Chop wood, carry water →

Published December 10, 2023 · All posts on Dec 10 · 7 for Sunday, Apogee

There is a well-known trumpet player named Rick Braun. Although a few years younger, he was born in the same city and went to the same high school as my dad. And if my memory serves, they were in high school at the same time and at least knew of each other. My dad played the trumpet in high school, even performing in a band. Many year ago, my dad saw Braun somewhere—a concert I think—and had a chance to speak with him. The story goes that my dad said something complimentary about Braun’s ability and talent. (Yes, this is all hearsay.) Braun’s reply? “What a lot of people mistake for talent is simply a lot of hard work.”

At Time in the nineteen-fifties, the entry-level job for writers was a column called Miscellany. Filled with one-sentence oddities culled from newspapers and the wire services, Miscellany ran down its third of a page like a ladder, each wee story with its own title—traditionally, and almost invariably, a pun. Writers did not long endure there, and were not meant to, but just after I showed up a hiring freeze shut the door behind me, and I wrote Miscellany for a year and a half. That came to roughly a thousand one-sentence stories, a thousand puns.
~ John McPhee from, Omission

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John McPhee is a stellar writer. He’s written a lot and, okay, sure, I get that. There are greatest-of-all-time musicians I’ve heard of who still do scales daily 30 years on. And McPhee wrote a thousand puns(!), a thousand titles, and a thousand one-sentence stories cut-down from larger stories. (And go read McPhee’s article right now, about omission.) And now here’s Braun’s comment. Frankly, I’ve heard this sentiment countless times in countless variations: The path to mastery? Chop wood, carry water.

The thing I’m not certain of though, from my dad’s story, is whether the takeaway for him was, “Oh cool, Braun’s just a regular guy who worked really hard!” or “Fudge, I shoulda’ stuck with the trumpet!”

Water pump →

Published December 11, 2021 · All posts on Dec 11

Have you ever worked a hand-operated water pump? I mean the outdoor, permanently installed ones for pulling up drinking water. There’s a lot of varability to them, but generally there’s a bit of pumping before there’s any fruit to the labor. In my mind, there’s also a particular sound that goes with the initial machinations.

Sometimes, when I want to create a blog post from nothing, I hear that sound. You start on that pump. Then you’d hear the sound change, you’d feel the water make the action of the pump more leaden as the amount of effort changed.

But still, no water yet. You’d lean into it a bit more. Some sounds of water now. A gurgling rising in pitch which you instinctively know means the space for air is dwindling rapidly. And at a hard to predict moment . . .

You get a blog post about water pumps when you were expecting drinking water.

The web is like water →

Published June 21, 2020 · All posts on Jun 21 · Internet Tech

There is no question that apps are here to stay, and are a superior interaction model for some uses. But the web is like water: it fills in all the gaps between things like gaming and social with exactly what any one particular user wants. And while we all might have a use for Facebook – simply because everyone is there – we all have different things that interest us when it comes to reading.
~ Ben Thompson from, Why the Web Still Matters – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

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That’s from 2014, and holds up pretty well I think. That the web, “fills in all the gaps,” is insightful. Sure, the technology that defines “the Web” drives an enormous amount of stuff other than written content. But even just the smaller portion that is the written word is a huge swath of time and attention. That speaks well for us in the aggregate.

I still believe that the problem, currently, is simply that people rarely bother to figure out how things actually work. People don’t tinker and change things. Once someone gets the bug of curiosity, it’s a slippery slope from poking and prodding, to tinkering and experimenting, to building and creating; It’s a slippery slope lined entirely with reading.

Waterfront →

Published August 29, 2015 · All posts on Aug 29 · Instaspam

Doing the tourist thing at the Toronto waterfront. Heading to the CN tower soon.

Bourton on the Water →

Published August 18, 2015 · All posts on Aug 18 · Instaspam

Kingsbridge Inn in Bourton-on-the-Water. A lot of the countryside here looks exactly like Pennsylvania… so much in England to love. (Driving on the left, not so much. But the way the traffic ‘works’ here is SO much better than in the states!) #roundaboutConvert

Fish don’t know they are in water →

Published February 7, 2015 · All posts on Feb 7 · Society

If you know a little history, you might see some of this, and think that today’s culture battles are part of a tradition that goes back to FDR …
If you know a bit more history, you might see that this culture war stems from North Eastern progressive tradition dating back to the US Civil War.
The truth is that our culture war does date to the Civil War. Just not the US Civil War in 1861. It’s the English Civil War in 1640s I’m talking about.
~ Clark from, «http://www.popehat.com/2014/10/10/strange-seeds-on-distant-shores/»

KU waterfall traverse →

Published June 30, 2014 · All posts on Jun 30 · Instaspam, Parkour

Be water →

Published July 23, 2013 · All posts on Jul 23 · Quotes

Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless – like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
~ Bruce Lee

slip:4a189.

Getting started with 16-hour fasting →

Published March 31 · All posts on Mar 31 · Fasting

This post is about ways to incrementally change when you are eating, to shift yourself from how you are eating today, to a particular time-pattern of fasting called 16:8 (pronounced “sixteen eight”.) 16:8 means every day you have a 16-hour fast (the “not eating” window,) and then an 8-hour eating window.

I’m going to start by assuming you already want to begin fasting. I’ve written more generally about fasting if you’d prefer to start with WHY you might want to try being more intentional about when you choose to eat.

Putting yourself into “intentional” mode

You SHOULD discuss your fasting with your primary care physician. Ask them what you should be aware of, or how it may affect you—they know the specifics of your body. You will discover they actually know all about fasting and diet. If you are proactively engaged in your own welfare, your physician will be happy to be a font of useful information.

For example: My primary care doctor is well aware of the beneficial effects of diet, exercise and fasting on my cholesterol markers. They are also convinced that my lifestyle changes will not be able to sufficiently improve those markers quickly enough. Thus, our discussions and my choices continue.

(And—yikes!—if your physician isn’t helpful, knowledgeable, and open to discussion, you should find a better physician.)

Fasting is about WHEN you eat

Fasting is easy to understand: It’s about WHEN you eat. Whether we use the word fasting, intermittent fasting (IF), or time restricted eating (TRE), we’re simply referring to when you eat versus when you don’t eat.

Fasting—here, and whenever I talk about it—is not about depriving yourself, nor about starvation or suffering. It is SIMPLY being intentional about WHEN you CHOOSE to eat.

I know, I know… 16 hours without eating probably sounds like a crazy-long time to not eat. But as I said at the top, I’m assuming you are motivated to try this.

(more…)

Part 5: Inflammation and Immune Renewal →

Published March 4 · All posts on Mar 4 · Fasting

I’ve been doing 16:8 intermittent fasting for years and recently started 48-hour fasts — dropping about three pounds each fast, gaining one or two back, and trending steadily downward. I wanted to understand what the research actually says about what I’m doing to myself, so I worked with Claude (Anthropic’s AI) to produce this series. I set the structure, chose the topics, pushed back on claims that felt hand-wavy, and guided the editorial tone. Claude did the writing and research synthesis. My curiosity driving Claude’s research and prose.

Inflammation and Immune Renewal

Research brief — how fasting reduces systemic inflammation and primes the immune system for regeneration. Two distinct but related mechanisms.

Inflammation Reduction

Jordan et al. 2019 — Stefan Jordan, Navpreet Tung, and colleagues at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, led by Miriam Merad. Published in Cell, 178:1102-1114. (1)

This study directly tied caloric intake to the circulating inflammatory monocyte pool — a key driver of systemic inflammation.

What they found:

Short-term fasting reduced monocyte metabolic and inflammatory activity and drastically reduced the number of circulating monocytes
The mechanism: fasting activates AMPK in hepatocytes (liver cells) and suppresses systemic CCL2 production via PPARα, which reduces monocyte mobilization from bone marrow
Fasting improved chronic inflammatory diseases without compromising emergency immune mobilization during acute infection — the immune system’s ability to respond to real threats remained intact