chooky fuzzbang

the bacon of shoes

2012-01-24T17:08:00.002-05:00

I posted a while back about some research I had done on the minimalist shoe movement and how I kind of bought into the entire thing. Namely shoes should really have wider toe-boxes and little to no heel support. I almost exclusively wear minimalist shoes now and what minor issues I had with my feet are largely gone. At the time I was trying out the Vibram Five Fingers which I still contend are a great pair of shoes.

Quite frankly though VFFs are just too conspicuous. So I hunted around for some alternatives and ended up trying the Merrell Trail Gloves. To say I love these shoes is an understatment. I now own 3 pairs and unless the occasion calls for something more formal they are on my feet. The toe box is huge. Which is good. I actually wear a pair of orthotic toe spreaders inside which as the name suggests spreads your toes out. The heel is very thin, the shoes are washable, and they breathe well so they don't get stinkified like the VFFs. And oddly these are the only pair of shoes that I get complements on. And you can use them anywhere. I use them to work out, hike, and stroll in the city.

chipotle

2011-12-23T15:38:00.001-05:00

I like this even if it is a total lie. The sentiment is worth something. And Willie covering Coldplay. That's probably enough to take it viral.

prometheus

2011-12-22T15:58:00.001-05:00

Well it looks like we are getting close. Ridley Scott has just released a trailer for Prometheus. What Prometheus is, is not entirely clear. It's clearly linked to the Alien movie universe. It started out as a prequel to the first Alien movie that he directed. But then the movie itself is supposed to not predate anything from the following films. That leaves us with a film that takes place far in the future from the Alien franchise but takes place on the planet where the aliens were first found.

To say I'm a little pumped for this movie is an understatement. Ridley Scott hasn't made a science fiction movie since Bladerunner (or Legend if you want to consider that sci fi). That's almost 30 fucking years. And I have been waiting

This is strange because between 1979 and 1985 he came out with Alien, Bladerunner, and Legend. None of them were particularly well reviewed by critics. They did okay in the box office. But all of them have cult followings now.

Alien did the best at the box office. It's a little hard to imagine now but that film was fucking scary as all get out when it came out. The advertising campaign was genius too. The tagline "In space, no one can hear you scream" became somewhat of a meme. And in reality it wasn't a sci fi movie it was a horror movie. I had to sneak into a theater to see it and fell in love.

Then Bladerunner came out and bombed. It had Harrison Ford so people thought it would be like Star Wars and it came out when a Star Trek movie and ET were released. Amazingly ET won the academy award for best visual effects that year. Go back and watch those two films and tell me the Academy didn't make a huge mistake.

And then finally he came out with Legend. Which bombed even more. But again this was also a great film that still is unlike almost anything else ever made.

All three films had something that was rare until then. The visuals, story, set design, and special effects were tight. 2001 Space Odyssey approaches something similar to these three movies in that the special effects have held up well over the years and the films weren't really about sci fi themes but humanist themes. But Scott removed the clean, white, pristine future look that plagued all sci fi films until then. These were grungy and retrofitted and quite frankly more realistic. And he had fitting soundtracks that improved the films. He's still the best sci fi/fantasy director ever in my book. And then Scott did the most annoying thing. He didn't make another sci fi/fantasy film. Unbelievable. Well now one is coming out. I'm a little apprehensive that he will have lost his magic but we'll see.

I should also point out a couple of interesting things. At 0:29 it looks like they are doing research on the 'space jockey' from the first film. And at 0:39 it looks like the chair he sat in is rising.

here comes the sun?

2011-11-04T09:38:00.000-04:00

The carnage going on in the solar industry is impressive. Take a look at this chart. This is First Solar. The biggest, most profitable solar company out there.

Total devastation. The CEO left not long ago. Some of this has been portrayed as Chinese companies dumping product onto the market but they aren't fairing much better. Here's Trina Solar.

These are impressive declines. What is going on? Classic cyclical market in a downturn. Everyone expanded when the market was strong and now finally it isn't strong. Governments have no money and the solar market needs subsidies to exist at the size it does today. Increasing supply and falling demand for what is basically a commodity product (no differentiation). Brutal.

And what's worse is that everyone keeps expecting things to bottom out but it just isn't happening. Just today Trina announced their shipping and pricing data and it's worse than expected. And they guided numbers for the third quarter HALF WAY THROUGH THE QUARTER. In other words things have become dramatically worse in the last month and a half since they gave that guidance. I'm not sure when it bottoms out. It will at some point.

In some sense this is good because prices have dropped dramatically making solar that much more economical. But at the same time new innovative companies are having a hard time raising money to expand because there is no need for new supply. And the name of the game in solar is you need to be big to distribute your fixed costs over a large volume. So all of us in the industry just sit and wait for the bottom to finally show itself.

i could care less

2011-11-01T08:41:00.001-04:00

I just noticed this. After Deadline in the NY Times. It reviews spelling and grammatical mistakes in the newspaper. It's both interesting, informative, and funny. HA!

automated garlic peeling

2011-10-17T14:50:00.000-04:00

This goes down as one of the greatest kitchen parlor tricks I've ever seen. I was absolutely sure this wouldn't work but I had to try it. Well. It does work. Amazingly well. No more expensive pre-peeled garlic for me. I now do it in batches and store it.

they are all gone

2011-09-13T12:32:00.000-04:00

As maybe a sign of the times I have almost completely eradicated myself of physical books. I've been thinking about doing this for a long time for a number of reasons.

They take up a metric crap-load of space.
They serve no rational purpose while sitting on a set of bookshelves.
"Things" rarely provide me with any value in life.

My hypothetical dream apartment consists of a bed, a computer, a cell phone, clothes, bathroom amenities, and kitchen utensils. And an ebook reader. In life I really don't need much more than that.

What gets in the way of that is the history of all those books. Maybe 600 in total. The pleasing aesthetic to a well stocked book collection. And my deep love of books.

The process of packing up the books was interesting. I almost kept backtracking on myself. At some point I justified keeping maybe 20% of the books. Well I haven't read that one. That one is kind of a keepsake. That was one of my favorite books. Ultimately I ended up packing up pretty much everything.

My extensive French Existentialist collection. The entire collection of Stephen Jay Gould. The entire collection of James Ellroy. A trove of popular science books. An extensive collection of Hunter S. Thompson. Gone.

The process was painful. I delivered the last of the boxes to the library of our local school today. I still feel a little weird.

It's perhaps interesting to see what books made it through.

Feynman's Lectures
Some history books I'm going to give to my dad
Books I expect my kids to read one day (Tolkien, Rowling, etc.). Ironically I think by then they'll just read the ebook version

That's it.

Also interesting. Getting rid of them was hard. The entire Brooklyn library system would not take them. Manhattan would only take them at one spot. I suspect ebook readers are changing the landscape more quickly than we imagine and that libraries are inundated with physical books.

hidden meanings

2011-09-12T17:15:00.000-04:00

Perhaps I'm over analyzing this but I kind of think Paul Simon's rendition of The Sound of Silence at the 9/11 memorial yesterday was one of the more subversive things I've seen in a while. And I can't find anyone that agrees with me.

Backstory: Paul Simon was supposed to play Bridge Over Troubled Waters at the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero and ended up playing The Sound of Silence. Bridge Over Troubled Waters is a clearly "uplifting when your down" kind of song. And it seems most people think Sound of Silence is the same.

Reports of the event were glowing with writers using words like "heartbreaking", "emotionally wrenching". "...his words seemed so moving". Gawker cryptically mentioned that "the lyrics are better , and arguably more appropriate, at least in the ways that their meanings have changed.

But I've always thought of Sound of Silence as a cry against false leaders and the unquestioning masses. The "silence" in the song is a lack of revolt and rebellion. The sound of conformism, of accepting the wisdom of our leaders. A perspective you could imagine a young Paul Simon having in 1964 after Kennedy was assassinated.

Here's the lyrics:

Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

"Fools", said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls"
And whispered in the sounds of silence

Some of the key lines are "People hearing without listening". You can imagine a visual of people listening to a leader who is spouting gibberish or lies but they aren't really listening. Just accepting what they are told. "Fools" he says. This silence is a cancer and will grow. But everyone ignores him and keep praying unquestioningly to their leaders.

The first time around Simon did play Bridge at the site just after the attacks. But I think he's become soured by our response to it, the wars, the removal of civil rights, etc. And I think he changed the song for this very reason. Not as an uplifting moment but rather to say your leaders and media are exploiting this event for their own political and social goals. Wake up.

Or maybe I'm overanalyzing this.

a victory for fossil fuels

2011-09-07T21:37:00.000-04:00

People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. - MIB

People popping potassium iodide tablets
Chinese hoarding iodized salt

I suspect Fukushima will have a larger impact on anti-nuclear sentiment than the much more catastrophic Chernobyl accident. Primarily because it was not a man-made issue. Scientists can no longer say "poor design", "poor procedures", "poorly trained workers", etc. This was a random dice being thrown and coming up 7.

All energy production requires tradeoffs.

Coal is estimated to kill 30,000 a year. I suspect it much higher than this. It liberates nasty radioactive particles and radiation. The CO2 it produces will eventually kill 100s of millions if it isn't removed from our gen grid.
Hydroelectric is one of the best but dams are not immune from earthquake damage. Oh you didn't hear about the dam that failed in the Sendair earthquake and flooded a town of 1,800. Not surprising. While that wasn't a power dam it's shows the damage it can do. How about Banqiao Dam. 18GW dam that failed. 26,000 died from the flooding and 145,000 died from subsequent epidemics and famine. Finally in the US at least our hydro is tapped out. We are actually losing hydro due to environmental lawsuits which dislike the damage to the environment they create.
Natural gas is very clean. Still produces a lot of CO2 though. About half as much as coal. The "fracking" of shale rock however is done in a manner that could be screwing with our water table. Unclear what the effects of this are. Plus it's incredibly price volatile.
Wind is outright one of the cheapest to build and operate. But it too has issues. There aren't a ton of great sites to place wind gen. We've tapped out Western Texas to the point where T Boone Pickens just up and left his projects there to die. And generally the wind blows where people aren't. Ever driven through West Texas? That means transmission lines and those are both pricey and also unbelievably hard to build in the US. 10 year lead times. Plus it generally blows at night when no one is really using power. One way to offset this is with batteries but then you have an expensive energy solution again. Plus it is not dispatchable. You can't just create energy from wind turbines when you need it. It stops blowing and there is very little forewarning. This is a strain on the operation of the grid and against costs money. Plus some potentially biased sources claim that more people die per wind MWh produced compared to nuclear.
Solar is like wind. Non-dispatchable, generally runs where people aren't, and unfortunately is still pretty pricey without massive subsidies. Plus it is not immune from environmental concerns either. Silicon production is a dirty business. And thin films used Cadmium. Ugly stuff.
Geo is almost perfect. It's dispatchable, deadly cheap to run, and no CO2 or any other environmental issues that we are aware of. The problem seems to be that the current technology has limited site applicability. I personally don't understand why this is. We are good at drilling. We have the oil and gas industry to thank for that. But that doesn't seem to make the capital costs work out or how to apply technology to capture the heat. Hopefully we'll figure that out one day.

So that means I like nuclear right? I think people having a pro or anti nuclear position are making this way too simple. There are good reactor designs and bad ones (1st gen BWRs). There are good procedures and bad ones. I like some of the new designs a lot. And I'm not against closing down dangerous reactors. And I think a lot more could be done. Like an international SWAT team that can be deployed in situations like Chernobyl and Japan quickly and with "best of" practices and tons of mitigating procedures and equipment. Quite frankly from what I've read Japan would never have been an issue if they would have dropped a good portable generation solution down on the plant while the batteries were being used. I still don't know why this didn't happen.

Nuclear power is dangerous stuff. But it has some great attributes. You can build big plants in small areas, it's cheap to run, there is no CO2, and it is dispatchable. We need that in our arsenal. And there are some interesting designs out there like,

Integral Fast Reactors. They in theory pull most of the energy out of the uranium or thorium compared to 1% for current reactors. You read that right. They can "burn" our nuclear waste. The fission byproducts half shorter half-lifes. They operate at ambient pressures (no chance for pressure explosions). The salt cooling system can be passive and operate purely by convection from the heat from the reactor. A loss of power to these reactors doesn't lead to dire consequences. They are self-regulating.

As the reaction heats up it causes neutrons to escape reducing the reaction and heat generated. Are there issues? Of course. There are always issues. The sodium burns in air and explodes in water which of course is in the turbine. It also produces precursors to weapons grade plutonium. This was the reason the initial work by the US was shut down in 1994. In 2001 the DOE tasked scientists to evaluate the best reactor designs. IFR was #1. There are none in operations but some prototypes exist. And of course more work needs to be done. You may be familiar with one configuration. Bill Gates has backed a traveling wave reactor concept.

It's all part of a portfolio of imperfect energy tools we have. I don't like the idea of throwing one out.

oils

2011-09-07T21:33:00.000-04:00

I mentioned previously that I'm becoming more skeptical of vegetable oils. Specifically industrial seed oils. Things like soybean (one of the more significant oils used in food processing), corn oils, sunflower, etc. More specifically these oils are referred to as polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) and depending on the type of fatty acid they can be further classified as n-3 (Omega 3 acids) or n-6 (Omega 6 acids). Typically oils have both types of acids but the prevalent one is sometimes used to describe a particular oil. We'll avoid that laziness.

Science lesson: What is an Omega 3/Omega 6 fatty acid?

Fatty Acids - generally a linear chain of carbon atoms with hydrogen atoms attached to the carbon atoms and on one end a carboxyl group which is (COOH). It looks like this, where R is the carbon chain and can be of various lengths.

Saturated fatty acids - Saturated here refers to the R part of the chain. If the connected carbon atoms have single bonds with each other that leaves 2 spots for hydrogen to attach (- CH2 - CH2 - CH2 -). The molecule is therefore "saturated with hydrogen".

Unsaturated fatty acids - The connected carbon atoms have one or more double or triple bonds which means there are less spots for hydrogen to attach. Monounsaturated means there is ONE double bond. Polyunsaturated means there are MORE THAN ONE double bonds.

Omega-3 fatty acids - These are unsaturated fatty acids. Therefore it has double or triple bond. Omega 3 acids have a double bond in the n-3 postion or the 3rd carbon atom in from the non-carboxyl end (the CH3 end). There may be additional double bonds farther up the chain depending on how long the carbon chains is. These dietary fats are mainly found in seafood, some seeds (flax and walnuts), and to a lesser extent in meats, vegetables and diary.

Omega 3 fatty acids - these acids therefore have a double bond on the 6th carbon atom from the non-carboyxl end. These dietary fats are found in industrial oils (corn, soybean, sunflower, cottonseed, etc.)

In general industrial processed seed oils are high in omega 6 acids. And as food has become more processed we've been ingesting more and more of these types of oils.

People cite this chart and the obvious correlation with modern diseases and use this to make a point that these oils are bad. But I have issues with this. I wish I could find the actual source of this data but I can't. Everyone uses this chart. And this chart doesn't actually show an increase in omega-6 fatty acids but unsaturated fatty acids in general. Many claim this is primarily omega-6 but I've never seen the proof of this. So this could potentially show some correlation to modern day diseases but again that is just correlation and it's a weak form of an argument. Anthropological research suggests we used to eat omega-3/omega-6 in equal amounts.

This USDA PDF states that polyunsaturated fatty acid intake (omega-3 & -6) increased form 13 grams in 1909-19 to 37 grams in 2004 and went from 11% of our total fat intake in 1909-1919 to 21% in 2004.

That PDF also has some PUFA consumption data that I plotted to just check on the graph above. Looks similar.

The other reason mentioned in anti-vegetable oil articles is that these things have not been a part of the human diet until relatively recently. True, but I hate that reason. It's a lazy reason. The whole natural is good and unnatural is bad is a similar type of argument that is just as lazy. If something is bad then there should be a why? Poisonous mushrooms are natural but they are clearly not good for you. Similarly corn syrup is not natural yet once the sucrase enzyme in your mouth breaks sucrose (table sugar) down into glucose and fructose then it is identical to corn syrup; namely a bunch of fructose and glucose molecules. That doesn't make it healthy but it isn't any less healthy than the "natural" table sugar.

Also cited are research articles showing associations between omega-6 and diseases.

This research is cited as showing that omega-6 is associated with inflammatory diseases It does nothing of the sort. What it does is look at various countries and their dietary n-3 intake and compare against coronary heart disease mortality, stroke mortality, cardiovascular disease mortality, total mortality, homicide mortality, postpartum depression, major depression, and bipolar disorder. And it shows that the higher the intake of omega-3 the low incidence of these diseases. In particular Iceland and Japan showed low incidence of most of these diseases (presumably they eat a lot of fish, high in omega-3). It doesn't directly focus on omega-6 fatty acids but infers higher omega-3 consumption will lead to lower omega-6 consumption. Possibly.

Also cite is this god awful page from the NIH. The key chart is this one. That's as big as the chart is. To be honest I'm not entirely sure what we are looking at. Y-axis is CHD mortality. Fine. X-axis is Perent Long 6 in total long. I'm guessing this means the percent of PUFAs in various countries diets that are omega-6. But frankly I'm not sure. It could mean the omega-6 in the blood at time of death. Not sure. The text is as bad as the web design.

What I really hate about this chart though is it has an R^2 of 95% meaning it's amazingly predictive. Man nothing is ever this predictive in science. I'm wondering if the data was cherry picked or something. It has happened before.

Another article with a bizarrely similar but different chart suggests these measurements are of highly unsaturated omega-6 fatty acids (HUFA) in cell tissue. And the measurement in the cell tissue is a good measure of the fatty acids in the diet.

There are also research articles that supposedly look at the n-6 to n-3 ratios and how these protect against heart degenerative diseases. But I can't get a hold of that one either. And the abstract really just recommends eating more Omega-3. In fact there are lots of links to research articles that are either not accessible, don't show what the author claims, or even are completely unrelated at all to what the author says.

So what can I say? Not much. Until the research focuses a little more on a holistic view of omega-6 and omega-3 then I'm not quite convinced.

Meanwhile if you want to avoid high Omega-6 oils these would be safflower, sunflower, corn, cottonseed, walnut, and soybean oils. Basically any oil where you say to yourself, "how the hell did they get oil out of that plant?". Coconut oil (my oil of preference) and flaxseed oil are the only plant oils I'll use. And yes coconut oil is completely saturated. And that's exactly why it is my oil of choice. Because saturated fat is good for you. But that's another post.

the great outdoors

2011-09-07T21:30:00.000-04:00

I had to laugh at this hilarious article in a Tacoma, WA paper on the lengths that some New Yorkers will go to experience the outdoors in New York.

Rancid canal passes for ‘great outdoors’ in Brooklyn

It's true of course. New Yorkers will embark on almost all manner of buffoonery to recapture or reclaim some aspect of normalcy in a city that is overpriced and overcrowded. From this kayaking expedition above to using dumpsters to make impromptu swimming pools to rooftop farms. Every week the NY Times has an article on some new crazy thing going on.

Actually I should be clear. It's not New York I'm talking about. It's Brooklyn. Manhattan is dead to the world. It's a homogenous giant strip mall now. Brooklyn is where the true craziness goes on.

But all things equal, I'd rather live in a world where this kind of craziness happens. Which is why I think hipsters, that most maligned group known to man, are simply the bees knees.

Hipsters perform two useful functions in this city.

They rebel against conformity and sanity and popularity as a principle.
They engage in un-economic activities.

Those two functions together mean we get lots of things that push back against the strip-mall-ification of New York City. While you get some misses (e.g. like the popularity of skinny jeans, ironic hats and fixies) you also get some serious wins like a huge number of serious old school butcher stores opening in Brooklyn

fat camps and diabetes

2011-09-07T21:29:00.000-04:00

Fat camp shows China battling the bulge:

While the fat camp thing has been published before I missed the little tidbit in this article that diabetes has increased to almost 7% of the population in China. I checked and the numbers are real.

Chinese with Diabetes:
2000 - 20.8 million (source: WHO)
2010 - 90.4 million (source: NEJM)

I'm not sure about that 2000 number. But the 2010 number is a big sample and uses the gold standard for testing for diabetes. Not only that but 150 million are estimated at risk of diabetes. I have to imagine that the Chinese diet on average is still better than the US so the fact that the diabetes percentages are getting close suggests again that Asians unfortunately have a disposition towards diabetes.

As you can guess it's a rich persons disease in China. The poor eat unprocessed foods and the rich get to down fast and junk foods. And when I say processed I mean high carb.

It's going to be interesting to see how the government addresses this. If they adopt the US "low-fat" approach things are going to get dramatically worse.

carbs and cancer

2011-09-07T21:26:00.000-04:00

For those of you who read this blog for the carb stuff this is an incredibly fascinating video spotted by Fat Head. It is the President and CEO of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center discussing how cancer grows.

The money begins around the 20 minute mark but it is worth watching the whole thing. In case you miss it at the end, he very clearly spells out the following - eating carbohydrates will increase your chance of cancer. It's amazing how 1/3 of the class completely misses the essence of this guys talk.

I've always suspected that cancer and carbohydrates were linked but this is a pretty damning testament. I'll go on record that I believe that we'll find that things like Alzheimers will eventually be linked to carbohydrates as well in short order.

That 1/3 screw up the answer to his simple question is a testament to how brainwashed we can all become. This ability to hold onto our beliefs is such a remarkably embedded quality in humans. I was reminded of this when a kerfluffle occurred in the low carb community around if carbs really were the problem or something else.

My knee-jerk reaction was to think the opposing side is just plain wrong. But then this is what 1/3 of the people did when they answered incorrectly. I need to dig a little deeper into this controversy and figure out if there is a solution to the disagreement.

wall-e

2011-09-01T23:20:00.001-04:00

Wall-E, I mean Opportunity rover, landed on Mars on January 2004. While its sister, Spirit, died a while back, that crazy thing has been going for over 7 years now. 30 TIMES LONGER THAN IT WAS SUPPOSED TO.

i don't buy it

2011-08-19T19:05:00.000-04:00

13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence

This was the top-ranking post on popurls.com today. Sounds wonderful. It'd be great if some breakthrough was made. The kid is certainly smart and ambitious. Problem is the whole breakthrough reads like bullshit. I read through his 'report' which didn't go through peer review and it just sounds completely hokey. The write-up sounds way too composed for a 7th grader. That's fine his dad helped. The sketches and drawings are ripped right from the illustrations in Wikipedia. Fine we all use Wikipedia.

More problematic is the whole thing makes zero sense from a physical and geometric perspective. Because he doesn't have a real research paper it's hard to understand his true physical setup and experimental procedure but it seems he's not measuring against a 'best-in-class' setup. You certainly wouldn't build a roof and put cells on BOTH sides. That cuts efficiency by around 50% right there. He's measuring volts instead of watts. He hasn't taken into account the massive costs associated with the structure. By default he has to string the PV in series which means an inverter for each panel (more cost, a lot more).

Even worse it's crazy how wholesale this story has been published and commented on in glowing terms. People don't even have basic science skills to question this at all. And it's kind of a flat out insult to the people attempting to do research in this area who work hard to improve these technologies. This kind of article always has that implicit tinge of disdain for the scientists in a field. "Look this kid showed up all these researchers."

I'm happy to be proved wrong in this but I think we'll find out this was a hoax or is total bullshit in short order.

[Update] Well Gizmodo has published an article claiming that someone has posted a takedown of the science. Unfortunately the blog post was in turn taken down presumably by the poster. Google cache here. The gist is measuring voltage is wrong because it's not related to power and then the geometry of the test case is inefficient. The blog by the way is a really interesting read. Loads of stuff on power gen.

[Update] Unfortunately the entire blog has been shuttered. I guess the guy didn't want the notoriety.

holy shit

2011-08-18T20:24:00.003-04:00

Reddit has a "List your favorite 'Holy Shit' fact". Some of them are interesting but I haven't verified any of them. Read at your own risk.

Cleopatra was alive closer to the moon landing than the construction of the great pyramids
John Tyler, the 10th president has 2 living grandsons
Lightning is 7 times as likely to strike men
Cashews actually come from a Central American apple
There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover North and South America in one foot of water.
Charlie Chaplin took part in a Charlie Chaplin 'look-a-like' contest and lost
The number of ways to arrange a 52 card deck is close to the number of atoms in our galaxy
Aldous Huxley was George Orwell's high school French teacher

And one funny one.

In 100 years Facebook will be full of dead people (or better known as Zombiebook as someone commented)

define irony

2011-08-08T16:00:00.000-04:00

It's ironic that the S&P US credit downgrade which has resulted in a plummet in the equities market is having the opposite effect on US government bonds.

The yield on the 10 year US government bonds has been in free fall today (when yields fall it means prices are increasing which means people are willing to pay more for that asset).

Why would that be? Well the downgrade on US debt introduces a huge amount of investor concern about the world economy at large. When people fear asset value destruction they jump into the safest things they can think of. So even though US credit was downgraded, it is, relatively, still much safer than equities, corporate bonds, etc. So people are selling those and buying US debt (and gold (and probably guns (and maybe Depends))). It's bizarrely self-consistent but still humorous.

round and round

2011-08-08T13:32:00.004-04:00

I love this rendition of Ariel Pink's Round and Round performed by a public school choir. The song is arguably the best song of 2010. They seem to perform lots of cool music.

fly fishing

2011-08-03T00:08:00.003-04:00

I haven't fished, any kind of fishing, in over 30 years. Even though I'm from probably one of the fishing capitals of the world, Minnesota, I fished once there. My dad, whose patriarchal duty it was to take me out fishing, hated fishing. He was so poor when he was young that fishing wasn't recreation; it was a way to get food. He didn't even have the money for a rod. He used to stand in the river, wait for fish to swim by, and throw them onto shore. I think fishing reminded him of work and the fact that he was once so poor.

During my visit to Seattle recently however, my friend Ty suggested we and our other friend Robert head out to Yakima and go fly fishing.

SOLD!

As an aside Ty and Robert are both Norwegian. Their last names are Jungerhans and Ueland. They are pretty much what you'd expect from Norwegians. Strapping is the adjective that comes to mind when you see them. They are both ex-football players and annually, without any kind of training, climb Mount Rainer and ski down. They are manly men. The kind of guys you want around outdoors and when you're learning to fly fish.

There were a couple of interesting things I learned on the trip.

First, fly fishing is fundamentally different from traditional fishing due to the fact that the fly or lure is a completely different weight. In traditional fishing the lure is heavy and when you cast you are casting the lure; flinging this heavy object out to where you think the fish are. And thus a bob is needed to keep it from sinking.

Fly fishing lures are as light as a feather. They float on the water until they get waterlogged. And so casting something as light as a feather will not work. To compensate the line is what is heavy. Therefore you are really casting the line in fly fishing. It's thick, colored, and not prone to breaking. So the flicking motion to get the lure where you want it to go is designed around whipping the line back and forth. It's actually quite easy to learn but difficult to master. There is also clearly no bob necessary as well.

The second thing I learned was that where we were fishing (we stayed at the Canyon River Lodge), the Yakima River, is Washington's only Blue Ribbon fishery. Blue Ribbon is sort of a loose designation for one of the top fishing locations based on how many fish are in the river among other things. This is also a slightly embarrassing designation because we hooked absolutely nothing. A few nibbles but no catches. What you are supposed to hook is trout and maybe salmon if you're there at the right time. But then I learned that catching fish is largely secondary to being on a river, outdoors, drinking beer, hanging with your buddies. It was a great time.

And around the area can be found interesting wild animals - Bighorn sheep, mule deer, herons, hawks, which we saw. And also bobcats, cougars (downtown Seattle has those too), bears, elk. It's a beautiful area and hopefully I can get a second try at catching a fish next time I'm in town.

bmi

2011-07-22T12:12:00.002-04:00

BMI - Body Mass Index. Calculated by taking weight in kg and dividing by height in meters squared.

I've seen lots of criticisms of BMI (most of them justified) but I've never seen the most obvious one. It is not dimensionless.

Being dimensionless means, duh, not having dimensions. When we talk about quantities they either have dimensions (or units) or they don't. Science likes dimensionless quantities because they have no dimensions. The quantities aren't dependent on a particular geometry or environment. There are lots of them.

BMI is not dimensionless. It has units of kg per meter squared. A better calculation for BMI, let's call it BMIa, is weight divided by height cubed.

Now you'll say well that isn't dimensionless either (kg per meter cubed). True. But we can make it dimensionless by dividing by a density. A good one would be to use a constant density of an "average" person. The problem with the BMI dimensions is you can't get rid of them. There's no kg per meter squared quantity in the universe. There's no weight per area that applies.

The reason that BMIa can become dimensionless is that it makes sense physically. Weight is a function of density multiplied by volume. One characteristics length scale for humans is height. So we use height cubed to get a volume. It's self consistent.

It's still not perfect. The perfect way to do it would be to divide weight by our body volume. Or we could approximate it by taking height times width times depth. This would just be our density. Which is ultimately what determines if we are fat or not. Dividing by an average human density would then give us a nice index. If you were average density then you'd be BMI = 1. Denser would give a BMI > 1.

The effect of the incorrect BMI calculation is that tall people suffer. Take me for example. I'm 173lbs and 6'2". My BMI is 22.3. That's a normal to high BMI but I'm very thin boned and have almost no fat on me so why would I be so close to being "overweight" (BMI > 25). Well, because I'm tall.

So this has the effect of distorting the research when looking across countries when average country heights are radically different.

chinese obesity

2011-07-22T11:05:00.001-04:00

Are Vegetables and Exercise Causing Childhood Obesity in China? - The Atlantic

There's sort of a bizarre article in The Atlantic regarding obesity in China. It's weird because researchers found odd correlations between obesity and lifestyles generally regarded as healthy. Such as,

More vigorous exercise
Eating less candy/fast food
Less snacking
More fruit consumption
Higher parental education attainment

Some of these things like fruit consumption I don't think are healthy. But eating less candy? Weird results.

It's a weak study but one to keep an eye on. The data gathering approach is somewhat suspect. It's primarily based on self-reporting and we generally don't do that well.

I've said before that China is going to have a metabolic syndrom epidemic (worse than the US) on its hands in short order. Mainly because research seems to suggest Asians are more susceptible to insulin problems. This study has some facts to suggest it's a real problem already.

As of 2004 20% of Chinese kids were already overweight or obese
One-third of Chinese boys are overweight or obese
Back in 1985 only 2% of kids were overweight

"What strikes me most about obesity in China is that it's like watching the U.S. except in high speed," she says. "It took Americans many decades to get this fat, and it took them no time at all."

apple

2011-07-20T16:40:00.006-04:00

Anyone following the markets is probably aware of the earnings report last night from Apple. If you take all of the fanboyism away from the discussion it is hard to view the rise/fall/rise of this company as anything other than phenomenal.

Here's their decade long stock chart. 10 years ago the stock was at $10. It is now at close to $400.

You'll notice a small blip at the beginning of 2006 as the company retreated in price. When I was an analyst we successfully shorted the stock for about a 30% gain before closing the position. Pure unadulterated luck. It could have been very ugly.

It has built 3 additional multi-billion dollar businesses (iPod, iPhone, and iPad) in addition to its growing Mac computer business in that 10 years. In fact the iPhone and iPad are slowly eclipsing the two smaller categories. It's remarkable that iPad is larger than Macs yet it has only been around for a little over a year.

In market cap it only trails Exxon-Mobil in size (AAPL $360B, XO $410B). It seems bizarre that those two are even in the same range of market caps.

But here's the thing. Is it expensive?

Let's look at Price over Earnings (P/E). PE = 18.4. "E" here is trailing earnings. The money made in the last 4 quarters. That's high but not egregious. Especially for a company that is growing revenues 80% and earnings 120% last quarter (year over year comparison). In fact that's kind of cheap.

If you look at forward estimates of E (the analyst's estimates on the Street) it's downright cheap. Forward E stands at $29.15 so PE (forward) is 13.3. That's damn near fair value IF it completely stopped growing next year. And considering analyst estimates are typically very low (almost by design) the printed PE next year will probably be even lower with no change in price.

So how would you justify such a low price. Clearly something has to happen either to sales or to margin. Both would affect the bottom line earnings. But what would that be?

Macs still continue to grow faster than the market and their margins have been fairly stable over time. It's hard to believe any competitor is going to come along and drastically change this in the next year or two.

iPod sales are stable to dying and margins I imagine are quite high so there's some money to be lost there. But they are now a small part of the overall business. And in reality these are just iPhone Light and a gateway drug to iPhones. My kids are unaware that there is another phone besides the iPhone.

iPads are still set to grow. There are lots of competitors, notably Android based devices. But it's hard to imagine that iPad sales won't continue to grow in such a nascent market. Most of the iPad competitors suffer from awful branding, marketing, and sex appeal. That will probably change but not in a way that will crimp continued astronomic growth.

iPhone is the only place I could get seriously convinced something bad might happen to Apple's stock price. But even there it's hard to believe anything terrible could happen. Android here is a real competitor, growing faster and taking share from Apple. Sales growth rates seems to be slowing from the chart above but that has more to do with the annual release cycle typical for Apple's phones. Could sales plateau? Possibly. Could margins get crimped? Unlikely. Both Apple and Android are just stealing the thunder from the incumbents like Nokia who have ruled the phone space for ages. Apple is still a relatively tiny player in the market, selling 20 million units last quarter when over a billion are sold each year worldwide. And that can only get larger.

So what's the argument for Apple being expensive?

The only one I can really think of is the Job's factor. If he dies or leaves the company in any capacity. Other than that it's tough to get too worried about holding AAPL.

nurses study

2011-07-19T10:41:00.004-04:00

An interesting read on obesity causes in the New York Times. The piece is reporting on this report done by five nutrition experts at Harvard University. It follows 120,877 well-educated men and women who were healthy and not obese at the start of the study and were followed for 12 to 20 years. The data was captured within the Nurses' Health Study, Nurses' Health Study II and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. In other words the study participants were nurses, doctors, etc.

The primary analysis focused on weight gain/loss over this time and the factors that influenced that gain/loss.

Interestingly participants gained 0.84 pounds per year on average. After the 20 years this amounted to almost 17 pounds of additional weight on average.

This is interesting because it shows that, on average, people over-consume about 8 calories per day. Take that piece of data in. To become overweight in 20 years requires you to mis-estimate your calorie requirements by less than two-thirds of a saltine cracker. While the conventional wisdom is that fat people are gluttons most health professionals know this weight gain is induced by very minor discrepancies in energy intake and expenditure.

“This study shows that conventional wisdom — to eat everything in moderation, eat fewer calories and avoid fatty foods — isn’t the best approach,”

So says the lead author (cardiologist and epidemiologist).

You don't say?

He then goes on to blow a hole in two of the more infuriating weight loss myths around.

“What you eat makes quite a difference. Just counting calories won’t matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you’re eating.”

Got that? Reducing calories and increasing calorie expenditure won't help you lose weight.

“The notion that it’s O.K. to eat everything in moderation is just an excuse to eat whatever you want.”

Got that? Moderation is not a weight loss plan.

The study then shows that physical activity and diet are the two most important factors they measured for weight control. I think physical activity IS NOT important and that it is merely correlated with healthier eating habits (e.g., who eats cupcakes when they're working out every day or training for a race). In fact he goes on to say

Both physical activity and diet are important to weight control, but if you are fairly active and ignore diet, you can still gain weight,”

The study then lists the foods that contributed the most weight. What's disappointing about this is the study doesn't say how much of these foods were consumed. Also it doesn't separate out effectively the carb/protein/fat components of these foods. For example red meats and processed meats are listed as contributing weight gain but they don't say what form they are in. For example where does a hamburger fit or a turkey sandwich. Both have more carbs than protein. Most derogatory Atkins means like bacon cheeseburgers are absolutely not allowed on Atkins. What about things like bacon and salami which also can have large components of sugar in them and are eaten with with carbs. Again not clear.

On some level it doesn't matter though. Because this is a primary research report put out by Harvard based on data from 3 well known and highly regarded studies. It should get the ball rolling on making carbs the enemy.

The foods that contributed to the greatest weight gain were not surprising. French fries led the list: Increased consumption of this food alone was linked to an average weight gain of 3.4 pounds in each four-year period. Other important contributors were potato chips (1.7 pounds), sugar-sweetened drinks (1 pound), red meats and processed meats (0.95 and 0.93 pound, respectively), other forms of potatoes (0.57 pound), sweets and desserts (0.41 pound), refined grains (0.39 pound), other fried foods (0.32 pound), 100-percent fruit juice (0.31 pound) and butter (0.3 pound).

One last thing

At least six prior studies have found that rising weight increases the risk in women of heart disease, diabetes, stroke and breast cancer, and the risk in men of heart disease, diabetes and colon cancer.

I also believe this is not strictly true. I believe that metabolic syndrome is the precursor to these diseases and that most people in metabolic syndrome gain weight. But many do not because of genetics. Some doctors will opine that these are the most at risk patients because they have no tell tale signs that they are suffering from metabolic syndrome.

pass the salt

2011-07-06T21:04:00.001-04:00

New Study Finds No Connection between Salt and Heart Disease: Scientific American

No surprise for anyone paying attention. The study is a meta-analysis which is the best type of clinical study.

i know, i know, more carb stuff

2011-07-06T00:35:00.001-04:00

Read it.

TL:DR

A growing number of top nutritional scientists blame excessive carbohydrates — not fat — for America's ills
Cutting carbohydrates is the key to reversing obesity, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and hypertension.
"Fat is not the problem," says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Says Dr. Edward Saltzman, associate professor of nutrition and medicine at Tufts University, "Now a growing and convincing body of science is pointing the finger at carbs, especially those containing refined flour and sugar."
All carbohydrates (a category including sugars) convert to sugar in the blood.
People are said to have the [metabolic] syndrome when they have three or more of the following: high blood triglycerides (more than 150 mg); high blood pressure (over 135/85); central obesity (a waist circumference in men of more than 40 inches and in women, more than 35 inches); low HDL cholesterol (under 40 in men, under 50 in women); or elevated fasting glucose.
"The take-home message from this study and others like it is that — contrary to what many expect — dietary fat intake is not directly related to blood fat. Rather, the amount of carbohydrates in the diet appears to be a potent contributor.

I'll also add on to point 6:

The only way to dramatically lower triglycerides is to reduce carbohydrates in the diet. Cut them to zero and your tris will drop precipitously.
Reducing salt will not reduce your blood pressure by any significant amount.
The best way to increase HDL cholesterol is to eat saturated fat and/or moderate amounts of alcohol