Archive for November 15th, 2022
The 10 main properties and benefits of coffee
I plan to resume drinking coffee, but to avoid physical addiction I will drink it only twice a week (Monday and Thursday) or at most three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday). I will drink it black because adding milk removes the health benefits and adding sugar — well, not me. (If you must use milk/cream in your coffee, take that as a sign you are not drinking good-quality coffee that’s well brewed. But if that’s what you must drink, then use oat milk rather than a dairy product.)
I plan to make a pint each time — the right amount for my Joveo Temperfect mug — and I’ll use the Clever Coffee dripper.
The reasons I am resuming coffee are set forth in this newsletter. It begins:
- Health benefits of coffee
- 1. Coffee helps to reduce fat
- 2. Coffee reduces the risk of developing type 2 diabetes
- 3. Enhance cognitive skills
- 4. Increases physical performance
- 5. It has an antioxidant function
- 6. Decreases the risk of degenerative diseases
- 7. Reduced risk of cancer
- 8. Reduces the onset of vascular diseases
- 9. It is a source of multiple nutrients
- 10. Improvement of mood
- Bottom line
- ❤️ Enjoy this Newsletter?
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☕️ Good Morning Friends, Today we’ll talk about the main benefits and properties of coffee.
Coffee is a beverage obtained from the ground and roasted beans of the plant of the same name, whose properties go far beyond the stimulation provided by caffeine. Today, we will have an overview of its main benefits on physical and mental health.
Coffee is one of the most consumed drinks in the world. Its stimulating effects are well known, but not so much the benefits it can have on mental and physical health.
It has been observed that a regular and controlled consumption of coffee, between 2 and 4 cups a day, can have the following benefits:
- favors the functioning of some of the cognitive skills,
- given the increase in vigilance and alertness,
- it helps burn fat and maintain a correct body weight,
- it reduces the risk of diseases such as some types of cancer, strokes or liver conditions.
Despite the benefits found, we must monitor and control consumption, since excessive drinking of coffee can be harmful. Symptoms of addictive substances such as poisoning or withdrawal syndrome have been observed.
For this reason, it should not replace good lifestyle habits, such as a healthy diet or rest for the hours necessary for the body to recover. . .
Elon Musk Faces His Waterloo
Elon Musk is now firing (by email) employees who post anything that is not complimentary about him. This is astonishingly thin-skinned, but I think his stress levels must be out of sight because he is clearly in over his head and flailing, and doing that in public. Flop sweat is doubtless pouring off him.
Peter Coy writes in the NY Times (no paywall):
Autocratic chief executives are dazzling. Unconstrained by the bonds that hold back ordinary executives, they soar to higher highs and crash to lower lows. Today’s case study in dazzlement: Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, who soared with Tesla and is crashing with Twitter.
To understand the phenomenon of the autocratic C.E.O. better, last week I interviewed Vivek Wadhwa, a Silicon Valley-based author and academic who early in his career developed software on Wall Street and founded a software company, Relativity Technologies.
In 2016, Wadhwa wrote an article for Quartz headlined, “The best companies in the world are run by enlightened dictators.”
“When you’re a visionary you come up with grand ideas that can change the world and no one believes you,” Wadhwa told me. “Visionaries have to defy the odds. They have to be autocratic and charismatic at the same time. They have to be tough, ruthless, persuasive all at the same time and get people to follow their direction.”
For such leaders, the work is an obsession, and failure is not an option. Musk worked up to 120 hours a week, popping Ambien, to get a new Tesla model out the door. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, called a Google executive on a Sunday about fixing the color gradient of the yellow “o” in Google’s logo as it appeared on the iPhone. Walt Disney lavished his personal savings on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” almost going broke before the animated film was released over budget in 1937.
“At a start-up these autocratic skills are an asset,” Wadhwa said. “You have to take a trusted team into the face of death when the odds of success are very low.”
But those personality traits can be deadly later in a company’s evolution. Managing an established company requires “a completely different skill set. Maturity, calm, listening, building consensus,” Wadhwa said. “That’s Elon’s problem right now. He assumes the skills from Tesla would carry over into Twitter. They do not. He’s getting completely outside of his domain. This is going to be his Waterloo.”
It doesn’t help autocratic C.E.O.s when success goes to their heads. “You achieve success. If you happen to be in Silicon Valley you create a lot of hype, and they begin to see you as a god and you begin to believe your own press. You get the God complex,” Wadhwa said.
Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t face-planted as spectacularly as Musk, but he’s facing his own Waterloo. Shares of Meta Platforms Inc. — formerly Facebook Inc. — have fallen by . . .
Continue reading. (no paywall)
The Gut Microbiome Helps Social Skills Develop in the Brain
Daniel Castranova/NICHD
The gut microbiome does so many things that it perhaps is thinking it might go into business for itself. Joanna Thompson writes in Quanta:
Two recent papers have shown that during a critical early period of brain development, the gut’s microbiome — the assortment of bacteria that grow within in it — helps to mold a brain system that’s important for social skills later in life. Scientists found this influence in fish, but molecular and neurological evidence plausibly suggests that some form of it could also occur in mammals, including humans.
In a paper published in early November in PLOS Biology, researchers found that zebra fish who grew up lacking a gut microbiome were far less social than their peers with colonized colons, and the structure of their brains reflected the difference. In a related article in BMC Genomics in late September, they described molecular characteristics of the neurons affected by the gut bacteria. Equivalents of those neurons appear in rodents, and scientists can now look for them in other species, including humans.
In recent decades, scientists have come to understand that the gut and the brain have powerful mutual influences. Certain types of intestinal ulcers, for example, have been linked to worsening symptoms in people with Parkinson’s disease. And clinicians have long known that gastrointestinal disorders are more common in people who also have neurodevelopmental disorders, such as ADHD and autism spectrum disorder.
“Not only does the brain have an impact on the gut, but the gut can also profoundly affect the brain,” said Kara Margolis, a pediatric gastroenterologist at New York University’s Langone Health, who was not involved in the new research. How these anatomically separate organs exert their effects, however, is far less clear.
Philip Washbourne, a molecular biologist at the University of Oregon and one of the principal co-authors of the new studies, has been studying genes implicated in autism and the development of social behaviors for over two decades. But he and his lab were looking for a new model organism, one that displayed social behavior but was quicker and easier to breed than their go-to, mice. “Can we do this in fish?” he recalls thinking, and then: “Let’s get really quantitative about it and see if we can measure how friendly the fish get.”
Germ-Free Fish
Zebra fish, which are also widely used in genetics research, reproduce quickly and are naturally social. After they turn two weeks old, they start hanging out in shoals of four to 12 fish. They are also transparent until adulthood, which allows researchers to observe their internal development without having to dissect them — a feat that is all but impossible in mammalian models, such as mice. . .
Presenting election data clearly
Although not deliberate deception, presenting election results by coloring states blue or red gives a misleading result. The problem is that the area of a state (which produces a visual impact) is almost independent of the population of the state, so that a state with very few representatives (Wyoming has but one) has a size disproportionate to their effect in the House of Representatives (though they do, of course, have two Senators — a definite problem in terms of fair representation).
Compare:
Set A: Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota; and
Set B: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey.
Set A has 18 times the area of Set B (387,451 sq miles vs. 21,030 sq miles) but less than 1/6th the population (3,326,837 vs. 21,022,234) — 15.8%. So Set A hits your eye and looms large, but in terms of representing the population of the US, the size is an illusion.
Jason Minor on Mastodon showed a better way to contrast area vs. political representation:
Poor representation of the data
Good representation of the data
Good data design doesn’t deceive.
Dark seem appropriate for a wintertime shave
Tallow + Steel, a Winnipeg company, makes exceptional shaving soaps and aftershaves, and early on they would emboss the surface of a tub of shaving soap with their logo, as shown in the photo at right. They no longer follow this practice, alas, but the soap remains first-rate.
The fragrance of Dark is alluring — “coffee, cocoa, ginger, and vetiver, combined with the sweetness of peppermint and benzoin.” However, they no longer make this fragrance — their fragrances seem seldom repeated, but what they offer is always good.
An excellent lather, thanks in part to my Phoenix Artisan Amber Aerolite shaving brush. The RazoRock stainless-steel BBS whisked away my stubble in a trice, and a good splash of the witch-hazel-based aftershave finished the job.
The coffee this morning is Murchie’s Queen Victoria Blend: “rich Darjeeling and Ceylon, smoky Lapsang Souchong, and sweet Jasmine.”
Later On 