All of those studies concern L-Carnitine. The acetylated form, ALCAR, seems to have significant differences, for one, it crosses the blood-brain barrier.
Since there is such a significant difference in the way vegetarians and meat-eaters repond to L-Carnitine, I'd have to think there is also difference between L-Carnitine and Acetyl-l-Carnitine.
As far a dietary supplements in general, I agree that the are not usually appropriate for young, healthy people. But, when humans start to live longer than their "natural" age, or they've been poisoned by the modern enviroment, I think some supplement help is perfectly normal and beneficial.
I've had remarkable success using various nootropics to restore the mental functioning of both my Mom and my Dad.
It is also very interesting that many of the substances that I have the most success with are difficult to obtain in the US, yet they are inexpensive over-the-counter drugs in most of the rest of the world. These include:
- Piracetam (brand name Nootropil is Europe)
- Centophenoxine (brand name Lucidril in Europe)
- Alpha-GPC (an official Alzheimer's treatment in the Netherlands)
The American FDA was originally supposed to protect the people from dangerous drugs, but there is NOTHING significantly dangerous about those three. (and they are all very effective). Today, the FDA seems to be run by drug companies who's only interest is promoting patented drugs for huge profits.
Fixed the link: "Ameliorating hypertension and insulin resistance in subjects at increased cardiovascular risk: effects of acetyl-L-carnitine therapy" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
I have quit my IT work to become caregiver to my elderly Mom and Dad. In the process, I have energized my mind (and theirs) by learning a lot about nootropics (and other) supplements.
When I tested Acetyl-L-carnitine (ALCAR) on myself, I found it gave me a great energy boost etc, etc.
Mom and Dad can't exercise and both have type 2 diabetes (one does insulin injections and the other does Metformin/Glipiside pills). When started giving ALCAR to them, I found that after a few days their blood sugar levels were repeatedly going too low.
Then I a hunch, I googled ALCAR and insulin resistance. Here is one of the more scientific articles: "Ameliorating hypertension and insulin resistance in subjects at increased cardiovascular risk: effects of acetyl-L-carnitine therapy." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
My mom, who could never keep her sugar under control, just had her A1C tested. Her doctor and I were stunned that it came in at 6.1 (excellent for a diabetic).
Of course ALCAR is a natural supplement that cannot be patented and is very cheap. No drug company will invest in an FDA trial to test its safety and efficacy for the treatment of diabetes. It will take a long time for American doctors to learn about it, since most of their education comes from drug company reps.
So -- if you have type 2 diabetes -- I'd suggest you study it, buy it, try it -- and spread the word !
Replying to my own comment -- how does this relate to the Apple watch ? It sort of makes me think about getting the watch -- except that this device does everything I'd want an Apple watch for -- and it does it better. Not only is $20 super cheap, but Xiaomi seems capture the "Apple ethos" in the way that Apple used to -- before they became a snotty status symbol.
The Apple watch hype last year got me interested in fitness tracking, but I wasn't sure I wanted something on my wrist, and I wasn't going to spend $500 to test the idea. Then I saw the $20 Xiaomi Mi Fit on DX. Got one for the wife, to sync with her iPhone, one for me, to sync with Android. It tracks activity, sleep, and even "deep sleep" and the battery goes about 10 days between charges. Vibrates for calls and texts when my phone is on mute. The wife loves the colored band I got her. I wear mine all of time and love it. Comparing my wife's activity with mine was nice. My wife quit wearing hers after a month. She says the capsule popped out of the band a few times during her work. If think the real reason is that it shows she doesn't work as hard as I do;)
I've been on something of a roll setting up Raspberry Pi's as something of a family IoT cloud. While it's probably not (yet) completely secure from hackers like the NSA, I do have a lot of confidence in Debian/Raspbian linux. With 7 million RPi's sold and lots of volunteers working on it, I expect it will be getting security updates for a long time.
I've got nice simple Python fabric scripts that I run from my laptop to keep everything up-to-date, setup ssh keys, firewalls, knockd, motion webcams, temperature and humidity sensors and private MQTT brokers and loggers.
Its not all foolproof yet -- but I'm learning a lot, and expect to open source it.
Most of us on slashdot will probably agree that "Economics, Energy, Carbon and Climate" are all one big problem that needs more investment. But the devil is in the details of how to do it.
I'm not an expert on this subject like Henson, but IMHO a space elevator seems just as close to being technically viable as space plane powered by a ground-based laser and microwave power beamed to earth.
Not only that -- a space elevator would be much cleaner and the cables might even be able to double as power transmission lines. And -- since all the good tethering points are in the third world (the equator) it would be a big solution to economic disparities too.
Why does Henson's article not consider the possibility of a space elevator ?
I agree, way too little -- but that just proves that blackmail must have been involved. The cash is just enough to provide the NSA "cover" for their blackmail when their actions were discovered (now).
Considering that RSA and all of its executives had been targets of the NSA for years -- it would be very surprising it they didn't get some dirt on someone at RSA.
Interesting -- I didn't know about Cybersyn. Too bad Allende was murdered before they had a chance to try it out. (and murdered with the help and encouragement of the same spooks who run the NSA)
The "time arrow" is just as much a part of existence as matter, energy, the spatial dimensions, and the laws of physics. The "creation" that you speak of can be at the end of our time line. The day that we completely explain our universe, may be the day that we create it. We can be our own god. (or think that we are;)
Oh -- and Godel's theory doesn't apply because the Universe contains multiple sets of uncountable infinity. That's a beautiful idea . . . In order to exist . . . the Universe *MUST* be uncountably infinite.
I was thinking about that 2D hologram theory too. Your idea makes me start to think that maybe all of the "big bang black hole math" actually boils down to nothing -- and -- we're just in a cycle of 3D big bangs/big crunches.
The math makes me hopeful that intelligent creatures like us might be able to holographically survive into the next cycle !
I recently defected from iOS and I'm having great fun with an android app called QPython. Docs are still a bit spotty, but with a few lines of Python I can do all sorts of things with the Android API.
If chemical weapons really was the issue -- we should just make lots and lots of gas masks and gas alarms for the people there. We could probably get most of them out of storage somewhere. These can be LEGALLY sent to Syria as humanitarian aid. Virtually everyone in Israel has a gas mask. The cost of 10 or 20 million masks for the people of Syria would be much less than the cost of any military strike.
How often do you get a chance to write serious code ? What's your default OS ? Command shell ? Version control ? Editor ? IDE ? Web browser ? IM client ? email client ?
Are you aware of any attempts by the NSA to add a backdoor in Python ? Of course, if you did get an NSA letter, you wouldn''t be allowed to say. You are welcome to NOT ANSWER this question. We will take note of that;)
Over the years, there have been several attempts to create a sandboxed version of python that will safely run in a web browser. Mostly this was because of problems with Javascript. Now that Javascript works -- and we have nice things like CoffeeScript -- is it time to give up on python in the browser ?
Remember that Aaron has a history of conflicts with the US Federal government that long preceded MIT/JSTOR.
In Chicago in 2008, he liberated the pay-walled PACER federal court records. The FBI investigated and decided he didn't do anything wrong.
He then embarrassed the FBI by doing a FOIA for his file, and posted it on his blog. This is when I first heard of Aaron -- It really made FBI look like the Keystone cops !
Aaron then proved himself to be a very effective leader and organizer in the defeat of SOPA last year.
Whenever, and for whatever reason, someone in power decided that he had to be "dealt with". They decided to sic two uncompromising careerist prosecutors on him. They might have only wanted to attach the "felon" label to discredit him, but both MIT and the prosecutors had been warned of Aaron's fragile mental state, and they pressed ahead. We know the result. Ortiz has now been politically "rewarded" with the Boston Bomber prosecution.
MIT has shown itself to be a "dutiful" lap dog of the police state. This is, no doubt, why MIT intervened to block the FOIA request for Aaron's Secret Service file.
But just the fact that a SECRET SERVICE file EXISTS -- shows where their instructions actually came from.
I have been doing time lapse photography with an HD webcam on a RaspberryPi for a couple of months and it has worked very smoothly. It is nice since the RaspPi puts the pics on an SD card just like a camera would.
Adding encryption to the photo store is not hard to do, but like most encryption systems -- handling the keys is the tricky part.
This is a great use case for an asymmetric data store. A python script on the RaspPi could capture the images from the webcam and use pycrypto to encrypt them asymmetrically using an RSA public key before it saves them. A script on your desktop computer can generate the key pairs, save the public key on the RaspPi, and retrieve and decrypt the photos (using the private key) when you connect the RaspPi (or it's SD card) to your desktop. You would want to do something to either clean up the oldest pictures when you run low on space, or blink a light to let you know when your SD card is full (or both).
For how many YEARS have we KNOWN that this sort of "big master plan to do everything, everywhere" is doomed? Isn't this a basic lesson of Agile/Extreme Programming that all CS students (and software project managers) should now know?
This is exactly what my high school (Webb) had when I started in 1974 -- so you must be one of my classmates. That school's "computer room" had a couple of other notable hand-me-downs from the aerospace industry: A giant analog computer (~8 full height rack mount cabinets with an X-Y plotter the size of a desk). That was great for teaching calculus. For fun it ran a moon lander simulation -- potentiometers for thrust control, X-Y plotter for output. We also had an LGP-30 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGP-30 -- which was basicly a giant HP calculator from 1960. It used 12-bit words, a very noisy magnetic drum as its "RAM" and tube powered flip-flops as accumulator and registers. It was a useless nostalgia item even back then, but a great history lession.
I'm an old timer, but all of the cool kids that I know are using CoffeeScript http://coffeescript.org./ It's just an extension of Javascript and it compiles into ordinary Javascript. It fixes most of the weird "broken" syntax of Javascript -- making it much more similar to Python (a better learning language -- if you could install it).
Best of all -- it runs in the browser -- hit the "Try CoffeeScript" tab in at coffeescript.org.
Slashdot Mirror
All of those studies concern L-Carnitine.
The acetylated form, ALCAR, seems to have significant differences, for one, it crosses the blood-brain barrier.
Since there is such a significant difference in the way vegetarians and meat-eaters repond to L-Carnitine, I'd have to think there is also difference
between L-Carnitine and Acetyl-l-Carnitine.
Here is a well-written criticism (from a slightly dubious source):
https://jonbarron.org/heart-he...
As far a dietary supplements in general, I agree that the are not usually appropriate for young, healthy people.
But, when humans start to live longer than their "natural" age, or they've been poisoned by the modern enviroment,
I think some supplement help is perfectly normal and beneficial.
I've had remarkable success using various nootropics to restore the mental functioning of both my Mom and my Dad.
It is also very interesting that many of the substances that I have the most success with are difficult to obtain in the US,
yet they are inexpensive over-the-counter drugs in most of the rest of the world.
These include:
- Piracetam (brand name Nootropil is Europe)
- Centophenoxine (brand name Lucidril in Europe)
- Alpha-GPC (an official Alzheimer's treatment in the Netherlands)
The American FDA was originally supposed to protect the people from dangerous drugs, but there is NOTHING significantly dangerous about those three. (and they are all very effective). Today, the FDA seems to be run by drug companies who's only interest is promoting patented drugs for huge profits.
Fixed the link:
"Ameliorating hypertension and insulin resistance in subjects at increased cardiovascular risk: effects of acetyl-L-carnitine therapy"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
another good article:
"Oral Acetyl-l-Carnitine Therapy and Insulin Resistance"
http://hyper.ahajournals.org/c...
I have quit my IT work to become caregiver to my elderly Mom and Dad.
In the process, I have energized my mind (and theirs) by learning a lot about nootropics (and other) supplements.
When I tested Acetyl-L-carnitine (ALCAR) on myself, I found it gave me a great energy boost etc, etc.
Mom and Dad can't exercise and both have type 2 diabetes (one does insulin injections and the other does Metformin/Glipiside pills).
When started giving ALCAR to them, I found that after a few days their blood sugar levels were repeatedly going too low.
Then I a hunch, I googled ALCAR and insulin resistance. Here is one of the more scientific articles:
"Ameliorating hypertension and insulin resistance in subjects at increased cardiovascular risk: effects of acetyl-L-carnitine therapy."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
My mom, who could never keep her sugar under control, just had her A1C tested.
Her doctor and I were stunned that it came in at 6.1 (excellent for a diabetic).
Of course ALCAR is a natural supplement that cannot be patented and is very cheap.
No drug company will invest in an FDA trial to test its safety and efficacy for the treatment of diabetes.
It will take a long time for American doctors to learn about it, since most of their education comes from drug company reps.
So -- if you have type 2 diabetes -- I'd suggest you study it, buy it, try it -- and spread the word !
Replying to my own comment -- how does this relate to the Apple watch ? It sort of makes me think about getting the watch -- except that this device does everything I'd want an Apple watch for -- and it does it better. Not only is $20 super cheap, but Xiaomi seems capture the "Apple ethos" in the way that Apple used to -- before they became a snotty status symbol.
The Apple watch hype last year got me interested in fitness tracking, but I wasn't sure I wanted something on my wrist, and I wasn't going to spend $500 to test the idea. Then I saw the $20 Xiaomi Mi Fit on DX. Got one for the wife, to sync with her iPhone, one for me, to sync with Android. It tracks activity, sleep, and even "deep sleep" and the battery goes about 10 days between charges. Vibrates for calls and texts when my phone is on mute. The wife loves the colored band I got her. I wear mine all of time and love it. Comparing my wife's activity with mine was nice. My wife quit wearing hers after a month. She says the capsule popped out of the band a few times during her work. If think the real reason is that it shows she doesn't work as hard as I do ;)
I've been on something of a roll setting up Raspberry Pi's as something of a family IoT cloud.
While it's probably not (yet) completely secure from hackers like the NSA, I do have a lot of confidence in Debian/Raspbian linux. With 7 million RPi's sold and lots of volunteers working on it, I expect it will be getting security updates for a long time.
I've got nice simple Python fabric scripts that I run from my laptop to keep everything up-to-date, setup ssh keys, firewalls, knockd, motion webcams, temperature and humidity sensors and private MQTT brokers and loggers.
Its not all foolproof yet -- but I'm learning a lot, and expect to open source it.
Most of us on slashdot will probably agree that "Economics, Energy, Carbon and Climate" are all one big problem that needs more investment. But the devil is in the details of how to do it.
I'm not an expert on this subject like Henson, but IMHO a space elevator seems just as close to being technically viable as space plane powered by a ground-based laser and microwave power beamed to earth.
Not only that -- a space elevator would be much cleaner and the cables might even be able to double as power transmission lines.
And -- since all the good tethering points are in the third world (the equator) it would be a big solution to economic disparities too.
Why does Henson's article not consider the possibility of a space elevator ?
I agree, way too little -- but that just proves that blackmail must have been involved.
The cash is just enough to provide the NSA "cover" for their blackmail when their actions were discovered (now).
Considering that RSA and all of its executives had been targets of the NSA for years --
it would be very surprising it they didn't get some dirt on someone at RSA.
It's probably the gene that makes me really good at software testing. I have a knack for zeroing in on whatever is screwed up ;)
Interesting -- I didn't know about Cybersyn.
Too bad Allende was murdered before they had a chance to try it out.
(and murdered with the help and encouragement of the same spooks who run the NSA)
The "time arrow" is just as much a part of existence as matter, energy, the spatial dimensions, and the laws of physics. ;)
The "creation" that you speak of can be at the end of our time line.
The day that we completely explain our universe, may be the day that we create it.
We can be our own god. (or think that we are
Oh -- and Godel's theory doesn't apply because the Universe contains multiple sets of uncountable infinity.
That's a beautiful idea . . .
In order to exist . . . the Universe *MUST* be uncountably infinite.
I was thinking about that 2D hologram theory too. Your idea makes me start to think that maybe all of the "big bang black hole math" actually boils down to nothing -- and -- we're just in a cycle of 3D big bangs/big crunches.
The math makes me hopeful that intelligent creatures like us might be able to holographically survive into the next cycle !
I recently defected from iOS and I'm having great fun with an android app called QPython.
Docs are still a bit spotty, but with a few lines of Python I can do all sorts of things with the Android API.
If chemical weapons really was the issue -- we should just make lots and lots of gas masks and gas alarms for the people there. We could probably get most of them out of storage somewhere. These can be LEGALLY sent to Syria as humanitarian aid. Virtually everyone in Israel has a gas mask. The cost of 10 or 20 million masks for the people of Syria would be much less than the cost of any military strike.
How often do you get a chance to write serious code ?
What's your default OS ?
Command shell ?
Version control ?
Editor ?
IDE ?
Web browser ?
IM client ?
email client ?
late nights or early rise ?
Are you aware of any attempts by the NSA to add a backdoor in Python ? ;)
Of course, if you did get an NSA letter, you wouldn''t be allowed to say.
You are welcome to NOT ANSWER this question.
We will take note of that
Over the years, there have been several attempts to create a sandboxed version of python that will safely run in a web browser.
Mostly this was because of problems with Javascript.
Now that Javascript works -- and we have nice things like CoffeeScript -- is it time to give up on python in the browser ?
Do you see PyPy as the future ? http://pypy.org/
Or do you remain unconvinced, and -- if so -- why ?
Remember that Aaron has a history of conflicts with the US Federal government that long preceded MIT/JSTOR.
In Chicago in 2008, he liberated the pay-walled PACER federal court records.
The FBI investigated and decided he didn't do anything wrong.
He then embarrassed the FBI by doing a FOIA for his file, and posted it on his blog.
This is when I first heard of Aaron -- It really made FBI look like the Keystone cops !
Aaron then proved himself to be a very effective leader and organizer in the defeat of SOPA last year.
Whenever, and for whatever reason, someone in power decided that he had to be "dealt with".
They decided to sic two uncompromising careerist prosecutors on him.
They might have only wanted to attach the "felon" label to discredit him, but both MIT and the prosecutors had been warned of Aaron's fragile mental state, and they pressed ahead. We know the result.
Ortiz has now been politically "rewarded" with the Boston Bomber prosecution.
MIT has shown itself to be a "dutiful" lap dog of the police state.
This is, no doubt, why MIT intervened to block the FOIA request for Aaron's Secret Service file.
But just the fact that a SECRET SERVICE file EXISTS -- shows where their instructions actually came from.
I have been doing time lapse photography with an HD webcam on a RaspberryPi for a couple of months and it has worked very smoothly.
It is nice since the RaspPi puts the pics on an SD card just like a camera would.
Adding encryption to the photo store is not hard to do, but like most encryption systems -- handling the keys is the tricky part.
This is a great use case for an asymmetric data store. A python script on the RaspPi could capture the images from the webcam and use pycrypto to encrypt them asymmetrically using an RSA public key before it saves them.
A script on your desktop computer can generate the key pairs, save the public key on the RaspPi, and retrieve and decrypt the photos (using the private key) when you connect the RaspPi (or it's SD card) to your desktop. You would want to do something to either clean up the oldest pictures when you run low on space, or blink a light to let you know when your SD card is full (or both).
Nice weekend programming project !
For how many YEARS have we KNOWN that this sort of "big master plan to do everything, everywhere" is doomed? Isn't this a basic lesson of Agile/Extreme Programming that all CS students (and software project managers) should now know?
My Correction -- the LGP-30 used 31-bit words (it did floating-point math!). The PDP8Ls used 12-bit words.
This is exactly what my high school (Webb) had when I started in 1974 -- so you must be one of my classmates. That school's "computer room" had a couple of other notable hand-me-downs from the aerospace industry: A giant analog computer (~8 full height rack mount cabinets with an X-Y plotter the size of a desk). That was great for teaching calculus. For fun it ran a moon lander simulation -- potentiometers for thrust control, X-Y plotter for output. We also had an LGP-30 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGP-30 -- which was basicly a giant HP calculator from 1960. It used 12-bit words, a very noisy magnetic drum as its "RAM" and tube powered flip-flops as accumulator and registers. It was a useless nostalgia item even back then, but a great history lession.
I'm an old timer, but all of the cool kids that I know are using CoffeeScript http://coffeescript.org./
It's just an extension of Javascript and it compiles into ordinary Javascript.
It fixes most of the weird "broken" syntax of Javascript -- making it much more similar to Python (a better learning language -- if you could install it).
Best of all -- it runs in the browser -- hit the "Try CoffeeScript" tab in at coffeescript.org.
This is a fully coherent LASER -- not just an X-ray source.