Quotulatiousness

July 17, 2019

QotD: “The United States government [became] the greatest and most potent maker of criminals in any recent century”

Filed under: Health, History, Law, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For most of the history of the United States, drugs were legal. People could buy opiates and cocaine-based products from their local pharmacy. An opiate-laced brew called Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, for example, was particularly popular with housewives. One person who viewed this legal system with skepticism was a Los Angeles doctor named Henry Smith Williams. When a small number of his patients became addicted, he was disgusted, and he came to see them as despicable “weaklings.” So when opiates and cocaine were banned in 1914, he welcomed this first birth-pang of the drug war with glee.

But then he noticed what happened to his addicted patients. They didn’t stop using. Instead, “here were tens of thousands of people, in every walk of life, frantically craving drugs that they could in no legal way secure,” he wrote in one of his books. “They craved the drugs, as a man dying of thirst craves water. They must have the drugs at any hazard, at any cost.”

At the same time, Smith Williams realized that the drug war was “in effect ordering a company of drug smugglers into existence.” Because pharmacists could no longer sell these drugs, the Mafia and other criminal organizations stepped in, selling a vastly inferior product at extortionate prices. In the pharmacies, morphine had cost two or three cents a grain, but the criminal gangs charged a dollar.

The death rate among addicts rose, and those who survived began to behave very differently. An official government study had found that, before the drug war kicked in, three-quarters of self-described addicts had steady and respectable jobs: some 22% were wealthy, while only 6% were poor. They were more sedate as a result of their addiction, but they were rarely out of control or criminal. Yet faced with the need to meet these extortionate new prices, many of the men started to commit property crimes, and many of the women started to steal or prostitute themselves.

So Smith Williams watched as the drug war created two waves of crime: first a wave of violent criminal drug-dealers, and then a wave of criminality among addicts. “The United States government,” Henry wrote in shock, had become “the greatest and most potent maker of criminals in any recent century.”

Johann Hari, “A 1930s California story shows why the war on drugs is a failure”, Los Angeles Times, 2017-06-16.

July 7, 2019

Does this sound like your gym?

Filed under: Business, Health, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

Instapundit linked to this older Sean Kelly article about the “Planet Fitness” chain of health clubs. According to him, it’s even less pretty than you might have thought:

Here’s what you need to know…

  1. Planet Fitness: The gym for people who don’t really want to get in shape, owned by people who really can’t afford for the members to be there.
  2. A survey of over 20 different Planet Fitness locations in 12 different states revealed that they provide no nutritional guidance. They do however supply candy and pizza.
  3. Planet Fitness seems to promise that health and fitness will ultimately be comfortable and not involve any real effort.
  4. Planet Fitness is a big, purple-colored adult daycare marketed to people afraid to go to an actual gym.
  5. Many Planet Fitness members do want to make progress of course, but the gym’s own rules and operating guidelines seem to dissuade this.

July 4, 2019

Assorted green scams

David Warren briefly returns to the current day (away from his normal 13th-century preferences) to look at a few of the many green scams being run by various government and industry scam artists:

Speaking with a gentleman who vends in a neighbourhood farmers’ market, I learnt something interesting, and probably true. Surviving family farms usually lack “organic” credentials. This is because getting them, from the bureaucracies that dispense them, is an immensely time-consuming process, and involves costs that would erase most of the little farmer’s profits. You have to be a big, faceless, industrial operation to afford the official “organic” labels that sucker big city consumers into paying double for essentially the same goods. That the whole system is massively corrupt, can almost go without saying. It was designed to be.

Organic scams are far from new, but perhaps more insidious because corporations love to add that “organic” label on stuff to jack up the prices on all sorts of things, like spices, wine, and many, many other items. Restaurants do the same trick on their menus, frequently assuming nobody will ever check up on them. That said, it’s mostly the well-off who get fooled because, well, they’re eager to be fooled on that score. The US government even admitted that organic certification is not about food safety or nutrition: it’s all marketing.

By coincidence, the same day my eye caught, by accident on the Internet, the announcement of a Green Award to a big car assembly “park.” They had changed all the light bulbs in their factory buildings, thus saving themselves a few thousand dollars on their multi-million electric bill, and seem to have installed new toilets, too. This sprawling high-tech carriage works remains three hundred acres of unspeakable aesthetic horror, in which human beings are enslaved to machines. But now it is “Green.”

The greenwashing of modern industrial and commercial buildings is a long-running scam, with the much-desired “LEED Platinum” certification usually, if not always, awarded to those who game the system most successfully. “What LEED designers deliver is what most LEED building owners want – namely, green publicity, not energy savings“

The environmental business — currently buoyed by unprovable, often fatuous claims of anthropogenic global warming — is perhaps the most cynical. It has spawned vested interests on a global scale, that will not be overturned by occasional exposure. At its heart is the manipulation of statistics, and scare-mongering through compliant mass media. The general public are hypnotized by repetition. I have noticed in desultory dips into the news that e.g. anomalous weather will invariably be attributed to “climate change,” when more plausible explanations are easily at hand.

This zombification extends to most other areas of reportage: invisible bogeys blamed for imaginary trends. Solutions to “environmental problems” are proposed that will not make the slightest dent in them.

Of course, the constant demands for “clean energy” almost always explicitly reject the use of nuclear power because reasons.

Darlington Nuclear Generating Station in Clarington, Ontario.
Photo by Óðinn via Wikimedia Commons.

But nuclear power, most easily in the form of molten salt reactors (on which research was killed fifty years ago), could replace most uses of coal, oil, and gas within a decade, through much smaller facilities eliminating huge transmission costs. It would be the cheaper because the fuels are readily available to start in the form of recycled nuclear waste, and the raw materials would be abundantly available thereafter.

On the question of safety, the death toll from mining, drilling, hydro dams, &c, is quite considerable — in the tens of thousands at least, post-War. Except for Chernobyl (one of many Soviet-era environmental disasters), the death toll from nuclear accidents remains about nil. No one died at Three Mile Island. Not one death was caused by the flooded Fukushima reactors (though well over twenty thousand were killed by the tsunami that caused the difficulty there).

In short, “clean energy” is not a problem. It had to be made into one by the fright campaigns of the environmentalcases, whose own power and income depends on sustaining the problem, and preventing the most obvious solutions.

June 28, 2019

QotD: “Intelligence” is just a noun

Filed under: Books, Health, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Howard Gardner has also convinced us that the word intelligence carries with it undue affect and political baggage. It is still a useful word, but we shall subsequently employ the more neutral term cognitive ability as often as possible to refer to the concept that we have hitherto called intelligence, just as we will use IQ as a generic synonym for intelligence test score. Since cognitive ability is an uneuphonious phrase, we lapse often so as to make the text readable. But at least we hope that it will help you think of intelligence as just a noun, not an accolade.

We have said that we will be drawing most heavily on data from the classical tradition. That implies that we also accept certain conclusions undergirding that tradition. To draw the strands of our perspective together and to set the stage for the rest of the book, let us set them down explicitly. Here are six conclusions regarding tests of cognitive ability, drawn from the classical tradition, that are by now beyond significant technical dispute:

  1. There is such a thing as a general factor of cognitive ability on which human beings differ.
  2. All standardized tests of academic aptitude or achievement measure this general factor to some degree, but IQ tests expressly designed for that purpose measure it most accurately.
  3. IQ scores match, to a first degree, whatever it is that people mean when they use the word intelligent or smart in ordinary language.
  4. IQ scores are stable, although not perfectly so, over much of a person’s life.
  5. Properly administered IQ tests are not demonstrably biased against social, economic, ethnic, or racial groups.
  6. Cognitive ability is substantially heritable, apparently no less than 40 percent and no more than 80 percent.

Charles Murray, “The Bell Curve Explained”, American Enterprise Institute, 2017-05-20.

June 25, 2019

QotD: Perpetual adolescence

Filed under: Books, Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

JOHN DICKERSON, HOST: Before we leave, let me ask you about your book The Vanishing American Adult. You see a very serious problem here for America. Explain what you mean. It’s a nonpolitical problem.

SENATOR BEN SASSE: Yes, so this book is 100 percent not about politics, and it’s 99 percent not about policy. It’s about this new category of perpetual adolescence. And, first, let’s just say that, over the last two millennia or so, the emergence of a category called adolescence is a pretty special gift. We believe that, when our kids become biological adults, when they hit puberty, they don’t have to be fully formed, morally, emotionally, economically, educationally, in terms of household structure. They don’t have to go out and be fully adult immediately. They don’t have to go off to war, and they don’t have to become economically self-sufficient. That’s glorious, to have that protected space between childhood and adulthood. But it’s only glorious if you understand that it’s a transitional state, it’s a means to an end. Peter Pan’s Neverland is a hell. It’s a dystopia. And we don’t want to be — have our kids caught at a place where they’re not learning how to be adults. And, right now, we’re not tending to the habit formation aspects of a republic.

“Face the Nation transcript, May 14, 2017: Schiff, Sasse, Gates”, CBS News, 2017-05-14.

June 21, 2019

QotD: Caloric intake and weight gain

Filed under: Food, Health, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The average person needs about 800,000 calories per year. And it takes about 3,500 extra calories to gain a pound of weight. So if somebody stays about the same weight for a year, it means they fulfilled their 800,000 calorie requirement to within a tolerance of 3,500 calories, ie they were able to match their food intake to their caloric needs with 99.5% accuracy.

By this measure, even people who gain five or ten pounds a year are doing remarkably well, falling short of perfection by only a few percent. It’s not quite true that someone who gains five pounds is ((5*3,500)/800,000) = 98% accurate, because each pound you gain increases caloric requirements in a negative feedback loop, but it’s somewhere along those lines.

Take a second to think about that. Can you, armed with your FitBit and nutritional labeling information, accurately calculate how many calories you burn in a given day, and decide what amount of food you need to eat to compensate for it, within 10%? I think even the most obsessive personal trainer would consider that a tall order. But even the worst overeaters are subconsciously managing that all the time. However many double bacon cheeseburgers they appear to be eating in a single sitting, over the long term their body is going to do some kind of magic to get them to within a few percent of the calorie intake they need.

It’s not surprising that people overeat, it’s surprising that people don’t overeat much more. Consider someone who just has bad impulse control and so eats whatever they see – wouldn’t we expect them to deviate from ideal calorie input by more than a few percent, given that this person probably has no idea what their ideal input even is and maybe has never heard of calories?

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: The Hungry Brain”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-04-27.

June 18, 2019

Blitzkrieg on Speed – Nazis on Crystal Meth Part 2 – WW2 SPECIAL

Filed under: Germany, Health, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published on 17 Jun 2019

While many armies use performance enhancing drugs during WW2, the Wehrmacht takes it to extremes in 1940, with more than debatable consequences.

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Creative Producer: Joram Appel
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Colorisations by Spartacus Olsson

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From the comments:

World War Two
1 hour ago
Read before you comment; “it wasn’t just the Germans” This video treats the use of methamphetamine by the German Wehrmacht and its cultural background. The purpose of this video is not to attribute any atrocities that the Nazis perpetrated to that they were simply on drugs – we know that this was not a contributing factor to what they did, although it perhaps influenced how they did it. It is also not the purpose of this video to single out Germany as the only belligerent to use drugs in WW2. As we point out in the video, many belligerents (to not say all) used drugs, especially amphetamines during WW2. In fact amphetamines are still in official, monitored used by for instance the US Army in some situations to this day. However, the Wehrmacht and a few of the Axis allies used methamphetamine which is different than amphetamine as the effects of meth is unpredictable and comes on faster and harder. These unpredictable effects include hallucinations and delusions, which amphetamines do not induce, or at least to a lesser and more predictable degree. Methamphetamine metabolizes into amphetamine in the body, but in that process it creates a number of side effects that contribute to its unstable effects. Of course this was poorly understood in 1940 and meth was also available commercially over the counter in many places like the US and Australia, mostly as a dieting pill and (somewhat ironically) an anti-depressant. While amphetamines like Benzedrine are still administered by doctors for certain conditions, methamphetamine is now known to be a very dangerous, potentially lethal, drug that only has recreational use, and in 2019 it is therefore illegal almost everywhere in the world. Last but not least, the Wehrmacht was singular in how liberal they were in distributing drugs to the troops, at least to begin with. It is important to also point out that beside the official use of drugs, many soldiers throughout the ages have resorted to intoxicating themselves to deal with the unfathomable horrors of war, and in this respect WW2 was no different. We will cover drug use by other belligerents and in general during the war in future videos.

June 16, 2019

QotD: Critical gender studies

The first thing you must understand is that gender is a social construct. “Woman” and “man” are concepts arbitrarily invented by society. They have nothing to do with reality. A child is assigned one of these labels randomly at birth by primitive, backward-thinking doctors who, for no good or objective reason, have decided that a human child with a penis must be a boy and a human child with a vagina must be a girl. These words are all interchangeable, as are the body parts. None of it means anything, really.

But remember that the generic people we meaninglessly call “women” are beautiful and powerful and their arbitrary womanhood should be constantly celebrated. Women must band together and lift each other up. Women must be represented equally in all of our institutions. Women are truly wonderful, splendid, special creatures.

But there is nothing special about women. Literally anyone can be a woman. A woman is not anything in particular. A person with a penis can be a woman. A person with a vagina can be a woman. If a bucket of sand came to life and wanted to be a woman, it could be a woman. There is no aspect of womanhood that is ingrained or biological or inaccessible to males. And womanhood certainly has nothing at all to do with your body parts.

But if you don’t have a uterus then you shouldn’t be giving your opinion on women’s rights. No uterus, no opinion. That’s the motto. We’re tired of men making decisions about women’s bodies.

But there is no such thing as a woman’s body. Transwomen are women, too. A transwoman is just a much a woman as any other woman. There is absolutely no difference between the two and to suggest otherwise is the height of bigotry.

Matt Walsh, “Explaining Progressive Gender Theory To Right Wing Bigots”, The Daily Wire, 2019-05-14.

June 12, 2019

Men’s mental health and the conflicting demands they face

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Psychology Today, Rob Whitley explains the paradoxical demands that men make active efforts to talk about mental health issues and to “check their privilege” and shut up:

Men, Please Talk More

Men experience elevated rates of numerous mental health issues including suicide and substance use disorder while showing low rates of mental health service utilization and a tendency to bottle-up. This has led many scholars to posit a silent crisis of men’s mental health.

Consequently, many mental health organizations and high-profile individuals are sending out an insistent message that men must talk more about their mental health.

Even royalty has endorsed this message, with HRH Prince William stating in a recent documentary that we need to “pass the message onto men everywhere that it’s okay to talk about mental health… and be able to talk about our emotions.”

Fine words indeed.

Men, Please Shut Up

However, other individuals and organizations are sending out a completely different message, namely that men as a group need to remain silent and “check their privilege.” As wryly noted by Bloomberg journalist Ramesh Ponnuru “check your privilege means shut your mouth.”

Such messages can be seen all over the Internet, with pleas for men to shut-up or stop whining. Of note, these pleas come from both men and women. These echo comments men often hear in face-to-face interactions, even from their intimates and their employers.

Indeed, such perspectives can emanate from high places, including the U.S. Senate, with Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono recently stating, “I just want to say to the men in this country: just shut up and step up. Do the right thing for a change.” For some, male silence is a sign of moral rectitude.

This situation creates a men’s mental health double-bind. On the one hand, men are being told to talk more and open-up; on the other hand, men are being told to check their privilege and be silent. This can only create cognitive and emotional distress.

Interestingly, the men’s mental health double-bind manifests itself beyond the borders of the U.S. As such, examples from the U.K and Canada are given below to illustrate its global nature.

High Hitler! – Nazis on Crystal Meth Part 1 – WW2 SPECIAL

Filed under: Germany, Health, History, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published on 11 Jun 2019

You might have heard he a was vegetarian. You might have heard that he shunned alcohol. You might have heard he was anti-tobacco. Then you might think he was against hard drugs as well, but you’d be wrong…

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Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns
Sound design: Joakim Brodén

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A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
2 hours ago (edited)
This is the first of our specials on drug use in the Third Reich, and this episode is about the drug addiction of Adolf Hitler himself. As Indy mentions in the video, YouTube regularly demonetises our content. Instead, we fully rely on our Patreon supporters to finance these series and this special. What doesn’t help, is that YouTube algorithm recommends demonetised episodes less, even further limiting our efforts. So, please share this video with your brothers and sisters, your friends, neighbours, your grandma and your history teacher. And make sure to turn on your notifications! And if you really like what we do – please consider supporting us on https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory or at https://timeghost.tv.

June 11, 2019

“[I]t may suddenly occur to you that Mazin has turned a deadly epochal disaster into … a buddy-cop movie”

Filed under: Environment, Health, History, Media, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I haven’t watched Chernobyl, but a lot of sensible people, including Colby Cosh, insist that it’s well-worth the watching:

It looks as though HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl will take the title as the prestige TV event of the first half of 2019. This is pretty remarkable, all things considered. The writer of the series, Craig Mazin, is still described on Wikipedia as “an American screenwriter and film director best known for writing Identity Thief, The Hangover Part II, The Hangover Part III, and The Huntsman: Winter’s War.” The director, Johan Renck, is a Swede who got his start as a Eurodance performer with the nom de guerre “Stakka Bo.” For the zillionth time, HBO has spread its patented secret sauce over unpromising ingredients and delivered superb television.

I am being something of a jerk about these people, of course. Screenwriters don’t have much control over which of their scripts get made and what happens to those scripts on the set, and Mazin is admired as a critic and teacher. (Unusual respect for writers is an obvious component of that HBO magic.) As for Renck, he got from trashy music to HBO through an apprenticeship in music video — the same kind of apprenticeship that brought us David Fincher, Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry. He may, in this regard, be the last gasp of a noble tradition.

It is not that the Chernobyl series doesn’t have elements of hackiness. After spending a couple of hours watching Jared Harris’s austere scientist and Stellan Skarsgård’s smarter-than-he-looks apparatchik warm to each other while trying to save Eastern Europe from obliteration, it may suddenly occur to you that Mazin has turned a deadly epochal disaster into … a buddy-cop movie. Set aside the wonderful visual poetry, the period detail and the fine soundtrack, and the spine you’re left holding is a whodunit. It’s the Case of the Exploding Reactor.

I think Mazin would probably admit this, if he hasn’t already, but if it’s not clear enough, the whole thing winds up in the last episode with a contrived courtroom drama, one which does not quite resemble anything that ever happened in connection with Chernobyl.

Here is the funny and admirable thing: the solution that Mazin’s “cops” work out is highly technical and involved, is explained in careful detail, and is more or less the real solution to the mystery of Chernobyl. Mazin, who is my age and was therefore a teenager when the reactor went kablooie, is not some Jordan Peterson-esque Soviet-history nerd or someone who wanted to turn Chernobyl into a metaphor. It just seems to have occurred to him one day, quite recently, that he knew the word “Chernobyl,” and remembered that Chernobyl was very bad, but wasn’t sure what exactly had happened. When he found out he realized there was a movie in it.

Between the accidents at Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island (in 1979), the nuclear power industry was set back literally decades … despite being one of the best — and safest — answers to the problem of generating enough electricity to keep modern industrial countries humming along while also reducing production of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Maybe someone will produce a TV mini-series to de-mystify the American nuclear accident soon, and debunk the half-truths, quarter-truths, and outright lies that still bedevil any discussion of nuclear power in the western world.

June 2, 2019

QotD: Explaining modern female sexuality

Filed under: Health, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I have a theory that for many women, sex, or rather agreeing to have sex is difficult, and especially so for the first time with a new partner. How else to explain the fact that so many women admitted that their first time with a new man was generally experienced in an alcoholic haze? (For those who haven’t been keeping up, the source data is here.) So if confronting herself about her “slutty” behavior (even if the sluttiness is only in her own mind), a woman would like to have an excuse like “Oh, but I was drunk…” and thus can excuse away or justify the indiscretion. Or else, as the original study showed, women can even explain away the drunkenness as just a regular part of the dating process, so therefore it’s okay.

I also believe that this is why so many women have rape fantasies, because “Oh, he forced me to do it…” is likewise an expression that denies the woman’s [shameful] complicity in the act. (Of course, now that it’s become okay to accuse a previous partner with actual rape as part of the excuse, the whole thing has become considerably more sinister, especially as such accusations can take place months or years afterwards and still be considered valid by law enforcement. But for the sake of argument, let’s treat this scenario as but a blip on societal consciousness which will disappear at some point when women regain their sanity. We can only hope.) Certainly, this explains female submissiveness (outside a natural submissive personality anyway), which can be regarded (by women) as a kind of watered-down rape fantasy.

The only time, I think, when self-delusion disappears is when a woman encounters a universal object of female desire, such as a hunky actor or popular musician. Even then, there is a “safety in numbers” excuse — “OMG everybody is crazy about him!” — which makes it okay, or at least, provides a figleaf of an excuse for irresponsibility and sexual licentiousness. You only need a sliver of an excuse, and it will be acceptable, in other words.

Kim du Toit, “Seeking Excuses”, Splendid Isolation, 2017-04-24.

May 31, 2019

QotD: How we gain weight

Filed under: Books, Food, Health, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I first learned about [Stephan] Guyenet’s work from his various debates with Gary Taubes and his supporters, where he usually represents the “establishment” side. He is very careful to emphasize that the establishment doesn’t look anything like Taubes’ caricature of it. The establishment doesn’t believe that obesity is just about weak-willed people voluntarily choosing to eat too much, or that obese people would get thin if they just tried diet and exercise, or that all calories are the same. He writes

    The [calories in, calories out or CICO] model is the idea that our body weight is determined by voluntary decisions about how much we eat and move, and in order to control our body weight, all we need is a little advice about how many calories to eat and burn, and a little willpower. The primary defining feature of this model is that it assumes that food intake and body fatness are not regulated. This model seems to exist mostly to make lean people feel smug, since it attributes their leanness entirely to wise voluntary decisions and a strong character. I think at this point, few people in the research world believe the CICO model.

    [Debate opponent Dr. David] Ludwig and I both agree that it provides a poor fit for the evidence. As an alternative, Ludwig proposes the insulin model, which states that the primary cause of obesity is excessive insulin action on fat cells, which in turn is caused principally by rapidly-digesting carbohydrate. According to this model, too much insulin reduces blood levels of glucose and fatty acids (the two primary circulating metabolic fuels), simultaneously leading to hunger, fatigue, and fat gain. Overeating is caused by a kind of “internal starvation”. There are other versions of the insulin model, but this is the one advocated by Ludwig (and Taubes), so it will be my focus.

    But there’s a third model, not mentioned by Ludwig or Taubes, which is the one that predominates in my field. It acknowledges the fact that body weight is regulated, but the regulation happens in the brain, in response to signals from the body that indicate its energy status. Chief among these signals is the hormone leptin, but many others play a role (insulin, ghrelin, glucagon, CCK, GLP-1, glucose, amino acids, etc.)

The Hungry Brain is part of Guyenet’s attempt to explain this third model, and it basically succeeds. But like many “third way” style proposals, it leaves a lot of ambiguity. With CICO, at least you know where you stand – confident that everything is based on willpower and that you can ignore biology completely. And again, with Taubes, you know where you stand – confident that willpower is useless and that low-carb diets will solve everything. The Hungry Brain is a little more complicated, a little harder to get a read on, and at times pretty wishy-washy.

But listening to people’s confidently-asserted simple and elegant ideas was how we got into this mess, so whatever, let’s keep reading.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: The Hungry Brain“, Slate Star Codex, 2017-04-27.

May 15, 2019

QotD: Women competing against other women

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are women out there who still see dressing to please a man as some sort of Stockholm syndrome thing — participating in your own (flouncy, spaghetti-strapped) subjugation. So, it’s possible that those advising you “Don’t change for a man!” are just trying to help you be a modern and empowered woman. Of course, one could argue that actually being a modern and empowered woman means you don’t have to dress like you’re hoping to get a call to clean out a sewer line.

Maybe those in your advice coven really do believe they’re acting in your best interest. Maybe. Social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Jean Twenge report that it’s widely believed that men drive the “cultural suppression of female sexuality” — which could include shaming women for how they dress. However, in reviewing the research, they make a persuasive case that it’s primarily women (often without awareness of their motives) who work to “stifle each other’s sexuality.”

This is right in keeping with research on female competition. While men fight openly — “Bring it! I will ruin you!” — women take a sneakier approach. As female competition researcher Tracy Vaillancourt explains it, women fight for their interests using “indirect aggression,” like gossip, mean looks, disparaging remarks, and other underhanded tactics to “reduce the mate value of a rival.” Underhanded tactics? You know — like suggesting you’re selling out womankind if you wear a skirt or winged eyeliner.

Amy Alkon, “Casual Coroner”, The Science Advice Goddess, 2016-09-20.

May 7, 2019

The Science of Ginger: Why and How it Burns and Its Impact on Cooking | Ginger | What’s Eating Dan?

Filed under: Food, Health, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

America’s Test Kitchen
Premiered on 22 Mar 2019

Why does ginger burn? Why does ginger turn pink? How come ginger makes meat mushy? Dan answers these questions and more about one of the most interesting ingredients cooks have at their disposal in this episode of What’s Eating Dan?.

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Click here for our Ginger-Scallion Everything Sauce recipe: https://cooks.io/2Yh01Tu
How to make Ginger-Milk Curd and the science behind it: https://blog.khymos.org/2014/02/24/gi…

ABOUT US: Located in Boston’s Seaport District in the historic Innovation and Design Building, America’s Test Kitchen features 15,000 square feet of kitchen space including multiple photography and video studios. It is the home of Cook’s Illustrated magazine and Cook’s Country magazine and is the workday destination for more than 60 test cooks, editors, and cookware specialists. Our mission is to test recipes over and over again until we understand how and why they work and until we arrive at the best version.

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