tingilinde

moderation in exercise

Most of us don't get enough, but it may be there is a sweet spot.  The NY Times on the subject - although I hasten to point out there is a lot of controversy in sports medicine over this issue and where practical limits lie.

snip

...

the researchers found that running in moderation provided the most benefits. Those who ran 1 to 20 miles per week at an average pace of about 10 or 11 minutes per mile — in other words, jogging — reduced their risk of dying during the study more effectively than those who didn’t run, those (admittedly few) who ran more than 20 miles a week, and those who typically ran at a pace swifter than seven miles an hour.

“These data certainly support the idea that more running is not needed to produce extra health and mortality benefits,” said Dr. Carl J. Lavie, medical director of cardiac rehabilitation and prevention at the Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans and an author of the study. “If anything,” he continued, “it appears that less running is associated with the best protection from mortality risk. More is not better, and actually, more could be worse.”

His analysis echoes the results of another new examination of activity and mortality, in which Danish scientists used 27 years’ worth of data collected for the continuing Copenhagen City Heart Study. They reported that those Danes who spent one to two and a half hours per week jogging at a “slow or average pace” during the study period had longer life spans than their more sedentary peers and than those who ran at a faster pace.

...

 

 

what a coke exec feeds her kid

quality food indeed

 

via Dr Yoni Freedhoff's blog

a diy electronic shifter for bikes

High end road bikes are beginning to get electronic shifters for quick and precise gear changes. They are very spendy - $3k for a low end unit.  But you can always roll your own.  

Here is a work in progress along with instructions

a weaponized cultural export

Exporting a deadly piece of The new way if American life - here to the Gulf states.

And the Guardian attempts to connect some dots on what ignited the obesity epidemic. Blame part if it on Nixon ;)

 

early "gps"

Navigation has been one of the fundamental technology challenges for centuries.  Astronomy in Europe had become an applied science largely focused on navigation in the 17th, 18th and first half of the 19th centuries as it was so linked to commerce.  Inertial systems are temperamental, expensive and prone to accumulating error, but they became core to navigation after about 1950.  All of this was hard.  

There was a crazy scheme that involved orbiting clocks and triangulation - but it was the sort of thing that physicists put up on the chalkboard to discuss other interesting problems.  The technical challenges would be enormous - you would be crazy to try as it would be silly expensive.  But DARPA made a go of it and it worked.  Oddly it is a technology that requires both special and general relatively.  And now we have $20 chipsets that give accuracy anywhere on Earth to a couple of meters - soon a few billion phones will be able to tell you where you are (and perhaps inform others you may not want to know).

Nancy pointed to a blog post that shows some proto positioning systems.  This one in a car is from 1932.

For the record I did some work on GPS denied navigation a few years ago - "how well can you do if the system was unavailable?"  Things have progressed a bit since 1970, but the competing technologies are basically static and it is still enormously expensive and difficult.

500 movies

to stream free over the 'net..

including Plan 9 from Outer Space...

neat manhattan video

hat tip to Om

The Manhattan Project HD1080P from Cameron Michael on Vimeo.

(it may not be worth the Verizon penalty, Roger...)

building to spec when the spec is clueless

 

CJ at a Lessor Photographer noted this in his mailing list today

We Need New Specs

Speed shouldn’t just be measured in the 100ths of seconds it takes to expose an image, but in the time it takes to get your camera out and capture the moment.

Exposure shouldn’t just be measured in a histogram. It should be evaluated in the ease by which the image can be exposed to right people in the right way to maximize impact.

The design of a camera shouldn’t be evaluated on day one. The mark of a great design is a camera that looks better after years of hard use. A camera acquires hard use, because it hits a sweet spot for its user between constraint and utility (also a part of the design process).

We need new specs.

Good points, but but these metrics and others along the same line exist.  The issue is consumer electronics and technology companies are rarely staffed with people in relevant positions who are skilled in this way of "thinking different" and their organizations usually have internal mechanisms to immunize themselves against this way of thinking.  It is also true that in areas like photography the sophisticated user (proam?) is encouraged to think in outdated engineering-only terms.

You get to the point where you can sense this in a company by visiting a few engineering directors, product managers and staff members … the culture defines the capability of the product and also attempts to educate the user base and press

 

there are things about america that are third-world

Universal healthcare should be a human right - it is in most of the so-called first world, but still doesn't exist in the US.   One rarely thinks about this group as impacted, but we know several who have had their share of bad luck.

perhaps an answer to a long-standing question

Why doesn't a mother's immune system reject a fetus?  Progress on an answer really neat!

snip

 

...

The research team has discovered that the onset of pregnancy causes the genes that are responsible for recruiting immune cells to sites of inflammation to be turned off within the decidua. As a result of these changes, T cells are not able to accumulate inside the decidua and therefore do not attack the fetus and placenta.

Specifically, they revealed that the implantation of an embryo changes the packaging of certain chemokine genes in the nuclei of the developing decidua’s stromal cells. The change in the DNA packaging permanently deactivates, or “silences,” the chemokine genes. Consequently, the chemokines are not expressed and T cells are not recruited to the site of embryo implantation.

Also of note, the observed change in the DNA packaging was a so-called ‘epigenetic’ modification, meaning a modification that changes gene expression without the presence of a hereditable gene mutation.

...

___________

 

Chemokine Gene Silencing in Decidual Stromal Cells

Limits T Cell Access to the Maternal-Fetal Interface

1. Patrice Nancy¹, 
2. Elisa Tagliani¹, 
3. Chin-Siean Tay¹, 
4. Patrik Asp²,*, 
5. David E. Levy¹,², 
6. Adrian Erlebacher¹,²,^†

+Author Affiliations

1. ¹Department of Pathology, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY 10016, USA.
2. ²New York University Cancer Institute, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY 10016, USA.

ABSTRACT

The chemokine-mediated recruitment of effector T cells to sites of inflammation is a central feature of the immune response. The extent to which chemokine expression levels are limited by the intrinsic developmental characteristics of a tissue has remained unexplored. We show in mice that effector T cells cannot accumulate within the decidua, the specialized stromal tissue encapsulating the fetus and placenta. Impaired accumulation was in part attributable to the epigenetic silencing of key T cell–attracting inflammatory chemokine genes in decidual stromal cells, as evidenced by promoter accrual of repressive histone marks. These findings give insight into mechanisms of fetomaternal immune tolerance, as well as reveal the epigenetic modification of tissue stromal cells as a modality for limiting effector T cell trafficking.