On this day

May 4th

Instincts

May 4, 2022

Our instincts as humans are slowly dimming the less time we spend in wild nature: rainstorms, cold, whiteouts, loose rocks, adventure. Climbing is an important and sacred opportunity for us to exist in situations that we faced a hundred thousand years ago. The animalistic side of human beings. Our instincts are an important element of our intelligence.

~ Reinhold Messner

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Create a space

May 4, 2022

Today I’d like to share an idea for getting things in order: just as I recommend for decluttering your house, create a place for everything that matters to you.

~ Leo Babauta from, Create a Place for Everything That Matters

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When you first hear this idea—for physical things and for the things “in” your life—it sounds insanely hard. If you manage to push through that initial resistance you find out that the problem isn’t the things in, or “in”, your life. The problem is that you let them in. And then you realize, that you didn’t actually let them in, you invited them in.

For me, solving the problem is not about my ruthlessly removing things. (And to be clear, thoughts this post I’m talking about physical things that are around me, people around me, ideas around me… everything.) Solving the problem is not about my ruthlessly trying to keep things away. No. The real problem is to identify and then resolve the urge. The urge to want more. The urge to collect. The urge to—I think—try to fill some sense of need.

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Mind your own

May 4, 2021

Not to support this side or that in chariot-racing, this fighter or that in the games. To put up with discomfort and not make demands. To do my own work, mind my own business, and have no time for slanderers.

~ Marcus Aurelius

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I recently had a run-in— well, to be accurate, I drove off the road… But I’ll call it a “run-in” with reality. (No injuries, no serious damage, just a bit of unexpected adventure in what should have been a boring car ride.)

First, as I touch-typed that previous sentence, I ended that parenthetical note by typing, “…a boring car die.)” If that’s not a Freudian slip, (where you mean one thing but say your mother,) I don’t know what it is. I stared at it for a moment and then corrected it, as it now appears above. Driving off the road didn’t scare me, but it has clearly been rattling around my thoughts recently.

Second, after more thought in the days after: Yeah, I’m ok with what I’m up to these days. Doing my own work. Working on minding my own business. Not making demands. Putting up with discomfort. …and that last one is not a passive-aggressive, “that’s ok I’ll just sit here in the dark.” (How many grandmothers does it take to change a light bulb? in case you didn’t catch that.) I mean simply putting up with discomfort; it’s hot, I’m sweaty and the gnats are annoying, sort of discomfort.

Anyway, I’ve just added this wonderful reminder from Aurelius to my collection of daily reflection prompts. There were 57, and now there are 58. It also becomes quote number 652 in my growing collection. If you’re curious about how these posts are created, it’s a mixture of scheduled posts and daily writing. Instead of scheduling this one out somewhere in the future—which does have the advantage of surprising me when they do pop out… Instead, I’m opting to drop it here to give me some room for more thoughts.

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Frog or bird?

May 4, 2020

He described himself as a frog not a bird, as he enjoyed jumping from pool to pool, studying their details deeply in the mud. The bird’s-eye perspective was not for him, and he had a lifelong suspicion of grand unified theories.

~ Robbert Dijkgraaf from, Remembering the Unstoppable Freeman Dyson

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Freeman Dyson’s, Frogs and Birds is also worth a read.

There is such an insanely huge amount of things I want to read. Web pages, PDF files, ePub documents in Kindle and Nook, and of course stacks of physical books. I read a lot, but of course I’ll barely scratch the surface of just the things I’ve actively decided I want to read. Fortunately, I’m no longer reading to reach a goal, or to finish.

My mind is but a tiny eddy of order, maintained every so briefly within the grand arc of time.

…and what fun it is to go frolicking through the works of mankind, sharing the occasional bit here with you!

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Daily steps of weight tracking

May 4, 2019

My weight fluctuates a lot during the day, and day-to-day. So I picked a consistence time and procedure. I try not to over-think it, and simply do the same thing each time, generally, in the morning after I go to the bathroom.

After doing this for a few years, I no longer care about the fluctuations. The whole point of this is to get a handle on the trends. The individual jumping around of the numbers is irrelevant. Once you see the numbers jump all over the place for a few weeks, you learn to stop caring about what the scale says on any given day.

My scale measures in 2/10’s of pounds. So I can get “123.4” or “123.6”. It’s digital, has huge numbers, and it lives right in the open in the bathroom where I can just step on it at any time. This is important as it removes all possible “friction” to weighing myself. I don’t even need to slide the scale out to step on it.

Next to the scale hangs a tailor’s tape measure. I use the metric scale on the tape since that gives me centimeters and tenths. (If I used the inches scale, I’d have to convert the 1/8’s of inches into decimals, so it’s easier to get 4 digits from the metric side.)

I step on the scale and grab the tape measure. By the time I look down, the scale is done deciding my weight. I step off scale and measure the largest circumference. This requires honesty, but is very easy to do once I did it a few times: I just relax, let it all hang out, and slowly let the tape measure slip longer as I try to slip it down around my waist. (I suppose, that some day, when I have a “waist” in the proper definition, I’ll have to tweak my method. That will be a great problem to have.)

I might get 232.8 pounds– I just remember 2 3 2 8.
I might get 110.7 centimeters– I just remember 1 1 0 7.
…and I walk out of the bathroom mumbling, “2 3 2 8 1 1 0 7”

In subsequent posts I’ll go into what I do with the numbers in terms of math, spreadsheets and why the units are irrelevant. But for now, that’s the data capture that I try to do every day. It’s fast and easy. Step on scale, measure “waist”, and record eight digits.

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Persistent organic pollutants

May 4, 2015

(Part 17 of 25 in series, M. Eades' Blog)

Organochlorine pesticides (DDT, lindane, etc), organochlorine and organobromine industrial pollutants, solvents, placticizers, and a host of other such substances are in the stored fat of all of us. Their use over the previous decades has so filled our environment with these chemicals that we can’t escape them. The are in the air, they fall in the rain, they are in the groundwater. Consequently, they are in our food. Whenever we eat, we get a load of these persistent organic pollutants (POPs) that make their way into our fat cells and cells in other tissues. And they build up because we can’t get rid of them.

~ Michael Eades from, «http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/weight-loss/a-legitimate-use-for-orlistat/»

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