When stress affects your performance

10:58 not performing at your best when all eyes are on you. 

16:50 [In stressful situations] we're often very confident we've communicated clearly...but our ability to accurately gauge whether someone else actually  understood it is what gets diminished [when we're stressed]

20:30 We only have so much working memory...e.g. talking on cell phone while driving. 

23:00 when we've learned [a skill] so well that we're actually on autopilot, it's better not to focus on all the details. So sometimes our working memory can actually get in the way. e.g. walking down the stairs quickly, but if asked to concentrate on how you move your knee while doing it, you are more likely to fall. 

24:35 the key is to have brain power at your disposal, but be able to turn it off when that brain power is a problem

36:00 Exposure to the stressor makes you better able to handle the stress. 

38:10 reinterpret adrenaline-based symptoms (sweaty palms, racing heart) as a sign you're going to thrive

39:49 reminding yourself why you should succeed - I'm the best person for this. Even if everyone in the room is smarter than me, I know my material better than anyone else. 

40:43 Ensure that you use procedural memory rather than your working memory to carry out a task you've already mastered. Give your mind unimportant things to do - counting backwards, sing a song, focus on the 3 take-home points of your lecture...focusing on your breathing... Anything that takes your mind off over-analyzing every aspect of what you're doing can be really important. 

Do something totally different right before the stressful event. 

44:50 When children learn activities they're thinking in a more automatic fashion... Protected from being able to unpack it in a way that disrupts their performance. 

49:27 Ability is way more widespread than opportunity. 

https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/stage-fright/

Solar charger for RV - do I need PMW or MPPT charging controller?

Pulse width modulation (PWM) charge controllers send out a series of short pulses to charge the battery instead of a steady output. It continually checks the battery status and uses the data to send appropriately-timed and -sized energy pulses. These energy pulses essentially limit the amount of charge that is sent to the batteries

A PWM controller will send a [small] pulse to the battery every few seconds in a fully charged battery with no load. But it would send long, continuous pulses to a discharged battery.

As your battery approaches full charge, a PWM controller slowly reduces the power volume entering the battery. It will continue to supply a small trickle charge to keep the battery topped off after it’s full. 

Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) charge controllers are more sophisticated. They convert the solar panel’s high voltage power output to a lower voltage. Doing so means your batteries can charge safely, and your devices can access peak power. 

So MPPT controllers ensure the output meets the battery’s voltage requirements and that the charge is efficient.

In addition to being a DC-DC voltage converter the MPPT does something very special that its name is derived from, "maximum power point tracking.' What this means is that the MPPT device analyzes the solar panels and determines what the perfect operating voltage should be to maximize power output. It then holds the panels at that and thus increases that panel output. This technology can improve solar panel performance by 30% over a PWM controller... the maximum power point of a solar panel will change depending on light and temperature conditions. 

MPPT charge controllers provide greater control in large systems. They’re as much as 30% more efficient than PWM controllers in these applications. They can use the maximum output from your solar panels, while PWM charge controllers cannot. 

PWM controllers’ efficiency rating is anywhere from 65-85% and often depends on weather conditions. On the other hand, MPPT controllers give you optimal efficiency from your solar array at all times, even in cooler climates. 

https://mortonsonthemove.com/what-is-an-rv-solar-charge-controller/

AI creates movies from still images

 

3:50 "...essentially this ensures that finer details [of the image] move together in the inner thinking of the neural network. This is an excellent lesson on how a small and carefully designed architectural change can have a huge effect on the results."

Overdub

This subscription service ($12/mo) allows you to edit audio with a computer generated likeness of your voice ( a "deep fake") so you don't have to re-record edits of audio tracks.

https://www.descript.com/overdub

https://youtu.be/-7x3CbbR-ns

Digital legacy after we die

What Should Happen to Our Data When We Die? https://nyti.ms/3kONmFd

"And obviously, if you're dead, you can't consent,"

"Facebook could have 4.9 billion deceased users by the century's end...'What do we do with the Facebook profiles of the past generation?'"

"...on the genealogy site MyHeritage, visitors can animate family photos of relatives long dead, essentially creating innocuous but uncanny deepfakes, for free"

Old farts

Increased farting with age can be due to lactase deficiency, medications, anal sphincter weakness, or weight gain, as outlined here. https://www.aarp.org/disrupt-aging

 

I think one's colon becomes stiffer with age due to loss of elasticity, and becomes less compliant and able to hold on to the gas - so it has to escape.

Here's an electron microscopy study showing the decrease in tissue elasticity with age, due to decreased cross linking of elastin and other changes : https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/331278

Here's proof that older people have less elastin in their spinal discs. 

Age-related changes of elastin content in human intervertebral discs.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8026603/

Old rats have weaker collagen than young ones: 

Age-related alterations in the strength and collagen content of left colon in rats.

"hydroxyproline content and hydroxyproline concentration in old rats were increased by 36% and 26%, respectively, compared with young rats" 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00341292

 

 

Get Flexible Hamstrings Without Stretching

https://youtu.be/KdaRZ3dmbyo

American Masters: Wyeth

Really enjoyed this retrospective on Andrew Wyeth [Amazon Prime link below] - it gives new depth and insight into his works. Here are a few excerpts:

Christina's World

1:00 There something very odd about his paintings in that all the air is sucked out. There is no atmosphere. If you think of Christina's World and the little house away in the distance, in real life that would be foggy...blurry...[the pristine clarity] gives you a sense of strange isolation. 

Karl's room, Kuerner's

1:01 He liked to turn his paintings upside down, and judge the composition, and if it didn't [retain] the sense of composition then it wasn't yet a great painting. 

Groundhog day

1:04: "the strange story of the dog...the log outside with that [impression] of fangs [on its jagged cut edge] became that dog so I could eliminate the dog... There's this scary log outside the window...That sense of violence... is part of the restlessness in this painting...in one sense this painting is so serene, and yet at the same time there are these unsettling aspects that can't really be explained, and they're part of that distillation of how he came to make this image." 

Thin Ice

1:05 the qualities that Wyeth possesses, and the way he perceived life and death - his essence - may actually be closer to the Japanese sensibility... In Japan, there is a line in the famous classic Hojoki, " The flow of the river is incessant, and yet the water is never the same." Meaning all things are constantly changing and transient... The kind of esthetic they honor in they're artists... He sits quietly with nature...in the constant change there is beauty to be enjoyed. 

https://watch.amazon.com/detail?gti=amzn1.dv.gti.06b2bfba-1c7b-ea04-e45a-f25a7db29b92&ref_=atv_dp_share_mv&r=web

Advice on boondocking [i.e. parking an RV anywhere outside a designated RV park]

Neighborhoods: The key is to find neighborhoods in which a large vehicle with out-of-state plates will not attract attention and to not overstay your welcome. 

Harvest hosts - annual fee of $99. Of the campers we met who had stayed with a Harvest Host, the reviews were positive. The sites are often not scenic — just the parking lot. 

General camping apps, such as The Dyrt , Freecampsites, or Campendium, are great for identifying all kinds of potential campsites — public, private, designated, or dispersed, fee or free.

HipCamp is another app that doesn't focus on free camping, but inexpensive options. Like Airbnb, it connects property owners willing to share their turf with campers.

A hard copy map of all the public land...can be found at ranger's stations, information centers, even gas stations...

People: Park rangers are your friends. They can tell you where to camp, and how long you can camp. Visitor information greeters are gold. 

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/07/14/lifestyle/sleep-anywhere-van-think-again/

Wilderness

"Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life. The wilderness idea is an intangible and spiritual resource, absolutely essential to the very philosophy and character of the American people. Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed…One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world." - Wallace Stegner, author of the famous 1961 Wilderness Letter which directly influenced Congress's Wilderness Act of 1964. 

Release Neck & Shoulder Tension in 30 seconds: no stretching

https://youtu.be/qx6D-qGI6wg

Slowly elevating and holding the shoulder up reminds your brain how much tension is in your shoulders, and the act of relaxing that tension as you lower the shoulder helps remind you to stop holding tension in your shoulders. 

Lifetime Free 1st Class Air Travel Pass: A Disaster

https://youtu.be/9fcH6-WQUAw

Too bad they don't still offer this! What a huge loss for the airline - and all because of 2 people.

Allergic Reactions to COVID-19 Vaccine

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7002e1.htm

"11.1 cases per million doses" 

Do humans get malaise for a reason?

I'm having some malaise today after my second shingles vaccine, and the thought struck me that malaise may have an evolutionary basis in decreasing mobility of sick individuals to limit spread of infectious disease, or perhaps even to slow down sick prey so they (and their genes) are culled from the herd. 

Sure enough, someone has theorized this. It took me down a wormhole to, believe it or not, autism and Neanderthals. 

"there is a method to the madness, beginning with the need to survive in a hostile microbial environment in ancestral times, and ultimately resulting in the legacy of an inflammatory bias which when triggered or fostered by environmental conditions can lead to a host of maladies that are overrepresented in the modern world including allergic disorders, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and neuropsychiatric disorders..." 

"From the behavioral side, reorganization of priorities to fighting infection and wound healing requires reduced exploratory behavior...as well as hypervigilance against future attack...Thus, as the immune and nervous systems developed hand-in-hand through evolutionary time, it should not be surprising that one of the consequences of our bias to inflammatory responses is a vulnerability to behavioral disorders that are coupled to inflammation including reduced exploratory behavior in the form of depression and hypervigilance in the form of anxiety. In support of this notion are recent data indicating that depression risk [genes] are regularly associated with immune responses to infection that were likely to enhance survival in the ancestral environment..."

"the infection-defense hypothesis not only incorporates the above noted advantages of energy conservation through the depressive symptoms of anhedonia, social withdrawal, fatigue and psychomotor retardation but also invokes the impact of depressive behaviors on reducing exposure to further challenge from infectious or other environmental stressors as well as decreasing the spread of infection to social conspecifics..."

"depression is associated with decreased concentrations of oxytocin...a molecule believed to be intimately involved in social relationships, thereby reducing the spread of infection through inhibitory effects on molecular pathways that mediate social attachment..."

"healthy volunteers administered endotoxin and typhoid vaccination have revealed that in the context of an inflammatory stimuli, multiple brain regions are involved in behavioral change including the basal ganglia and limbic regions..."

The paper goes on to elaborate on the links between infection/inflammation in early childhood and subsequent depression, schizophrenia, and autism. 

Malaise, Melancholia and Madness: The Evolutionary Legacy of an Inflammatory Bias

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3678371/

One more curious fact in this paper, that we get our immune prowess from Neanderthals: "data suggest that European and Asian peoples were the beneficiaries of a critical immunologic boost through interbreeding with Neanderthals...genes derived from Neanderthals* that cluster in the human major histocompatibility locus and are associated with a more aggressive immune response to pathogens including viruses."

*  I also didn't realize that actual Neanderthal DNA has been found and sequenced. "DNA extracted from Late Pleistocene remains make its study challenging. The DNA is invariably degraded to a small average size of less than 200 base pairs" - https://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5979/710.full

And the extent of Neanderthal DNA in our genome has been extrapolated by statistical means "They developed a statistical approach to identify genetic signatures suggestive of Neanderthal ancestry in the genomes of 379 European and 286 East Asian individuals." - https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.the-scientist.com/features/neanderthal-dna-in-modern-human-genomes-is-not-silent-66299/amp

A good discussion of the science of Neanderthal DNA from the Smithsonian included this interesting discovery: " Because Neanderthals likely evolved outside of Africa (no Neanderthal fossils have been found in Africa to date) it was thought that there would be no trace of Neanderthal DNA in African modern humans. However, a study in 2020 demonstrated that there is Neanderthal DNA in all African Homo sapiens (Chen at el., 2020). This is a good indicator of how human migration out of Africa worked: that Homo sapiens did not leave Africa in one or more major dispersals, but that there was gene flow back and forth over time that brough Neanderthal DNA into Africa."

https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-and-neanderthals

Also from that article, both Neanderthals and humans developed pale skin: " Vitamin D is synthesized when the sun’s UV rays penetrate our skin... Therefore, it would be beneficial for populations in colder climates to have paler skin so that they can create enough vitamin D even with less sun exposure."

NVIDIA’s GANCraft AI

https://youtu.be/jl0XCslxwB0

Using AI to generate a realistic gaming world from simple inputs. The level of detail is amazing, and the ability to transition the lighting is impressive too.