My very elderly Canadian neighbour, at one time associated with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and retired from teaching at an American medical school more than 15 years ago, told me that a scientist at her university came up with photo micrographic evidence of of adult mammalian neurogenesis in the late 1940s. This caused some eye rolling and denial of tenure for heresy, and the fellow eventually disappeared. It had to wait 'til the sixties to be rediscovered by Altman.
The 4 one minute sprints twice a week is not, that I know, of a recommended form of exercise. The researchers were interested in the minimum amount of exercise out of scientific curiosity.
As you can imagine they experimented with other schedules less than and greater than 4 min x 2 time per week. Blood sugar was under excellent control with the minimum stated.
Strength, flexibility, co-ordination, fat loss, etc. are other considerations: but they did demonstrate their hypothesis that you need to deplete energy from your muscles to make room to sop up glucose in the blood.
p.s., you can imagine the horror we will soon face on late night TV as an infomercial selling a cheap exercise bike promises you CONTROL DIABETES AND LOSE WEIGHT WITH 8 MINUTES EXERCISE A WEEK. NO MONEY DOWN, PAY IN 8 EASY INSTALLMENTS, IF YOU ORDER NOW YOU GET A FREE ABERCISER. ORDER NOW OPERATORS ARE STANDING BY...
Yes. If you are addicted to caffeine, although a large amount of caffeine will keep you awake, a small amount can promote sleep.
Despite my claim to never drink tea or coffee after 4 p.m. I occasionally take a 1/4 cup of tea before bed if I need to get to sleep quickly because I'll be rising early.
This is in proportion to how much tea/coffee I drink during the day: 2 or rarely 3 cups. I've known 6 cup a day coffee drinkers to drink an entire cup of coffee before bed. (I've also known them to have anxiety, shaky hands, and logorrhea)
Yes I have 2 citations. This is an informal setting so I didn't go looking for them just now. One is the Berkeley Wellness Letter (a monthly publication associated with the Berkeley School of Public Health). There have been numerous references to keeping blood sugar from spiking and on the types of sugar that are worse for you, e.g., fructose. The other was from a Science podcast (or was it Nature?) on research on the "minimum" amount of exercise needed for health. In it they remarked that the longer sugar remains in your bloodstream the more cumulative damage it does to your arteries.
The minimum amount of exercise was, interestingly enough, 4 one minute sprints on an exercise bicycle, all out, as hard as you can go with no holding back. You can take a break after each sprint for a short while to catch your breath. Do this twice a week.
The test subject and controls were from time to time given a glass of glucose water, and the experimenters measured how long it took to clear the sugar from the blood.
The theory was this. The muscles have a ready reserve of energy and resist taking more from the blood unless you deplete some of it. Experiments indicate that the benefits of this "minimum" exercise program last for weeks after ceasing it.
This is not my field and I could not tell you why sugar in the blood is bad for you, or why certain sugars are worse. However, I understand that the Berkley Wellness Letter and Science/Nature are evidence based publications.
Anyone not credulous can spend about an afternoon looking these things up, though a library is probably better than the internet because many relevant publications are not free.
Four hours is probably not enough lead time before sleep. I was taught years ago to never take caffeine after the traditional English "tea time." Tea time is around 4 or 4:30. For the last decade or more I've taken tea or coffee as I pleased up until 4 and then cut it out.
Nobody in their right mind should ever drink soda/cola/pop. Forget the caffeine, it is the high fructose corn syrup, or the artificial sweeteners that cause problems. Diabetes in a bottle.
Perhaps he could give the money to his mother. Isn't she is supporting him on 30 quid a month? She would like to have the medal too, to show her friends over coffee. Mothers need things that sons don't.
The psychologist wanted to see how a physicist and a mathematician solved problems. He devised two experiments.
Experiment I: He placed an empty bucket in the first corner of a room, opposite to the second corner which had a tap. Then in a third corner he had some combustible material. His instructions to them were: "I will start a fire in the third corner by burning the stuff. Your task is to put it out." Well, both the physicist and the mathematician did the obvious thing when their turn came -- they took the bucket from the first corner, went to the second where the tap was, filled it with water and then rushed to the third corner and poured it onto the fire.
Experiment II: He then said to them: "For the next experiment, I will vary the initial conditions of the first experiment and you solve the same problem." He then placed the bucket, but now already filled with water, in the first corner -- nothing else changed. He then started the fire as before. The physicist solved the problem by taking the bucket directly to the fire and put it out with the water.
When the experiment was repeated for the mathematician, he picked up the bucket of water and emptied it on the spot, and put it down. He then announced, "I'm done", despite the now raging fire in the third corner.
When the psychologist asked him to explain, the mathematician said "Well, as you can see, I have just reduced the second problem to the first, for which I had shown there is a trivial solution.
I have an HP 48GX. One cannot think with a TI in hand. Once one has typeset the equation and carefully paired off the matching parentheses a TI reports the answer, but one isn't involved. On the other hand, solving problems with an HP is an interactive, instructive, and inspirational process. I'd be happy if they gave five function RPN calculators to elementary school students (reciprocal, 1/x, would be the fifth function).
But by preference I use a 1970's HP 65 (with a cardreader! I got it on Ebay). When they gave HP's more power and more features, they made them less good. HP peaked with the HP 67. Also HP failed to give the 48 GX a good programming language, and they gave up on the mythology of greatness.
I got in trouble in college for designing a stack computer and writing a sample program for it, in defiance of instructions to design a register based machine as an assignment.
WIth the lower costs of "filming" digitally, and an increasing "long tail" of niche audiences, both "Rendezvous with Rama" and Hoyle's wonderful "The Black Cloud" are perhaps candidates for feature films. They are both such excellent combinations of science, science fiction, and thrilling plot. And such aliens. The Cloud gets my vote as the most original, while still plausible, alien of all time. The Cheela is a close second, but the story was less fun.
(I read everything Hoyle ever wrote, there were many good SF novels after the Black Cloud, but I wondered at the time if he had a drinking problem or something, because each subsequent novel was slightly less enjoyable than its predecessor, until, at the end, they were disappointing. Perhaps it was just him ageing, but the decline was steady).
Personally I am tired of the ST Universe. I want Science Fiction, emphasis on science. Phasers are just blasters from 40s or 50s pulp fiction, warp speed is a tired imitation of the WW2 Navy movies, where the captain had to think hard about the fuel/delta t trade off where the drag is proportional to velocity cubed. Warp is not Science fiction, it is elves in middle earth fantasy. I am tired of "subspace" communication (someone just heard the word in his linear algebra course before he dropped out and became a screen writer), tired of every planet being "class M", having a gravity of 10 m/s/s and a breathable atmosphere. I am especially tired of low budget aliens. Makeup does not make an alien, any more than assigning them the characteristics of some earth culture makes them alien. We've had Viking/Moslem warrior aliens, Seidenstraße aliens, Greek mythology aliens (and also vomitous magical "Q" aliens that remove the need for any coherent SF)... Aieee!!!...
Remember when science fiction was fun and the characters two dimensional? Remember when they travelled at sub light speeds around the solar system where there was no artificial gravity? Clarke's 2001, A Fall of Moondust, Rendezvous with Rama, Heinlein's "The Rolling Stones" and many more. We have the technology to make a coherent near future SF TV series, using the actual properties of our planets, with Lagrange colonies, pioneer colonies, mining operations on Mercury, slow freighters and liners using economy orbits and fast (expensively anti-matter powered) "Federation" ships busy about the system.
How many of us learned the basic (incorrect) properties of the planets from those books? Now let's do it again with Mercury's real day, and a non-tropical Venus. Settle the moons and adventure in space.
It is not for us. It is for that Aspergers 14 year old guy who is awkward with girls but knows the ABCs of Relativity; the one in the generation coming up fast behind us. Let us relive SF through his (yes his) eyes.
There can still be a 7 of 9 character so that he will have an imaginative, once removed from reality, sex life.
Maybe it is irony. The concept has taken on a series of overlapping meanings between eiron and Kierkegaard. The blog you cite is sophomoric. Here is not the place for a reiteration of my sophomore paper on "Irony" but you can call using windpower to haul fossil fuel situational (or cosmic) irony.
Ironically the new Oxford English Dictionary defines this type of irony in a less accurate, though more concise, manner than in my sophomoric paper: "Irony is a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result."
There is probably more than one contributing factor to being gay. It does look like it or they are almost entirely innate. However, in my Abnormal Psych class many years ago we read an unusual case study of a man who had had homosexual encounters and there was something abnormal about him. I believe he'd never had an orgasm. For some reason they electrically stimulated an epileptic fit in his limbic lobes (which I think is what similar to what happens when you have an orgasm anyway). After that epileptic fit he was sexually active and heterosexual.
Feel free to correct the details since that is all from memory. It was in the case studies prepared by Prof. Pihl at McGill University for Abnormal Psych. (After hanging on to them for 15 years in case I might one day want to refer to them, I discarded them about a month ago, hehe).
Re:Should you teach your children chess at all?
on
Chess for Kids?
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· Score: 1
avi33, you didn't even read the post before replying to it.
Re:Should you teach your children chess at all?
on
Chess for Kids?
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· Score: 1
All the skills you describe exist in other games and they are extremely valuable. However, learning the book moves (my 12th edition, Modern Chess Openings, has nearly 500 pages) is done at the expense of, say reading a book on discrete mathematics, or Feynman's Lectures on Physics. The last two are as challenging but have applications in real life. I am proposing introducing kids to games that are more open ended than chess, like the game I suggested that is played on an 8x8 board, involved building decision trees, but in which memorizing opening moves is of little value.
Chess, and competive sports are games, played for FUN, and only incidentally improve mind and body (from the point of view of evolutionary psychology the are fun because they improve mind and body, but that is besides the point). Sadly competive sports are big bucks now and people treat them as jobs. Professionalism weakens the pleasure of Tennis, Chess, Bridge, etc. which ought to be diversions from research, firefighting, teaching, farming, etc., etc, and not careers. I can't even bear to watch tennis now, with graphite rackets, where a studied opening (a well rehearsed serve from a teenage who has spent hours a day being bullied by a professional coach and psycho parents) is 60% of the game. Gone are the days of running about the grass court in the sun with a wooden racket. The only thing worse is college baseball with aluminum bats. Rant rant rant. I voted conservative today for the first time in my life.
Should you teach your children chess at all?
on
Chess for Kids?
·
· Score: 1
The play of chess requires some skills that are relatively useless in real life. One must spend years memorizing book openings in order to play at a competitive level. The right moves to play for all end games with 5 pieces have been precalculated, and can be looked up in a database. The true fun of chess is in the strategy and tactics of game play, not in spending one's autistic years in 15 hour days of study (a la Bobby Fischer, who, incidentally gave up chess in part because of the issue of rote memorization of book openings).
I recommend that children be taught games that are fun, and that contribute to their intellectual development. One possiblilty is the game Arimaa which a child can learn but that has been deliberately designed to make brute force search or alpha beta-pruning less productive for a computer. This has the effect of reducing the amount of memorization involved for a human. I still play chess and haven't learned Arimaa yet. Does anyone have an opinion on how much fun it is?
Another possibility is to play various trump card games with your child, building up from Nines or Hearts to Whist and finally to Contract Bridge. The advantage of Bridge is that it develops both social and analytical skills. Also, an understanding of natural bidding helps one understand some of the less explicit cues one receives in one's personal and business life.
For myself, though I love chess, a human against human real time strategy game, where the computer handles the boring logistical details, trumps chess any day.
The light behind the knees experiment turned out to be flawed. You can read the paper demonstrating this at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/297/5581/571.pdf but you have go through a lengthy process to become a free member before you can read the paper.
Here is an excerpt: Although nonocular light exposure can directly affect
deep brain and body circadian oscillators in many species (9), the suggestion that photic
signals are carried from the back of the knee to
the human brain via the circulatory system is
not supported by our data.
I am not referring to standardization of the physical medium, but of the logical organization. It's a bit difficult to search through historical data on, say, telephone traffic in the 1970's in Canada (which by the way would be an incredible dull thing to do, so you can expect that someone will write a master's thesis on it). The reason it's a bit difficult is because the data is stored on tapes written by a Univac 1106 computer. You have to be aware that this computer has a 36 bit word, and that individual characters of text are stored as either 6 bit or 9 bit bytes, at the discretion of the programmer. Since the tapes are physically degrading they could be copied onto a CD ROM or your hard drive, changing the physical medium but not the logical organization.
Maybe a more realistic problem would be reviewing weather records from the 70's. You'd have to be aware that this was a one's complement machine. Those kinds of things have been standardized, we settled on two's complement, 8 bit byte, the unicode code space (we also settled on binary, rather than decimal or trinary some years earlier).
Moving up in complexity we are likely to have a standardized searchable database for any type of, uh... sensory data. You know: text, movies, engrams. The database will probably be a direct descendant of mySQL (:-)
We're right in the middle of it, change in computing is constant, but that will slow down. Think on how many competing notations for differential and integral calculus existed in Babbage's day, and how few there are and how standardized they are now.
A degree in VLIS is too specialized. We can expect to see information storage standardized in the lifetime of any presently young college student. There will be niche work in antiquated technologies. Big deal. Anyway this degree is called a masters in library science in Canada.
Hmm, a gene that lowers IQ by 20 points. Easy enough, there are lots of defective genes that do that. Does this variant of the gene have a purpose? Is there a reason why this allele perpetuates? Does it confer advantage?
We've talked in the past about numerous genes that raise IQ (in the ashekenazim discussion, though these genes affect others), this allele lowers IQ.
Slashdot Mirror
My very elderly Canadian neighbour, at one time associated with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and retired from teaching at an American medical school more than 15 years ago, told me that a scientist at her university came up with photo micrographic evidence of of adult mammalian neurogenesis in the late 1940s. This caused some eye rolling and denial of tenure for heresy, and the fellow eventually disappeared. It had to wait 'til the sixties to be rediscovered by Altman.
I couldn't tell by your tone of voice that it was sarcasm. I actually reads straight.
The 4 one minute sprints twice a week is not, that I know, of a recommended form of exercise. The researchers were interested in the minimum amount of exercise out of scientific curiosity.
As you can imagine they experimented with other schedules less than and greater than 4 min x 2 time per week. Blood sugar was under excellent control with the minimum stated.
Strength, flexibility, co-ordination, fat loss, etc. are other considerations: but they did demonstrate their hypothesis that you need to deplete energy from your muscles to make room to sop up glucose in the blood.
p.s., you can imagine the horror we will soon face on late night TV as an infomercial selling a cheap exercise bike promises you CONTROL DIABETES AND LOSE WEIGHT WITH 8 MINUTES EXERCISE A WEEK. NO MONEY DOWN, PAY IN 8 EASY INSTALLMENTS, IF YOU ORDER NOW YOU GET A FREE ABERCISER. ORDER NOW OPERATORS ARE STANDING BY ...
Yes. If you are addicted to caffeine, although a large amount of caffeine will keep you awake, a small amount can promote sleep.
Despite my claim to never drink tea or coffee after 4 p.m. I occasionally take a 1/4 cup of tea before bed if I need to get to sleep quickly because I'll be rising early.
This is in proportion to how much tea/coffee I drink during the day: 2 or rarely 3 cups. I've known 6 cup a day coffee drinkers to drink an entire cup of coffee before bed. (I've also known them to have anxiety, shaky hands, and logorrhea)
http://www.google.ca/search?q=HFCS+causes+increases+in+insulin+resistance&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
The minimum amount of exercise was, interestingly enough, 4 one minute sprints on an exercise bicycle, all out, as hard as you can go with no holding back. You can take a break after each sprint for a short while to catch your breath. Do this twice a week.
The test subject and controls were from time to time given a glass of glucose water, and the experimenters measured how long it took to clear the sugar from the blood.
The theory was this. The muscles have a ready reserve of energy and resist taking more from the blood unless you deplete some of it. Experiments indicate that the benefits of this "minimum" exercise program last for weeks after ceasing it.
This is not my field and I could not tell you why sugar in the blood is bad for you, or why certain sugars are worse. However, I understand that the Berkley Wellness Letter and Science/Nature are evidence based publications. Anyone not credulous can spend about an afternoon looking these things up, though a library is probably better than the internet because many relevant publications are not free.
p.s., a software engineer is a machine that takes caffeine as its input, and produces computer programs as its output.
Four hours is probably not enough lead time before sleep. I was taught years ago to never take caffeine after the traditional English "tea time." Tea time is around 4 or 4:30. For the last decade or more I've taken tea or coffee as I pleased up until 4 and then cut it out. Nobody in their right mind should ever drink soda/cola/pop. Forget the caffeine, it is the high fructose corn syrup, or the artificial sweeteners that cause problems. Diabetes in a bottle.
Perhaps he could give the money to his mother. Isn't she is supporting him on 30 quid a month? She would like to have the medal too, to show her friends over coffee. Mothers need things that sons don't.
Experiment I: He placed an empty bucket in the first corner of a room, opposite to the second corner which had a tap. Then in a third corner he had some combustible material. His instructions to them were: "I will start a fire in the third corner by burning the stuff. Your task is to put it out." Well, both the physicist and the mathematician did the obvious thing when their turn came -- they took the bucket from the first corner, went to the second where the tap was, filled it with water and then rushed to the third corner and poured it onto the fire.
Experiment II: He then said to them: "For the next experiment, I will vary the initial conditions of the first experiment and you solve the same problem." He then placed the bucket, but now already filled with water, in the first corner -- nothing else changed. He then started the fire as before. The physicist solved the problem by taking the bucket directly to the fire and put it out with the water.
When the experiment was repeated for the mathematician, he picked up the bucket of water and emptied it on the spot, and put it down. He then announced, "I'm done", despite the now raging fire in the third corner.
When the psychologist asked him to explain, the mathematician said "Well, as you can see, I have just reduced the second problem to the first, for which I had shown there is a trivial solution.
But by preference I use a 1970's HP 65 (with a cardreader! I got it on Ebay). When they gave HP's more power and more features, they made them less good. HP peaked with the HP 67. Also HP failed to give the 48 GX a good programming language, and they gave up on the mythology of greatness.
I got in trouble in college for designing a stack computer and writing a sample program for it, in defiance of instructions to design a register based machine as an assignment.
(I read everything Hoyle ever wrote, there were many good SF novels after the Black Cloud, but I wondered at the time if he had a drinking problem or something, because each subsequent novel was slightly less enjoyable than its predecessor, until, at the end, they were disappointing. Perhaps it was just him ageing, but the decline was steady).
Remember when science fiction was fun and the characters two dimensional? Remember when they travelled at sub light speeds around the solar system where there was no artificial gravity? Clarke's 2001, A Fall of Moondust, Rendezvous with Rama, Heinlein's "The Rolling Stones" and many more. We have the technology to make a coherent near future SF TV series, using the actual properties of our planets, with Lagrange colonies, pioneer colonies, mining operations on Mercury, slow freighters and liners using economy orbits and fast (expensively anti-matter powered) "Federation" ships busy about the system.
How many of us learned the basic (incorrect) properties of the planets from those books? Now let's do it again with Mercury's real day, and a non-tropical Venus. Settle the moons and adventure in space.
It is not for us. It is for that Aspergers 14 year old guy who is awkward with girls but knows the ABCs of Relativity; the one in the generation coming up fast behind us. Let us relive SF through his (yes his) eyes.
There can still be a 7 of 9 character so that he will have an imaginative, once removed from reality, sex life.
Maybe it is irony. The concept has taken on a series of overlapping meanings between eiron and Kierkegaard. The blog you cite is sophomoric. Here is not the place for a reiteration of my sophomore paper on "Irony" but you can call using windpower to haul fossil fuel situational (or cosmic) irony. Ironically the new Oxford English Dictionary defines this type of irony in a less accurate, though more concise, manner than in my sophomoric paper: "Irony is a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result."
There is probably more than one contributing factor to being gay. It does look like it or they are almost entirely innate. However, in my Abnormal Psych class many years ago we read an unusual case study of a man who had had homosexual encounters and there was something abnormal about him. I believe he'd never had an orgasm. For some reason they electrically stimulated an epileptic fit in his limbic lobes (which I think is what similar to what happens when you have an orgasm anyway). After that epileptic fit he was sexually active and heterosexual. Feel free to correct the details since that is all from memory. It was in the case studies prepared by Prof. Pihl at McGill University for Abnormal Psych. (After hanging on to them for 15 years in case I might one day want to refer to them, I discarded them about a month ago, hehe).
avi33, you didn't even read the post before replying to it.
Chess, and competive sports are games, played for FUN, and only incidentally improve mind and body (from the point of view of evolutionary psychology the are fun because they improve mind and body, but that is besides the point). Sadly competive sports are big bucks now and people treat them as jobs. Professionalism weakens the pleasure of Tennis, Chess, Bridge, etc. which ought to be diversions from research, firefighting, teaching, farming, etc., etc, and not careers. I can't even bear to watch tennis now, with graphite rackets, where a studied opening (a well rehearsed serve from a teenage who has spent hours a day being bullied by a professional coach and psycho parents) is 60% of the game. Gone are the days of running about the grass court in the sun with a wooden racket. The only thing worse is college baseball with aluminum bats. Rant rant rant. I voted conservative today for the first time in my life.
I recommend that children be taught games that are fun, and that contribute to their intellectual development. One possiblilty is the game Arimaa which a child can learn but that has been deliberately designed to make brute force search or alpha beta-pruning less productive for a computer. This has the effect of reducing the amount of memorization involved for a human. I still play chess and haven't learned Arimaa yet. Does anyone have an opinion on how much fun it is?
Another possibility is to play various trump card games with your child, building up from Nines or Hearts to Whist and finally to Contract Bridge. The advantage of Bridge is that it develops both social and analytical skills. Also, an understanding of natural bidding helps one understand some of the less explicit cues one receives in one's personal and business life.
For myself, though I love chess, a human against human real time strategy game, where the computer handles the boring logistical details, trumps chess any day.
Here is an excerpt: Although nonocular light exposure can directly affect deep brain and body circadian oscillators in many species (9), the suggestion that photic signals are carried from the back of the knee to the human brain via the circulatory system is not supported by our data.
Maybe a more realistic problem would be reviewing weather records from the 70's. You'd have to be aware that this was a one's complement machine. Those kinds of things have been standardized, we settled on two's complement, 8 bit byte, the unicode code space (we also settled on binary, rather than decimal or trinary some years earlier).
Moving up in complexity we are likely to have a standardized searchable database for any type of, uh ... sensory data. You know: text, movies, engrams. The database will probably be a direct descendant of mySQL ( :-)
We're right in the middle of it, change in computing is constant, but that will slow down. Think on how many competing notations for differential and integral calculus existed in Babbage's day, and how few there are and how standardized they are now.
A degree in VLIS is too specialized. We can expect to see information storage standardized in the lifetime of any presently young college student. There will be niche work in antiquated technologies. Big deal. Anyway this degree is called a masters in library science in Canada.
Just nitpicking, but they were chipmunks not gophers that were excessively polite in the Warner Brother cartoons.
Why are only two of Knuth's books in the photograph? I've been using Seminumerical as a nick for over a decade. Where is Seminumerical Algorithms?
We've talked in the past about numerous genes that raise IQ (in the ashekenazim discussion, though these genes affect others), this allele lowers IQ.