Archive for September 23rd, 2022
Speeding Up Your Daily Walk Could Have Big Benefits
Rachel Fairbank has an interesting article (gift link, no paywall) in the NY Times on the benefits of walking briskly vs. slowly. Let me preface her article with an observation regarding today’s walk.
Duration suggested in article: 30 minutes per day
Today’s walk: 46 min 48 sec
Brisk walk as defined in article: 80-100 steps per minute
Today’s walk: 110 steps per minute (That’s what I aim for in general.)
I also have seen a brisk walk defined as 3 mph or faster; today’s walk was 3.47 mph (or, to a single decimal place, 3.5 mph). Moreover, today’s walk was with Nordic walking poles, which provides a 20% increase in benefits over regular walking (without Nordic walking poles).
Today’s walk graphically:
With my new Amazfit GTS 4 Mini, the heart rate readings make much more sense, even in the distribution among the heart-rate zones. (PAI for today was 14 points.)
Fairbanks’s article begins:
Many of us regularly wear an activity tracker, which counts the number of steps we take in a day. Based on these numbers, it can be hard to make sense of what they might mean for our overall health. Is it just the overall number of steps in a day that matter, or does exercise intensity, such as going for a brisk walk or jog, make a difference?
In a new study, which looks at activity tracker data from 78,500 people, walking at a brisk pace for about 30 minutes a day led to a reduced risk of heart disease, cancer, dementia and death, compared with walking a similar number of steps but at a slower pace. These results were recently published in two papers in the journals JAMA Internal Medicine and JAMA Neurology.
9,800 steps a day offered the highest level of protection.
For these studies, which included participants from UK Biobank, participants with an average age of 61 agreed to wear activity trackers for seven full days, including nights, at the beginning of the trial. This study represents the largest one to date that incorporates activity tracker data.
“Activity tracker data is going to be better than self-reported data,” said Dr. Michael Fredericson, a sports physician at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study. “We know that people’s ability to self-report is flawed,” often because people don’t accurately remember how much exercise they did in a day or week.
After collecting these data, researchers then tracked participant’s health outcomes, which included whether they developed heart disease, cancer, dementia or died during a period of six to eight years.
Researchers found that every 2,000 additional steps a day lowered the risk of premature death, heart disease and cancer by about 10 percent, up to about 10,000 steps per day. When it came to developing dementia, 9,800 steps per day was associated with a 50 percent reduced risk, with a risk reduction of 25 percent starting at about 3,800 steps per day. Above 10,000 steps a day, there just weren’t enough participants with that level of activity to determine whether there were additional benefits.
In the past, . . .
Continue reading. (gift link, no paywall)
Israeli Forces Deliberately Killed Palestinian American Journalist, Report Shows
Israel too often disproportionately reacts to provocations — for example, by murdering a journalist who reports on the problems Palestinians face. Alice Speri reports in the Intercept:
Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed by Israeli forces in May while reporting from the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, was deliberately and repeatedly targeted, along with her colleagues, despite being clearly identified as a member of the press, a new report released Tuesday concludes.
The report, a collaboration between Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq and the U.K.-based research agency Forensic Architecture, confirms the findings of half a dozen earlier independent reviews of the incident, including by the United Nations, which have found that Israeli forces were responsible for Abu Akleh’s killing, with the U.N. noting that the bullet that killed her was “well aimed.” But the new report, which includes a detailed digital reconstruction of the incident based on previously unseen footage recorded by Al Jazeera staff at the scene, in addition to witness testimony, open-source video, and a drone survey of the area, offers the most conclusive account yet of what transpired that day.
The report directly contradicts the final conclusions of a review by Israeli authorities issued earlier this month, in which officials conceded there was a “high possibility” that Abu Akleh was “accidentally hit by [Israel Defense Forces] gunfire.” In that report, Israeli officials claimed that the IDF soldiers were firing toward “suspects identified as armed Palestinian gunmen, during an exchange of fire in which life-risking, widespread and indiscriminate shots were fired toward IDF soldiers.”
But the new reconstruction clearly shows that there were neither armed gunmen nor shots fired in the minutes leading up to Abu Akleh’s killing. Instead, the reconstruction shows that Abu Akleh’s and her colleagues’ “PRESS” insignia was clearly visible from the position of the IDF shooter; that the shooter had a “clear line of fire,” indicating “precise aim”; and that the firing continued as the journalists sought shelter. After Abu Akleh was hit, a civilian attempting to provide aid to her was fired upon each time he tried to approach her.
“This is literally the last nail in the coffin of what the army is arguing,” the Forensic Architecture researcher in charge of the investigation, who asked not to be named because of fear for their safety when working in the region, told The Intercept.
“We can prove conclusively that there was no one — zero persons — in between the occupation forces and Shireen,” they added. “There were no bullets, in sound or visually, so it’s not that the army was responding to anything. We can also show using visibility analysis that we’ve done in our model, that the shooting only happened when they were within the visible range of the army, which means that it was fully intentional.”
The IDF did not immediately respond to questions about how the new evidence contradicts its claims. . . .
Once again, we see an organization and a military deliberately trying to cover up a bad thing (in this case, the unprovoked murder of a journalist).
See also:
‘These Kids Are Dying’ — Inside the Overdose Crisis Sweeping Fort Bragg
Why is it that so many organizations — corporations, banks, schools, Boy Scouts, the Catholic church, the Evangelical churches, the Southern Baptists, the army, police departments, and so many more — decide that when bad things happen within the organization, those things must be hidden and kept secret. I suppose the basic reason is fear. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with shame but rather a perversion of pride — that if people don’t learn about the bad, the organization can still stand proud (and not have to change anything, change always being the enemy when an organization’s ideal is static). At any rate, here we have yet another of myriad examples of the US military doing all it can to hide its failures. As I often observe, the military places a high value on honor, but what they mean by “honor” differs a lot from what most understand the word to mean. In the military, “honor” involves not acting honorably so much as concealing dishonorable actions.
Seth Harp reports in Rolling Stone:
RACHEAL BOWMAN, A single mother from Aberdeen, Maryland, was finishing up her shift as a postal worker the afternoon of June 11, 2021, when she got a worrisome call from her son’s girlfriend. Her son, Matthew Disney, a 20-year-old soldier stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, wasn’t answering his phone. Neither his girlfriend nor his mom nor his little sisters could reach him. “It was very unlike him,” Bowman says. “Matthew’s sister has been incredibly ill her whole life” with a rare intestinal disorder. “When she calls, he answers.”
Her son was the child she never had to worry about, Bowman tells Rolling Stone. As a boy, he was well-behaved and supportive of his mom, who had been through a nasty divorce and struggled financially. He was “upbeat and passionate” about baseball, football, and video games. And for as long as she could remember, he’d had it in his head to join the military. “He had the very strong belief that if you were able-bodied, you should serve your country,” Bowman says. “Whether you like your president or not. He could tell you all about other countries where it was mandatory.”
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Disney considered all the service branches, and decided on the U.S. Army. He enlisted after high school, trained as a radar operator and, in March 2020, was assigned to an airborne artillery regiment at Fort Bragg. He had done nine parachute jumps, and the last time he spoke to his mom, he was excited to do his 10th. But that Friday in June, he had the day off. “Hours were going by and he was not responding to any of us,” Bowman says. “This was extremely out of character.”Bowman and her daughters called up some of Disney’s friends, fellow soldiers at Fort Bragg, and they alerted the fire guard on duty, she says, who located surveillance footage of Disney and another radarman, Spc. Joshua Diamond, entering the barracks at 11 the night before. But when they knocked on Diamond’s locked door, no one answered. Neither the fire guard nor the military police would open Diamond’s door by force, because 24 hours hadn’t elapsed, meaning he and Disney couldn’t be considered missing persons. “Even though there were family members saying something is wrong,” Bowman says, “they would not open the locked door.”
Bowman was frantic. She contacted a family friend in Maryland, a colonel in the Army, and he made some calls that evidently spurred the military police into action. They called Bowman and asked her permission to track her son’s phone. “And then it was crickets,” she says. “Everything went silent. The second I gave my permission to ping his phone, the MPs wouldn’t talk to us.”
The Army follows a strict procedure for notifying the next of kin of casualties, and always sends a uniformed officer to deliver the bad news in person. But around midnight, Disney’s sister received an anonymous call. Bowman was standing on the front porch. “I just heard her scream,” she says. “And I went inside, and she was on the kitchen floor with Matt’s girlfriend, screaming ‘This isn’t fucking funny. Who the fuck are you? What kind of sick joke is this?’”
The caller would only tell them that Disney was “no longer alive.” Bowman placed phone call after desperate phone call and, at two in the morning, got through to her son’s battalion commander. He confirmed that Disney had been found in Diamond’s room, lifeless. “I’m so sorry,” she remembers him saying. “He was a good kid.” But he wouldn’t tell her what had happened, only that Disney “didn’t do anything to hurt himself.”
On top of the shock and grief of learning that her only son was dead, Bowman was confused. If it wasn’t suicide, then what had happened to Matthew? All she could think was that the other soldier, Diamond, must have done something to harm him.
That was not the case. In fact, Diamond was dead, too. His body had been found slumped over Disney’s on the floor, almost as if in an embrace. And many Fort Bragg soldiers have died recently under similar circumstances — quietly, in their barracks, in their bunks, in a parked car, or somewhere off-post, from no outwardly apparent cause. According to a set of casualty reports obtained by Rolling Stone through the Freedom of Information Act, at least 14 — and as many as 30 — Fort Bragg soldiers have died in this way since the start of 2020. Yet there has been no acknowledgment from the Army or reporting in the national press on any aspect of this phenomenon, nor word one from any member of Congress. Only the families of the victims have been informed — discreetly, and in private.
Disney’s memorial service was in July. “We were getting ready to go into the chapel,” Bowman says, and Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, came into the room and personally informed her that the results of a toxicology report were in. The cause of death was acute fentanyl intoxication.
Donahue, who has since been promoted to lieutenant general, did not respond to a request for comment sent to Fort Bragg. But Rolling Stone obtained Disney’s Defense Department Form 1300, a “report of casualty,” which essentially functions as a military death certificate. It confirms that he died accidentally from an overdose of fentanyl.
That only compounded Bowman’s confusion. “My son was not a drug user,” she insists. Under no circumstances would he have wittingly ingested fentanyl. Addiction ran in the fa mily, and Disney’s little sister had endured dozens of surgeries, and periodically relied on or had to withdraw from opioids, so he was well aware of the risks they entailed. “Fentanyl, ketamine, Narcan, laudanum, Percocet, morphine,” Bowman says. “These are drugs that we talked about on a very regular basis.”
However, one conversation she never had with her kids was about counterfeit pills. Military investigators informed her that Disney had ingested an imitation Percocet, a prescription painkiller. “I had never in my life heard of a fake Percocet that looked legit from a pharmacy,” she says, “until my son took one and it killed him.”
A STAGGERING TOTAL of 109 soldiers assigned to Fort Bragg, active and reserve, lost their lives in 2020 and 2021, casualty reports obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show. Only four of the deaths occurred in overseas combat operations. All the rest took place stateside. Fewer than 20 were from natural causes. All the rest were preventable. This is a seemingly unprecedented wave of fatalities on a modern U.S. military installation.
Forty-one Fort Bragg soldiers took their own lives in 2020 and 2021, making suicide the leading cause of death. A spokesman for the Army, Matthew Leonard, confirmed that no other base has ever recorded a higher two-year suicide toll. There were also a shocking number of incidents of soldier-on-soldier violence. Since mid-2020, 11 Fort Bragg soldiers have been murdered or charged with murder, including one murder-suicide. Five Fort Bragg soldiers were shot to death, and one was beheaded. Rolling Stone has previously reported on the rash of violent crime at Fort Bragg and investigated several of the unsolved murders. The newly obtained documents shed light on another kind of killer stalking soldiers and go a long way toward explaining the record-setting death toll.
Fourteen of the casualty reports state explicitly that the soldier died from a drug overdose. Eleven of these identify fentanyl as the fatal agent. In five other cases, . . .
After decades in prison, Jack navigates the strange, beautiful outside world
More and more, I think the most important facet of character is kindness. If we could some teach people to be kind to each other, our lives would be so much better.
The video below comes via Psyche, which notes:
Jack Powers was incarcerated in 1990 following a conviction for bank robbery. In prison, he witnessed a murder and received death threats for testifying against the perpetrators. The experience left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. The next 33 years of his life would be defined by a long and excruciating series of prison transfers and heinous neglect of his diagnosed mental illness, including 12 years in extreme solitary confinement. Amid his struggle to stay alive in these cruel conditions, Powers also embarked on a regimen of self-improvement and activism, becoming an important voice in the prison reform movement from behind bars. In 2022, Powers was finally released and he set out to start his life anew.
A film commissioned by the organisation Solitary Watch, which fights against the widespread use of solitary confinement in the United States, Tuesday Afternoon (2022) follows Powers in the first hours following his release as he travels from a prison in Pennsylvania to a halfway house in New Hampshire. In the US director Pete Quandt’s sensitive hands, this . . .
Saul Kripke obituary
Jane O’Grady reports in the Guardian:
In 1970, the philosopher Saul Kripke, who has died aged 81, gave three lectures at Princeton University that shook up Anglo-American philosophy. Speaking without notes, he interwove topics in the separate fields of modal logic (concerning necessity and possibility), philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, transformed each, and resuscitated metaphysics.
The resulting book, Naming and Necessity (1980), is one of the major philosophical works of the 20th century. It opens with an apparently abstruse question: what connects a name to the individual – whether present, distant or dead – who is named?
According to then standard views, a name such as Aristotle is really a matter of “disguised descriptions”: shorthand for what the name-bearer is known to have done. If so, said Kripke, then “Aristotle was a philosopher in ancient Greece” would be a mere tautology, like “a bachelor is an unmarried man”; while to say that Aristotle could have taken up politics instead of philosophy, or that perhaps someone other than Aristotle wrote the works attributed to him, would be meaningless. But it certainly makes sense to say either, and to imagine that Richard Nixon did not win the 1968 US presidential election, or might have been called Robert.
Names could hardly be fixed by description at the outset, Kripke reminds us. “[A] baby is born; his parents call him by a certain name. They talk about him to their friends. Other people meet him. Through various sorts of talk the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain” across time and space.
Thus we can correctly refer to Richard Nixon purely “in virtue of our connection with other speakers in the community, going back to the referent himself”, and irrespective of whether we know much about him. “[I]t is not how the speaker thinks he got the reference” that determines what he is referring to, any more than it is his knowledge of how electricity works that enables him to switch on a light, but a causal-historical chain quite external to him that reaches back to the originally named individual.
Kripke proposed that we “call something a ‘rigid designator’ if in every possible world it designates the same object”. And that applies not only to individual entities but to “natural kinds” such as water, gold, lion. “If we imagine a hypothetical baptism” of the general term “gold”, “we must imagine it picked out as by some such ‘definition’ as, ‘Gold is the substance instantiated by the items over there, or at any rate by almost all of them’”. The discovery (much later) that it had atomic number 79 served properly to distinguish it from gold-resembling substances such as iron pyrites (“fool’s gold”).
The US philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine had influentially argued that whether an entity has the same property in assorted possible worlds depends on how it is described in each; that it has no essential properties in itself. But, said Kripke, “possible worlds” are not distant planets on which we can glimpse varied alternatives of what Richard Nixon, for instance, did in the actual world, thus making it a moot point “which one of these people, if any, is Nixon”.
Rather, they are simply “counterfactual situations” that can be differently “stipulated” as wished. In some of them we imagine Nixon being a garbage collector, or dying aged 10, or not existing at all. In all of them, though, “Richard Nixon” names the person who was engendered from a particular sperm and egg, and who, whatever he in fact ended up doing, has “transworld identity” across possible worlds. How could he not be himself?
Reference to an entity (or type of entity) after its “initial ‘baptism’” encompasses its essential properties by default, whether they are known or not. Initially, and for centuries, “heat” applied merely to “that which is sensed by sensation S”, but nonetheless, in using the term, we were inadvertently referring to heat’s imperceptible chemical constitution – otherwise we would not have been referring to heat at all.
Knowledge that heat is molecular motion is a posteriori – acquired through experience. Certainly the fact that we know this is contingent – we might never have discovered it. But what we have come to know is as much a necessary truth as 2 + 2 = 4. So is the identity of water with H2O. Wherever you get water, you (necessarily) get H2O because that is what water essentially is and always has been. “This in and of itself has nothing to do with anyone’s knowledge of anything.”
Thus necessity is not, as immemorially assumed, exclusive to what is known a priori – independent of experience; there are also propositions the necessary truth of which is revealed only thanks to empirical research. Why it has seemed otherwise is because epistemology – the way we know about things – has been confused with metaphysics – the way things are.
Kripke deployed this revolutionary notion of “a posteriori necessity” to combat Identity Theories in philosophy of mind. These claim that, just as heat has been discovered to be molecular motion, so mental states will be revealed to be brain states.
He showed that this is a false analogy. For God to create heat, he said, was . . .
US installs record solar capacity as prices keep falling
John Timmer reports in Ars Technica:
This week, the US Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab released its annual analysis of solar energy in the US. It found that nearly half the generating capacity was installed in the US during 2021 and is poised to dominate future installs. That’s in part because costs have dropped by more than 75 percent since 2010; it’s now often cheaper to build and operate a solar plant than it is to simply buy fuel for an existing natural gas plant.
The analysis was performed before the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains many incentives and tax breaks that should expand solar’s advantages in the coming years.
Solar, by the numbers
In terms of large, utility-scale solar installs, the US added over 12.5 gigawatts of new capacity last year, bringing the total installed capacity to over 50 gigawatts. Texas led the way, with about a third of the total capacity added (3.9 GW) going online in the Lone Star State. Combined with residential and other distributed solar installations, solar alone accounted for 45 percent of the new generating capacity added to the grid last year.
That growth showed up in figures on how much energy solar supplies. Five states now receive more than 15 percent of their electricity from solar power, including Massachusetts and Vermont, with California receiving 25 percent of its electricity from the Sun.
Solar’s expansion has largely been driven by falling costs. The DOE estimates that the price of building a solar plant has been dropping by an average of about 10 percent a year, leading to a fall of over 75 percent since 2010. That has left prices averaging about $1.35 for each watt of capacity in 2021. Large-scale plants benefit the most, with projects over 50 megawatts costing about 20 percent less than those under 20 MW.
The drop in prices is causing some somewhat odd trends, driven by the fact that it’s becoming increasingly economical to install large facilities in states that don’t get as much sun, like Maine, Michigan, and Wisconsin. As a result, the past several years have seen the average incoming energy at newly constructed facilities (measured as daily kilowatt-hours per square meter) drop by about 20 percent.
That has helped cause a large spread in what’s called the capacity factor, which is calculated by dividing the amount of energy produced at a facility by the maximum energy it could have generated if it produced 24 hours a day. The median capacity factor of solar plants in the US was 24 percent, but outliers were as low as 9 percent and as high as 35 percent. As prices continue to fall, this spread may become more pronounced, with more plants at the low end of the range.
More to come
In parallel with the drop in construction costs, the cost of electricity generated by solar farms has been dropping as well. The new analysis has tracked this via both the cost of power purchase agreements and the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), the latter being a measure that compensates for the benefits of tax incentives to provide a more direct measure of how much a method of generation costs.
Both of these are dropping. The LCOE has plunged even faster than the cost of construction, dropping 16 percent annually since 2010, for a total drop of 85 percent. In concrete figures, the LCOE of solar was about $230 per megawatt-hour in 2010; it’s now $33 per MWh. If the tax incentives are included, it drops further to $27 per MWh.
(An aside about those tax breaks. Before the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the only way to get a tax break on a battery installation was . . .
Made Simnett’s vegan buffalo sauce
I adjusted Simnett’s recipe as shown below in brackets:
In a blender [or in an immersion blender’s beaker – LG] add:
• 3/4 Cup of Frank’s RedHot [I used 1/2 cup Original, 1/4 cup XTRA Hot, – LG]
• 3-4 Tbsp of Cashew Butter [I used 5-6 Tbsp – LG]
• 1 tsp Garlic Powder [I used 2 large cloves of garlic, quartered – LG]
• 1/2 tsp Paprika [I used 1 tsp Spanish smoked paprika – LG]
• 1/4 cup of water [I would start with 2 Tbsp water, more if needed – LG]BLEND! [Since the garlic is blended, no need to crush it. – LG]
I used a locally made cashew butter. Ingredients: cashews.
Dietary cholesterol and cancer
I have long been averse to having cancer, though of course some people (e.g., cigarette smokers) don’t seem to mind. That’s why for decades green tea has been part of my diet, though I did switch to white tea when I learned that white tea is even better than green tea as a cancer preventive.
This video is interesting because dietary cholesterol — cholesterol consumed in food — is clearly extraneous (because our bodies make all the cholesterol we need). A low-carb/keto diet has a lot of cholesterol, at least in the typical version (heavy on meat and eggs).
A Luxury shave
The Rooney Style 2 Finest is one of my favorite brushes: excellent resilience, long loft, somewhat fluffy, lots of volume available for lather — and such a good lather it was! Grooming Dept Luxury (not currently available) has a fragrance of “Oud + Leather.” In fact, Luxury “contains some real Agarwood!” (Agarwood is the source of oud.) The fragrance does indeed seem luxurious, and the Kairos formula produced a very fine lather indeed.
RazoRock’s Game Changer, here the .86-P version, is a wonderful little razor, and I do like the RazoRock Barber Pole handle. Three passes did the job, and then a splash of Pashana (with a couple of squirts of Grooming Dept Hydrating Gel) finished shave on a luxurious note.
The tea this morning is Murchie’s Storm Watcher: “Black tea.” (Apologies for the over-succinct and under-informative description, but that is all that Muchie’s provides. I have complained. The tea is tasty and robust and I like it. I dislike only the puny description.)
Update. I heard back from Murchie’s:
Contains: Yunnan and Ceylon
Tasting Notes: Full-bodied with low astringency, a selection of tea terroirs blended for a brisk, satisfying mug. Slightly smoky with toasted malty notes.
Nordic walking makes a big difference after just 3 weeks
This post will be of particular interest to readers who have type 2 diabetes or know someone who has it. At right are what my Contour app shows after this morning’s fasting blood glucose reading. Just before I resumed daily Nordic walking on September 1, the averages were 6.2 right down the line: 7-day, 14-day, 30-day, and 90-day.
The benefits of exercise — particularly aerobic/cardio exercise — in reducing fasting blood glucose levels cannot be denied, but I should also point out that I follow a whole-food plant-based diet and that I stop eating at 5:00pm. Absolutely no food goes into my mouth (i.e., not a bite or even a taste) after 5:00, though I do drink iced tea (hibiscus + white tea) in the evening. I also have cut out eating between meals during the day, and I think that helps as well. This abstaining from food part of the day is a version of intermittent fasting.
Fasting after 5:00 make a big difference. I have found, for example, that if I have a snack at 8:00pm, that definitely raises my morning blood glucose reading.
The figures shown are in mmol/L, the usual measure, though the US uses mg/dL. To convert from mmol//L to mg/dL, multiply by 18.018. Thus 6.1 mmol/L = 110 mg/dL, and 5.7 mmol/L = 103 mg/dL. (My former average of 6.2 mmol/L is 112 mg/dL.)
I’d like to get my average down to 5.5 mmol/L (99 mg/dL). Maybe…
Later On 