Original Cin

Kind of weird: my diet log for yesterday shows that, without intending to, I ate foods in order of descending calorie count. There are 3.6 million different ways I could have eaten the exact same stuff!

Mummies Had Heart Disease, Too on WebMD.

This story has been making the rounds, but incredibly, it’s not news at all. The fact that ancient Egyptians had heart disease has a whole chapter dedicated to it in Protein Power (I believe I read the 1996 edition, so this has been known for at least thirteen years).

I originally wanted to post this as a comment to this post at Marginal Revolution, but for some reason TypePad’s not letting me:

The chart is terrible mostly because (I suspect) the “X-axis” is mislabeled — it should say “economic issues” rather than “liberal-conservative,” which is also loaded with social policy meaning. It doesn’t help that it’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ votes because of the colors used (would it really be that much more difficult to use dark cyan and pink?). The chart would then be a round version of the political diamond/Nolan Chart. Why you would ever draw one of these things as a circle, when just doing a plain old scatter plot and then turning it 45 degrees would be both easier and more readable, is beyond me. It’s more readable, although still not great, as a giant flash applet that takes up the entire screen instead of a tiny image.

Anyway, with this in mind, the chart actually does say a few interesting this. A vertical line roughly halfway through the chart would indicated that only a Senator’s view of economic issues affected their vote. The line is pretty close to vertical, so apparently this wasn’t a very ’social’ vote. Oddly, the mislabeled axis seems to have led some of the comments at Mother Jones astray — if the line were tilted clockwise, being more socially liberal would make a senator more likely to vote against defunding (holding their view on government economic policy constant). But the line tilts counterclockwise, and the far right and libertarians — small l, what few there are in the senate — voted to defund together.

If you want to see something really weird, go to http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~rcarroll/currentsenatevotesb.html and have a look at chart 24 — labeled as McCain Amendment 2580 “To strike amounts available for procurement of C-17 aircraft in excess of the amount requested by the President in the budget for fiscal year 2010.” — sounds like an entirely ‘economic’ issue, but a Senator’s votes on the matter created a horizontal line, which was almost a perfect match for the Democrat’s votes!

Went to buy avocados at the grocery store. Next to the normal avocados, they had, I kid you not, low-fat avocados. What is the world coming to that someone would make such a thing?

This is a tank in Downtown Dekalb.

I wish I could receive an award based on what was expected of me. With incentives like that, I suppose I’d promise the moon.

Another wonderful chart. I’m still losing weight keeping an eye on my carbs.

Fate gave to man the courage of endurance.

– Ludwig van Beethoven

via Thoughts and Quotes: Fate gave to man the… – Forbes.com.

Something’s rotten in Oklahoma City:

Long-secret security tapes showing the chaos immediately after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building are blank in the minutes before the blast and appear to have been edited, an attorney who obtained the recordings said Sunday.

…

“Four cameras in four different locations going blank at basically the same time on the morning of April 19, 1995. There ain’t no such thing as a coincidence,” Trentadue said.

He said government officials claim the security cameras did not record the minutes before the bombing because “they had run out of tape” or “the tape was being replaced.”

-Tim Talley, “Attorney: OKC bombing tapes appear edited“

Of course, schools are no political prize at all whatsoever:

The notion that schoolchildren are being subjected to partisan politics rather than taught civics emerged earlier this month before an Obama speech to students was played in thousands of schools.

By then, unlike February, there was broader mistrust of Obama, particularly over his health insurance overhaul plans. Concerns that he would use his speech to students as a political tool grew partly because the White House initially released a lesson plan encouraging students to “help the president.”

….

“There was no intention to indoctrinate children,” he said. “The teacher’s intention was to engage the children in an activity to recognize famous and accomplished African Americans.”

He said he would not identify the teacher who led the song. State education officials said she retired at the end of the last school year.

[Probably true, but I'd still like to see that retirement verified by a third party... trust but verify... - Nic]
- Geoff Mulvihill, “Scrutiny rises over NJ kids singing Obama song“

On a completely unrelated note, I’m sure, Barrack Hussein Obama wants the school year extended:

Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).
- Libby Quaid, “More school: Obama would curtail summer vacation“

.

My idea: Fix the schools, by actually getting lots of teachers and administrators that aren’t, on the whole, transparent sycophants. Does Obama have any ideas in his head other than “More Cowbell Government?”

Social Security is in trouble (on NPR).

Found CRON-O-Meter, a diet tracking program the other day, and so far I like it. It gives me the instant feedback on my diet that I like so much, without most of the annoyances of NutritionData.

The program uses the same USDA database that everyone else under the sun seems to use, but allows adding new foods. Even more importantly, you can take a food in the database, change its values, and make a new entry out of it, something that I desperately wanted on several occasions when using NutritionData. So, if you have a piece of salmon that just has a mystery coating on it that adds some calories, getting that into CRON-O-Meter is a matter of starting with the entry for the right type of salmon and adjusting it; while not every food can be dealt with like this, it’s still helpful for lots and lots of things.

The visualizations of CRON-O-Meter are less razzle-dazzle than NutritionData, but they’re “good enough” and don’t require selectively loading a buttload of flash; I can live with plain old bar charts and pie charts, and you could ever argue that these are superior, time-tested charts that are easier to read than NutritionData’s triangle. NutritionData, unlike CRON-O-Meter, has always been a bit of a nutritional nag, complaining indiscriminately about relatively high levels of fat and sodium on a food-by-food basis. I know I shouldn’t anthropomorphize computer programs, but NutritionData seems shrill and nagging about EVERYTHING. As I once joked — “Sugar has sugar in it? I had no idea.”

I’m not yet certain if CRON-O-Meter is smart enough to have any sense of “Net Carbs.”

CRON-O-Meter also has a sense of time, and will happily act as a food diary for a while. NutritionData requires daily “clearing” to use its tracking on a day-by-day basis.

It looks like it’s possible to share nutritional information from CRON-O-Meter with others. I have no idea how this works.

As the name indicates, CRON-O-Meter was designed with Calorie Restriction in mind, but I don’t see any reason you couldn’t use it for basically any reasonable diet.

Installation on my Ubuntu system was a bit awkward. The “Linux” download link is a shell file that has comments to download the MacOSX version and unzip it in the same directory. The zip utility that comes with Kubuntu, Ark, insisted that this archive wasn’t valid, although I managed to open it up just fine with the command-line unzip. All said and done, I managed to get an entry in Kickoff that I click on to launch CRON-O-Meter just like any other program, even though it took me a few minutes (Hint: Working directory matters). I’m guessing Windows installation is easier, actually having an executable setup.

What the government does not like to admit is that another 20% of Medicare dollars are paid out in the form of overpayments to those with political connections. What companies do is lobby Congress to enact legislation mandating that Medicare pay inflated prices for certain products and services that can be obtained for a fraction of the price on the free market. This enables those who are politically connected to grossly overcharge Medicare because Congress mandates the inflated expenditures.

….

All it takes to make this drug is to put 5 mg of finasteride into a tablet that dissolves in the stomach. Vitamin companies do this every day with nutrients, but the FDA does not allow them to freely do the same thing with drugs.

- William Faloon, Why American Healthcare is Headed for Collapse – Life Extension.

So, to review: government dietary guidelines have been ass-backwards for at least a good portion of the population (not in this article, see Calories and my previous posts).  Medicare pays several times what it should for almost everything and anything. The FDA kills – yes, kills — by driving up the cost of the producing drugs and making new treatments unavailable; but everyone already knows that, and no one seems to really care. But the people want more government involvement in healthcare, and by golly, that’s what they’re going to get, sooner or later, one way or another.

Last time, I talked about the idea that increasing carbohydrate consumption is a huge force behind increasing obesity. The jury, in all honesty, is still out, and Taubes says as much.  General philosophies that you can’t prove a negative be damned, I think we can be pretty sure at this point that low-fat diets don’t work for a lot of people.

So, let’s suppose it’s true that high carbohydrate diets cause obesity and diabetes, which cause heart attacks, strokes, Alzheimer’s and other serious health problems. What are we to make of the role of the U.S. government in all this? And of other national governments around the world? Farm subsidies no longer appear as mere foolish economic protectionism, but as a policy that, quite frankly, kills people. Add to this the fact that nutritional labels are organized around the low-fat viewpoint: fats are listed first, saturated fat at the top, right after calories, and grouped with other things to supposedly minimize, such as cholesterol and sodium; carbs and protein are relegated to the bottom — thank goodness they’re listed at all! Also, government funding paid to disseminate the low-fat message, and for the questionable research behind it. Food pyramid, anyone? The fact that the message may have been right for some doesn’t excuse that it seems to have been deadly for others.

Now, it’s important to note — I’m not saying any of this was intentional. Rather, people with good intentions and a lot of power bent a few rules of good conduct. That is what makes Good Calories, Bad Calories especially frightening. It seems to be a made-for-a-textbook example of how concentrated power can go awry.

WASHINGTON – Hospitals and drug makers like what they see in the early version of a health care plan that may evolve into the one that ends up on President Barack Obama’s desk.

- Ricardo Alonso-zaldivar And Alan Fram, Senate plan to create winners and losers – Yahoo! News.

Wow, first of all, what a headline — perfect for this story, I hope they don’t change it. So, let me get this straight: In order to control increasing medical costs, we’re going subsidize medical costs. We’re upset that insurance costs so much, but we’re going to force everyone to buy it. And if the insurance is too good (expensive? annual coverage? They’re at least loosely linked), it’ll be taxed at a 35% rate.

This craziness has to have been put forth specifically to make everything else look good.

Me and my friends occasionally joke about an item being “not-something”, especially in Exalted. Infallible messenger is a “not-cell-phone”, that fire powder stuff is “not-gunpowder” and so on and not-so-forth. We’ve been known to call various politicians “Not-Daley.” So my jaw hit the floor when I found out that “Not/Starch”, “Not/Sugar”, and “Not/Cereal” are all apparently real products:

not/Starch works in hot or cold recipes. You don’t have to dissolve it like you do with corn starch – corn starch and flour can get lumpy and stringy. not/Starch will stay fluid and smooth – even if they are stored in the fridge or freezer.

They really named it “not/Starch”?!?!?

Meanwhile, the federal government made it cheaper for us to eat sugar and starch through massive grain subsidies. As the old farmer told the stars of King Corn, “You couldn’t make any money growing corn if not for the government payments.” Those government payments are the reason we feed cattle corn instead of letting them eat grass as nature intended. Subsidies are the reason high-fructose corn syrup is in half the products you’ll find in the grocery store, including bread. Dirt-cheap subsidized corn is the reason for Big Gulps and endless refills at the soda dispenser.

via Tom Naughton, Fat Head » Cheaper Health Care.

I wrote this to deal with the weird, weird way that PHP handles variable variables and arrays:

eval (“\$item_to_make = &$item_to_make;”);

I think it’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever written.

Eleven-time World Series of Poker champion Phil Hellmuth wears a hat and sunglasses when he plays poker. He does it to disguise his reactions from the other players, which might seem surprising. One would think that a man who can win 11 championships and more than $6 million over 18 years would be able to control his expression when he’s on the job.

In fact, says Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Ph.D., Toshiba professor of media, arts, and sciences at MIT and the author of Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World, he can’t. Nor can you. According to Dr. Pentland, our tiny, unconscious reactions can say more than we mean — and they don’t lie.

via The Impact of Unconscious Communication.

“If Today Was Your Last Day” offers better advice to an immortal than to someone who will die tomorrow. Here are some of the things in the song that would make more sense to do if you had thousands of years or longer rather than just one days left:

“Leave no stone unturned….try to take the path less traveled by…“

If you’re going to be around for a while, the cost of exploring new ideas, going new places, and trying new techniques is low — you can always go back to what you know works. On the other hand, let’s say you spend two hours of your last day on something that doesn’t work — you’ve just wasted over 8% of your remaining time.

“…Leave your fears behind…”

Possibly makes sense for fear of things that might result in death, possibly not, but let’s put that aside for now; if you’re immortal and you screw up in a non-fatal way, you have a lot of time to set things right socially, emotionally, physically, whatever. Suppose everyone thinks you’re worse than Hitler because of a faux pas. If you’re immortal, you can change their minds, or at the very least work on a new identity. For the last day scenario, you’re reputation is pretty much sealed; whatever you do that so terrible will be on the evening news, and you’re not going to have enough time to organize a press conference for a rebuttal. Non-lethal physical injuries are even worse — a broken leg will dramatically change the types of activities someone with lots of lifespan can do, but they have time to heal and can still have a full life in the meantime. Break a leg on your last day, and you’ll be in terrible pain for the rest of your life and not doing much of anything.

“…say goodbye to yesterday?“

I suspect immortals would definitely have to get a bit less starry-eyed about the past, simply because they’d have centuries of it after, well, a few centuries.

“Donate every dime you had…”

This one is tricky, but I think massive donations make much more sense if you’re going to live a long time rather than if you’re going to die in the very near future. If you’re going to die soon, it makes sense to try to get as much fun (utility?) out of the remaining time as possible, and it’d be easier to do that with a lot of money. No need to worry about what happens about anything you can’t spend as long as you have a halfway decent last will, which might even be something you could throw together with some online software and a couple friends in a pinch (NOT the right way to do things at all, this is something that shouldn’t be rushed, but I’m assuming someone with only 24 hours left is not going to spend hours talking to a lawyer, and people have gotten away with far more unusual things for wills) — you can still give gobs of money to charity. On the other hand, if you’re immortal and give all of your money to charity or someone random, it’s no big deal — wait a few years, and you’ll have plenty again, as long as you maintain some sort of reasonable income stream; if you don’t include illiquid assets that generate an income stream as “money,” this gets very, very trivial.

“And would you call those friends you never see? / Reminisce old memories?”

If I were going to go out in a day, no. The last thing I’d want to do in an “every second counts” situation like this is leisurely go over old stuff with kinda-friends. I’d much rather do new, fun stuff, as quickly as possible, with the friends I see most often. But if I had all the time in the world, sure. Friends are valuable, and improving a friendship has benefits into the future. The immortal has a future (the long now?) to consider — not so if it’s your last day.

“Would you forgive your enemies? …. Would you make your mark by mending a broken heart?”

Same thing as the friends. There’s a harm to having enemies and an unhappy ex or two or more into the future, but unless you think someone will try to sabotage your last day if you don’t reconcile with them, it doesn’t make much sense to waste time on them. That, and you might very well be depriving them of an after-funeral celebration if you call them and let them know all is forgiven.

“And would you find that one you’re dreaming of? ….fall in love if today was your last day?”

Relationships take time to build. You can bonk in 24 hours and maybe get dinner, go on a date, or role-play a deeper relationship; an actual lifetime romance takes… well, a lifetime.

“You know it’s never too late to shoot for the stars”

If you’re going to die in 24 hours, then, yes, it is too late to shoot for the stars. Writing a novel, building a skyscraper, founding a colony at sea, developing a new form of intelligence, or literally shooting for the stars in a rocket are all things that take time. Not a big problem for the extended lifespan, which is why we should support research toward life extension.

I’m struggling to understand the ramifications of this; except that it seems that the Obama administration may be trying for a weird, roundabout tax increase, and through sheer incompetence didn’t hide it very well:

The new federal steps, which do not require congressional action, include:

….

Allowing people to check a box on their federal tax returns asking that any refund be sent as a savings bond. More than 100 million U.S. households receive refund checks each year, and many are promptly cashed and spent.

-”Obama expands workers’ retirement savings options” http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090905/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama_retirement_savings

The incompetence comes in the fact that someone clearly had Nudge (which is in my queue of things to read) in mind when they came up with this, to the extent that the changes also include “allowing” (nudging?) smaller companies to set up opt-out retirement plans. I managed to confirm on Google books that this is an idea directly from Nudge.

The evil, or at least highly questionable part of this comes from the fact that savings bonds are government debt, and there’s been a lot of talk lately about what the federal government is going to do to pay for all of the crazy spending that’s been going on lately. Will the Fed be forced by politics to fire up the printing press, causing the U.S. to inflate away its debt? Will the government simply refuse to pay? Will we see explicit higher taxes? It’s clear this is an attempt to nudge lenders toward lending to the government, and I’m surprised it’s not actually the default.

To review — the government takes some of your money. If it takes more than it’s “supposed to” it keeps the money interest-free until roundabout April or May. If you’re not paying attention to the fact that Uncle Sam is not as trustworthy a borrower as he was in the past, you can allow the government to keep the money, albeit with interest. It’s entirely possible you won’t get it back, or won’t get back the amount you’re expecting, or that the government will tax it again at a new, higher rate.