teslabox

> Disputing the consensus should not by itself be forbidden, even when the consensus is accurate and important.

I have a facebook page for sharing my take on non-monopoly medicine. I wrote a blog post for one of my websites commenting on a Spectator.co.uk article about how the Germans were doing much better with their SARS-CoV-2 patients than the Italians. The interviewed German doctor attributed their success to their making every effort to not ventilate their COVID-19 patients.

Facebook scanned my website and decided that it violated their "community standards", or some such claptrap. But the facebook robots let me directly link the same Spectator article to my facebook page. Facebook's algorithms must have changed between March and April, as they previously allowed my early-March post calling SARS-CoV-2 a 'weakling virus'. [I stand by that statement: the SARS-CoV-2 virus has mostly killed nursing home residents, ventilated patients, and other vulnerable populations (vitamin-D deficiency), and is entirely survivable for young/otherwise healthy people.]

Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell broke rank with consensus to share the experience of doctors on the front lines actually treating SARS-CoV-2 patients, by posting a few videos expressing his frustration at the standards his ICU was implementing while treating SARS-CoV-2 [0]. He single handedly changed the COVID-19 standard of care in the United States by objecting to the consensus policy of ventilating fully-coherent people, thereby preventing untold number of patients from being harmed with ventilation. A later Spectator.co.uk article was written by a Canadian M.D. who traced the abandonment of ventilation for SARS-CoV-2 patients to Dr. Kyle-Sidell's efforts. The Canadian opined that Kyle-Sidell really just tapped in to the mass of front-line workers' observations that aggressive ventilation was not helping.

Conventional medicine is founded on quicksand (mercury/blister agents/bloodletting/etc), got captured by the pharmaceutical industry in the early 1900's (over-reliance on asprin, heroin, etc), made some progress in the early 20th century anyways (antibiotics, imaging, lab tests, science), then was led astray by drug reps promoting new patent-medicines when the old patent medicines lost their protection.

A solid case can be made that the former consensus on SARS-CoV-2 was wrong, and that BY DEFERRING TO THE CONSENSUS OF THE MEDICAL MONOPOLISTS the platforms are promoting modern bloodletting.

[0] https://twitter.com/cameronks/status/1246765252307533825 / https://twitter.com/cameronks/status/1246762772400148480 - These two tweets from April 5th announced the Doctor's uploading his video to Vimeo and YouTube. Dr. Kyle-Sidell's video seem to have been the catalyst for the abandonment of the former consensus of proactively ventilating SARS-CoV-2 patients. [483]

> I think we're simply discussing the wrong thing. Instead of questioning whether college is important for X, Y, we should be discussing how we can make every single American go to college.

Or we could help most people learn valuable skills in their first 13 years of schooling, so the only people who need/want to go to college are those who will actually benefit.

I saw a submission in /newest last night about how one of the actual purposes of American K-12 education is 'childcare': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23027408

"Like pretty much every everything about schooling in the US ever, it assumes that what schools do – and all that schools do – is educate. [...] The fact of the matter is our primary school system is state-subsidized childcare for the vast majority of parents who cannot afford to raise their own children in our ghastly economy. That's been the case for the last 40-plus years. This isn't new, and if it's news to you, o reader, it's only because nobody much in the US has wanted to admit this evidence of the US economy being terrifyingly more broken than we Americans are prepared to confront."

While I appreciate that public schools are supposed to serve the interests of the public, the standard factory school model isn't doing anyone any favors.

The United States' College/University system is a much more valuable institution than the K-12 as commonly exists today.

The only reform really needed for K-12 is to transform it into an institution that exists to help children figure out what they're good at, and provide the resources to help them learn what they want to learn.

Your link is a video of anti-sugar crusader Robert Lustig's talk at UCSF. It was posted on July 30, 2009, right around the time that the revelations about the contamination of HFCS with mercury started to become known. Mercury exposure is associated with diabetes and metabolic syndrome [2].

While I think Lustig is genuine, he was not aware in 2009 that Fructose is also manufactured/metabolized by the brain [0] [1].

I think the stealth calories in HFCS (as starch), above and beyond the label, is an additional as-yet unappreciated factor in presentations of insulin resistance and obesity.

The HFCS problem is multi-faceted.

[0] The human brain makes fructose, researchers discover – here’s why that might be a big deal (2017) - https://theconversation.com/the-human-brain-makes-fructose-r...

[1] Specific regions of the brain are capable of fructose metabolism (2017) - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28034722 - "Furthermore, rates of fructose oxidation in these brain regions are 15-150 times that of liver slices, confirming the bioinformatics prediction and in situ hybridization data. This suggests that previously unappreciated regions across the brain can use fructose, in addition to glucose, for energy production."

[2] Is mercury exposure causing diabetes, metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance? A systematic review of the literature (2017) - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28482296

I like the conspiracy theory about how the New Coke fiasco was actually deliberate subterfuge for switching the product from sugar to high fructose corn syrup. Corn-syrup coca-cola tastes different than Coca Kola's classic sugar formula, and allegedly people noticed the difference when the Coca-Cola company was doing tests, pre-New Coke.

My cousin-in-law only drinks "Mexican Coke" (but Mexicans drinking coca-cola in their country get HFCS-Coke too. Wikipedia says only mexican coca-kola produced for export is made with sugar).

Fortunately HFCS is no longer contaminated with mercury [0] [1] (or less contaminated?), thanks to the efforts of a whistleblower [2].

The last problem to deal with is how HFCS preparations might have more calories than listed on the label, on account of residual starch molecules that aren't split into glucose. Residual starch adds calories but don't affect the perceived sweetness.

I previously wrote about how the original soda products were herbal beverages: Coca-Cola is made with flavorings from the Coca leaf and the Kola nut, Root beer is made with roots, Dr. Pepper's 21 plant flavors, etc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17979670

[0] Mercury in High-Fructose Corn Syrup? - https://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/news/20090127/mercury-in-... (2009)

[1] https://www.iatp.org/documents/much-high-fructose-corn-syrup... (2009)

[2] FDA WHISTLEBLOWER SPEAKS OUT ABOUT MERCURY IN OUR FOOD - https://www.foodwhistleblower.org/fda-whistleblower-speaks-o...

[edit: added some words to first paragraph re sugar and Coca-Cola company's taste tests pre-new-coke.]

> He was having none of that, so he goes to the kitchen and gets a spoon and a bottle of vodka and proceeds to snort a spoonful up both nostrils. It was horrifying. Then he gives the spoon to me. I don't know how exactly, but he convinced me to do the same.

Cool story, thanks for sharing.

> Am I recommending this? Hell no, don't do it!

Alcohol fumes are also useful for treating tuberculosis and pneumonia. I don't recommend the spoon method, it's much gentler to use an evaporation chamber.

The bit in my comment about the period of the solar cycle being 11 years was a quote. The sun also oscillates in intensity over hundreds and thousands of years. The sun was (allegedly) slightly less active the Europe's colonial age, which motivated a lot of people to leave Europe. The sun was slightly more active during most of the 20th century, leading to the observations behind the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

Some scientists, who aren't wedded to the anthropogenic theory, have looked at all the solar numbers and concluded we're due for a couple decades of weak solar cycles (global cooling) before the warming resumes.

I don't know who to believe, I just wanted to point out that there might be a reason behind this alleged "warmest winter ever" other than "it's the CO2". I'm not particularly interested in debating with someone with convictions of hot-earth environmental catastrophe being more reasonable than cold-earth environmental catastrophe, so feel free to have the last word.

Most of the cold air was locked up over the Artic this past winter, whereas normally it is carried south by the jet streams. Some areas of the planet did have record cold in February. An article about February's snow in Baghdad, Iraq (the second snowfall in the last 100 years) says the warm winter in Virginia had to do with the "north atlantic oscillation" [NAO]:

> So why is it that we seem to be in a snow hole?

> Part of it has to do with something called the North Atlantic Oscillation. This combines the effect of two features in the atmosphere; the Icelandic Low and the Azores High. - https://www.wsls.com/weather/2020/02/12/baghdad-sees-rare-sn...

Having just used the "disable javascript to read the article" trick, I noticed this Economist article correctly points out the NAO's influence in keeping cold air locked up in the Arctic, but doesn't mention the snow in Baghdad nor the blizzards in Turkey [0] nor the record colds elsewhere (certain places in Canada, eastern Russia, etc)

Wikipedia has this page on the North Atlantic Oscillation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_oscillation

[0] https://www.ntvhouston.com/2020/02/blizzard-buries-turkish-v...

I read reports of potato farmers in Idaho having to deal with an early frost last fall, and racing to harvest the potatoes before they were ruined by an early cold snap. I don't know how much of their crops were lost. I've also noticed reports of a sugar shortage.

Humans need to work on being climate-flexible, not being "all in" on global warming.

"A false dilemma (or sometimes called false dichotomy) is a type of informal fallacy in which a statement falsely claims an "either/or" situation, when in fact there is at least one additional logically valid option." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

The false dilemma presented in this article is that of "global warming" vs. "the old climate status quo". The third logically valid option is that climate is now cooling due to the solar cycle. I read a great article about one of the solar telescopes having measured slight changes in the sun's output over the last 20+ years... The data is out there, scientists just have to consider the full spectrum of climate possibilities.

[Edit] I thought the article was about the SOHO satellite, but maybe it was about instruments on the International Space Station. These pages mention European solar observatories on the space station:

> The Sun does not always shine with unchanging power: its output varies minutely over the period of about 11 years known as the ‘solar cycle’. In principle, these fluctuations can affect us on Earth.

- http://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exp...

> This is where the Solspec instrument comes in. Part of the Solar package on the International Space Station, it was launched with the European Columbus space laboratory in 2008 and tracked the Sun until it was shut down this year [2017]. It measured the energy of each wavelength in absolute terms and its variability – a feat that requires a higher order of precision than relative measurements. As an analogy, it is easy to feel a change in temperature, but nobody on Earth can sense the exact temperature without a thermometer.

- http://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exp...

> Driving a small car at night is so difficult for me these days, especially as a person who wears glasses.

Self-defense Step #1: avert your eyes from the bad headlights. One of the problems is our eyes have a natural tendency to look at things which are blue at night, on account of our eyes' hyper-sensitivity to blue light.

It was sort of happy accident that early incandescent bulbs were low-blue sources of light that put out vastly more of the safe portion of the spectrum (infrared, red, orange, yellow).

Self-defense Step #2: screen out excess blue light. I wear polarized yellowish fit-over glasses at night. They help a lot. I found my current preferred pair at a clearance apparel/home goods store for $8. My backup glasses are yellow safety goggles -- these turn the bad headlights greener than the polarized goggles, but I've tended to use the polarized ones since I found them. You can spend more on "swannies" [0] or whatever, but I'm happy with my $8-$11 yellow glasses.

This was inspired by a HN comment, who told about wearing orange glasses to walk his dog: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14170975 My first set of orange safety glasses cut out too much light -- great for dealing with headlights, not so great for noticing pedestrians.

[0] https://www.swanwicksleep.com/

Good analysis of the entrepreneurship in the energy sector. I might email him about this contradiction:

1. Consumers don’t care about energy

versus:

I don’t believe that we’ll get where we need to go without a global price on carbon. This is why I volunteer with the Citizens’ Climate Lobby to build political will for a national carbon fee and dividend policy in the US

Someone pointed out to me around 15 years ago that "green" is terrible branding for environmentalism.

Taxing carbon makes living more expensive for people. Most people on the margin will reject anything that makes energy more expensive for them. Dyslexic philosopher George W. Bush once said, "Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."

People don't trust scientists, they trust engineers, because engineers own up to their mistakes and usually make a second-generation product that's better than the first edition, whereas 'science advances one funeral at a time' (the standard paraphrase of Max Planck).

The vast majority of people absolutely 100% do not care about their carbon output. They care about their wallets and quality of life. Advocating for carbon taxes is an exercise in futility, encouraged by artificial fear. IMHO, climate alarmism is propagated by people with good intentions and incomplete analysis of reconstructed data. Scientists have only recently put temperature sensors on the Juan de Fuca volcanic ridge, there's no sensors on the vast majority of the ocean ridges, and only in the last... ~40 years have they started to put fleets of automated temperature buoys into the oceans... We've had a mild winter where I live, but Baghdad Iraq had atypical snowfall this month [0].

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/11/baghdad...

But I feel more and more that we’re approaching the point at which technology has gone about as far as it can within the confines of a 20th century policy regime.

The 20th century brought us the electric utility model, which encouraged the economy to develop to use as much energy as possible.

Humanity's best hope is not figuring out how to de-carbonize the economy, but to finish the Book of Physics and figure out where all the energy is hiding. Nikola Tesla promised us it's out there. 21st Century physics is tiptoeing towards an answer.

> Red meat and dairy have significant amounts of trans fats.

Natural trans fats [1] are made by bacteria in the rumen, and are rather different than manufactured trans fats created from seed oils with hydrogen gas and catalysts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugated_linoleic_acid - "The biological activity of CLA was noted by researchers in 1979 who found it to inhibit chemically induced cancer in mice [...] In 2008, the United States Food and Drug Administration categorized CLA as generally recognized as safe (GRAS)."

> You're still probably better off with vegetable fats if you can help it, at least where partially hydrogenated oils are banned.

Most polyunsaturated oils are deodorized ("refined"), so customers don't realize they're eating rancid oil.

I bought unrefined grape seed oil years ago. Didn't know what to do with the obviously-rancid oil. Now I would give it to my father, so he could use it to help start his barbecue's charcoal.

I went to wikipedia to look up coal gas, which you mentioned in the video but didn't link to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gas

My dad's house was built in the mid-1990's. It has custom fluorescent bulbs that are probably rated at 5000K. They're "okay", but only because the bulbs are entirely hidden on top of cabinets or high in the ceiling, and filtered through the tan paint on the walls. I found some 2200K COB LEDs that I intend to install on those light circuits, as the other lights in his kitchen are a case study in poor lighting practices.

His kitchen has canister lights. The stickers say "max 40w", but he had 75-watt equivalent 5000K CFLs in those canisters. They were terrible. I found a box of 2700K 60-watt equivalent LEDs in his laundry room, and switched them out while he was traveling. At the time he was like, NO I'M OLD I NEED SUPER-BRIGHT LIGHTS, but now he uses those lights instead of ignoring them. They're still too bright, but at least they're usable now. I recently found some 15w and 25w incandescent bulbs: the canister lights directly above the counters would be fine with 25w bulbs.

In your future videos, I'd be interested in comments on the dark-sky movement, efforts to prevent skyglow, how people commonly use too much light at night, and the abandonment of good lighting practices in the name of energy-efficiency: glare, "daylight" LEDs, broad-spectrum streetlights, etc.

OH, and I'd be especially interested in the difference between 5000K fluorescent and supposed-5000K LED bulbs. I'm sure the spectral power distribution of the supposed-5000K LEDs is totally different than 5000K fluorescents: lots of blue with just enough ROYG to trick people into thinking it's 'white' light (LED) vs. a relatively-flat power distribution (fluorescent)?

I heard tumbleweeds are an invasive species. Wikipedia seems to confirm:

"Kali tragus [...] is an annual plant that breaks off at the stem base when it dies, and forms a tumbleweed, dispersing its seeds as the wind rolls it along. It is said to have arrived in the United States in shipments of flax seeds to South Dakota, perhaps about 1870. It now is a noxious weed throughout North America, dominating disturbed habitats such as roadsides, cultivated fields, eroded slopes, and arid regions with sparse vegetation." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbleweed#Plants_that_form_tu...

These are the western equivalent of Kudzu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu_in_the_United_States

I wonder if there any species from the Americas that are invasive to Europe/Africa/Asia... ?

One of my pet peeves is the proliferation of blue-white LEDs into areas where the previous generation of light technology was perfectly acceptable and safe. I think car owners trick up their cars with blue-white LEDs (as replacement headlights, or as "light bars" and floodlights) because they confuse blue-white LEDs with the spectrum emitted by the high intensity discharge headlights [0] that were formerly used on expensive cars.

Motorcycles have long had mandated daytime running lights, as it helps make them more visible. Do modern motorcyclists intentionally retrofit super-bright Blue-White LEDs thinking they help improve their visibility?

What would be a good way to reach motorcyclists to help them realize their blinding lights aren't actually as protective as they presumably think?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlamp#High-intensity_discha...

> Gee, I wish someone would study why I need to go three times a year and maybe figure out how to change the chemical makeup of my mouth so I didn't have to!

People are too profitable for the system to be motivated to figure out actual causes behind common problems.

Your quip reminds me of a comment from 2 weeks ago, where someone shared how vitamin K supplementation helped reduce buildup on their teeth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20902899

I understand that people usually get adequate Vitamin K2 from their intestinal bacteria. Perhaps the buildup on your teeth is due to your microbiome.

I brush with salt and baking soda, but still have some plaque on my occasional visits to the dentist. I’ll have to think about this some more.

Last night I stayed at a hotel with horrible blue lights. The hallways were too bright and too blue. The parking lot was lit up with “daylight” blue-white LEDs. It looked like someone decided the lot wasn’t bright enough, and they added supplemental LED floodlights (not even compliant with state law, let alone city code) to the poles to fill the lots with extra light.

The free standing lights in the room had proper shades and pleasant 2700K “warm” CFL bulbs. The ceiling light at the door was blue, the bar light above the bathroom mirror was blue, and the light over the toilet was blue.

The hanging lights in the lobby were fine, but the spotlights in the ceiling were obnoxious.

I wonder if the hotel got ripped off by a fly-by-night energy efficient retrofitter.

Science has determined precisely how blue lights hurt people. It’s too bad the country replaced safe light bulbs with fundamentally defective bulbs prematurely.

I’d like the legislatures to protect the public from blue-white LEDs.

Earlier this year I was looking for a specific book from the early 2000's. It was priced around $60-$100+ at most of the used book sites, which I thought was rather excessive for what I assumed was a little trade paperback.

After a few months a copy turned up on ebay for $15. I looked into the seller, thrift.books (mentioned in this story), decided I wasn't taking advantage of a little mom-and-pop bookseller, and purchased it. It was indeed a little trade paperback.

While most of this type of book would go for a penny, this one is valued much higher because of the chemical recipes. The author was somewhat miffed at the profiteering taking place in his industry, and told his audience how to reap the benefits of the book without being ripped off.

> But, it would be great to have an actual fact-based answer as to what has happened.

This would be inconvenient to the business models of Big Medicine and Big Food.

Good places to start an investigation are the official advocacy for replacing saturated fats with deodorized vegetable oils [1], the holy war against sweet forms of sugar (mix of fructose/glucose) instead of waging war on starch (chains of non-sweet insulin-stimulating glucose), the advocacy for chemical non-caloric sweetners (sucralose, etc), the contamination of the food supply with imitation foods (orange drink vs. orange juice, etc), and considering whether fortified grains is really the nutritional panacea it is supposed to be.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10536349

edit: added "non-caloric" and "sucralose"

July is hotter than January, even though the planet is closer to the sun in January, because there is more land in the northern hemisphere than the Southern Hemisphere.

There was a submission ~3 months ago regarding this phenomenon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012565

I’m certain there’s a submarine agenda behind most of these “hottest month EVAR” stories. /methinks it’d be much more productive to focus on making human society more resilient, than to focus on a single variable (“carbon”).

I followed /u/RickJWagner’s comment’s link to accuweather, and saw a story expressing concern about this year’s coming harvest [0].

Instead of focusing on immediate problems, the NY Times and others fixate on the one variable the experts have been collecting data for, and say “see this confirms the one-variable model is right!”

>> [...] Noam Chomsky has a characteristically dry and precise version of the story: “Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice.”

>> So historians, mystics, scientists and drunks have something in common: they all tend to seek the truth where the process of seeking is easy, rather than where truth is.

- https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2016/03/the-street...

The problems of a fragile climate are always with us.

[0] https://m.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/why-there-is-shock...

There used to be a paper from a Harvard Law student on the school’s website about the Estrogen scam. As I recall, the paper told of how a drug company figured out they could get estrogens from the urine of pregnant horses. They put the estrogens into a pill and called it PREMARIN (PREgnant MARes urIN) [0], and told women their premenopausal problems came from not having enough estrogen.

Horse piss was a big business for big pharma. Then one day a doctor said, ‘we ought to do a study to see if women are actually benefitting from their estrogen supplementation’. This was the Womens Health Initiative. The study was stopped early [1] when the preliminary results found that women were actually getting cardiovascular problems and cancer from the horse urine.

This is as should have been expected. Estrogen is the end of the chain in the steroidogenesis [2] pathway... steroids are made from cholesterol, they are transformed, used then disposed of by the liver. Supplementing the tail end of the chain (estrogen) instead of the start of the chain (pregnenolone) causes all sorts of problems.

Progesterone supplementation is supposed to also delay menopause for aging women, but it’s not as profitable or fancy, and doctors tend not to start with simple treatments.

(edit1: references)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugated_estrogens#Contraind...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Health_Initiative#HT...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steroid#Steroidogenesis

Your link references the street lamp joke - love that one, referenced it in a comment yesterday.

My understanding is the omega-3 oils are problematic for humans too, they’re just not as acutely toxic as the omega-6 oils. I started avoiding seed oils in college. It was not the specific intervention I needed, but I believe avoiding this anti-food has helped keep me from deteriorating like people commonly do...

> Genes are useful because they are far more fixed and they are far easier to measure than many other things that could be measured. [...] It is especially useful to look at genetics because it is (relatively) cheap to get a person's genetics and painless - whereas studying the microbiome is much more difficult and expensive.

This reminds me of the joke about the drunk looking for his keys:

>> [...] Noam Chomsky has a characteristically dry and precise version of the story: “Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice.”

>> So historians, mystics, scientists and drunks have something in common: they all tend to seek the truth where the process of seeking is easy, rather than where truth is.

- https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2016/03/the-street...

I read something semi-recently where the author explained his interpretation of the microbiome findings as a part of a cascade: an initial stressor (every case is unique) -> cultivation of the autistic microbiome -> inability to relax -> symptoms. I'm not qualified to re-explain it in my own way, so please take this as my statement that I find an alternate explanation than 'bad genes' for all cases of ASD diagnosis to be more plausible.

While Genetics are good explanations for some things, using 'bad genes' as an explanation is frequently a distraction from a person's actual problems. See my reply to your other comment about the streetlight effect.

There is nothing in this study that is useful, it just confirms pre-existing theories that autism is all in the genes. I think those theories are wrong and harmful.

In the real world, autism develops. If the medical profession treated the diagnosis as something other than a chronic condition that a person is going to have for the rest of their life, they might figure out how to treat it.

There is some good modern medicine, but the fixation on genes handicaps certain investigators.

> the heritability of ASD was estimated to be approximately 80%, indicating that the variation in ASD occurrence in the population is mostly owing to inherited genetic influences, with no support for contribution from maternal effects.

I think they’re trying to say “it’s not the mother’s fault the kid just has bad genes.”

In the real world there are non-genetic causes behind almost all of the symptomatic presentations of children medically-cursed with the diagnosis of “Autistic”. One group of researchers recently published a paper about the microbiome’s role in the condition [1]. My understanding is that less-desirable bacteria don’t synthesize vitamins and other useful substances (biotin, etc), and make more noxious endotoxins (that overwhelm the liver), than friendlier bacteria.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3564498/

The type of fiber in the diet has a significant influence on the type of bacteria in the intestines. If I had an Autistic kid, I’d try to feed him/her inulin from Jerusalem Artichokes (the food with more of this prebiotic fiber than any other), and avoid all the fake foods they sell in the grocery stores. Many thickeners (carageenan, carob bean gum, etc) are cosmetic food ingredients...

Allegiant started out with old DC-9's/MD-80's, and a few 757's. They were all replaced with Airbus A320's by November 2018. Most of Allegiant's previous safety problems stemmed from using old jets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiant_Air#Fleet

I think the company's startup plan was to use cheap/old fuel-guzzling aircraft to get the business off the ground: it's cheaper to pay for fuel than interest payments on new jets. Now that they've built a stable-enough business they've transitioned to newer planes. Wikipedia says the company's first brand-new jet was purchased in 2017, which was 20 years after the company was founded.

Some months ago I defended the herbal beverages made with various medicinal plant extracts: Kola Nut, Coca Leaf, root extracts, etc [1]. In that post I spoke of having a 2-Liter bottle of the classic herbal beverage for when it seemed like my blood sugar was getting a little low.

In recent months I've decided that even though the 2L bottles are probably cheaper on a per-ounce basis, my waste 2L bottles were contributing to the plastic problem. I've switched to buying 12 ounce cans, which I open and pour into a glass.

My last purchase of Kola was as boxed 12-packs (no plastic in the packaging, other than possibly in the can liner [2]). I save my cans, and will be taking them to a local salvage yard to be properly recycled.

My trash company supposedly has "single stream" recycling, but I doubt they find all the aluminum cans the waste stream.

In drafting this comment I found a Wired story about the engineering that goes into can production [2]. My cans probably have BPA liners -- "hmm". Maybe I'll buy some Kola nuts and make my own herbal beverage.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17979670 [2] https://www.wired.com/2015/03/secret-life-aluminum-can-true-...

> “The more they dig into it being about freedom, the more susceptible they become the to the theories,” said Dave Gorski, a Michigan physician who has tracked the anti-vaccine movement for two decades. “Appeals to freedom are like the gateway drug to pseudoscience.”

Medicine uses a lot of pseudoscience in marketing treatments: stents for stable heart patients, Premarin (derived from horse urine) for menopause... knee surgeries that are no better than placebo [0]... Chemotherapy as treatment for cancer, even though Otto Warburg determined cancer is a metabolic problem in the 1940’s... there was an article on medium by a doctor who challenged his profession’s obsession with bariatric surgery, if I find the link when I get home I’ll post it in a follow up comment.

I think the stories of adult baseball players from Central America catching chicken pox are interesting. Why doesn’t chicken pox spread in Central America? Is there a connection to sunlight? Vitamin D? Just like we have a flu season, I bet there’s a chicken pox season too... People in northern latitudes get Winter Sickness when the sun goes away for the winter, on account of the lower level of sunlight (due to vitamin D, and how red light refreshes cytochrome c oxidase, the copper enzyme in our mitochondria).

I had a mild case of chicken pox. Only had it once. I think doctors vaccinate against chicken pox for the convenience of parents and day care centers, not because children actually need to be protected against this particular viral infection. Yes, some children have bad cases of chicken pox, but shouldn’t science be employed to figure out why some children have mild cases of chicken pox, while others have severe cases?

Tetanus vaccination is very useful. Tetanus vaccines are good for about 10 years, iirc. Vaccination advocates ought to lead with tetanus, because tetanus infections are random, miserable, and often fatal, whereas measles is inevitable and mostly survivable.

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/health/features/stories/2015/03/25/42... - a study about arthroscopic knee surgery being no better than placebo surgery first hit the news around 2002, it seems, but this link is more recent.

I think it is a fundamental mistake to base human society's agricultural efforts around corn and soybeans. Corn is more efficient at making carbohydrates from sunlight than many other plants [0], but mono-cropping [1] corn loses whatever efficiency might be gained.

Grains are useful because they can be stored for years before they're used. Chickens, pork and other animals are fed grain because it's convenient for mega-businesses that don't have enough kitchen scraps to feed their millions of animals.

Potatoes are much better food for humans (and animals), but they are a living food that have to be used right away, or processed/preserved for later use (dried/frozen/etc).

I have a book somewhere that says the dairy cow is the most efficient means of converting the grass on a rocky slope into human-usable protein.

Agriculture is fundamentally a labor-intensive endeavor. The replacement of the mixed (family) farm with monocrops is a great vulnerability, no matter the cause of unpredictable weather.

Corn-based ethanol is stupid, full-stop. If the corn crop does fail this year, I wonder how much corn can be saved by stopping the ethanol plants. In the future, maybe ethanol could be made from corn that hasn't been used after 7-10 years in storage, or from corn that becomes moldy while being stored.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation#Plants_that...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocropping#Soil_ecology

There are 'okay' LED streetlights and there are 'bad' LED streetlights. Most of Phoenix's new streetlights are three LEDs pointed down. It seems like some of these use ~5000K leds (daylight / blue-white), while the others use ~2700K (much closer to incandescent). Some of the 2700K-ish streetlights lights I've looked at recently have different power output - a dimmer one was 'okay', the others were uncomfortable to be in the vicinity of.

All of Phoenix's new lights have no diffusion effect - they just have three LED chips pointed down. I commented on a recent submission about the invention of the frosted light bulb [0], which were more popular than the previous bulbs because it diffused the light generated by the filament.

Another LED streetlight model I've noticed (not in Phoenix) has a much more diffuse effect, because it has dozens of LEDs poined in different directions. That intersection, while inferior to the previous amber LPS bulbs, wasn't an active hazard, just mildly annoying.

Flagstaff, Arizona has some amber LED streetlights. They're too intense (too bright), but they're not painful to be in the presence of, as long as I don't look directly at the amber LEDs.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19474110

The point of my post was supposed to be that people who care about earth-based astronomy really need to resist the proliferation of white led streetlights. Kids who grow up without ever seeing stars aren’t likely to care about the night sky.