omenti

"exercise may be the single most potent medical intervention ever known:

a minipost - an important podcast episode that could have a large impact on your health

 

Eric Topol does cardiology and genomics at Scripps.  He's also an excellent communicators and was one of a half dozen voices during the pandemic offering translations of the rapidly evolving results from research and practice into language the general public can understand   He has interests that go beyond those areas an recently hosted Euan Ashley of Stanford on his podcast.  The title is provocative:  Exercise may be the single most potent medical intervention known. (audio and transcripts with links)  highly recommended.  The amount of sexual dimorphism in response is remarkable - but it's all heathly.

A couple of nits - noting I'm far from being an expert, but have read a fair amount in this area.. Ashley mentions the one minute five minute rule.  My understanding nothing supports this as a quantitative statement, but the qualitative direction is probably right.  Also Ashley mentions a company he's involved in that tries to optimize exercise for professional and serious amateur athletes. At the professional level much of this work is noise at this point - particularly the "AI" approach (and and LLM is clearly not the path), at the serious amateur level it may well be useful as anything is useful even though it may not be optimal. Research from the study Ashley talks about could lead to big improvements in this area.

What the podcast highlights is the release of data and some results  from a large body of research.  The research solidly confirms earlier work that points to how important exercise is as a medicine.

Here's the link to the data release site.  It has additional information - some aimed at the general public.

 

 

 

beyond the equal sign

 

 

 

About ten years ago I devoted a good deal of time to learning a bit of category theory - an area of abstract mathematics that's become important to physics.  It deals with relationships rather than objects, abstractions and analogies, context, sameness, equivalence rather than equality, how you see patterns, and much more.  It can impact thinking in many areas beyond mathematics. It provides a rigorous framework that gives choice in how problems are approached and take you beyond  putting things in boxes that don't always make sense.

 

It's very technical, but Eugenia Cheng has written an excellent non-major freshman level book with the goal of getting art students to think about the world differently.  I suspect it will work for many other people - particularly those who have to deal with complexity and seeing curious patterns that are otherwise missed.  The Joy of Abstraction is one of those rare books that can change how you see the world.  I'd recommend getting a physical version and doing the exercises. (I don't buy books from Amazon and recommend you support local bookstores)

 

Steve Strogatz chatted with her on this episode of his Joy of Wh(y) podcast.  Listen even if the book doesn't strike you as interesting!

 

 

physics isn't about looking for some grand truth

 

It turns out we make it up as we go along and that's a foundational piece of why it's been so successful.

 

Apparently there's been some discussion about the connection of physics and some quest for an ultimate truth on a social media site I gave up.  A few people reached out and asked my opinion.  Starting down the path as a teenager, I thought science was after some deep and ultimate truth.  Some grand and beautiful underpinning of the Universe.  I was wrong.  It took time, but finally as a grad student I had come to know better.

 

What physics does is build mathematical models that describe observations. (why math works so well is another discussion - but it just does)  The hypothesis models that are robust enough to survive different experimental techniques and are predictive become accepted theory.   It's very much an iterative process and the models get progressively better with more predictive models coming into use as appropriate.  The Standard Model is the best we have for particle physics.  It has some warts, but it's far and away the most accurate theory devised.  General Relativity is the benchmark for gravity.  Both are under constant study and that study has led to radically different views of the Universe and how it has and will evolve. 

 

But to the question from the birdsite.  What is real?  Is a proton real and what is it made of?  What about the spin of a particle?  Is dark matter or the dark force real?  For the electron and the quarks and gluons that make up protons and neutrons, the most accurate and way to think about them is as excitations in fields that spread throughout the universe.  You, the computer screen you're looking at, your dog and your lunch are vast assemblages of field excitations.  It's far from intuition and these models are rarely taught until the junior year and that's usually at a high level as the math is a bit intense.  It may seem weird, but it's much more predictive than anything else. And gravity being spacetime that changes it's curvature around mass and mass that responds to the curvature of spacetime isn't exactly Newton's falling apples.  

 

Current accepted theory addresses serious flaws in earlier work. The earlier work was good enough given the sophistication of measurements, but tools improve with time.   It turns out most  (but not all!) of applied physics and engineering doesn't have to worry about these deeper descriptions as these are fields that usually apply to things roughly our size moving a low speeds.  There's an interesting notion called complementarity that tells you it's okay to use less precise, but easier to understand, models when you don't need extreme accuracy.  We live in a world where models with a Newtonian underpinning are usually valid.  

 

In a way it's how we perceive things. We only sense a tiny amount of the electromagnetic spectrum, our hearing misses quite a bit, our sense of time misses large and small intervals and our size is roughly between that of the Sun and a hydrogen atom.  We don't perceive much of the reality around us - we have to use our imaginations to figure out how to ask the right questions and see more deeply.

 

So we build models.  We don't work out the equations of motion, but we walk, throw balls, drive cars and so one. We have a fair amount of information for these simple actions.   Physical models quickly get more difficult.   How do you predict an earthquake and its severity?  When and where tornadoes will do damage?  We build approximations, but that's all they are.  Better models will come using the scientific process. Even if it's a messy undertaking, it's proven to be the best approach we have.  And there's a foundational principle you have to deal with  - one that Feynman famously articulated:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

More complex and social sciences come into play. Predicting markets and economic models don't have the twelve digit accuracy seen in the Standard Model .. they generally don't make it past the decimal point.  They're also a stab at reality.    Social models are often poorly constructed with bad data and analysis - a major "AI" issue these days.  And how we understand each other as people.   We all build models.  Hopefully they're good enough.

 

For a long time I believed you could change minds about the causes and threat of global warming through education.Silly me -  it turns out to be a fool's errand. We all have different views of reality.  We can witness an event and see differing realities.  These lenses can be very different and culturally driven.  Quite a bit of work has been done trying to understand how this works.  Recently a podcast chat with  psychologist Jer Clifton was recommended by Corinne.  I give it two thumbs up and recommend it to anyone who has to deal with other people in almost any capacity.  It may even make you think twice about how you interact with others.

 

design for kids and community in japan

a minipost

 

About twenty years ago I was associated with a human computer interface department. A good deal of the work was associated with this nebulous concept of “community”. The term tends to be defined in the mind of the person talking about it .. like the word god. We had a list of about twenty words that needed rigorous contest when we publishing internally or externally .. community was everyone’s first choice for the list, That said most of us default to a warm and fuzzy concept. How people and neighborhoods should interact. The sort of thing Bob Kraut worries about. (to be fair he also thinks about communities like QAnon)

 

A recent 99% Invisible podcast focused on Japanese community of place design.. deign for the six year old Mixed use zoning, very narrow roads, a school house at the center and very independent kids. Some of us worry about urban and suburban design and traffic - how to you minimize the two or three ton vehicle carrying a driver and a bag of groceries? We often look to the Netherlands snd the Nordics for inspiration Indeed they’re excellent examples of moving from 1970s car-centric design to something better for cyclists and pedestrians. Japan offers a different path - one that seems unlikely in the US.

 

Here’s the a link to the audio, a transcript and a few videos

 

A comment .. most of us of a certain age grew up with kids walking and cycling everywhere - starting around six for walking and seven or eight for cycling. It was the only way a kid could deal with the scale of suburban design with fixed zoning and wide roads. That’s the environment the Dutch and Nordics started with rather than doubling down on complete car dependance.

 

people beyond the numbers

 

"Track is nothing but numbers. A good mathematician probably could be a good track coach."

 

A quote from the head coach of the University of Oregon's track and field program.   They've picked some metrics that aren't applicable to sport which force young women to endanger themselves mentally and physically.  It turns out to be a way to turn a "fitness goal" into body shaming and performance on the field can suffer.   Here's a good piece on the subject.  Unfortunately Oregon isn't alone. 

 

Just what needs to be measured and how is it analyzed and interpreted.  In this case it's an outdated belief that thin people can run faster and jump higher.  It may be true to a point, but going past that point can reduce performance and lead to Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport.   Sadly RED-S is common among female athletes - often the result of the athletes and their coaches not being aware of the last few decades of health and fitness in sports research.  They may be very good at measuring body fat percentages, but that's barking up the wrong tree.

 

People, it turns out, are complicated.  Traditionally medicine has been based on a biomedical model.  Simply speaking you measure something and react (treat medically or create a fitness goal in sports) based on the number and then repeat the steps.  For many medical conditions measurements and treatments are coarse enough that it works well enough - it's often all there is.  

 

In the past twenty years there's been a recognition that the mind is involved.The mind and body react together to what we forecast might happen in the near future.¹  Sometimes the mental component is small but it's can very large - particularly in competition.   To get a handle on the mental side athletes are often asked to keep detailed training diaries on how they feel at various times of the day .  A coach looks for changes and tries to adjust the training accordingly.   To go deeper here's been explosive growth in the use of sports psychologists in professional and D-I college sports.

 

There's also been an explosion in wearable fitness devices.  They can be great when the simple biomedical model applies.  Using them to improve fitness levels works for many people who aren't at peak performance levels.  Many paths can result in improved fitness and motivation is extremely important.  Professionals find them useful in some areas of training - checking heart rates during aerobics for example,  but don't find them terribly useful outside training.  

 

And back to the amateur.  You may have the twin goals of weight management and improved fitness.  Exercise is almost always great for health and probably worth the price of a wearable if you have motivation issues, but weight management is poorly dependent on exercise.  A device may tell you how many Calories of kilojoules you've used during a session, but sadly it's incorrect to assume that's tied to how much you eat.  Metabolism is very complex and the body and mind adjust it to match new conditions.  So you lose weight at first, but then it comes back even though you're exercising and eating the same.   There are good evolutionary reasons for this that we've abundanced our way out of.

 

Assume you have a device that can measure a few metrics that are well-understood.  How the information is used can be tricky.  We're seeing a lot of amateur mistakes with date analysis in the pandemic - and often by people who should know better.  It's common in fitness training and undoubtedly in many fields.   My friend Greg Blonder put together two pieces of information that presented together are misleading.

 

You plot the amount of ketchup on the horizontal axis, and Tastiness on the vertical.
A hamburger is very desirable with a little ketchup, ever more so slathered. Liver is highly detested, but LOTS of ketchup helps. So more ketchup is better for either meal, but worse overall. The undesirability of liver skews the results when you aggregate data.  

 

__________

¹ In the literature the mind-body models are sometimes called anticipatory regulation or predictive processing.  Journalist Mike Finch and sports scientists Ross Tucker and John Kiely talk about this and a few other training issues associated with elite sport in episode 26 Tucker's The Real Science of Sport podcast.  If you have any interest in sports science this is one of the best podcasts around. 

 

 

very light narrative structures

I first heard about Norwegian Slow TV a decade after it began.  I watch a half hour of one of the rail trips. It didn't do anything for me.  Other than hearing about other hits like chopping wood and knitting, I almost forgot about it.  Two months into the pandemic I found my watching a semi-live train trip across Norway.  Much of the  scenery was similar to where I grew up and I found myself watching.   It wasn't long until I found myself daydreaming, creating my own narrative to match the flowing images.  Two hour later I stopped a dream-like story in my head.  

 

About four in the morning the next day I was jolted out of bed with an interesting approach to some physics that I had abandoned months before due to lack of process.    Having your mind work on something when you're not working on it is well known.  I suspect the neural connects I had was making in the narrative I was writing in my imagination had a good deal to do with it.   

 

This morning I caught an episode of Invisibilia that dives into the subject.  Recommended if you have an interest in narrative in any form.  Slow TV is an hours or days long TV show without plot, characters, or tension.  How Norwegians responded as a shared experience is the most fascinating part

I've done a bit of work in remote audio ambiances.   A few created serendipity.  Here's an excerpt from an old post on one:

 

5:25 am - excellent!

 

I brush the last of the snow from my coat and switch on the lights before taking my seat.   few minutes of silence and then a door opens and closes reverberating for about three seconds.  The clicking of shoes echoes through Warner Hall as she makes her way to the bench.  A minute of preparation and then the Praeludium in G by Bach fills her space and mine.  I sit back and shut all but the Bach from my mind.

 

She's doing an excellent job until - rats.  Bach derails and I sit up in my chair looking around.  A female shout fills the space reverberating for about three seconds.

 

sh*tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt!

 

She goes back a few bars and dances through the problem smoothly.  Now a piece I don't recognize, but it is still clearly Bach until about 6:55.   Her shoes and coat go on and steps click to the door in the distance.

 

And a little magic as a female voice is softly singing Bach.

 

A door opens and closes.  The reverberation is about three seconds and then silence. Time to switch off the amplifiers and make some hot chocolate before getting to work.

She was an organ student in Oberlin and I was in a special room in New Jersey where we were working on the reconstruction sound fields.  A special seven microphone array had been installed in the hall with a computer handling compression mixing and compression in realtime.  The bitstream made traveled eastward to our room where a reasonably convincing illusion of the hall's sound space was created.  We had created a virtual acoustic reality.

 

an olympic-scale audio uncanny valley

a pre-Olympic minipost

An hour into the first of last year's AVP beach volleyball tournaments a warning clickthrough page appeared on the event's Amazon Prime Video page. Amazon had been covering the AVP tournaments since 2018, but the pandemic forced a strict spectator-less bubble.  During the previous two years they hadn't spared any expense. Now they had to keep viewers engaged.  Rather than using sampled crowd audio and cutout spectators, they they focused on highlighting the event's audio.  A sports audio specialist was brought in and dozens of microphones were installed on the main court, players chairs, coaches, referees,  along with a number of moving microphones.   The first match immediately was sprinkled with some rather colorful language - enough to trigger Amazon's warning clickthrough.  

 

Watching the matches was something of a revelation. Sounds of the game ranging from sound normally masked by crowd noise to coaches discussing tactics with players during timeouts.  The announcers had been coached to work around the new sound field. By the end of the first tournament the viewer experience was excellent.  Similar things happened in other sports that took the "honest" route. Viewership often increased, while many of the major sports saw drops.  Now NBC and other large networks around the world have to deal with an Olympics with empty stadiums.  How will they react?  A miscalculation could damage viewer engagement.  It's a very interesting social technology experiment.

 

It turns out a lot of work has been done over the past sixty years.  Sports like football (not the American variety), tennis, rowing, past Olympic games, and online games have driven innovation.  Seven years ago 99% Invisible aired a radio documentary produced by Peregrine Andrews on the sound of sports.  It's fascinating and worth the hour.  Listen with stereo headphones or earbuds.  

Roman Mars · 99% Invisible-127- The Sound Of Sports

There's another fascinating question.  How do athletes react to empty stadiums? That experiment has been underway for a year now.  It's not simple.

 

wellness

After all these years my mother still holds the record for the most tragically wrong holiday gift.  The sad thing is most of it was thought-out and given in the spirit of goodwill and love.  Unfortunately a misunderstanding of psychology set the stage for some holiday bad cheer.

 

The year before my father's father was taken by a heart attack in his early 70s. Dad was something of a workaholic with a fondness for ice cream and all things fried.  Since he wasn't exactly following his doctor's advice, Mom reasoned monitoring was the answer.   On the recommendation of the family doctor she bought a beautiful sphygmomanometer - exactly the same device found in his office.  

 

I knew about it and had a look before it was wrapped.  Fine instruments are beautiful and she got the top of the line model.  Using an old stop watch we tried it out on each other.  Sweet.  It even seemed fun.  I thought about finding a nice logbook for a gift, but fortunately was derailed.  Christmas would be her's to lose.

 

For  years there wasn't much money, but this had been a good year and my sister and I had great expectations.  He probably had great expectations... expectations that continued until the moment he unwarped his own precision medicial instrument.

 

It is difficult to mask disappointment. Expectations were shattered by reality.  He got up without saying much and walked out.  Mom passed a bowl of M&Ms around.

 

___

 

Sensors are cheap.  Soon the devices we carry will be passively monitoring some of our vital signs creating biometric selfies in the process.  How much of a difference this will make and to what segments of the population?  Will the information be accurate enough to act on, will we know how to use it, will we act on it, and who else will be party to it?

 

____

The notion of wellness goes back to  mid 1840s London and the founding of the YMCA by George Williams.  It was a reaction to the physical and social displacements visited upon England by the Industrial Revolution.  The idea was to give young men (and later young women) a safe haven where they could improve their health through competition in sport and become better Christians as part of the bargain.  

 

The movement grew rapidly and with it amateur and professional sport. Later in the century the American branch of the Y creating the 'safe' sports of volleyball and basketball.  As part of the Muscular Christianity movement churches sponsored youth sports as safe haven from the dangers of urban life.  Calisthenics became popular and part of primary education the US and many European countries.  An Olympic movement emerged for the upper class.

 

About the same time great advances were being made in sanitation and a few people, nominally the wealthy, began to worry about what they ate.  Towards the end of the century we have the curious story of the Kellogg brothers...

 

Perhaps you've seen The Road to Wellville - the film adaptation of a novel by T.C. Boyle. Funny and recommended, but I didn't realize until today that much of it is accurate.  During this morning's rowing session I caught a bit on the Kellogg brothers on the Science Friday podcast. (audio, about 21 minutes) I won't spoil it as it is very entertaining involving gorillas, a wolf, a sanitarium, the first exercise recordings, brass bands, corn flakes and an obsession with constipation. 

 

There have been ups and downs in active wellness over the years.  Current trends are not terribly encouraging with fewer than 20% of adults meeting minimal recommended levels of exercise and about 5% getting the recommended 30 minutes of aerobic exercise a day.¹

 

My physician has pointed to work that suggests if Americans met minimum recommended fitness and nutrition levels that the savings in healthcare costs would be greater than the massive amount of waste and inefficiency that currently plagues the system.  Denmark and the Netherlands recognize this with pedestrian and cycling infrastructure costs partly being paid for by healthcare savings.  Most of us have problems following advice.  Perhaps we'll exercise for a few weeks after some bad news from a physical exam.  Perhaps we'll spend a half year on a diet to lose twenty pounds.  Unfortunately most of us have problems maintaining these levels.

 

We already have ubiquitous measurement tools - scales and the fit of our clothing is ubiquitous as is our level of exhaustion as part of normal life.  We can get fitbits and other monitors, but sales tend to saturate.  It has been shown that people who use them for more than a few months are the people who are in the fit 20% - the people who meet the recommended minimum fitness levels.  

 

I suspect the same will be true with biometric selfies and 'videos'.  Most of us will just ignore the information.  For those who use it clear actions need to be suggested.  Particularly with diet and nutrition that turns out to be difficult as the underlying science is not well understood and anything deeper than the general recommendations of today is unlikely for some time. 

 

What might happen is insurance plans might require the data as part of their risk management.  We're already seeing this with companies offering incentives for employees who wear fitbits and report the results.  Perhaps we'll see individualized risk management on the part of insurers before individualized wellness.

 

The motivation problem needs to be cracked.²  B.J. Fogg and others have taken some steps, but the field is waiting for real innovation.  At the same time solid wellness information needs to be clear.  It exists, but there is an enormous amount of wrong information and many people can't separate good advice from snake oil.  Huge social problems.  I wouldn't expect miracles any time soon.

 

__________

¹ It is difficult getting historical statistics, but fitness levels tend to be low along with decreasing nutrition levels.  One high level source is from the federal fitness site.

² There are promising paths.  My undergrad school required physical education, but the focus was on matching students with activities they enjoy and might continue with after graduation.  It was like having your own personal trainer who is looking at the next thirty years or more of your life.  I have poor eye-hand coordination and am a terrible jumper and sprinter, but I have reasonable endurance.  Cycling and rowing were recommended.  Like many others who exercise regularly, I have put together a small social web that offers support.  In particularly I owe a lot to a one time professional athlete who is good at offering encouragement when it is needed and figuring out the right mix of exercises and challenges.

 

__________

Recipe corner

 

This time a guest recipe from Sandra.  Really fine chai!  I've made two batches.  One used tumeric and almond coconut milk and the other used nutmeg and orange peel and straight up almond milk.  You *really* should give this one a try!

 

Sandra's Chai Tea

 

° Whole Cloves (8-10)

° Cinnamon stick (1)

° Cardamom pods or the ground spice (1/8-1/4 )tsp

° Fresh ginger (½-1) tsp

Optional:

° fresh turmeric (1/2 tsp)

° grated fresh nutmeg 1/8 tsp)

· orange peel

° star anis

° black tea

° Milk (regular, skim, Soy Almond, etc)

Put all ingredients onto a tea strainer. Pour hot water over all ingredients. Add milk and allow to steep until water cools enough to drink. OMG!!!

system, intersystem, intrasystem and metasystem dynamics

The transportation system is enormously fascinating and complex.  There were a few decades of radical developments in the automobile about a century ago coupled with the growth of energy, roadway, legal, safety and other systems.  The growth in the adoption of the car caused an enormous expansion of a sprawl to the suburbs that had been foreshadowed by commuter trains and new modes of shopping.  

 

If you get behind the driver's seat of a 60 year old car you'll find yourself in a familiar place (try that with the console of a 60 year old computer).  There have been a large number of refinements, but the "car-ness" hasn't changed much.  Now we're at a point where the car-ness of an automobile may begin to change.

 

Most people tend to think about a change in drivetrain - an electric car for example.  That is part of it, but only a small part.  We'll see a move towards the electrocution of the automobile - probably the vast majority, but the degree will cover a wide range and seeing the majority of cars being electric is some time in the future - perhaps three decades or more.  (note - the Chrysler turbine car was certainly not an electric vehicle, but underscores the focus on powerplants even though the overall system is more complex.  It is also beautiful..)

 

But the real change is much richer than power plant.  How are cars made?  Where are they made? How are they used?  What is the nature and rate of adoption for self driving cars?  What do people expect from a car and is it changing across generations?  Is the notion of range and refueling anxiety changing across generations?  Amazon?  Value of time? Do vehicles become more specific to the task?  When and how are carbon strategies implemented?  What is the path of applied research, research engineering, invention, and new technology?  Grid directions?  Vehicle to house, vehicle to grid? What synchronizes?  Financing of all of this? What about the developing world? etc. etc.  What about urban and suburban design?

 

So many questions and this just touches the surface.  There are emerging signals and one can construct a few interesting models to gain some depth.  Reality will not strictly follow them (that's why they're called models), but it may rhyme enough that they are interesting.  It is great sport.

 

Horace Dediu and Jim Zellmer conduct fascinating discussions that speak to these issues at Asymcar  - a podcast, but you can find individual programs and show notes on the site.¹  They were kind enough to invite me to the discussion on Asymcar 16, so I'll take the easy way out and count that as my blogging hour this time around.   We only scratched the surface, but this was an interesting discussion with two very sharp people. 

 

For fun you might be interested in a short Ars piece on the evolution of automotive controls and interiors - something deep that we tend not to think about.  One of the sharpest engineers I've met works on this problem - to say she is multidisciplinary is  understatement.

 

There are several earlier posts that are relevant - you can also poke around in the energy category

 

change will be electrified

car power - where does it go?

moving beyond cup holders

fc-evs

 

If there is interest I'll write a post with some of the numbers and back of the envelope calculations you can use to compare apples and oranges in a meaningful way.

__________

¹ Horace also has Asymco and his Airshow presentations which combine the language of cinema with presentation.   I strongly recommend both.

 

__________

 

I've been playing around with banh mi variations - here is a simple pickled vegetable that works.  Amounts are guesses - they won't be very critical

 

Pickled Vegetables 

 

Ingredents

 

° 1/4 cup rice vinegar

° 1/4 cup water

° 2 tsp sugar

° 1/4 tsp salt

° 1 cup carrots cut into matchsticks

° 1 cup peeled daikon radish cut into matchsticks

 

Technique

 

° combine vinegar, water, salt, and sugar in a medium bowl, stirring until sugar and salt dissolve.

° add carrot, radish, and red onion and toss. Let stand for at least a half hour stirring occasionally.  drain the excess liquid..

for new readers

For those who have come from the Asymcar podcast (#6) - welcome.  

Omenti is published roughly once a week and represents an hour's writing on something that strikes me as interesting to myself and potentially a general audience.  It is not carefully edited, but tries to be more conversational - comments are very welcome!  Subjects vary so use the category section in the right column.

For transportation related pieces try these for a start

° moving our personal atoms around

° moving our personal atoms around 2

A bit more about me here.