Month: November 2014

By Robert Lustig. Some interesting points:

– Thin people are not in control of their eating any more than fat people are and they can and do “flip” any time.

– The industrial global diet is ubiquitous and in demand, which means more obesity is on the way worldwide.

– Fructose as the “number one cause of chronic metabolic disease. ” (This claim seems a little extreme.)

– Foods that cause an insulin spike (such as fructose) may block leptin signaling and cause a starvation signal in the brain, causing overeating.

– Exercise is essentially useless for weight loss but increases overall health.

The author is not hopeful about the situation but the last part of the book offers some useful ideas including buying screen time with exercise. Example: being active for one hour buys you three hours of internet/phone/video games.

Fun fact: today I learned that the person on Instagram with the username Cunt_Destroyer is a teenage girl ! Weird.

I had the experience of not knowing whether it was more polite to correct a person’s false claims or to let him go on displaying his ignorance at the risk of further embarrassment:

A guy told me potassium was a large protein with “lots of grabbers” to transport other molecules throughout the body for clotting (This is totally wrong and he meant vitamin K). He said he was an O positive blood donor, “the universal donor” (It’s actually O negative). He then went on a lengthy rant about how one’s phone is the dirtiest thing one touches all day because “lots of things are cultured from it” (But is there any evidence those bacteria cause disease?).

I have no problem with ignorance (the ignorance of the human race, of all of us) when accompanied by a little humility. This “papier-mâché Mephistopheles” was only annoying to me because of the way he told me, unbidden, that he used to be the director of the Children’s Hospital lab, and then reminded me of this again a week later. People who go around wowing and silencing others with credentials and technical terms should be aware that an informed listener might be present to call out their bullshit and point out that they are literally a goddamn idiatic.

Ultimately it seemed most polite just to smile and nod.

Included: icy Lake Nokomis. Today I learned a lot about the wetland and oak savanna restoration efforts underway there. Also a frog.

A man died on Broadway Avenue a few months ago while checking out a Nice Ride bike. Some lowlife in a van veered off the road, hit him, and fled.

I visited the site the day after and thought about how I sometimes repeat phrases from Moby Dick to try to attain inner calm when I feel harassed: "Deep down and deep inland there I do bathe me in eternal mildness of joy." Or I think of the Meditations of Aurelius, that emperor who was ever turning inward:

"If a man should stand by a limpid pure spring, and curse it, the spring never ceases sending up potable water; and if he should cast clay into it or filth, it will speedily disperse them and wash them out, and will not be at all polluted. How then shalt thou possess a perpetual fountain and not a mere well? By forming thyself hourly to freedom conjoined with contentment, simplicity and modesty."

But it’s not enough simply to regulate your internal environment. Suppose that crash victim was in total inner peace when he was hit by the van. It didn’t prevent him from dying. Sperm whales turned out not to be malevolent at all but instead quite docile and vulnerable to overhunting. And you’re not a well, spouting huge quantities of fresh water. You’re vulnerable too and you have to fight to protect yourself and improve your surroundings. You have to fight for bike lanes that are separate from vehicle traffic, for increased enforcement of drunk-driving laws, and for a livable city so you don’t end up like that poor man on Broadway Avenue.

Sure it’s good to strive for inner calm, but if a circumstance is not right you should always make an effort to change it.

I stepped out from work at just the right time. It looked as though a rounded chunk of the sun was being shorn off. It was touching that a viewing party was visible right there in my sight-line. How many other such parties, cascading across the earth, followed this accident of perspective as it moved through space, in an event worthwhile only because it was so coincidental? No doubt the oohs and aahs were uttered in a predicatble wave from east to west as the event unfolded.

I’ll be present, mentally, tomorrow when the Philae lander touches down on a comet for the first time. And I’ll see (if it’s not overcast) the Taurid meteor shower peak in a couple of days. Hopefully the skies will dump all the snow they can muster on Monday to allow for clear viewing on Wednesday.