ideonexus.com

AAAAAaaaaaAAAAAiiiiiiIIIIIIIEEEEEEeeeeeeEEEEE!!!
(HT Oranchak)

My latest article is up at the Science Creative Quarterly:

Explaining Our World: Science VS Creationism.

My previous articles are still available there as well:

Tragedy of the Commons Explained With Smurfs

Science Fiction VS Fantasy: An Opinionated Guide

How To Fly

Enjoy!

“The dinner we have eaten tonight, was part of the sun but a few months ago.” - Weston Price

When geneticists mapped out the human genome, they found a complex world of proteins that will take decades, possibly centuries, to fully decipher. Medical applications, such as gene therapy, cloning, and medications must go through years of rigorous testing before being tried on humans, and even then, some of these must be recalled for dangerous side effects. The long chain of events from our DNA to our physical and mental expressions is far too complex for anything else.

Nutritionists work the opposite way. They isolate nutrients out of foods that we know are healthy, and then tell us to get more of that nutrient in our diets. When they say “oatbran” or “calcium,” food manufacturers up that nutrient paste it on their refined cereals, oils, pastas, and other manufactured food stuffs. Then we consumers eat more of that isolated nutrient. Because it’s food, the same rigorous testing does not apply. We consume these nutrients in food, what’s wrong with consuming them isolated from it?

We are in the midsts of a great dietary experiment, because we don’t really know what eating specific nutrients isolated out of their contexts will do to our bodies, but we recognize the effects of this strategy overall. Our obesity rates are soaring, as are diabetes rates and heart disease.

The reasons why this strategy isn’t working are myriad and complex beyond our full appreciation. Counfounders, variables in our whole foods, are not appropriately accounted for in our nutritionist methodologies. Just as chaos theory prevents us from predicting the weather, it prevents us from predicting the effects of dramatically changing our diets. For instance, failing to take into account the ways foods work together:

We eat foods in combinations and in orders that effect how they’re metabolized. The carbohydrates in a bagel will be absorbed more slowly if the bagel is spread with peanut butter; the fiber, fat, and protein in the peanut butter cushion the insulin response, thereby blunting the impact of the carbohydrates. Drink coffee with your steak, and your body won’t be able to fully absorb the iron in the meat. The olive oil with which I eat tomatoes makes the lycopene they contain more available to my body. … We have barely begun to understand the relationships among foods in a cuisine (66, 67).

These complementary and deleterious effects of different food combinations are called Food Synergy. Our diets are more than the sum of their nutrient parts. This is the thesis of Michael Pollan’s well-written and increasingly influential “Eater’s Manifesto.”

As a child, I would often find dead bugs in the white flour in our pantry. My mother, a nurse, explained the bugs had died, “because there are no nutrients in white flour.” Pollan asks, “Is a steak from a feedlot steer that consumed a diet of corn, various industrial waste products, antibiotics, and hormones still a ‘whole food’ (143)?”

Modern agriculture first robs the soil of its nutrients, then we rob the food produced of its nutrients to preserve it. The result is that we now have to eat three apples to get the same amount of iron in a 1940s apple (118). This decline in nutrients is great for food manufacturers, as it forces us to eat more of their product to maintain our health, but has created a culture of over-consumption.

Abnormality is defined as the absence of normality. Diabetes has become a cultural norm, as has tooth decay and heart disease, but in the context of our species, they are not the norm. They are the result of an influx of simple carbohydrates. Combining pure glucose with fructose to produce sucrose was like turning cocoa leaves into cocaine (105), our bodies are overwhelmed by it.

Michale Pollan’s strategy for escaping this downward spiral is simple, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Pollan’s book is a quick read and a simple message, but one that belongs on everyone’s bookshelf.

The article that preceded this excellent book, Unhappy Meals, is available online, which hits many of the point in Pollan’s book about how we adopted the nutritionist approach to food and what foods we should eat for maintaining health.

Pollan’s Rules for Eating are posted at NPR.

He has also given a TED talk.

Michael Pollan also gave a talk at Google:

Clones Ryan Somma

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback on my free creative commons e-book Clones, and I was amazed that, while everyone had their own favorite stories from the collection, the one that got best reviews was Ryan’s Clone, where I speculate on what it would be like to spend a day at the mall with my own cloned child. It was the simplest, least thought-provoking story of all, but readers all seemed to agree that it was the most natural of the stories.

I don’t have any more Clones stories in me, but I want to read more of them. So I was wondering if anyone else out there would like to take a turn at the speculative helm and tell everyone about your own clone? It could be a short story, a blog post, or just a comment.

I think this is a thought experiment with a lot of merit. It’s an issue we’re facing in our lifetimes, an exercise in futurism, creative writing, social commentary, and has the potential to wrestle with some very sticky ethical issues.

Here’s some dimensions to consider:

• Suppose you were to have a clone made of yourself. Why might you do it? To get things right? Raise yourself better than your parents did? Raise yourself with the wisdom you have of yourself now? Maybe it’s just plain old curiosity? Or maybe you need a kidney?
• How old is your clone? Think about what you were like at that age, or ask your parents. Are there surprises? Insights into who you are today gleaned from seeing who you were then? There’s no reason your story cannot play out as a series of vignettes visiting with you and your clone growing up over the years.
• What parenting activity are you engaged in with your clone? Are you helping your clone with their homework? Are you grocery shopping with a four-year-old version of yourself having a temper-tantrum? What would playing with dolls or action figures be like with your child-self?
• How much of you is nature and how much is nurture? How do you feel about yourself, and how will that affect your interactions with your clone
• Surprise me and everyone else by thinking outside these parameters.

Now please Write something. It doesn’t even need to be a short story, just some speculation in a blog post will do. The only request I have is that you begin your speculation with, “My clone was…” How you fill out the rest is entirely up to you.

Post it to Oort-Cloud, post it to your blog, post it to the comments section, as a letter to the editor of your local paper, or wherever. Notify me, and I’ll link to them. Or e-mail them to me with a creative commons attribution license (preferably the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license), and I’ll post them to Oort-Cloud crediting you.

You might learn something about yourself. : )

Note: This is for online collaboration only, a speculative exercise. I will only provide links and Oort-Cloud posts. If this idea gets a lot of good responses, I’ll see about contacting everyone to measure interest in collaborating on a vanity-press anthology or something along those lines.

I’ve been struggling to find something profound and insightful about bugs and insects, but I just keep coming back to “Insects are cool.” One drawback to the NCMoNS is their lack of labels for some displays. So I have a lot of insect pictures here that I don’t have titles for. I’m hoping the Netizens of this 2.0 interwingularity will help me figure them out.

Giant Walking Stick

View the complete flickr set here.

Heading to NY for the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at the MoMa. Blog will be running on autopilot until Monday. : )

Last night I did my regular routine of working the stationary bike to get my three aerobic exercise sessions in for the week (I do weight training the other three times). For one hour I kept my RPMs above 85, managing over 20 miles in one hour. I lost two pounds of water weight from sweating in that time, and I burned a little over 500 calories.

That hour of intense effort barely made up for the Hostess Zingers I ate after lunch (470 Calories). When I add in the Caramel Machiato coffee I got from Starbucks that morning (340 Calories), my dieting outlook gets bleaker. If I were to add just one signature burger, fries, and milkshake from McDonalds to this picture (1,500 Calories), I’d bust my limit on a 2,000 calorie daily diet by 300 calories, and there’s still a whole meal, or two, we need to fit into this food schedule.

If 3,500 calories translates to one pound of fat, then such a diet would doom me to obesity very quickly, just as it brings down so many others in today’s society.

Dieting is complicated. So be sure to keep up on the math involved.

My personal Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is 2040 ((weight X 10) + (weight X 2)). Take a moment to figure yours out, then take some simple mental notes using the nutritional facts listed on food containers and the numerous calorie-counters available online. Just that much education could convince you to give up that visit to the snack machine, or choose peanuts instead of straight sugar.

Here’s a variation on an old favorite of a card game. Try playing Rummy, but in addition to pairs and straights, try throwing in other number sets.

Hyper-Rummy My (A) Fibbonnacci Set Loosing to (B) Pi, (C) Even Numbers, and (D) Primes.

1 - Ace
11 - Jack
12 - Queen
13 - King

Set of Natural Numbers: {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13}

Set of Even Numbers: {2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12}

Set of Odd Numbers: {1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13}

Set of Primes: {1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13}

Set of Fibbonnacci Numbers: {1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13}

Set of Exponents: {1, 2, 4, 8}

You could also add famous irrational numbers taken to the maxium number of decimal places allowed by the available cards:

Pi: {3.14159265358979323}

Phi: {1.6180339887498}

e: {2.718281828}

Everyone automatically plays the empty set. : )

From my personal observations of my Triassic Triops:

03/14
Add distilled water to the tank. Added nutrient pack, which is like a tea bag. Nutrient pack floats. Accidentally popped it trying to get it to submerge. Particulate, sticks and twigs, are floating in water.

03/17
Added eggs. Eggs clump together on water’s surface.

Triops Eggs

03/18
No life yet.

03/19
0900: No life yet. Eggs still floating. Dropped water droplets on some of them to submerge, but they float right back to the surface.
1400: Life! A little white dot jiggling up and down and around the tank. About 1mm in size. It pushes its way through the ater rather than swims.

Triops One Day Old

03/20
1100: There are now two triops in the tanks. The one from yesterday has doubled in size to 2mm, and it now swims much more smoothly. Younger counterpart still in the ‘pushing through water’ phase.
1340: Just counted four triops in the tank.
1700: Trying to photograph triops. Keep getting blurry dots. One triops swam close to the egg cluster and got stuck in the mucous-tendrils that spread out from it in the water.

Triops Two Days Old

03/21
0800: Crushed two food pellets and added them to the tank.
0930: The first hatchling is now 4mm long and 2mm wide. I’ve decided to name it Spaz because it swims crazily all over the tank. Other triops are hard to find. Only observed one other, the size of a hatchling. Spaz must have eaten the others. This suggests and evolutionary advantage to being the early-born triops, and getting the size jump on your siblings so you can eat them.
0500: Removed nutrient pack. Spaz is the only triop in the aquarium. It has even eaten most of the eggs at the surface. I put several crushed pellets worth of food in the tank for the weekend. Took apart nutrient pack. It’s all twigs. Don’t know why the directions have you treat it like toxic waste.

03/24:
1000: Spaz is huge and still a spaz. One inch long. Head antenna and tail antenna are very visible. Added four food pellets. During the day, Spaz will grab one from the surface and pull it down to munch on it.
1700: Fed Spaz four pellets. It took one and nibbled on it upside down, rolling it over and over in its legs.

Spaz Six Days Old

03/26
1200: Spaz ate two pellets given this morning, out of four. It is two inches in length now. Carapace is solid. Spaz swims like a dolphin, up and down, rather than like a fish, side to side. Mandibles are clearly visible as well. They look like big white buckteeth.

Spaz Six Days Old

03/27
1400: Six food pellets from this morning are gone. Spaz is still two cm long. Two and a half counting tail antenna.
1430: Noticed a shell at the bottom of the tank. Spaz has shed its outer layer since yesterday.

Spaz Six Days Old

03/28
0815: Put a dab of tuna into the tank. Spaz jumped right on it, and then went crazy swimming around the tank.
0850: Tuna has been torn to little pieces, which Spaz continues to munch on.
1700: Dumped a bunch of tuna and triops food (12 pellets) into the tank before leaving for the weekend.

03/31
0800: Spaz is dead, lying upside down at the bottom of the tank. All food pellets in the tank are eaten, but the tuna is untouched. I suspect the tuna was responsible for Spaz’s death.
1730: I have preserved Spaz in a test tube filled with 70% Isopropyl Alcohol.

Future Plans: I still have half the eggs left and another nutrient pack. Intend to try the whole thing again very soon.