and wacky.

Like a ketogentic diet for diabetes, Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson's, or epilepsy. Who would listen to a non-expert suggesting extreme ideas such as carbs are bad and ketone bodies are good? Even if the evidence is out there on the not-so-distant fringe?

I mean, how would you recommend deliberately infecting someone's kid with hookworms or whipworms to treat Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), multiple sclerosis, asthma, eczema, dermatitis, hay fever, or food allergies?

http://gut.bmj.com/content/54/1/6.full

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy

Hell, I read the studies, see some of the evidence, understand the basic concepts and still don't trust my judgement. How could my opinion do anything other than marginalize a cause or a cure?

I could tell my dad until I was blue in the face that there is very good evidence that minimizing carbs will help starve cancer cells because most cancer cells lack glucose transporters and rely on osmotic flow of glucose, but his doctor says something else, and so... yawn...

I could (and have) lay out the idea behind the "old friends" theory of Crohn's to someone whose kid has Crohn's but they just nod and let the silly conversation pass.

I could (and have) lay out the idea behind mitochondrial damage in the brain due to glucose by-products and how ketone metabolism alleviates many of the symptoms of Alzheimer's, but they politely bite their tongue at screaming, "Quack!"

I could explain how insulin signals to the body to store sugar as fat and glycogen and causes the kidneys to retain sodium, but ... "That Greg!  He sure has some outlandish ideas!" Or, "That goes against what I have heard."

Like "scientists [who] are always coming out with a new study that contradicts the last one," you can't change your mind on anything without ruining your credibility...

Ah, woe is me! It is so hard being a crank, a contrarian, and a quack without groupies praising my every utterance. 

One Way to Darkness

I frequently entertain myself with thoughts about the dismal science and economic growth and have reached the conclusion that it is a one way trip. If we stop growing, the economy will collapse. So this article rings true:

http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy-except-at-a-very-basic-level/

But then, this article, written by the same person, I believe, seems completely Waco (allusion to Waco, TX):

http://ourfiniteworld.com/2014/02/17/reaching-limits-to-growth-what-should-our-response-be/


But then again... if I am honest, this is pretty much where my negative thinking wallows...

Efficiency & the Green Economy

Being "green" by being more energy efficient means using less energy to do a given task. But, what happens with the money left over? If the energy efficient method does not cost as much as the alternative, then the extra money is used somewhere else in the economy. For example, a fuel efficient car leaves more money for the driver to spend on other things - which generally means more consumption and natural resource pollution.

Obviously there is some choice and discretion one can exercise to spend money on "green" alternatives, but reducing your expense on non-green consumption fixes nothing.  You need to spend a higher percentage of you total yearly expenditure on "green" expenses.

If you don't spend your money, but save it instead, your bank will loan it to someone who will spend it - and it probably won't be a very "green" use...

Efficiency allows more to be produced for less, which allows surplus to be used for something else. The result is a larger economy, or more economic activity. In general, more economic activity results in greater resource consumption, which, ironically, means that energy efficiency leads to natural resource depletion. 

Housing and Inequality

The increase in value of a house is almost entirely due to scarcity. The house exists in a place where more and more people want to live, so only those who are able to out-pay others are able to get the desirable houses.  As the saying goes, the three most important things about real-estate are location, location, and location.  Any place desirable enough for people to want to move there will soon become expensive enough to prevent many people from being able to afford to move there.

Housing appreciation, more than almost anything else, is part of the economy which "grows" in value without producing anything: more money goes into the system, but only to the relatively well-off.  Tax write-offs magnify this effect - giving even more money to the already well-off.


It is odd to think of increasing the demand for something without producing any new goods or services that can be exchanged - this seems to be tied directly to inflation and inequality.

There must be a magic solution to cramming millions of people into a place where they can all walk to work, have good schools, and be otherwise happy and healthy.

History and Neomania

In a time when new is everything, there is no history. Without a sense of history, there is no sense of the future in anything more than the immediate sense.

Thinking about anything a thousand years from now seems whacky, but we accept the "ancient" history of more than a thousand years ago. Most major religions are based on beginnings more than one or two thousand years ago.

It is strange that we can accept the ancient past, but we burn-up our future with lefty-green-conservationist looking a whole 100 years in the future and being thought of as extremists.

Divided We Stand

There are pros and cons to division versus unity.
Divided, I believe, is less fragile, less "efficient", and more robust.
For example, currency exchanges fix regional differences in the real value of money. The value of the dollar in Arkansas, for instance, is much greater than a dollar in New York city. Before the Euro, differences in the value of currency between Germany and Greece were negotiated on the exchange market. Pretending like a Euro is a Euro distorts the economy.

If we had a global currency and the confidence in the currency suddenly collapsed, the whole world would suffer. If a local currency faltered, the effects would be minor and localized.
Similarly, if we have one species of corn all across the world and one particularly virulent virus found its' calling, then corn and the huge corn-industrial-complex, would be in serious trouble.

Sexual reproduction is more trouble than asexual reproduction, but nature favors it as a strategy because it provides more protection through variation.

Variation is good.

On the other hand, divided and un-unified means a bunch of small-minded, xenophobic, ignorant, inefficient, warring tribes.
*
This is a quote from Nassim Taleb:
Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks — when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought.
pp. 225-226 of Black Swan

Driverless Taxis

The bulk of the cost of a taxi is the salary of the driver; remove the driver and the cost of the taxi goes way down and people don't need cars any more. Driverless car sharing is similar.

If a taxi service buys 100 driverless cars and charges 15% net margin on the cost of service and operation, then a drive across town could be $10 or $15 rather than $30.  Suddenly it would be relatively cheaper to use a taxi rather than own a car.

This is different from car-sharing because the car could pick you up at your house.

Robinson Crusoe.

I just finished listening to the free Librivox audiobook of Robinson Crusoe.


It was first published in 1719, but despite the age, it seems remarkably contemporary to me.  One theme of the book is to put into sharp focus how meaningless it is to have everything (pounds of gold, all the food you could eat, a large tropical island all for yourself, good health, etc),  without human companionship.

Coffee bean

As opposed to a great deal of other grains of sand on the mountain of science, these pebbles seem to indicate coffee could be bad for insulin resistance.

"Caffeine ingestion negatively affects insulin sensitivity during an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) in lean and obese men..."
http://jn.nutrition.org/content/134/10/2528.short


"One common biologically active food component that has been recently implicated in acute insulin resistance is caffeine."

Sugar Coating

"Protein and sugar naturally stick together, and there's more sugar in the blood of people with poorly controlled diabetes, so they tend to have a higher percentage of HbA1c in their blood."

"...when sugar binds to the protein LDL, it makes it stickier and more likely to attach to artery walls, an essential step in plaque formation. Plaque buildup on artery walls is a major cause of heart disease."


"Advanced glycation end products (AGEs) have been implicated in the chronic complications of diabetes mellitus and have been reported to play an important role in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease."

LBM and BP

Apparently it has been known since the time of Hippocrates that the "athletic" body type predisposes people to hypertension. I did not know this. I knew that BMI correlates positively with blood pressure (BP), but I thought that was just the statistics of fattness.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11939617

Body size correlates positively with blood pressure (BP) but there is controversy about the roles of obesity versus muscularity in this relationship.
The amount of LBM erased categoric BP differences between the genders.
The gender-related BP differences appear to reflect the inherent gender differences in muscle bulk.
Systolic and diastolic blood pressure are positively correlated with lean body mass and strength of leg extensors.

Therefore high lean-BMI correlates with high BP.

Sunscreen and Blood Pressure

1) Nitric oxide (NO) is a powerful blood pressure regulator.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17170603

2) UV light stimulates production of NO.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC507845/

3) Sunscreen ingredients inhibit inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS): a possible biochemical explanation for the sunscreen melanoma controversy.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15714114

Toxic Sugar

Sugar is worse than almost as bad not quite as bad as smoking... It sticks to proteins and messes them up.

...researchers said "sugar is so toxic that it should be taxed and slapped with regulations like alcohol."
Public health: The toxic truth about sugar
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22297952
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120201135312.htm

180,000 Deaths Worldwide Each Year May Be Associated With Sugary Soft Drinks, Research Suggests
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130319202144.htm

Cigarette smoking causes an estimated 443,000 [U.S.] deaths each year, including approximately 49,000 deaths due to exposure to second-hand smoke

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/tobacco/statisticssnapshot

Lean

Apparently all kinds of bad things are caused by a high metabolic rate and high food intake - even "healthy" food.  I could babble and plagiarize other people for hundreds of pages, but I'll just steal these blurbs:

In regards to cardio health, cancer risk, metabolic disorders, etc... Eg "Be as lean as possible without becoming underweight"
http://www.aicr.org/reduce-your-cancer-risk/recommendations-for-cancer-prevention/recommendations_01_weight.html

 "calorie restriction (CR) decreases the circulating concentration of a powerful inflammatory molecule called tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF). They say the combination of lower T3 levels and reduced inflammation may slow the aging process by reducing the body's metabolic rate as well as oxidative damage to cells and tissues. "
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060531164818.htm

Voice Tunnel

“What makes the experience valuable is the fact that it’s ephemeral,” said the installation’s creator, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, 45. The project “allows us to remember that we are on earth for a very brief period of time, and then we’re going to die. And it helps us live perhaps more intensely. We’re more alert to the fact that it ends, that we’re getting recycled, that there is a flow.”


http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/voice_tunnel.php

Creativity Crud

I've heard a lot of crud about creativity.
I've heard how creative people are frequently bipolar or have other mood disorders.
I've heard that many highly creative people have "brain patterns" similar to schizophrenics.
I've heard that THC can make some people creative and some people, who are already prone to schizophrenia, fall off the cliff.
I've heard that urban environments stimulate creativity.
And I've heard that urban environments create more mood disorders.

Could it be that having a huge amount of diversity in your social environment creates a bit of schizophrenia?
Maybe urban environments stimulate creativity due to mental mirroring and empathizing with different people, causing a bit multiple-personality like thinking...

Creativity seems to have a high social value these days, but it might also have an emotional cost.

Something to think about, eh? No? Ok.

So much for non-violence

I have listened to far too many hours of podcast lectures on the historical jesus (upwards of 30 hrs + books)... Yet I still came across something interesting - they were armed.

Yeshua and his followers went to Jerusalem during Passover and knocked over the money changers' tables at the Temple. That night, when he was arrested, one or two of his followers drew swords and one struck off the ear of the high priests' slave. Armed and violent... how bizarre.

Passover is, of course, a Jewish liberation holiday. Since the Romans were oppressing and heavily taxing the Jews (and everyone else), the Romans were wary of such liberation festivals. There were thousands of extra soldiers in Jerusalem for Passover to quickly squash any sort of revolt that might form -- exactly the sort of disturbance that Yeshua made.

The Romans had already crucified thousands of Jews for defiance against the Empire - they did so quickly and brutally, without any trial or preamble. Everybody, including Yeshua and his followers, knew this. They went there looking for trouble, with swords.


So much for non-violence.

Placebo

Do you believe in the placebo effect, the nocebo effect, or expectation effects?

The placebo effect yields beneficial clinical results in 60-90% of diseases that include angina pectoris, bronchial asthma, herpes simplex, and duodenal ulcer. Three components bring forth the placebo effect: (a) positive beliefs and expectations on the part of the patient; (b) positive beliefs and expectations on the part of the physician or health care professional; and (c) a good relationship between the two parties. Because of the heavily negative connotations of the very words "placebo effect, " the term should be replaced by "remembered wellness." Remembered wellness has been one of medicine's most potent assets and it should not be belittled or ridiculed. Unlike most other treatments, it is safe and inexpensive and has withstood the test of time.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8712773

Being rational and critical is self-defeating, and for what purpose? To look and feel smart?


By developing a "faith" in magic, supernatural, or medicinal powers, you can develop a very real power of expectation.  

Wild Apples

We have wild apple trees here. Feral trees, I suppose. I eat them on occasion, but it seems that most others are uneasy.
 

"Raised largely by the industrial food complex, we’ve been taught that we can’t feed ourselves ..."

http://zesterdaily.com/agriculture/sustainability/foraged-apples-have-natural-appeal/

Fictional Mind

More theft: I steal this time from the Boston Globe

-- http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/04/28/why-fiction-good-for-you-how-fiction-changes-your-world/nubDy1P3viDj2PuwGwb3KO/story.html

1.
"Studies show that when we read non-fiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and sceptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard."

2.
"Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds. More peculiarly, fiction's happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place."

3.
"...fiction serves the function of making the world a better place by improving interpersonal understanding."

4.
"As people who watch the news know very well, bad things happen to good people all the time, and most crimes go unpunished. In other words, fiction seems to teach us to see the world through rose-coloured lenses. And the fact that we see the world that way seems to be an important part of what makes human societies work."

Disgusting

Those who have a low sensitivity to disgust tend to be liberals or libertarians; those who are easily disgusted tend to be conservative.


-- from a Geoffrey Miller (Spent, The Mating Mind) Twitter feed 

Delectable Lie

I am stealing this from CBC

In his new book Delectable Lie, [Salim Mansur] argues that multiculturalism's main tenet, that all cultures are equal, is a flawed idea.

"It was a warm and fuzzy idea introduced by Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s, and liberal democracies in Europe followed. Forty years later, they have come to the realisation that multiculturalism is a failure."
...liberal democracy itself is a culture that had to be fought for and defended. "Liberal democracy is based on the idea of freedom and individual rights," explained Mansur. "And when you import the idea of multiculturalism, then you are placing an equal emphasis on group identity, or collectivism."

This contradiction is exactly what Mansur says doesn't work about multiculturalism: if the rights of the individual are more important than the rights of a collective, how can the rights of a collective be just as important as the rights of an individual?

How can [cultures that don't respect freedom or gender equality or minority cultures] be given equal treatment alongside liberal democracy? It is an absurdity that is hollowing out liberal democracy."

---  http://www.cbc.ca/books/2011/11/salim-mansur-on-the-delectable-lie-of-multiculturalism.html

Instead of war or sanctions, we should wage trade... by first allowing huge numbers of Afghans, Iranians or whomever to come to America and send remittances home.  This will jump start economic progress which will quickly lead to liberal democracy.

Singularity Confusion

Here is a brainstorm I had about why the Singularity will not happen.

Right now, software pretty much reproduces itself asexually. A billion
copies of the same thing.

What is the primary advantage of sexual over asexual reproduction?
Resistance to infection.
Sexual reproductive mixing is an excellent strategy of changing passwords, encrypting genetic code, changing interfaces, changing infection detecting genes, etc.
In other words, it is a tool for fighting the constant battle of genetic machinery hijacking, hacking, genetic crime, etc.
I predict that one form of artificial consciousness will evolve to evaluate the cleanness and viability of code. In the ongoing arms race between crappy code, buggy code, infected code, and the need to interface with unknown code sources for everyday functions, a series of paradigm shifts will occur.

The first shift has already occurred toward advanced and novel techniques of authenticity verification. Code is constantly checked before it can be trusted. "Scanning for viruses" etc are just the first steps.

The next shift will be one of productivity. Updates to virus checking software is, as far as I know, a manual process from the suppliers end - employees of a company update their libraries and push the updates out to subscribers. This process is in need of a dramatic increase in productivity which will be through host software adaptive immune systems ... biological immune systems provide a ready model for computer "immune systems".

The final shift, following the biological analogy to its bitter end, is software capable of seeking out and identifying other successful software versions that can be blended to create healthy, infection resistant offspring. The new versions will have a new combinations of adaptive immune response tricks and code snippets that should help fight off infection.

The "seeking out and identifying" part of the version mixing will be a complex game of detecting health, fitness, liars, cheaters, users, abusers, and the usual mating market games that humans face.

When the survival of software depends on a life and death game of sexual-social-advertising and evaluating, then, possibly, artificial consciousness will be born - with all the cloudy, confused uncertainty that plagues humans.

We do not have crystal clear consciousness because it is an on-going arms race for detecting, advertising (even when we know we are not the best product out there), deceiving (ourselves, at times, to seem more
genuine), and expediently making do with what is available, etc.

Software, like humans, will be immersed in an environment of infectious attack. Over time, these attacks will compromise their genetic value.  Therefore they have a limited amount of time to "reproduce". They will
be rushing forward, madly, in a rat race, cooperating and fighting.

Will they make themselves better and better into the so-called singularity?
No. They will be too busy fighting off viruses and malware. Sickness will drive computer evolution. (See Survival of the Sickest) It will drive "artificial" evolution madly, frantically forward, without time to coldly sit back and calculate with awesome brain power how to become infinitely intelligent.

Intelligence is a red-herring. Too much emphasis is placed on intelligence.
Intelligence is just an indicator of fitness. A successful display of intelligence indicates that the gene donor has excellent fitness evaluating capacities and is not compromised by viruses or malware.
Survival will depend more on advertising intelligence than on actual intelligence. More emphasis will be placed on "acts of creativity" - language, art, music, dance, sport, etc - that show high-functioning, non-compromised software, than on being able to calculate the square root of pi to the 300th decimal. This is simple for computers and therefore useless as a display of fitness.

Complexity and confusion go hand in hand with creativity. It is not creative if it is too simple. Creativity will always be on the bleeding edge of what is understandable. It is, therefore, an ideal advertiser of fitness.

But there is an indistinct line separating madness from creativity.
Radical recombination and pushing the envelope are necessarily risky.

So: artificial consciousness will be just as confused as we are.

Mutations and Evolution

Check out The Art of Computer Virus Research and Defence By Peter Szor -- you can just skim the table of contents with Google books.  Very interesting. 
Also, look up Symantec's Digital Immune System..

http://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Art_of_Computer_Virus_Research_and_D.html?id=XE-ddYF6uhYC

Why? Because of this singular idea (section 7.4):

"Virus writers realized quickly that detection of an encrypted virus remains simple for the antivirus software as long as the code of the decryptor itself is long enough and unique enough. To challenge the antivirus products further, they decided to implement techniques to create mutated decryptors."

In a few billion years, we'll have life.