Letter Never Sent

…but there is something fascinating about faux-reality shows like The Hills or Laguna Beach. If I’m ever channel surfing and happen across one of these shows, I’ll get sucked in. It has the approachable mundane-ness of a reality show with the story line of a high-production television drama. I have a hard time watching shows that don’t seem real enough. I just can’t forget that I’m watching something fake. I think this is why I also enjoy shows like Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm (although CYE has become more fake and unreal recently). All of these shows have realistic characters, realistic lighting and environments, realistic dialogue, and realistic wardrobes and makeup. If television taps into some evolved social interest, it stands to reason that the more real the simulation, the more effective it will be in evoking sympathy and interest. Look for the lines between life and entertainment to blur further.

Crucial Minutiae has a good take on it that is worth reading.

The next time you’re driving keep an eye on the light poles looming over the Interstate. You might notice a red-tailed hawk keeping his vigil. The first time I remember seeing this was in Austin about 10 years ago, although doubtless they have been doing it longer and I just never noticed.

On one winter drive out to my uncle’s house in Southlake (an exurb of Dallas and Fort Worth), I counted five hawks perched on light poles between the opposing flow of traffic in a span of about 5 miles. My guess is these poles make a great vantage point for hunting the rats and mice that live in the close-cropped grass perimeter of our highway system.

In the short history of human civilization, many animals have learned to adapt to our ways. Rats and mice being obvious examples, but also animals we might forget like raccoons, pigeons, coyotes, and hawks. You could even count dogs and cats as animals that have adapted to us. The main requirements for living closely with humans seem to be that you must either be able to live without attracting notice (nocturnal lifestyle) or you must be able to keep from being captured (flight). In the case of cats and dogs, they have adapted by engaging our sympathies and our innate sociability. When we look at a cat or dog, there is a moment of recognition. Maybe this is due to their forward-facing stereoscopic eyes. Or, maybe it is something deeper.

As we encroach further on the natural world, animals will have to get better at adapting to a human-dominated environment or they will have to move further and further out of reach.

Great and funny piece on how nerds work over at Rands in Repose, The Nerd Handbook:

Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head. It’s the end of the day and you and your nerd are hanging out on the couch. The TV is off. There isn’t a computer anywhere nearby and you’re giving your nerd the daily debrief. “Spent an hour at the post office trying to ship that package to your mom, and then I went down to that bistro — you know — the one next the flower shop, and it’s closed. Can you believe that?”

And your nerd says, “Cool”.

Cool? What’s cool? The business closing? The package? How is any of it cool? None of it’s cool. Actually, all of it might be cool, but your nerd doesn’t believe any of what you’re saying is relevant. This is what he heard, “Spent an hour at the post office blah blah blah…”

(As I post this after midnight)

Being a morning person or a night owl doesn’t just determine when you start or end your workday; your internal clock may help define your psychology as well. A Spanish researcher found that our preference for engaging in activities earlier or later in the day shapes both our perceptions and our interactions. The author gave personality tests to 360 university students, whom he describes as a “proper sample,” noting that the circadian rhythms of students “are not much under the influence of time schedules and social patterns.” (Despite the occasional all-nighter, students presumably can follow their preferred sleep schedules more easily than working adults can.) His results offer new evidence that morning and evening types think differently. Early risers prefer to gather knowledge from concrete information. They reach conclusions through logic and analysis. Night owls are more imaginative and open to unconventional ideas, preferring the unknown and favoring intuitive leaps on their way to reaching conclusions. Social behavior diverges as well: Morning people are more likely to be self-controlled and exhibit “upstanding” conduct; they respect authority, are more formal, and take greater pains to make a good impression. (Earlier research also suggests that they are less likely to hold radical political opinions.) Evening people, by contrast, are “independent” and “nonconforming,” and more reluctant to listen to authority—which suggests that teachers may have several reasons to prefer those students who wake up in time for class.

—“Morning and Evening Types: Exploring Their Personality Styles,” Juan Francisco Díaz-Morales, Personality and Individual Differences

From Atlantic Monthly via Steve Sailer.

As I related in the previous entry, I spent some time at the library reading. Most notably: A Perfect Mess. The basic premise of the book is that a certain amount of disorganization is actually adaptive, efficient and beneficial. And, organizing may actually be counter-productive in terms of the energy required to stay organized. What a relief this is for disorganized people. I have noticed that it takes a lot of energy to keep things neat when it would actually be better to just accept a nominal amount of disorder so you can focus on more important things.

I took a few notes you might find interesting:

1. “Office messiness tends to increase sharply with increasing education, increasing salary, and increasing experience.”
2. On the questionable value of Jack Welch-ian strategic planning: “Managers import a raft of poor assumptions into the planning process…” Which results in useless or unfounded ‘planning’.
3. On comfort noise: Telephone engineers actually add a certain amount of background noise to telephone and especially cellphone conversations because people find total silence in conversation unnatural and confusing. Users hate the complete absence of background noise. “Adding background noise to telephone calls signifies presence.” Read more about ITU recommendation G.711.II.
4. On randomness and noise as a fundamental concept of existence. Example Brownian motion.
5. “Disorder creates connections.” Mess-driven invention.
6. Rather than focus on terrorist leaders, FBI / CIA focus on the productive nodes: “In a disorganized network the nodes in the middle carry the greatest workload.”
7. The cost of neatness: “Being neat requires constant expenditure of resources.”
8. Robustness of disorder: “Messy systems are more resistant.” Loosely woven.
9. The popular Noguchi file system is simply a pile shifted on its side. More frequently used items work their way to the front, just as in a pile. In other words, piles are intuitive expressions of higher order.
10. Messy environments provide useful cues.

This article on weight and exercise in New York Magazine presents the argument that conventional science has it wrong on diet and exercise. How many models do we have for how things work that are just plain false?

To be sure, this is the same logic that leads to other unconventional ideas. As it turns out, it’s carbohydrates—particularly easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars—that primarily stimulate insulin secretion. “Carbohydrates is driving insulin is driving fat,” as George Cahill Jr., a retired Harvard professor of medicine and expert on insulin, recently phrased it for me. So maybe if we eat fewer carbohydrates—in particular the easily digestible simple carbohydrates and sugars—we might lose considerable fat or at least not gain any more, whether we exercise or not. This would explain the slew of recent clinical trials demonstrating that dieters who restrict carbohydrates but not calories invariably lose more weight than dieters who restrict calories but not necessarily carbohydrates. Put simply, it’s quite possible that the foods—potatoes, pasta, rice, bread, pastries, sweets, soda, and beer—that our parents always thought were fattening (back when the medical specialists treating obesity believed that exercise made us hungry) really are fattening. And so if we avoid these foods specifically, we may find our weights more in line with our desires.

The prescription seems to be: dump the sugar and junk carbs. Eat high quality, less processed food.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t get so-called social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, etc. I don’t use them to find music, hang out, send messages, or whatever it is people do. I don’t use them period. I have signed up to try them out and to see if I could stalk find people from high school, etc., but after that what else do you do? Just leave notes on people’s pages? Why not just send an email, instant message, or make a call? Whenever I go to the library it seems like all the people on the library computers are using MySpace. I don’t understand it. Is it basically asynchronous, public instant messaging?

My working theory is that social networking sites are the successors to online dating websites. In effect, MySpace reintegrates online dating into some semblance of a normal, social life, albeit one that is semi-virtual and online rather than physical and actual.

Rather than cruise for connections with strangers (the normal online dating paradigm), social networking sites facilitate lively echosystems where people can potentially pair off. In fact, I believe this is the whole point of MySpace-type sites. According to this theory, I would expect the people who are most active in MySpace/Facebook to be single and looking. Or cynically, in a relationship and looking. In simple terms, dating sites are the online equivalent of a singles’ bar, whereas MySpace is a party. Even though the goal in both often comes down to romance/sexual gratification, they both go about it in very different ways.

Social networking sites will eventually replace dating sites because they perform one very important function: they erase the stigma of meeting people online.

This is just an idea because I am clueless about it. I’d be curious to know what the appeal is. If you participate in social networking, how do you use it? What purpose does it serve for you?

Right now juvenile birds all over the northern hemisphere are fledging, growing their flight feathers and learning to fly. You may have noticed some birds looking particularly clumsy, patchy, loud, and awkward. These are likely fledglings, the bird equivalent of a human teenager. Just like teenagers, they are testing their wings, preparing to leave their parents for the world beyond. Also like teenagers, they are obnoxiously dependent, ungainly, and even ugly in a half-baked sort of way.

You will often see fledglings chasing their parents around begging for food. Most young birds make distinct “feed me” calls their parents find impossible to ignore. In a study involving the cagey wild turkey (I can’t remember where I read about this), scientists created a decoy polecat with a tape recorder inside that would play the cheep-cheep call of the wild turkey chicks. As the polecat is one of the turkey’s mortal enemies, the turkey would predictably attack the polecat decoy on sight unless the decoy played the cheep-cheep call. In this case the turkey would hover protectively over the polecat as if it were part of its brood rather than a potential predator. The fact that this behavior is automatic and triggered solely by the cheep-cheep call shows how nature uses instinct as an effective mental shortcut to produce good parenting behavior. From the parent bird’s perspective, they probably don’t realize that their need to feed their offspring is triggered by a particular sound and behavior. In their tiny bird brain, they are probably thinking something like, “Gotta find food now and give it to the baby.” Repeat.

It makes you wonder how much of our own behavior and thoughts are dictated by instincts undetectable to our conscious minds. Why do we really feel and think the things that we do? Do we overestimate the power and control of our own consciousness? What behaviors and feelings do we indulge because of some hidden, instinctual motive? I think about this on the highway where it seems like everyone is talking on a cellphone as they return to their homes. Many people feel this strong desire to stay in constant contact. There has to be some reason we feel the need to socialize in this way.

Maybe depression and anxiety are caused, in large part, by behaving against instinct. Maybe happiness itself is the emotional payoff from acting in accord with Nature. If that is the case, are there any cases where nature/happiness is suspect? In other words, are there times when we should act against Nature to achieve a better long-term dividend of happiness? I think this conflict between what we want and what we think we want is ever present and is responsible for many problems like crime, poverty, violence, and addiction.

It is possible that to achieve larger ends we must act against instinct even to the point of suffering.

From a scene in Frank Hebert’s Dune:

“What’s in the box?”
“Pain.”
He felt increased tingling in his hand, pressed his lips tightly together.
How could this be a test? he wondered. The tingling became an itch.
The old woman said; “You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a
trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure
the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to
his kind.”
The itch became the faintest burning. “Why are you doing this?” he demanded.
“To determine if you’re human. Be silent.”

I have never had problems with my weight. In my mind I will always be that skinny kid of 12 years old. Like a lot of guys, I never worried about how much or what I ate. Food was just this thing my body demanded. Likewise, I gave little attention to my physical shell, simply because it took care of itself. Youth bestows an effortless beauty and vigor, which most people appreciate only in retrospect. As Schopenhauer wrote, “Youth without beauty always has attraction; beauty without youth has none.”

As I approached my mid-twenties, my metabolism slowed down and my eating habits caught up with me. I woke up one day about a year ago and realized that I was overweight. I had tried to ignore the problem, but it was there in photos and in my ever expanding waistband. At my heaviest I weighed about 210 pounds. While this is not considered obese in a man over six feet tall, it was the heaviest I had ever been and it did not look good on me. I decided that I needed to do something because ignoring the problem wasn’t working. I tried several approaches but focused mainly on reducing input (calories consumed) and increasing output (energy expended). Eventually, I worked down to my current weight of just over 185 pounds for a difference of roughly 25 pounds. I’m working toward a goal weight of 170 pounds.

It was easy to lose the weight. The problem is deceptively simple. Weight gain is the result of consuming more than your body can expend. Our bodies are amazingly efficient and adaptive systems. If extra food is available, your body will store it as fat rather than waste it. This is how it should be. Add the relative physical ease of modern life with the high availability of nutritious food and you understand why obesity is such a problem. Fatty food is a quick phone call away.

During the course of my weight loss experience, I did not have to diet and everything was painless. As with most things, it just took some attention and time and is easier than most would have you believe. I will share what worked for me in case it can help you. I hope it does.

Measure it, Track it

I don’t advocate calorie counting because this is more work than anyone can be expected to do for the rest of their life, which is exactly how long you will need to maintain your ideal weight. However, until you measure something you cannot manage it.

I measure two things, the moving average of my daily weight (taken first thing in the morning) and everything I eat. I do not even know how to calculate a moving average. I just use the Google Fifteen Widget for the iGoogle homepage. It tracks and calculates everything for me and outputs a nice graph to show my progress. If the moving average trends down, I know I’m losing weight. If the trend moves up, I know I’m gaining weight. Some people will tell you that it is demotivating to weigh daily, however this helped me tremendously as I was able to adjust on the fly. As long as you recognize that your daily weight may fluctuate wildly and that the moving average is the key measurement, you will be fine.

I do not write down what I eat or keep a diet journal, but every time I sit down to eat I pause and consider what I’ve eaten that day. All I need to remember is what I’ve eaten that day. If I’ve had a couple slices of pizza or something similarly unhealthy, I will decide to eat a smaller portion or something with fewer calories.

Change the Way You Eat, Not What You Eat

Diets are stupid, conceptually. The idea is to motivate people by making them eat food they don’t like and banning foods they do like? This will not work. As Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided will not stand.” When you’re on a diet, you are at war with your sensual side. Your body doesn’t understand why it can’t have what it wants, it just wants it and knows when it’s not getting it. For example, I will never be a person who loves salad. That’s just not something I like. The solution is to trick your body into going along with the weight loss plan. There are a couple ways to do this.

Keep Eating Crappy Food, Just Eat Less of It

Many people will tell you fast food is bad for you. I imagine it’s no less healthy and probably more healthy than what you get at some of the places people like to eat. There’s no way Olive Garden, Chili’s, or Red Lobster is more healthy than McDonald’s. Most of the food in these places is larded up with fat and salt so you’re tempted to order Appletini’s or multiple glasses of overpriced ‘house’ wine because you’re artificially thirsty from all the added salt. Likewise, a tub of salad slathered in ranch dressing is NOT healthy. In general, any food you buy prepared sucks.

If you want a cheeseburger, knock yourself out. Just forgo the French fries and large carbonated beverage. You’ll spend less and eat less crap. Make compromises. Split a dinner portion and take half home for later. Always drink water with your meals. Never buy appetizers or eat all the chips and salsa on the table. At a fast food restaurant, the right portion size is available on the 99 cent menu. Get one small, cheap hamburger or whatever and call it a day. As someone once said, “The best exercise you can do is pushing yourself away from the table.’

Eat at Home, Eat Earlier

When’s the last time you made yourself an appetizer before dinner? When’s the last time you ate chips and salsa or a dessert with your meal at home? Seldom to never.

When you eat at home, you’re almost guaranteed to eat better and less, especially if you have a large family or live with a bunch of freeloading roommates who make you fight for that last taco.

In general, I like to eat around 6:30 or 7 at night. By the time I finish dinner, I know I’ll have 2-3 hours before I go to bed and then 8 or more hours on top of that until I eat again. This gives me over ten hours to burn the energy I just ate. Also, try to eat a modest dinner as it is the last meal of the day. Another easy-to-remember platitude: “Eat like a king for breakfast, a prince for supper, and a pauper for dinner.”

Get a Gym Membership and Have Fun With It

I used to be against gym memberships because I’m a cheapskate. I had all sorts of reasons: it’s expensive, there’s a workout room in my apartment complex or at my office, I hate membership contracts, etc. The fact is, it is worth it to have a gym membership and it doesn’t have to suck. I work out at Lifetime Fitness where they at least don’t have contracts. It’s not bad at all.

The decision to get a gym membership was made easier when I admitted a few things to myself. Number one, I need to invest in my health and that investment (spending money every month) motivates me to get value out of it. Number two, free workout facilities suck. There is never enough equipment and I don’t want to work out with people I’ll see around the office or at the apartment complex.

I try to have fun when I go work out. When I first started going, I went every day, which was impossible to keep up. But, I did it for a reason. I wanted to create the habit of going until it was just part of my life. Now I keep a bag in my car and go every other day, at least three times a week. When I first started I would do 30-60 minutes on the elliptical or bike in addition to weights, then I discovered that this is not fun. Cardio is extremely boring and enjoyed by only the most dull or masochistic of people. I’m convinced that people stop working out because it’s not fun, even with an iPod.

How do you have fun at the gym? Instead of grinding out the cardio, I warm up by shooting hoops then I just lift weights until I’ve done my set for the day. If I’m taking my time, I’ll sit in the hot tub or wet sauna for 10-15 minutes when I’m done. If I go work out on my normally alternating days, I’ll do 30 minutes of cardio since I need to let my muscles repair from lifting weights. When you lift weight, make sure it is not too easy and not so difficult that you can’t do a set. To improve your muscles, you should lift to the point that the targeted muscles are exhausted. I’m convinced that lifting weights does more to burn fat than anything else. Unless you’re trying out for a marathon, why would you want to do cardio every time you work out?

Television by Appointment Only

It’s been a while since I’ve had cable, but Jody has it at her house and I’ve been amazed at how easy it is to get sucked in for hours at a time (I like Dirty Jobs, Man vs. Wild, and Cops). There is something going on in our brains when it comes to movement on a screen because television has the ability to maintain your attention like nothing else. In the past I have advocated against television, however since falling in love with Entourage on HBO, I am now advocating that you simply plan what you watch. Instead of plopping down and zoning out for several hours, look at what’s on and plan what you would like to see that week. Keep your total viewing to 2-3 hours a week. I think you will be pleasantly surprised by the general improvement in your life. I read more, work more, go to sleep earlier, and get more done when I’m not tied to the TV.

Closing Thoughts

Being overweight does not make you a bad person or unlikable. It’s just a problem of physical laws: too much input and not enough output. Personalizing a physical problem will not help you address it. Some of being overweight is genetic and part of who you are. If your parents are on the round side, you are likely to be on the round side. However, a distinction should be made between being thick muscled and being flabby. If you are barrel-chested or thick-shouldered, you will never be waif thin and that’s okay. However, if you’re muscled normally and covered with flab, this is a situation you can do something about. As important as it is to shed extra pounds, it’s equally important to shed negativity and try to help yourself. You can afford to be a little vain, as long as it helps you.

I’m curious what other experiences people have had. What has worked for you? What have you had trouble with?

My brother sent me this mind-blowing video explaining how the accepted plate tectonics (continental drift) theory is all wrong. The video argues that the earth is in fact expanding. In other words, the continents are not moving around like sheets of ice in the ocean, rather they’re being pushed apart by an expanding earth and unlike in continental drift theory, there is no subduction of plates into the mantle only a gradually increasing planetary surface.

It sounds crazy, but Neal Adams makes a pretty good visual case for it. I’m skeptical because if this theory were true it would change everything. Although, it could answer an earlier entry where I wondered why gigantism seems so common in prehistory and yet not so common today. If the earth were smaller, more like Mars, animals would be able to grow to enormous size due to lighter local gravity. At the risk of sounding like an idiot, this is the same reason Mars has mountains and canyons that are miles high and deep. It’s easier for things to stand out higher when gravity is less of a burden. Although, if the mass of the smaller earth and the larger earth is the same, the gravity should be the same as well, correct?

For there to be greater local gravity over time the earth would have to either increase in mass due to some unknown phenomenon or matter would have to accrete from outer space, maybe as a result of cataclysmic meteor strikes or comet impacts. Also, if you view the video, you’ll see that there is little ocean in their visualization. Does this mean the oceans were much deeper in the past or that there was less water? Assuming their theory is valid, could the additional mass and additional water be accounted for by the impact of a giant icey comet? I don’t have the answers, but I’d like to see a refutation of the expanding earth theory.

Of course, Wikipedia has a good article explaining everything including my puzzlement at dinosaur size:

The primary objection to Expanding Earth Theory centered around the lack of a accepted process by which the Earth’s radius could increase. This issue, along with the rise of the theory of Subduction, caused the scientific community to dismiss the geological evidence Carey and others presented. The evidence for continental matching even on the Pacific facing sides became irrelevant, as did the claims that a smaller sized and lower gravity Earth facilitated the growth of dinosaurs to their relatively enormous size.

Here’s a question, if everything in the universe were increasing in size at the same rate, how would we know? This is Adams’ basic thesis, that the entire universe is growing:

Adams believes his theory presents a more concise and comprehensive reading of available scientific evidence which indicates the universe is growing, not exploding or merely expanding. Along with other Expanding Earth researchers and enthusiasts, he utilizes the internet to encourage discussions of it and disseminates his theory to the scientific community and wider audiences.

Crazy.