[Very, very handy website. -egg]
Examine.com makes it easy to look up what actual scientific studies say on various supplements. From popular supplements like vitamin D and fish oil, to more esoteric ones like berberine and spirulina, this website has it covered (and over 17000 citations).
[Malcolm Gladwell, ahem, hits it out of the park. -egg]
The other great doping pariah is Lance Armstrong. He apparently removed large quantities of his own blood and then re-infused himself before competition, in order to boost the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells in his system. Armstrong wanted to be like Eero Mäntyranta. He wanted to match, through his own efforts, what some very lucky people already do naturally and legally. Before we condemn him, though, shouldn’t we have to come up with a good reason that one man is allowed to have lots of red blood cells and another man is not?
via Malcolm Gladwell: Do Genetic Advantages Make Sports Unfair? : The New Yorker.
[tl;dr — we really don’t know much about most mental illness or how to make drugs that help it. -egg]
*
Having been discovered by accident, however, [psychiatric drugs] lacked one important element: a theory that accounted for why they worked (or, in many cases, did not).
That didn’t stop drug makers and doctors from claiming that they knew. Drawing on another mostly serendipitous discovery of the fifties—that the brain did not conduct its business by sending sparks from neuron to neuron, as scientists previously thought, but rather by sending chemical messengers across synapses—they fashioned an explanation: mental illness was the result of imbalances among these neurotransmitters, which the drugs treated in the same way that insulin treats diabetes.
[Totally awesome question, coupled with a great overview of changes in lifespan over the last couple hundred years. -egg]
You may well be living your second life already. Have you ever had some health problem that could have killed you if you’d been born in an earlier era? Leave aside for a minute the probabilistic ways you would have died in the past—the smallpox that didn’t kill you because it was eradicated by a massive global vaccine drive, the cholera you never contracted because you drink filtered and chemically treated water. Did some specific medical treatment save your life? It’s a fun conversation starter: Why are you not dead yet? It turns out almost everybody has a story, but we rarely hear them; life-saving treatments have become routine. I asked around, and here is a small sample of what would have killed my friends and acquaintances:
[Very, very helpful in getting a sense of what a reasonable level of paranoia is. -egg]
The latest Snowden document is the US intelligence “black budget.” There’s a lot of information in the few pages the Washington Post decided to publish, including an introduction by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In it, he drops a tantalizing hint: “Also, we are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic.”
Honestly, I’m skeptical. Whatever the NSA has up its top-secret sleeves, the mathematics of cryptography will still be the most secure part of any encryption system. I worry a lot more about poorly designed cryptographic products, software bugs, bad passwords, companies that collaborate with the NSA to leak all or part of the keys, and insecure computers and networks. Those are where the real vulnerabilities are, and where the NSA spends the bulk of its efforts.
via How Advanced Is the NSA’s Cryptanalysis — And Can We Resist It? | Wired Opinion | Wired.com.
[So here’s what Assad has to say. -egg]
Today there are many Western politicians, but very few statesmen. Some of these politicians do not read history or even learn from it, whilst others do not even remember recent events. Have these politicians learned any lessons from the past 50 years at least? Have they not realised that since the Vietnam War, all the wars their predecessors have waged have failed? Have they not learned that they have gained nothing from these wars but the destruction of the countries they fought, which has had a destabilising effect on the Middle East and other parts of the world? Have they not comprehended that all of these wars have not made people in the region appreciate them or believe in their policies?
From another perspective, these politicians should know that terrorism is not a winning card you play when it suits you and keep it in your pocket when it doesn’t. Terrorism is like a scorpion; it can unexpectedly sting you at any time. Therefore, you cannot support terrorism in Syria whilst fighting it in Mali; you cannot support terrorism in Chechnya and fight it in Afghanistan.
via Bashar al-Assad: «All contracts signed with Russia are implemented» – Известия.
[Totally kickass short story about technology, memory, and written vs oral tradition. Highly recommended. -egg]
Millions of people, some my age but most younger, have been keeping lifelogs for years, wearing personal cams that capture continuous video of their entire lives. People consult their lifelogs for a variety of reasons—everything from reliving favorite moments to tracking down the cause of allergic reactions—but only intermittently; no one wants to spend all their time formulating queries and sifting through the results. Lifelogs are the most complete photo album imaginable, but like most photo albums, they lie dormant except on special occasions. Now Whetstone aims to change all of that; they claim Remem’s algorithms can search the entire haystack by the time you’ve finished saying “needle.”
via The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang — Subterranean Press.
I was away from the network all weekend and caught up on my reading. Rather than make a bunch of separate posts, I’m just going to dump links here. Definitely a bunch of awesome stuff. I’ll post them roughly in order of awesomeness. -egg
Really interesting academic paper arguing that the core of our cultural ideas about constructing the self and about authenticity are shifting from the consumption of cool to the performance of the self on social media. I think the author gets some stuff really wrong, but a lot of stuff really right.
For those who enjoyed Charlie Stross’ article about gen Y, gen Z, and the extremely dangerous loyalty problem faced by the intelligence community, he’s done an extended version for Foreign Policy.
Woohoo, Cory Doctorow’s written a novella in the same series as _Little Brother_ and _Pirate Cinema_! These are the most compelling politically radical books for kids that anyone’s written in a long time, and this one is about Occupy. Available free online, like the others.
Fantastic article (2009) about the world of ’70’s lesbian separatists.
Scathing and well-written: Some Context for Our Upcoming Bombing Campaign
In A Grain Of Golden Rice, A World Of Controversy Over GMO Foods : NPR
How “cell tower dumps” caught the High Country Bandits—and why it matters
The Placebo Effect Is Real. Now Doctors Just Have To Work Out How To Use It
Good long article about what Sonny Rollins is up to these days.
Twitter ‘Joke Bots’ Shame Human Sense of Humor
Nasdaq crash triggers fear of data meltdown
Also, Bruce Sterling has written a very strange novel. Now that he’s not primarily a fiction writer, he can just write whatever the hell he wants, and that shows through here like crazy. I’m really enjoying it so far.
[By far the most lucid thing I’ve read about the current Syria situation (although I’m not terribly knowledgeable about it). -egg]
The UK and France had a lot of experience of running colonial empires, and had devised a recipe for establishing puppet states. You carved up the blank areas on the map, deliberately cutting across tribal/national boundaries, to establish zones with a 70/25/5 percentage split. The 70% majority were to be ruled and policed by representatives drawn from the 25% minority, armed with clubs and possibly rifles, while the 5% of imperial merchants and administrators enforced colonial rule over the 25%ers with machine guns and gunboats.
[Absolutely fascinating. -egg]
Researchers say this new breed of bots is being designed not just with greater sophistication but also with grander goals: to sway elections, to influence the stock market, to attack governments, even to flirt with people and one another.
via I Flirt and Tweet. Follow Me at #Socialbot. – NYTimes.com.