Adapted from a series of Instagram posts by Weiss, the film blends reenactments, live action and, of course, some exquisite microscopy to explore how his tendency to seek ‘comfort in unusual places’ culminated in his spending up to 16 hours at a time with only single-celled organisms as company.
~ from, A body called life
Watch.
ɕ
I’ve come to believe that wise people don’t tell us what to do; They start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life—intimacy versus independence, control versus uncertainty—and understand that our current self is just where we are right now, part of a long continuum of growth.
~ David Brooks
slip:4a1430.
Reading time: About 5 minutes, 1000 words
Get 7 for Sunday in your inbox. → Subscribe here.
This issue is https://7forsunday.com/38
Sometimes I sit and reflect on what it’s all been for. When I am able to briefly clutch a bit of perspective, it’s clear that it’s not all “for” anything specific. Life’s a journey, is none the less true for its being cliché.
The naive activist wants to change the world. But that isn’t necessary: the world is changing anyway.
~ Ed Lake from, Aaron Swartz was on a crusade, that is clear, but for what? | Aeon Essays
slip:4uaeea5.
Lately I seem to be stumbling over a large number of “I should probably know who that is” essays. This one about Swartz is one such essay and it filled in some blanks.
But that little bit which I’ve quoted leapt out at me. The world—all of it, from microbes to society, from rock to Gaia—is so absolutely not static. Any urge I’ve ever had to change anything was actually not an urge for a specific change, rather it was an urge for control.
ɕ
Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.
~ Gordon Hempton
slip:4a1189.
This is discontent, but it is not the discontent of pessimism. It is noble discontent which is the secret of progress. Only the pusillanimous are content. Heart’s desires are divine discontents. Only the unsatisfied do things. The satisfied do nothing. Unsatisfaction is the stimulus to achievement. Satisfaction is destruction and leads down to the chamber of death.
~ Jack London
slip:4a928.
There’s also a long list of advertisers who rely on this confusion to abdicate their ethical responsibility in terms of their money winding up in the pockets of bottom-dwelling grifters and bigots. The murkiness makes it easier to pretend it’s not happening, and it’s this accountability gap the group hopes to target
~ Karl Bode from, Nonprofit Takes Aim At Fox News By Demystifying Ad Exchanges | Techdirt
slip:4uteno2.
Caution: Depending on your viewpoint, that article will make you cheer, or will enrage you. What I want to focus on is, “murkiness” and I want to split a fine hair.
I believe there’s visibility, (in the sense that it is clear who is accountable for some speech [advertising is speech],) anonymity, and murkiness which obscures the dichotomy of visibility versus anonymity. My position is that murkiness is never a positive thing. The knowledge that something is being said with accountability, (who said it is clear,) versus with anonymity is critical for one to be able to evaluate some speech for oneself. That knowledge is removed when there’s murkiness.
ɕ
I [generally] hate the Internet. I wanted to start this post with a reference to a little children’s TV skit I saw many (many) moons ago, on Sesame Street or maybe it was the Muppets… about a guy named Henry with a bucket with a hole who tried to fix it based on another character’s—named Liza—ministrations, but which eventually lead him to need the hole-y, original bucket to haul water to complete the bucket-repair process. If you’re not yet grabbing your head, try reading: “There a hole in my bucket. Dear Liza. Dear Liza.” Fortunately, Wikipedia, and a pile of YouTube clips I managed to not watch, have me covered. Long live the Internet!
“Holey-bucket-fixing” is a long chain of tasks which turn out to be circularly dependent. Obviously, I don’t realize it’s holey-bucket-fixing at the start of the side quest. I start off on some simple problem. To do A, I need B. To do B, I need C. To do C, I need… A? Where’s the Tylenol?!
But sometimes, I start off on some simple problem and it goes very well. As in . . .
Your merry band enters the dimly lit inn, glad to find shelter from the stormy night. The rogue among you sticks to the shadows to the left, the dwarf angles right, (in both senses of the word,) towards the bar, and the elf-archer, with the balance of the band in tow, strides for a long table against the doorless, far wall. The dwarf orders the first round of whatever-it-is-they-serve-around-these-parts, and the bartender strikes up a conversation. “Haven’t seen you folks around before. You look like you might be up for an adventure.” If you want to go on an adventure, turn to page 42. If you just want this idiot to shut up so you can drink your whatever-it-is-they-serve-around-these-parts in peace, continue reading.
And so, with a hole in my bucket, or a simple question in mind, or—challenge-loving dwarf-at-the-bar that I play so well—just too curious for my own good… I almost always turn to page 42.
ɕ
Ever since I first read these words, they stuck with me as useful for understanding the working world in particular. The whole edifice that we now call “productivity advice” distills, I realized, to instructions for cajoling the elephant. If you’re not firm, it’ll do what it wants to do.
~ Cal Newport from, Deep Habits: Never Plan to “Get Some Work Done” – Cal Newport
slip:4ucabo3.
Plan? Do? Chaos? I get so swept up in systems that sometimes I just bridle and rebel. I think the problem comes up when I have too many systems that don’t have an end goal. My systems are supposed to make the space for me to get real things done. But if all I have is ongoing systems of the busy-work that’s supposed to make space, then I rebel. Because I also need real projects. I want to spend as much of my time as possible getting real things done. Real things for which I have real reasons for wanting to do them. And those real things require real planning.
Generally, I don’t have a problem with over-planning; I can do a tremendous amount of planning, but experience shows that I always do better if I resist the urge to begin… start now! Take action! It’s always better if I resist action, instead doing a brain-dump session and then setting the whole thing aside. When I return later, more ideas flow and more planning ensues. Maybe a third session. Maybe even a fourth.
Meanwhile, the elephant dozes as I plan surreptitiously.
Ever notice that the “doze” in bulldozer is the exact opposite of the elephant’s? Eventually, the planning reveals a beautiful domino setup, and it’s time to awaken the elephant who easily bulldozes them one by one.
ɕ
(Part 11 of 13 in series, Changes and Results)
With any form of IF, you can get the same physiological benefits. The key is to find a form/style of fasting that works for you and which yields the results you want. No matter what you do, it requires [what may be] a whole new level of paying attention to your body; how you feel, how much you weigh, how strong you feel, how sharp your mind seems, etc. IF is putting your food consumption and internal eating-related systems on manual. That can be great, or it can be a car crash.
I’ve come to realize that the style of fasting I do is not actually me “doing something”, but rather me living in tune with my body. The way I ate previously was automated and not healthy. I started IF as a project, and now it’s simply more normal and healthy than they way I used to eat.
“Starvation mode” is not something you have to worry about with any of these short-term fasts. You’re not going to lose muscle (especially if you continue training or weight lifting). You certainly can exercise in the fasted state; I do just that all the time. I don’t eat until Noon and I’ve done all sort of ranges of activity in the fasted state.
Cells prefer to run on glucose. Things like muscles store some glucose internally and use that initially because it’s readily available. Some cells (notably, your brain cells) don’t store glucose and must have glucose from the blood. The liver stores glucose and releases it into the blood when glucose levels drop. When the liver runs low on stored glucose, it creates glucose from fat. In that process, the liver also create ketones (small, simple, alcohol-like molecules) which get dumped into the blood and will be removed by the kidneys or expelled in the breath.
Counterintuitively, some processes in your body (e.g., your heart muscle) operate more efficiently in the fasted state. When the liver adds ketones to the blood, your brain and heart prefer ketones as an energy source, which reduces your need for glucose to be produced by the liver. (If you do the deep dive on the biochemistry, it turns out that per joule stored in glucose versus in ketones, the heart can do more work per joule when using the ketones.) There is also a pronounced mental “feeling” of thinking sharper when your brain is using ketones. “ketone hacking” is an entire universe of people, information, podcasts…
Fasting is all about WHEN or HOW MUCH to eat. What to eat is a whole additional discussion. Some of the things you’ll read talk about what to eat, but I recommend initially focusing only on the when and how-much of eating. Then on subsequent reading and study, you could look at what you are eating and adjust that within the framework you’re settling on.
Aside from the various religious fasting prescriptions, there are two main variations: “eat, stop, eat” (ESE) and “16/8”. ESE is where you fast for a 24 hour period, once or twice per week. With “16/8” you fast 16 hours every day and have an 8 hour eating window.
I prefer the 16/8 because I like the regular schedule and I can always have lunch/dinner with people. (Most people don’t even notice I’m actually fasting in the morning.)
So that’s my overly-simplified introduction to the actual introductions to IF. I suggest starting here:
Intermittent Fasting: A Beginner’s Guide | The Art of Manliness
Intermittent Fasting – Craig Constantine
ɕ
But as the saying goes, the darkest hour is just before dawn. At some point during this “dark night of the soul,” I realized that the depression and despair I was feeling was the direct result of comparing my actual experience with an idea of what I thought my experience should be. I saw that I was striving for an ideal of health that was—at least at that point—unattainable, and that this was the cause of most of my suffering.
~ Chris Kresser from, What is Health? | Chris Kresser
slip:4uciwa1.
This idea is right at the heart of my experience of the last few years.
ɕ
rep’in in Boston! Lunch. Shade!!
ɕ
Tracy’s new #skochypstiks
ɕ
ɕ
Packed and ready to “parkour floor” it in Boston. But first, a detour to the Wells Fargo Center in Philly for the Rush 40 Tour concert!!
ɕ
Instead of specializing someone who is specialized in something else, we need to un-specialize them. We need to give people what they don’t have at the foundational level first. …
Once that foundation is established we’re able to move into almost any specialized activity, and that’s the goal. Not just to be good at exercising for a while, but to have bodies that are capable of doing whatever we want without injury in the real world, for the rest of our lives.
~ Matt Malloy from, «http://roguedenver.com/variability-fitness-training/»
ɕ
The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.
~ Bruce Schneier from, Our Internet Surveillance State – Schneier on Security
slip:4usebo3.
…and he wrote that essay before the Snowden/NSA revelation showed us we’ve gone far beyond it being only an Internet surveillance state. We have collectively delivered ourselves into the power of ideas we do not know we have accepted.
ɕ