Free Books On My iPad

[and you shall know them by the badness of their malts...]

Saw a rumor that the entire Project Gutenberg library will be freely available from the iPad bookstore, which would be fantastic. My first NeXT workstation in the early 90s had the Shakespeare plays pre-installed (for no good reason, but it was cool), so this would definitely be in keeping.

I have to assume the guy writing a heartfelt treatise on brewing never expected me to be reading a non-print copy nearly 300 years later...

The many Inhabitants of Cities and Towns, as well as Travellers, that have for a long time suffered great Prejudices from unwholsome and unpleasant Beers and Ales, by the badness of Malts, underboiling the Worts, mixing injurious Ingredients, the unskilfulness of the Brewer, and the great Expense that Families have been at in buying them clogg'd with a heavy Excise, has moved me to undertake the writing of this Treatise on Brewing, Wherein I have endeavour'd to set in sight the many advantages of Body and Purse that may arise from a due Knowledge and Management in Brewing Malt Liquors, which are of the greatest Importance, as they are in a considerable degree our Nourishment and the common Diluters of our Food; so that on their goodness depends very much the Health and Longevity of the Body.

Avoiding Irony Deficiency

Irony is a virus. Early exposure is crucial for health later in life. An irony deficiency can have dire consequences if left untreated too long. Best results are seen when exposing children to irony. Overly sterile environments can be detrimental. Ideally irony exposure starts at home at a young age. Often groups of children will develop irony at roughly the same time, but if someone in your child's social group catches irony early, it can be a good idea to schedule an irony party, allowing other neighborhood children to get enough exposure to their infected friends to get a healthy inoculation.

Weird Lower-Leg Cramping

I have strange lower-leg cramping -- calves, feet, toes -- only at night and only after either drinking alcohol or eating lots of sugar. The only thing that seems common between the two would be my liver (since fructose and alcohol are metabolized similarly in the liver), but how my liver would have some sort of neuromuscular impact on my lower legs while sleeping is beyond me.

I see no plausibility for the usual (mostly half-assed) explanations for cramps such as "dehydration" or deficiency of magnesium or potassium or "electrolytes". Very odd. The obvious solution, which I practice most days, is to simply neither eat sugar nor drink. Still, it's an odd one.

Scrubs == Mash

My 12-yr-old and his buddies love Scrubs. I enjoy it a lot. Nice and goofy. I only belatedly realized that for him it's basically what Mash was for me & my friends.

Personal Trainers

I get a kick out of watching the personal trainers do their thing at the club. They seem to operate out of the same playbook. The current script is to do something with kettlebells (lots of kettlebell swings), something with a box, and to do some mini squats in the cage with a barbell. The latter is especially clever because most of the people getting personal training would never approach a barbell or cage. I'm not sure why the trainers don't teach them actual squats. They put a barbell across the back and half them bend the knees just a little then back up. Makes me think of Tugg Speedman in Tropic Thunder, to the little kid with the stick figure: "I will call you... Half Squat." But they aren't even half squats. More like quarter squats.

In January the trendy trainer exercise was to get people to crouch on an inverted hemisphere. "For skiing", I bet. I saw a poster advertising the imminent arrival of some sort of weighted tube with handles that promises to be the next excellent exercise accessory. Looks like one of the battering rams cops use on doors. Can't wait to see that in action.

Health Care Reform In The USA

The health care reform that has just passed in the US is mainly concerned with insurance reform. It doesn't turn the US into Canada or the UK. It does make the US a lot more like Switzerland (or, oddly enough, Massachusetts). I find this interesting since I lived in Switzerland for a couple of years. I have never lived in Massachusetts, although I have seen nearly every episode of Cheers.

In Switzerland about twenty years ago insurance companies started pulling the same shenanigans they were pulling in the US -- aggressively dumping people off their coverage, expanding denial for "pre-existing conditions", that sort of thing. The Swiss shortly got annoyed and about 15 years ago enacted reform that cleaned up insurance practices and made insurance mandatory, along with public and subsidy provisions. The measure was passed by referendum. [Switzerland is much more of a democracy than the US, which is not always a good thing.] Private healthcare in Switzerland is still going strong and by all measures I can see, including anecdotal first-hand experience for myself and my family (we had private insurance), the overall system is of good quality.

The UK, on the other hand, seems to have adopted a typical "worst of both worlds" approach, trying to get the worst of capitalism and the worst of socialism and combining them, with the best will in the world, to yield something that kind of works, kind of fails, and is in perpetual CRISIS. From personal experience and observation, if you've got decent private insurance and/or enough money to pay for private healthcare, you can get fantastic quality care in the UK. If you are poor, you'll do much better for healthcare in the UK than in the US. The group that would really be better off in the US than the UK is the subset of the middle class that don't have private insurance through work, but likely would in the US doing equivalent jobs. But, seriously, if anyone's thinking of big-time reform, the UK would not be on the shortlist of models to emulate.

France, though, is a different story. I have never lived in France but by all accounts the quality of care is very good from top to bottom. For full universal health care with public options but still allowing private hospitals and doctors in private practice (I am more than happy for good doctors to get wealthy, it's an important job and they've earned it), France would top my shortlist.

Comparing Switzerland, France, and the US*:

• %GDP spent on healthcare is substantially higher in the US than in either France or Switzerland
  
• Total spent per capita on healthcare is substantially higher in the US than in either France or Switzerland
• despite percentage of costs covered by the government being lower in the US, per capita public expenditure is higher in the US than in either France or Switzerland
• life expectancy at birth, infant mortality rates, and some other gross markers of health are better in France and in Switzerland than in the US
• both France and Switzerland have substantially higher ratios of practicing physicians/population than the US
• Switzerland has more nurses per capita than the US, but the US has more than France

It will be interesting to see how this evolves in the US over the next decade or two.


*These numbers, and lots of others, along with pointers to the more comprehensive full report, available here.

Conditioning Upkeep & Decline

Per plan, I've scaled way back on the running this year after a hugely gratifying New Year's Day 10k race. I've stuck with weight training, not as often as I'd like, given demands of the new job, but usually hitting my 3x/wk target. My strength has measurably improved. I've not been able to run at least once a week as hoped, but have gotten out occasionally. It's surprising how rapidly sport-specific fitness declines, in particular endurance. Thirteen weeks ago I put in a 22k run, but now I wouldn't be able to get close to that. Interestingly, my pace is still ok. I just did a short tempo run, covering just over 6k in 30 minutes. But the ability to sustain that same pace for a further 60 or even 30 minutes is gone.

Anniversary Dinner

Second time I've been to Boundary, and it was even better than the first time. Just a fantastic meal! Started with oysters: english rocks, french rocks, english natives. All fine, but the english natives were winners by knockout. Then sauteed foie gras, lovingly seared in butter and served with some poached rhubarb, with just enough sweetness and sharpness to offset the rich, silky indulgence of the perfectly cooked liver. My mains was trotter, sweetbreads, and morels -- pig's foot magically slow-cooked to leave everything fork-tender but still full of rich porky flavor, stuffed with sweetbreads and complimented by morels in a reduction sauce. Dessert was St. Emilion au Chocolat, which was like the richer, denser, tastier, smarter, over-achieving cousin of a dark chocolate mousse. They even got the espresso right. Heartily recommended.

Innumeracy In The Medical Community

Sigh. Dr. Davis recently blogged ostensible evidence that butter has an "unusual ability to provoke insulin responses", which will trigger weight gain, "because of butter's insulin-triggering effect, doubling or tripling insulin responses (postprandial area-under-the-curve)."

Doubling or tripling post-prandial insulin AUC? OK, I'm intrigued. So I read the study.

The insulin AUC numbers from the study are as follows

19960 +- 2766 control*

27970 +- 2107 VEFO
29619 +- 4975 MUFA
34749 +- 1167 HPSO
37582 +- 4364 SFA (butter!)

*And here's a really important detail: the "control" meal has no fat at all, and is not isocaloric with the test meals. "the macronutrient profile was as follows: 72% fat, 22% carbohydrate, and 6% protein (see Table S1 under "Supplemental data" in the online issue). The subjects also consumed the same test meal containing no fat as a control meal". So the butter test meal has nearly 4x as many calories as the control meal. The AUC for insulin between the two is about double for the butter, but that seems like a useless measure.

Comparing like-for-like, the spread between average insulin AUC for butter meal and the isocaloric alternate fat meals shows the butter to be about 34% higher than VEFO and only 8% higher than HPSO.

8% above the nearest non-butter meal is not "doubling or tripling".


P.S. A few further notes.
(1) Quick search of pubmed turns up a few interesting things: one, papers contradicting this study, when isocaloric meals were tested (but seems like potatoes are a popular choice for carbs instead of wheat flour used by Dr. Davis's cited study). Here's an example: "Differential effect of unsaturated oils and butter on blood glucose and insulin response to carbohydrate in normal volunteers"
(2) Studies like this all seem to be studying responses of fat + carbs. Not sure how relevant this is if you don't eat a lot of carbs.


P.P.S. Peter at Hyperlipid has a more thorough piece on this, in his typical hilarious-yet-rigorous style ("FFAs do not pop in to existence merely to prove that butter is going to kills us through obesity")

Insult to Injury

This disclaimer was at the bottom of an online menu. Cheaper to not get sick I guess.

The consumption of raw or undercooked seafood may increase the risk of foodborne illness. A discretionary 12.5% service charge will be added to your bill.

Guinness Is Good For You

After the most consistently cold London winter I've experienced, the weather's warmed slightly, the days are longer, and the sun's been out. At lunch this week there have been crowds of businessmen outside pubs with pints. I find this reassuring and civilized. It's a shame that most places in the US feel they can't trust people to drink outside. It's not even close to being warm, but tonight being St. Patrick's the crowds outside were larger (although it's not that big of a deal here, certainly not like it is in the states), and I even caught some live music from a pub with open windows. Yeah, it might barely be 50F out, but not many jackets being worn.

In honor of pubs and what passes for spring, here's my favorite Guinness ad. I remember seeing this in the 90s, grabbed it as an avi off someone's share as I recall. Back before videos were so accessible on the web. Guinness has had an astonishing run of memorable ads in print and vid, eh? Must be the beer.

Repeating Myself In The USA

Cars are oversized.
People are oversized.
Americans really dress like slobs in restaurants. <--I am an old coot.
On the plus side, service is really good.

Editing Goldacre

I like Ben Goldacre a lot but I find him a bit hard to read sometime, because of the writing, not the content. His energetic, digressive style works well extemporaneously but doesn't translate well to writing. His essays more often than not leave me a bit confused. His recent article on smoking and alzheimer's (or is it on the source of evidence? or is it on media coverage?) is an example: some good points in the wrong order, a typical goldacre apparent subject-switch right at the end, and a couple side remarks injected into the mix. The article is worth reading, but I took a 2-minute stab at editing it. I like my edit better. Here's Goldacre, remixed:

In Nazi Germany two researchers, Schairer and Schöniger, worked on biological theories of degenerate behaviour under Professor Karl Astel, who helped organise the operation that murdered 200,000 mentally and physically disabled people. In 1943 those same researchers published a well-conducted study demonstrating a relationship between smoking and lung cancer. Their paper wasn't mentioned in the classic Doll and Bradford Hill paper of 1950, it was referred to only four times in the 60s, once in the 70s, and then not again until 1988, despite providing a valuable early warning on a killer that would cause 100 million early deaths in the 20th century. It's not obvious what you do with evidence from untrustworthy sources, but it's always worth appraising its untrustworthiness with the best tools available.

You've probably heard that smoking may prevent Alzheimer's. It comes up in the papers[1], sometimes to say it is true, sometimes to say it has been refuted. Maybe you think it's a mixed bag, that "experts are divided". Perhaps you smoke, and joke about how it will stop you losing your marbles.

This month, Janine Cataldo and colleagues publish a systematic review on the subject, but with a very interesting twist. First they found all the papers ever published on smoking and Alzheimer's, using an explicit search strategy which they describe properly in the paper – because they are scientists, not homeopaths – to make sure that they found all of the evidence, rather than just the studies they already knew about, or the ones which flattered their preconceptions.

They found 43 in total, and overall, smoking significantly increases your risk of Alzheimer's. But they went further. Eleven of the studies were written by people with affiliations to the tobacco industry. This wasn't always declared, so to double check, the researchers searched on the University of California's Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, a vast collection of scanned material which has been gathered over decades of legal action [2].

How much did it matter if the researchers worked for the tobacco companies? A lot: the risks of Alzheimer's associated with smoking reported by these papers were on average about a third lower than those conducted by others, and they produced many papers showing cigarettes were protective. If you exclude these 11 papers, and look only at the remainder, your chances of getting Alzheimer's are vastly higher: comparing a smoker against a non-smoker, the odds are higher by 1.72 to 1.

[pithy conclusion here, please]

-----------

[1] If the media were actuarial about drawing our attention to the causes of avoidable death, newspapers would be filled with diarrhoea, Aids and cigarettes every day. In reality we know this is an absurd idea. For those interested in the scale of our fascination with rarity, one piece of research looked at a period in 2002 and found that 8,571 people had to die from smoking to generate one story on the subject from the BBC, while there were three stories for every death from vCJD.

[2] If you ever want to spend a chilling afternoon in the head of an industry whose product has been proven to kill a third of its customers, this is the place for you. "The importance of younger adults" uses financial modelling to explain the importance of recruiting teenage smokers to replace the dying older ones before it's too late, and explains that "repeated government studies have shown less than one third of smokers start after age 18 [and] only 5% of smokers start after age 24." "Youth cigarette – new concepts" from Marketing Innovations Inc takes these ideas further, into cola and apple flavour cigarettes, because "apples connote goodness and freshness".

Profit-Taking

Speaking of ginormous balls, Matt Taibbi's article on the wall-street profits is well worth reading. Although it pains me, I have to defend the traders here a little bit. If the government presents, repeatedly, opportunities for them to make risk-free money, they have to take it. They just can't help but do it. You can't really expect traders to have any social conscience or to ponder the greater good or, really, to spend even a microsecond on the question of whether they have any human social responsibility whatsoever. It's unrealistic to expect them to act as if they were humans with moral and ethical considerations, even ones that are suppressed and ignored. "Ethics" is only considered with respect to a calculus of financial gain or loss. Morality doesn't even come into it. It is as purely amoral (and thus, arguably, as purely immoral) as an industry can be.

These are creatures who are exceedingly good at gaming anything -- figuring out where the chances to game exactly live, in a changing environment, and taking advantage as quickly as possible. That's all they do, and they do it to make money. At an individual level, there is huge upside reward potential and minimal or zero downside risk. At an institutional level, "too big to fail" means relatively small downside potential and huge upside potential. Private profit, public loss. That they usually get to write many of the rules helps, too. So if the government loans them money for free then offers to borrow it back not for free, why be surprised when they do it? If the government decides to sponsor purchases of toxic assets in a way that will raise market value for those, why be surprised when banks start buying them to resell or revalue and make profit?

They can no more resist than our pet carp can resist when we drop a couple food sticks into the water. Investment banks have repeatedly made it clear they are not fully functioning members of society. Why keep treating them as such in the hopes they'll rise to expectations?

The Seduction of Squats

Since starting some weightlifting, in a fairly light, not-at-all hardcore approach, I can appreciate more the lifter mentality. It's a great workout, and, for me, driving [little girlie bits of] iron is much more gratifying than using machines. I love squats. I'm only a novice at them -- I do goblet squats and haven't gone beyond sets with 30kg (yes, little mini baby starter squats) -- but I can appreciate the squat mentality and find this video funny and accurate.

I saw this at conditioning research, which references some good reasons I might want to tone down my enthusiasm for weighted squats before too long. When I can do bulgarian split squats with 100kg across my shoulders, I'll let you know.

Hockey

I love international football (soccer) -- world cup, euro cup -- but have a hard time getting into the professional sport as a fan because it's kind of boring. What hockey (ice hockey) really adds is that possibility of scoring. It's the potential that adds tension and excitement. I watched a bit of NHL in 1991 by virtue of having free cable for some reason in my apartment in Chicago. Years later I went to a blackhawks game at the (then) new united center. I can't get past the fighting. It totally ruins it for me.

It's a great sport -- looks awesome in HD, has (like baseball) wonderful sounds, fast, elegant, bruising but without all the stops in play of NFL. I watched some men's and women's hockey during the olympics and was reminded how beautiful the game can be. I just can't abide the fighting in the pro game. It's not done in the international game or the college game. It's an easily solvable problem. Fix that and I'm in.

Double Cream

I love the stuff. I keep some at work for coffee. A woman the other day "caught" me using it and started chuckling and smiling and going on about how "naughty" I was being. Naughty? Like I was stealing spoonfuls of a coworker's soup, or doing something illicit in the supply cabinet? I wondered what she ate, since she was not obese but certainly not slim and probably in a near-constant state of neurosis about food choices that most women are socialized into now. What's for breakfast? But I didn't ask. I simply and truthfully stated, without apologizing, that I love double cream, leaving her envious.

I don't understand the "guilt" about food choices. While I believe that eating involves all kinds of moral choices (e.g. if my double-cream came from cows whipped with barb wire daily, milked by 5-yr-old slave labor, driven to market in a cart made of the bones of the elderly and fueled by distilled baby fat, I would feel really guilty), I don't see how or why macronutrient content would factor into it. "Guilt free" food usually means "low fat!" As if dietary palmitic acid were immoral.

My knowing colleague in the coffee room might do well to give up the guilt. I guarantee her grandmother had no qualms about using real butter or cream.

Disingenuous Deficit Hand-Wringing

Tired of hearing deficit fear-mongering from those whipping up the folks who should care least about the deficits and the most about jobs and public spending to create them?

Joe Conason in Salon points out that David Walker, whose name is often taken in vain by rabid neocons, has penned a clear and direct essay with Lawrence Mishel that is well worth a read:

The answer, from a policy perspective, is not that hard: A focus on jobs now is consistent with addressing our deficit problems ahead.