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Biological Spaces and Information
June 30, 2005 01:12 PM
I think a new understanding of life and its connectedness will come from the idea of gene space. Presently, we classify living things according to body shape and other features of morphology. This is a standard practice of Paleobiology and it is powerful, but limited. An advance on this practice is mapping genetic relatedness and the flow of genes over time and geographical space.
As more is learned of the genome it is likely that we will characterize living things by their genes and their place in the space of genes. A gene space is a mathematical space of many dimensions and a species will be a set of genes in that space. A creature will be a single point in the space. So will you be when your place in the Grand Scheme of Things is mapped.
The relatedness of all things will be defined by a measure of genetic distance, of which there are many possible measures. Something like this is behind the attempt to trace the distance between a modern human's genes and the genes of a Paleo ancestor.
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Immortality
June 28, 2005 05:16 PM
Only the information in your genes is immortal, all the rest of you is mortal.
That makes life precious.
Your genes are millions of years old and will live far beyond your life.
That makes life mysterious.
Another kind of information lives long after you die. That is the influence you have on others.
That makes life meaningful.
We are information and all we leave behind is information.
After death, there is no neural substrate to sustain a mind, which is the only form of sentience.
That is fine with me. It makes life precious, mysterious, and meaningful.
It makes me want to treat my body and mind well for they are physical stuff that makes this wonderous thing called life.
I don't need any more answers than those.
LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (24)
A Real Iraqi Rambo
This isn't from a Rambo movie, but it sure looks like an Iraqi Rambo. Perched in this way, he is a perfect target, but what a Hollywood Moment.
The photo is from LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (0)
An Iraqi Rambo
This isn't from a Rambo movie, but it sure looks like an Iraqi Rambo. Perched in this way, he is a perfect target, but what a Hollywood Moment. I love it anyway.
The photo is from Michael Yon's Online Magazine. He is doing some of the best reporting on the war in Iraq.
The picture is of a member of the Iraqi Security Forces as they respond to a carjacking and murder of the seven occupants.
LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (12)
Fights in Movies
They are almost always bad.
I read a long article years ago by a doctor who analyzed movie fights and killing. His main point was that humans are extremely difficult to kill and that the movies dramatically cheapen human life by making it appear that humans die easily. They don't and an evolutionary perspective would make you understand how hard it is to kill a human. Those who went easily didn't leave their genes behind.
People who are on PCP are almost super human; they can tolerate great pain and injury and still exert enormous force and power. They are extremely lethal.
The legendary Berserkers, the wild killers of the Viking invaders, were on some form of drug rather like PCP according to scientists who have studied them. They were also a semi-secret, cult-like group who practiced hypnotic rituals before their attacks. They didn't wear armor, just fur covers, unlike the other Vikings.
I suppose they were sold some kind of Valhalla story, rather like the fundamentalists of our day. Another instance of someone forecasting your future for you to their benefit, not yours. Of course, there is no Valhalla on the other side as there is no other side. The mind dies when the brain dies and so do any thoughts or sentience that reside there. The cheapening of the present, the only place where you live, relative to the future is a common trick of those who want to manipulate you. The future is completely unpredictable. And you are only alive now.
Interestingly, body builders are not good fighters, at least if you judge by their movies. Steve Reeves was awful; he lunged and posed more than he fought. Reg Park too. Arnold isn't at all convincing. You action movie fans could name others I am sure. Harrison Ford is a more convincing fighter than any major star, but his victims drop far too easily. If they didn't, the movie would be one long fight. And, no story (come to think of it, there is no story anyway.)
It would actually be an awful movie to see just one victim die in a realistic way for it would take most of the movie.
The fighters in Troy who were said to be bashing each other pretty hard were the Bulgarian weight lifters, probably Olympic lifters rather than body builders, though I don't know and I didn't see the movie.
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The End of the Assault Weapons Ban
My friend and great economist John Lott is at it again. In his LA Times article he looks over the latest evidence on the demise of the Federal assault weapons ban. (I am surprised the LAT published this. I had been a reader of the LAT far back in the Norman Chandler days. I worked out in same gym where his son Otis, the successor Chandler to become publisher, trained when he was a track athlete. Though he improved the Times, he also put it on the track to its current dismal state.)
Several points:
1. The rise predicted by gun control advocates did not occur. They were just wrong and their analysis has always been faulty.
2. Murders fell for the first time since 1999.
3. The pattern of the slight decline over states is revealing; the decline was less in states with bans than in states without them. This pattern is pretty strong evidence against the efficacy of the bans.
4. The number of murders and robberies fell more than the number of other crimes where guns are not typically used.
Even though the numbers are small (you don't expect big changes in only 9 months in either direction), they are wholly contrary to the gun control advocate position.
Some time back I was asked by the Edge Question center to submit a one liner on what I thought was one of the more interesting issues about how science was used in public policy. My statement appears there, but here it is:
The future is over-forecasted and under-predicted.
Advocacy groups are always making forecasts to bring you to their position. They are almost always wrong because nobody can predict these things. Financial analysts are among the worst. So are environmentalists and, as John shows, gun control advocates.
It is not just the movies where nobody knows anything. It is in all complex social processes. It has to be this way.
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My Watch
June 27, 2005 08:02 PM
I am a bit of a watch fan, but I quit buying expensive watches when my Audemars Piquet Royal Oak broke on me. But, I have always admired the Audemars style, far better than the too popular Rolex in my opinion.
I came across a replica of the famous Royal Oak Offshore Terminator edition (yes the watch Arnold wore in the movie, which I didn't see). I liked the Offshore (non-Terminator version) ever since I saw it in London years ago, but couldn't/wouldn't part with the $11,000 to buy it. It may be more by now, I don't know.
Here is a picture of this great looking watch.
It keeps better time than any watch I have owned but for an atomic watch and it is a mechanical movement with mineral crystal crystal. It feels like titanium too.
I saved about $11,000 on this watch, but I would have bought it for even less than Audemars' price because I am not after the exclusivity. It isn't the price, which renders it unobtainable for ordinary (and sensible) people. So, it isn't a statement about me, it is the style and function that I like. That is to say, it is about me to me, not to others.
It is now available for less than I paid for it; it is $137 instead of the $141 I paid. It came in a string wrapped paper package right from Russia with great looking stamps on it. I got it at a place called Rusplanet.com and there were no hassles at all. I suspected I might get charges to my credit card, but none. But, I had planned to cancel the card anyway and did a few months after buying this watch.
OK, it is a fake and I don't like ripping off designs. But, they could pay a small royalty on the design and make a cheap copy. That would be a win win situation. The copies are not likely to diminish demand for the low volume real thing, but by licensing the design, Audemars might get more revenue from its great looking designs. Buy a genuine Audemars replica authorized by the factory. In contrast, movie and music downloads do diminish demand substantially (I have done the research on the movies, but won't publish it yet).
If the license fee were modest, there would be a small incentive to copy without paying it so long as there are any copy right protections in Russia at all. They exist even in Hong Kong where software pirates go to elaborate lengths to avoid being caught with inventory. They have only empty boxes on the shelves.
It cost Audemars nothing because I would never buy one at that price and I have not been all that happy with the very expensive one I did buy. It is still in the drawer, not running.
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Troy and Me in Time Magazine
Do you remember this movie? It was heavily advertised and featured Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom.
Just before it came out Time Magazine interviewed me on its prospects. The article by Josh Tirangeal was pretty good.
The link is Troy in Time.
There is a funny bit about the 250 Bulgarian weight lifters they recruited for the movie and the problem they had with the food. Storms, wars, and little tortoises on the beach all add to the mad chaos of making this film.
How will it do they asked me? Nobody knows. But, what about all those screens they asked. That is supply, not demand. The audience has to fill those seats or you don't have anything. I haven't checked, but it didn't do very well as I recall; it was gone pretty quickly.
If you think about it, the ability of movies to temporarily fill the shelves is quite different from selling toasters or bicycles. For a week or two, a movie might fill 20% or more of the available shelf space (screens). What if retailing operated this way? It would be madness.
LINK · The Movie Business · Comments (4)
New Site Design
Sekimori has completed their new design for my site. It will be up in a few days.
Here is a look at the new high style site. I like it.
LINK · Everything · Comments (4)
FT Muscle and Free Fatty Acid Uptake
June 24, 2005 10:15 AM
This sounds imposing, but it is a relatively little known property of FT fiber that it increases its rate of uptake of free fatty acids during fasting. During the non-fasting state it is usually the ST fibers that take up the free fatty acids (FFA) that are reesterfied in the liver.
No wonder it is so easy for me to stay lean. I have a lot of FT fiber volume relative to ST volume because of my training and, perhaps, some genetics too. When I do my intermittent fasting, it turns out that the FT fibers take up more FFA than they do in the fed state. So, I take in and burn fat as the energy substrate to my FT fibers. I burn more fat than someone who has less FT fiber. Another triumph of Evolutionary Fitness technology.
The evolutionary rationale for this is harder to spot. I don't want to go too far out this limb until I learn more about the mechanisms. But, we know that for every mechanism such as, FT fiber takes up FFA but only during fasting, there is a deeper adaptive reason. One could see it as preparation for the high intensity of the hunt, which requires more FT energy. Starvation would motivate the hunt and the uptake of FFA in the FT fibers would be preparation. The ST fibers already carry their energy supply, but are less important relative to the FT in the high intensity of the hunt. So, there is a slight shift of energy substrate between the fiber types. [This is probably too clever by half as one of my early bosses used to tell me about my explanations.] It is known that fighters are more effective if they fast mildly before the fight. This is consistent with the relative shift of substrate between the fiber types.
As you read this remember that the nonoxidative muscles are the FTx and, to some measure, the FTa because they are both glycolitic and oxidative.
It is known that the total uptake of FFA in the body exceeds what can be accounted for by the liver. Now, it appears that the heretofore undiscovered FT fibers are responsible, at least to a significant degree.
Some enclosed comments are my clarifying remarks. The bottom line: FT fibers carry low levels of lipids (IMCLs) when you are well fed, but they take up fats from the blood stream at a high rate and reach high levels during fasting. And, we have always been told that aerobic exercise and ST muscle fiber burns fat. Maybe in the fed state, but not in the caloric deficit induced by fasting or heavy exercise.
How do you fast? Try an overnight 15 hour period of not eating. Skip dinner on any day you like, random is best, so long as you are active and hit your FT fibers on that day.
The following extract is from Muscle-type specific intramyocellular and hepatic lipid metabolism during starvation in Wistar rats in Diabetes (March 2004) by too many authors to list.
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Who is that actor?
June 23, 2005 05:53 PM
One of our readers guessed that the actor shown on the (discounted at Amazon) cover of my book, Hollywood Economics, is Harold Lloyd.
So here is the little contest. The first one to correctly name the actor on the cover, the movie, and the director gets a (listen to this) free copy of Chapter One of Evolutionary Fitness.
I will use the time date on the email to decide who wins and you must name all three. This is easy. But, the prize is not that great either.
LINK · The Movie Business · Comments (9)
Time Magazine and the Movies
June 22, 2005 09:34 PM
I gave a long telephone interview today to Time Magazine on the pending merger of AMC Entertainment and Loews Entertainment. Both are major theater chains and the combined theaters of the merged entity would be 450 theaters. Not so much compared to the more than 5000 theaters in the US, but one that has a lot of major city coverage. I did the interview to test what effect it would have on the sales of my book, Hollywood Economics. Today its sales rank is 223,380. I'll check back after the interview appears. I plan to turn down future interviews; they usually are not worth my time.
As to the merger. Neither company is publically traded so it is hard to know how the market evaluated the news of the pending merger. In most mergers, one or both companies suffer a stock value decline. This is probably due to the high transactions cost of putting the merger together; fees are incredibly high and this has to take a toll on the value of the merged entity. But, the answer I gave is that nobody knows if or how the merger will pay off. It could go either way, though the evidence in the movie/entertainment business is that mergers and acquisitions do not increase value.
The industry has written off many billions in the past decade or so. SONY wrote off 5 or so billion in its acquisition of Columbia, the ABC-Disney merger saw a stockholder value loss of, I forget, but it was many billions. And then there is the Time/Warner AOL merger that helped to produce a loss of stockholder value in excess of 30 billion. Finally, there was the French sewer company, Vivendi. Its claim to fame was political power within France because of connections to municipal policiticians throughout the country through Vivendi's interests in water systems. Through this influence it gained access to capital and political support in media. Mercier, as a graduate of one of the prestigious Ecole's, leveraged this small base into a world wide media company, in part through the acquisition of Universal here in the US.
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Set Points
I have said that I believe the set point theory is wrong. According to this theory, the body monitors its fat stores. When it "detects" a suffient loss of fat, it acts to defend the remaining amount. This makes further loss more difficult. The body acts to defend the fat you are trying so hard to lose and diets become self-defeating. Even health professionals who are surveyed think the theory is true.
Fortunately, it is completely wrong and there is abundant evidence on that score. Much of it is reviewed in my paper Why We Get Fat. The confusion is that fat loss declines as the body loses weight because a chronic caloric deficit leads to a loss of lean body tissue and a corresponding decline in energy expenditure. The energy loss is a basal loss and a loss because people become less active owing to hunger fatigue and because they have less muscle to move them around.
In my paper I show how these energetics work out and how body mass seeks a thermodynamic equilibrium with respect to energy intake and expenditure. Dieters regain fat, not because all diets must fail, but because they return to the intitial conditions of intake and expenditure they are accustomed to. It turns out too that their equilibrium is very fragile so that slight changes can sweep them right off it.
The paper also shows that exercise is more effective than dietary restriction for losing fat and attaining a health body composition at a desirable body mass. As you get to this point it becomes easier to stay there too. So, this equilibrium is far more stable than a diet/starvation equilibrium (which isn't one at all). That is because as you gain lean mass you become more active and energy using. Your basal metabolic rate goes up and you move around more too. Moreover, you can generate fairly large energy bursts, certainly relative to a dieter.
The paper reafirms an earlier point I made about appetite. It is uncoupled with energy intake and humans evolved to be able to eat way more than they expend in energy. Any other strategy was far too dangerous. And, we went hungry about one third of the time and balance energy over longer time periods, not daily like so many try to do. Silly really silly.
Neat stuff about maximal sustained energy expenditure too and some Tour de France data. If you like it, send praise not money.
You can download the paper at the link below. It is a bit technical, but you will find a lot you can enjoy in it. Sorry, references are in the text, but I haven't got the bibliography finished.
Art De Vany's Why We Get Fat
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (8)
Hunter Gatherer VO2 max compares with elite athletes
June 21, 2005 05:13 PM
In a previous post on body composition of elite and non-elite high school wrestlers, I noted that the VO2 max for the elite group was 52.6 and for the non-elite group it was 51.5. VO2 max is a measure of cardiac output and aerobic fitness.
For modern day hunter-gatherers the VO2 max value is 52, right at the value for the elite group. In contrast, the VO2 max value of males of age 40 in the US is 34 and for females it is about 20. At age 20, the values are about 35 for males and 22 for females. (I can't be more exact as I am reading from a scatter diagram.)
Thus, hunter-gatherers living in their traditional, high energy way, achieve a fitness level comparable to elite athletes. This is one of the origins of my concept of ancestor as athlete. Note also, that VO2 max is a measure of extended sprint power; it measures the largest volume of oxygen you can pass through the lungs. Think of a 200 yard sprinter up to a miler, but not a jogger.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (1)
Chapter 1 of Evolutionary Fitness
June 20, 2005 08:11 PM
It is done and will go tomorrow to my reviewers, after I add a few references.
How will I distribute it? I have not decided. Now that it is finished I have a different inclination than before. I will wait to see what my web designer comes up with for distribution. I am working toward a one time fee for all the chapters, that will come out over a period of time. You will have access to all the chapters for the single payment. On the other hand, this may not be feasible.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (6)
Appetite
Just a brief note because I was reminded yesterday at a restaurant that human appetite is not a reliable guide to energy or nutrient content.
In the corner of the restaurant were two couples weighing in at at least 250 per person. They ate course after course of dinner plates and were still going strong when my wife and I left. We had come in just after them.
One woman in the group made her way to the rest room and could just get down the aisle between tables (there was plenty of room). She was so large she had trouble moving.
My wife was incredulous at the pace at which she ate. My wife and this woman both got a plate at about the same time and this woman's serving was gone almost instantly, almost inhaled rather than eaten.
One sees this all the time and it is powerful evidence that the body does not monitor its fat content, nor does fat content affect appetite. The idea of a set point where the body monitors and defends its fat stores is wrong and always has been (more on this in a day or so). Pathological levels of fat do not diminish appetite. Clearly, evolution had no need to guard against such levels of obesity as they had to have been extremely rare.
I used to tell my health class that I would be a lousy waiter. Someone would ask me what I recommend for dinner and I would probably say; I suggest you don't eat for about a week. Another career busted because of my attitude.
It is true that humans do not have accurate appetites. Infants are known to almost perfectly adjust the volume of their intake to match their energy needs. Some (mean) experimenters dilute the energy content of the infant's formula and the infant ups its intake by just enough to offset the dilution. No such mechanism exists in adults. We seem to lose the energy detection system somewhere along the way. The only people who have a reasonable match of expenditure to intake are those who expend a lot of energy.
Lumberjacks and Tour de France participants do pretty well. So do Ache' hunter gatherers. In these individuals energy expenditure is very high. It seems that what little appetite control remains into adult hood is designed to prevent deficient energy intake, not to prevent excess energy intake. This makes much evolutionary sense.
I liken this to a thermostat, always a poor analogy to human metabolism but it is useful here. The sensitivity or gain on the thermostat is poor at low energy expenditure so it doesn't work very well at, say, an expenditure of 1800 calories a day. At 4 or 5000 calories a day, it works pretty well. Again, this would be to prevent an ancestor or even us from ignoring our energy intake when we are expending a lot of energy. So, it is more a fail safe mechanism to prevent under nutrition than it is to prevent over nutrition. Under nutrition is more dangerous than over nutrition, at least in the short run and certainly to an ancestor with uncertain food availability
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (12)
Body Composition
June 18, 2005 09:09 AM
I am a believer in good body composition. I think this is more important than plain mass; too many people with large muscle mass are too fat and actually have a poor body composition. Above 13% body fat, bad things begin to happen for a male at least. On the other hand, the research claims that as we age we lose about 2 pounds of lean muscle mass each decade. Given today's sedentary lives, the loss is likely to be even greater than this.
Reading the evidence in skeletal remains and muscle attachment points allows anthropologists to assess the body composition of our ancestors. They had large powerful muscles (the attachment points are very large and their bone density shows their muscles exerted substantial force). So the body composition of a Paleolithic ancestor would have been something like a lean, powerfully-built, wrestler, but a large one not in the 132 pound class but more like the 200 pound class.
Hormone profiles are favorably shaped by body composition and the activities necessary to attain that composition. Lean body mass is your active tissue, it is the metabolically active you, the force that moves you through life. If you watch your weight, it should mean to you that you watch your lean muscle mass. Don't lose it or you begin to age because you lose your insulin sensitivity and alter your hormones unfavorably.
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Update on The Book and the Blog
June 17, 2005 12:30 PM
Chapter One is pretty much done and will go out to a few select reviewers soon. I will distribute it sometime next week. It will be free as it is mostly overview and there are no new technologies in it.
The web site is being redesigned by a well-known designer, Sekimori. So, some changes are coming even though I want to continue the clean, relaxed look of the site.
My primary concerns are to put up other pages for Arthur De Vany Consulting and links to my research papers, at least those I am permitted by copyright agreements to distribute. There will be a bit of Paleolithic and statistical artwork (yes, some statistical diagrams are lovely). We are also working on a way to distribute new chapters as they appear in a simple and more economical way than $10 each (although that may still be the simplest way after all).
LINK · Everything ~ · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (2)
Followup to Torque and Power in the Golf Swing
Just a couple of comments to add to this issue.
1. The model used in the article in Sports Engineering (2002) 5, 23-32 by E. Sprigings and S. Mackenzie neglects gravity. So, it is possible to generate even more power in the down swing than the their model estimates. In most long-hitters, the downswing is a kind of controlled fall, like a pitcher. Let gravity be your friend one of the better long hitters once told me (Gerry James).
If you turn against a firm backleg and pull with your front shoulder along your swing plane, the left side of your body falls forward and around. This is clear in looking at Tiger's or Vijay's swings. The first part of their downswing is a controlled fall.
If you start the downswing with the left shoulder, the torque reaction feeds into the left hip. Even though many teachers say to start with the left hip, it is really the turning of the left shoulder that initiates the turning and forward movement of the left hip. Pulling back and down from the left shoulder makes the front hip rotate and move forward a bit. Then you can just "walk through the swing" to continue the movement of your weight to the left side.
Contrarily, if you start the downswing with the right shoulder the torque reaction pushes you back into a reverse pivot, alters the swing path, and ruins your spine angle. It also makes you jump up onto your toes, ruining your swing radius.
2. Harry Vardon was not the person who devised the Vardon grip now used by so many. He was just one of the better-known players to use it. He was a very long hitter and a great player. His belief was that you can go over trouble with high, long shots -- a very modern view. What is a bit less well known about him is that he bent his left (lead) arm at the elbow in the backswing and extended it in the down swing. This is more like a modern baseball swing. It also adds another joint hinge for generating power. This might be a problem for accuracy, but then again it does promote a more in to out swing path and seems to make it easier to initiate the downswing (really down and around) with the left arm and shoulder. So, there may not be much penalty in accuracy.
When Mark Maguire first broke into the majors, he had a very long swing and a pronounced rolling of the wrists in the release. It was powerful, but not quick and the wrist roll pulled the bat off line. His mature swing was short back and long through, just like Harry Vardon's would have been. They both had bent left elbows. In Mark's case, the hands didn't roll any more at release; he hit through with his hands parallel to one another and to the ground. His extension came from letting the right hand go so the left arm could extend further down the swing path. The bat stays on line much longer this way and the drive through the ball puts more backspin on it so it carries farther.
3. The downswing at 0.34 seconds is Nick Faldo's. I think, say, Sergio Garcia's might take bit less as he has an almost Hogan quality to his club head lag. He, like Hogan, is pound for pound, one of the longest drivers on the tour. The model estimates that a delayed release can add about 5% to the power generated in a swing.
4. Both Ben Hogan and and Mike Austin explained how they put wrist cock and lag into the swing the same way. Austin, a Ph.D. in physiology and legendary long hitter, was very precise: extend the base of the left hand and pull the shaft down with the right index finger. This brings the forearms closer to one another and produces the most acute angle the player is capable of at the wrist link between the forearms and the club shaft.
LINK · Sports · Comments (9)
Torque and Power in the Golf Swing
June 16, 2005 04:13 PM
I love to do these analyses of the golf swing (and of the baseball swing too). It is preparation for my plan to play at bit more golf. I may do some long drive competitions too, but not with those 50 inch shafts (I think they just changed the rules to limit the shaft to 46 inches, so that a long drive is no longer a trick shot). I am mostly a FT person and a shorter shaft actually lets me generate more club head speed, but I am getting ahead of myself.
These are some reflections based on research in The Physics of Golf by T. Jorgensen and and article in Sports Engineering (2002) 5, 23-32 by E. Sprigings and S. Mackenzie. It is called Examining the delayed release in the golf swing, but it has a lot of other good information.
It had been thought that 3040 watts was necessary to hit long drives. This is about 4 horsepower to generate a club head speed of 100 mph. But, it turns out a lot less than 2040 watts is required; it is more like 1650 watts. And this is because linear reaction forces at the joint centers transfer energy to the club head by joint-force power.
Consider power generation at the shoulder, the wrist and the torso (this is shoulder rotation about the spine, with some hip rotation too). The powers generated at these points are: shoulder 800 W, wrist joint 600 W, torso 390 W. The shoulder joint transfer point generates the highest power, followed by the wrist joint. No wonder Annicka can hit 300 yard drives; she has the best wrist release in golf and her arm-torso separation is excellent. That is, her arms speed up relative to her torso as she almost "walks" through the swing. The slow tempo of her torso is a key; this segment only contributes 390 W, so keep it smooth and it serves as a point for absorbing the torque reactions from the arms and wrists. As the shoulder rotates, the torque reaction transfers to the torso and tends to slow it down. Walking through the rotation absorbs the torque reaction. As the wrists release, the arms slow down as they absorb the torque reactions.
The way the segments slow as the power is transferred to the next one down the chain from torso to shoulder to wrist to club makes a well-synchronized swing look slow. Even when the club head speed is 120 mph.
Annicka's wrist release (unhinging of the wrists, forearm rotation and extension of the bent right arm at impact) must be one of the best ever seen. Her release and shoulder-arm acceleration are more than 3/4 of her power and her smooth torso rotation absorbs these forces. Thus, she looks so smooth and yet generates high power. So does Ernie Els. Both of them look like they are swinging so slowly because their torso rotation is slow, but continuous and supporting to the higher power generated in their shoulder and wrists.
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What Hump?
June 15, 2005 11:27 AM
In Mel Brooks terrific movie Young Frankenstein, Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) tells Igore (Marty Feldman), "I am a brilliant surgeon. When this is done, I can fix the hump on your back." To which Igore replies with a hard look and almost threatening tone, "What hump?"
Is Igore guilty of self-deception or is Frankenstein guilty of putting Igore in a category of those to be pitied or helped? Is either perception the right one? Why can't Igore see that he has a hump when Gene Wilder has his hand on it?
This is one of those self-referential nightmares of the sort loved by logicians and famously studied by Godel and Turing. (Both these guys committed suicide, so fair warning if you read any further.)
If Igore acknowledges his condition, then he must recognize he is pitied by others. Then he might deserve our pity since the pity and help are worse than his condition, which he doesn't acknowledge he has. He is better off not seeing his condition.
So, this can hardly be called self-deception; it seems rational to me. He lives with his body and we with ours and there is no point whatever in comparing himself with others. He is asserting his rightful self-image and rationally choosing not to adopt an image others may have of him. Neither the Hunchback of Notre Dame nor the Elephant Man could bring themselves to do that. But, that is just Hollywood; any rational person would take Igore's position.
The problem is that the brain has a special structure, the mirror neurons, that help us to imagine how others might act by running a simulation of a model of that person in our brain. This lets us forecast their possible actions, maybe even their strategies or thoughts. This structure is supposed to let us run the simulation in the other way too; that is to imagine what we would do in their situation.
Does this structure let me run a simulation of myself in my own brain? Perhaps to assess what kind of a person I am? Probably, because I think we often think that others ought to admire us because we admire ourselves and we can run our simulation of others to the same effect.
But if I can simulate myself and others in this structure, who am I? Am I my simulation or am I something else? Are the perceptions of others as valid as mine or more? Or is everyone completely wrong about me?
So you can see how complicated this self-referential simulation of self and others gets to be. It can go very wrong.
The problem is that it is not possible to design a mind that is capable of assessing itself. The self-assessment must always be either inconsistent or incomplete. There must be times when we don't know who we are and other times when we are wildly inconsistent. That is inherent in the neural substrate and its algorithms that we call the mind.
The brain doesn't have enough "stuff" to step outside itself, so it can never have anything but incomplete and inconsistent knowledge of the mind. This makes the Biblical injunction "Know thyself" the hardest thing to do. It is impossible.
Intuition is just a word for knowledge that we have that cannot be expressed and this must always be true. Godel's theorem says this. We have knowledge beyond what our language and formal systems can express. Turing did it a different, but equivalent way. It must have been hard for both of them; self-referential introspection, running simulations of ourselves and our thought is hard; a Doesteveskian task. I wonder if it killed them.
That is why it is OK to be inconsistent or to be ignorant in some situations. It must be. There is no way around it. This the Godel/Turing theorem applied to the human mind. The theorem applies most strongly when we must imagine and analyze ourselves.
I frankly do not believe a lot of the research on self-deception. It is tangled with these self-referential vs. other paradoxes. Though I do think we do deceive ourselves. It must have had great adaptive value in the evolutionary context. How otherwise would Homo Erectus have left Africa and populated all of Europe? Its not a nice place, after all, as Mel Brooks might say.
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Thermodynamics and Muscle
June 14, 2005 02:10 PM
In an earlier post on Mass I made the point that one can build muscle without being in positive caloric balance. I didn't claim that is the best way to gain muscle, but I think it is the best way to change your body composition to make a leaner and more muscular body. If you want to grow beyond that point, then a slight caloric excess is all that is required.
The problem is that most people have no idea what their energy expenditures are or what their intake is. Nor do I. So, in accordance with the rule athletes and body builders tend to follow "If a little is good, then a lot is even better", people eat too much trying to put on muscle. Most body builders I have seen over many years are too fat. Even pros may get smooth in the off season. And most of the young men I see these days in my gym who are body building are way too smooth.
Here is the most direct evidence you can find, better than some lab study. What do most people who eat more than they expend look like? We call them fat. Excess energy goes into fat after the muscle glycogen is restored (a trivial amount). Eating more protein doesn't mean that protein is what you get when the body is through with it. A lot of it will go into fat.
The hard thing is to gain muscle mass and maintain or improve your body composition as you do so. That is why it is important not to overeat on a long term basis.
Protein pools in the body are excreted as they turn over. The protein pool varies and its size is affected by protein intake, by cell turnover and loss, and by nutrient partitioning into body protein or fat. It has a lot of places to go and you certainly need plenty of it. It does not violate thermodynamic equilbrium to gain muscle as you lose fat. Working out and fasting promote GH which is protein sparing and directs resources to repair and maintenence. You have plenty of fat to fuel this process, even those of use who are lean have enough.
But, what about thermodynamic equilibrium?
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Leukemia
A question from a reader.
"Hello Dr. DeVany. I would like to know your opinion on treating leukemia by means of elevating the immune system through antioxidants, cold water dousing, exercise and diet. My sister has just been diagnosed with acute myologenous leukemia, and will start Chemo soon. I want her to have some quality of life, and would like to help her if I can. Links or information would be welcome. Your blog is very informative. Thank you, Ron."
My answer...
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Foraging in the Woods
I invited Wild Bill to share his experience in foraging in the forest. He kindly responded and I think the information is so revealing that I wanted put it a post and comment just a bit on it.
In reading his response note the caloric return relative to energy expenditure in foraging for different food sources. Optimal foraging theory (economics again) tells you to exhaust first those sources that give the highest caloric return relative to energy expenditure and then work your way down the energy return chain.
Animal sources come through clearly at the top of the list. Tubers are next. Some, but not all, nuts offer a high return, but they have toxins and long processing time. Other nuts fall far down the line.
Animals and tubers are exploited by all known foragers who have been studied and have access to these sources. Seasonality is clearly a problem in plant sources and animal sources seem to function as a carry over for seasonal variation of plants, though they too vary in fat content and availability.
So, optimal foraging theory does work and this test is one of many that support it. And, this leaves little doubt of the scavenging, hunting hypothesis of early human foraging.
Wild Bill: "Spending time in the woods as a simulated hunter-gatherer gives much insight. Bear in mind that you are traveling with the clothes on your back and the few items that you value enough to carry, such as a flint knife, stone axe and fire making kit (some carried more, others less). Most hunter-gatherers practiced little or no storing of food.
There are hundreds of edible plants here in the Upper Midwest. Living on them requires the ability to locate, identify and prepare them. I am familiar with about 150 to 200 edible species.
Protein and fats are found concentrated in seeds and nuts. They are easy to identify and widespread. Most of these are only available in autumn. Anyone who has harvested wild nuts knows that many varieties require extensive processing, including husking, shelling and leaching of tannic acid. I have a black walnut tree in my yard, and it takes me ten hours to harvest and process one pound of finished product.
Another calorie dense form of plant food is the tuber. Typical examples here are Arrowhead and Ground Nut. Thousands of calories can be harvested in minutes with bare hands (Arrowhead) or a digging stick (Ground Nut). Tubers are best harvested late autumn through early spring.
Tap roots such as Parsnips and Burdock also offer calorie dense food with no more than a digging stick. A fifty calorie root takes a few minutes to get out. Tap roots are best in the spring.
Shoots, stalks, leaves, flowers and greens are available from early spring through late fall. The calories, however, are much less dense. An hour of picking might only yield a few hundred calories, and more bulk than you could carry.
Fruits such as grapes, raspberries, plums and cherries can be found easily. They are limited by a window of a few weeks when they are ripe in the fall. Ten minutes of picking wild plums can easily yield 5000 calories.
Edible wild plants are literally everywhere. I have counted about two dozen growing wild in my tiny yard. Vacant lots, ditches, parks and the countryside are literally bursting with food. One problem is that most foods are seasonal. This holds true in the tropics too. You have to be in the right place at the right time. Another problem is that humans face stiff competition for plant food with the local animal population. If you show up at the berry patch a day too late, it may be bare. Yet another problem is that it makes very little sense to spend 500 calories of work to harvest 250 calories of food. As hunter-gatherer, I am going to stick with the easy-to-harvest calorie-dense plants. The hundreds of other plants are useful for micronutrients, and might make a good nibble while I'm lounging around.
By way of comparison, you can set out a trap line with a dozen snares or deadfalls in a few hours. With skill and luck, such a trap line will yield meat almost daily. Once the traps are put out, they require only a quick daily check. There are mammals, birds and fish out year-round. Without doing any active hunting, a good trap line can yield tens of thousands of calories at a time. It also has the bonus of giving hides, bones, etc. It's also much easier to process an animal for protein and fats than it is to process nuts.
All of that said, it's easy to see why hunter-gatherers world-wide have included meat in their diet."
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A Really Quick Workout
June 13, 2005 08:00 PM
The frequency of work outs is more important than many realize. Why? Each time you work out you elevate your insulin sensitivity for 12 or more hours. So, I often have little workouts; it may be stair climbing for those who are in taller buildings, it may be just lifting a rather heavy weight a few times, or even one time. Or, it could be a real work out in the gym. Even that can be as little as 15 minutes at a very brisk pace.
Today, I wanted to do a bit of exercise but had things to do. So I went up the hill to our club house and did the briefest of work outs. My insulin sensitivity is now raised and my blood pressure is 103/68.
Here is what I did. I pedalled on a reclining bike for about a minute at an easy pace. Then I notched the resistance up and generated 200 watts for about 30 seconds. Easy pedal for 20 seconds, then up the resistance and generate 300 watts for about 20 seconds. Easy pedal and then up the resistance again and generate 400 watts for, I don't know, something like 20 seconds or a bit less. Then a little cool down pedalling for about 1 minute.
Then, some heavy pull downs with my hands close together. First, a stretchy warm up and then the full stack for a few reps in perfect form. Then some cable rows, same deal. Then a few curls with a fairly heavy weight with a real concentration on keeping the lordosis in my lower back and a tight transverse abdominus. Finished with a few upright rows on the bench press machine. Nothing very heavy because of my bad shoulder.
That is it.
When I take my wife up there it is with the intention of building her strength and elevating her insulin sensitivity. She does the stationary bike in the same way I do, but she focuses on seeing what her max wattage is with just a little warm up and cool down in between her 2 attempts. Then the leg press. A handful of warm up presses, then 2 or 3 reps with a challenging weight and 2 negatives where I help her up with the weight and she lowers it herself.
She is gaining strength on this simple and brief program. You don't have to be in the gym forever and it is probaly better to be there briefly, but with some challenge. Each time you go, you raise your insulin sensitivity and gain a little strength. Do that for a year or two and the results will be excellent.
My marine friend triathlete was there, watching some really stupid TV show at a high volume and running on the treadmill at a slow, painful pace, drenched in sweat. His running mechanics are awful and that may be why he keeps pulling his hamstring. He is so wrapped up in this "sport" that he may not see what has happened to him.
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Summaries of Chapters 4 and 5 of Evolutionary Fitness
Chapter 4: Why Starving and Sweating Fail
In this chapter, I discuss the extraordinary failure rates of existing diet and exercise programs and show why they fail. They fail because they are inconsistent with our species' evolutionary origins. It is shown that it is impossible for most people who are insulin resistant to adhere to a diet. Their insulin resistance is the cause of their getting fat in the first place as I show in the preceding chapter. And, their elevated insulin levels quickly exhaust their blood glucose. When it crashes they become hungry again. The result is that they can lose weight only through the most determined self control and in the face of constant starvation---sometime only a very determined few can accomplish.
Most diets require too much and too frequent carbohydrate, and people fail to distinguish properly between the kinds of carbohydrates they eat. The energy demands of commonly recommended exercise programs are too small to have a large impact and the most effective strategy for weight control is to burn energy but, more importantly, to elevate insulin sensitivity and build lean body mass to burn energy continuously.
Chapter 5: Metabolic Fitness
In this chapter I present the concept of metabolic fitness. Metabolic fitness is an encompassing concept of fitness and a more reliable and comprehensive measure of a healthful pattern of living. If you are metabolically fit, your health will be excellent, no matter how far you can jog or how much weight you can lift. Genetics, diet, exercise, sleep, and the timing of meals and activity are shown to influence metabolic fitness. The evolutionary basis of metabolic fitness is rooted in the adaptiveness of insulin resistance in the human genome. In this chapter I discuss how the hormone dynamics of the human body work and how they shape your body. This begins our development of strategies for achieving metabolic fitness and places the emphasis on triggering the right metabolic pathways through diet and activities and their timing.
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Freeing Onself from Trying to Convince Others
June 12, 2005 08:15 PM
Long ago, I gave up the attempt to convince others about anything. I give my argument or model and my assessment of the evidence and that is all I do. It gives one a wonderful sense of freedom and it makes you a better advocate in the quest for the truth.
As soon as you try to convince others, you become an advocate of your position and you distort things to your own benefit. That is one reason I don't like debates and dropped being on the debate team.
You can analyze arguments, models, and evidence that are given in opposition to your view, but you still can't convince anyone who isn't disposed to your point of view. And, you shouldn't try, in my opinion. Usually, the two points of view or models do not exhaust the world of possible models and they do not usually represent nulls of one another. Both models can be true or both false and the falsity of one rarely entails the truth of the other.
But, many people try to set the argument that way. In our chimp discussion, the proponent appeared to me to be claiming implicity that if I could not convince him that his model of humans qua chimps was not true, then my argument which is more or less present humans qua Paleolithic humans genetically, psychologically, and physiologically then his model must be true. Of course, this is not the case. But, more importantly, the setting of the argument this way sets up the proponent as the arbiter of what is true.
I had a colleague who pulled this trick many times in seminars and he managed to perplex many younger scholars. One way he put it was to say; that isn't obvious. To him it was not obvious, he meant, when usually the argument was not hard to follow at all. He was setting himself as the arbiter of truth and inexperienced presenters at seminars would spend a lot of time trying to convince him. It was always a lost cause. Once they tried to convince him, he had them because they were accepting that they had to convince him to be right. Nonsense.
The other trick was to say he could find other models that would give the same results. Well, so what? There are an infinite number of models and a finite set of facts, so there are plenty of models to go around. And they do not have the nice property that they stand in some logical relationship where they negate one another. That other models could give similar results does not invalidate the speaker's model. It is rare to find decisive evidence that supports one and rejects the other.
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You Are Not Alone
June 11, 2005 01:28 PM
Sitting here writing or where you are going over parts of this blog, you tend to think you are alone. Or, you don't even consider how many others are sharing these thoughts. The comments give you some clue, but, still, it is a pretty private matter that leaves you unaware of the extent to which others are also participating, lurking, or commenting.
It turns out, there are a lot of you reading this and quite a few commenting. I find this stimulating, but I know it could go either way any time.
We have as of yesterday 253,559 hits on the blog. This month, the average number of hits a day is 7461. The total number of visits is 22,578. Visitors seem to read quite a few pages when they show up, around 3 pages per visit.
The largest number of hits in a day was 20,086. This was the day I put up the All You Need to Know About Zen... post. The day after was high too, at just nearly 11,000. Is there a connection? I don't know.
About 46 countries are involved. Alas Cuba is not among them and will never be until those Castro thugs are finally gone. Computers were recently outlawed there. Zambia is there and so are the Creel Islands. Russia is missing but there are former Soviet block countries showing up such as Bulgaria (a great weight lifting country), Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovenia.
Turkey, India, UAE, Egypt, and Djibouti are connecting too. Some of these countries are going through a Type 2 diabetes surge now, particularly Egypt. I suspect UAE and Turkey are not far behind. As these countries become prosperous, they substitute machine for human labor and they eat more and more regularly. Traditional foods in some of these countries, Egypt and India in particular, are conducive to insulin resistance when food becomes more available. Relatively speaking, carbohydrate is cheap, but dangerous in quantity. Its real cost is high in human and environmental terms.
Its hard to see how many unique visitors have been to the site, but it looks like about 7000 unique visitors and growing over the past few weeks. This can go up or down quickly too.
This has all happened in about 70 days; from nothing to something of some measure with no advertising or promotion. You still won't find a link here to another site, the easiest way to build numbers.
Now if you have read this far, you know you have company. You are not alone, in fact there are a few of us reading quite a bit on each visit. So what?
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Mass
A number of people have asked how they can add muscle mass. They often think they have to eat a lot more to put on mass. Not so, you can put on muscle mass even if you are in caloric balance. You do this by redirecting nutrients and energy over the right metabolic pathways. This requires a reduction in cortisol (so don't over train and get plenty of play and rest) and an increase in growth hormone (GH).
To increase GH you must raise your core body temperature when you exercise and get some lactic acid going. So, you have to train at a brisk pace. The GH release is pulsate, spurts, and so even 15 minutes is enough to get it going. If you go beyond 30 minutes at a high pace, then you start to get the cortisol as a marker of stress.
But, it is even easier than this.
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Some comments and summaries of Chapter 2 and 3
June 10, 2005 11:44 AM
I have had some comments to the effect of what am I doing trying to sell a $140 book. My answer is don't buy the individual chapters, wait for the book. I don't know what it will cost, but it will be a lot less.
Or just buy those chapters you think you might not want to wait to read. For those who do buy single or several chapters, I do expect that you will have questions and I would encourage you to send them in through this blog. I will try to answer them here for all to see. (Sure, non-buyers will free-ride on your question, but I do want to share the information with everyone.)
I will do a chapter a month, so take that into account in your decision. It is a kind of serialized book I suppose that will come out over no more than a 14 month period.
My interest is in committing myself to the project, not in marketing. If I take money for chapters, well then I have to deliver them. So, I am designing the system for myself, to give me the incentives and commitments to get through this rather hard work.
I don't expect the $10 to create any net revenue for me as I will farm out the order fulfillment process. It will likely cost that much to process and set up the web systems and all that. If I make a bit of money, fine, but I can assure you I can consult at a far higher rate of return per hour than the chapters will net or even than the book will earn. Close to 90% of books do not earn a profit to the publisher or even the author when opportunity cost is included. Book publishing is another one of those heavy-tailed distribution businesses where a few blockbusters earn nearly all the returns.
As to the price. The price is really quite modest in my opinion; I looked over some material on a web site the other day where you can buy a "book" barely as long as one of my chapters on sport specific exercises for a dozen sports. Each "book" was $27.50 and had nothing but pictures of models (never the author as my book will have if I include a few exercises) doing simple exercises. I have a book on the physiology of golf that cost me over $90. The hard back version of my Hollywood Economics is $145. Besides, as my wife is fond of telling me, I am expensive.
The other reason for doing this, beside structuring my own incentives (as good economists like to do), is to gather information that might be useful in selling the book to a major publisher. If the chapters sell reasonably well, then we have some evidence that is useful in convincing an editor to part with a big advance.
Anyway, relax and enjoy it; buy those chapters you want, free ride on my answers to questions supplied by purchasers, and start from the Essay like Hone did. Build your own system based on those ideas. You don't have to wait to get started on a new lifeway that is based on evolutionary principles and high technology.
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Lead in to the Chapter Summaries
June 9, 2005 09:07 PM
First a couple of points. I do not plan to include more than a few example work outs and sketchy recipes of the sort you have already seen in my Three Day Diet Diary. To do more than that is contrary to the Evolutionary Fitness Way.
Only the principles will stay with you and you must adapt them to your life and physiology. Otherwise, you will not "own" them and you would be operating in the Soviet mode following advice from a guru, which I refuse to be. I am posing and explicating a model for a life of health, fitness, and accomplishment that you must judge and use as you see fit and are able to do.
I will post Chapter 1 in its entirety, probably next week, then the chapters will be available one by one at something like $10 each. I am arranging this.
Purchasers will gain the earlier information, but you can wait until the whole thing is finished and then buy the book. Your choice.
Subscribers to the chapters will receive the whole book in a finished file and a copy of the Evolutionary Fitness Manual which I plan to add to the series when the book is finished (though work proceeds on both at the same time).
Tomorrow a summary, tentative, of Chapter 2.
Here is the lead into the chapter summaries contained in chapter 1. It is a draft and, in fact, I have not looked at this in years.
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Hone's Progress
Hone posted this message to the blog that I want to call attention to. Many find it hard to believe he could have these results.
"Using the principles and examples I read about at the university site, and after reading a few other articles floating around the web like the Clarence Bass interview, I was able to lose 27 pounds of body fat in 2 months. This was after struggling for 6 months to lose anything with regular gym exercise and diet.
I then taught my friend the principles and he lost even more body fat in a similar amount of time.
I thank you for your work on this Art, the blog, and look forward to your book."
Actually, this sort of progress is not that unusual. I have many emails from others over the years to demonstrate that point. One former student had results as spectacular; he was somewhat muscular before he began, so he had a good start. All he had to do was to get his hormones working for rather than against his goals.
Mark, the trainer I am doing the Evolutionary Fitness Training Manual with, told me today that his wife has lost 20 pounds in something like 2 months, or maybe 2.5. We weren't quite sure, but an impressive loss none the less. She did this just by following the guidelines in the Evolutionary Fitness Essay that I distributed to blog readers. Check the archives, it is still there.
She does train with Mark, who is pretty tough and follows the many of the principles I do. But, she had trained with him before and not had the same improvement in body composition.
Remember, it is not body weight, but body composition that spells health. You need weight if you are to have adequate lean muscle tissue, so don't go for weight loss. Mark's wife and my former student, and I bet Hone too, increased their lean body mass as they dramatically decreased their fat mass. Any water loss is transitory and not without its own benefits. But any new steady state point at an improved body composition makes for a radical change in your hormone milleau; it starts working for rather than against you.
I would suggest that Hone and any of you begin to practice a bit of intermittent eating; try fasting overnight for about 15 hours. Or do what I do which is to pick a day when I hike or ride a motorcycle for a good part of the day. Don't eat that day except for a good breakfast. The next day you can have a good work out and eat to your fill. The shock is good for your hormones.
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Chance
My dear friend Vela Velupillai was invited to Paul Samuelson's 90th birthday celebration at MIT this past May. The great man himself had this to say about his illustrious career, quoting from Vela's letter:
"The celebration to mark the 90th birthday was a glittering affair with many of the luminaries of 20th century American economics present. Samuelson himself gave a charming and almost humbling talk at the end of the long and lovely day of celebrations. The title he gave for his talk was: ‘Serendipities’ – playing down his own genius in the life choices he made and emphasizing the role of fortuitous chance in guiding him to success and happiness, professionally and personally."
Vela is the John Cairnes Professor of Economics at the National University of Ireland; he is doing a long review essay on my Hollywood Economcs for the European Journal of Political Economy.
Nassim Taleb has written of chance in literature and I in movie careers. Now, Paul Samuelson is pointing to chance in his scientific career. Curiously, given the extensive literature on scientific accomplishment and citations by De Sola Price and recently by Charles Murray in his Human Accomplishment, there is yet little recognition of the role of chance or luck in scientific careers. Le Fanu has a nice description of the role of chance in medical discoveries in his The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine. The discovery of penicillin was almost pure luck, though its subsequent development was pure hard work.
But, the larger issue is how scientific careers branch onto different paths and how the non-linear citation count process gets under way. Such a process has been described and it is basically a citation-culling process, but it hasn't been taken seriously and investigated throughly. I have shown that a coin flip process generates the lower part of the distribution of movie director accomplishment; only in the upper tail does the odds ratio move away from pure chance.
There is probably something on this issue out there that I don't know about. If you know of some research on this, please let me know.
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Dr. Rosedale's Talk on Insulin and Leptin
I read and enjoyed Dr. Rosedale's speech many years ago and used it as a reading in my health course at UCI. He is an expert on insulin and leptin and he is an original thinker; what other doctor do you know who would correctly label medicine a business rather than a science? Only Dr. Le Fanu, whose insights I have already mentioned twice in blog posts.
The four part text of his informal talk is at this link Dr. Rosedale on Insulin and Leptin.
I found it very interesting that Dr. Rosedale's publisher dumbed down his book, as I have heard Loren Cordain's publisher did as well. That's why I am going to publish mine serially here, probably a chapter at a time to be followed by the whole thing.
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Evolutionary Fitness Table of Contents
June 8, 2005 01:44 PM
Here is the working version of the outline of Evolutionary Fitness.
Ignore the page numbers as these just indicate notes and not full content. The book will probably be 250 or so pages.
I will post summaries of the chapters over the next few days.
Evolutionary Fitness Table of Contents
Your comments have helped shape this version of the book. If you have more insights you want to share, please post them.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (17)
Weepy Relatives and Depression
June 7, 2005 07:17 PM
This is a follow-up to my All You Need to Know about Zen and the Tao post.
My wife has had some serious medical problems and I get these calls from relatives who cry and lament how unfair life is. Why Bonnie? etc. etc. I tell them we are dealing with it.
Are you depressed they ask? And I say no, you only get depressed when you compare the present state with one that is better or perfect in some way. If you accept the reality of the present state, then you can't make these irrelevant comparisons of what is against the ideal.
You are so strong they say. And I say, no. I am just grounded in the reality of the now and trying to find the best things to do to influence the ensemble of paths on which our lives will evolve from here. If I become depressed or confused, I give up our moment of power.
I don't compare some ideal state to the present, real state (to the extent anyone can know the state of their health, given present medical technology and a limited willingness to undergo more tests; they take a terrible toll and it is clear that information is not free). Such a comparison is a prescription for depression.
The lifepath ensemble formulation is a liberating idea because it makes you understand that you cannot achieve a unique outcome and that the transitions from this state to the next are stochastic. All we can do is to do those things that make favorable transitions more likely. And we are succeeding with no crying or depression.
Not that depression is that bad a thing always. If it is motivating to realize you have fallen short of some attainable goal, it may lead you to improve your preparation for the next life transition. But, if you think you can achieve the change or goal with certainty, then you may become depressed in an unhealthful way. This can fall into a non-linear dynamic that is reinforcing, leading to deeper depression and, eventually, non-competent decisions.
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All You Need to Know About Zen and the Tao
June 6, 2005 09:39 AM
I was once a philosophy major, but I got bored with it. Only a few philosophers seem to know or care a lot about science and many love paradoxes and infinite set problems that are mostly just a confusion. I do admire the work of Dennet, the Churchlands, Popper and my friend and former colleaque Bryan Skyrms who uses game theory to study the dynamics of deliberation
I did read a fair amount about Zen and the Tao. Wonderful imagery and poetry, but the core of the knowledge in them is easily put in terms of complex systems theory and Bayesian inference.
Here is all you need to know about both.
The Tao is algorithmically incompressible.
To reproduce the information contained in a life sequence requires no less information than is contained in the sequence itself. There is no algorithm that is capable of reducing the information in a life sequence to a shorter statement. Each sequence is unique unto itself.
This means you cannot predict which among many possible stochastic paths originating from this point in time and space your life will move onto.
You can know something of the ensemble of paths and how your actions may condition the likelihoods of these paths. Your only moment of power is NOW, the moment when you can take actions that influence the distribution of future outcomes.
You learn of the possibilities from your experience with no regrets and you make your choices in the Now with the knowledge that they do not determine the outcomes only the possible paths on which your life may evolve. Thus you do not fear the outcomes or attempt to control things you cannot. Be a good Bayesian who uses evidence from your past to form expectations of the possibilities of the future and make choices that influence the distribution of possible outcomes in your favor. Never expect a distinct outcome to result from your actions.
Here is something from an earlier post that captures the idea: Complex systems don't have causes you can easily spot. There are just patterns and at any point one's state of health can move randomly onto a new path. It is not the particular path that one should think about. It is the ensemble of possible paths, given how you live. All you can do is to try to influence the distribution of possibilities. You can never set the particular path or outcome that will be yours from this time forward. And, if you think you can look back and see some cause of events, you are probably suffering hindsight bias.
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Fiber Types
June 5, 2005 11:32 AM
This web site Athletic Quickness summarizes a lot of good research on the training of the FT fibers. It supports the ST exhaustion techniques that I have used for many years and is the foundation of my Hierarchical Sets. They use a slightly different technique from mine to move up the fiber recruitment sequence. They use isometric contraction which, if extended for a period of time, exhausts the weaker ST fibers and then successively recruits the two versions of the FT fibers as the contraction is maintained. This is the ST dropout process that I have used for so long. Curiously, they do not use eccentrics, which are well-known to preferentially recruit FT fibers by reversing the muscle contraction sequence which is usually ST to FTa to FTx. Eccentrics reverse this sequence.
They also point to the findings now supported by much research that the FT fibers are the "default" setting for muscle. This is something an evolutionary perspective would tell you and which I have understood for a long time. Anaerobic metabolism came first, well before aerobic metabolism. For a very long time, there were living creatures but no oxygen, so anaerobic metabolism was the foundation of all other forms. At first, oxygen presented a crisis for living organisms to whom it was highly toxic. It still is, which is why our bodies have so many antioxidant defenses.
The oxygen energy crisis was solved when organisms incoporated mitochondria into the cell. This little furnace is able to use oxygen to make ATP through the Krebbs Cycle. The result was a big gain in energy efficiency, but at the cost of damaging free radical production. The mitochondria are susceptible to free radical damage (ROS) and eventually decline in production. This mitochrondial insufficiency is a major factor in aging.
I prefer to be a primarily FT sort of person. It promotes athletic quickness and is expensive because FT fiber is so energy inefficient (6 to 8 times less efficient than aerobically adapted ST or FTa tissue). So, I stay lean and quick even though I eat quite a bit, which helps to make me well-nourished. I don't get the mitochondrial damage from excessive use of the aerobic pathway.
I get plenty of rest and train intermittently so that even my FT fibers tend to be more of the fastest FTx type than the FTa type that is prevalent in body builders who do high volume training. This exploits the "overshooting" process that results in greater expression of FTx fibers. I am not bulky either because I do not do the volume that increases the mass of my FTa fibers. So, I am quick and powerful, not bulky and merely strong.
Power Law training exploits all these features of muscle plasticity and energy systems.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (7)
Robb Wolf Live
June 4, 2005 05:17 PM
Robb Wolf and I seem to go back quite a long time. He went to study with Loren Cordain at my recommendation and we have communicated over the years. He is affiliated with the CrossFit program and a principal of the CrossFit NorCal facility. These guys know what they are doing. Robb is also a frequent commenter on this blog.
Robb will be the guest on CrossFit Live this Sunday from 7 to 9 PST. Go to Robb Wolf LIve to see the telecast.
I plan to watch; it beats 60 Minutes any time and my motorcycle is in the shop. So, what else would I think of doing but watching.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (1)
My Responses to Some Great Comments
June 3, 2005 01:54 PM
So many terrific comments on the last couple of posts. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and research links. The discussion of glutathione was very helpful and Dave did us all a favor by sharing his research with us. I tend to go by memory a lot and don't want to dig around in my references and so I do not always have something at hand to make my point. Of course, no one will ever find a definitive study that settles all the issues so one reference can be misleading.
CLARENCE BASS A great guy who is an inspiration to many. I have mentioned that if you get too lean, you do have a problem with blood fats. When fat is in the blood it has to be reesterfied to leave and enter, say, an adipose cell from which it can later be released for energy. There have to be enough adipose cells, particularly it seems in the trunk area, to acquire the circulating fat. Hence, too little abdominal fat translates into too little capacity to recapture and reesterfy circulating blood fats. So, they stay there and you get high triglyceride readings on your tests.
Carbohydrate also promotes the problem, as one of our commenters noted when he was on a high carb, runner's diet and had high cholesterol. Carbs and fats compete for disposal pathw