Quotulatiousness

June 20, 2015

ISIS and the endangered archaeological sites of the Middle East

Filed under: History, Middle East, Religion, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Last month, Michael J. Totten described ISIS as “The Borg of the Middle East”:

ISIS has conquered Syria’s spectacular Roman Empire city of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site long known affectionately as the “bride of the desert,” and in all likelihood is gearing up to demolish it. We know this because they’ve done it before. ISIS used hammers, bulldozers, and explosives to destroy the ancient Iraqi cities of Hatra and Nimrud near Mosul, and they did it on video.

“These ruins that are behind me,” said an ISIS vandal on YouTube, “they are idols and statues that people in the past used to worship instead of Allah. The Prophet Muhammad took down idols with his bare hands when he went into Mecca. We were ordered by our prophet to take down idols and destroy them, and the companions of the prophet did this after this time, when they conquered countries.”

Muslims have ruled this part of the world for more than 1,000 years. All this time, they’ve been unbothered by the fact that Palmyra, Hatra, and Nimrud include pagan monuments, temples, statues, and inscriptions that predate Islam. Only now are these places doomed to annihilation. ISIS is more belligerently Philistine than any group that has inhabited the region for a millennium. The only modern analogue is the Taliban’s destruction of the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan with anti-aircraft guns, artillery shells and dynamite in March 2001, mere months before their al-Qaida pals attacked New York City and Washington.

This attitude toward history harks back less to the seventh century than to the twentieth, when Pol Pot reset the calendar to Year Zero after the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia, and when Mao Zedong’s Chinese Cultural Revolution murdered millions in the war against everything “old.”

Maamoun Adbulkarim, Syria’s antiquities chief, told Reuters that the army carted hundreds of ancient statues away to safety, but of course the giant Roman columns and the museum itself aren’t going anywhere except, perhaps, underneath the jaws of ISIS bulldozers. “This is the entire world’s battle,” he said.

That’s how bad things are in Syria now. The mass-murderers, war criminals, sectarian gangsters, and state sponsors of international terrorism in Bashar al-Assad’s Arab Socialist Baath Party regime can plausibly tout themselves as the defenders of civilization. In this particular case and in this particular place, they’re right.

June 18, 2015

Nutrition … what we thought we knew is wrong, again

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Real Clear Science, Ross Pomeroy explains how historical “expert knowledge” and government cheerleading pointed in exactly the opposite direction of today’s experts and government regulators:

For decades, the federal government has been advising Americans on what to eat. Those recommendations have been subject to the shifting sands of dietary science. And have those sands ever been shifting. At first, fat and cholesterol were vilified, while sugar was mostly let off the hook. Now, fat is fine (saturated fat is still evil, though), cholesterol is back, and sugar is the new bogeyman.

Why the sizable shift? The answer may be “bad science.”

Every five years, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, composed of nutrition and health experts from around the country, convenes to review the latest scientific and medical literature. From their learned dissection, they form the dietary guidelines.

But according to a new editorial published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, much of the science they review is fundamentally flawed. Unlike experiments in the hard sciences of chemistry, physics, and biology, which rely on direct observational evidence, most diet studies are based on self-reported data. Study subjects are examined for height, weight, and health, then are questioned about what they eat. Their dietary choices are subsequently linked to health outcomes — cancer, mortality, heart disease, etc.

That’s a poor way of doing science, says Edward Archer, a research fellow with the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama, and lead author of the report.

“The assumption that human memory can provide accurate or precise reproductions of past ingestive behavior is indisputably false,” he and his co-authors write.

Two of the largest studies on nutritional intake in the United States, the CDC’s NHANES and “What We Eat,” are based on asking subjects to recall precisely what and how much they usually eat.

But despite all of the steps that NHANES examiners take to aid recall, such as limiting the recall period to the previous 24 hours and even offering subjects measuring guides to help them report accurate data, the information received is wildly inaccurate. An analysis conducted by Archer in 2013 found that most of the 60,000+ NHANES subjects report eating a lower amount of calories than they would physiologically need to survive, let alone to put on all the weight that Americans have in the past few decades.

June 16, 2015

Over-diagnosis as a root cause of the “addiction surge”

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Stanton Peele is not happy with the latest version of the standard psychological diagnosis document:

The American Psychiatric Association creates the gold standard for diagnoses of mental disorders in the United States — and worldwide — through its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. DSM-IV was published in 1994. In 2013, DSM-5 was released.

As I describe in the March, 2014 issue of Reason, there are several notable peculiarities about the manual. DSM-5

    eliminates the distinction between dependence and abuse. Instead it classifies substance use disorders as mild, moderate, or severe. Thus the DSM-5 does not explicitly recognize such a thing as drug addiction or dependence. But under “Substance Use and Addictive Disorders” the manual includes a category called “Behavioral Addictions” that so far consists of a lone entry: “Gambling Disorder.”

These two major conceptual changes immediately aroused suspicion. Writing in the New York Times, investigative reporter Ian Urbina accused the psychiatric establishment and pharmaceutical industry of expanding the whole treatment enterprise by including “mild” substance use disorders, as well as recognizing things other than substances as being addictive. Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychology professor, “predicted that as many as 20 million people who were previously not recognized as having a substance abuse problem would probably be included under the new definition.”

My argument is more fundamental. The ways of thinking about substance use and disorders embedded in DSM-5 and promoted by American psychiatry are actually causing an epidemic of these disorders.

June 15, 2015

“The destruction of the family is the single most destructive force in the past 40 years”

Filed under: Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Gavin McInnes talks to Dr. Amier Carmel, a New York psychoanalyst, about trauma and “cry-bullies”:

He describes the cry-bullies as people with “an intense need to control” and says that “the resentment associated with this need to correct is often an induced feeling used to fix another problem.” This makes perfect sense. Whenever I argue with liberals and they preach to me about immigration, education, or women’s rights, their lack of knowledge on the subject makes it clear they’ve never looked it up. “It’s never about what it’s about,” as Derb would say. Ask them how many illegals are in the country and they’ll rarely get within 10 million of the number. Ask them how much we spend per student per year and they’ll say, “Not enough.” Ask them how much young women without kids make compared with men and they’ll say, “Women need a choice.” They’re not in it for the truth. They’re in it for the platitudes of the crusade and the power it evokes. We all know that by know. The question is why.

Carmel has a fascinating answer. “The destruction of the family,” he opines, “is the single most destructive force in the past 40 years.” Amier then discusses the back-and-forth kids do, going from mom to dad every time they have a grievance. “This dance,” he says, “is how we attain justice. It’s how the parameters of our sense of internal integrity are defined.” Amier seems particularly concerned with the lack of fathers. “The father sets down the law. When he is not there, a sense of anxiety takes root and that leads to outwardly directed hostility. Soon you are looking to the outside world to show you what the limits are. You’re ‘acting out’ and hoping society will control you. The desire for paternal law becomes pathologized.” Amier calls PC violations “narcissistic injury” and adds that this fear-driven petulance becomes especially dangerous when the ideology becomes someone’s entire identity. “When that happens,” he says, “it’s as though rationality and socialized relationships dissolve. The ideologically identified person can often become wildly reckless because they seek the obscuring of accountability with increased pathos.”

We can see this in the liberal demigod Che Guevera. His insatiable lust for power was cloaked as a need for justice, but it’s arguably just a case of a mentally ill child trying to impose order on a world he felt was spinning out of control. Che grew up in a household where his emotionally absent father would openly flaunt infidelity. Ernesto Guevara Lynch was a loser who blew his wife’s fortune on himself and young girls. I’ve noticed a pattern with liberals and fathers who were negligent and financially irresponsible. So much of their belief system seems to come from revenge. This is why they attack white men for looking at someone funny but turn a blind eye to a child prostitution ring in Rotherham. This is also why feminists won’t shut up about the “white male patriarchy” (“patriarch” meaning “father”) but have nothing to say about the shocking difference between black-on-white rape and white-on-black rape. Che is no different. He took his pain and turned it into a crusade against the world. This is why liberals put him on a T-shirt. They don’t like him because he freed Cuba or forced socialism down its throat. They like him because he personifies the cry-bully.

QotD: The modern Alcoholics Anonymous

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

I picked the wrong year to quit drinking.

If you’ve never been to an old-school AA meeting, imagine Vince Lombardi’s locker room if he’d been coaching Pilgrims with Tourette’s: a spartan, Quaker-meeting setup, all bootstrapping, no bullshit. A newcomer dumb enough to whine about their “feelings” gets ordered to scrub out the coffee urn by a gruff “old timer.”

That’s not what I slunk into in 1992, by which time then-faddish PBS fixture John “Finding Your Inner Child” Bradshaw had accidentally turned Alcoholics Anonymous into a New Age unicorn-and-rainbows therapeutic weep-fest that would’ve disgusted Greatest Generation founders Bill W. and Dr. Bob, who probably kept their fedoras on in the gutter.

Some meetings even served decaf.

Believe me: “Low self-esteem” is not your typical boozehound’s problem. Then again, about half the people I met in “the rooms” weren’t even alcoholics, just neurotics too cheap to get real therapy.

Remember, it was the 1990s, the era of The X-Files and Oprah at her tabloid low: at every 12-Step meeting, you’d meet “survivors of ritualistic Satanic abuse” and “recovered memory victims” and alien abductees and even “starseeds,” the self-proclaimed spawn of spacemen who’ve been sent to Earth to…do something or other. (Luckily the latter two never came to blows.)

There were so many “multiple personalities” at some meetings, we were probably breaking fire codes without knowing it.

And I lived in Boystown, so lots of the real drunks were gay, bi, trannies, lesbians of convenience, and even “two-spirited” (AKA gay Indians).

Despite all this, I never drank after my first meeting (ODAAT), worked the Steps, got a new job, and ten years later, I looked around at all the people who still hadn’t and thought, “I didn’t get sober so I could spend the rest of my life with these losers.”

It took me a decade to notice that none of the 12 Steps is “Go to meetings.” So I stopped. I couldn’t take the crazies. In retrospect, I was the crazy one for thinking I was rid of them.

Kathy Shaidle, “My Otherkin Headmate is a Two-Spirited Starseed!”, Taki’s Magazine, 2013-03-05.

June 4, 2015

When did “scientific literature” transmogrify into bad science fiction?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Lancet, Richard Horton discusses the problems of scientific journalism:

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.
Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”. The Academy of Medical Sciences, Medical Research Council, and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have now put their reputational weight behind an investigation into these questionable research practices. The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of “significance” pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale. We reject important confirmations. Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent, endpoints that foster reductive metrics, such as high-impact publication. National assessment procedures, such as the Research Excellence Framework, incentivise bad practices. And individual scientists, including their most senior leaders, do little to alter a research culture that occasionally veers close to misconduct.

June 2, 2015

The Chemistry of Cannabis & Synthetic Cannabinoids

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

Compound Interest posted an infographic on cannabis and synthetic cannabinoids:

Click to see full-sized infographic.

Click to see full-sized infographic.

In recent years, there’s been an increase in the number of media reports on users of synthetic cannabinoids. Commonly referred to by names such as ‘Spice’ or ‘K2′, the most recent reported case involved five UK students being hospitalised after use. But what are the chemicals present in ‘spice’ and similar drugs, and what are the chemical compounds in cannabis that they aim to mimic? That’s what this graphic and post attempt to answer.

May 30, 2015

The chemistry of gin

Filed under: Randomness, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Compound Interest looks at the chemical make-up of gin:

Click to see full-size graphic

Click to see full-size graphic

For the fifth in the ‘Alcohol Chemistry’ series, we turn to gin. As with other types of alcohol, there are a huge number of different chemical compounds present, but it’s possible to identify a range of significant chemical contributors to its aroma & flavour. Here, we take a look at those compounds and where they come from.

Gin is a spirit that we’ve been making for centuries; although Franciscus Sylvius, a Dutch physician and scientist, is often credited with its discovery in the 17th century, references to gin (or genever as it was also known) exist as far back as the 13th century. Sylvius originally conceived it as an concoction for the treatment of kidney and bladder problems, but its popularity as a recreational drink later soared.

Its popularity in England was spurred by heavy government duties on imported spirits, as well as the fact that gin production was not required to be licensed. This growth in popularity was also accompanied by a gradual decline in its reputation, however, with it being blamed for a range of issues, from social problems such as public drunkenness, to increases in death rates. Gin’s reputation has since largely recovered, although some references to these associations still survive in English parlance – ‘Mother’s Ruin’ is still a widely known alternative name for the spirit.

May 28, 2015

The ways that scientific journalism fails

Filed under: Media, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Vox.com, Julia Belluz and Steven Hoffman show how perverse incentives and human frailty contribute to the wasted efforts — and sometimes outright fraudulent methods — that get “scientific” results published. It’s getting so bad that “the editor of The Lancet … recently lamented, ‘Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.'”:

From study design to dissemination of research, there are dozens of ways science can go off the rails. Many of the scientific studies that are published each year are poorly designed, redundant, or simply useless. Researchers looking into the problem have found that more than half of studies fail to take steps to reduce biases, such as blinding whether people receive treatment or placebo.

In an analysis of 300 clinical research papers about epilepsy — published in 1981, 1991, and 2001 — 71 percent were categorized as having no enduring value. Of those, 55.6 percent were classified as inherently unimportant and 38.8 percent as not new. All told, according to one estimate, about $200 billion — or the equivalent of 85 percent of global spending on research — is routinely wasted on flawed and redundant studies.

After publication, there’s the well-documented irreproducibility problem — the fact that researchers often can’t validate findings when they go back and run experiments again. Just last month, a team of researchers published the findings of a project to replicate 100 of psychology’s biggest experiments. They were only able to replicate 39 of the experiments, and one observer — Daniele Fanelli, who studies bias and scientific misconduct at Stanford University in California — told Nature that the reproducibility problem in cancer biology and drug discovery may actually be even more acute.

Indeed, another review found that researchers at Amgen were unable to reproduce 89 percent of landmark cancer research findings for potential drug targets. (The problem even inspired a satirical publication called the Journal of Irreproducible Results.)

So why aren’t these problems caught prior to publication of a study? Consider peer review, in which scientists send their papers to other experts for vetting prior to publication. The idea is that those peers will detect flaws and help improve papers before they are published as journal articles. Peer review won’t guarantee that an article is perfect or even accurate, but it’s supposed to act as an initial quality-control step.

Yet there are flaws in this traditional “pre-publication” review model: it relies on the goodwill of scientists who are increasingly pressed and may not spend the time required to properly critique a work, it’s subject to the biases of a select few, and it’s slow – so it’s no surprise that peer review sometimes fails. These factors raise the odds that even in the highest-quality journals, mistakes, flaws, and even fraudulent work will make it through. (“Fake peer review” reports are also now a thing.)

May 26, 2015

Nice guys really do finish last

Filed under: Business, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

At least, that’s what this article in The Atlantic by Jerry Useem says:

At the University of Amsterdam, researchers have found that semi-obnoxious behavior not only can make a person seem more powerful, but can make them more powerful, period. The same goes for overconfidence. Act like you’re the smartest person in the room, a series of striking studies demonstrates, and you’ll up your chances of running the show. People will even pay to be treated shabbily: snobbish, condescending salespeople at luxury retailers extract more money from shoppers than their more agreeable counterparts do. And “agreeableness,” other research shows, is a trait that tends to make you poorer. “We believe we want people who are modest, authentic, and all the things we rate positively” to be our leaders, says Jeffrey Pfeffer, a business professor at Stanford. “But we find it’s all the things we rate negatively”—like immodesty—“that are the best predictors of higher salaries or getting chosen for a leadership position.”

Pfeffer is concerned for his M.B.A. students: “Most of my students have a problem because they’re way too nice.”

He tells a story about a former student who visited his office. The young man had been kicked out of his start-up by — Pfeffer speaks the words incredulously — the Stanford alumni mentor he himself had invited into his company. Had there been warning signs?, Pfeffer asked. Yes, said the student. He hadn’t heeded them, because he’d figured the mentor was too big of a deal in Silicon Valley to bother meddling in his little affairs.

“What happens if you put a python and a chicken in a cage together?,” Pfeffer asked him. The former student looked lost. “Does the python ask what kind of chicken it is? No. The python eats the chicken. And that’s what she” — the alumni mentor — “does. She eats people like you for breakfast.”

In Grant’s framework, the mentor in this story would be classified as a “taker,” which brings us to a major complexity in his findings. Givers dominate not only the top of the success ladder but the bottom, too, precisely because they risk exploitation by takers. It’s a nuance that’s often lost in the book’s popular rendering. “I’ve become the nice-guys-finish-first guy,” he told me.

Give and Take seeks to pinpoint what, exactly, separates successful givers from “doormat” givers (the subtleties of which we will return to). But it does not consider what separates successful jerks, like Steve Jobs, from failed ones like … well, Steve Jobs, who was pushed out of his start-up by the mentor he’d recruited, in 1985.

The fact is, me-first behavior is highly adaptive in certain professional situations, just like selflessness is in others. The question is, why — and, for those inclined to the instrumental, how can you distinguish between the two?

May 22, 2015

QotD: Triggers and triggering

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

The thing is, triggering is a valid concept in psychology and counseling. But it has been swiped and used inappropriately.

The area I’m familiar with is Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), but it’s a useful concept in other areas, like PTSD. DID is what used to be called “multiple personality disorder.” Years ago I married a woman with DID. She was high functioning, but under stress, she started switching alters (terms of art). In other words, she started changing personalities. I didn’t know it at the time, so the behavior appeared either deliberate and purely evil, or it was some form of extreme psychosis. I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell. This is where a little knowledge on my part would have gone a long way.* It turns out I was triggering her. I know this in retrospect, having put the pieces together in the time since. I’m the one who increased her stress. My stark reactions to her behavior made her switching worse. I was, frankly, scared out of my wits, and my honest what the hell? responses were damaging. I was a machine gun of triggers. Worst of all, I eventually brought out her protection alters. These personalities will defend the ego at any cost. They lack empathy and, indeed, appear sociopathic. They have to. They have a job to do.

    * She didn’t tell me. Knowing what was going on — knowing about DID and triggering — would have allowed me to respond properly. The right way is to a) be attuned to the possibility of a switch and b) be polite and respectful when one arises and kindly explain to the “new personality” things like where you are, how you got there and, most importantly, that everything is okay. Here’s an example of when this would have been helpful: she switched in a grocery store checkout line once. She suddenly appeared surprised and bewildered to be standing there. She seemed amazed at her clothes. I didn’t know what was going on, but at least I didn’t say anything that time. My private reaction: “What the hell was that?” The best reaction would have been something like, “Hi, hon. We stopped by here on the way home from work. So glad it’s Friday. I’m looking forward to the cookout tonight.”

Another thing caring family members and friends can do is develop a mental list of potential triggers and try to avoid them. The point is, this is what the the concept of “triggering” is all about. This is who triggering is for. It’s for people who have serious medical issues. It’s not about the New Victorians and things that make them uncomfy, even if they do get the vapours on occasion.

The concept of triggering is for those who are close to a person who is hurting: family members, close friends, and mental health professionals. It is for when you are knowingly dealing with someone who has a problem. If you know a topic, a word, or an image that might cause someone difficulty, you can avoid it. Accordingly, trigger warnings are for known situations where sufferers might encounter common triggers, like if you’re conducting a seminar for people with PTSD or writing a book for people with DID. Triggering is not a concern for the general public. You and I do not have to worry about triggering some unknown person. There is no way to trigger-proof our entire culture on the chance you might affect a stranger with an emotional or mental problem. And there is absolutely no need to worry about triggering Social Justice Warrior snowflakes and prudes. No one has to walk on eggshells around them. They need to learn to own their feelings.

Speech police types who use triggering improperly to shut down speech are misguided. Opposing political views should be discussed. Comedy does not have to be anodyne. Stories and movies need not be bland, and we do not need to live in a way that kowtows to those with aggressively delicate sensibilities. Unless you’re dealing with a family member or a friend who has a real problem, say what you want to say. Don’t allow the speech police to make fun, free expression taboo.

rdbrewer, “Triggers and Triggering”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2015-05-13.

May 21, 2015

Jonathan Kay, ebike martyr

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Despite having become the editor-in-chief of The Walrus, poor Jonathan Kay suffers the slings and arrows of all those who condemn and ridicule his ridiculous choice of transportation ebike (especially from his own staff):

City planners think of transportation in terms of its logistical and infrastructural components. That’s also how the issue gets discussed in the context of, say, energy conservation and traffic management. But when it comes to the transportation products we actually buy, our utilitarian calculus is overwhelmed by our aesthetic biases. When the Segway scooter had its great reveal in 2001, few observers cared about its groundbreaking self-balancing technology. All they saw was a nerd standing upright, wearing a funny helmet.

It is a lesson I have learned again over the last year, at great cost in dignity and personal reputation, as I have motored around Toronto on an ebike — a zero-emission electric scooter that travels at speeds of up to 32 km/h. As I noted in an essay last year, ebikes combine the low cost and convenience of a bicycle, while allowing a user to get to work without an ounce of sweat or a stitch of lycra.

In a more perfect world, the streets of our cities would be humming with ebikes. But that is not the world we inhabit. After a year of evangelizing these fantastically useful, earth-friendly contraptions among my peer group, I’ve failed to gain a single new convert.

Just the opposite, in fact: I have become a figure of overt and willfully cruel mockery.

Jonathan Kay - ebike ad

May 20, 2015

Scuttled Soviet submarines in the Arctic

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Soviet Union had a remarkably casual approach to disposing of nuclear-powered submarines that were no longer useful in active service:

Russian scientists have made a worst-case scenario map for possible spreading of radionuclides from the wreck of the K-159 nuclear-powered submarine that sank twelve years ago in one of the best fishing areas of the Barents Sea.

Mikhail Kobrinsky with the Nuclear Safety Institute of the Russian Academy of Science says the sunken November-class submarine can’t stay at the seabed. The two reactors contain 800 kilos of spent uranium fuel.

The map shows expected spreading of radioactive Cs-137 from potential releases from the K-159 that still lays on the seabed northeast of Murmansk in the Barents Sea.

The map shows expected spreading of radioactive Cs-137 from potential releases from the K-159 that still lays on the seabed northeast of Murmansk in the Barents Sea.

At a recent seminar in Murmansk organized jointly by Russia’s nuclear agency Rosatom and the Norwegian environmental group Bellona, Kobrinsky presented the scenario map most fishermen in the Barents Sea would get nightmares by seeing.

Some areas could be sealed off for commercial fisheries for up to two years, Mikhail Kobrinsky explained.

Ocean currents would bring the radioactivity eastwards in the Barents Sea towards the inlet to the White Sea in the south and towards the Pechora Sea and Novaya Zemlya in the northeast.

May 18, 2015

Your diet isn’t working. And neither is yours. And yours, too.

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

In the Washington Post, Roberto A. Ferdman dishes the dirt on every diet guru’s most brilliant brain-fart … they don’t actually work.

For centuries, men and women have worked tirelessly to fit the physical molds of their time. Diets, which have ranged from the straightforward to the colorful and kind of silly, have produced a wide range of results — and all sorts of followings.

Not long ago, the Atkins diet villainized carbohydrates and convinced millions to avoid starches of any kind. Today, the Paleo diet, which purports to emulate the eating habits and digestive systems of ancient humans who lived for many fewer years than people on average do today, is perhaps the most popular — or at least talked about — dietary fad. Soon there will be another fad that sweeps the dieting conversation. And another one.

The question that seems to hover over all this diet talk is whether any of the myriad weight loss schemes have worked. If one had, shouldn’t it have survived the test of time? And if we’ve gone this long without a diet that has been shown to work — according to science, not simply the sellers of the fad — will one ever emerge that actually does?

The short answer is no, according to Traci Mann, who teaches psychology at the University of Minnesota and has been studying eating habits, self-control and dieting for more than 20 years. Over the course of her research, largely conducted at the University of Minnesota’s Health and Eating Lab, Mann has repeatedly asked these sorts of questions, and always found the same disappointing answers.

May 15, 2015

QotD: Portuguese genetics

Filed under: Europe, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

On the face of it it sounds like the nice narrative we are fed every time something like this happens. I haven’t been following the international scene, and frankly it wouldn’t even surprise me if Europe headed for nativism and blood-related nationality. It is what is at the basis of their nation states (even if it’s often a lie. For instance I’d hazard that a lot of people in Portugal — yes, d*mn it, I’ll do the DNA testing. Let the house sell and let me have some money first — are as mixed as Americans. My kids call Portugal the reservoir tip at the end of Europe, which is unkind but somewhat accurate since that portion of land was part of the Celtic commonwealth, before being invaded by Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Germanic tribes, Moors (though their contribution in the North is minimal as the North was usually administered by overseers with little or no actual colonization) French crusaders, Viking raiders. Then there were British and Irish merchants due to ties going back before the Carthaginians who would set up trading posts, send their younger sons over, sometimes engage in a bit of raiding, etc. There are unkind proverbs about blue eyed Portuguese, but there are also a lot of them. (Two of my grandparents. A third was green eyed.) And in the end sometimes I think all of us are the result of some girl who tripped (on purpose or not) while evading a foreigner. All this to say that when my dad talks of the “The Portuguese Race” (and boy, does he) he’s mostly talking of a mythical entity. But it’s one they all believe in as hard as they can.)

Sarah A. Hoyt, “Multiculturalism IS Racism”, According to Hoyt, 2015-04-04.

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