I have been a lifelong student of nutrition, dieting, and trying to be healthy. And if I learned anything, it’s the cynical fact that the diet that works is:

1. Pick any diet that makes sense to you.
2. Deceive yourself into thinking it’s the right way to go.
3. Follow the diet with strict discipline.

However, if you lack discipline, but need to lose weight fast, I have a revolutionary new diet for Americans:

1. Change the setting on you bathroom scale from pounds to kilograms.
2. Convince yourself that there are approximately 2 lbs in 1 kilogram.
3. Boom! You just shredded 9% of your body weight! That’s 16 lbs lost if you weigh 180 lbs, and it’s 36 lbs lost if you weight 400 lbs.

The idea of this diet came from a talk I heard from the Nutrition Studies Research Center at Stanford, where the speaker converted from kilograms to pounds by multiplying by two. It wasn’t important to be accurate in the point he was making, so he just did what I find a lot of people do: round off the 0.2 in the interest of time.

So that’s where this new diet comes in. We first switch to the metric system and then rely on our general inability to multiply numbers by 2.2 and instead multiplying by 2.

While this “diet” is tongue-in-cheek, I think two things are true… First, so much of our relationship with food and weight loss is a sink for emotional issues from other aspects of our life. Second, Americans are getting fatter. While we’ve grown by 1 inch in the last 40 years, we’ve gained 25 lbs. But don’t worry that’s only 10 kilograms.

I have a long history with Diablo and Diablo 2, and so the pull of it is strong. I have very little time to play it, nor frankly does anyone have time to play it, because it’s not a game that you can play in moderation, unless you have some kind of superhuman self-restraint. Let’s be honest here.

That said… I told myself that I will play it but only if by the end of May I finish the journal paper I’m working on now, and also if I win a gold medal at the jiu jitsu World championship on May 31st. Both of these are difficult but achievable goals if I continue working hard. So I’m using the extremely addictive drug that is Diablo 3 as a reward to push myself.

Much like a drug addict who has beaten the habit, I have a certain approach to games like Diablo 3 that basically can be summed up with “will it really be worth it in the end?” In a way, the answer of course is no, but then again perhaps the same could be asked of life in general. Like many things we take on outside of work (and sometimes work itself), it’s an escape. It’s a chance to get away from the difficulties of the real world, whatever form they take, and immerse yourself in a universe where hacking away at demons with a giant sword somehow has meaning, and even more, can make you truly happy.

So, for at least another 2 weeks, I will let the fires of hell burn outside, and continue my peaceful life in academia, focused on publishing not slashing, occasionally running into a co-worker with dark circles under his eyes who has clearly given into the dark mystical attraction of another Blizzard title.

Main point: Defining “life” and “intelligence” becomes that much more difficult when you consider the possibility of an organism operating on a different scale of time and space than those “living” on Earth.

In 1995, the first planet (51 Pegasi b) orbiting another sun was discovered. Ever since then, the idea of life (even intelligent life) being a widespread phenomena in the universe became real in the minds of many astrophysicists and scientists in general. The 1961 Drake equation got a little empirical boost, and the imagination of the public was off and running.

Once you open your mind to the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, the next question is: what does it look like? How do we identify an object as “living” when we see it? And once we say it’s a living thing, how do we know if it’s “intelligent”?

As I was walking home yesterday, it occurred to me (as it must’ve occured to a lot of people seeking a definition of life) that when we intuitively think of what is a living thing we think of objects operating on a time scale similar to our own life. So, in defining whether that thing is intelligent, we consider whether it can “reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience” (Gottfredson 1994) on the time scale of a human life.

So here is a question… are plants intelligent? At first the intuitive answer is no. But what if we normalize the changes that “happen” to plants to be on the same time scale as our own, then the gradual adaptations of plants would seem no different than our own physical movements in response to the external environment.

Even more radically, here’s another questions… is a planet a living organism? Let’s again normalize a planet such as Earth in size and time to be similar to the size of human beings and the time scale of our daily life. Could we then classify a planet as a living thing? Under the common biological definition, one of the things missing is the ability to reproduce. But is it really missing? In a certain kind of way, human beings are the cells of this organism. These cells are the carriers of information in the same way that DNA is.   So perhaps a planet can indeed reproduce, luckily without the commitment-laden intimacy of sexual intercourse, by the colonization of other planets.

I don’t like writing long blog posts, because the main point can too easily be drowned in the rambling chaos of poorly formed ideas. In fact, often, a long blog post is an indication that there is no main point. Well, let me just end it by saying that our understanding of life and intelligence is limited by the way our brain has evolved to effectively deal with the environment around it.

There are a lot of opinions about the political impact of this. While I will engage in such discussion given a few beers, I certainly don’t see value or validity in any opinion on the matter. I have only one general sense, and that is: when people will look back 50 years from now at the fact that gay people could not marry, they will see it the same way as we now see the fact that women could not vote in the United States in a relatively recent past.

In other words, we are making some kind of progress. None of it is trivial (though it might appear to be in retrospect) but it’s comforting to know that I live in a time when we as a society are actively struggling with big moral questions. And all of it adds up to real implications for ourselves and our neighbors.

Of course, I’m confident that in 50 years, there will be newly “identified” groups of people whom the majority will discriminate against, either through the law or just through the way we talk, think, and live. I believe that one such group is robots. It may seem like a joke now, but I do believe that the growth of the personal robotics industry (or perhaps cloning) will bring some damn tough moral questions to the forefront.

Main point:

I personally think that the theory of evolution is one of the most beautiful and world-changing ideas ever discovered and formulated by man. But I don’t agree with a commonly stated claim that it is an “obvious fact”. It’s beautiful, powerful, exceptionally well-supported by evidence, but it is not obvious. We do not observe evolution in every day life, because evolution operates on a time scale that is orders of magnitude larger than the time scale of our day-to-day existence.

If you don’t understand the basic mechanisms of evolutionary biology that make it all possible, then frankly, it’s much more natural to think of it as some mysterious miracle of the universe or orchestrated by some intelligent designer (e.g. God).

It’s sad that “science” is viewed with suspicion by many people in the United States. Too often, ignorance and poor education is not viewed as something to be ashamed of, but a kind of staple of the cowboy character… “I like beer, and I don’t like math”. That’s truly unfortunate. Put evolution, global warming, and whatever other politicized field of science aside. If you are bad at math… if you don’t know the basics of the scientific method… pick up a book, let yourself be amazed by the world out there.

Science isn’t something for “elitist” professors at “liberal” universities. It’s simply a method of answering the universal question of “how the heck does this work?” and “why the heck does this happen?” If you allow yourself that little bit of curiosity, and follow it up with some reading, I think the beauty of the universe will open up to you, with or without God.

Back to the main point… evolution is only beautiful if you learn a little bit about it. It is not obvious. It requires study. I find that most people that deny the theory of evolution, don’t know much at all about it. Wikipedia, my friends, is a good place to start.

Each Friday, C-SPAN’s “America By the Numbers” segment features information from the federal statistical system. This week they did a program on the U.S. Prison Population.

Mostly, they confirmed what I already knew…

The American prison system is growing rapidly due to the fact that there is money to be made in it on many levels. The plot on the right shows the % of US population jailed at 0.22% in 1980 and at 0.76% in 2007. In other words, it more than tripled.

Many libertarians will tell you that the war on drugs is at the core of the problem. It seems that it is part of the problem but not at the core of it. Only 20% of prison inmates are there for drug offenses. However, there is a more powerful but indirect effect of the war on drugs seen in longer sentences for more violent or property crimes if the criminal has a prior record (often due to a minor drug offense).

Of course, the C-SPAN program also highlighted the well-known race imbalance. Black males are imprisoned at 6.5 times the rate of white males. One new interesting statistic I learned is that there is a bit more racial equality among women in that black women are imprisoned at 3 times the rate of white women.

By the way, for people that are unclear about the distinction between jails and prisons… A jail is for short sentences or just for holding people that are awaiting trial. A prison is the long-term cage that most of these financial discussions are center around.

The book gets at who Obama, Clinton, McCain, Palin, Edwards, and Giuliani really are better than the media did during the campaign. Why? Because most of the book was written from interviews done right after the election. Everyone’s memory was fresh, and there was much less need to lie (or less immediate benefit for doing so). Some of it is a bit gossipy, even if the sources are solid.

The following, off the top of my head, are some of the more interesting things I remember from the book:

Obama is a Political Science Nerd

Obama is a policy wonk. He is known for making flowery speeches and being a good politician, but in fact his interests lie in long private debates over details of policy. Yes, he is a political science nerd, and this alone made me gain a ton of respect for him. He is luckily more than an empty suit with pretty words that I was worried he might be. One problem he kept complaining about (as many other politicians do) is all the time he is supposed to spend fundraising takes away from the valuable policy discussions. I can relate to that problem, as that seems to plague the world of academia as well. Many professors find that a large portion of their time is spent searching for funding of their research as opposed to doing the actual research.

Elizabeth Edwards is Not a Saint

I don’t want to touch this subject too much because Elizabeth Edwards was deceived by her husband and suffered a public death while inspiring many people with her saintly image. What the book reveals is that she was a very difficult person in private life. She was controlling, irrational, and just not good to John. Clearly he didn’t deserve better, but the description of Elizabeth’s real-life character helped me understand that dysfunctional relationship a little better.

Politically, McCain was In Over His Head

I gained a lot of respect for McCain after reading this book, because honestly, his instinct and intentions are genuine in a way that’s rare in politics. As he started losing, however, he let other people define who he is. He started trying to “play” politics and lost. It’s clear that the brilliant politicians in this whole group are the Clintons. McCain and Obama are much more human and real. Luckily for Obama, he can also make a hell of a good speech, and McCain can’t.

The reason I became curious about this is that I read in American Sniper that Navy SEAL’s divorce rate is 90-95%. Whether that’s true or not, it made me wonder what the rate is for other occupations. It seems intuitive to me that a person’s job may be one of the best predictors of a marriage’s success or failure. The balance between work and family seems to be a common day-to-day struggle of the middle class average Joe.

There are a lot of factors wrapped up in what occupation a person has. The job defines the amount of hours you work, the mental toll it takes, and also the personality you develop from succeeding or failing at that job. And conversely, the job you choose is certainly a reflection of your personality.

The table below identifies that the highest divorce rates are for dancers, bartenders, and massage therapists, all around 40%. Perhaps the extroverted nature of these job reflects a personality that is unwilling to commit or quickly gets tired of the same old thing. The occupations with the lowest divorce rates (of less than 10%) mostly seem to be engineers. I was very surprised to read this, because of the intellectual and mental toll that a lot of these jobs take. The engineers I know become extremely passionate about their work, which I assumed can take away from the marriage. But perhaps it doesn’t. There’s hope for us nerds after all.

As much as the next guy, I enjoy the occasional genius of a happy clown (or as they are more commonly know “joke guys”). These comedians are after the hard punchline: the twist at the end of a well-timed poem. My favorites in this category are Steven Wright, Mitch Hedberg, and even Demetri Martin. To me, brilliant joke guys are masters of absurdity.

But like I said, my favorite type of comedy is dark personal story telling. I think Jim Jefferies is a good example of that. Here’s him talking about depression being a luxury of the rich:

Another example of a guy I find funny, even when I’m not laughing, is the aforementioned Marc Maron. Here’s him actually doing something that resembles a more traditional “joke”, but for the best of Marc you really have to listen to the long interviews on his podcast, or from what I understand, go see him live.

The above statistics scare me. To me it shows that while Americans are tired of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are not tired of war in general. There is still a fundamental hope among the majority of Americans that good can overwhelm evil by hard military force.

For every word I write or speak on the subject, I make sure to read 10 more, and listen much more than speak. There are many very difficult moral, political, social, and financial questions here. How bad is it if Iran gets the bomb? How bad is it that China, Pakistan, and North Korea already have the bomb? What is the best way to prevent the bomb from being used anywhere in the world? Does the United States support Israel if it invades Iran?

The more I learn about war, the more anti-war I become. And the older I get, the more willing I am to stand up for what I believe. I am in support of having a large military but with an emphasis on defense, not preemptive offense.

I don’t want to write much more here today, because a blog is not the correct medium for such discussion. But this is simply a request that you keep your ears and mind open to the facts, costs, and ideas around war before you declare that you are for or against it.

Think not only of the short term, but the long term effects as well.