Is medicine our species' cancer?

Medicine is used to fix cancer, stupid, what ARE you talking about?

Bear with me here for a second.

Assuming you believe the theory of evolution, we've arrived at each new iteration (species) by selectively breeding for traits that help us pass those traits on to the next generation. There's a key here: the traits really only need to benefit our ability to make more offspring. After the new generation is born and independent, there's questionable benefit to the parents staying alive. In practice, all the selective breedings are really accidental combinations of two people's genetic goo. The selector is the external environment (in much the same way that a dog breed is hostile to the un-cute puppies).

Medicine has improved by leaps and bounds over time. Not that long ago, being born diabetic would have been an early death sentence with a very low odds of that person having kids. Assuming diabetes has a genetic link, those exhibiting the issue would have been pruned from the gene pool  by, effectively, our species' immune system. Go back just 500 years and people with bad eyesight would likely have met the same fate.

At the species level, we self-correct failures. Testing against the real world validates which people will lead to stronger branches of descendants. Medicine counters all this. We are now able to manage poor eyesight, diabetes, mental retardation, many cancers, etc. Socially we've accepted that it's unfair to let people who lost the gene pool lottery die. This is a statement of fact, which leads to the inevitable conclusion that these people will reproduce, adding more and more defects to the species gene pool.

I'm not advocating eugenics here, just drawing conclusions from the state of the world as I see it. But, what's the outcome? Medicine should, in effect, keep pace with increasing rates of disease. After all, it was that effectiveness that leads to previously unfit people surviving. However, it feels like a fragile end-game. Will we reach a state where each individual has to many flaws that they require constant attention to survive? And then the next flaw causes it all to come crashing down?

In short, medicine allows our unproductive divisions to survive, and possibly take over the whole system.

A week without sugar*

* - Actually, with limited added sugar. I'll explain.

Marisa and I watched the documentary Fed Up. The premise is: something's wrong! We have more and more people going to the gym than ever, but we're fatter than ever! Wtf?

In the end it was an interesting take on the role of sugar in the American diet. The general argument is that we concluded that fat was bad, so processed foods became low-fat. However, removing fat removes taste, so the processors just dialed up the sugar content to compensate (and our agricultural policies lead to unbounded cheap sugar being available). Unfortunately, sugar is a serious toxin to your body over the longterm and a) is immediately processed by your liver into body fat and b) causes metabolic disease (like diabetes). Added sugar is particularly bad because it gets absorbed so fast, all hits the liver, causes massive insulin release that leads to blood sugar swings, etc. Sugar in fruits, however, is not bad because all the other fiber and so on keep it from being digested super fast.

I've been hearing elsewhere that the particular "sugar" in the above is actually fructose. But, the two most common sugar sources either immediately break down into part fructose (sucrose = fructose+glucose) or have even more excess fructose (high fructose corn syrup). However, the documentary asserts that all sugar is equally bad. For the purposes of this discussion, let's go with that.

The documentary also introduces a few key pieces of circumstancial evidence, most notably a WHO study and recommendation to lower total calories from sugar to 10% of daily intake being squashed by a threat to revoke US funding. From our side, the recommendation evidently is to eat at least 20 or 25% of our calories from sugar. Our canonical balanced breakfast is cereal, orange juice and all sorts of other sweetened stuff. I'm always a touch leery about what really happens in these situations, sometimes documentaries like to oversimplify or understate certain aspects of things. Certainly in this case, the information is out there, so it's not like the report's content completely disappeared. The fact remains that the recommendation exists, and our nutrition labels say nothing about added sugars. In addition to the total sugar number, they recommend no more than 6 teaspoons (24g) added sugar per day for women, and 9 (36g) for men.

Fed Up meanders into some tangents about other unhealthy eating (high fat, high calorie) that seem nothing to do with sugar, but it's easy to pile on when discussing an obesity epidemic. So let's just ignore that.

The documentary ends with a challenge to meet their added sugar recommendations. We've decided, why not? The recommendation isn't something drastic, doesn't seem like it can hurt. The first step was to look through our fridge and see what foods were safe and what were not. Sugar as a total is broken out in the carbs section of nutrition labels, but there's no distinction for added vs not. Even if there were, it's dicey, depending on how that would be defined technically (I've heard that some products add grape juice because it's not "added sugar" but is pretty much as sweet). We both had an unexpected culprit: yogurt for Marisa and protein bars for me.

Marisa's favorite Yoplait fruit-flavored 6oz yogurts have 26g sugar. 12g is the baseline amount that should be in that much yogurt from the sugar content in milk. The other 14g are sweeteners and one yogurt uses over half her daily budget. My Clif Builder bars contain 21g each. It's not clear from the label where those come from, but rice syrup is a top ingredient so I'm going to go with that and assume it's the bad stuff. And of course I enjoy regular Pepsi. At 40g per can, it's not an option. Otherwise we're largely good.

There are some tips throughout: any amount of fruits are fine, if you mostly cook your food at home you're probably fine. We're semi good about this; I'd estimate about 50% of our meals are home-cooked. We used to be a lot better about taking our food for lunch, but have fallen out of that habit.

So how has it been going?
Day 1: I felt like serious crap. I had breakfast like normal, but by 11am I was getting symptoms of hypoglycemia: mostly lack of concentration and feeling slightly like blacking out. Lunch helped a lot, but I was feeling it again by 3pm. I went scouring for a snack and ended up with some Clif Mojo bars. 9g sugar each, assume it's all added. Ate one of those, felt better. Overall the day was a success.

Day 2: Similar to day 1. I used the Mojo bar again in the afternoon.

Day 3: I felt ... great. All the weird symptoms were gone.

Day 4 and 5: Still all great. Day 5 was probably the worst cheating since I had a half a Pepsi with lunch. I didn't have anything else with added sugar all day though, so the ~20g is still well under my recommended limits.

Aside from the above, I've noticed I feel better hydrated. My muscles feel firmer. And that nagging little fat pad on my lower abdomen (I'm in overall great shape, but this is something that's never gone away) seems to be shrinking. So far so good! We're headed to festive events so I'll have to avoid all the cupcakes and stuff, but I can manage. I think the week has proven what I already knew: drinking less soda is definitely good. It may have proven more: that drinking (basically) none might be even better.

Think for yourself.... right?

Thinking for ourselves is the great hallmark of independence. No one will the wool over our eyes and whatnot! Everyone should strive to think for themselves all over the place.

Or not?

Unfortunately, many people come to very bad conclusions when left to their own devices. In fact, everyone has stuff they just don't know very much about, lack the background to deduce, and therefore have no reliable way of coming up with reasonable conclusions for.

Ironically, an important aspect of thinking for yourself is being aware of when your own conclusions aren't likely to be correct and in those cases, thinking for yourself that you should not think for yourself, but instead reference the consensus conclusion.

So you know, think for yourself, except when you're unlikely to get it right.

How do you know when you're unlikely to get it right? Looking at the general population, I think we're fucked here.

An Alpine Mystery

GermanWings 9525 went down in the Alps yesterday. The initial reports stated that it was in perfect mechanical condition, took off with no issues, reached cruising altitude and soon after started a shallow descent which ended when it hit the side of the mountain. There was no communication from the plane to the ground, though radar had clearly followed and determined the above path. The flight recorders were found soon, and analysis has started.

The New York Times is reporting that, per one investigator, one of the two pilots was outside the cockpit and unable to get back in. This instantly screams foul play or engineering failure, and the speculation seems pointed at suicide missions or sudden cabin pressure loss, etc.

My initial reaction is that this is a tragic, but innocent case. One of the pilots stepped out of the cabin to use the bathroom. In the meantime, the other had a heart attack or other sudden medical emergency that left him incapacitated. The cockpit door is locked, the other pilot can't get back in, the end.

We'll see how this all plays out, but this is an interesting point of failure. If there's only one crew member in the locked cabin, what DOES happen if they are incapacitated? Is there any override to get into the cockpit? The pilots can't have physical keys because then hijackers could nab one when s/he came out of the cockpit. Maybe there could be a secret code? But that could be tortured out of the abducted pilot. Or maybe a code that only opens the door if the person inside the cockpit doesn't enter a lockdown code? I wonder if a possible solution would create more security risks or points of failure for cockpit access?

So who's really the dumb one?

On a recent trip to bing.com, this article popped up. So I read it. Pretty cut and dry: two twenty-something girls go to Rome, try to carve their initials into the Colosseum, get busted. Not really that exciting.

What is interesting is the torrent of outrage in the comments. And I don't just mean vanilla outrage like "idiots, how could they!". The comments went way further. By my approximate assessments, here are the major categories:

Throw them in jail!
In this category were variants including jail times up to 2 years, fines up to $10k in addition to restitution costs, months of community service cleaning Rome, and banishment from Italy. While mostly excessive, at least these are in the realm of feasibility. However, a non-trivial number of commenters piled it on with options like:

• send them to Singapore for a caning
• send them to a Turkish prison
• permanently revoke their passports

I really wonder how these guys think the world works?

These kids these days!
A giant portion of comments bemoaned the state of America's youth. Additional variants branched into "California", "libtard", "sense of entitlement", etc commentary. However, the article itself calls out that per 6 million visitors over the course of the last year, only 5 similar incidents occurred (1 each were by American, Canadian, Brazilian, Russian and Australian). So not only is this exclusively an American problem, it's pretty easy to argue that it's not a problem at all. If only about 1 in a million people does something that, in the end, amounts to just poor judgment (in the sense that it's not, for example, blatantly hurting another person), we're doing pretty well.

No respect!
This is similar to the kids these days set, really, but I'm focusing it more on the idea that kids are raised badly by their parents.

Permanent black mark!
These include, in no particular order: revoking passports, marking passports as "defacers of other cultures", marking all social media with "I'm a defacer" and so on.


What is particularly fun ("sad") for me to see is how all the self-proclaimed wise/enlightened elders a) advocate for grossly disproportionate or downright non-sensical punishments, b) complain about the sad state of affairs that leads to the absolutely vast majority of visitors doing no wrong, and c) then cast the stone at, ultimately, their peers. And of course, I suspect if any of these people were assigned such a permanent black mark they'd be outraged at the violation of their personal liberties.

This behavior is understandable in that most people believe the world is getting worse.
Lucky for us, that's just not true.

Minor differences: Beijing

It's pretty common to see people take a nap on their desk after work, and since there are no closed-door offices, they're just RIGHT THERE. No big deal, just different.

There's a lot more manual labor, it seems. For example, our meeting rooms are stocked with sharpened pencils. The pencils are sharpened by the custodial staff, using the old-school pencil sharpeners that you crank by hand. In the USA we'd probably just buy machine-sharpened pencils or something. Actually I think we mostly just use pens?

Traffic has the same rules, but red lights seem to be suggestions only. Pedestrians don't have unquestioned right-of-way, so cars will cut people off in crosswalks. However, it works because everyone expects it, and everyone pays attention. However, don't text while walking [across the street].

I asked a coworker what he felt were the differences between Chinese and Japanese food. "Japanese food is all undercooked, served cold and has no oil. So ... really it's all just rice".

While walking around the vibrant bar district, I get solicited. Except now I have no idea what I'm being offered. Hope it was only hookers and blow, not something I actually wanted.

The same downtown district has security staff like we'd expect to see in an upscale area in the USA as well. Except here, the staff are all busy watching the girl dancing in the plain-glass window of what I think is technically a club? She was on a stage, with a pole, with stripper moves, but her small amount of clothing stayed on.

I love when contractors call around noon. Not too early, I'm usually free. Except when I'm 16 hours ahead and finally getting a decent sleep through the night.

Who needs gloves?  A lot of people ride motorcycles. To keep their hands warm, they put a jacket around the front of the motorcycle, pulling the sleeves over the handles. Then they put their hands into sleeves to operate the bike. As a bonus, the jacket acts as a windbreaker for their legs. Also, they still wear gloves.

Walking around, I see all the same stuff I'm used to: bicycles, gyms with weights, etc. Just in most cases, the construction quality is lower. But all the stuff works. I wonder how much more we spend on a basic item just because we want it newer, shinier, nicer, etc.

Musings via Beijing

I'm currently on a 1-week work trip to Beijing. I'm just wrapping up my first 24 hours here.

The flight itself is uneventful. It's an approximately 12 hour direct from Seattle, roughly following the Pacific coastline through Alaska, then passing into Russia and flying the last 6 hours over Siberia and China. Funny thing is, the Delta flight tracker on our entertainment systems stopped working right around the time we hit Russian airspace. Coincidence, or something more? Who knows.

As we were landing, we were told that anyone experiencing flu-like symptoms, vomiting, fever, etc, or anyone who has recently been to West Africa needs to notify the flight staff and fill out a card. They must then present that card to the quarantine officer, who may decide to detain them. I wonder how many people comply ...

Beijing is physically giant. It's made of a giant core and an even more giant suburb. After all, 20 million people have to fit somewhere. Unlike Mexico City, it has a fair number of tall buildings and probably higher density.

Beijing is externally famous for two things: scary driving and smog. After getting through customs and immigration, I bought some yuan and hailed a cab. One of my colleagues had warned me not to take up any free-lancing cabbies on their offers, so I instead stood in the longest cab line I've ever been. Vegas can compete. However, no one really tries to cut in line in Vegas, then argues with a cop who tells him to get to the back of the line. Also unlike Vegas, I found communication with my cabbie impossible. The same colleague had also told me to just show them written text of where I want to go, but that wasn't working. The cabbie just looked confused and angsty. I was about to ask if I should get out of the car (which made him even more anxious, probably because he'd have to circle around for a new fare) when one of the line attendants came to our aid. I kept pointing at my hotel name; turns out they needed a phone number to call. Once that happened, all was well. And unlike Mexico City, the drivers were relatively normal. Aggressive, but normal.

We got to the hotel without incident. I checked in and went up to my room and admired the view. I look down the 3rd ring road as it passes between some large, lit-up buildings. Smog shmog. Good night.

My view was considerably different in the morning. I woke to a PM2.5 rating of 198, which is nearly ten times the levels in Seattle, 4 times New York and double LA (though to be fair, these values change a lot daily, so these factors may vary). I could barely see skyscrapers a half a mile away. There was also a  slight sensation in my throat for a good part of the day. A local coworker later exclaimed "Oh, it's a pretty clear day today!"

I took the subway to work. I can't tell a Chinese character from another one to save my life (or find my direction). I prepped by cross-checking subway maps I'd printed out. 13 stops. The one with the name made of 3 characters, immediately after the one with 4. The rest before those are 5. These are my path markers. In reality the subway had been overhauled for the 2008 Olympics so not only were the names also present in Pinying (like how we type, for example "SuZhouJie" or "LiangMaQiao"), but there was even good English on everything. Despite the warnings, it wasn't horribly crowded. Standing room only, for sure, but no sliding in each others' sweat while a 4'10" woman squeezes between everyone, selling stuff for 5 pesos. Just like in Mexico, I (or my immediate party) was the only non-local in the transit system.

I was well aware that a lot of people might not speak English. I was not, however, prepared for how isolating it is to not even be able to attach a sound to a written character. It's how I imagine telling a 4 year old to read a map and find their way would play out.

The internet is another funny. It seems like they mostly dislike Google (and Youtube), Twitter, and Facebook. My hotel has CNN and BBC news (so western propaganda or whatever seems not to be an issue in that sense) and both their sites load (however, most CNN stories don't load). Microsoft services all work, but only in china-specific form. The only way I can check my gmail account from the hotel is to VPN to my corp network, remote into a machine physically sitting in Redmond, and run my browser there. Same with Facebook. However, both at least kinda worked at the airport. Maybe the Great Firewall has a few holes in it?

My hotel is very nice. The nightly rates are not outrageous (~150). However, the dinner options at the hotel are crazy. There's  restaurant that serves the most expensive steak I think I've ever seen. $130 for a ribeye and $105 for a sirloin. They do have attached marbling ratings and probably the life story short movie of the cow, but ... wow.

Other tidbits: a lot of people smoke, but it seems predominantly to be the men. Women wear very little makeup or jewelry (at least on the #10 subway line) and very few high heels. And, I got a nosebleed after dinner.