I went back to the gym for the first time since I got my pull-up and chin-up stand. Mostly I was just waiting until the people who show up around New Years finally dissipate. I got a sense that I was getting stronger just from how much easier it was to do a greater number of pull ups recently, but I was shocked to see that I could do about 20 pounds more on a lat pull-down and maintain form! I noticed a similar effect on the chest machines (fly and press). As most readers know I got serious about my health in about the spring of 2014 and began running and hitting the gym about then, but I’m a little surprised at how much gain I’ve had from just doing pull ups at home. My own suspicion is it has less to do with the better quality of the exercise, than the reduction in activation energy of actually working out when the stand is right there in my home office. (a long-time reader has also started doing pull ups, and reports that he’s seeing immediate results)
In other news, I got some mealsquares. I like them much better than soylent. They’re 400 calories a serving at $3 a pop. Basically like very dense banana bread. Often if I haven’t had much of a breakfast I’ll eat two.
The convenience is good, but one thing I’ve started to question is the whole idea of a “nutritionally complete meal” that can work for everyone. Much of the extra cost in these sorts of ‘scientific’ foods is getting to nutritional completeness, but what if you’re just optimizing for outmoded government recommendations? Consider that the reference daily intake you see on nutritional labels are “level of a nutrient that is considered to be sufficient to meet the requirements of 97–98% of healthy individuals in every demographic in the United States.” That means that the majority of people do fine without getting the recommended dosages of lots of nutrients. That’s why vitamin deficiency isn’t a major problem and supplements are mostly useless.
Meritocracy: Harvard PR vs. Factual Reality. Ron & company got the signatures needed. Meanwhile, Harvard wants to revolutionize college admissions. Will it work? No.
California gets a lot of hate. It’s expensive, and the taxes are high. But I really don’t get the people who say that they “like seasons”. Why exactly? It’s as if you have a climatic fetish or something. Yesterday it was in the 70s and I decided to go pick some kumquats form the tree next to my house. I wore a t-shirt and shorts. Today I went into the office with sandals on. Meanwhile I’m seeing friends in the Northeast posting images on Facebook like they were taken from The Road.
Someone asked me about a book on evolution (as in, what should they read). There are plenty out there. Mayr’s What evolution is is decent, but I noticed that the Charlesworths came out with something in the early 2000’s, Evolution: A Very Short Introduction. I got a copy, though I don’t know when I’ll get to it. The main issue though is that I have a lacunae at this point for stuff outside of evolutionary genetics, and Charlesworth & Charlesworth probably isn’t a way to fix that. Prothero’s Evolution: What The Fossils Say and Why It Matters fills in that hole a bit, but it’s been around six years and I don’t recall much.
We’ve had debates about Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother on this weblog before. Overall I like Chua’s oeuvre, but she’s a bit superficial and over-hyped. It probably has to do with the fact that she’s trained as a lawyer, and so can nail the style but doesn’t have enough of the cognitive toolkit to process large amounts of empirical data (as opposed to selectively marshaling her “case”). Chua is persuasive if you are primed to believe her. Well, Joshua Hart and Chris Chabris have a paper out, Does a “Triple Package” of traits predict success? In short, no. So don’t abuse your children!
Z & Y is as good as advertised. Definitely the best Szechuan in San Francisco that I’ve encountered. But I still will give the nod to Mala bistro, where the flavors are stronger and have more of a kick. Then again, I’m probably biased, since I can barely taste mild flavors.
Yes, I think long but fixed terms for Supreme Court Justices would be a good thing. I also think our courts have too much of a role in the governance of this country…but looking at the world-wide trends, it strikes me the United States might be ahead of the curve on that.
I’ve put the reader survey up in CSV format. Recently I was having dinner with a few friends. One of them (a recent college grad) mentioned he’d been reading me since 7th grade. This prompted my other friend, who is less aware of my blog history, to express surprise and ask how many years I’d been blogging. She was taken aback when I said since 2002. The median number of years people have read me is 4 years, with a mean of 4.8. The standard deviation is 3.3 years, and the third quantile goes back 7 years. That means that at least 25% or so of the readers date to the ScienceBlogs years, which sounds about right.
The density plot to the left makes it clear that many people are anchoring to values like 5 or 10. Several people claim to have been reading me since 2002, though those of you claiming that you’ve been reading me for 16 years are off (I changed the values to 14). The drop off in the last few years is simply a function of the fact that the people most likely to actually fill out a survey like this are regular readers, and those who are only recently sampling probably don’t have any incentive (this sort of distribution where there’s a drop off at 1-2 years has been pretty consistent over all the years I’ve posted a survey).
Jerry Coyne has a post up where he comments on Stephen Fry leaving Twitter. He ends:
Do readers here use Tw**er? If so, do you use it to get information, enjoy drama, or to simply communicate with others in a non-rancorous way? My own view, which is mine, is that if you have a website on which to write at length, there’s simply no need for Twi**er to communicate anything other than articles that you wish others to see. And Fry does have his own website.
I have my own website, and I’m very active on Twitter. For the first few years I did as Jerry does, mostly using Twitter to push my own content out there passively. What changed? First, Twitter became the locus for a lot of scientific conversation. This is especially true in genomics, where lots of people are on the computer facing a terminal, but have a browser open somewhere. At Jerry’s stage in his career and his prominence there’s no need for him to be consuming on Twitter, as he is mostly in production-phase. But a lot of conversations that might have occurred on blogs have now moved to Twitter (a very prominent blog like Jerry’s is exceptional). At least in genomics. If you want the latest responses to a big splashy paper, look to Twitter.
Second, if you don’t really care too much about being “problematic” it’s not that big of a deal being on Twitter. When the whole issue with The New York Times happened some progressive people on Twitter demanded that I justify my previous opinions and explain myself. I ignored them, because I didn’t really care about being validated by their opinions, since I’m not a member of their tribe in the first place.* Twitter be scary if you worried that you’ll be up next on the docket of cyber-show-trials. But if you aren’t invested in the idea of being part of a movement/group with particular shared norms then it isn’t as much of an issue since you don’t care too much whose toes you step on inadvertently if you can’t keep up with the treadmill-of-social-justice. The same goes in real life, when people who try to correct or educate me on social justice, they are surprised when I brush them off and tell them I’m conservative and I couldn’t care less (their prior assumption is that I share their values since I’m currently in academia). I don’t know what the equivalent for conservative deviationism would be…I have a fair number of high profile conservative Twitter followers, and my acerbic atheism, pretty clear isolationism, and periodic sympathy for positions more in keeping with left-wing populism haven’t triggered a “call out.” But I don’t care. Most of the people I follow on Twitter are scientists.
Two papers submitted for your approval: A Genealogical Interpretation of Principal Components Analysis and Population Structure and Eigenanalysis.
The latest on the GCTA wars in reverse order:
– Response to Commentary on “Limitations of GCTA as a solution to the missing heritability problem”
– Commentary on “Limitations of GCTA as a solution to the missing heritability problem”
– Limitations of GCTA as a solution to the missing heritability problem
– GCTA: A Tool for Genome-wide Complex Trait Analysis
These need serious digesting. For various reasons I lean toward the GCTA camp.
Who killed Nokia? Nokia Did. One can quibble on the details, but the phenomenon outlined is well known in the corporate world. Organizations evolve, and over time feedback loops snowball. I had a friend who worked at Sun during the tail end of its pre-Oracle days, and he said it was very depressing, as the only people left were those who either at the end of their careers or had no other options.
Is anyone reading anything interesting?
* A few prominent public intellectuals did contact me and suggest I explain myself in long-form because they thought my voice was important to have in the public arena. But I don’t see myself as a journalist, and frankly my experience last spring convinced me that there’s no way I should ever devote most of my energy to this sort of stuff (some of my less socially intelligent readers actually thought that it was a big deal for me personally that The New York Times dropped my contract, but the reality is that it fell into my lap without any expectation, and most of my time is allocated to and income derived from things that don’t get any mention on this weblog, which is more a hobby about my intellectual interests). I don’t plan on “explaining” myself ever, because I try to say what I think is true. That’s just a major problem for anyone trying to be a public intellectual today, unless they are independently wealthy. But the truth is kind of a much bigger deal than any ephemeral exposure via mainstream media for me. It’s what I began with as a child, and it’s what I plan to die with as an old man.
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