Patri's Peripatetic Peregrinations

bipolar and fitness

2009-11-25T18:40:32Z

Relatedly to the last post, here is an evbio argument for bipolar disorder. It's actually quite a general argument to explain why conditions that lower fitness can survive evolution, I first heard it as a theory about homosexuality. The basic idea is that if multiple genes all affect some trait, and moderate levels of the trait are good (better than low levels), then the genes will be selected for until they reach a certain level in the population, and that level will occasionally produce people who get too many of the trait-promoting genes, too high a level of the trait, and it becomes a dysfunction. (here's a graph)

The simplest version of this is sickle-cell anemia or any other trait which is good when you get one copy of the recessive and bad when you get both. I think the argument above is basically a multi-genetic and thus more continuous version of the same phenomenon.

My main issue w/ this explanation is the effect of the prenatal environment. As I've posted before, fish consumption when pregnant and in early life has a huge effect on the prevalence of mental illness (major depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia). That suggests that these are at least in part malnutritional dysfunctions, not adaptations. But the two theories can play together - the fitness argument might be the reason why the conditions exist at all, and their prevalence might be increased b/c too little omega-3 greatly increases the susceptibility of people to develop the dysfunctional version of the trait.

The orchid theory of genetics

2009-11-25T18:29:05Z

Fascinating:

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people. …

Researchers have identified a dozen-odd gene variants that can increase a person’s susceptibility to depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, heightened risk-taking, and antisocial, sociopathic, or violent behaviors, and other problems—if, and only if, the person carrying the variant suffers a traumatic or stressful childhood or faces particularly trying experiences later in life.

(via Overcoming Bias)

Yay technology!

2009-11-25T06:08:08Z

via nasu_dengaku, the Zeo:

Introducing Zeo™, the Personal Sleep Coach. Developed with leading sleep scientists, Zeo is a new kind of educational tool and motivational program that helps you understand how you are sleeping, reveals habits and behaviors that may be helping or hindering your sleep, and teaches new ways that may help you get a better night's rest.

The soft, lightweight Zeo Headband uses our SoftWave™ sensor technology to simply, comfortably, and accurately track your unique sleep patterns. The headband sends your personal sleep information safely and wirelessly to the bedside display.

Cool! And they have a free 30-night trial.

Hard...to avoid...controversy

2009-11-24T21:36:47Z

via sconzey, here's a depressing perspective on the reliability of the CRU data. Apparently the programmer had huge trouble making sense of the mess of undocumented data files, and a lot of trouble building any models from them that fit the published data.

This does not imply fraud - anyone who has done data analysis that wasn't meant for sharing knows how messy all the intermediate files can get. However, I do believe the level of tweaking and adjusting and trying different things and the range of possible outputs strongly implies that these people have enough degrees of freedom to fit an elephant. This is very damning to any claim of precision for their models, and may even cast some doubt on whether their results mean anything. (Could be a situation like the people who found hidden messages in Shakespeare/Bacon using a method w/ enough degrees of freedom to get English out of a random stream of characters).

mandatory paternity testing?

2009-11-24T08:14:59Z

Robin argues persuasively in support of it. My inner libertarian doesn't like mandatory testing, but my new inner weird evo-conservative finds it appealing. As Robin says, it makes more sense than screening for obscure genetic disorders, and the counterarguments are quite weak. Plus he points out: "we have a far stronger reason to expect market failure for paternity testing than for the other required tests. Men are clearly reluctant to request a paternity test at birth because doing so sends a bad signal"

I should go to bed, so I have no interesting comments to make.

D&D scaremongering video

2009-11-24T08:02:31Z

from long long ago (1985):

What a great example of how many people react with instinctual fear & hatred to anything different, especially if creative or imaginative. On the plus side, the documentary suggests that the controversy actually increased sales.

H/T Eric Crampton.

H+ summit - speaker schedule is up

2009-11-24T01:05:03Z

nasu_dengaku & I are speaking, plus lots of the usual suspects from Convergence, Sing. Summit, BIL, etc., so LA peeps, come on by! Here's the schedule.

This week's global warming scandal

2009-11-24T00:13:49Z

I am trying to do real work, so I'm not going to get involved in this in any substantial way, including reading too much about it. But since it confirms my prejudices, I of course think it is awesome and will at least mention it :).

For those who don't know, someone hacked a global warming research group's email and published a lot of private emails. There is debate about whether or not the emails imply outright fraud (I have no opinion), but they clearly show a focus on generating the desired answers rather than scientific accuracy, and on lots of political maneuvering, tribal us vs. them mentality, and other things that we'd all like to believe academia is above. For example, my dad asks "Is pressuring a journal not to accept work you disapprove of by getting colleagues not to cite papers published in that journal a legitimate tactic?"

Here's my dad's take, and Climate Audit is of course having a field day. (lest you think that's solely because they are being tribalists too, note that McIntyre considers the inclusion of data and source code to be at least as valuable as the emails). For defense of the research group's emails, see RealClimate (which I'll assume is reasonably canonical).

I've turned off comments, so discuss this elsewhere :).

UPDATE: An emailed comment: "Howdy, I happen to have a copy of these and have explored them somewhat. If you care to take some time to look at them I can link you to a zip.

While the accusations of scientists trying to pressure people out of journals are most certainly substantiated, I want to stress quite strongly that the science being done by CRU is completely sound. I've looked at their data and their code (lots and lots of fortran, mostly) and it is robust.

Regardless of where one stands in the debate (and I am highly dubious of AGW just to provide some background :>), I am very wary of this hullabaloo "poisoning the well". Now any meaningful data out of (at least) British researchers will be met with shouts of "hide the decline" (which doesn't mean in that email what people think it means...).

I guess what I want to say is that before deciding it confirms your prejudices, have a gander at what actually leaked. Let me know if you're interested."

better sleep

2009-11-23T19:54:49Z

Before my MMA surgery, a really good night of sleep without taking any sleeping drugs was waking up at

4,6,8U

(time from going to sleep in hours. U indicates I got up). So 2 intermediate wakes was basically the best I ever had, for years. There were maybe a few nights in 5+ years with 0/1 wakes. Whereas in the last 2 weeks, I've had nights of (again, without sleeping drugs):

6,8U
5,7U
7U

So that's 0-1 intermediates! It's annoying to not be able to get back to sleep after 7 hours, when I still feel tired, but that seems way healthier than usually being able to go back to sleep b/c my sleep is always bad. I haven't felt super-energetic during the day very often, so I am still not totally happy w/ my sleep, but there is definitely significant improvement. I have a lot of hope that I can tinker and make further improvements.

De-compartmentalization and Integrity

2009-11-23T19:20:05Z

For my whole adult life, people have found my expressiveness and openness to be odd and interesting. To me, it seems natural: like the only way to be. It's nice to see someone else talking about the authenticity of de-compartmentalization:

I was a slightly different (and more fake) person around family then I was with friends. I was a different person with my friends than I was with my wife. I was a different person alone, than I was with any of those other people. But most of all, where I felt most suffocated was the dichotomy between who I was everywhere else and the person I was at work.

No resemblance. Total deception.

But as I said earlier, this type of deceitfulness is totally accepted in our society. No, not just accepted. It’s expected.

It took me a while to realize that even though a lot of people choose to live this way, I didn’t have to. ...

That’s when I realized that my ultimate goal in life is to live from that place of total, authentic action. Using no limits as a way of limitation.

I want there to be no discernible difference between when I am working and when I am playing. No division between my purpose and my life path.

When everything is completely integrated, when your heart, mind, and body are acting as one vehicle, your life starts to become something very beautiful. Your expression is natural, unique, and right. Your creativity flows. Your heart is opened.

And you no longer seek anything outside of yourself. You are internally validated.

(H/T Jenny Blake)

Happy Fuck Like A Pirate Day!

2009-11-23T18:17:02Z

You heard me.

exhausted!

2009-11-20T02:46:19Z

Just wrestled for the first time in 10 yrs, pretty much. Holy shit was it exhausting! Reminded me that I used to say, back in the day, that the only thing I'd ever done that was as physically draining as wrestling was swimming with a sweatsuit on. (That was part of the gym requirement back in high school. Note that I don't float, which makes even normal swimming hard).

Probably didn't help that I'd only had a couple hundred calories all day. And that the other guy was 135lbs and in practice. On the other hand, we rotated through cycles of 3 guys against him and he still won almost all the bouts, so max props to JC. The guy was efficient and in great cardio shape.

I wish I could say it all came back to me, but mostly I realized how much basic technique I'd forgotten.

I get more joy & flow out of acrobatics and working with my own body, but pitting myself directly against another guy is always good training for the warrior spirit.

Nightwish

2009-11-19T23:27:20Z

They're just amazing. My favorite band of the last 5 years, maybe the last 10.

Gotta see 'em live in 2010...

Will's #1!

2009-11-19T21:00:03Z

congrats to TSI Research Associate willmagic, who (along w/ his partner Sarah) is ranked #1 of 552 teams in the NPTE (college debate) rankings.

reminder: compressed Patri

2009-11-18T21:55:47Z

for my < 140-char thoughts, read my twitter or friend me on FB (I syndicate my tweets to FaceBook). More links, more wit (one of the two things brevity is the soul of), less trolling!

tovar and games

2009-11-18T04:07:46Z

He is only moderately into his ipod touch games. What he most wants to do with it is watch TV, which we don't allow - I wish I hadn't ever shown him that it could play videos.

What he's really into is Plants vs. Zombie, he often asks me to play and was sad when I finished the game and stopped playing as much. He loves Crazy Dave especially.

Movie: Pirate Radio

2009-11-18T00:03:17Z

if you're in the Bay Area, come see Pirate Radio w/ us tomorrow (Wed) at 7:15PM at CineArts Palo Alto Square.

Seastead Book Help

2009-11-17T22:21:35Z

Since hiring nthmost, eelcoh, xleste, radiantsun, and Max to work for TSI (offices are a bit busier these days!), I've been able to delegate lots of major projects and get lots of writing time in on the book, yay!

As a result, I'm getting close to the point where I'll be ready for feedback on the new version of the seasteading book. If you're highly interested in the topic and motivated to read rough prose and give substantial feedback, read and summarize relevant books in our area, that sort of thing, drop me a comment or email patri-at-seasteading-dot-org and I'll add you to our elite list of literati. michael_keenan & eruv, you're already on the invite list.

Also, as a reminder, if you're interested & able to give help with git/github (our version-control system) and/or LaTeX (our typesetting language), join tsi-book-dev.

Life goals

2009-11-17T21:35:46Z

Does anyone have a favorite one-stop resource for prioritizing / setting / tracking / achieving life goals? A book, say, or website? Something that includes levels like 5 years, 1 year, 1 month, 1 week, as the range of granularity. Getting Things Done covers this briefly, but doesn't really focus on it.

I'm feeling like I have a bewildering & overwhelming variety of life goals that I can't accomplish all of, and trying to figure out what to do on an ad hoc basis is not working very well. Should I work on selling my S2000? Decluttering my physical space? Working out? Analyzing/experimenting with my sleep/energy levels? Maintaining stronger friendships? Put all my extra time into my job? My family?

warm / easy / healthy

2009-11-17T18:27:51Z

Had crock-pot dinner yesterday, as suggested. Thanks for reminding me of the joy that is crock-pot cooking!

Knot-Tying workshops in SF!

2009-11-17T18:19:35Z

The flowers of holding Ephemerisle / hiring Naomi begin to bloom...

Announcing Seasteading Practicals: Monthly Knot-Tying Workshop

Knots are a sailor's resume, and judging by the display of expertise at Ephemerisle, most of us are just about qualified to ask "do you want fries with that?"

Ain't that the truth!

I'm excited about having a larger quantity and variety of local socials, including practical stuff like this, so that we can strengthen the local seasteading community, and then eventually expand to other regional chapters.

Tortuga & Calderon Cohousing in LA Town Crier

2009-11-16T06:11:53Z

Local newspaper article about cohousing communities

Warm & Healthy foods?

2009-11-14T03:02:44Z

My diet principles include: low calorie density, minimal processing, lots of fruits & vegetables. Not that I stick to them perfectly, but at least those are the goals.

I've been having more trouble now that the weather is reminding me that I live in Northern California. I crave warm food, but fruits, vegetables, and salads are usually cold. I am having trouble coming up with warm foods that are high in vegetables and low in calorie-density. Vegetable soup? Steamed vegetables? Stir-fried vegetables?

Ok, that wasn't hard. But I see the real problem now. All of those require cooking. One of the hidden benefits of "minimal processing" is that food often goes from the store to the fridge to my tummy without the inconvenience of passing through the stove. Warmth = cooking = stove. Hmph.

Thiel Foundation Website

2009-11-13T21:12:41Z

The Thiel Foundation (sadly no longer called "The Shire") has a fancy new website up. You can find TSI under "Freedom", and some other familiar faces under Science & Technology.

Peter's essay on The Contrarian Hero particularly resonates with me:

Contrarians stay centered for the same reasons they see so clearly—because rigorous application of fundamental principles aligns thinking with feeling, creating a clear picture of the world that explains how it ought to work, how it does work, and our place in it. Once you achieve a clear and true picture, apparent contradictions fall away. The right road is still steep and treacherous, but at last it's clearly marked.

This is the predicament of the contrarian hero: his eyes are opened. Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, and every step reveals not only the futility of reaching the peak, but also the impossibility of turning aside.

posts other places

2009-11-13T20:55:58Z

I won't cross-post everything, but as I'm trying to establish traffic for these blogs...

On pua4ltr: choiceful posts How to Make your Woman Happy: Study PUA, and I post The Repetition Game And Presence.

On LATNB: Second talk from Seasteading09 is up: Michael Strong on Free Zones and how they could lead to innovation in government.