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| Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 |
patrissimo
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3:34p |
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patrissimo
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8:52a |
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patrissimo
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8:51a |
Sleep/energy QS
(Main personal project for 2010, at least first half) Note: interventions can be classified as short or long-term (ST/LT), depending on whether their effect is daily (breathe-rite strips) or takes time (quitting caffeine, regular sleep schedule). Decisions: randomize ST interventions daily (2 from 5-10). Do LT one at a time, start w/ control period, then try an LT for 2-4 weeks and see what happens. (as opposed to: randomly choose a subset of LTs every long period and accumulate data over many months.) This risks confounding, but I can give second tries to apparently unsuccessful interventions or challenge apparently successful ones later to help w/ this. (Benefits: smaller menu of options is lower-overhead in various ways). Open question: ? track things that might affect sleep and are under my control therefore could be interventions later, but I don't feel like randomizing now, like alcohol, exercise, hot tub ? More data, but more work to track. Umm...let's start simpler. ST interventions chosen: Bed tilt (nose) BreatheRite (nose) ENTsol acute (nose) Pre-bed relaxation ritual (bin beats or body scan meditation) Desmopressin low-dose Trazodone Earplugs LT: Sinus rinse Sleep schedule, 8am 6d/week, sleep in once Outcomes: Zeo data (incl time to fall asleep, sleep efficiency, etc.) Subjective: sleep quality, awakenings, energy/alertness (morn/afternoon/eve) |
patrissimo
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7:42a |
morning brainwash
Patri walks into kitchen, has this internal monologue: Voice1: Ok, breakfast, so eggs, should I use the microwave for speed or the stove for tastiness?
Voice2: I don't think I can resist a chance to cook.
Voice1: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU AND HOW DID YOU GET INTO THE HEAD WITH ME?Does getting up early poison the brain? I shouldn't be so surprised, I do sorta enjoy cooking, I just don't like how long it takes, and I have been cooking more lately. It was just very strange to hear a voice in my head casually state an opinion that's brand new to me / not part of my identity. Oh well, we already knew that voice is just a narrator trying to weave together a coherent story out of what various conflicting modules do... |
patrissimo
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7:19a |
jet lag
Is not so bad. Falling asleep 1:15 after getting home and sleeping through family time last night was not so great, but being up at 4:45am means starting work at 5:15am and getting a hot tub break at 6:30am, as the sky slowly lightens... Extra bonus: jet-lagged wife who usually doesn't get up before 10am magically appeared to join me in the hot tub. It is kinda weird, though, that I'm falling asleep at 8pm every other night or so...I mean, India is 13.5hrs off, where the heck does my body get "go to sleep 3-4 hrs earlier than normal" from? Ok, breakfast and back to work... |
| Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 |
patrissimo
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10:57a |
Neti pot vs. motorized spray?
Anyone researched the benefits of nasal irrigation via a neti pot vs. a device like the SinuPulse or WaterPik or whatever? Sounds like there is a little evidence that pulsating sprays may be better, but not much. It's only $80, I'm more concerned about having yet one more piece of crap lying around. But if it works better... |
| Monday, January 4th, 2010 |
patrissimo
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2:46p |
Russian Translation?
Anyone feel like translating this Russian article? Dunno exactly what it is about, but it starts w/ pictures of me, my dad, and my grandfather. PDF |
patrissimo
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10:54a |
gmail compose
anyone know how to compose in gmail w/o checking new mail or showing the inbox? The gmail notifier can jump directly to compose, but it also lists the inbox. The internet said I could go to compose in gmail, then pop-out a new window and copy & paste the URL, but it didn't work. And I tried & failed to setup Apple's Mail to send gmail w/o receiving it too. |
| Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 |
patrissimo
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9:09a |
Misc travel thoughts
Singapore has the most amazing malls I've ever seen. Cool city, if a bit expensive. And a testament to government-as-competitive service. As Carl says, they started with 200 square miles of mud. (Note for self-sufficiency buffs: they started out trying to grow food, and quickly gave it up). I sense biographies of LKY in my future. The on-demand video/entertainment system on our return flight is an older generation from our outbound flight, and doesn't work so well. I was annoyed for awhile, before I remembered that I've never even been on a plane w/ on-demand video before. How quickly we take things for granted. Travel is just not good for getting work done. I think I may need to scale back the seasteading book, it's taking too long. It's fine to try to write a novelette about my views on politics, but I just don't have the time. I miss Tovar. I miss work and my co-workers and the office. And big monitors. Big monitors really help writing. My sleep has been all fucked up the last week. Lots of sleeping pills, and of course travel issues. I'm excited to start taking a more analytical approach to it. India doesn't do it for me. We'll leave it at that. Although, I miss the unattractive women already. Singapore was much more visually distracting in that regard. Yeah, it's aesthetic, but it's damn distracting. If only the response to hot women wasn't wired so deeply into my monkey brain. I got a new pair of Vivo Barefoot shoes! They had a Terra Plana store in SG that Carl & I stumbled across (two, actually). They had several models I liked but only one that fit my little foot, but i've been wearing it for a couple days and it is hella comfy! No toes, so easier to slip on than Vibrams and accepts normal socks. Expensive, though I think it was like $150 or so. I was in Tokyo for an hour, so maybe I overlapped w/ ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) terrencechan? I want to learn more about shipsteading ( I think I posted syncretin's talk). I find myself talking about the importance of rapid iteration and doing real things a lot, but it has been hard to get our seasteading strategy to match up with that ideal in practice. Maybe it's worth thinking more about. Kinda tough for me to lead the way towards living on a ship w/ family & TSI responsibilities though. I mean, yeah, either one of those could perhaps adapt to a ship, but it adds difficulty & complexity to an already tough undertaking. I dunno. Always a balance between slow & good, fast & bad...do it when the plan is sold / adequately designed & capitalized vs. iterate and refine. I must say, iterate & refine is less attractive when a "crash" can mean death and not just a website being down. Ok, that's the ramble for today. |
patrissimo
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9:08a |
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patrissimo
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7:35a |
Patri's Confirmation Bias links?
Proposal: move my posting of links that confirm my biases to a new twitter feed, thus allowing those who don't share my ideology to skip them, and discouraging comments on them since Twitter is not a very interactive medium. |
patrissimo
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7:34a |
The cure for grumpy is awesome
(written some previous day in some previous time zone)  I was really grumpy this morning b/c I've had bad, short, Ambien-sleep for days with all our travel, and now I have like a 20 hr day to LAX and it will be 11:30AM when we arrive and I am terrible at napping and all of that. Well, actually the future situation has nothing to do with my mood, that's a classic fallacy, but the nights of short Ambien sleep do for sure. Soo...here at Singapore airport where we are waiting for our flight to LAX via Tokyo, I went off to procure breakfast while choiceful guarded the bags, and I put on my ipod and sang out loud to Madonna while doing the tiniest bit of parkour on the moving walkways, which was fun enough, BUT THEN I came across the most amazing thing right there by Burger King: A Garden of Butterflies And Native Carniverous Plants! OMG, Butterfly Garden in the airport! Which was awesome enough, but then when you take into account that I looked at the breeding container and actually watched A BUTTERFLY BIRTH (where by birth I mean emerging from the chrysalis), it was nothing less than SUPER-AWESOME! It fought with its legs and wiggled its little butterfly butt until it got out of the cocoon and hung there drying its wings. Squee! The Koi pond on the way back was just icing on the cake. What a great airport! Take that, grumpy! We'll see if it holds up for the 17 hours on planes coming up... |
| Thursday, December 31st, 2009 |
patrissimo
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8:49p |
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| Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 |
patrissimo
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7:53p |
IVF travel adventure
Patri: Let's not mention anything about refrigerated and injected medication at the airport, when we're explaining why we aren't checking our bags through to LA.
Shannon: Sounds good!As if international travel wasn't complicated enough, refrigeration, injection timing, and the timing of the 9 different oral medications Shannon is on are involved for us - all in a world of security theater. Fortunately it shouldn't turn out to be an issue, thanks to our 24-hour stay in Singapore there is a simple plan that meets all requirements. And if travel screwups happen, well, one of the refrigerated injections isn't needed for weeks, and the other one, they didn't even give Shannon in Panama. I am glad I'm logging all med events in a notebook in UTC, though, what with the time zone changes... |
patrissimo
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5:15p |
Are belly rolls particularly unhealthy?
My claim was that the midsection is the least healthy place to store fat. This is somewhat true, but with a caveat: visceral fat (around organs) and subcutaneous fat that happens to be in the abdominal area are different. It's the visceral fat that is more harmful. Subcutaneous abdominal fat, like any other abdominal fat, is not healthy but not as bad: As people go through their middle years, their proportion of fat to body weight tends to increase — more so in women than men. Extra pounds tend to park themselves around the midsection
At one time, we might have accepted these changes as an inevitable fact of aging. But we’ve now been put on notice that as our waistlines grow, so do our health risks. Abdominal, or visceral, fat is of particular concern because it’s a key player in a variety of health problems — much more so than subcutaneous fat, the kind you can grasp with your hand. Visceral fat, on the other hand, lies out of reach, deep within the abdominal cavity, where it pads the spaces between our abdominal organs.
Visceral fat has been linked to metabolic disturbances and increased risk for cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. In women, it is also associated with breast cancer and the need for gallbladder surgery. I was assuming that the thick midsections in Hyderabad represent visceral fat, and it is possible they do, as they are part of an "apple shape": Fat accumulated in the lower body (the pear shape) is subcutaneous, while fat in the abdominal area (the apple shape) is largely visceral. Where fat ends up is influenced by several factors, including heredity and hormones. As the evidence against abdominal fat mounts, researchers and clinicians are trying to measure it, correlate it with health risks, and monitor changes that occur with age and overall weight gain or loss. On the other hand, I have particularly noticed the frequent "belly rolls" as part of women's thick midsections, which suggests subcutaneous fat. [TROLL ON](Isn't it weird how I'm tying specific aspects of physical appearance and health together, almost as if there is a scientific relationship or something. Gosh, that's not like the bullshit fairytales we get fed that everything's OK and everyone's equal...weird, huh?)[TROLL OFF] Anyway, proper diet and exercise are private goods - privately produced and privately enjoyed, so there is no need to go on any kind of crusade about them, even though the issue gets my blood flowing. [TROLL ON]Other people are welcome to believe that being fat is healthy, and die sooner than those of us who have correctly evaluated the evidence. I'll restrict my sympathy for those who wish to lose weight but struggle with their sugar-craving instincts. And other people are welcome to believe that beauty is subjective and cultural and that one should just "be yourself" - we'll see how they do on the dating market compared to those who ape the "arbitrary" Western standards of beauty and seek to improve their skills at sexual dynamics. If you're happy, great. Let's check back in every decade or so.[TROLL OVER] |
patrissimo
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5:08p |
Well
Now I can say I've walked the streets of a city where the military were patrolling in order to maintain order in the face of civil unrest. How bracing! (Not that I'm particularly foolhardy or brave or badass or anything for doing it - things were very calm and quiet and the anger is not against foreigners, so it was no big deal) |
| Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 |
patrissimo
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3:19p |
Rant: Dumpy = no muscles = unhealthy
[Only 2 more days to make rants before I stop, or limit them, or make them private, or remove comments, or something like that....so time to get in the rants!] Before I get into the offensive ranting, I'll start by agreeing that my posting about the aesthetic appearance of Hyderabad's women is objectifying and contributing to a culture of valuing women primarily by their appearance. I think female appearance is important, but it is not the only thing that is important. It's a bummer that my observations from taxi, which are of course mainly about appearances, have this small negative effect. But...the idea that many gave that I am imposing arbitrary subjective irrelevant aesthetic standards is total bullshit. Several commenters zeroed in on exercise being a big part of the issue, for example: There is a general cultural attitude against fitness and muscle among middle/upper-class indians in general, not just women. My mom tried to dissuade me from applying for a commision in the Marine Corps by telling me that indians are not strong. I think that the middle/upper classes view muscles as a sign of being a poor laborer, while fat (or skinny-fat) as a sign of wealth. People who are flabby and untoned look unattractive to me. People who are flabby and untoned are also UNHEALTHY AND GOING TO DIE SOONER. If India truly has an anti-muscle, anti-fitness culture, that is a self-destructive belief which is hurting their lifespan. An intervention aimed at making Indian women less "dumpy" and more attractive to Patri Friedman would reduce heart disease, diabetes, and death.
You people bemoaning my aesthetic judgements, privileging local standards of beauty, and acting like beauty is arbitrary are on the side of unhealthiness and death. Is that really what you want?
So I call total bullshit on this politically correct idea that beauty is totally arbitrary. Yes, some small part of beauty is arbitrary. But I'd be willing to bet a big chunk of money that "people Patri thinks are hot" is substantially correlated with biomarkers of health and longevity. Attractiveness is not arbitrary. Deal with it.
Current Music: Discord - After Forever |
patrissimo
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1:42p |
Eggs
They retrieved 13 eggs. On Thursday they will let us know how many are fertilized and developing well. I think they may do the implantation then too. Current Music: Discord - After Forever |
| Monday, December 28th, 2009 |
patrissimo
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9:39p |
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patrissimo
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9:15p |
If you're going to be contrarian, this is the way to do it
Robin Hanson reviews the randomized evidence on mortality from smoking, and finds vastly lower harm than most sources (which use non-randomized data). Like, 1. It seems to be a general truism in health that randomization is much much better than retrospective because there are serious confounding factors - people who do one healthy thing also do lots of other healthy things, more than you can control for. Here's an idea: maybe rather than ranting, I should try to start a red pill meme. A red pill is a very well-backed contrarian claim, to open people's minds to the possibility that mainstream belief is wrong in a given area. One works on a red pill, rather than ranting, because a red pill can actually change minds. Red pills will tend to be simpler, weaker claims, like: "There is a genetic basis for race" (say, using population genetics studies), rather than full memeplexes ("There is a genetic basis for race and it correlates with our visual stereotyping, and abilities vary between races, occasionally even by more than differences within races") Eh...no. That would be something to do if my main goal from ranting was to change minds and I wanted a more effective way. But I think my main goal is just to get these things out of my system. I have strong emotional beliefs that differ from those in the world, and it feels good to spout them off every once in awhile, especially when I encounter contradictory beliefs, knowing that (because they are emotional) they are less likely to be true and less fun to argue about that other beliefs I hold. Maybe I should just label all my rants and turn off comments on them. Hmm...strategies to ponder. Current Music: Discord - After Forever |
patrissimo
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8:01p |
Avatar is porn
via martian687, Please mount my hot blue alien: Let's talk about those tails. Oh, honey. Did you know animal tail fetishism is one of the biggest sexual fetishes in all of fetishdom? Well it's not. Or rather, it might be. I really have no idea. I just made that up, too. But it sure sounds right, doesn't it? A tinge of bestiality? A hint of exotic animal play? Face it: on the right kind of creature, tails are sexy as hell. Just ask a mermaid. Catwoman. The devil. I mean, come on. Hah! Current Music: Discord - After Forever |
patrissimo
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6:55p |
Rant post
Thanks for all the great, thoughtful responses on my post about how not to rant. Many of the comments were about habits / resolutions in general, which is great b/c one of the things that made my short list of 2010 projects/priorities is lessening negative habits. I'll share whatever methodology I decide on, of course! Current Music: Discord - After Forever |
patrissimo
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11:59a |
Ideas on not ranting?
Any of y'all successfully implemented a New Year's resolution like "not ranting", and have advice on how to do it? Make a bunch of bets with people? Put up a big "NO RANTING" sign by my computer (or that XKCD, which is already up on my wall)? Taper by ranting into private journal entries, or text files? Every time I want to rant, think about that time I cracked my windshield by bouncing a postman off it? This is probably 100% obvious to most of you, but just in case there are a few of you who like my rants, the reason to not rant is that it is very unproductive. It's like folk activism - it feels like "fighting the war of ideas", but really, ranting rarely convinces anyone of anything, and even if you do convince a few people, that isn't how popular opinion gets changed. Doing studies, or writing really good really popular books assembling the evidence - that's how minds get changed. I guess nowadays I would add blogs like GNXP and Climate Audit - but the blogs have to be really popular and really good to make a difference. And that takes expertise and a serious time commitment. I just don't think this is an area where a little work makes a little difference. Also, there is the whole issue of "pulling on the ends of a rope vs. pulling it sideways", which I got from Robin Hanson. The idea is: for very emotional topics, with lots of people on both sides, you have a very taut rope, and it is very hard to move it. It's the opposite of a point of leverage. The place you can make the most difference is on ropes that aren't being pulled. Or if you do focus on a major issue, find a way to pull the rope sideways. Seasteading is an example, instead of advocating for any policy or political system (that would be pulling on a very taut rope), we advocate for the more diverse, innovative government industry that would come from a competitive market for government. My personal goal and passion for seasteading is the same as my personal goal and passion for arguing libertarianism (because I want to live in a society which shares my morals), and so the drive feels the same. Yet as methods of implementation, seasteading and libertarian ranting are vastly different in their likely effectiveness. My rants here are, in my opinion, pulling on a taut rope. Or trying to move a big object without a lever. There are places where I have levers. They don't feel different emotionally (if anything, they are less satisfying and less cathartic, because they are less emotional!), but they can actually make a difference. |
patrissimo
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11:41a |
Rant addendum
I haven't read past the first few comments to the rant yet, but a couple things popped into my head overnight: 1) I think IQ's heritability is 0.8, not 0.6, so I understated the case. 2) As a commenter mentioned, the proportion of the variance explained by the correlation is the square, so 0.8 heritability explains 64% of the variance. 3) The SAT test is highly g-loaded, especially the math half. Something like 0.6, I seem to recall? So "doing well on the SAT" is not identical to "have a high IQ", but it's pretty close. 4) A crucial important add-on fact for why "my parents read big books to me when I was little" is preposterous as an explanation for intelligence/doing well on the SATs is: what is the source of the non-genetic variance in IQ? After all, even if you buy that a big chunk of the variation is genetic, if the rest is due to how kids are raised, then the statement is perfectly sensible. It turns out that there are two main sources: a) shared prenatal environment, b) non-shared environment. There is little to no variation detectible from c) shared family environment.What (a) means is that fraternal twins have a higher IQ correlation than siblings, even siblings separated by only a year in age. I'm not sure if there are other angles on this effect - none come to mind quickly. (This could be further confirmed by studies using surrogates, though, which would offer a great source of variation in prenatal environments, but AFAIK such studies haven't been done). What (b) means is something like "It's random", or "We don't know, but we know it isn't the family", because (b) is what is left over after taking out (a) and (c). We take out (c) through comparisons like: how does the IQ correlation of identical twins raised together differ from identical twins raised apart? How about adopted kids raised together vs. adopted kids raised apart? Siblings raised together vs. siblings raised apart? "raised together" vs. "raised apart" isolates whatever it is that the family does uniquely - like read to kids. The results, very surprisingly, are that none of the variation in IQ outcome comes from the shared family environment. |
| Sunday, December 27th, 2009 |
patrissimo
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6:11p |
Feel the burn
First workout in weeks, at hotel gym. They had some annoying multi-use strength machine and dumbbells, so I did dumbbell hang clean / front squat / push press, ie a hang clean into a thruster. Dumbbell thrusters are my hotel gym standby, and I figure adding a clean can't hurt. Worked from 8kg up to 18kg I think, sets of 10 early down to 7 late, maybe just 5 on the last one (I was having trouble stabilizing the dumbbells). Owww my thighs! It doesn't seem like much weight, 18 * 2 * 2.2 = 79#. Wow, that's more than I expected, actually, that is a decent amount of weight, considering I went deep and am out of shape. I need to get a weightlifting userpic, I should get someone to take one at Tortuga sometime. Current Music: Richard Cory - Simon & Garfunkel |
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