Détroit Électrique Not ‘Magnifique’

Government loans, grants from the Department of Energy, and private parties, pooling money in hopes of creating the next “Apple” of autos have flooded the “green vehicle” market with a motley crew of “earth-saving” cars. There was Fisker. There is Tesla — as well as an array of “EV” models added to mass-market brand portfolios… everyone and their cousin is jumping on the wagon to create an electric car. In the midst of this scramble, a historical EV maker has been revived.

It’s almost been two months since the new and improved Detroit Electric was relaunched to the world. Albert Lam, former Group CEO of Lotus Engineering Group and Executive Director of Lotus Cars in England, is the mastermind behind this historic company’s revival. The original “Detroit Electric” (also Anderson Carriage Company) produced electric cars from 1907-1939 but eventually went bankrupt due to the stock market crash of 1929 and its inability to keep up with the battery’s main competitor: the combustion engine.

While the American dream supports Detroit Electric’s pursuit of happiness (and success), I am not 100% sold on what D.E.’s niche will be…  what will make them stand out compared to its competition? The start-up EVs tend to be super-cars on a veggie diet… or electric sports cars.  Tesla has its sporty Model S and now we have, essentially, an electric Lotus Elise in the Detroit Electric SP.01. Keep in mind, buyers also have another luxury option in the electric BMW ActiveE.

The hybrid super-car competitor for Tesla and Detroit Electric, Fisker, is currently exploring bankruptcy and Tesla just made a profit (after 10 years). Do we really need another electric sports car?  It sounds like something isn’t working… and it think it’s the price-tag.

Science Confirms What We All Knew: Dogs Are Superior to Cats

There’s a reason dogs are known as “Man’s Best Friend” while cats are primarily associated with batty spinsters. It’s CALLED SCIENCE.

Here’s the proof from the book 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot:

There are many ways in which a dog can make you feel better. Scientists have conducted numerous studies that examine how you might benefit from having a four legged friend.

Some of the best-known research, run by Erika Friedmann at the University of Maryland, and outside colleagues, investigated the possible relationship between dog ownership and cardiovascular functioning. After carefully following the recovery rates of patients who had suffered a heart attack, Friedmann discovered that those who were dog owners, compared to those who were without a canine pal, were almost nine times more likely to be alive twelves months later. This remarkable result encouraged scientists to explore other possible benefits of canine companionship, resulting in studies showing that dog owners coped well with everyday stress, were relaxed about life, had high self-esteem, and were less likely to diagnosed with depression.

…Interestingly, the same cannot be said for cats. Some studies show that living with a cat may help alleviate negative moods, but is unlikely to make you feel especially good, and others suggest that cat owners may actually be more likely than others to die in the twelve months following a heart attack.

On the upside for cat fans, the failure of cats may be related to some sort of consistently horrible defect in the sort of people who prefer cats over dogs, as opposed to the general awfulness of cats as pets.

But, all kidding aside; this makes perfect sense. Dogs are loyal companions who are thrilled out of their minds every time you return home while cats are generally indifferent to your existence, but are willing to tolerate you as long as you are giving them food and they’re allowed to use you as a scratching post.

Why Does Classical Music Make You Smarter?

Thirty-six million Chinese kids now study classical piano, not counting string and woodwind players. Chinese parents pay for music lessons not because they expect their offspring to earn a living at the keyboard, but because they believe it will make them smarter at their studies. Are they right? And if so, why?

The intertwined histories of music and mathematics offer a clue. The same faculty of the mind we evoke playfully in music, we put to work analytically in higher mathematics. By higher mathematics, I mean calculus and beyond. Only a tenth of American high school students study calculus, and a considerably smaller fraction really learn the subject. There is quite a difference between learning the rules of Euclidean geometry and the solution of algebraic equations: the notion that the terms of a convergent infinite series sum up to a finite number requires a different kind of thinking than elementary mathematics. The same kind of thinking applies to playing classical music. Don’t look for a mathematical formula to make sense of music: what higher mathematics and classical music have in common is not an algorithm, but a similar demand on the mind. Don’t expect the brain scientists to show just how the neurons flicker any time soon. The best music evokes paradoxes still at the frontiers of mathematics.

In an essay for First Things titled “The Divine Music of Mathematics,” just released from behind the pay wall, I show that the first intimation of higher-order numbers in mathematics in Western thought comes from St. Augustine’s 5th-century treatise on music. Our ability to perceive complex and altered rhythms in poetry and music, the Church father argued, requires “numbers of the intellect” which stand above the ordinary numbers of perception. A red thread connects Augustine’s concept with the discovery of irrational numbers in the 15th century and the invention of calculus in the 17th century. The common thread is the mind’s engagement with the paradox of the infinite. The mathematical issues raised by Augustine and debated through the Renaissance and the 17th-century scientific revolution remain unsolved in some key respects.

The Earth is a Death Trap. How Will We Escape?

Free Market Vs Big Government: Who Can Better Invest $10 Million Toward Space Colonization?

Click to submit book suggestions for the new daily feature at PJ Lifestyle. Tuesday selections focus on technology, media, communication, capitalism, writing, self-improvement and entrepreneurship.

Does New Study of Burial Cloth Add to Existing Proof that Jesus Was Resurrected Around 33 AD?

After reading about a newly published scientific book titled The Mystery of the Shroud, which attempts to prove that the Shroud of Turin actually dates back to the time of Jesus, I planned on writing what you are about to read.

Then, an hour before my scheduled writing time,  I “just happened” to notice a Facebook post that read:

Christmas was the promise — Easter is the proof.

That phrase truly resonated with me because of the word “proof.”

But do believers really have proof that Jesus was resurrected from the dead?

After twenty years of reading about and studying the Shroud of Turin (and even viewing it in 2010), I have all the “proof” I need.  Although let me state emphatically that my faith — and the faith of most people who are celebrating “Resurrection Sunday” today — does not depend on any physical proof whatsoever.

For we know that Jesus is alive and His Spirit lives in us; that is all the proof we need.

Still, physical proof of Christ’s resurrection would be useful, especially when one tries to convince loved ones to believe in what more than a billion people around the world believe today.

So what if this new Shroud of Turin scientific study really does prove conclusively that the Shroud cloth dates back to the time of Jesus? Does that mean mankind finally has the proof it needs to believe that Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead after dying on the cross?

We are certainly getting close to “proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” and here are some reasons why this is happening now.

13 Weeks: Getting Animated

Week 8 of my second 13 week season: low carb diet and more exercise, tracking my weight, blood glucose, and body fat. You can follow me at my 13 Weeks Facebook page for daily updates, and you can join Fitocracy (free!) and follow my daily exercise, and maybe even start tracking your own.

A few days ago, PJ Lifestyle ran an excerpt from Leonard Mosely’s book Disney’s World, in which Walt Disney, in a letter to his partner Ub Iwerks, expressed his frustration with the his first sound cartoon, the now-iconic Steamboat Willie.

He’s pretty depressed. he doesn’t like Hollywood, he doesn’t like being away from home, and he’s losing confidence in the still-unfinished film.  You can see why, when he was having trouble selling the idea, and animation is a frustrating process anyway.  This was in the days of the most primitive hand-drawn animation, where every frame of the film had to be hand drawn on clear acetate, with tiny changes from frame to frame. Twenty-four times for each second of film.  In this 7 minute 23 second film, that’s something like 10,600 frames.  He was tired, and he was bored, and he had trouble seeing any progress.

Why did this strike me, he asked rhetorically?  Well, it reminds me of my ongoing glucose/bodyfat/weight project.  Here I am, eight weeks into my second season, 147 days since I first started tracking this, and it’s a little frustrating and hard. I’ve been less diligent about the exercise, and I do find myself missing things I used to eat.  Like chocolate. And pasta. And bread.  And while I have lost some weight, it’s slow and the day to day variations make it hard to see.  It’s like Disney must have felt — another 24 frames, another day’s work, and what did he have? Another lousy second of film.  That no one wanted to distribute.  He was past the initial excitement and into the slog.

Right now, this project feels much the same.  I’m actually losing weight, and I can see changes — more muscle coming back to my arms, and to put it bluntly, my boobs are smaller.  I’ve lost six inches around my waist, and I can feel that every time I put on a pair of pants that were in the back of the closet because I hadn’t been able to wear them.  But at the same time, the progress is a little slow and hard to see, and it’s a little hard to explain why it should matter to anyone — especially me.

But then I got thinking, and a little Excel-fu got me this.  Here’s my actual weight, charted over the last sixty days, with a trend line.  This is very much like the other charts I’ve been posting.

My actual weight for the last 60 days.

Trend line is down. This is good. It’s not down very fast, and the added muscle certainly explains that — but also notice that individuual weights vary pretty wildly around that trend line. So here’s another chart.

13 Weeks: How Scales Lie

Week 4 of my second 13 week season; low carb diet and more exercise, tracking my weight, blood glucose, and body fat. You can follow me at my 13 Weeks Facebook page for daily updates, and you can join Fitocracy and follow my daily exercise.

I haven’t published new charts recently, so I think it’s time. Here’s the first one, my weight.

OH, NOOOOOES! My weight is going up! I’m a failure! Eeeek!

Well, maybe not, although certainly if all I was tracking were my weight I’d be mildly hysterical. (And I have to admit I get qualms looking at it this time, even though I swear I’m not primarily interested in my weight. But 50 years of dieting doesn’t go away quickly.)

The thing is, that weight in general isn’t really our primary interest. I asked whether weight itself was a primary concern over at my Facebook page, and got a lot of different interesting answers; almost none of them included weight. “Feel better”, “better health”, “more attractive”, “sexier” all did show up. Now a couple of people with bad knees and backs did say weight in itself was a problem, but for most people it’s more a symptom of something else that troubles them. Certainly so with me — blood sugar, health in general, and as I realized during the first 13 weeks, simply feeling ugly and disgusting were my major issues.

What people use as a proxy for all this is weight, of course, and especially with daily weighings, this can be very disheartening.

What’s worse, I’ve been at least as diligent with the diet — in the last full week, according to LostIt!, I’ve been 8200 kcals in deficit, with an average of about 9g carbs a day net of fiber. Being diligent with the diet isn’t so awful, but still I’d sure like a chocolate bar or a plate of spaghetti sometimes. In anything, I’m doing better with the diet plan that in my first 13 weeks.

Add to that I’ve been pretty diligent with the exercise — not every day but at least five days a week (I’ve got more to say about the exercise, below) so I’m lots more active than I was in the first 13 weeks — and probably more than I’ve been in the last 13 years.

But still, I’m actually gaining weight.

Oh.

My.

God.

13 Weeks: Week 13 — in Which We Speculate

So here it is: week 13 of the 13 Weeks, which officially ends tomorrow. This is also Day One of the next 13 Weeks, which I started today to make everything match with the publishing schedule.

I pretty well explained what I’m doing for the next 13 weeks in my post last week, so I won’t linger on that: same eating plan or similar, but adding a Seinfeld calendar with six days a week of a Tabata protocol workout, plus weightlifting and yoga or Pilates. I have a new spreadsheet which tracks body fat as well as weight and glucose. As of today, this is a new experiment, so I’m starting from an empty spreadsheet. As of today, weight is 272.1, body fat by Withings impedance scale is 33.1 percent, and morning fasting glucose is 109. “After pictures” and a comparison in next week’s column.

So, below the fold, a little change of pace.

See you next week.

Solowheel: Automatic Electric Unicycle

(Heinlein fans may remember this from “The Roads Must Roll”.)

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Related at PJ Lifestyle:

The Most Powerful Idea in the World

What Can Science Teach Us About the Mystical Experience?

via Transcendence and the Limits of Science « Acculturated.

Religion, God, transcendence, spirituality: do these things exist independently of the human mind or are they products of neurochemical firings of the brain? When Saul had his revelatory experience on the road to Damascus, had he fallen under the spell of a seizure, as some have claimed, or was it a flash of the divine that caused his conversion to Christianity? When Fyodor Dostoevsky experienced the self-transcendent moment he describes below, was he momentarily elevated into a mysterious mystical realm or was he having a fit of temporal lobe epilepsy?

The air was filled with a big noise and I tried to move. I felt the heaven was going down upon the earth and that it engulfed me. I have really touched God. He came into me myself, yes God exists, I cried, and I don’t remember anything else. You all, healthy people . . . can’t imagine the happiness which we epileptics feel during the second before our fit . . . I don’t know if this felicity lasts for seconds, hours or months, but believe me, for all the joys that life may bring, I would not exchange this one.

Over at the Atlantic, two scientists and doctors–the renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks and radiologist Richard Gunderman–are debating these fascinating questions.

In his new book Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks writes, “One must wonder to what extent hallucinatory experiences have given rise to our art, folklore, and even religion.” In his recent piece for the Atlantic titled “Seeing God in the Third Millenium,” he went on to argue:

Hallucinations, whether revelatory or banal, are not of supernatural origin; they are part of the normal range of human consciousness and experience. This is not to say that they cannot play a part in the spiritual life, or have great meaning for an individual. Yet while it is understandable that one might attribute value, ground beliefs, or construct narratives from them, hallucinations cannot provide evidence for the existence of any metaphysical beings or places. They provide evidence only of the brain’s power to create them.

When I interviewed Sacks for a profile, his words were slightly softer: “There is always a brain basis for these various religious states, although this says nothing of the meaning or value of hallucinations. I don’t think it’s at all reductive.”

Continue reading at Acculturated.

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Related at PJ Lifestyle:

Scientific Proof of Life After Death?

Dostoevsky’s 6 Nightmare Prophecies That Came True in the 20th Century, Part One

23 Books for Counterculture Conservatives, Tea Party Occultists, and Capitalist Wizards

Believing in Christmas from Santa to Christ

I lost the argument with my wife. Should we encourage our children’s faith in Santa Claus? I was concerned that doing so might later undermine both our credibility as parents and our children’s belief in God.

It may not be a conversation that most couples have. Then again, must couples don’t include a former Jehovah’s Witness who was raised without holidays. As a child, I absorbed the cold hard truth dispensed from my parents. There was no Santa Claus. Other children’s parents cruelly lied to them. The privilege of knowing the truth served as consolation for receiving no presents.

Though I’ve long since rejected Jehovah’s Witness beliefs, my parents’ reasoning regarding the Santa fantasy lingered. Is there value in believing in something which is not true?

That question deserves careful consideration, and serves as a check against adult beliefs. In our postmodern, politically correct society, we commonly hear ecumenical equivocations like, “There are many paths to God.” While sharing my Christian faith, friends have more than once told me, “That’s your truth.” That rebuke stops short of saying my faith is false, claiming only that it is no more or less true than any other. But if that proves somehow valid, if one person’s faith in a flying spaghetti monster is no more or less true than my faith in Jesus Christ, what value is there in holding to either?

“Exactly!” an atheist might say. “Faith in Jesus is no better than faith in either Santa Claus or the flights of a pasta god.”

In Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels, the ardent atheist and intellectual heir to objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand defines faith as the opposite of reason:

“Faith” designates blind acceptance of a certain ideational content, acceptance induced by feeling in the absence of evidence or proof.

Were this our working definition, I could agree that faith in anything is useless. However, this narrow view of faith does not encompass how the word is used in our culture. When a husband expresses faith in his wife, is he necessarily doing so in the absence of evidence? Or is his faith a bet made on the basis of past experience and intimate knowledge of her characteristics? Either scenario is possible, and surely men and women have been known to invest faith blindly. However, as a friend to a married person, we would not encourage blind faith in the same manner we would that informed by evidence.

13 Weeks: Week Six — Surprise, It’s Saturday!

These are the adventures of Charlie Martin, his 13-week mission to follow a Taubes-inspired low-carb eating plan with high-intensity training, to find out what the hell happens and hopefully lose some weight and improve his health besides.  Follow me here on PJ Lifestyle, and on the 13 Weeks Facebook page.

Yeah, it’s Saturday. I forgot to mention last Sunday that to fit in with the new weekly schedule for Lifestyle health-related posts, we’re moving to Saturday. So strictly, this is really sort of week 5 1/2, but roll with it.

This really has gotten to be sort of the boring middle — my blood sugar continues its slow decline, and I’m still more or less plateaued: my weight hovered at 278.2 exactly for 6 days before breaking below that this morning. Except, maybe it’s not a real plateau: my weight is still fitting a trend line of about 1 pound every four days. We’ll see on Sunday.

In the mean time, though, there’s been one thing I’ve noticed: I’ve been letting the exercise slide. There are several reasons, or excuses, for this — I really did feel bad right after Thanksgiving, and last week was a terror, with one all-nighter programming and a cold. But still, I’ve been back to my old habit of the most exercise I get being the trip from the parking lot to my desk at the office, and I’ve been parking closer to the door than usual.

And that nonsense has got to stop. Starting today, I’ll be carefully recording the exercise on Lose It! and I’ll be announcing it in my morning updates on Facebook. Every time. Days with no exercise I’ll also mention in my morning updates. That’ll keep me honest.

I did notice one interesting thing this week. Here’s my Physics Diet chart from the start of the experiment:

The line along the bottom is daily weight; the straight line is the linear-fit trend line and the blue line is a exponentially weighted moving average. What’s interesting is the way it seems there’s almost a pattern to it — a bump up, a plateau, then a sudden decline. I don’t know what to make of that. In any case, the current plateau is going to be challenged quite a bit this weekend; I’m having a little procedure done this Monday, so I’ll be on clear liquids for the weekend.

What? What procedure? Just a procedure.

Oh, all right: it’s a colonoscopy. Happy now? Another of the joys of  middle age.

13 Weeks: Week 4 — In Which We Plateau

The continuing saga of my experiment with a Taubes-inspired change in diet, and high intensity training. Follow me here on PJ Lifestyle, and follow it day to day by liking my 13 Weeks Facebook page.

Okay, last week was on Thanksgiving survival; this week is the aftermath, and then I’ll talk about high intensity training. But first the aftermath.

Basically, I gained about 6 pounds directly after Thanksgiving. Now, as I said last week, there was no way that was “real” weight gain — that would have implied I’d eaten 21,000 kcals over what I need to keep my weight level in the span of a couple of days, when in fact by my food diary I’d eaten 7,700 kcals under. And as I’ve said all along, this is an experiment to see what happens, especially to my blood sugar, not about weight.

Well, I talk a big game, but the fact is that with 50 years of baggage, I can’t help but pay attention to the weight loss, and I was pretty unhappy about the whole thing. Not unhappy enough that I was tempted off my eating plan, mind you. I was really uncomfortable the weekend after Thanksgiving. If I ever ramp up the carbs, it’ll be very carefully.

The first 4 pounds came back off in a couple of days, and then I plateaued — I hit 281 or thereabouts and bounced along for five days. Five freaking days. Now, 280 has been a hard level for me for several years — I could lose down to there but hard to break through.  (To end the suspense, yes I did finally — I’m back to 279.)

Here’s what the weights would have looked like if I only weighed on Sunday, just as I only do measurements on Sunday:

Matching the scale etc, the Thanksgiving weight gain is a very small alteration; the trend line is still down. In fact, since the long plateau isn’t included, the slope of the trend line is rather greater — 0.27 pounds a day versus 0.21. Once again, I think the lesson is that normally, maybe weighing yourself every week is enough, if you can stand it. (I couldn’t: I’d have to throw away my scale or hire someone to bring it over once a week.) Now, let’s get to what I’ve promised for a couple weeks, and talk about the training routines I’ve followed. That will start right below the fold, so follow this on to the next page.

Marco Rubio and the Progressive Atheist Orthodoxy

To read some of the reactions to Senator Marco Rubio’s comments on the age of the earth, you’d think that he’d proposed rounding up scientists and imprisoning them in gulags. Liberals apparently think this is a plank in the vast right-wing “anti-science” conspiracy. At the very least, a man who refuses to swear a blood oath to the current orthodoxy that the earth is 4.5 billion years old is not fit to hold any job that requires any more intellectual heft beyond knowing the proper temperature for grilling burgers.

In case you missed it, Rubio was interviewed by the great intellectual journal men’s fashion magazine GQ. No doubt interviewer Michael Hainey is congratulating himself for asking the first “gotcha” question of the 2016 presidential campaign and is contemplating where he’ll display his Pulitzer Prize. In the middle of the interview, Hainey asked the random, drive-by question, “How old do you think the Earth is?” Rubio’s response:

I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.

Rubio, widely regarded as the GOP’s rhetorical Wunderkind, tried to walk the politi-religious tightrope by giving a non-answer answer because he could smell his own blood in the water. Blowing up the campaigns of conservatives with controversial questions has become the favorite sport for left-wing (so-called) journalists, a contest that conservatives have sadly begun to participate in.

Aside from the goal of derailing any future political ambitions of Rubio, the basic premise behind Hainey’s question is “Do you believe in God or science?” — as if they are mutually exclusive. It’s actually an insidious question, rooted in the Progressive philosophy which demands that “progress” and the evolution of history be seen as superior to Natural Law, our Judeo-Christian heritage, and antiquated notions of God.

Hillsdale College professor Ronald Pestritto describes the competing visions of Progressives and the Founders:

The founders had posited what they had held to be a permanent understanding of just government, and they had derived this understanding of government from the “laws of nature and nature’s God,” as asserted in the Declaration of Independence. The progressives countered that the ends and scope of government were to be defined anew in each historical epoch. They coupled this perspective of historical contingency with a deep faith in historical progress, suggesting that, due to historical evolution, government was becoming less of a danger to the governed and more capable of solving the great array of problems besetting the human race.

13 Weeks Extra: In Which We Do Arithmetic

I’m doing a low carb Gary-Taubes-like diet and adding high intensity training for 13 weeks to see how it works. This 13 Weeks series is my diary of the experiment; you can also follow me day to day at my Facebook page.

Yeah, yeah, I know it’s not Sunday, But I noticed something so interesting I decided to do an extra post; I’m still planning to talk about high intensity training this Sunday. I’ve been doing a food diary at LoseIt!, and tracking my weight in a spreadsheet and at Physics Diet. So I’ve got a pretty solid diary of what I’m eating and its nutritional contents. Now, Physics Diet is pretty solidly devoted to the traditional thermodynamic “a calorie is a calorie” model of weight loss. When you enter your weights, it computes some interesting statistics and charts them; it also computes how many calories you have been under (or over) your needs based on the rate of change in your weight. So, without further adieu, here are some charts.

First, a chart from Excel showing my weight and fasting blood sugar, both taken immediately after awakening every day. (Click to enlarge the charts.)

Weight and Glucose including linear best-fit trend lines

Notice that both trend lines are going down quite nicely.

Now, here are my charts from Physics Diet. First, here’s a chart for the whole time since I started watching carbs on 19 October.

Now comes the arithmetic. Nominally, a pound of weight is 3500 kcal; you have to cut out 3500 kcal to lose a pound, and if you eat 3500 kcal too much, you gain a pound. As of today, I weighed 278.6; I’ve lost roughly 23 lbs since 19 October, when I weighed 301.5. That means by the “calories are calories” model, I had to have cut 80,500 kcal over that month and a day, or about 15,000 kcal a week — 2515 kcal a day — under my metabolic needs in order to get an average weight loss of 4.25 pounds per week. Honestly, that seemed unlikely.

But then if we look at the chart for just the time I’ve been really running the experiment, it gets even more interesting.

13 Weeks: Week 2, In Which We Eat

Backstory: In October I realized that if I didn’t lose weight and get my blood sugar under control, I was going to die.  I didn’t like that. I decided to try a 13 week experiment: cut out carbs and add  a small amount of high intensity exercise and see what happened. This is the continuing story of that experiment. Follow it every week here at PJ Lifestyle — including some sort of embarrassing “before” pictures — and follow my 13 Weeks Facebook page.  I’ll report more on results next week, but right now, I’ve lost 21 pounds since 19 October and my blood sugar is down from 157 mg/dL to 119.

I started worrying about my weight — and being teased about it — by the time I was six or seven. At twelve or so I was an experienced dieter, and my experience was pretty much uniformly negative: I’d try dieting and maybe lose a little weight. Then the weight loss would stop. This would be doubly traumatic, as on a “balanced healthy diet”. I felt horrible, I was hungry all the time, and my pediatrician would yell at me that I had to be cheating, no one could not lose weight on that diet.

I could lose weight on the Stillman Quick Weight Loss Diet — nothing but lean meats boiled or broiled, cottage cheese, and poached or boiled eggs — but then I got yelled at by my pediatrician, my gym coach, and random people who happened to hear about it because it wasn’t a balanced diet. Also, after five or six weeks, it got a little boring: I remember breaking into tears one night when presented with another skinless, boiled half-chicken.

So my feelings about “going on a diet” have a lot of baggage. Skipping about 40 years, I read Gary Taubes first New York Times article, “What Really Makes Us Fat“, which said some things I knew from personal experience but had been told real science disputed. Like “all calories are not created equal,” and “what you eat is more important than how much you eat.” I bought Taubes’ books, Good Calories Bad Calories, and Why We Get Fat and read the primary literature, which makes a strong case that the underlying culprit is refined carbs.  Sure enough, cutting out refined carbs helped me lose weight. This time around, I’ve lost 21 pounds since the 19th of October, and my blood sugar is also down a good bit.

But what about the boredom?

What I’m eating now is, thankfully, far more interesting than boiled chicken and cottage cheese. I thought today I’d tell you about some of them.

Breakfast

Most mornings, I’m up at 6AM and about to write. I feed the cats, and stumble about waiting for the coffee — the worst part about getting your first cup  in the morning is needing to make it before you’ve had it — and I’m not up to doing anything complicated, so I zap bacon in the microwave, take cold boiled eggs out of the refrigerator, and have

Charlie’s “Diet” Breakfast

• 3 boiled eggs, sliced with an egg slicer and drizzled with about a tablespoon of mayonnaise
• 4 strips of bacon

Except some mornings I have 4 eggs and 8 strips of bacon. I slice the hard boiled eggs because otherwise they last about two bites, and I add the mayonnaise because it tastes good.

Lunch

I  usually go out for something because someone who can’t cope with cooking eggs in the morning isn’t going to handle making lunch very well either. There are really lots of options — a diner where I can get bacon or ham or pork chops and eggs, a buffet restaurant where I get salad and roast chicken, or MAD Greens, where I make up a salad with lots of protein:

MAD Greens Salad Example

• baby spinach
• feta cheese
• Oil-marinated tuna
• Red wine vinaigrette

Mad Greens actually has a calorie and nutrient calculator on their web site, which scores this out as 41 grams of protein and 6 grams net carbs (9 grams – 3 grams fiber),

Another thing I’ve done is make a big bowl of tuna salad.  One variant is my Mediterranean Tuna Salad, based on something I used to get at a sprouthead restaurant in Durham, NC 20 years ago.

Crying’s Essential Role in Human Evolution

via I Cry, Therefore I Am – NYTimes.com.

IN 2008, at a zoo in Münster, Germany, a gorilla named Gana gave birth to a male infant, who died after three months. Photographs of Gana, looking stricken and inconsolable, were ubiquitous. “Heartbroken gorilla cradles her dead baby,” Britain’s Daily Mail declared. Crowds thronged the zoo to see the grieving mother.

Sad as the scene was, the humans, not Gana, were the only ones crying. The notion that animals can weep — apologies to Dumbo, Bambi and Wilbur — has no scientific basis. Years of observations by the primatologists Dian Fossey, who observed gorillas, and Jane Goodall, who worked with chimpanzees, could not prove that animals cry tears from emotion.

In his book “The Emotional Lives of Animals,” the only tears the biologist Marc Bekoff were certain of were his own. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, the authors of “When Elephants Weep,” admit that “most elephant watchers have never seen them weep.”

It’s true that many mammals shed tears, especially in response to pain. Tears protect the eye by keeping it moist, and they contain antimicrobial proteins. But crying as an embodiment of empathy is, I maintain, unique to humans and has played an essential role in human evolution and the development of human cultures.

Within two days an infant can imitate sad and happy faces. If a newborn mammal does not cry out (typically, in the first few weeks of life, without tears) it is unlikely to get the attention it needs to survive. Around three to four months, the relationship between the human infant and its environment takes on a more organized communicative role, and tearful crying begins to serve interpersonal purposes: the search for comfort and pacification. As we get older, crying becomes a tool of our social repertory: grief and joy, shame and pride, fear and manipulation.

….

Darwin speculated that crying occurred less in Britain than in non-Western countries. More robust cross-cultural evidence comes from the Dutch psychologist A. J. J. M. Vingerhoets, who with his colleagues surveyed crying across 37 countries. Americans, Germans and Italians are more prone to tears than Bulgarians, Chinese and Peruvians. Paradoxically, people from wealthier democratic countries with moderate climates cry — or admit to crying — more frequently, and the gender differences are greater. The less hierarchical the social-class structure, the more tears flow, which is perhaps a reflection of greater individual autonomy, acceptance of emotional displays and exposure to the arts.

SADNESS is our primary association with crying, but the fact is that people report feeling happier after crying. Surveys estimate that 85 percent of women and 73 percent of men report feeling better after shedding tears. Paradoxically, crying is more commonly associated with minor forms of depression, like dysthymia, than with major depression involving suicidal thoughts. The popular antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, like Prozac, are reported to inhibit crying — an effect that, surprisingly, many patients who otherwise obtain relief from the drugs find unsettling.

Read the whole thing.

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Image courtesy shutterstock / szefei

Related at PJ Lifestyle:

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VIDEO: From Big Bang to Skyscrapers in 60 Seconds

5 Reasons We Can’t Have It All

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VIDEO: From Big Bang to Skyscrapers in 60 Seconds

Hat tip: Vulture

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Related at PJ Lifestyle:

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Why Societies Develop Like Embryos

23 Books for Counterculture Conservatives, Tea Party Occultists, and Capitalist Wizards

I guess it’s to be expected – that the cool grew up to be square. Hell, even evangelicals are hipper than liberals now. (I used the word Hell deliberately, even though it isn’t cool.)

Now here’s the thing: Liberals are beginning to realize they’re not hip anymore. They won’t admit it, but they do. Witness Obama’s behavior with the press. He’s sweating like Nixon – and that’s definitely not hip. (On second thought, Nixon was finally hipper than Obama.)

And Jay Carney? Would you call him hip? And what about Biden? Has there ever been a soul so square?

What makes modern liberalism the mess that it is today is that it is mainly composed of people who desperately wanted to be cool in high school – wanted to be Abbie Hoffman or Eldridge Cleaver – but never were. Their longing – this need to be Abbie – has clouded their thinking and their ability to perceive reality, placing us all in a mess along with them.

Meanwhile, Bob Dylan became a conservative.

– PJ Media CEO Roger L. Simon, June 19, 2012

“He’s forgetting what his own positions are, and he’s betting that you will, too. I mean, he’s changing up so much and backtracking and sidestepping, we’ve gotta … name this condition that he’s going through… I think it’s called Romnesia,”

– President Barack Obama, October 19, 2012

Of course we’re down to the final months of the president’s term, as presidents…

(LAUGHTER)

…as President Obama surveys the Waldorf banquet room with everyone in white tie and refinery, you have to wonder what he’s thinking. So little time, so much to redistribute.

(LAUGHTER) ….

And by the way in — in the spirit of Sesame Street, the president’s remarks tonight are brought to you but the letter ‘O’ and the number $16 trillion.

(LAUGHTER)

– GOP Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney, October 18, 2012

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Previously at PJ Lifestyle we’ve discussed the phenomenon of the “crunchy conservative,” the individual who embraces politics and values commonly associated with “the Right” while living a more natural, “hippie” lifestyle stereotyped as a monopoly of those on “the Left.”

But libertarians who prefer raw milk and organic food aren’t the only oddballs smashing the stereotype of what a “Bitter Clinger” actually looks like. Here are three more political-cultural hybrids:

Counterculture Conservative

Someone with classical liberal politics and outside-the-mainstream art tastes, lifestyle choices, diet, fashion sensibilities, sexual preferences, or religious beliefs. Often times this mindset comes as a result of a political shift to the Right later in life.

Archetypal example: New Media troublemaker and publisher, the late Andrew Breitbart (whose memoir appears second on the list.)

Tea Party Occultist

One who identifies with both the founding fathers’ Enlightenment politics and Masonic spiritual values — and perceives the relationship between the two. Religious Liberty requires a government based in Political Liberty and a military to defend it from barbarian idolaters who would take away both. Alternative definition: one who identifies with both the “Right-Wing” Tea Party movement and the Right-Hand path of the Western Mystery Tradition, adequately defined here by Wikipedia:

The Right-Hand Path is commonly thought to refer to magical or religious groups which adhere to a certain set of characteristics:

• They adhere to social conventions and avoid taboos.
• They divide the concepts of mind, body and spirit into three separate, albeit interrelated entities.^[3]
• They adhere to a specific moral code and a belief in some form of judgement, such as karma or the Threefold Law.^[3]

(See the rest of the Wikipedia entry for a list of various religions and mystical groups characterized as Right-Hand.) Even within the magical world those on “the Right” cherish the Rule of Law, while those on “the Left” embrace anarchy.

Archetypal example: James Wasserman, author, book designer, and a “founding father” of the modern revivals of the mystical secret society the Ordo Templi Orientis and its religion Thelema. (Wasserman’s new memoir begins the list and four more of his books also appear.)

Capitalist Wizard

One who understands the magical abilities of the free market to create value, wealth, and prosperity out of nothing but hard work, great ideas, and good luck. In free societies you really can wave your wand and turn lead into gold. All wealth begins when the entrepreneurs who will someday create it first dream and then put pen to paper to lay out their plan. Writing creates wealth. The ridiculous level of comfort in our society today — our government can afford to pay for the luxury of a cell phone for “poor” people — could happen because hundreds of years ago men wrote that the pursuit of happiness was an innate right.

Archetypal Example: Walt Disney. What began as imaginations in his head and sketches of a mouse would one day become a billion dollar multimedia empire with DisneyLand — our Mecca — as the permanent celebratory reminder of how the imagination can manifest mental and spiritual wealth into the material world.

One can note that these categories each correlate with one of the three values of the American Trinity identified and defined by Dennis Prager in his book Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph. Counterculture conservatives embody Liberty, Tea Party Occultists emphasize In God We Trust, and the Capitalist Wizards live E. Pluribus Unum in both theory and practice.

These three categories also have their natural opponents, of whom more will be said later in the list when appropriate:

• Counterculture Conservatives Vs Cultural Marxists.
• Tea Party Occultists Vs Nazi Mystics.
• Capitalist Wizards Vs Corporatist Sorcerers.

My intent with this list is to compile an annotated bibliography of sorts — a collection of books on a variety of subjects and genres that when put side by side can manifest fresh connections and new ways of looking at the world so we as individuals can solve our problems and live happier, more fulfilling lives.

Future editions will include additional categories and authors, as well as expanded entries for the books and authors already included. (Please leave suggestions of who should appear in future updates. And if you leave an especially strong comment then I might include it in the next edition.) This first list comprises only a bare bones beginning for defining these three emerging traditions. Perhaps 100 more titles await in my mind for potential inclusion and with input from PJ Lifestyle’s readers that number can grow.

Here are the various sections of the list for your browsing convenience so you can jump to the subjects or authors who are of most interest. However, I’ve still written this extended article (really more of a free e-book before the election) with the traditional intent that it should make the most sense read beginning to end… that is, if it ends up making any sense at all — which is not something I can guarantee… Caveat Emptor…

Part I, Autobiographies: Forging Counterculture Conservatism In The Center of the Fire

• Occult author James Wasserman in the context of New Media publishers Roger L. Simon and the late Andrew Breitbart.

Part II, History: The Temple of Solomon and the Foundations of Western Civilization

• Abraham, The Patriarch as Original Counterculturalist.
• Also: the truth about the Muslim occultists who tried to separate Islam from Shariah and their hidden role in shaping Western Freedom.
  

Part III, Polemics: A Moonchild of Aleister Crowley and Ann Coulter

• “Freedom is a two-edged sword of which one edge is liberty and the other, responsibility. Both edges are exceedingly sharp and the weapon is not suited to casual, cowardly or treacherous hands.” — Jack Parsons…

Part IV, American Exceptionalism: The Secrets Embedded Within The Fourth Great Western Religion

• The Tarot cards hidden in Washington D.C.’s architecture.
• Why America really is a nation of crazy people.
• Also: meet Ronald Reagan’s favorite occultist.

Part V, Media: Douglas Rushkoff and Programming Internet Magic

• The Bible as R-rated Counterculture Comic Book For Adults.
• What’s the difference between capitalism and corporatism?

Part VI, Science: Howard Bloom and the Modern Alchemical Marriage of Secularism and Spirituality

• What does it mean to understand Mother Nature as “a bloody bitch?”
• And what does it look like when an atheist proves that God exists not as a noun, but as the Kabbalists always said, a Verb?

VIDEO: Israeli Inventor Introduces $20 Cardboard Bike

via Cardboard bike is a ‘game changer’ in Africa – Telegraph.

Izhar Gafni, 50, is an expert in designing automated mass-production lines. He is an amateur cycling enthusiast who for years toyed with an idea of making a bicycle from cardboard.

He told Reuters during a recent demonstration that after much trial and error, his latest prototype has now proven itself and mass production will begin in a few months.

“I was always fascinated by applying unconventional technologies to materials and I did this on several occasions. But this was the culmination of a few things that came together. I worked for four years to cancel out the corrugated cardboard’s weak structural points,” Gafni said.

“Making a cardboard box is easy and it can be very strong and durable, but to make a bicycle was extremely difficult and I had to find the right way to fold the cardboard in several different directions. It took a year and a half, with lots of testing and failure until I got it right,” he said.

Cardboard, made of wood pulp, was invented in the 19th century as sturdy packaging for carrying other more valuable objects, it has rarely been considered as raw material for things usually made of much stronger materials, such as metal.

Hat tip: Kurzweil AI

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More on technological innovations at PJ Lifestyle: 

VIDEO: The Beginning of Cyborg Flesh at Harvard

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The 5 Most Fantastic Technical Advances Coming in Our Future of Abundance

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VIDEO: October is ‘The Month of the Flexagon’

Hat tip I09

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More science at PJ Lifestyle:

The Arrogant Doctor

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The Arrogant Doctor

At the risk of sounding arrogant, most physicians are arrogant. Some are so downright arrogant that they make Obama look humble.

The Wall Street Journal recently had a two-page article from a Dr. Marty Makary (“How to Stop Hospitals from Killing us.”) This self-righteous yellow journalism article went on to regurgitate the Institute of Medicine’s 20 year old review paper claiming that there were 98,000 deaths a year from medical errors. Before I respond to Dr Makary, I need to repeat what I wrote here on PJ and elsewhere a short time ago:

We hear much about the number of deaths from “medical errors.” This narrative began when an Institute of Medicine article stated that medical errors cause up to 98,000 deaths a year in U.S. hospitals. This received huge play in the mainstream media. While any medical error is bad — and sometimes tragic — they do not occur to the extent reported. The original report relied on a study from 1991. Only a small subset (27%) referred to negligent or substandard care. That still leaves the number of medical error deaths at a staggering 27,000, but the remainder of these adverse events were normal complications of medical and surgical care, such as infection and post-surgical bleeding. There we go again with “complications” equaling malpractice.

The other neglected point: how many “complications” were due to care in a teaching institution or training program? This study also failed to consider the quality of outpatient facilities or private medicine.

The problem with yellow journalism is that it is based on a little truth, and then it runs wild with speculation. Dr Makary does just that.

First, he makes the assumption that no other doctor but himself was capable of improving health care outcomes. Thank you Dr Makary. The Institute of Medicine paper is more than 20 years old. He assumes that we physicians have stood still for 20 years. There have been incredible advances in the treatments of cancers, spinal cord injuries and more. Umbilical cord blood stem cell therapies are about to revolutionize medical therapies.There has also been tremendous strides to improve and limit any complications from surgeries, re-admissions and the like. While any complication is a horrible occurrence, it does not happen anywhere near the rate that Dr Makary claims. He should know better than that. He is using 20 year old data — and faulty data at that.

The Hygiene Hypothesis: With Fewer Germs to Fight Does the Body Attack Itself?

I devour good books, and have no problem putting down a bad one after 30 pages and never picking it up again. If it’s not good, why waste my time? If it’s good, I don’t want to stop. This one is a hell of a read! So was the The Andromeda Strain.

I read Moises Velasquez-Manoff’s  An Epidemic of Absence in one sitting. This was Michael Crichton with Hookworms. The premise is fascinating, although heavy with anecdote and less on peer reviewed clinical data, even with his 307 footnotes. Definitive science should never get in the way of a good read.

I was hooked, pun intended. Remember, I am Western-trained but still consider myself very open minded.

What Velasquez-Mannoff suggests is that maybe we are a little carried away with the pure benefits of hygiene. Does using Purell at every turn really benefit us in the long run, or will we end up dying from a dirty finger nail because of it? This puts credence in what I always believed…”The 10 second rule”. You know, if it’s on the floor less than 10 seconds you can still eat it.

His adventure begins with searching to cure his premature baldness. Okay, I’m a little hard on him here. He’s really looking into an area of medicine that has not been brought to light until now, and he was really looking for a treatment for Irritable Bowel disease and MS. Every action in medicine and in life has an unintended side reaction. We are all intertwined. We, meaning every organism that is in touch within our body. We don’t need to treat everything! Not all bacteria are bad. Our intestines, mouth, and nose are lined with millions of organisms that actually are our allies in keeping us healthy. I think we all know that.

The problem as I see it, which he does not address is deeper. I’ll explain in a moment.

First, physicians have 2 main edicts that we should follow

1) Above all, physician do no harm
2) Alleviate pain and suffering

Our job is not to make people live longer. That’s just a by product of the 2 edicts.