…mathematics is only a tool, though an immensely powerful one. No equations, however impressive and complex, can arrive at the truth if the initial assumptions are incorrect. It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible. – Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 7, 1962
I finished reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes a few days ago. I think I’ve made a lot of progress on my goal to lose weight just by doing so (it’s the light blue square in my goal grid), although only time will tell. It’s a marvelous book with political, scientific, and health freedom issues that go far beyond those that Taubes immediately brings up, and I am stunned.
Calories convincingly makes the case that a misunderstanding of statistics regarding heart disease at the turn of century, as well as a flawed understanding of what humans ate tens of thousands of years ago, essentially caused an ill-founded crusade against dietary fat. Combined with the fact that fat is roughly twice as calorie-dense as protein and carbohydrates, this led to many health officials recommending low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets. This puts a recent NutritionData blog entry into perspective (the entire post is worth reading, slowly, and carefully, although it makes a lot more sense with details from Taubes):
The prevailing wisdom that meat and saturated fat are unhealthy is based on the same sort of inconclusive, circumstantial evidence as the studies I’ve noted here. But if we really want to get to the truth, we’re going to need to consider ALL the (flawed) evidence, not just that which supports our point of view. – Monica Reinagel, More evidence that saturated fat has been falsely accused?
The bulk of the evidence on diet is inconclusive and circumstantial because, Taubes points out, the research is just not conducted in a competent manner:
…institutionalized vigilance… is nowhere to be found in the study of nutrition, chronic disease, and obesity, and it hasn’t been for decades. For this reason, it is difficult to use the term “scientist” to describe those individuals who work in these disciplines, and, indeed, I have actively avoided doing so in this book. It’s simply debatable, at best, whether what these individuals have practiced for the past fifty years, and whether the culture they have created, as a result, can reasonably be described as science, as most working scientists or philosophers of science would typically characterize it. Individuals in these disciplines think of themselves as scientists; they use the terminology of science in their work, and they certainly borrow the authority of science to communicate their beliefs to the general public, but “the results of their enterprise,” as Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, might have put it, “do not add up to science as we know it.” – Calories, 451
Indeed; calories is full of examples of questionable assumptions, poor choices of animal models (rabbits!?), and a general lack of clear thought. This book is just as much a book about the history of science (?) as it is about nutrition, and it puts contemporary events such as the rise of evidence-based medicine in perspective. (When I ran across it in the text, I found the Cochrane Collaboration website already in my bookmarks).
Fast forwarding past the history lesson that justifiably takes hundreds of pages in Good Calories, Bad Calories, the best information we have on metabolism at this point suggests that insulin promotes the storage of energy as fat, and that the intake of carbohydrates causes a big increase in blood insulin levels. Neither point should be terribly surprising to anyone that’s ever been around diabetic family members on insulin. Taubes describes this as fat cells pulling in calories, making fewer available for everything else, and increasing appetite — this model “assumes that energy intake and expenditure are dependent variables” (358).
Calories is simply too much to talk about all at once, and I’ll continue writing about this for a few days at least.
Found this online:
…Steven Gortmaker, who heads Harvard’s Prevention Research Center on Nutrition and Physical Activity. “If you’re more physically active, you’re going to get hungry and eat more.” Gortmaker, who has studied childhood obesity, is even suspicious of the playgrounds at fast-food restaurants. “Why would they build those?” he asks. “I know it sounds kind of like conspiracy theory, but you have to think, if a kid plays five minutes and burns 50 calories, he might then go inside and consume 500 calories or even 1,000.” – John Cloud, “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin”, Time
Why assume a conspiracy theory? It’s easier to suppose that fast-food restaurants (basically McDonald’s) that had play areas were more successful, and are therefore common today. Actually, if this is the case, as soon as any fast-food chain has play areas for kids, or even locates by a public park, the outcome seems pretty well inevitable, intentionally and conscious conspiracy or no.
I’ve been listening to remixes of Linkin Park’s “Numb” on YouTube. I like Linkin Park, and I like most of the remixes, but I just have to say I’m reminded of Unskippable on Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil.
Because really, adult life is not about getting all the things that make you look stable and successful. Adult life is about constantly making difficult decisions about what you are going to give up.
3 Questions you ask me a lot, about money, Brazen Careerist
Besides being a support of SENS, I’d also like to see work done toward whole body transplants; an idea that usually makes my friends a bit jittery. “Won’t you have to kill someone in order to have your brain transplanted into them?” Well, I hope not; it would be much better if everyone on earth could benefit from such technology. My knowledge isn’t yet good enough to speculate on the details, but there have been plenty of alternatives kicked around, particularly the engineering of cloned brainless bodies. The benefits of such technology are so overwhelming that it boggles me that people aren’t working on it like crazy.
Another issue that might come up is one of identity. After all, people won’t be able to recognize you! But a society that supports the idea of a whole-body transplant shouldn’t have any trouble with this; you just need a doctor or some other authority to send “before” and “after” pictures to the government and your friends and family.
I recently moved into a new apartment, and that meant getting a new Internet connection. This is the first time I’ve set up a permanent high-speed connection that I’m not sharing with anyone else for my computer. To complicate things slightly, Windows isn’t working right now on Lelouch (my laptop), and Kubuntu is all I have.
I used pppoeconfig to set up my intial connection, and was pleased that it more or less “just worked” right away, so I was surprised when I rebooted, ran pon dsl-provider, and it didn’t work.
By playing around with pppoeconfig, I managed to figure out that it runs pppoe -A -I eth0 when it says “looking for access concentrator” or something like that. From what I gather from Wikipedia, this is the discovery phase of PPPOE, and either the DSL modem or my ISP expects it for every single connection.
So, I ultimately came up with this script to connect to the internet:
#!/bin/bash pppoe -A -I eth0 pon dsl-provider sleep 2 plog echo "Press any key to continue..." read -n1
Mind you, I only have a really, really vague sense of what pppoe -A -I eth0 actually does, so there could be some inefficiency or problem here that I’m not aware of (in other words, your milage may vary). But it works. The last four lines are because I’m nosy and like to see what going on.
Found this song, “Forever“, on Youtube. The lyrics are just a bit creepy if you think about (intentionally misinterpret?) them.
image: detail of installation by Bronwyn Lace
