Perfectionists
December 5, 2007 12:43 PM
Have a look at this NYT article Perfectionism before you buy that next self-help book.
I have learned to get along with my slight perfectionism. I find my best work is always done with a sense of effortlessness and enjoyment. Blogging, maybe not my best work, is completely effortless. I sometimes look back on a post and wonder how I did it.
Perhaps the deepest link to eating disorders and an exessive concern with body image is with perfectionism. Most steroid users are ordinary guys looking for a perfect body image, not athletes. Eating disorders seem to come from the same sort of excessive concern with the opinions of others or a critical parent from the past that you still carry around in your brain and in your self-talk.
My perfectionism appears in sports more often than elsewhere. I often expect to perform at a high level which is really kind of silly when you think about it. So I turn it into a learning experience to enjoy the study of technique and science behind a sport.
I think an element of Zen teaching is to get the student's ego and perfectionism out of the way. We could all do that in everything we do.
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Mood Change after a work out
November 7, 2007 10:44 AM
An interesting question from a reader that I have had to sort out for myself too. I find, as does Joe, that if I work out very intensely that I have a mood change a day or two later. Strangely, the hard work out seems to happen because I feel so good at the time that I want to do more. I have learned to avoid this feeling as Rodney Dangerfield advises, I sit down when I get the urge to exercise.
For me it is the second day that hits me most. Of course, this is the interval for DOMS, or delayed onset muscle soreness as it is called in the literature. A very hard work out damages a lot of muscle tissue and triggers a surge of stress hormones, activates macrophages to consume damaged proteins (a benefit as it recycles the material to fuel rebuilding and renews the cell), triggers inflammation in the sore tissues. But, it is likely that the cytokines are the real culprit. Just how they do this and promote soreness is something I have not been able to discover.
Why go through this? There is no need and the loss of time and mood change is not worth it. It is likely that so much damage is done in this sort of hard work out that any progress you are seeking is set back; I suspect it leaves you worse off physically than if you had followed Dangerfield's advice and done nothing. So, I don't work out that hard any more. I just feel challenged and that I am up to the challenge.
But, Joe's discussion highlights other matters that we should pay attention to. One of them is how close to exhaustion many people live as a result of their obsession with exercise or fitness. It seems Joe did this for years, mostly as a result of excess running. Another is the sugar obsession many runners have or develop from their excess reliance on carbohydrates to fuel their high activity. Another is the longer term depression or mood suppression that can develop from chronic over training of any kind. Mike, our 54 year old wonder from the last post, also had what seems to be a generally depressed mood and was drowsy often during his body builder/high cardio days. He was even going to up his cardio load because he was too fat from the body builder diet and eating pattern he was on.
I really do think most chronic body builders and runners are way over training, damaging themselves and their mood.
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Calorie Restriction Society
November 4, 2007 05:28 PM
I spoke at an earlier conference of the CR Society and really enjoyed the discussion and the other presentations. Their San Antonio conference is coming up November 11. If you have a chance to go, it is well worth your time. Dr. Krikorian is the organizer, a name you will recognize from earlier posts. Go to the link anyway to learn more about CR.
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The disease network of obesity
October 20, 2007 12:08 PM
Have a look at the complex interaction of genes, friends, spouses and families in this network of diseases associate with obesity. Obesity is linked to 7 other diseases. Friends and spouses are to a significant degree proxies for diet, activity, and how we live life. The complex network of genes, behavior and metabolism is slowly being pieced together. It is not a pretty picture. Behavior and genes drive the metabolic network, which in turn, shape gene expression and behavior.
I think this picture strongly supports Evolutionary Fitness and its strategies. Stay lean and you stay out of this destructive network.
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A Nobel in Economics I can agree with
Hurwicz, Maskin and Myerson do deserve the Nobel. Still, there is a good deal lacking in mechanism design: it is a stylized form of decentralization, too rooted in equilibrium, and does not allow arbitrage against inefficient incentive-based behavior. The "lemons" theory is not so strongly borne out by the evidence (see John Lott's Freeomnomics for many tests that show the theory fails because of the incentives that are created to solve the inefficiencies).
And, the agents are imbedded in a far more complex environment than the model permits. Still, by putting incentives and information at the center of economic (and human) activity, it advances economic analysis. In the old days at UCLA with Armen Alchian and Jack Hirshleifer, and a proper skepticism, as our guides we knew this, even though it did not have a name then.
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Quants Get it Wrong too
A nice article from Technology Review showing that the quant models also fail. Imagine they didn't expect the variation to be as large as it turned out to be.
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A nice summary of complexity and self-organization
This is one of the more readable and thorough explanations of self-organization Complexity and Self-Organization
The ideas are highly relevant to fitness and health, and life, as I have tried to show.
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Glutathione, Aging and Cancer
August 4, 2007 10:18 AM
Here is a bit more on why I think supplementing with glutathione (GSH) is a good practice as we get older. The mechanisms through which GSH reduces aging and prevents cancer are described (to the extent they are known, there may be others such as preventing cell senescence of cells by reducing oxidation of telomeres so that the Hayflick limit is not hit).
I have only quoted part of the article; those of you who have access can read it all. GSH detoxifies numerous metabolic products that promote aging and cancer, particularly toxins and carcinogens. I think it may be true that the aging we see in excessive runners is due to the depletion of GSH. Almost surely, depleted GSH is a factor in inflammation. A high carb diet supplies little GSH or other natural antioxidants and promotes a burst of free radicals that deplete GSH and other endogenous antioxidants. It also damages the HPA axis (the hypothalmic, adrenal, pituitary network) which is ruinous. Perhaps the only reason slightly better longevity is found in runners is that the rest of the subjects (the controls) live so poorly; with almost as bad a diet and too little exercise. Do recall that the mortalilty curve is J-shaped; it declines with exercise, hits a bottom and then rises. The over-exercised fare no better than the underexercised.
For those of you trying to gain muscle mass, be reasonable in your goals: wanting too much mass and too quickly is a prescription for getting fat and is unhealthy in so many ways. But, do note that GSH is important to muscle synthesis. I can put on muscle, even at my "advanced" age, just by looking at a barbell. I think GSH is one of several reasons for my response to exercise.
The text from the article is below...
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Physics versus Hype
July 27, 2007 11:31 AM
I have been looking over at the Climate Audit site run by Steve McIntyre (one of the guys who showed the famous Hockey Stick global warming graph and its underlying calculations were wrong) and was not suprised to see that many of the sensors that collect temperature data are in odd places. They are close to antennas, microwave relays, and many are close to air conditioners. Trying to correct the "urban heat zone" out of the "global" temperature (there is none because the atmosphere is not uniform) may be hopeless. And, until now, I don't think anybody really understood how poorly selected some of these sensor locations are.
I was also struck by the reasonableness and serious physics in this article Physics Trumps Hysteria. The worm may be turning, but I do not discount the uncertainty of our knowledge and of the need to take all reasonable steps to clean up the atmosphere.
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Google/Yahoo! Economics
July 26, 2007 09:52 AM
You may not know that Google and Yahoo! have research groups. I don't know what they are up to, but I do know both they have hired some well-known and respected economists. Two I know of are Preston McAfee and Hal Varian.
Hal was the Dean at the Business School at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of a well-known text book on microeconomic theory and, more recently, of a book on network economics. If I recall correctly, he works for Google. McAfee is a Professor at Cal Tech and is well-known for his research on auctions. He is now a Research Fellow at Yahoo! Research and Vice President leading a group focused on microeconomics research.
I would have thought it would be the other way around: McAfee at Google, and Varian at Yahoo! Since Google is bidding on a large chunk of electromagnetic spectrum (likely to begin a cell phone service), you would expect them to hire McAfee to help in their bidding strategy. Varian would be helpful in designing information industries.
Finally, companies are using economists in the right way, in the design and implementation of business and network models and, more importantly, in building incentives into these models so that the agents want to do what the model assumes they will do. Up until now, they did little more than forecasting and crunching the numbers. Since forecasting is close to impossible, economists were not well-regarded in industry. Now, it may be different. Economists have far better tools than business school graduates and actually are capable of doing scientific work that might really change business. Now if some movie studios would do the same thing Google and Yahoo! are doing, the business would improve and so would movies.
Seeing Google bid for spectrum warms my heart. Back in 1969 when Ross Eckert, Don O'Hara and I, along with a lawyer and physicist, designed a property system for spectrum and suggested auctions as a means for transfering spectrum to markets, we were almost laughed at. We surely were treated a bit rudely and with the usual distain that is affected by opponents to bolster their weak arguments. Time, scarcity and new technology were on our side.
More remarkable, if Google's usual business model is applied to their cell phone business (who knows until we see it) the service will be "free". Of course, there will be ads and promotions, but probably there will be no charge for the basic service. This really warms my heart because I have long argued that making the spectrum private, rather than the phony claim that it is a public good and must be publically owned and controlled, gives it a chance to become so plentiful that it becomes almost free. Thus, private ownership and competitive markets will be more successful in making the spectrum available to everyone than treating it as a classic public good. Of course, there are no such goods anyway, it is just a model that too many people tend to forget and which is a convenient rationale for Congress to grab another resource for their own purposes.
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Climate Forecasting, no better than economic forecasting
July 13, 2007 09:44 AM
I have seen a lot of forecasting models over my career; every government agency seems to have one and there once were a host of economic forecasting models that were sold to corporations and government agencies. I began to become a skeptic when I found that one of the most famous regional forecasting models, which had been developed for the state of Hawaii, was a stack of cards in the basement of the government agency it was built for. No one knew how to run it and the only forecasts ever done with it were done by the author for his publications. Graduate students in regional economics all over the world were required to read these publications, but the model was never used by the agency it was built for. From that point foreward, every new project for the state began with a new forecasting model so there was never any validation of the prior model and there was no incremental learning or skill development in the staff. Consultants came and went and the models just piled up, never tested or used beyond the study they were built for (a good thing probably, because they were just trend equations).
Then I reviewed a host of forecasting models for air traffic. It was a nightmare. The FAA's model had failed to anticipate the explosive growth of air travel and Congress got angry at the agency. From that point on, every FAA forecast became optimistic and, still, equally inaccurate. Regional forecasting was even worse. In reviewing airport by airport forecasts, usually done by a consulting firm for the local airport authority, I found that every one of them forecast that the local airport would experience a rising share of the national market. This is an impossibility. So, there was no consistency at all. It was all local boosterism. I solved this problem by modeling the air travel system as a network. So, I was the only economist who had seen that the hub and spoke system of air travel would emerge. But that is another story.
Then I had a look at motion picture forecasting and things really got ugly. It essentially took opinion and mathematized it. It was never "wrong" there was always something wrong with the trailer, or the release pattern, or something else. So, no one ever learned anything. But, still they forecast, institutionalizing group think in the form of Excell spreadsheets.
With this experience, I was not suprised to read this fine review of climate forecasting. They have no clue. Nobody knows anything. Most "expert opinion" is just opinion. The experts are usually worse than Joe the Bartender or you or me in forecasting because they are wedded to a certain view. The dominant forecast for just about any complex process is that tomorrow will be like today. The best forecast of a stock price tomorrow is its value today.
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Deep Cores, Climate Variation, and Weight Loss
July 10, 2007 09:49 AM
I have made the point several times that natural climate variation is so large that the climate models, forecasts, and conclusions about climate change have little foundation. Variation is too large to draw any conclusions and they are left completely out of forecasts. You never hear about the topic of variation from the press on climate, stock market movement, home runs, or any topic. Of course, any complex system, of which all these are examples, have a lot of variation. So, have a look at this article on Deep Cores and contemplate and relish the variation that is in all natural things.
As in climate variation and in the variation in our lives, the same point is true. We are here at this point and there are many paths before us. And, we have no control over the climate or any other natural process. We have some influence on the likelihood of moving along an ensemble of paths, but no control. The choices we make influence the probabilities of the paths on which our evolving lives will move. But, that is all.
To close on the problem of weight control, I find that many people who embark on a weight loss program expect to have far more control of the process than is possible. If you weigh yourself every day or even every week and want some kind of uniform or dramatic change, you are setting yourself up for failure. You have to just live the new way and let it happen. It will happen. But, excessively monitoring your progress or perceived lack of progress is a prescription for failure. It is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: if you obsessively measure your weight, you will perturb the natural process. You will be fooled by the random variation and draw pessimistic conclusions that are not valid. Focus instead on what you do or eat and let it happen. It took many years to wreck your metabolism. Evolutionary Fitness will transform your metabolic health. If you want to measure your progress then focus on how you feel and your insulin level. If you feel better and your insulin declines, you are moving along a good path.
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Zen Again
July 7, 2007 04:40 PM
I happened to see Al Gore being interviewed (very briefly) and he mentioned Zen. So, I thought it was time to put my thoughts on Zen up one more time. All You Need to Know About Zen.
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The State of Gore's Science
June 30, 2007 07:52 PM
You ought to read this point be point refutation of the claims made by Al Gore on his version of global warming. Each specific claim is demonstrably false as this Claims and Facts shows. The evidence is simple to understand and convincing. There is some warming of the Earth and our solar system, but the events Gore claims are produced by this modest warming, as well as the causes he attributes it to, are wrong.
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Asthma
I was reading a review on the status of asthma through out the world and was struck by the strong correlation between obesity and the incidence and severity of asthma.
The bulk of the rise in asthma around the world seems to be diagnosis; that is, subjects see doctors more and are diagnosed. The criteria have also changed a bit. So, overall, more cases are diagnosed (this is true of almost any diseased these days and is a good sign that more people are gaining access to medical care).
The "clean environment" hypothesis, which says you need some exposure to pathogens to develop immunity, is only weakly confirmed. Generally, the diagnosis is hyperactivity of the constriction of the airways.
Asthma is a general condition of inflammation of the airways and lungs. Triggering events may be many, but the general condition of inflammation is the underlying and unifying trigger of asthma events.
I do think that inflammation is the broadest and most prevalent cause or symptom of disease in our time. From heart disease, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer's, lupus, MS, and so on the common issue is inflammed tissue. I would speculate that aging falls in that grouping too.
The most powerful sources of inflammation are obesity, excess production of free radicals, and lack of antioxidants in the diet. Obesity triggers many free radical pathways and the resistance to insulin that accompanies it accelerates the damage through the poor metabolism of fats and excess glucose in the blood (it oxydizes every tissue it reaches). Excess production of free radicals comes from drinking soft drinks and alcohol and consuming excess fats. It also comes from excessive aerobic exercise (many distance runners have asthma). The lack of anitioxidants comes from a poor diet, lacking in protein (a consitituent of antioxidant enzymes), too high in simple sugars and starches (they deplete antioxidants and contain few), and a lack of co-factors that stimulate enzyme action.
In the review I read, there were few conclusions to savor or try to use. It failed to look at the generalized inflammation hypothesis which I suspect is the most promising. When diet, activity, environment and obesity promote inflammation, then it is just a matter of which tissues are most susceptable and how weak the person's defences are to the latest stress. Chronic free radical stress from all the sources I listed push the most vulnerable tissues into a chronic state of inflammation. Specific therapies aimed at those tissues are not sufficient. A more general approach to attacking inflammatory producing processes at all sources seems more promising to me.
I do live this way. I always have in mind the inflammatory load associated with anything I do, eat, or drink. It is working, at least for now. I am looking forward to my 70th birthday with relish. I will celebrate with my new wife (WW) and new home in Mexico.
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A Study of Mulitculuralism
June 27, 2007 12:12 PM
Multiculturalism is a failed experiment. I saw it failing when I was teaching at the university. Diversity promoted the creation of tribal groups who were recognized as separate from the student body as a whole and given entitlements. As a result they were drawn more closely into enclaves where hurts and beliefs were magnified and enforced.
I sat through an Academic Senate meeting as it was invaded by a few inarticulate and illogical students demanding an Asian Studies Program as though it were an entitlement. Other groups had such programs, it was said, so why not we? Now my old university is besieged with demands from, the latest aggrevied group, muslims. In trying to cope with the demands of the various tribes it has created through its promotion of "diversity" it recently established a Multicultural Center. Eventually, the Center will become a distribution center for rewards and a focus of poliltically correct positions to be taken by faculty on topics in courses. I can't tell you how glad I am not to be in that environment any more.
By creating entitlements and rewarding objectionable and sometimes outrageous actions and demands, the university is fanning the fires of tribalism and separatism. The evidence is pretty clear as Tom Schelling showed a long time ago about black and white separation in neighborhoods. Complex systems studies have shown that even slight differences in preferences to affiliate can create highly segregated communities, particularly when there are many of them and none is dominant in population. By creating small groups that are identified and rewarded for nothing other than their "differences" from others, multicultural programs strengthen the preferences of small groups to separate from the whole. The result is a kind of balkanization of the student body into groups with their own identity and agenda. The student body has been separated into tribes of Gays, Blacks, Muslims, Asians, Females, Hispanics and other groups each vying for attention and recognition of their demands and shared grievances. This is Multiculturalism.
Professor Putnam has done the research, which you can see lucidly discussed in this post by Dr. Sanity on Multiculturalism.
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Solar Cycles and Cosmic Ray Amplification
June 21, 2007 11:14 AM
There is little doubt that the solar cycle drives climate variation, on the Earth and on the other planets in our solar system. There has been doubt that the solar variations were sufficient to drive the temperature changes that follow the solar variation. Now the puzzle has been solved and the effect of cosmic rays is known to amplify the effects of solar variation. Here is a systematic explanation and discussion of new data by a solid scientist working on sedimentary deposits in Canadian fiords Solar Cycles.
I had been considering a move to a colder climate during the summer; it is too hot here to suit me at this time of the year. But, by 2020, some of our ski areas may be so cold and over-laden with snow that it may be difficult to live there. Summers should still be OK and how much will I care 13 or 15 years from now? A lot, I hope.
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Silver Mines under the Receding Alpine Glaciers
May 6, 2007 11:13 AM
Reid Bryson, one of the most distinguished climatologists, is interviewed here.
They have found a silver mine emerging from one of the receding glaciers in the Alps, the tools stacked neatly as though they would return next spring to continue their work. Bryson stresses climate variation, as any one with a historical sense and appreciation for the natural variation that complex systems display (and require to operate).
At 86 years old and still working and this witty? Amazing. I would still be at it, though retired, were not economics so boring compared to what I am doing now. Well, maybe I am still at it, but on a different range of topics.
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The Omnicompetent State
February 13, 2007 02:55 PM
Theodore Dalrymple exposes the rot at the core of British government and its demoralizing and dehumanizing of the British population and its ethics. Dalrymple.
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A Physcists View on Global Warming and Man's Contribution
February 4, 2007 03:09 PM
This view is more consistent with how I see the evidence and of the scientists whose work I reviewed prior to the release of their comment on the Fourth Assessment.
It is sheer speculation to say that man has warmed or cooled the Earth through our emission of "greenhouse" gasses. By the way, there is no greenhouse effect of the sort typically used to describe the effect of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Be sure to read the other articles in the series to get a view of the distinguished scientists who find other mechanisms drive the Earth's climate, particularly the Sun. Mars is warming too and the simultaneous warming of both planets can is only consistent with a common driving external source, solar and more distant star irradiation.
More than a few of the articles point to coercion and misrepresentation of scientists who cast doubt on the central dogma of climate alarmists.
From a decision theoretic point of view, you do not have enough evidence or underlying physics to accept an hypothesis on the linkage between policy actions and outcomes.
There are other sites that are more effective forums for this topic; aside from posting the summary of the science that I recently reviewed and some links, I will return to my more customary topics.
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Complexity in Physiology and Medicine
October 24, 2006 04:09 PM
You may know by now that complexity is part of Evolutionary Fitness. It is a blend of the Stone Age with High Tech. The old part is our genes and how they were shaped by evolutionary forces. The new part is the science of complexity. These topics fuse naturally because our ancestors were adaptive and lived in an uncertain world; thus we were made by evolutionary forces to live in a complex and challenging world. Virtually all deep research in physiology relies on complexity.
I have argued often here that averages and thinking based on averages distorts medical decisions. Virtually all distributions of physiological variables that are used to assess health or illness are non-normal distributions and fall into the stable Paretian class.
Now there is a new book on Complexity in Medicine that develops that vision. This is the second prong of a new kind of medicine, one that combines Evolutionary Medicine with Complexity Medicine.
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Deja Vu All Over and Over and Over and ... Over Again
September 24, 2006 07:15 PM
Yogi Berra may have been far smarter than he is given credit for. His has been credited or blamed for the famous statment; "It's deja vu, all over again."
To some the statement is repetitive for deja vu is to see an event that one has experienced before as experienced again. But, give him some credit for one can have a deja vu experience on many levels since life is a fractal experience and the brain has limited capacity to detect and represent patterns. Thus, it is possible to experience deja vu moments on many levels.
One can experience the experience of deja vu, in effect saying "I have felt a moment like this before and am likely to do so again." This is second order deja vu; recognizing previous such experiences. A still higher order of deja vu is in seeing a pattern of higher order in deja vu recurrence. And so on. Because life is a fractal there will be events and complex moments that are similar to one another on many scales. Thus, a deja vu moment on a low dimensional scale (sweaty and kissing in the drive-in as a teen ager) may recur on a higher dimensional scale (devotion to your wife) and on yet higher temporal orders (discovering a new love at a late stage of life). Or they may recur from lower to higher dimension --- physical love, love, sharing, and devotion, or rediscovering love that one has lost. And so on.
Because life is fractal there are many scales on which it looks similar --- self-similarity all over again. Small events look similar to bigger ones and these events recur on a scale of decades and these patterns recur on the larger canvas of a lifetime.
It cannot be otherwise because life is a fractal so if we have the ability to see higher orders of order we must experience similarity of experiences; deja vu on many levels. We should not make too much of this because, fractal life aside, the brain is limited in its recognition and representation of experiences. Deja vu moments have no deep meaning. They represent little more than the limits of the brain to detect and represent complexity in real events. Because there is limited neural substrate and real patterns are of unlimited complexity, many experiences must recur on different scales. So, representational limits in the brain make deja vu inevitable because a finite brain can only support a finite number of representations of experiences. If similar events call forth the same or similar representation in neural substrate, a deja vu moment occurs.
This is easy to show. Suppose the brain can allocate 20 neurons to an event. If an event is complex it may require a description of the state in 200 dimensions. Thus, a lower order representation is one of 20 to the 200th power number of states. A higher order processor must pick a state or subset of states from this huge number of possible combinations. 20^200 possible states cannot be enumerated in a lifetime or many lifetimes.
The problem has to be reduced in dimension because there are not enough neurons and there is not enough time to function with state representations that are of dimension 200. Increasing the number of neurons devoted to an event is not a solution because doing so expands the demands on the next level of cognition, the pattern recognizers. So, the state representation must be reduced in dimension, from 200 perhaps to 10 or even 3 or 4. Doing so frees neurons from simple representation to higher orders of pattern recognition, a likely avenue of brain evolution. It also reduces the computational burden of the higher order neuronal circuits and this holds true farther up the line all the way to the neocortex.
So, I think the brain must be organized to operate with low dimensional states; that is to say, that complex events will be represented in the brain as finite and rather low dimensional events, say, on the order of 3 or 4 up to 7 dimensions. This spares the requirements for neurons from the lowest to the highest levels. The cost is that the finite number of states make deja vu inevitable. The down side is that once an experience is brain-encoded in the sex, food, danger dimensions a lot of the other dimensions can't carry much weight.
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A New Complex Systems Resource
March 1, 2006 12:11 PM
The New England Complex Systems Institute is hosting a new resource for researchers at NECSI.
I attended one of the classes some years ago and have read Bar Yaneer's (the driving entity of the Institute) books. Good stuff.
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