Oral/anal

charlie sheen shirts site.com

"You don't get it. I am one runaway son of a bitch! I am an animal! I want to eat everything! I want to get drunk every single night! I want to screw every woman there is! We are all wild animals. But we must learn to use our minds. We must learn to control the bestial and sensual sides of ourselves!"

Jack LaLanne Is Still an Animal

Unenlightened self-interest

antony gormley

Due to a 7-yr old house guest have only been to a bar once in the past month, and thus spent no time listening to people who drink, smoke, eat too much, exercise too little and carry too much debt complaining how stupid ‘the masses’ are for not acting in their own interests.

Matryoshka selves, strange loops and inner voices

I don't do anything in particular to keep my energy level up during the summer. I guess the only thing I do specifically is try not to drink so many cold drinks. And eat more fruits and vegetables. ... I'm not eating these, though, simply to stave off the summer blahs, but because my body just naturally craves them. Being active every day makes it easier to hear that inner voice.

Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, p49

My last day at work was November 31st '08, and it's taken me a while to even get slightly used to the demands [and lack of] of a freelancing, unscheduled life. Meaning that for the first four and a half months or so I colored outside the lines way too often, but the almost total lack of stress and the freedom to follow the dictates of the body inre. food and rest seem to have more than offset the late nights, alcohol and often poor dietary choices. I may be distracted, but never tired.


The last few months have been a fall down the stairs series of surprises and sudden rebirths, like waking up within recursive dreams. So I feel like an entirely different creature than a few weeks ago, never mind a year, all the time sloughing off lives like snake skins, and although I don't feel personally responsible for anything that I may have done, other people are bound to think differently.



Related post:
Strange loops and the pleasure of finding things out

Air-conditioned nightmare

Alien circadian, thermal, kinetic, sensory, nutritional and social environments. A presentation by Frank Forencich to go with the occasional paleo theme of this page.

The point about light / darkness as cues for body chemistry was something I'd forgotten since I stopped working night shifts, 13 yrs ago. The current regime isn't as jarring, but still unnatural. After watching this talk I've been keeping to lower lux mood lights and making use of dimmer switches, with the idea being that as much as possible the general evening on environment is kept as well lit as a tribal camp site on a moonlit night. I have a very tolerant wife.

Related posts:
The process not the outcome
Big fat lie
Stochastic jerks
Paleoconservatism

Homo evolutus

Juan Enrinquez works with Craig Venter. In this talk at TED 2009, he starts off by giving a fairly right-wing assessment of the economic crisis, then moves on to describing the current and near future state of the art in engineering microbes, tissues and robots. The word isn't said, but it's verging on soft take-off Singularity stuff. The cool thing comes in the last third when he draws out the implications. Now, other speakers and writers always cover the last part along the lines of everything will be awesome, without specifying awesome for who. Enriquez states the obvious, unapologetically. One slide in his presentation shows how in our recent evolutionary history is was more common than not for different species of hominid to live at the same time, and he looks forward to next one to share the stage with homo sapiens, homo evolutus - the rich becoming superheroes. It's an interesting talk.

According to Ray Kurzweil, the logarithmic graph of 15 separate lists of paradigm shifts for key events in human history show an exponential trend. Lists prepared by, among others, Carl Sagan, Paul D. Boyer, Encyclopædia Britannica, American Museum of Natural History and University of Arizona; compiled by Kurzweil.

Wikipedia

Related posts on this site:
Venter speaking at the Long Now, 2008

A long-range view of things

But when I think about it, having the kind of body that puts on weight easily was perhaps a blessing in disguise. In other words, if I don't want to gain weight I have to work out hard every day, watch what I eat, and cut down on indulgences. Life can be tough, but as long as you don't stint on the effort, your metabolism will greatly improve with these habits, and you'll end up much healthier, not to mention stronger. To a certain extent, you can even slow down the effects of aging. But people who naturally keep the weight off no matter what don't need to exercise or watch their diet in order to stay trim. There can't be many of them who would go out of their way to take these troublesome measures when they don't need to. Which is why, in many cases, their physical strength deteriorates as they age. If you don't exercise, your muscles will naturally weaken, as will your bones. Some of my readers may be the kind of people who easily gain weight, but the only way to understand what's really fair is to take the long-range view of things. For the reasons I give above, I think this kind of physical nuisance should be viewed in a positive way, as a blessing. We should consider ourselves lucky that the red light is so clearly visible. Of course, it's not always easy to see things this way.

Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, p42

As healthy as possible

To deal with something unhealthy, a person needs to be as healthy as possible. That's my motto. In other words, an unhealthy soul requires a healthy body. This might sound paradoxical, but it's something I've felt very keenly ever since becoming a professional writer. The healthy and the unhealthy are not necessarily at opposite ends of the spectrum. They don't stand in opposition to each other, but rather complement each other, and in some cases even band together. Sure, many people who are on a healthy track in life think only of good health, while those who are getting unhealthy think only of that. But if you follow this sort of one-sided view, your life won't be fruitful.

Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, p98

Recently I've met a number of people who say they want to die at 60 or 70. Myself, I want to be 90-something and in good health. It probably won't happen, but I want to be as healthy as possible for as long as possible.

Still, dying is not very difficult, it's not something you need to plan 20 or 30 years before the event. It's as easy as getting a haircut. You can open an artery, take an overdose, drive into a wall, jump off a tall building, inhale gas, hang yourself. There are enough ways to die that everyone is sure to find one that they can accept.

Of course, I got into this discussion with between five and eight beers in me, and then rode my bicycle home at 04:30, but at least if I'd been hit by a truck my body would have been working well right up until the moment of impact.

The process, not the outcome

Art De Vany [71 and fitter than you] with a nice clip on fractal variation / power laws in work.

Related posts:
Stochastic jerks
Paleoconservatism

Big fat lie

Prehistoric rock paintings from Bhimbhetka, India. Thanks to Sarbanidas Roy

...if researchers seek to study something less costly and more controllable, they end up studying experimental situations so oversimplified that their results may have nothing to do with reality. This then leads to a research literature so vast that it's possible to find at least some published research to support virtually any theory.

Gary Taubes What if it's all been a big fat lie? [2002 NY Times article on low carb beating low fat]

Good interview on the writing, publishing and aftermath of the article

I like the fact that the primal / paleo lifestyle is based on asserting affinity with our early ancestors. Back to the first hominids and back to the first life of all. We are family - the genetic potential of a long series of lucky individuals playing out against the blades of the environment.

Related link: What's the difference between Primal and Paleo? at Mark's Daily Apple

Health and frugality

FelipeArte

The simpler I can make things the better, and I think when I get truly old and my brain starts to melt it'll be a long time before anyone notices.

I was wondering if I should be worried at all about economic collapse, but can't seem to work up any concern. All I do is try and stay healthy [exercise / diet / rest / no stress] and live within my means. That's all I can do, and the rest is up to chance, the collapse of one critical state into another.

Tom the Dancing Bug [click pic for full story]

A rod for my own back

The kindness of folk in Taiwan, which could be a running series, either that or the devil sent a man who had a spare Xbox 360 [hardcore gamer, bought one early and then an updated model] and a copy of GTA IV that they lacked the English to play, so the console is staying with me. I'm pretty hopeless, mashing buttons when I fight and knocking down way too many lamp posts / pedestrians, but some late night urban mayhem is exactly what I need at the end of the summer.

And I have my new routine, classes only in the evening, proofreading from 7:30am until 11am, the afternoons all free, my training wheels for a greater freedom, until good habits are more deeply ingrained.

Meanwhile, bouncing between over- and under-confidence, which seems to be a natural state that I need to accept. The idea being that when I feel fat / ugly / poor / stupid I work harder, leading eventually to a period of contentment / over-confidence. I see this at work with the smart and beautiful students I know - they tend to be very insecure, hence the exercise, make-up and study. Harnessing low self-esteem for self-improvement. I guess the key is to narrow the gap between the extremes, to get the good habits in deep enough that they're automatic, require no prompting from a sense of weakness, and all the time to be on guard against arrogance, et cetera. Ha.... At the moment I'm on a clean food / exercise kick on the old paleo model, which, coupled with my new found mastery of time and the concomitant ability to eat when I'm hungry, sleep when I'm tired, is leaving me feeling very good.

Busted rhythms of limited interest

"Wealth is passed down from generation to generation, you can't get rid of wealth. Rich is some shit you can lose with a crazy summer and a drug habit."

Chris Rock

I wrote a post entitled Manumission a few months ago, before this summer of lost IQ, declining health and massive opportunity costs really kicked in, and now only five days to go until everything becomes more human, In the middle of the summer I finally got my permanent residency, so I can do anything to make money that's legal, which opens up a whole arena of things that I don't want to do, but also the possibility of functioning independent of a boss, which is key. Although my class hours will fall way down, as desired, but I'm lucky the remaining ones are all in the evening. It greatly reduces the opportunities for mischief inherent in being able to start drinking at noon. I spent my 20s and early 30s coloring outside the lines, and am happy to set myself up within strict limits.

Still, no idea how people cope with a long career of 9 - 5 with a commute at each end and continual debt. It's been interesting to watch myself deteriorate, but not a lot of fun, and I never want to work like this again, 50 - 60 hrs a week on projects not of my choosing. Still, I've got $$$ in the bank for the rest of the year, and that's always good. F*** you $ beats possessions every time.

The main thing is to get my health back into condition, so more cooking rather eating out, more exercise beyond bike riding. Basically back to the paleoconservative plan of veg / fruit/ meat - low / no carbs - and short bouts of hard exercise interspersed with frequent, low level activity. Living like a caveman again, letting the system right itself.

With regard to exercise, I got bored with my regular free weights routine. Too many programmed actions that isolate muscle groups rather than giving a workout that mimics real actions. To keep things fresh, the next phase of hefting metal disks on steel poles with be based around these sledgehammer routines. I haven't bought a sledgehammer but just took the weights off one end of a regular EZ curl barbell, and I don't use anything to pad the heavy end. Certain elements of the routine will change after I've had my first accident, but the sense that a false swing might cause intense pain / lasting damage is a good way to keep attention on form.

Decline is inevitable, so you have to keep moving just to stay the same, but add a little more effort, a little more smartly, and gains can actually be made, at least terms of learning, strength, performance and finances, if not my face, which has already moved well from the boyish to the characterful phase of its existence, aka the Dirty Old Man.

Monkey in a man suit

Benny had actually read Darwin once, in college a long time ago, and had heard of sciences like ethology and ecology, but the facts of evolution had never really registered on him. He never thought of himself as a primate. He never realized his friends and associates were primates. Above all, he never understood that the alpha males of Unistat were typical leaders of primate bands. As a result of this inability to see the obvious, Benny was constantly alarmed and terrified by the behavior of himself, his friends and associates and especially the alpha males of the pack. Since he didn't know it was ordinary primate behavior, it seemed just awful to him.

Robert Anton Wilson, Schrödinger's Cat, quoted on p63 of his own Prometheus Rising, available in pdf form at the link

Being a teacher I generally get away with the illusion of being the boss primate, at least in my own head, which is the reality that counts, psychosomatically. This leads to good spirits and good health. But lately this system has broken down slightly, and for the last two or three months I've had two classes a week, out of 20+, in which I come off the worst in the monkey dominance trip. The stress hormones kick in and linger in the system. Chemically, it's an interesting experience, like when I test my system by eating only carbs and getting manic and grumpy, or mix Xanax and alcohol and pass out too soon. Interesting experiences, but personally they suck.

I need to find a workaround for such occasions.

Stochastic jerks

What other people do repels me. It's an instinctive weakness, 1/3 due to curiosity [what about another way?], 1/3 due to arrogance [I'm sure I know better], and 1/3 straight stupidity [mind is blank]. Curiosity, arrogance, stupidity. A winning combination, the kind that leads to poking bee hives with a stick.

I've been to gyms, and enjoyed getting into the subset of consciously healthy people, although, once ensconced, it's plain that there are degrees. For example, the leap from exercise to diet is often unmade by gym rats, save for protein shakes and the like. I see such people eating crap, which is broadly defined as not only junk food but all carbs, the basic paleoconservative position being that you should eat nothing introduced into the human diet after the development of agriculture. So, no grains, but a hunter-gatherer diet of vegetables, meat, nuts and fruits, although not the bred-to-be-sweet varieties of the latter. It's strict, and it's a pain to observe as it involves breaking many habits and being prepared for when hungry [appropriate snacks on hand], but it works, if you do it. Note: this does not mean, if you follow the paleo-diet and also eat carbs. The foods are not supposed to be an addition to your diet, but to become the entirety, or at least the vast majority. Losing weight, gaining muscle, saving $, learning a language, cooking good food. Many things are easy if you do what you are told, but what people tell me to do repels me.

You try - observe - tweak - observe. After some time you have what works for yourself. The Heath Robinson nature of my work-arounds. Ideally I'd make use of Dr Lilly's Metaprogramming, but the fact is that I shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the controls of my biocomputer. My first creative instinct, when I got into self-hypnosis, was to cobble together MP3s that put me under and then produced sex and psychedelic dreams. When it comes to tinkering with my basic system, I'm not to be trusted, but I still trust myself better than anyone else. It's my body, my head. At best I try to undertake the task with close reference to nature, following the clues it scatters. Try - observe - tweak - observe.

Nassim Taleb on his exercise regime, via Art DeVany:

1) NO MODERATE EXERCISE SESSIONS. Either too little, or too much, way beyond what I thought I could do –and no set schedule. Never have a clear plan of how long to stay at the gym. So I would randomly push myself –with output as powerlaw distributed as possible. It is a matter of bandwidth –The range of fatigue from regular exercise does not reach all areas of the body. I now spend between 5 minutes and 4 hours at the gym –working out harder as I get more tired. I spent several times 10 days without any exercise. But my total time at the gym per month averages less than I did before. And I have no routine, do not count sets, with a preference for free weights/pull ups/dips/pushups. Sometimes I just do pushups by avoiding the moderate number 60: either 10 or 350 –then nothing for a week.

2) NO PURELY AEROBIC EXERCISE –the separation is foolish & not empirical. Avoid listening to “trainers”.

3) FOOD INTAKE Eat no carbs that do not have a Biblical Hebrew or Doric Greek name (i.e. did not exist in the ancient Mediterranean) : no oranges (only citrus), no bananas, no mangoes, etc. Apples and grapes were acidic in taste, bittersweet. Eat nothing out of the box. No sugar, bread, pasta, etc. Avoid artificial sweeteners.

4) STARVATION: Workout while starving.

Pills to forever

1. Ordinary life is sometimes boring. So what?
2. Eternal life will be as boring or as exciting as you make it.
3. Is being dead more exciting?
4. If eternal life becomes boring, you will have the option of ending it at any time.

Ed Regis, Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, quoted on p53 of the worth-a-read Transhumanist FAQ

The above are the pills that Ray Kurzweil [aged 60] takes every day to help ensure that he's around for the Singularity and the concomitant eternal life. The picture and the following quote [from the reporter, not RK] are lifted from a recent Wired profile.

...immortality will arrive in stages. First, lifestyle and aggressive antiaging therapies will allow more people to approach the 125-year limit of the natural human lifespan. This is bridge one. Meanwhile, advanced medical technology will begin to fix some of the underlying biological causes of aging, allowing this natural limit to be surpassed. This is bridge two. Finally, computers become so powerful that they can model human consciousness. This will permit us to download our personalities into nonbiological substrates. When we cross this third bridge, we become information. And then, as long as we maintain multiple copies of ourselves to protect against a system crash, we won't die.

I had a post on this while back, when I was just getting into this page, and it includes more color on Kurzweil and praise for the very good post-Singularity sci-fi novel Accelerando, available for free and legal in pdf form at the link. I'm very, very skeptical, but I like the idea, and I like ideas to play with. But all my bets are on getting older and dying, on not having eternity to play in.

Paleoconservatism

Humans are very adaptive, but this means that we’re changed by our environment and actions as much as we change it or control them. To quote Spencer Wells, the anthropologist who interviewed Will Self [below]:

We've probably changed more since the dawn of the Neolithic than we did in the hundreds of thousands of years leading up to that. Basically what we're doing is adapting to the culture we created, which is a frightening thing because the culture, in a sense, has become a living organism of its own. It's almost like a virus the way it's taken over. The greatest adaptation seems to have come from the change in diet and the change, perhaps, in shelter and making clothes, and all these things that happened as a result of the Neolithic.

The User Illusion ended with a criticism of our increasingly mediated, screen-based world, noting that we evolved to preconsciously take in, weigh up and act on millions of bits of information. The idea is that we should cut ourselves off from mediation and gain a more direct experience of ourselves and the environment, but more essentially in this context [and this post] to incorporate elements of a Paleolithic lifestyle. A good start on this, beyond walking - which I dislike, I ride a bike - is in terms of diet and exercise.

The summary is this: as few neolithic, agricultural foods as possible, i.e. no grains, lots of fruit, vegetables, nuts, meats, and short, irregular bouts of randomized hard exercise, interspersed with low level physical activity. Keeping things non-linear and faux hunter-gatherer. A good place to start on this is with Art De Vany and his essay on Evolutionary Fitness.

You can make that choice

Will Self interviewed on walking and attaining the hunter-gatherer mindset

I think the only thing I can do is to try and persuade people to walk. Once you walk, it starts to fall into place. [...] A Zen‑like state of absorption into physical geography. Because if you are solely concerned with orientation and movement, then the so‑called higher faculties don't have a lot to do. There isn't a lot of room. You're not tormented by what the Germans call the "earworm" gnawing away at you, or the resentment you had toward the guy at the party in 1985 who spilled the drink on you. That goes after a few miles. And I think then we're probably back in the hunter-gatherer mindset. What I'm saying is, you can be a hunter-gatherer. You can be a hunter-gatherer now. Anybody here in Manhattan, or in any major city, can make that choice to be a hunter-gatherer.

Busy with a stack of proofreading after the new year break, but want to post something. The above really ties in with lots of other things on diet, exercise and consciousness, but for the moment it'll have to stand on its own. At a loss at what to tag it. Toying with some variation of 'cosa nostra', our thing, which I think covers the ill-defined goal of general mental and physical well-being, but for now will make do with 'health', and return to this topic at the weekend.