Coffee achievers!

Last month the Journal of the American Medical Association, also known as JAMA LAMA BING BONG BOO, ran an excellent study entitled "Coffee and Tea Intake, Dementia Risk, and Cognitive Function." Why is this so important? Because: 

Greater consumption of caffeinated coffee and tea was associated with lower risk of dementia and modestly better cognitive function, with the most pronounced association at moderate intake levels.

There it is! Just what I've been saying all along. Coffee makes your brain work better, and keep at it longer! 

health food

"But, Fred," you say, "surely you just agree with this because you like coffee and becase you are hopelessly addicted to caffeine." 

To which I counter: Ha! And: Maybe! But don't just take my word for it. Take the word of me looking back at my younger days. 

In my house, you started drinking coffee as soon as you could stand it, usually a drop of coffee in a cup of milk. By the time I was in my early teens, I was drinking it with Mom and Dad as is. Did it make me smarter? Well, probably not, but it got me out the door in time for school.

Since then I have relied heavily on caffeine, but except in small Pepsi Zero type doses or the occasional black tea, I rely on coffee to get my moving. No No-Doz or Red Bull. (I'll bet that Red Bull stuff actually causes more dementia, just going by the ads.) 

How do I know that these so-called scentists aren't just in the pocket of Big Coffee? Well, for one thing the names include Zhang, Liu, Li, Gu, Kang, Wang, and Hu. They all are affiliated with American institutions, but if they were on the take you'd think Big Tea would have been a more natural cultural connection. So I think they are 100% trustworthy on this important issue.  

So drink that coffee! Fight that dementia! And don't worry about the "moderate intake levels" stuff. I mean, it just stands to reason that two pots of coffee are twice as good as one pot of coffee. It's science! 

Monkey wrenches.

A company I work for was recently purchased by some firm you and I never heard of. While being tangentially in the same business arena, one is a publisher and the other one is an investment firm. 

Knowing the track record of the money mooks at places like Boeing in recent years, I am not optimistic. My main contact says that so far there's been a little departmental shuffling, but no major changes. 

I will be the first to admit that publishing is a mug's game these days, the overeducated spooling the unnecessary to the uninterested. It had reached a grand height in the 1990s, when Condé Nast built its new tower on Times Square, and has been in precipitous decline since. (Condé had its own tower by 2015.) Still, some ends of the business are attached to lucrative industries like finance and healthcare, so they have reason to continue to expect profitability. The company I work for is like that, so there's no reason to think it was bought to be sold off in parts, or to have the stock price run up and then dumped for profit by buccaneers of finance. 

However, there is every reason to fear that, once the dust clears, the new owners will move in the monkey wrench crew to improve things. 

These improvements are very much like artificial intelligence. They are forced onto the unwilling to perform functions that are unnecessary and wind up costing jobs for people who have performed well for years. The work is then outsourced or given to cheap hires that perform poorly. The bottom line is temporarily improved, the stock price rises, then clients flee as everything gets weird and shoddy. Then it's sold off for parts.

Improve Back Better

Don't get me wrong; I'm a big fan of capitalism. The profit motive in a high-trust society like America has been until recently is the best means of raising people in large groups out of poverty ever devised.

I'm against stupid capitalism, however, where companies are run by people who neither know nor care about the actual business and everything goes to hell. I'm sure you can list a dozen examples of companies that died that way, usually the death of a thousand cuts rather than a staggering collapse. Often companies are just caught by surprise by technological advances. But in the end, it mostly comes down to a lack of the intelligence and devotion that made the companies great in the first place. 

If your company is bought out, as has happened to me in the past, I wish you very good luck. Keep an eye open for the monkey wrench crew, come to fix things. It's usually a sign to get the résumé together, if you haven't already. 

Stunad time.

You know you're getting older when you think of something you have to do and you know you will forget to do it and then it comes up and you forget to do it even though you knew that was exactly what you were going to do. 

Makes me wonder sometimes if I got one of those Abby Normal brains. 

But then I'll come up with a memory of something so far back that I can't believe I pulled it not just out of left field, but out of left field in a ballpark of a foreign country where they don't even know what baseball is. Some core memory, often of a person or place or product, that I wouldn't have recalled on a bet, but that some trigger has set off a memory cascade and there it is. Like one of those guys who remain awake during brain surgery, and when the surgeon pokes him in a particular spot, he remembers the girl with the red sunglasses who tried to get him to take the brown acid fifty-six years ago. He hasn't thought of her since then and is amazed that that datum is still floating around in the attic.

And that's what a lot of people in the hinterland of years will say, that the reason they are forgetful is not senility, but that there's so only so much capacity in the old hard drive and they've been socking data away for decades like the Library of Congress. If it's useless information, well, welcome to the club. A ten-year-old still has lots of data storage available but is using it for character profiles from Dora the Explorer and episode details from Paw Patrol. By now she'd like to offload that for more room, but sorry, kid. No cloud storage available for the brain. 

Another age-related issue I think is misunderstood is falls. Falls are a danger to everyone, but especially old people, and yet they seem to enjoy them, as they fall almost as much as toddlers. But really, why? Poor vision? Muscle loss? No, I think the main reasons are pain and data storage failure. Pain, because even though you've been down those steps a thousand times, that new pain in the hip/knee/foot/back causes an involuntary hitch in the giddyap that ruins your rhythm, and down you go*. Data storage failure, because (and I'm not joking about this) even though you've been down those steps a thousand times, at a crucial second in the journey the brain will toss up Cal Ripken's batting average in his final season** and you will literally forget how many steps you've walked. Your brain will think five but you've done six, so you hit that ground like you're going down another step and blam! Flat. 

Our best bet is to do things more (ugh) mindfully, a word I hate as much as yummy, belly, or inflammation.*** But Mom always did say to stop daydreaming and pay attention. Back then it was so I'd do better in school. Now it's so I don't stumble into the road and die.  

🧠🧠🧠

* I remember a ballplayer with a chronic back injury that ruined his career. He was still strong and otherwise healthy, but the pain would ruin his mechanics. With the strongest will in the world, it is still hard to do something you know will hurt, and when it's something like hitting a baseball -- the most difficult feat in sports -- that little difference makes all the difference.

** .239

***Everything wrong with you is caused by chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is because of your bad living. Broken leg? It's because you eat too much bacon, lardass. 

The hungry I.

"AI development could be slowed by a huge demand for electricity," reports WSHU in Connecticut, and it's an interesting development in this weird new world of artificial intelligence. 

Connecticut and other states would have to significantly improve their energy infrastructure to keep up with the electricity needed for AI computing, said Chetan Jaiswal, a computer science professor at Quinnipiac University and an AI researcher.

“For example, a single chip running for nine days uses more than 27,000 kilowatt hours. An average household uses approximately 10,000 kilowatt hours annually,” Jaiswal said.

And that's a report from tiny Connecticut, far from the fantasy land that is California, where so many high-tech companies dwell, and where the government thinks that medieval tech like sun and wind will somehow cough up enough power for all of this. 

I have done some work in the last year looking at business startups, and many of them are pasting AI on their business plans the way Dot Com was bandied about in the nineties. It was the special sauce necessary to bring in the investor lettuce; then on to the IPO; then on to the giant bubble. Will that happen again? Yeah, probably. 

I don't even know that most of us are that impressed with artificial intelligence to date -- it seems to be a little crazy and even stupid. Is it worth all the hullabaloo? It's already helping lazy students get by, but worse, it's literally destroying science publishing. Science publisher Wiley is closing nineteen journals in its Hindawi subsidiary because of manuscript fabrication by so-called paper mills using AI. This is a terrifying development in the field. 

At least in the Dot Com revolution, when things shook out we had the Internet -- not an unmixed blessing, no, but for most people something of value. What will the AI revolution yield? Garbage research and a bottomless hunger for energy seem to be the whole of its useful product to date. 

What first popped to my mind with that energy-hungry-AI story was this unnerving quote from the third book of C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, which takes place in England: 

"It is the beginning of what is really a new species--the Chosen Heads who never die. They will call it the next step in evolution. And henceforward, all the creatures that you and I call human are mere candidates for admission to the new species or else its slaves--perhaps its food."

--The Director, That Hideous Strength 

In Lewis's 1945 novel, the monsters are organic; in our time, the "new species" is electronic. But what are we to be, but its slaves? Either by maintaining it technically where it can't maintain itself, or by providing its energy. It won't eat us, but it doesn't have to -- it will eat our energy, which we also need for food and homes and transportation. The more idiot humans cut back on our means of generating power by fossil fuels and nuclear energy, the less there is all around, and AI will need a bigger cut every year. Our energy costs will skyrocket yet more, because the wealthy investors will demand that AI get all the power it needs. 

It's a sneaky path to Doomsday that I wouldn't have expected, although in a way C.S. Lewis did. He was well aware of the kind of scientists who revile humanity and see it as an impediment to a better world. He knew that these were the very modern geniuses who could lead to our destruction, congratulating themselves as they too were fed to the fire. 

The formula of stupid ideas.

I have wondered if there is some means to get an idea of how many stupid ideas we have. I think there must be a finite number. Perhaps if we had a formula to find that number we might be better able to prevent them, or at least cope with their effects. 

Some definitions are in order here. By stupid ideas, I am referring to bad ideas for actions that may be put into effect. "I am cold, so I will leap into the sun" is stupid, but impossible. "I am cold, so I will start a fire in the kitchen" is stupid, but possible. The latter would count toward the total, the former not.

The universe may be infinite, or infinite for our practical purposes, but human intelligence can only grasp so much. Therefore we may assume it has an upper limit to its generative capability, which we will call i. The total number of humans to have ever existed to the present moment we will indicate by the symbol h. We will further want the number of dumb ideas generatable by i over the course of the average lifespan (g). That gives us the base formula of:

(i x g) x h = theoretical total of dumb ideas 

But wait! Perhaps we want to remove all the redundant ideas -- like, instead of counting each incidence of "I'm going to wrestle that polar bear" as 1, we just count every incidence of that exact idea as a single idea, allowing for similar but not identical permutations of it. I propose that for this purpose we use the amended formula thusly:

(i x g) x h - dittos = theoretical total of unique dumb ideas 

Now, if it wasn't obvious before, it will be clear that I am talking through my hat. I can barely make my checkbook balance. So while it might be a nice idea to get a grip on our total number of possible bad ideas, I have no idea how to do that. Plus, in practice, human ingenuity toward bad ideas may actually be infinite.

I'm kind of sorry I started this whole process. Just add this blog entry to the pile of bad ideas and proceed with your day.   

Let's hear from the spleen.

There's a woman I have known for a number of years, and the odd thing about her is that while she has changed many things about herself, she has herself remained unchanged. I'm not sure that's a good thing. 

In a way it shows consistency, but it may be of the hobgoblin-of-little-minds variety. I am not without any respect for her, so I'll say it's somewhere in between consistency and a failure to learn.

Everything about her seems to have changed in many ways, including attitudes, religions, politics, dietary preferences, work ambitions, and on and on, but they're all keyed into the fact that she is ruled by the heart. Intellectually it looks like she's all over the map -- and not a well-drawn map either -- but emotionally I think she's straight as an arrow, following a rule of kindness and love. It seems to me that without the intellectual virtues of prudence and justice, this kind of compass can lead to horrible whimsical decisions, and also hatred for those who get in its path, ending in destruction and misery. 

Then again, my wife thinks I am a logical person, and I've heaped my buffet plate with my share of destruction and misery too. So who knows what's best?

And yet whenever someone uses that aggressively stupid expression "The heart wants what it wants," I chime in with "Could you at least please give the head a vote?"

They might be better off if they polled all the organs, in fact, rather than just cave in to whatever that ignorant thumping dumdum in the chest says all the time. I'm sure the other organs might have interesting counsel. Like:

STOMACH -- "I don't care. When do we eat? Not now? In a little while? How about now? Not yet?"

GENITALIA -- "Who? That person? That GORGEOUS SEXY THANG? YES! LET'S GO! LET'S -- What? We're just here to compare home equity loans? DANG wake us when its over."

LUNGS -- "This nonsense leaves me breathless, although everything does in time. On that note, don't listen to the genitals. They just want to get into everyone's pancreas."

Pancreas: "Hardy har har, lungs."

LIVER -- "I'm just sick of this behavior. I always have to clean up your stupid mistakes, whether it's the Beer Pong World Championships or the Nuclear Wings Cookout or the gas-station nigiri. How about we just say no to everything for a couple of weeks and let me catch up?"

KIDNEYS -- "We are down with Liver on this, as we are with many things, and for the same reason -- we always have to deal with the fallout. Sorry to rain on your parade. Don't even ask Bladder; he never says anything unless he's all full of himself.”

LARGE INTESTINE -- "I think I speak for my partner Smalls when I say we are just flushed with relief. It bowels us over. Let's move on with this decision right away."

SPLEEN -- "What do I think? I think I'm furious, that's what! And if I don't start doing some venting, there's gonna be trouble around here!"

ISLETS OF LANGERHANS -- "Well, gee, thanks for asking! After all, I'm not really an organ, just a group of pancreatic cells, but since you -- Hey! Where're you going?"

Midvale's world.

One of the most famous -- maybe the most famous -- of Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons is the Midvale School for the Gifted. 

I must have seen this a thousand times and it's still funny. 

What's not funny is that we now live in Midvale's world. We live in an era in which our elites are stuffed with self-confidence but are demonstrably incompetent. They seem to think that all their problems can be solved if they just believe in themselves, and when they fail anyway, it was all the fault of those bastards on the other side, just as the Soviet Union blamed masses of saboteurs and hoarders when their miserable plans came to nothing. The idea that our elites know nothing but charge in like blundering clowns anyway never occurs to them. How could they fail? They always did so well in school!

As Nathanael Blake wrote in January: 

The American ruling class thus faces an ancient problem: how do political, cultural, and economic winners convince everyone else to accept the system; how do elites secure the consent of non-elites? Members of our ruling class cannot appeal to religion or immemorial custom to justify their place. Indeed, they cannot appeal to much of anything beyond their own supposed merits, both personal (they earned their place) and as a class (they believe themselves to be wise and leading us well).

But the superlative merits of our ruling class are less obvious to the rest of us.

You can say that again, brother. Also: 

This combination of arrogance, incompetence, and malice undermines the legitimacy of elite power. A prudent ruling class would be self-aware enough to realize this vulnerability. It would be wise for them to be less culturally aggressive, economically greedy, and politically domineering, but our elites lack the coherence and self-restraint to do so.

There's that word: Incompetence. Since the Kennedy Administration's "best and brightest" led us into a war in Vietnam that by structure and fear of World War III we could not win, our country has been led by dumbbells who have the utmost confidence in their mental superiority. It was bad enough in the sixties; later, the institutionalization of these morons in permanent government agencies made them completely unaccountable. They can perform like idiots, completely screw up their assignments, lie, lash out at the little people, break the law, deny everything when their policies ruin and kill people, and pay no price -- even be hailed as heroes by their companions in the inner circle. Nothing matters to them as long as they remain in the inner circle. 

C.S. Lewis learned about what he called the "inner ring" at boarding school and beyond. He knew how hard it was to be an outsider, but also the horrible and perilous temptation to be an insider. As he wrote: "Of all passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things." He considered it one of the most deadly temptations: 

I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.

But this is Midvale's world, where it's even worse, because not only are those in the inner circle flirting with damnation, but also their stupidity and entirely unearned confidence is killing the rest of us. 

We shouldn't send these dummies to the Pull door. We should send them to the Exit door, and fast. 

No brainer!

There resides among us a woman named Adrienne Sioux Koopersmith, and she is exceptionally notable. The legacy of any a prominent person has resulted in the creation of a holiday, but Koopersmith has gone beyond that by far; she is responsible for more than 1,900 of them. 

As explained by CNN in 2018, 

The undisputed champ of holiday creation is Adrienne Sioux Koopersmith, a Chicago woman who bills herself as "America's Premier Eventologist."

     Koopersmith started creating holidays -- or "holidates," as she likes to call them -- about 30 years ago, almost as a form of therapy after she got mugged in the lobby of her apartment building by a robber who smashed her in the face with brass knuckles, she said.

     "This was an event in and of itself that would change the entire course of my life," she told CNN.

     In order to deal with the trauma of the attack, she started writing and creating cartoons, which she merged with her love of holidays.

     She thumbed through a book that listed holidays and thought a lot of them were dull and stupid.

     "Why not do events that are fun and whimsical?" asked Koopersmith, determined to complement traditional holidays with days a little more fanciful.

She's still at it as I write this -- and that brings us to the holiday she created for today, February 27: No-Brainer Day. 

Koopersmith created the holiday in 1995, according to the site National Today, to encourage "people to stop overthinking things, criticizing themselves, and loosen up and unwind. Things are simple, and the multiple problems we face daily may have easy solutions if we stop stressing and take things easy. As it implies, ‘no-brainer’ means making choices that require very little thinking or work."

I think that's a pretty good idea, especially when the day falls on a Sunday, the day of rest. We do tend to complicate the hell out of things. A friend of mine says he can complicate a glass of water. That sounds hard to do, but toss in a dash of our cultural catastrophizing and it's a piece of cake, er, water:

• I want a glass of water
• Glass or plastic cup?
• Glass: breakable, dangerous
• Cup: Possible phthalates; poisoning?
• Large container or small or medium? 
• Regular or "company reserved"?
• Water: Tap or bottle?
• Tap: Contaminates in water supply 
• Bottle: Ecological garbage
• Cold or warm?
• Cold: Refreshing but requires electricity in summer
• Warm: Not as refreshing
• Add-ins? Kool-Aid? Tea? Tang? Lemon? Ice? Twist? Carbonation? Booze?  
• Coaster available?

It's a no-brainer! Get some water and drink it! Good grief, we're turning into Buridan's ass, dying of thirst from overthinking, except no donkey in real life would be that dumb. Being that dumb and possibly crazy requires the sophisticated human brain.

So today: No-Brainers all the way. I'll tell myself KISS: Keep it simple, suckah. There will be plenty of time Monday to screw everything up again, and I'm just the guy that can do it!

Seeking the smartness.

When I saw this in the store, I thought, Smartfood has kind of lost the thread here.

What on earth could be smart about Cap'n Crunch's Crunch Berries? 

We'll get back to that shortly. First, a little backgrounder about the history of the Smartfood brand.

Back in 1988, Inc. magazine had a profile on the upstart Smartfood:

It did not come out of the R&D department of Borden or Frito-Lay. Years of expensive consumer testing did not produce this popcorn, which, if truth be known, was originally intended as mere bag filler for a new concept in snack-food packaging. No, this popcorn came from Ann Withey's kitchen stove. Withey, 21, perfected the recipe after fooling around with dozens of different combinations of ingredients. She then fed the results to her 29-year-old husband, Andrew Martin, and their 26-year-old friend and business associate, Ken Meyers. Martin and Meyers thought it tasted swell. They also thought it would make a very smart idea for an all-natural snack food -- so smart they decided to name it Smartfood.

Frito-Lay may not have created Smartfood, but the company bought it in 1989 for $15 million. Anne Withey went on to found Annie's Homegrown, with rabbit Bernie as its mascot, which went public, and was ultimately sold General Mills for $820 million. What an American success story!  

Smartfood was smart for them. But is Smartfood smart for the rest of us? Their pitch was always that it was all-natural, not that it was a diet food, after all, or a panacea in popcorn form. And yet consumers, myself included, have always tended to think of Smartfood products as borderline health food, or at least a healthier alternative to other snacks.  

I looked at some labels. The original white cheddar Smartfood popcorn has 160 calories per 2.5-cup serving and 10 grams of fat (2 of those saturated). A tenth of your sodium intake is also taken care of for the day. That actually is no better than one serving of Lay's potato chips, which has the same amount of calories but less fat and sodium. However, one serving of chips is 15 chips, which will probably be hoovered up a lot faster than 2.5 cups of popcorn. Then look at Orville Redenbacher's fattest popcorn, his Movie Theater Butter variety; a serving of that is 5.5 cups, but if you could stop at 2.5 cups, you'd have fewer calories and less sodium than with Smartfood, but a little more saturated fat. I guess the dairy makes all the difference. 

Really, there's nothing particularly smart about Smartfood, and we'd all be better off eating plain popcorn or no snacks at all. But who wants that? Anyway, we've all gotten fatter since the brand premiered, so our overall fitness smartness has fallen.

Let's cut the chatter and see how bad this Cap'n Crunch version of Smartfood is, shall we? 

It's not exactly loaded with Crunch Berries. Not that sweet, surprisingly. 

Here's the nutritional data:

It's a little deceiving, because the serving size is 3/4 cup less than the regular Smartfood cheese popcorn. Why is that? No one can say. Well, they could -- they make the serving size smaller to make the nutrition data look better. But no one will say that. 

However, I think it does compare well to regular cheesy Smartfood. Moreover, the popcorn itself is not all that sweet. If you want a really sweet popcorn snack, you'd do better with kettle corn. Popcorn Indiana's kettle corn is 130 calories for only 1.5 cups, which means there's barely a dime's worth of difference between that and this Crunch Berry Smartfood. And 1 cup of Cap'n Crunch with Crunch Berries cereal itself is 150 calories, with 32% added sugars (vs. 12% for the Smartfood CB serving). Lesson: If you're craving Crunch Berries, Smartfood is the smarter option. And like all popcorn, it's hard to stop eating once you start. It took just two days for me and my wife to finish this bag. (And she'd scoffed at me for buying it.)

In a way you could call this smart food, then, or at least it compares favorably with other Crunch Berry and sugared popcorn products, and with cheesy popcorn products. But I think the only really smart thing about Smartfood was that the inventors got $15 million out of Pepsi for the brand five years after a disastrous launch, and went on to create an even huger brand with Annie's Homegrown. Someone's smart around here, but it ain't me. 

Write on, brother.

Everybody writes sometimes, even if they only write lists or notes. The question is, how do you write? Do you use pen and pad, or do you dash of memos and things on tablets, smartphones, and computers?

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

Okay, you're not doing it wrong, but one of the immutable rules of writing a blog is that you have to tell people that whatever they're doing, they're doing it wrong. ("10 Reasons Why You Eat Peas Wrong -- #8 Will Blow Your Mind!")

The reason I bring it up is an interesting study out of Japan about writing, published in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. UPI reports:

Writing on paper, instead of on a tablet or smart phone, boosted the brain activity of a group of Japanese university students when they tried to recall information they'd learned an hour earlier....

"Actually, paper is more advanced and useful compared to electronic documents because paper contains more one-of-a-kind information for stronger memory recall," study co-author Kuniyoshi L. Sakai, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Tokyo, said in a press release.

In addition to aiding memory formation and recall, writing on paper is also more efficient. During the study, volunteers using paper completed their learning task 25 percent faster than the university students using tablets and smart phones....

"Digital tools have uniform scrolling up and down and standardized arrangement of text and picture size, like on a webpage," Sakai said.

"But if you remember a physical textbook printed on paper, you can close your eyes and visualize the photo one-third of the way down on the left-side page, as well as the notes you added in the bottom margin," Sakai said.

This makes sense to me -- there's a lot more tactile information registered in writing by hand, including the tool and pad used and where and when they're used. Seems to me that would indeed make a lot of unintended cues useful for retaining and retrieving the information.

I find that I prefer to make notes in longhand, but for lengthy writing I'll just use the computer. My wife, on the other hand, likes to write out first drafts in longhand on a legal pad, which helps her organize her thoughts, especially with complex jobs. So when I read the report on this study, I told her she was right about yet another thing in this life. 

The study itself was only limited to testing brain function and memory with memorizable tasks, not on the quality of the writing. It used "three groups of participants who read dialogues on personal schedules and wrote down the scheduled appointments on a calendar using a paper notebook (Note), an electronic tablet (Tablet), or a smartphone (Phone)". So this was not a test of whether one wrote better short stories or poems on paper or electronic device. 

It does appear that students are missing out, thanks to all the electronic devices available. Students have to deal with notes and memorization more than the average worker. 

I've been using a keyboard to write fiction since I was old enough to use a keyboard, but I have always started to work out plot outlines by pad. If you'd asked me why, I probably wouldn't have had an answer before. Now I think it may be that I sensed the pad made for a better means of juggling information on complex plots. In the kind of things I like to write, there's lots of bits of information that come up in one place and matter later, and to keep it all afloat I have to remember them as I go. Once the outline is set, I can write everything in a Word document, because now I don't have to remember everything.

How about you? Are you a pad person, an electronics person, or do you just trust your amazing eidetic memory to keep your data in your head?

Genius idea!

 

Instapundit, under one of its "What could go wrong?" headers, linked to this article in MedicalXpress: 

Researchers discover deep sea microbes invisible to human immune pattern recognition

Okay, that's probably just fine, right? 

In the largest and deepest marine protected area in the world, a team of ocean experts peered over 3,000 meters below the surface to find new types of microbial organisms that people would have never encountered before. These microbes—types of bacteria—could now open up doors to new ways of understanding how the immune system responds to completely foreign invaders.

Well, that sounds great!

A collaborative study among the Rotjan Marine Ecology Lab at Boston University, the Kagan Lab at Harvard Medical School, Boston Children's Hospital, the government of Kiribati, and others has found that there are some bacteria so foreign to humans that our immune cells can't register that they exist, overriding the long-held belief of universal immunity, or that our cells can recognize any bacteria they interact with. Rather, the study found, some bacteria are solely defined by their local habitat or surroundings. Their findings were published Friday, March 12, in Science Immunology.

Emphasis added. As if to say "Oh."

"Our team discovered and cultured novel microbes that are completely immunosilent to human immune systems," says Randi Rotjan, meaning that the bacteria triggered no reaction or response from our innate immune system. Rotjan, a BU College of Arts & Sciences research assistant professor of biology and a co-lead author of the paper, says this discovery was completely unexpected.

All right, now I'm getting a little nervous. I mean, if there's no immune response, does it mean that the bacteria would have no effect on us? I don't think so....

More from Rotjan:

All bacteria cells have an outer coating. Lipopolysaccharide, or LPS, is the outermost layer of the bacterial membrane. This outermost layer is what allows other organisms to recognize it. LPS receptors of human cells, mice and horseshoe crab were unable to detect 80% of deep-sea bacteria examined. Now that we know this, there is a pressing need to learn more about host-microbe interactions in every ecosystem, as new discoveries may be made in each habitat. This opens up the potential for new biological tools and therapeutics. For example, using the silent bacteria as a way to deliver medicine or an immune therapy. A mechanistic understanding of our own immune system, coupled with an increased understanding of deep-sea life, opens up new avenues of science to simultaneously help human health while also providing important justification for increasing ocean protection. Interdisciplinary collaboration really opens up new worlds.

 Yes, no doubt in my mind that this bacterial discovery will be used for only therapeutic purposes. 

Rotjan also said:

Kiribati, where our team was based in 2017, is listed by the United Nations as a least developed country, and they have made an incredibly large ocean conservation commitment. One important aspect of this study is that it is a collaborative effort with the government of Kiribati, showcasing the importance and beauty of international partnerships.

Yes, we all love those international partnerships. Like those with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. You know, I heard that last year the National Institutes of Health was going to cut funding off from that institute, because there was some fuss about a coronavirus that got into the populace there. You may have seen something in the papers. 

Then, The Scientist reported, "77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies separately sent letters to NIH Director Francis Collins criticizing the decision to terminate the grant and urging that it be reviewed." Apparently the outbreak in question did not come from the institute, but "most likely jumped from infected animals to humans" -- by enormous coincidence, right there in downtown Wuhan. Amazing! So of course the NIH backed down, because you elected officials can go pound sand; boffins know best.

Anyway, all this has made me wonder what international partnerships have been involved in the study of these non-recognizable bacteria. The "and others" in that top quoted paragraph is a little sly, isn't it? Well, I had a look at the abstract in Science Immunology and it doesn't all that international; all but two of the fifteen study authors listed are affiliated with American universities, the others from Poland and Kiribati. But where is the enormous funding for the project coming from? That we don't know.

However, if you're concerned that we're not getting enough foreign support for this mission, I think you shouldn't worry. The new administration is opening new doors to scientists in China, and various Nobel laureates and the NIH will be right there with them. I expect to find that the Shanghai Institute of Bacteriology is working on this invisible deep-sea bacteria before you know it. Of rather not to find; we won't know about it unless something bad happens.

That won't be the case. We can surely trust everyone involved, right? What could possibly go wrong? 

This explains a lot.

I saw this little gem thanks to the Week in Pictures feature from the gang at PowerLine: 

So one article tells us that we have no unconscious thought and the other that we have no conscious thought. Well, that pretty well fixes our wagon, doesn't it? What's left?

I decided to do a deeper dive -- I was thinking about this dilemma, you see, and realized that I might not really be able to think about it or anything else, consciously or unconsciously. I figured I'd better find out if it's true, so I can stop thinking about it. 

The first article comes from the science magazine Nautilus, written by behavioral scientist Nick Chater and published July 26, 2018. Its argument against unconscious thought addresses the origins of the popular idea that we often find solutions after leaving off a problem because our unconscious mind continues to puzzle it out. But Chater says that the neural network is complex and interconnected and doesn't have bandwidth to work on multiple serious puzzles with some on the back burner. Chater writes:

Solving difficult problems, whether mathematical, musical, or of any other kind, is the very antithesis of a routine, specialized problem with a dedicated brain network: On the contrary, thinking about such problems will need to engage most of the brain. So the idea that profound unconscious thought can be “running in the background” as we go about our everyday lives is fanciful indeed. Routine and highly practiced activities aside, the cycle of thought can attend to, and make sense of, only one set of information at a time.

All right, so the idea of this unconscious problem processor is bunk, and the reason that we think it works that way is that what seems like inspiration is just caused by taking a break: 

Breaking out of mental cul-de-sacs is precisely what a break will give us. A clear mind is more likely to succeed than a mind filled with partial solutions and suggestions which have clearly failed. And, by sheer chance, we might even bump into a clue that helps. But probably the most important aspect of setting a problem aside is that, when we return to it, we see it afresh unencumbered by our previous failed attempts. Often, our new perspective will be no more successful than the old, but, now and again, we will chance on the right perspective—the pieces of the mental puzzle will suddenly snap into place.

Okay! No unconscious thinking! If you are thinking unconsciously, knock it off! You're defying science!

But wait -- what about conscious thought? Well, article #2, from Scientific American, was published just a few months later, on December 20, 2018, and is an interview with brain philosopher Peter Carruthers of the University of Maryland. Why does this smartypants think that conscious thought is just an illusion? 

I believe that the whole idea of conscious thought is an error. I came to this conclusion by following out the implications of the two of the main theories of consciousness. The first is what is called the Global Workspace Theory, which is associated with neuroscientists Stanislas Dehaene and Bernard Baars. Their theory states that to be considered conscious a mental state must be among the contents of working memory (the “user interface” of our minds) and thereby be available to other mental functions, such as decision-making and verbalization. Accordingly, conscious states are those that are “globally broadcast,” so to speak. The alternative view, proposed by Michael Graziano, David Rosenthal and others, holds that conscious mental states are simply those that you know of, that you are directly aware of in a way that doesn’t require you to interpret yourself. You do not have to read your own mind to know of them. Now, whichever view you adopt, it turns out that thoughts such as decisions and judgments should not be considered to be conscious. They are not accessible in working memory, nor are we directly aware of them. We merely have what I call “the illusion of immediacy”—the false impression that we know our thoughts directly.

Uh... yeah.

There's a lot more to the Carruthers interview, but in a nutshell, the way he finds that consciousness works, or doesn't, is associations of sensory aspects and memory. Our awareness of our own thoughts is the illusion, the results of mental processes below the level of what we consider thought -- or, should I say, below the level of conscious thought. 

Now, I encourage you if you're interested to read both pieces in case my summaries are worse than I think they are. I think it's clear that Nater and Carruthers might have some nasty words to exchange if they ran into each other at a brain convention, but maybe not -- maybe there's more ground to agree than not. Maybe they'd agree that we actually have no thoughts at all. 

And, as I said in the title today, that would explain a lot. 

Since I'm not thinking, consciously or unconsciously, I'm going to give up thinking about this. You're welcome to post your thoughts in comments... if you have any. 

Fred gets results!

You may remember last year when I went bonkers over a minor thing that was none of my business. All right, that doesn't narrow it down very much. What I was mad about was the cheapassery involved with a house that was being flipped. The flippers took out a glorious old light fixture, one that showed off a gorgeous vertical window, and replaced it with a cheapjack kitchen table fixture. 

Time marched on, and no one bought the house. Then one day in the spring I noticed that the cheapass fixture had been replaced by a more expensive one, although one still too dull and small for the showplace window. 

Couldn't really get a nice shot, but this one is triangular with an unusual fiery bulb. Okay, well, better anyhow. Not so cheap. 

A couple of months later the For Sale sign was gone and lots of activity was seen on the grounds. 

In the end, the new owners put in this: 

Well, all right! It's a big eyecatcher, which is just what the space needs. It is the first thing one notices about the house from the street and it deserves something special. 

I still think it's not long enough. The space is narrow and high, and would be better served by something similar, like maybe:

But hey, I don't have to live with it. I'm glad they've improved what the flipper put in. 

Now, I hope they don't suffer for all the cheap structural "improvements" made to the house as well. 

Of course, I'm still not happy. The new owners are building some sort of arbor at the front of the main door that looks terrible. Why, if I weren't an uninterested party with no stake in the outcome, I'd have words with them. But as it is, I will just continue silently judging, like everybody else.

Fred's Book Club: Courage in Reporting.

Welcome, friends, to another edition of our Wednesday book group, the Humpback Writers, not named for humps but for Wednesdays. It's a dumb joke but we're sticking with it.

This week's book is by one of the few really sharp and honest reporters of whom I know, someone who does not toot the courage horn by sitting in a studio defended by the resources of a network, but demonstrates it by going out in the world to find things called facts and write stories based on them. I mean City Journal's own Heather Mac Donald, and her book, The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society.

I feel you can make a distinction between two types of reporters who look at societal problems: the first, your average J-school grad, says Look at this problem! Do something! The other, much more rare, says Why is this a problem, one that has proved so hard to solve? Mac Donald is squarely in the second camp, and this book is a great collection of her pieces on these problems.

"The reality I have observed again and again in welfare offices and urban classrooms across New York and elsewhere is so dissimilar from that presented in the mainstream media that I sometimes wonder whether their reporters and I occupy the same universe," she writes in the introduction. "Maybe this is a matter of my background. I came to writing about urban problems and social policy as an innocent, without a preconceived theory about the neighborhoods that have dominated domestic policy debate for almost half a century now."

This book was published in 2000, but hardly anything has changed in the last twenty years, and where things had changed for the better, as in New York, they are rapidly changing back for the worse.

What Mac Donald learned in her work is shown in this book, with chapters like "The Billions of Dollars That Made Things Worse," "Why Johnny's Teachers Can't Teach," "Public Health Quackery," and "Revisionist Lust: The Smithsonian Today."

One of the most powerful chapters to me was "Homeless Advocates in Outer Space," which described a 1990s program by the Business Improvement District of Times Square to do exactly what advocates for the homeless seem to think has never been tried -- provide a no-strings-attached outreach to feed and clean and house the homeless, then offer every kind of help to get them on their feet provided they refrain from drug and alcohol use for a period of time. "One year and $700,000 later, only two people had accepted housing," Mac Donald reports. And this is only one of the programs described, a hint of the millions spent that helped hardly anyone. She concludes, "A sane homeless policy would acknowledge two basic realities. First, many people on the streets need treatment, not housing. For the sickest, legislators need to change rules against involuntary confinement, and states need to recommission mental hospitals emptied by deinstitutionalization. Second, for the rest of the homeless the best medicine is the expectation of responsible behavior -- the expectation of work and civil and lawful conduct in public spaces."

When The Burden of Bad Ideas was published, the New York Times Book Review said "this book has the freshness of a stiff, changing breeze." With the rush among governors and mayors to empty prisons and allow tremendous homeless encampments, and ding-dongs like Mike Bloomberg disowning all the policies that made his political leadership successful, I think it's safe to say that Mac Donald's essays, backed by interviews, observation, and deep research, have been completely ignored by those empowered to make better public policy. In fact, just last year she had a look at San Francisco's intractable homeless situation and found a situation even uglier than described in Burden. I doubt her work finds a welcome in the New York Times Book Review today.

I would advise anyone interested in the problems of urban decay to read The Burden of Bad Ideas. Urban problems have been given the breath of new life since the book was published. The causes have not changed, but now the idiocy that led to bad public policy has seeped into an urban population incapable of seeing how its participation in bad ideas leads to its own misery. This book ought to be required reading for every political science major in the country.

Instead, of course, Mac Donald gets silenced on campuses by the usual idiots who can't bear to hear anything resembling the truth.

Etch Knievel.

We were thinking that the JV dog, Nipper, who does nip, was not named properly after all. Evel Knievel seems to have been a better choice as it turns out. Or maybe Crash. Or just Bonk.

All dogs will skid on hard floors, ram their heads into things, and have similar accidents. Nipper, however, appears to be completely impervious to harm, at least as far as his noggin is concerned. Pull out one of his hairs and he'll yip to shatter glass. But the head? He's taken blows to the melon that would have me rolling on the ground whimpering, and he doesn't shake them off---he doesn't even know that they happened.

No skull could be that thick. There'd be no room left for anything else.

Now, let me say right here that Nipper is not a dumb dog. In fact, he's learned a whole lot in the months we've had him. He came here a blank slate, a tabula rasa, a brand-new Etch-a-Sketch, but we (meaning: my wife) have worked very hard to teach him things every young pup needs to know.

And yet sometimes he seems to be a complete ding-dong, having forgotten the simplest commands and tricks.

It took a while, but I think I put it together. He is a dog version of the Etch-a-Sketch.

Poor li'l guy. Maybe I should get him a helmet or something.

Humans as masters, as pets.

I know it's not an original science fiction idea, but since we got Number One Dog I've occasionally wondered what it would be like as a human pet of superintelligent aliens, aliens who are as intellectually superior to us as we are to dogs. It's certainly a notion that has occurred to SF writers before.  But there are some real stumbling blocks to the idea:

1) If we were smart enough to know what those aliens were thinking and doing, we'd be them. A writer trying to create the situation would have to come up with things as baffling to us as, say, raking leaves, painting pictures, balancing checkbooks, or writing blogs are to animals. But for them to be inscrutable to humans they'd have to look like nonsense, which would make for a dull story. On the other hand, if they're just doing stuff we do in a smarter way---teleportation instead of driving---we'd easily grasp the reason, if not the method.

2) People aren't dogs. My dogs don't sit around and wonder why I wear clothes, let alone why I make them learn to heel. I would do that constantly as a pet of an alien creature. No matter how frustrating it was, I would keep thinking, trying to learn, trying to understand, because that's what we do. It makes us crazy sometimes, but we never stop. Dogs? Cats? Eh, not so much. They can figure out some things like how to turn on the light, or get up on the counter they're not allowed on, but that's because when their desires are directly affected, they can understand the easy, concrete cause and effect. They keep it simple. (I know, I know, YOUR cat is a Rhodes scholar, but I mean other normal cats, okay?)

3) This is also why stories narrated from the point of view of pets are pure fantasy. A cat is never going to solve a crime. He doesn't understand enough to know what a crime is. He wouldn't care if he did, as long as it didn't affect him. The smartest dog in the world is never going to think like the dumbest human, because their brains are different machines used in a different way. Animals are excellent at survival and certainly get up and at it faster than we do, but they have no imagination. (I began writing this yesterday, but this morning I see the Great Lileks went into the people vs. animals comparison at length.)

Although the dogs don't worry about why I do all the weird stuff I do, they sure aren't dummies. I think they definitely have some ideas about the things and people they encounter. For example, Number One Dog knows that when we're out in the yard and I am saddled with Number Two Dog on the leash, Number One can get away with more crap. He doesn't push the envelope, he shoves it, running into the neighbors' yard, peeing in prohibited areas, ignoring every call and sound effect I can produce. Basically he's always a little bit of a jerk outside, but he turns into a complete teenager when I have the kid. At times like that, he sees Daddy as:

On the other hand, when the kid is acting up inside and making a ruckus, it is sometimes asked of me that I put him in his pen or the crate. Like a toddler he gets overtired and becomes a brat. "Would you put him in the pen?" is the question I get asked more than any other, partly because as big as he is I can still manhandle him as needed. Since Mommy is the boss, you know what that makes me:

At times like that he sees me as the cheap muscle.

So our pets definitely have humanlike perceptions, and humanlike elements about them, as well as definite personality traits. (At least the mammals; I've had little experience with fish and reptiles.) But they're not humans.

Please do bear in mind that I'm a guy who makes cartoons about how my pets think, and when they sneeze I say gesundheit. So maybe I'm not a great one to write about this topic. I'd love to hear your thoughts. And if you know of any writers who actually have carried off the people-as-pets idea well, I'd like to know.

Is we Geting dummer?

"Are We Becoming More STUPID?" asks the DailyMail.com, to which the initial response could conceivably be, "Well, we're reading your Web site, aren't we?" But I actually do give the Daily Mail credit for covering non-PC stories. Its American online edition will go after stories that the American press---too busy giving each other awards for their courage---is too chickenspit to cover.*

The thesis of the stupidity story is that we reached peak smarts a while back but have been dumbing down in the last decade. The "Flynn effect," wherein better nutrition and living standards are linked to higher IQ, did all it could from the 1930s to the 1980s, but now we're settling in for a long winter's duh. Perhaps it is coming attractions for Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" and Judge's Idiocracy, wherein dumb people keeping having a dozen kids while smart people have few or none, so the human race devolves into universal dumbassery.

But is this study what it purports to be? We are told that IQs have been declining in the UK, Australia, and Denmark. Although I am unable to parse the actual data, which is behind a paywall, I would like to make some observations and thoughts, in order of increasing importance:

1) The UK, Denmark, and Australia have had unprecedented immigration over the last two decades, primarily made up of people from countries that had inferior infrastructure and education, causing an anti-Flynn effect, if you will. Which leads us to...

2) The longstanding battle over how to measure IQ that controls for education. Intelligence quotient is supposed to be able to determine native intelligence, not how much you've learned in school (fluid intelligence vs. crystallized intelligence, to scrape the tip of the iceberg), which, despite the researchers' best efforts at controls, may be telling us nothing more than that the British, Danish, and Australian school systems suck eggs.

3) The most important thing may be that the culture is declining. People who believe in nothing see little reason to get ahead; people who don't value education don't exercise their minds. Hard work is a sucker's game; doing well in school is playing the toady; faithfulness and family are barriers to the expression of delightful me. What happens when these attitudes are widespread? Hordes of drunken yobs hurling on street corners in every town in the UK that isn't overtaken by Muslims, if you read Theodore Dalrymple. When there's no faith in the decency of society, no desire for self-improvement or even willingness to tolerate self-improvement in others, no belief in morals from an unimpeachable source, no value in self-command, no love for anything but the self (however vile), and no shame in the able-bodied living off the government dime, how smart are you going to bother to be?

I mean, XTC's "The Mayor of Simpleton" is considered not a sweet song of irony now, but rather a career option.

Learning is hard and even painful; the smartest kid on the block is going to be a dumbbell by any measure if everyone around him is a dumbbell too. If this report of decline in intelligence is accurate, I am certain that the main reason is a decline in our society. Once again we are surprised that when we saw off the legs, the table does not float.

* Fear of losing access in Washington is one reason; dishonesty for fear of giving their ideological opponents an advantage may be worse. Then there's the PC stuff, the terror of terrorists, and so on. There are obvious and even tragic examples of real press courage, of course, but almost never in domestic news coverage.