Archive for January 24th, 2021
Some good cooking advice – video
I like this guy and have blogged other of his videos. This is a good summary.
“Am I part of the problem?” — A tool to increase self-understanding and empathy and to see why to apologize and how to do it
Elizabeth Sampat has an interactive site that greatly assists in analyzing what you may have done or said, exploring what was going on, and finding how to make things right again.
Check it out. Very interesting.
Scientist Debunks Myths About Exercise And Sleep
Terry Gross at NPR interviewed Daniel Lieberman, a professor in the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard. The audio of the interview (36 minutes) is at the link. The article there includes excerpts from the interview transcript. The article begins:
For much of history, human beings needed to be physically active every day in order to hunt or gather food — or to avoid becoming food themselves. It was an active lifestyle, but one thing it didn’t include was any kind of formal exercise.
Daniel Lieberman is a professor in the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard. He says that the notion of “getting exercise” — movement just for movement’s sake — is a relatively new phenomenon in human history.
“Until recently, when energy was limited and people were physically active, doing physical activity that wasn’t necessarily rewarding, just didn’t happen,” Lieberman says. “When I go to these [remote African tribal] villages, I’m the only person who gets up in the morning and goes for a run. And often they laugh at me. They think I’m just absolutely bizarre. … Why would anybody do something like that?”
nt a lot of time with indigenous hunter-gatherers in Africa and Latin America, cataloging how much time they spend walking, running, lifting, carrying and sitting. He writes about his findings, as well as the importance of exercise and the myths surrounding it in his new book, Exercised.
“If you actually look at what our ancestors do, they walk about 5 miles a day, which turns out to be, for most people, about 10,000 steps,” Lieberman says.
Lieberman notes that many people are moving less than they did before the pandemic. He says if 10,000 steps feels out of reach, it’s OK to shoot for less — just so long as you’re focused on movement. Even fidgeting can keep your muscles engaged.
“The more we study physical activity, the more we realize that it doesn’t really matter what you do,” Lieberman says. “You don’t have to do incredible strength training … to get some benefits of physical activity. There’s all different kinds of physical activity, and it’s all good in different ways.”
Interview highlights
On the demonizing of sitting as “the new smoking”
When I walk into a village in a remote part of the world where people don’t have chairs or a hunter-gatherer camp, people are always sitting. … Some friends and colleagues of mine actually put some accelerometers on some hunter-gatherers and found that they sit on average about 10 hours a day, which is pretty much the same amount of time Americans like me spend sitting.
So it turns out that I think we’ve kind of demonized sitting a little falsely. It’s not unnatural or strange or weird to sit a lot, but it is problematic if, of course, that’s all you do. As I started to explore the literature more, I was fascinated because most of the data that associates sitting a lot with poor health outcomes turns out to be leisure-time sitting. So if you look at how much time people spend sitting at work, it’s not really that associated with heart disease or cancers or diabetes. But if you look at how much people sit when they’re not at work, well, then the numbers get a little bit scary.
On the importance of “interrupted sitting”
Just getting up every once in a while, every 10 minutes or so — just to go to the bathroom or pet your dog or make yourself a cup of tea — even though you’re not spending a lot of energy, you’re turning on your muscles. And your muscles, of course, are the largest organ in your body — and just turning them on turns down inflammation. It uses up fats in your bloodstream and sugars in your bloodstream, and it produces molecules that turn down inflammation. So the evidence is that interrupted sitting is really the best way to sit. In hunter-gatherer camps, people are getting up every few minutes, to take care of the fire or take care of a kid or something like that. And that kind of interrupted sitting, as well as not sitting in a chair that’s kind of nestling your body and preventing you from using any muscles, all that kind of keeps your muscles going and turns out to be a much healthier way to sit.
On how chairs with backs have contributed to our back pain
We all think that it’s normal for a chair to have a seat back. But until recently, only really rich people — the pope or the king — had a chair with a seat back. Until recently, all human beings pretty much either sat on the ground or, if they did have chairs, they were stools or benches or things like that. …
The reason it matters for our health is that a seat back essentially makes sitting even more passive than just sitting on a bench or a stool because you lean against the seat back and you’re using even fewer muscles, even less effort to stabilize your upper body. And the result is that we end up having very weak backs. So there are a lot of muscles that we use in our backs to hold up our upper body, and those muscles, if we don’t use them, just like every other muscle in your body, they atrophy. And weak muscles then make us more prone to back pain. In fact, studies show that the best predictor of whether or not somebody gets lower-back pain — and most of us do get lower-back pain — is whether or not we have weak and, importantly, fatigable backs. I think sitting a lot on chairs with backrests contributes to that.
On the idea that running is bad for your knees
There’s this kind of general idea out there that running is like driving your car too much — [that] it’s wear and tear, and that running is highly stressful and it just wears away your cartilage, just like driving your car for a long period of time wears out your springs, for example. And that turns out not to be true. Study after study has shown . . .
America Has a GPS Problem
Heavy reliance on a fragile system is a recipe for catastrophe. Kate Murphy writes in the NY Times:
Time was when nobody knew, or even cared, exactly what time it was. The movement of the sun, phases of the moon and changing seasons were sufficient indicators. But since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve become increasingly dependent on knowing the time, and with increasing accuracy. Not only does the time tell us when to sleep, wake, eat, work and play; it tells automated systems when to execute financial transactions, bounce data between cellular towers and throttle power on the electrical grid.
Coordinated Universal Time, or U.T.C., the global reference for timekeeping, is beamed down to us from extremely precise atomic clocks aboard Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. The time it takes for GPS signals to reach receivers is also used to calculate location for air, land and sea navigation.
Owned and operated by the U.S. government, GPS is likely the least recognized, and least appreciated, part of our critical infrastructure. Indeed, most of our critical infrastructure would cease to function without it.
The problem is that GPS signals are incredibly weak, due to the distance they have to travel from space, making them subject to interference and vulnerable to jamming and what is known as spoofing, in which another signal is passed off as the original. And the satellites themselves could easily be taken out by hurtling space junk or the sun coughing up a fireball. As intentional and unintentional GPS disruptions are on the rise, experts warn that our overreliance on the technology is courting disaster, but they are divided on what to do about it.
“If we don’t get good backups on line, then GPS is just a soft rib of ours, and we could be punched here very quickly,” said Todd Humphreys, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas in Austin. If GPS was knocked out, he said, you’d notice. Think widespread power outages, financial markets seizing up and the transportation system grinding to a halt. Grocers would be unable to stock their shelves, and Amazon would go dark. Emergency responders wouldn’t be able to find you, and forget about using your cellphone.
Mr. Humphreys got the attention of the U.S. Department of Defense and the Federal Aviation Administration about this issue back in 2008 when he published a paper showing he could spoof GPS receivers. At the time, he said he thought the threat came mainly from hackers with something to prove: “I didn’t even imagine that the level of interference that we’ve been seeing recently would be attributable to state actors.”
More than 10,000 incidents of GPS interference have been linked to China and Russia in the past five years. Ship captains have reported GPS errors showing them 20-120 miles inland when they were actually sailing off the coast of Russia in the Black Sea. Also well documented are ships suddenly disappearing from navigation screens while maneuvering in the Port of Shanghai. After GPS disruptions at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport in 2019, Israeli officials pointed to Syria, where Russia has been involved in the nation’s long-running civil war. And last summer, the United States Space Command accused Russia of testing antisatellite weaponry.
But it’s not just nation-states messing with GPS. Spoofing and jamming devices have gotten so inexpensive and easy to use that delivery drivers use them so their dispatchers won’t know they’re taking long lunch breaks or having trysts at Motel 6. Teenagers use them to foil their parents’ tracking apps and to cheat at Pokémon Go. More nefariously, drug cartels and human traffickers have spoofed border control drones. Dodgy freight forwarders may use GPS jammers or spoofers to cloak or change the time stamps on arriving cargo.
These disruptions not only affect their targets; they can also affect anyone using GPS in the vicinity.
“You might not think you’re a target, but you don’t have to be,” said Guy Buesnel, a position, navigation and timing specialist with the British network and cybersecurity firm Spirent. “We’re seeing widespread collateral or incidental effects.” In 2013 a New Jersey truck driver interfered with Newark Liberty International Airport’s satellite-based tracking system when he plugged a GPS jamming device into his vehicle’s cigarette lighter to hide his location from his employer.
The risk posed by our overdependency on GPS has been raised repeatedly at least since 2000, when its signals were fully opened to civilian use. Launched in 1978, GPS was initially reserved for military purposes, but after the signals became freely available, the commercial sector quickly realized their utility, leading to widespread adoption and innovation. Nowadays, most people carry a GPS receiver everywhere they go — embedded in a mobile phone, tablet, watch or fitness tracker.
An emergency backup for GPS was mandated by the 2018 National Timing and Resilience Security Act. The legislation said a reliable alternate system needed to be operational within two years, but that hasn’t happened yet.
Part of the reason for the holdup, aside from a pandemic, is disagreement between . . .
Later On 