The Engineers' Secret Fitness Plan contains three basic elements:
1. At some point in your life, decide what size you are.
2. Only buy clothes that are your size.
3. If your clothes feel tight, that means you are not hungry.
It really is that simple. But non-engineers (i.e. Complainers) always manage to find something to complain about:
"But my stomach FEELS hungry!"
Oh, right. Which organ are you going to believe? That paragon of intelligence and good decision-making: The Brain, or some gurgling bag of acid and gas that never knows what's good for it? Your Brain is the only organ that you should allow to make decisions for you.
The one problem is that most engineers become aware of what they are by about age 15. Some people claim that this is too early to decide what size clothes you buy for the rest of your life. This may also be the reason that when you look at an engineer, you can usually see his socks.
Myself, I was still lengthening out my arms and legs well into my university years. But being a Western Reformed Engineer, I was allowed to select my clothing size upon graduation.
Showing posts with label Health and Fitness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Health and Fitness. Show all posts
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Pernicious Lies Masquerading as Enlightened Whiz-Dumb
We've all seen them on the social networking sites: feel-good aphorisms written on attractive pictures of kittens and little children. They are the kinds of statements with which on the surface no one would ever directly disagree. Few people realize how destructive these lies can be.Much of their destructive power arises exactly because they seem so sweet on the outside that polite people dare not disagree with them for fear of being labeled an ogre, anti-social, or simply a grouch. We swallow them without a thought and repeat them whenever seems appropriate, thus spreading the brain viruses and fanning the current epidemic of unconsciousness.
To misquote the late Richard Feynman, "What do I care what other people think?" Call me a grouch if you must, but I'm going to take on these pernicious lies and expose them for what they are: flaxen shackles of the Victimhood Mentality that enslaves most of Mankind.
First up:
While this may seem like a reminder to always bend over backwards to avoid any misunderstandings, that may be exactly what's wrong with this picture. Oh, there are so many errors here I'll have to start a list!
- If someone misunderstands you in a poisonous, negative way, it is because they have filters that are tuned to see things in the worst possible way. It's their stuff, NOT YOURS!
- If you believe that a misunderstanding is poisonous, then it will be for you. It's just a belief, just a thought! It's not real.
- It is possible, and actually almost a certainty, that you have unconscious beliefs of which you are not even aware. These beliefs can cause your Meaning-Making Machine (i.e. your brain) to create the most negative possible meaning out of any event or statement that is even slightly ambiguous.
- You cannot avoid all misunderstandings, because they are not all your fault. Understanding is a thing that your listener does with your help, but in the end it is entirely the listener's responsibility. They will make whatever meaning of your messages that they will, and there's not one thing you can do about it.
- If YOU do not consciously choose to reprogram your unconscious mind to always seek the most positive possible meaning, then the world (our culture, the TV, your parents, etc) will program your unconscious for you, and odds are that your unconscious will be programmed to find the most negative, poisonous possible meaning out of everything that anyone says or does. Next stop: advanced Paranoia and total isolation from every living being. It's epidemic, but it's also your choice as long as you know that it is.
Next,
The premise is that we can unknowingly cripple a child for life by saying the wrong thing, and so we tiptoe around the child and give them all the power in the relationship. This causes two things: it makes insecure children who always feel like victims thus crippling them for life, and it makes weak adults who shirk their responsibilities to the child and fail to take the opportunity for spiritual advancement that parenthood affords.
What about the adult who feels crippled by some wrong word that someone said to them as a child? The adult who, according to this picture, is in need of "repair?" There are two lies sneaking in to your brain within that little premise. One is that you can repair a person, or if it's you, that you need someone other than yourself to fix you. The truth is that you can't save anyone. They have to do it themselves. Similarly, you have within you everything necessary to "fix" yourself. Everything, except possibly the awareness of that fact.
A child younger than about age seven can not critically dismiss any of the things it hears, and unconsciously accepts them as true. But as an adult, you do have the ability and responsibility to seek out and replace any of the false, disempowering beliefs you picked up as a child. You have the opportunity and duty to gain awareness.
The order of operation is not as suggested by the picture - make sure the children aren't damaged because there's no longer any hope for us. The correct order is 1) to become more conscious as an adult and with volition to chose our beliefs; 2) THEN we will be able to raise children who will know that they must do the same as we, and will not live their lives as the victims of other's words.
Hopefully one more example will be enough for you to be able to identify and actively resist the lies that keep people living small:
The underhanded, undermining premise here is that "other people" are the source of the "wonderful things" in life. By corollary, the only thing coming out of ourselves is shit. Of course this is complete bollocks - utter nonsense.
Rather than planting the lie in your mind that "(without some special person, we) are without a source of wonderful things," this belief should be actively refuted using the truth that each of us is the source of many wonderful things. Each of us is our own source of Divinity, goodness, strength, power, love, and peace. It is only that disease called co-dependency that "needs" other people. But if we are awake to the truth, then we do not "need" other people at all. We can choose or choose not to share a part of our life with another person.
To live as a victim means to blame any of your woes on another person, on circumstances, or on any excuse so carefully crafted as to be completely beyond your control or influence. What is your big excuse? If you examine it closely and objectively, looking under the surface, you will discover that it is a fabrication of your own manufacture.
To throw off the culture of Victimhood means to take full responsibility for everything in your life, and to re-gain the control over your mortal experience that you forgot you had.
"But John, isn't it insane to pretend that the situation you're in isn't very bad if it actually is?"
Insanity is a symptom of resisting reality. I'm suggesting just the opposite: accept reality and surrender to it; either reserve judgement on it as good or bad, or else seek and find a way to judge it as potentially positive in the long run. We can change our thoughts, but only if we know it and believe it. When we change our thoughts, our circumstances gradually (or sometimes rapidly) adjust to our way of thinking.
"How is that even physically possible?"
All behavior has its roots in thought. All actions were first a mental impulse, either one we chose or one that was chosen for us - someone else's script we are unwittingly acting out. Throw off the slavery of other people's thoughts, scripts, and judgments. Throw off the shackles of Victimhood and begin to think your own thoughts! Choose ones that will empower you and cause you to take the actions that will inexorably lead you into better circumstances: better relationships, better finances, better mental and physical health.
Sometimes all you need to know is that a thing is possible before you find a way to make it happen.
Saturday, July 21, 2012
"All Knowledge is Subjective..."
. . . is an example of an objectively falsifiable statement. And a particularly easy one to falsify, at that. All it takes is one example of knowledge that is objective, in other words, universal and independent of who is doing the knowing. The fact that an objective, knowable reality exists is the ultimate counter-example to this popular statement.
"Tautology!" you say? Ok, I'll provide as many additional counter-examples as you wish later on. First, let's try to understand what the objective reality even is. Ironically enough, the story begins inside the totally subjective human brain.
Nothing we experience is real. All we experience with the ten senses (and the additional ten internal senses, making twenty in all) is a virtual re-creation of what your brain thinks is real that it projects onto your consciousness: an illusion of reality, and not always a particularly accurate one. All our awareness of and experiences with reality are gained indirectly at best, for the simple and obvious reason that we need a brain in order to be conscious of anything.
Are your eyes recording everything visual around you? They are not. The high-definition dynamic image you think you "see" now is really a re-creation of information your brain has collected, with occasional reference points and updates (3 per second or so) gleaned from the optic nerves and from other sensory input. You "see" with your eyes, nose, ears, sense of touch, etc., but you mostly "see" with your brain. Want proof? Ok - here it is. You can see perfectly well in the dark with your eyes closed. You do it every time you dream.
Color can physiologically only be perceived in the fovea, that tiny dense circle of photoreceptors at the center of the eye with which you are reading these letters now. You can't quite make out the words that you aren't looking directly at, can you, because only the fovea has enough "megapixels" to clearly resolve them. It also has the only color receptors in your entire eyeball. The colors that you "see" in your peripheral vision are not being seen directly by you now; they are only the memory of the colors that you saw there before.
Pain is another illusion created entirely by the brain. When you stub your toe, it hurts. The pain feels completely real. That is the power of the brain's capacity to create illusion: it seems completely real because the brain is the only way you have of experiencing anything at all, real or otherwise. In reality, your actual toe feels perfectly fine. It does not experience pain; it has no consciousness with which to make that judgement. The pain exists only in the brain's virtual re-creation of your body, called the body schema. Pain is there only to tell you to watch where you are going next time, but it can become a habit. Few people are aware that they can switch it off at will, and some people are even offended when told they have this ability.
Incidentally, there are numerous crazy ways that "body schema" makes itself known to us: through bulimia - the belief that a thin body is actually fat, "phantom limb syndrome" of amputees, "foreign limb syndrome" where people feel so uncomfortable with a particular arm or leg that they cut it off, and other hallucinations about the body.
The brain creates your own personalized version of reality in other ways, too, that people are not often naturally aware of. The filtration system at the center of your brain, called the Reticular Activating System or RAS, only lets through a tiny proportion of the information it receives every second, with the "tuning" of this filter under the control of your unconscious mind. It thinks it knows what trickle of items are important for you to be consciously aware of, and "protects" you from a veritable firehose of sensory input it deems irrelevant. Another secret of the brain that people are often disturbed to be told about is the fact that you can, with practice, consciously "tune" your RAS to the things that you willfully decide are important for you.
With the brain's virtual reality engine the only link your consciousness has to the "outside" world, people can be forgiven for concluding that there is no reality outside, and that "all knowledge is subjective." But that doesn't make them any less wrong.
But distinguishing between reality and illusion with any certainty does take discipline and effort. One has to disbelieve almost everything, or at least only "conditionally accept" what your brain tells you, pending independent verification. Through this process, you can come to know that there is an objective universe out there, consisting of matter and energy.
There exists, for example, particles designated "electrons" which have a mass (at rest) of between 9.109382910x10-31 kg and 9.109382918x10-31 kg, and this range is 99.99% certain. They also repel other electrons with a force that is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. This is an example of what we call a "law" of the objective reality nicknamed "Nature."
Disciplined humans peeling back the biases and re-creations of the subjective mind have discovered this information independently all over the world. Also, there is strong evidence that these electrons exist in even the most distant galaxies as far away and as far back in time as our machines, which have no subjective mind or consciousness, can detect.
Some subjective minds have labelled this discipline "science" meaning "knowledge," and have dismissed it as just another illusion created by the subjective mind. While the discipline may be a human invention, the knowledge uncovered is not invention but discovery. You may travel to a city in a car that belongs to you, but the city it takes you to does not therefore also belong to you.
People who insist that there is no objective knowledge are only speaking for themselves in their own undisciplined, disinterested ignorance. But in a sense, they are right: there is no objective knowledge that they are aware of.
.
"Tautology!" you say? Ok, I'll provide as many additional counter-examples as you wish later on. First, let's try to understand what the objective reality even is. Ironically enough, the story begins inside the totally subjective human brain.
The Subjective Brain
 |
| we need this brain |
Are your eyes recording everything visual around you? They are not. The high-definition dynamic image you think you "see" now is really a re-creation of information your brain has collected, with occasional reference points and updates (3 per second or so) gleaned from the optic nerves and from other sensory input. You "see" with your eyes, nose, ears, sense of touch, etc., but you mostly "see" with your brain. Want proof? Ok - here it is. You can see perfectly well in the dark with your eyes closed. You do it every time you dream.
Color can physiologically only be perceived in the fovea, that tiny dense circle of photoreceptors at the center of the eye with which you are reading these letters now. You can't quite make out the words that you aren't looking directly at, can you, because only the fovea has enough "megapixels" to clearly resolve them. It also has the only color receptors in your entire eyeball. The colors that you "see" in your peripheral vision are not being seen directly by you now; they are only the memory of the colors that you saw there before.
Pain is another illusion created entirely by the brain. When you stub your toe, it hurts. The pain feels completely real. That is the power of the brain's capacity to create illusion: it seems completely real because the brain is the only way you have of experiencing anything at all, real or otherwise. In reality, your actual toe feels perfectly fine. It does not experience pain; it has no consciousness with which to make that judgement. The pain exists only in the brain's virtual re-creation of your body, called the body schema. Pain is there only to tell you to watch where you are going next time, but it can become a habit. Few people are aware that they can switch it off at will, and some people are even offended when told they have this ability.
Incidentally, there are numerous crazy ways that "body schema" makes itself known to us: through bulimia - the belief that a thin body is actually fat, "phantom limb syndrome" of amputees, "foreign limb syndrome" where people feel so uncomfortable with a particular arm or leg that they cut it off, and other hallucinations about the body.
The brain creates your own personalized version of reality in other ways, too, that people are not often naturally aware of. The filtration system at the center of your brain, called the Reticular Activating System or RAS, only lets through a tiny proportion of the information it receives every second, with the "tuning" of this filter under the control of your unconscious mind. It thinks it knows what trickle of items are important for you to be consciously aware of, and "protects" you from a veritable firehose of sensory input it deems irrelevant. Another secret of the brain that people are often disturbed to be told about is the fact that you can, with practice, consciously "tune" your RAS to the things that you willfully decide are important for you.
With the brain's virtual reality engine the only link your consciousness has to the "outside" world, people can be forgiven for concluding that there is no reality outside, and that "all knowledge is subjective." But that doesn't make them any less wrong.
The Objective Universe
Life in this world is a never-ending experiment in which we probe, test, examine and manipulate reality. I can paint a wall blue, and wait. Sooner or later another consciousness will bring itself to my attention and insist that the wall over there has been painted blue. Yup. I did that. I manipulated Objective Reality. I wouldn't be able to do that if it didn't exist.But distinguishing between reality and illusion with any certainty does take discipline and effort. One has to disbelieve almost everything, or at least only "conditionally accept" what your brain tells you, pending independent verification. Through this process, you can come to know that there is an objective universe out there, consisting of matter and energy.
There exists, for example, particles designated "electrons" which have a mass (at rest) of between 9.109382910x10-31 kg and 9.109382918x10-31 kg, and this range is 99.99% certain. They also repel other electrons with a force that is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. This is an example of what we call a "law" of the objective reality nicknamed "Nature."
Disciplined humans peeling back the biases and re-creations of the subjective mind have discovered this information independently all over the world. Also, there is strong evidence that these electrons exist in even the most distant galaxies as far away and as far back in time as our machines, which have no subjective mind or consciousness, can detect.
Some subjective minds have labelled this discipline "science" meaning "knowledge," and have dismissed it as just another illusion created by the subjective mind. While the discipline may be a human invention, the knowledge uncovered is not invention but discovery. You may travel to a city in a car that belongs to you, but the city it takes you to does not therefore also belong to you.
People who insist that there is no objective knowledge are only speaking for themselves in their own undisciplined, disinterested ignorance. But in a sense, they are right: there is no objective knowledge that they are aware of.
.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
American Health Care Is Stupid
Yes, you read that correctly. I know you were expecting the title to be "Australian Health Care Is Weird" because that be more in line with the overall tenor of this blog. But this is one area that I think Australia has a few things it could teach its bigger, fatter cousin to the north. And I'm not talking about China.
Obamacare, obamacare, obamacare!
In Australia, whether you're a permanent resident, a naturalized citizen, or a citizen by birth, YOU HAVE BASIC HEALTH INSURANCE. Automatically. For FREE!
All you have to do is walk in to your local Medicare office (or Mediocre if you're a smart-ass like me), fill out a form, and get a plastic card with your name and your Mediocre number embossed on it.
Then, anytime you feel yourself coming down with a broken leg, a brain tumor, ADHD or the Spanish Flu, you can make an appointment at any local family doctor of your choice (called a General Practitioner or "GP"), pay a few dollars and get it checked out.
If the "GP" has enough turnover to employ an office staff, then they might do something called "bulk billing." That means you pay only the $20 or so co-pay for the office visit, and the doctor sends Mediocre a bill for the rest. Otherwise, you pay the full bill, then later take it in to the Mediocre office yourself and get most of it refunded back to you.
Now, let's say you have a serious condition that requires a specialist. Acne, for example. Then, your GP would write a referral to a specialist, a Dermatologist in this case. (If you have Lizards, he might refer you to a Herpetologist.) With that referral, most of your costs incurred with that specialist are covered by Mediocre. But if you are content to pay out of your own pocket, you are perfectly at liberty to see any specialist anytime as much as you want without a referral.
Sounds like a Hypochondriac's Utopia, doesn't it. Well, it has some down sides too. Because it's almost free, it is sometimes over-used by idiots who smoke, drink, eat and screw themselves into poor health. Consequently there can be lengthy waits to get an appointment at a GP, get into the hospital, or to finally have that brain transplant you've been so desperately needing.
Also, Mediocre stipulates how much Mediocre money a doctor can receive for their mediocre services, and often this is below the doctors' costs. As in America, the cost of health care has risen dramatically as scientists have invented ever more expensive ways to not die a little longer. Consequently, most doctors only have enough time in your appointment (average length: 1 hour in the waiting room, 14 seconds in the "surgery" or examination room) to give you a randomly-generated prescription for some pills that may or may not make frogs grow out of your armpits.
In other words, "free" health care is no exception to the maxim that you get what you pay for.
That is why in Australia you also have many opportunities to purchase "private" health cover which gets you into the medical fast-lane, better hospitals, smarter doctors with better English skills and TWICE the amount of time (28 seconds) to give you a prescription for something guaranteed to make you go away and not bother him anymore.
Private health insurance in Australia costs about a tenth of what health insurance costs in the US. It also covers "unnecessary" extras like dentistry, hand-washing before surgery, and boob-jobs. Though what exactly constitutes "necessary" medical procedures is the subject of intense debate in pubs and bars across Australia.
Shouldn't America adopt a similar system? Perhaps not. Australia has just eight or nine states or territories (we're not sure if Christmas Island and the Cocos Islands count), and just 22 million residents. It's quite a different thing to administer a Mediocre-type system across 50+ states and 300 million people. There is a strong argument in favor of running these things on a State level under Federal laws. Except if you live in Arizona. In that case there's a strong argument in favor of moving to Colorado.
Another problematic issue is this. If someone is paying for your medical care, can that person reasonably have some say in what you can and can't do that may affect your health, and consequently your medical costs? I personally think that would only be fair. But good luck banning all the things that could put you in the hospital! Food, drink, drugs, tobacco, sex, sitting, standing, working, playing, walking, driving; virtually every aspect of life eventually comes under government control if we follow this line of reasoning.
But there is a solution!
My solution to the quandary of a single-payer health care system which does not simply reward idiots and bums while punishing healthy people with higher taxes is this: Free basic health care with a slight twist. If you drink, smoke, do drugs, overeat, don't exercise, are overweight, have unprotected sex, or are really, really accident-prone, you pay for the privilege and freedom of doing as you please with an extra co-pay for each voluntary behavior that increases the burden on the health care system.
When we examine the extraordinary costs of providing emergency-room care for the poor and the cost of interventions that would have been cheaper to fix sooner, then the single-payer system is the cheaper option by far, as long as you don't inadvertently reward behavior that makes people sick.
But in the end, as all of us will, you will eventually die. In Australia, it will almost certainly be in the jaws of a shark, crocodile or wombat. From this perspective, America's obsession with Obamacare seems a silly, silly, silly, silly silly thing to worry about.
Find out more. Understanding Australia's Health Care System:
Obamacare, obamacare, obamacare!
In Australia, whether you're a permanent resident, a naturalized citizen, or a citizen by birth, YOU HAVE BASIC HEALTH INSURANCE. Automatically. For FREE!
All you have to do is walk in to your local Medicare office (or Mediocre if you're a smart-ass like me), fill out a form, and get a plastic card with your name and your Mediocre number embossed on it.
Then, anytime you feel yourself coming down with a broken leg, a brain tumor, ADHD or the Spanish Flu, you can make an appointment at any local family doctor of your choice (called a General Practitioner or "GP"), pay a few dollars and get it checked out.
If the "GP" has enough turnover to employ an office staff, then they might do something called "bulk billing." That means you pay only the $20 or so co-pay for the office visit, and the doctor sends Mediocre a bill for the rest. Otherwise, you pay the full bill, then later take it in to the Mediocre office yourself and get most of it refunded back to you.
Now, let's say you have a serious condition that requires a specialist. Acne, for example. Then, your GP would write a referral to a specialist, a Dermatologist in this case. (If you have Lizards, he might refer you to a Herpetologist.) With that referral, most of your costs incurred with that specialist are covered by Mediocre. But if you are content to pay out of your own pocket, you are perfectly at liberty to see any specialist anytime as much as you want without a referral.
Sounds like a Hypochondriac's Utopia, doesn't it. Well, it has some down sides too. Because it's almost free, it is sometimes over-used by idiots who smoke, drink, eat and screw themselves into poor health. Consequently there can be lengthy waits to get an appointment at a GP, get into the hospital, or to finally have that brain transplant you've been so desperately needing.
Also, Mediocre stipulates how much Mediocre money a doctor can receive for their mediocre services, and often this is below the doctors' costs. As in America, the cost of health care has risen dramatically as scientists have invented ever more expensive ways to not die a little longer. Consequently, most doctors only have enough time in your appointment (average length: 1 hour in the waiting room, 14 seconds in the "surgery" or examination room) to give you a randomly-generated prescription for some pills that may or may not make frogs grow out of your armpits.
In other words, "free" health care is no exception to the maxim that you get what you pay for.
That is why in Australia you also have many opportunities to purchase "private" health cover which gets you into the medical fast-lane, better hospitals, smarter doctors with better English skills and TWICE the amount of time (28 seconds) to give you a prescription for something guaranteed to make you go away and not bother him anymore.
Private health insurance in Australia costs about a tenth of what health insurance costs in the US. It also covers "unnecessary" extras like dentistry, hand-washing before surgery, and boob-jobs. Though what exactly constitutes "necessary" medical procedures is the subject of intense debate in pubs and bars across Australia.
Shouldn't America adopt a similar system? Perhaps not. Australia has just eight or nine states or territories (we're not sure if Christmas Island and the Cocos Islands count), and just 22 million residents. It's quite a different thing to administer a Mediocre-type system across 50+ states and 300 million people. There is a strong argument in favor of running these things on a State level under Federal laws. Except if you live in Arizona. In that case there's a strong argument in favor of moving to Colorado.
Another problematic issue is this. If someone is paying for your medical care, can that person reasonably have some say in what you can and can't do that may affect your health, and consequently your medical costs? I personally think that would only be fair. But good luck banning all the things that could put you in the hospital! Food, drink, drugs, tobacco, sex, sitting, standing, working, playing, walking, driving; virtually every aspect of life eventually comes under government control if we follow this line of reasoning.
But there is a solution!
My solution to the quandary of a single-payer health care system which does not simply reward idiots and bums while punishing healthy people with higher taxes is this: Free basic health care with a slight twist. If you drink, smoke, do drugs, overeat, don't exercise, are overweight, have unprotected sex, or are really, really accident-prone, you pay for the privilege and freedom of doing as you please with an extra co-pay for each voluntary behavior that increases the burden on the health care system.
When we examine the extraordinary costs of providing emergency-room care for the poor and the cost of interventions that would have been cheaper to fix sooner, then the single-payer system is the cheaper option by far, as long as you don't inadvertently reward behavior that makes people sick.
But in the end, as all of us will, you will eventually die. In Australia, it will almost certainly be in the jaws of a shark, crocodile or wombat. From this perspective, America's obsession with Obamacare seems a silly, silly, silly, silly silly thing to worry about.
Find out more. Understanding Australia's Health Care System:
Monday, October 31, 2011
Making Vegetables Edible Again
For years the "health" community has been trying to eliminate men by getting them to stop eating their vegetables.
Oh, they will certainly deny it, because it is a top-secret, tightly-controlled conspiracy to which only 20 million or so dietitians and doctors worldwide are a party. This gets a little complicated, so bear with me.
First, it was ulcers. Men who had ulcers were put on very strict diets. They were told "You have to stop eating Mexican Food or anything remotely delicious. It's causing ulcers." And their wives fell for it. Consequently, the typical Western dinner table became increasingly bland over the years, and now new generations of homemakers no longer even know the original reason. Spicy was equated to bad.
Then there was fat. Cholesterol became the new suburban boogeyman lurking inside anything even remotely enjoyable: eggs, cheese, sour cream, bacon, whipped cream on top of bacon-flavoured ice cream, and steak. Meat was an innocent bystander in the war on fat. Food became lower in protein, higher in empty calories, and what meat we did consume became more tasteless, tougher, and laden with guilt.
Finally, to complete their triumvirate of tastelessness, dietitians declared war on salt. People were incited to extreme and ludicrous measures to eliminate virtually every source of sodium in food and drink. This is still continuing today, and people unquestioningly obey and defend this corrupt practice.
What does this add up to? If all of the things that make vegetables even remotely palatable are banned, hot spices, cheese, butter, sour cream, bacon, and foremost of all, salt, then no man in his right mind will want to eat them, much less grow them for himself in an act of self-sufficiency and defiance of The System.
And for all their do-gooding and banning, what is the result of dietitians' campaign of tyrany over the male diet? An epidemic of obesity. Round, soft males who can no longer fend for themselves. Lacking testosterone and any will to live, they loll around consuming whatever food-replacement product and bland entertainment the big corporations deem most profitable to provide.
But Now, The Truth.
First, Ulcers. In 1982, Australian scientists Robin Warren and Barry Marshall made the discovery that 80% of stomach ulcers and 90% of intestinal ulcers were caused not by spicy foods at all, but by a specific bacterium. A short course of the right antibiotic takes care of it. For most men, there's no longer any medical reason to be bland. Warren and Marshal were awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in medicine, presumably by people who like spicy food.
The other 10 - 20% of ulcers are managed not by diet but by stress reduction. Mainly, this means becoming more physically active and thinking differently, both of which we are at perfect liberty to do at all times.
Second, cholesterol. There are countless references to both sides of the question, but a few things are crystal clear. First, cholesterol is not strictly bad, but a vital component of healthy cells in your body. A critical lack of it has even been linked to emotional instability and violent behavior. Second, any link between consumption of cholesterol-bearing foods and heart disease is extremely complex and actually rather weak. The media over-simplifies things by reporting, "Cholesterol causes heart disease." But the data actually support a conclusion more along the lines of, "If you're not physically active enough, heart disease will get you, using your friend cholesterol as a mechanism."
Eliminating fat and cholesterol from your diet is like refraining from putting gasoline in your car because it might explode if you attempt to drive it. The more sensible course of action is simply that - Action! Eat what your body craves, and always be doing things. Life's too short to lay about, anyhow, so get out and enjoy it.
Third, sodium. In 2003 a review by medical researchers revealed that although a low-sodium diet has a tenuous, barely discernable link to lowering high blood pressure, the effect was so slight as to have no measurable impact on overall health. In other words, the enormous effort and cost of our low-sodium diets are not justified by any positive benefit. Far more dramatic reductions in high blood pressure and immediate health benefits are readily observed when people simply exercise physically, and exercise good mental health by not indulging in excessive worry, which is as destructive a habit as compulsive smoking or cutting one's self with knives.
Have you spotted the common theme? Everything's OK to eat if you are physically active. Fortunately for me, there's always plenty to do at the Shed, and most of it is pretty strenuous.
What does this have to do with eating vegetables?
Exploding these deceitful and misandrous dietary myths means you can grow your own vegetables and load them up with as much salt, real butter, melted cheese, spicy seasonings, sour cream and bacon as required to make them edible. A baked potato, for example, is chock full of energy, fiber, vitamin B, vitamin C, potassium, and Wodan knows what else, while at the same time being a highly effective sour cream delivery medium, which is why I eat them. Certainly not for the flavor of potato!
But a person can have too much of a good thing. To stay healthy there is one absolute dietary rule that I hold to without exception most of the time: Only eat when you're actually hungry.
But that's not hard when there's so much to be done and so little time.
Oh, they will certainly deny it, because it is a top-secret, tightly-controlled conspiracy to which only 20 million or so dietitians and doctors worldwide are a party. This gets a little complicated, so bear with me.
First, it was ulcers. Men who had ulcers were put on very strict diets. They were told "You have to stop eating Mexican Food or anything remotely delicious. It's causing ulcers." And their wives fell for it. Consequently, the typical Western dinner table became increasingly bland over the years, and now new generations of homemakers no longer even know the original reason. Spicy was equated to bad.
Then there was fat. Cholesterol became the new suburban boogeyman lurking inside anything even remotely enjoyable: eggs, cheese, sour cream, bacon, whipped cream on top of bacon-flavoured ice cream, and steak. Meat was an innocent bystander in the war on fat. Food became lower in protein, higher in empty calories, and what meat we did consume became more tasteless, tougher, and laden with guilt.
Finally, to complete their triumvirate of tastelessness, dietitians declared war on salt. People were incited to extreme and ludicrous measures to eliminate virtually every source of sodium in food and drink. This is still continuing today, and people unquestioningly obey and defend this corrupt practice.
What does this add up to? If all of the things that make vegetables even remotely palatable are banned, hot spices, cheese, butter, sour cream, bacon, and foremost of all, salt, then no man in his right mind will want to eat them, much less grow them for himself in an act of self-sufficiency and defiance of The System.
And for all their do-gooding and banning, what is the result of dietitians' campaign of tyrany over the male diet? An epidemic of obesity. Round, soft males who can no longer fend for themselves. Lacking testosterone and any will to live, they loll around consuming whatever food-replacement product and bland entertainment the big corporations deem most profitable to provide.
But Now, The Truth.
First, Ulcers. In 1982, Australian scientists Robin Warren and Barry Marshall made the discovery that 80% of stomach ulcers and 90% of intestinal ulcers were caused not by spicy foods at all, but by a specific bacterium. A short course of the right antibiotic takes care of it. For most men, there's no longer any medical reason to be bland. Warren and Marshal were awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in medicine, presumably by people who like spicy food.
The other 10 - 20% of ulcers are managed not by diet but by stress reduction. Mainly, this means becoming more physically active and thinking differently, both of which we are at perfect liberty to do at all times.
Second, cholesterol. There are countless references to both sides of the question, but a few things are crystal clear. First, cholesterol is not strictly bad, but a vital component of healthy cells in your body. A critical lack of it has even been linked to emotional instability and violent behavior. Second, any link between consumption of cholesterol-bearing foods and heart disease is extremely complex and actually rather weak. The media over-simplifies things by reporting, "Cholesterol causes heart disease." But the data actually support a conclusion more along the lines of, "If you're not physically active enough, heart disease will get you, using your friend cholesterol as a mechanism."
Eliminating fat and cholesterol from your diet is like refraining from putting gasoline in your car because it might explode if you attempt to drive it. The more sensible course of action is simply that - Action! Eat what your body craves, and always be doing things. Life's too short to lay about, anyhow, so get out and enjoy it.
Third, sodium. In 2003 a review by medical researchers revealed that although a low-sodium diet has a tenuous, barely discernable link to lowering high blood pressure, the effect was so slight as to have no measurable impact on overall health. In other words, the enormous effort and cost of our low-sodium diets are not justified by any positive benefit. Far more dramatic reductions in high blood pressure and immediate health benefits are readily observed when people simply exercise physically, and exercise good mental health by not indulging in excessive worry, which is as destructive a habit as compulsive smoking or cutting one's self with knives.
Have you spotted the common theme? Everything's OK to eat if you are physically active. Fortunately for me, there's always plenty to do at the Shed, and most of it is pretty strenuous.
What does this have to do with eating vegetables?
Exploding these deceitful and misandrous dietary myths means you can grow your own vegetables and load them up with as much salt, real butter, melted cheese, spicy seasonings, sour cream and bacon as required to make them edible. A baked potato, for example, is chock full of energy, fiber, vitamin B, vitamin C, potassium, and Wodan knows what else, while at the same time being a highly effective sour cream delivery medium, which is why I eat them. Certainly not for the flavor of potato!
But a person can have too much of a good thing. To stay healthy there is one absolute dietary rule that I hold to without exception most of the time: Only eat when you're actually hungry.
But that's not hard when there's so much to be done and so little time.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
How To Lie in a Hammock
It's not junk food. It's not driving slightly over the posted limit. It's not carrying a few extra pounds around the middle. It's not chlorine or fluorine in the drinking water. It isn't those overhead high-voltage power lines (an awe-inspiring monument to what separates Man from the animals: his ability to make electricity). Neither is it drinking from plastic bottles, cooking salty food in a teflon pan, or licking cholesterol-based pork-flavored frosting directly off of aluminium pots. It's not even duct-taping a dozen active cell phones to your head and calling all of them at once. None of these things can actually kill you.
Stress is the real killer. Do something about stress, and these other risk factors take care of themselves. Ignore stress, and you're caught in a non-stop game of whack-a-mole with a never-ending stream of environmental health hazards, many of which you can do nothing about. But what can your average Joe do about stress? Plenty.
When men are relaxed, composed, well-rested and get the required amount of sleep, they perform better on the job, have stronger marriages, have better relationships with their kids, fewer car accidents, fewer health problems, more hair, and a longer schwanz.
(Well, probably. We haven't actually tried to get data on that last one.)
Men, it is virtually YOUR DUTY as a husband or father to go lie in a hammock. RIGHT NOW!
Here's how to make hammock-time a safe and enjoyable means to a longer, happier life, rather than the painful, embarrassing Funniest-Home-Videos experience it has the potential to become.
1. Find two stout trees in a quiet location that are 12 feet apart and each at least 8 inches in diameter. I strongly advise against hammocks slung on a metal frame, between posts of a patio, or on hooks screwed to a wall or ceiling. No hook, eye bolt or screw from a hardware store will do the job, and 2x4s or even 4x4s are not suitable. You need trees.
If the trees are too close together, your bum will drag on the ground. If they are too far apart, your bum will drag on the ground. Weird, isn't it? It's paradoxes like that which motivated me to study physics and mathematics in the first place. The really important questions in life.
2. Get two pieces of strong rope, half inch diameter give or take, about 5 feet long, but long enough to wrap around your trees three times with a foot or two left over. Tape and melt the ends to prevent fraying (if natural fiber, tape or lash the ends and apply glue). I like to wrap the rope in tape at the cut before I cut it, to forestall any unraveling.
3. One end of the rope attaches to the loop on the end of your Hammock
as shown. Pass the end through the loop, behind and around the hammock cord, and then under itself. Do not make a more complicated knot than this, because a) it will not hold any better, b) it will be more stressful on you and on the rope. The secret to hanging in there for the long haul (physically and metaphorically) is to manage stress and keep things simple.
4. The other end of each rope is wrapped around a tree at about head-height like this. The second pass goes under the first, on the side of the tree facing directly away from the other tree. The third pass makes a loop which is put under the second pass as shown. Why a loop? When it starts raining you can pull this end of the rope and have your hammock stowed away in seconds flat. Again, don't try to make the knot more complicated. If done correctly, the rope will break long before this knot ever lets go. The bark of the tree provides friction against the rope, so don't attempt this on metal poles, smooth timber posts, or on anything other than a natural tree, or with anything other than twisted multi-strand rope.
5. See that the hammock hangs approximately as shown (below). If it hangs too slack, it will be uncomfortable. If it doesn't hang enough, you could break the ropes and end up with a bruise on your backside and your ego.
6. Lie diagonally across the hammock, not lengthwise. Hammocks are more stable this way, and you will not flip over and fall flat on your face to the utter glee and amusement of anyone who happens to be videoing you on their cell phone.
An empty hammock forms a geometric shape called a Catenary. It is the solution to an elliptical integral equation which has no simple algebraic form. It is one of Nature's most beautiful shapes, in my opinion. Interestingly (well, to me anyway) it is also the shape assumed by a thin, flexible elastic object, such as the blade of a saw, when the ends are pushed towards one another.
When a typical 200 pound man sits in the middle of a hammock, how much tension is on each rope? Would you say one hundred pounds, which would be the total weight shared evenly by the two ropes? No! This is why many hammocks fail. The rope tension is actually much higher than that. If the trees are 12 feet apart and the total hammock length is 15 feet, then the rope tension is 167 pounds. If you shorten the hammock by 1 foot, the tension increases to 194 pounds. Taking another foot off makes it 260 pounds. I'll leave the details of the vector geometry for the reader to do as an exercise.
As the hammock is shortened so that it doesn't hang down at all, the force theoretically approaches infinity. But long before that happens, the trees lean inwards to reduce the tension, or the rope stretches slightly, or something breaks. Again, do not use metal hooks, screws, bolts, hangers, eyes, or anything from a hardware store other than good, honest rope and two solid trees in a quiet location. If these steps are followed to the letter, I personally guarantee you total relaxation, longer life, better health and significantly fewer incidents of public humiliation. Or your money back.
Stress is the real killer. Do something about stress, and these other risk factors take care of themselves. Ignore stress, and you're caught in a non-stop game of whack-a-mole with a never-ending stream of environmental health hazards, many of which you can do nothing about. But what can your average Joe do about stress? Plenty.
When men are relaxed, composed, well-rested and get the required amount of sleep, they perform better on the job, have stronger marriages, have better relationships with their kids, fewer car accidents, fewer health problems, more hair, and a longer schwanz.
(Well, probably. We haven't actually tried to get data on that last one.)
Men, it is virtually YOUR DUTY as a husband or father to go lie in a hammock. RIGHT NOW!
Here's how to make hammock-time a safe and enjoyable means to a longer, happier life, rather than the painful, embarrassing Funniest-Home-Videos experience it has the potential to become.
1. Find two stout trees in a quiet location that are 12 feet apart and each at least 8 inches in diameter. I strongly advise against hammocks slung on a metal frame, between posts of a patio, or on hooks screwed to a wall or ceiling. No hook, eye bolt or screw from a hardware store will do the job, and 2x4s or even 4x4s are not suitable. You need trees.
If the trees are too close together, your bum will drag on the ground. If they are too far apart, your bum will drag on the ground. Weird, isn't it? It's paradoxes like that which motivated me to study physics and mathematics in the first place. The really important questions in life.
2. Get two pieces of strong rope, half inch diameter give or take, about 5 feet long, but long enough to wrap around your trees three times with a foot or two left over. Tape and melt the ends to prevent fraying (if natural fiber, tape or lash the ends and apply glue). I like to wrap the rope in tape at the cut before I cut it, to forestall any unraveling.3. One end of the rope attaches to the loop on the end of your Hammock
as shown. Pass the end through the loop, behind and around the hammock cord, and then under itself. Do not make a more complicated knot than this, because a) it will not hold any better, b) it will be more stressful on you and on the rope. The secret to hanging in there for the long haul (physically and metaphorically) is to manage stress and keep things simple. |
| Second pass: goes under first pass. |
4. The other end of each rope is wrapped around a tree at about head-height like this. The second pass goes under the first, on the side of the tree facing directly away from the other tree. The third pass makes a loop which is put under the second pass as shown. Why a loop? When it starts raining you can pull this end of the rope and have your hammock stowed away in seconds flat. Again, don't try to make the knot more complicated. If done correctly, the rope will break long before this knot ever lets go. The bark of the tree provides friction against the rope, so don't attempt this on metal poles, smooth timber posts, or on anything other than a natural tree, or with anything other than twisted multi-strand rope.
 |
| Third pass: loop held by second pass. |
5. See that the hammock hangs approximately as shown (below). If it hangs too slack, it will be uncomfortable. If it doesn't hang enough, you could break the ropes and end up with a bruise on your backside and your ego.
 |
| A Catenary. |
An empty hammock forms a geometric shape called a Catenary. It is the solution to an elliptical integral equation which has no simple algebraic form. It is one of Nature's most beautiful shapes, in my opinion. Interestingly (well, to me anyway) it is also the shape assumed by a thin, flexible elastic object, such as the blade of a saw, when the ends are pushed towards one another.
When a typical 200 pound man sits in the middle of a hammock, how much tension is on each rope? Would you say one hundred pounds, which would be the total weight shared evenly by the two ropes? No! This is why many hammocks fail. The rope tension is actually much higher than that. If the trees are 12 feet apart and the total hammock length is 15 feet, then the rope tension is 167 pounds. If you shorten the hammock by 1 foot, the tension increases to 194 pounds. Taking another foot off makes it 260 pounds. I'll leave the details of the vector geometry for the reader to do as an exercise.
As the hammock is shortened so that it doesn't hang down at all, the force theoretically approaches infinity. But long before that happens, the trees lean inwards to reduce the tension, or the rope stretches slightly, or something breaks. Again, do not use metal hooks, screws, bolts, hangers, eyes, or anything from a hardware store other than good, honest rope and two solid trees in a quiet location. If these steps are followed to the letter, I personally guarantee you total relaxation, longer life, better health and significantly fewer incidents of public humiliation. Or your money back.
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