teslabox

This is an interesting blog. Medicine was very primitive into the early 20th century - it took centuries for the old ineffective techniques to die out. Planck's observation was paraphrased as 'science advances one funeral at a time', but Medicine resisted advancement for hundreds of years. Hustlers [0] were probably the greatest obstacle to medical progress.

[0] I don't mean this as 'con artist', but people who think they're more competent than they actually are. There's probably a better term...

Maybe it had to do with literacy - effective techniques weren't propagated more quickly because they were passed down to apprentices, rather than published widely. I enjoyed this post:

A caesarean section in 18th-century Ireland - Irish midwife Mary Donally saved a woman's life by performing a c-section in 1738. - https://thequackdoctor.substack.com/p/a-caesarean-section-in...

The baby was breach, and did not survive. The illiterate midwife showed up 12 days after labor had begun, extracted the dead baby, sewed the woman up with silk thread and tailor's needles, and applied a salve made with egg whites. A literate surgeon visited a few days after the operation, and wrote a report for Medical Essays and Observations.

Boiling corn in an alkaline solution breaks down the fiber and allows the niacin contained to be used by humans. Native Americans knew to boil their corn in wood ash, but Christopher Columbus didn't realize this was important.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

The percent change is relatively small: 0.028% (280ppm) of the atmosphere to 0.0425% (425 ppm). Even if atmospheric CO2 doubles from today's level, it won't even be 0.1% of the atmosphere. (Edit: "For the majority of greenhouse crops, increasing CO2 levels to 1000 ppm (parts per million) results in an increase in photosynthesis by 50% over ambient CO2 levels." [0])

~25% of CO2 emissions are captured by the oceans. The increased productivity of terrestrial plants captures more of the emissions. I don't think the inertia provided by CO2 captured by the ocean is taken into account. This is presumably why the COVID lockdowns didn't make much difference for atmospheric CO2 levels: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55018581

The most important of the "complex downstream effects" of increased atmospheric CO2 is increased agricultural productivity.

[0] https://pulsegrow.com/blogs/learn/ideal-co2-levels-and-room-...

Before the 1950’s, soybean oil and linseed oil were used to make paint. These are drying oils that combine spontaneously with the oxygen in the air to form a hard film.

Then the paint industry figured out how to make their products from petroleum distillates. The seed oil industry remarketed their product as vegetable oil, and hired some scientists to tell us the saturated fats we’d been eating for thousands of years were actually the cause of the new wave of cardiovascular disease.

At least we can still use vegetable oil as biodiesel.

This was not "pure luck". Reminded me of that quote about chance favoring the prepared:

"Dans les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés." -Louis Pasteur

  In the fields of observation chance 
  favours only the prepared mind.

Variant translations of this or similar statements include:

  Chance favors the prepared mind.

  Fortune favors the prepared mind.  

  In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind.

  Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur#Quotes

edit: "Louis Pasteur's quote "Chance favors the prepared mind" means that the better prepared and more knowledgeable you are, the more you'll be able to take advantage of any chance opportunities or observations.

"If you are unaware of things that influence a situation or an event, you are very unlikely to be able to identify any opportunity or learn anything significantly new. By having insight, interest, and aptitude related to the situation, you put yourself in the position to capitalize upon any hidden "nuggets" buried at the moment."

- https://asymmetric.pro/chance-favors-the-prepared-mind/

I think the real advantage of a google AI over Bing's AI is their book project and library of scholarly papers: https://books.google.com and https://scholar.google.com

I've asked the Bing Chatbot some questions. While it was good for finding relevant webpages, one of its answers cited my (recent) webpage. I was not impressed.

The answers I was looking for are in the old paper books that Google may or may not have digitized, or in the mountain of papers that were published in the pre-internet era.

Concussions are mild traumatic brain injuries. There’s a lot more to recovering from a TBI than ‘rest’ or ‘stay active’.

Looked at the concussion alliance website - it seems to be quite reasonable. https://www.concussionalliance.org/treatments

The xeno-estrogen Ethinylestradiol is used in birth control pills because it is more resistant to degradation by the liver than bio-identical hormones.

Birth control use one of a variety of Progestins, instead of bio-identical Progesterone USP, for the same reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethinylestradiol

If you could share what specifically you found to be "uninformed and insane" in my comment, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

Estrogens tell the body's tissues to 'swell and divide'. It's a stress hormone, for both women and men.

Advocates for hormonal birth control have an unstated rule: 'do not talk about the problems of hormonal birth control'.

It's farcical that preteen and teenage girls are commonly put on birth control by their doctor becuase they're having very difficult periods, not because they don't want to get knocked up by their 7th-grade classmate.

Lots of women I know trialed and discontinued birth control. I've found lots of reports from women who didn't realize how adversely they'd been affected by these pills, until they discontinued after a decade+ had passed...

Low-carb/no-carb/Keto is a very hard way to lose weight over the longer term. I have a note on my wall from a radio show ~2 or ~3 years ago about the fatal metabolic defect of the ketogenic diet.

I have a friend who tortured herself trying to stick to a keto/low-carb routine, even though she knew the slimmest she'd ever been was when she was eating rice cakes and egg whites (iirc - she wasn't that healthy, just was slender.)

Something happened in the early-mid 1970's. The results started to appear 1978 to 1980: the population's weight on the scales started ticking up. I've posted about this a few times recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39493758 All the interventions in the decades since 1980 haven't helped, because they don't address what changed circa ~1975-1977.

I recently found a newspaper article from 1981 that's basically a smoking flare gun. I'm certain it covers what set off the obesity epidemic in the mid- to late- 1970's: the removal of a protective factor in the food supply. The sources cited in that 1981 article were so proud of themselves. Not sharing until I figure out how to take credit. The clues are all out there, you just have to know what's important.

After addressing what happened in the mid-1970's, losing weight should be easier. There are still lots of details, and things that'll be specific to your own personal situation, but it shouldn't be so insurmountable.

I'd be happy to chat with you about 'weight'. I just added a firefox relay email to my profile. I'll check spam to make sure it goes through... I'll respond to anyone who writes with a picture of my note about the fatal defect of 'keto', and a basic strategy for humans to keep themselves from gorging at their meals.

This is a good write up about the LED street lights that fail by turning purple. I took a panoramic picture of purple streetlights in Phoenix recently: https://twitter.com/jamesknochel/status/1762862867861451027

I spoke with someone who worked on Phoenix’s streets department. Around 2015 they pulled all their high pressure sodium lights and replaced with 4000k led fixtures. After a while they did it again, replacing the 4000k leds with 2700k. They’re slightly less obnoxious than the 4000k fixtures, but inferior to ~2000k (almost blue-free) high pressure sodium bulbs.

The main advantage of LED fixtures over high pressure sodium bulbs is the LEDs were supposed to last 10 years, whereas the HPS bulbs have to be replaced every 5 years.

HPS bulbs are much better for safety, as our eyes work best with orange light under low-light conditions.

Edit: Phoenix’s page about their led conversion: https://www.phoenix.gov/streets/led

The amino acid profile of gelatin is much better than the profile of steak. Gelatin is an incomplete protein that has more of the simple anti-stress amino acids (glycine and proline mainly) than excitatory amino acids (tryptophan).

Soup stock made from chicken carcasses or the beef knuckle bones will gel, like gelatin. The anti-stress aminos are why people have traditionally made soup to feed to sick family members.

Great Lakes Gelatin makes good versions of gelatin and collagen protein powders: https://greatlakeswellness.com/products/beef-gelatin-single-...

Last month I used the chat feature to ask about where the amino acid profiles had gone on their website. I was told they were switching the labeling/packaging from the former "supplement facts" to "nutrition facts". I presume this was motivated so people can buy this food product with food stamps (SNAP), but I didn't ask and they didn't volunteer.

Arsenic used to be added to chicken feed, to change the color of the meat. The chickens’ arsenic droppings were used to fertilize rice fields. Rice concentrates arsenic out of the soil. I think the rice from Arkansas and other southern states are the most contaminated with arsenic. Whoops.

There are cooking methods to remove arsenic from rice. Simplest method is to use a coffee percolator to run fresh hot water through the rice. The other way is to boil the rice in lots of water for five minutes, discard the water, then add fresh water and cook until completed.

If science can’t figure out the causes of the so-called obesity epidemic, even the best aspirational interventions won’t help. Ancel Keys’ tirade against saturated fat turned out to be pseudo-science, but it didn’t make the population instantly larger.

Something happened in the late 1970’s, and the population’s weight on the scales started ticking up around 1978-1980 [0]. All the interventions since then haven’t helped. If we can figure out what that 1970’s mistake was, and what it was that used to protect us from the food industry’s pseudo-science, we can begin to correct course.

[0] my earlier comment about 1978-1980: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38812171

This case is available from Framework directly for $39: https://frame.work/products/cooler-master-mainboard-case-and...

Q: the pictures of this case on the CoolerMaster site looks like there's a USB-C trigger to a Coaxial power connector, then another connector to the mainboard itself. Would this case work with a 20v coaxial power supply?

Q: What voltage/wattage does the Framework SFF computer need to power up?

A lot of the USB-PD power supplies only give watts, not the voltage provided. Your 60w power supply is probably either 12v/5A or 20v/3A, but the page itself doesn't say: https://frame.work/products/power-adapter

I have some 15w USB-C 5v/3A power supplies (that won't charge my Sony camera), a USB-PD battery that supposedly puts out 12v on the one USB-C port, and an Apple 30w USB-C ac adapter. My 2016 macbook charges on 5v, which is convenient. Framework forum posts indicate the laptops will charge on 5v 12v and 20v, but there was a problem with 15v.

> research [] conducted in the Philippines and Ecuador

These are tropical countries where coconuts are an evolutionary-appropriate part of the food supply. Coconut oil is mostly saturated, and is stable at human temperature. Western countries switched to polyunsaturated "vegetable oil" as a dietary staple.

Sometime in the 1940's the paint industry figured out how to make their paints and stains from petroleum distillates. Originally the paint industry used linseed oil and soybean oil for most of their products. The unsaturated components of polyunsaturated seed oils combine spontaneously with the oxygen in the air to form a hard film [0].

The paint industry essentially said, "farmers, thanks for your products all these years, best of luck in your future endeavors." The seed oil conglomerates [1] (ADM, et al) were screwed. Then they realized they could just rebrand their products as "vegetable oil". Ancel Keys was hired to convince people of the hazard of saturated fats...

Omega-6 degrades to prosteglandins [2], which are molecules of stress and inflammation [3]. Omega-3's are more unstable than Omega-6 oils. IMHO, the ω-3 / ω-6 ratio doesn't really matter - the most important thing to get inflammation under control is to limit "vegetable oil" intake.

Olive Oil's okay, if it's genuine. Unfiltered olive oil is even better. But wikipedia says the American Heart Association still recommends getting your daily dose of inflammation precursors [4]. Not impressed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drying_oil

[1] https://www.imarcgroup.com/vegetable-oil-manufacturers

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostaglandin

[3] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0334211100

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-6_fatty_acid#Health_effe...

Good candidates for contributing factors for the obesity epidemic.

There seems to have been a spark that set off the obesity conflagration sometime around 1978-1981. The kindling that nurtures this spark had been accumulating since the early 20th century… The chemicals you mention were certainly contributory.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38812171

The turning point was right around 1980. If we can figure out what changed then, we can correct course. I think what happened around 1980 was only a spark to the kindling that'd been prepared by a series of mistakes starting in the 1950's.

Obesity in Females: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/...

Obesity in Males: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/...

(graphs from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States )

"Trends in obesity among children and adolescents ages 2–19 years, by age: United States, 1963–1965 through 2017–2018": https://www.niddk.nih.gov/-/media/Images/Health-Information/... (from https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti... )

Flour is fortified with folic acid because it is more stable. People who are poor methylators can’t transform folic acid into folate, ergo they are harmed by folic acid fortification.

The energy of sunlight that hits the ocean is absorbed, and flows into the deep ocean. A smaller percentage of the energy that hits land is absorbed, but this rapidly radiated away at night.

I have an mdisc drive, and a few mdisc DVDs I haven’t burned yet. Someone on/r/datahorder noticed they don’t sell real mdiscs anymore: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593967

Thanks for the reply, and for sharing your experience.

> I think the whole plant-based diet is some sort of religious belief for moral superiority or something.

Confirmation bias and circular reasoning is probably most of it. Anthropogenic catastrophism is self-evident to many.

I was recently at Costco waiting for my tire to be repaired, and saw a canister of "plant based" protein in the returns cart. The customer's reason for return: "tasted like sand".

Proteins are composed of amino acids. Some amino acids are more important than others. Glycine is the simplest amino acid, and also has anti-stress properties. Other amino acids are excitatory.

The main protein sources for the latest round of "plant based" protein products are pea protein and brown rice protein. Soybeans were used decades ago, but fell out of fashion on account of soy's phytoestrogen load.

The process of separating seed protein from the starch is not incredibly complex. But someone said that seed protein is folded up for storage, and is not especially useful to our bodies anyways. Native Americans knew to boil their corn seeds in wood ash (alkaline material) - Nixtamalization - which I understands unfolds the proteins to make them more useful to humans. All corn tortillas are made with 'trace of lime', which means that corn has been properly boiled in a alkaline solution to be more edible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

The most abundant amino acid in gelatin is glycine. Second-place is proline. I don't grok the biochemistry, but I think it reasonable to propose that glycine is a much more reasonable foundation for the body's protein sources than the excitatory amino acids. The richest amino acid in the plant based protein powders I've looked at is glutamic acid.

"[Glutamic acid is] the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitter in the vertebrate nervous system." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamic_acid (emphasis added)

"Glycine is an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system, especially in the spinal cord, brainstem, and retina. When glycine receptors are activated, chloride enters the neuron via ionotropic receptors, causing an inhibitory postsynaptic potential (IPSP)." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycine#As_a_neurotransmitter (emphasis added)

I recently blogged to tell people to make soup from their turkey carcass: https://radialappliance.teslabox.com/2023/11/cayce-approved-...

I, for one, welcome Italy's defense of traditional food wisdom.

The current top comment [0] on this submission said he was "curious about this being a trans fat". This would be a result of biohydrogenation, where the bacteria in the ruminants stomachs will add hydrogen to the unsaturated oils.

First link for biohydrogenation: https://www.megalac.com/resources-advice/fats-advice/71-bioh...

Biohydrogenation is a totally different process from the hydrogenation used to make margarine from seed oils.

Ruminal microbe of biohydrogenation of trans-vaccenic acid to stearic acid in vitro - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3305423/

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38434521

> And CO2 remains in the atmosphere for 100-200 years after emitted.

My understanding is that methane is lighter than air, and circulates in the atmosphere until it breaks down (~12 years). CO2 is heavier than air, and readily dissolves itself in ocean water. In the pre-industrial era the oceans emitted carbon dioxide, to keep the plants on land alive. My earlier comment had a reference to estimates of how much CO2 is absorbed by the ocean: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20002823

Searching now, the officially-sanctioned estimates are that 30-40% of human CO2 emissions are rapidly captured by the ocean. If we instantly stopped all CO2 emissions, I think most of the excess atmospheric CO2 would be captured by the plants and the ocean over just a few years.

The longest day of my life was when I was maybe 5 years old: the day my parents bought their timeshare.

A few months ago I went with my father to a presentation by a company that helps people get rid of their timeshares. The presenter said buying a timeshare is like pre-paying for your next 30+ years of vacations. The annual maintenance fees pay the property taxes for the resorts, state governments like their property tax revenues, so they allow the racket to continue.

The 'time share relief' presenter asked everyone how much their annual fees were, and pegged their company's fee to the annual fee charged by the timeshare company.

Dad was all ready to sign up to pay $X,XXX to get rid of it. He's at the point where he doesn't have the energy to travel anymore, so he thinks the maintenance fees are just money wasted. I looked into the matter. Our state's law makes it relatively easy to get rid of timeshare fees, without having to pay for the services of a timeshare exit firm. Furthermore, many of the timeshares have programs for people like my father to get rid of their obligations: https://responsibleexit.com/who-we-are/diamond-resorts/

My brother ended up offering to split the fees with our father, as he likes to use it for his little trips. The properties do give preferential treatments to their 'owners', and the cost-per-night isn't so bad, as long as you use the nights you've paid for. My GF and I have used it twice this year, and have another trip coming up. I guesstimated the room's cost was about $50/night for a studio with refrigerator and cooktop. The same room was going for $150+/night on priceline & the other booking sites.

The Timeshare Users Group is probably one of the best internet forums about timeshares: https://tugbbs.com/forums/

tl/dr: if you're thinking about buying, DON'T. But in our case, what mom & dad paid out 30+ years ago would cost $80,000+ today, so we might as well just keep paying the maintenance fees and try to use it for all our little trips. <shrug>.

I bought an OpenGarage for my brother maybe 5 years ago (“Black Friday” sale every year). He gave it back to me when he got a new opener. I updated the firmware , installed it on an old opener at our dad’s house and it works great. You might need the “Security 2.0” accessory, or they have instructions for soldering wires into an existing button:

https://openthings.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/...

The U.S. Navy is often a first responder to disasters. This mission would be more effective if the Navy had ships that were specifically outfitted for the role. In 2010 I proposed starting with the USS Enterprise (CVN-65). The Big E was retired in 2012, decommissioned in 2017, and de-fueled by 2023. Amphibious Assault Ships - which are designed to support helicopters - would also be especially effective for disaster relief.

There’s about 1 gallon of asphalt in every 42-gallon barrel of crude oil. Were it not used to pave roads, asphalt would be a waste product of crude oil refining.

I don’t think there are any good substitutes to asphalt concrete for paving roads. Railroad tracks only need crushed rock - if we fully transition away from crude oil, we might have no choice but to switch to rail for all our ground-based transportation needs.

https://mercercapital.com/energyvaluationinsights/a-bright-s...

Zenni's yellow 'night-driving' clip-ons are okay - better than the blokz lenses, but not as good as the $2 yellow safety glasses from Harbor Freight.

These are my favorite self-defense glasses for driving at night: https://cocoonseyewear.com/shop/safety/lightguard-medium-fit...