A Brief History of Obesity: Truths and Illusions

Playing Scrabble, I encountered the Scottish word "sonsy,"* meaning plump and buxom, which comes from the Gaelic for "good fortune."

That triggered me to look up the history of obesity, formerly associated with opulence and success in the middle ages, yet now more shameful. It turns out that obesity has undergone vicissitudes from aspiration to derision. Even Hippocrates knew that exercise was the antidote to the ills of obesity.  Here are some excerpts from an article: 

"The history of obesity includes a variety of tribal customs, such as fattening up young girls and women to make them more desirable...."

"figurines, dated to about 25,000 B.C....Some have theorized that it represented a fertility symbol, an idolization of beauty or desirability, an object of worship or a totem for good fortune."

"However, the Old Testament, the New Testament, early Christian writings and the Talmud regard obesity negatively... Proverbs 23:20: "Be not among drunkards or among gluttonous eaters of meat.""

"The recognition that obesity was an impediment to good health and longevity is documented in the writings of ancient Greece, Egypt and India." 

"It is very injurious to health to take in more food than the constitution will bear when, at the same time one uses no exercise to carry off this excess. ..."(Hippocratic Corpus)."

"Hindu physicians... noted in the second century B.C. that black ants were attracted to "honey urine." [presumably diabetes] Hippocrates stated: "Corpulency is not only a disease, but the harbinger of others. Those who are constitutionally very fat are more apt to die quickly than those who are thin""

"After the fall of Rome...scholarship [was] confined to monk archivists...medicine lagged behind, and the conceptualization that obesity was in essence a malignancy ceased to be recognized. In certain societies, obesity was often considered a privilege of the upper classes. In fact, it was obviously considered beautiful, as the Rubenesque obese female nudes demonstrated."

https://www.clinicaloncology.com/Current-Practice/Article/07-18/A-Brief-History-of-Obesity-Truths-and-Illusions/51221

*The Scrabble word was actually "sonsier," since in Scrabble you're often trying to use up the letter "i."

Emotional ambivalence spurs creativity

Although being ambivalent has been shown to diminish people's perception of your character,  experiments have shown that:

24:00 Feeling emotional ambivalence makes you cognitively more flexible

24:50 "when we shut down ambivalence, we start to prioritize decisiveness over accuracy" 

https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/the-benefits-of-mixed-emotions/

Committee that approves emojis - LA Times

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-emoji-q-and-a-20160125-htmlstory.html

"the Unicode Consortium, which is largely a volunteer effort..." 

"Our main focus is supporting the languages of the world, such as Chinese characters, Japanese characters, Cyrillic letters and others. We have roughly 7,000 characters slated for release this year, and roughly 70 are emoji." 

"We look at the expected frequency that the emoji is going to be used. That's a very strong factor. We also look at whether it's needed to flesh out an existing set."

Woodturning Coffee Spoons

https://youtu.be/eOU7a1iQC2Y

I didn't know you could turn resin on a lathe with something embedded inside. A remarkable result. 

Tom Scott: my robot double.

https://youtu.be/uXlQuTRSmzc

His wordless reaction at 6:11 is so telling. 

6:21 "this is such a surreal experience" 

AI Makes DeepFakes better

https://youtu.be/4lQkQSmA8nA

1:29 "temporal coherence" means the AI engine remembers how it manipulated previous images so it can produce a consistent effect on subsequent images. 

Deep Dive Inside Gigafactory Texas

https://youtu.be/pqf55JLc6t0

This self-congratulatory peacocking video is a little much...but makes some interesting points and incredible claims. 

  

Elon compares his factory to a computer chip - achieving better efficiency by putting all functions on one "chip"

8:44 "we've made the world's largest casting machine work very efficiently to create and radically simplify the manufacturing of the vehicle" - making the main  structure out of 3 parts is revolutionary

9:47 "half a million units per year in a single factory is the biggest of anything in the world." 

Inheritance | Radiolab | WNYC Studios

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/inheritance-2204

If your grandfather suffered near starvation between ages 9-12, his children and grandchildren have stunningly lower risk of serious diseases like diabetes and heart disease. That's because it's the age when spermatogenesis happens, and epigenetic changes occur that are passed on. 

Act 3 is a really thought-provoking look at a program to pay drug-addicted mothers to be sterilized. It's a really polarized debate. Some people think it's good to prevent pregnancies that are unwanted and babies that start life in drug withdrawal. Others feel it borders on Nazism to control reproduction when there are some drug-addicted mothers who later become great mothers of good kids. 

Dealing with grief

The Kubler- Ross "stages of grief" don't help the grieving person, and  aren't actually substantiated by science. What matters more is how you deal effectively with grief and get beyond it. 

Ask yourself continually "Will this thought or activity actually help out hinder my healing to move on with my life?" 

Hunt the good stuff: find out what thoughts or activities actually help you feel better and gravitate to those

"Accept the good" - you will have negative thoughts, but when you find a good thought accept it and embrace it. 

https://hidden-brain.simplecast.com/episodes/healing-your-heart-KpF6ftN9

Deadliest Roads Congo

https://youtu.be/coyaVoVkhVw

A desperate situation where the government refuses to repair roads that are ridiculously difficult to pass, taking days to go 20 miles, and filled with corruption.

Re: Africa's Plan to Bring Chocolate Profits Home

https://youtu.be/gCicz3H-5k4

Sadly, farmers in Côte D'Ivoire and Ghana, Africa's main chocolate producers, live in poverty and see less than 2% of the profits from selling chocolate. Refining and manufacturing chocolate locally would create jobs and keep more profits locally, but like many African products the raw materials are sent offshore. 

WIND FARM ASSEMBLY

https://youtu.be/RqdE53JhJ4E

Massive machinery and millimeter precision

31:35 "wind is the adversary." The conundrum is that wind makes erecting the tower difficult (must be < 12m/s or 26 mph) yet wind farms are deliberately placed in windy locations.

Are birds immune to hot pepper, enabling them to eat vast amounts and spread the seeds?

"...While mammals will avoid food containing as little as 100-1000 parts per million (ppm) of capsaicin, birds will readily consume up to at least 20,000 ppm (mind, we're talking food that's 2% pure capsaicin here). The difference seems to be that bird receptor cells are largely insensitive to capsaicin."

"The reason chilies incorporate capsaicin in their fruits (and red/green peppers of course are fruits in a botanical sense, not vegetables) seems to be to ensure that their seeds are dispersed properly. When small birds consume the fruits of wild peppers the seeds pass through the gut undigested and, due to the birds' flight range, are deposited in distant places where they can grow with less competition. If the fruits were consumed by larger mammals the seeds would either be digested, or deposited much closer to the parent plant." 

https://www.straightdope.com/21342997/are-birds-immune-to-hot-pepper-enabling-them-to-eat-vast-amounts-and-spread-the-seeds

Not only that, but passing through the bird's gut actually helps the seeds germinate better: 

"... Researchers conducted feeding trials with captive birds to obtain gut-passed seeds. The seeds then underwent planting trials to determine how they performed compared to seeds that hadn't passed through birds." 

https://phys.org/news/2018-02-birds-rare-wild-chili-peppers.html

A Cure For Diabetes

https://youtu.be/E5bacxqobwY

Stem cell-derived islet cells implanted in the body can renew insulin synthesis, a potential "cure" for diabetes, but their subsequent destruction by the immune system (an underlying mechanism for diabetes in the first place) has to be controlled, either by immunosuppressive therapy, or encapsulating the cells beyond the immune system's detection or reach. 

Study: Airbags Can Turn Phones into Dangerous Projectiles

I've wondered about this: 

"Each time, the cellphone hit the dummy in the neck or square in the face." 

I've wondered about this. 

https://www.41nbc.com/study-airbags-can-turn-phones-into-dangerous-projectiles/

"The traffic division of the Dallas Police Department says its seeing a lot of minor accidents that are more serious than they should have been."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.clickondetroit.com