#Linkdump for March 31st
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at A List Apart
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via Scott M.
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at Zen Habits — apropos of recent reading
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at Lapham’s Quarterly
Archive for March 2010
#haiku move review: District 9
No, wait! It’s an action flick!
Vaporized blood? Ick!
Still unpacking District 9. I was a little jarred by the fact that they start it out as a faux documentary (which I loved immediately) and then cut to scenes that were more a bit more “traditional action film”; but I can’t say that I can see how they would have accomplished what they needed to with this film had they gone exclusively with the former format. So… all is forgiven?
Regardless, it’s bloody and violent but that’s just a veneer for what is otherwise a story about tolerance and redemption. It’s well-structured (despite the conflicting formats) and I’m hoping that it stands the test of time to enter the canon of Great Sci-Fi Films.
#the runner’s diet: where’s the beef?
…an epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt? In search of an answer, Christopher McDougall sets off to find a tribe of the world’s greatest distance runners and learn their secrets, and in the process shows us that everything we thought we knew about running is wrong. [...] For centuries [the Tarahumara] have practiced techniques that allow them to run hundreds of miles without rest and chase down anything from a deer to an Olympic marathoner while enjoying every mile of it. Their superhuman talent is matched by uncanny health and serenity, leaving the Tarahumara immune to the diseases and strife that plague modern existence.
So aside from that quote from the inside flap of the dust jacket, I’m not going to go on about the barefoot running. I’m not going to harp on that.
I am (however) going to harp on a certain apparent contradiction. Or if not a contradiction, then at least an intractable, difficult-to-reconcile inconsistency between points raised in the text.
It hit me around page 243, right around the time that chapter 28 was wrapping up4. What hit me was: there seem to be two different messages about what the “good stuff” to eat is.
But let’s back up for a moment here.
Throughout the text, the message seems to lean toward vegetarianism. The Tarahumara don’t seem to eat much meat; every time McDougall describes their diet, it’s mostly beans and pinole—and aside from a mention of a soup with beef broth, I can’t find another place where they consume an animal product. There is a passage where Scott Jurek’s diet is described, and how the coaches of his youth insisted on “lean meat” for muscle development but how as an adult he had stripped down his intake to be bean proteins and raw veggies and the complex carbohydrates from stuff like uncooked oats. Then there is Dr. Ruth Heidrich’s “simple rule” as espoused to McDougall:
…if it came from plants, she ate it; if it came from animals, she didn’t.
In other words, everyone seems to go vegetarian. Or vegan. Or “raw”.
And this is a pretty consistent thread in the overall narrative, right up until chapter 28.
When we get to chapter 28, McDougall starts to talk about the human animal as a running animal, and there is a substantial discussion on the advantages of bipedalism5 and quite a bit of speculation on the evolutionary arc that led to the success of Homo sapiens as a species6. McDougall focuses on a hypothesis by David Carrier7 that Homo sapiens turned into this explosive success because persistence hunting8 gave them improved access to food (i.e., meat)—and persistence hunting would not be possible without a biology that makes endurance running easy.
If I’m following the text correctly, then the basic idea is this: (1) Homo sapiens and Neanderthal are competing for resources. (2) Homo sapiens has a more efficient means of running and can use this efficient running to execute this “persistence hunting”—which basically means that they run their prey to exhaustion. (3) This strategy somehow permits easier access to food year-round. (4) Not only that, but the improved access to meat provides a concentrated high-protein food source that allow for rapid brain development and an otherwise improved probability of long-term survival.
So… running gave us better access to meat which was crucial for our species’ evolution and long-term. And yet we argue that a vegetarian diet is the ultra-marathoner’s ace-in-the-sleeve? …the key to longevity and beating cancer etc.? But the meat is what got us here in the first place?
Hmm…?
Now before anyone goes all Michael Pollan on me9, bear in mind that what I find obnoxious here is that there doesn’t seem to be much effort to reconcile these conflicting ideas. Page 244 rolls around and it isn’t about diet anymore; diet becomes about running, and running is what carries the narrative.
So instead we’re left wondering:
- Is the meat just a gateway? Break on through the big-brain barrier and you don’t need it anymore? Or, as much?
- Did it really not have anything to do with the meat, but instead more to do with the improved strategy combined with Homo sapiens omnivorousness? Because if the speculation is true and Neanderthal really was exclusively a carnivore, then there’s another advantage we would have right there. (Which minimizes the importance of the easy-access meat.)
- Do we need to divorce the arguments? Is the vegetarianism “right” for the runner’s diet? And the meat is more to do with the brain development? (That doesn’t sound right to me at all.)
I’m sure there are more questions to be spawned as I continue to meditate on this. But as it is not nearly reconciled in the text, I suppose I’ll have to work to reconcile it on my own.
- Subtitled: “A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen”.[↩]
- And possibly even life-changing?[↩]
- Especially runners, and people interested in running.[↩]
- Not to mention giving me this utterly perverted desire to run. What the fuck is that all about?[↩]
- Especially w/r/t/ the efficiency of respiration in a bipedal running organism.[↩]
- As opposed to (say…) Neanderthal or some off-shoot of that species.[↩]
- And/or Dennis Bramble. Pretty sure the idea originates with Carrier, who was working with (for?) Bramble at the time. Anyway, the truthy tale (as opposed to strict hypthesizing) about running an antelope to death with the Kalahari Bushmen? That’s all Louis Liebenberg.[↩]
- Not that you can prove such a thing in the fossil record.[↩]
- I know and love the credo: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” –Michael Pollan, 2007.[↩]
#Linkdump for March 23rd
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at Princeton University — the real "this is why you're fat":
"Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn't true, at least under the conditions of our tests," said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction. "When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight."
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at The New Yorker (via DF):
For Apple, which has enjoyed enormous success in recent years, “build it and they will pay” is business as usual. But it’s not a universal business truth. On the contrary, companies like Ikea, H. & M., and the makers of the Flip video camera are flourishing not by selling products or services that are “far better” than anyone else’s but by selling things that aren’t bad and cost a lot less. These products are much better than the cheap stuff you used to buy at Woolworth, and they tend to be appealingly styled, but, unlike Apple, the companies aren’t trying to build the best mousetrap out there. Instead, they’re engaged in what Wired recently christened the “good-enough revolution.” For them, the key to success isn’t excellence. It’s well-priced adequacy.
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at NYTimes.com — frustrating that we have not come farther on this:
The report found ample evidence of continuing cultural bias. One study of postdoctoral applicants, for example, found that women had to publish 3 more papers in prestigious journals, or 20 more in less-known publications, to be judged as productive as male applicants.
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The fiber, we wants it…
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at Democrats.senate.gov (via Balloon Juice) — Harry Reid on John McCain:
For someone who campaigned on ‘Country First’ and claims to take great pride in bipartisanship, it’s absolutely bizarre for Senator McCain to tell the American people he is going to take his ball and go home until the next election. [...] At a time when our economy is suffering and we’re fighting two wars, the American people need Senator McCain and his fellow Republicans to start working with us to confront the challenges facing our country—not reiterating their constant opposition to helping working families when they need it most.
#3D cinema and depth-of-field
With 3D turning into a big draw for box office films now1, and with Sony claiming they’ll put in our living rooms by the end of the year, I’ve had a few conversations now about the 3D effects and whether/not they “feel right”. Most folks seem to agree that if you let go and relax your eyes and just stare straight ahead, that you get used to it pretty quick and that the 3D effects add a little something special to those films. But most folks also agree that something about it also feels a little bit off, and that it doesn’t take much to pull you right out of that relaxed adjustment.
If you think about it for a minute, you’ll notice that it’s the depth-of-field2 that betrays you.
This came to me relatively early in the film when I went to see Avatar. It’s a relatively inconsequential scene: Jake Sully is floating in zero-gee, coming out of the interstellar suspended animation… The camera is sharply focused on him and the depth-of-field is pretty shallow… Sully is groggy and floats dead center in the frame… And down in the lower left of the frame is a box or a cylinder or something with a label on it. But you can’t make out the writing because it’s in the foreground, too close and out of focus. But you want to know what it says, so you move your eyes to the object and try to focus…
And that’s it, right there. Your brain has got competing signals. You perceive everything in the frame in 3D. So your brain assumes you can just track the objects with your eyes, move your own focus. Your brain believes it ought to be able to make out those words. But the letters never snap into focus.
But now you’ve pulled yourself out of the scene now. Your eyes aren’t relaxed anymore, they’re not in the center of the frame “where they belong”, and you’re certainly not caught up in the transformative magic of the 3D effects anymore.
So the questions then become…:
- How many 3D films are we going to need to see before we train our brains to “turn off” those attempts to change focus? That is to say, is this just an artifact of the fact that we have already “trained” ourselves not to try this change-of-focus with traditional 2D cinematography and we just need to train ourselves to do the same thing with 3D?
- How are directors and cinematographers going to change their framing techniques? Seriously, is the focus always going to be in the center of the frame “from now on” when it comes to 3D films? Because I can tell you it was awkward and maybe a little bit vertigo-inducing to look at the edge of the frame in those 3D shots.
- How is this going to work in the living room? Glasses that you can lose? Or that your cat will chew to bits? Help me out here… But I guess having a 3D TV in the den will help us get the training hours under our belts to address #1?
- See also: Avatar, Alice in Wonderland, Tron Legacy…[↩]
- If you’re unfamiliar with the term, try the Wikipedia primer on depth-of-field; though this image is probably enough to illustrate the definition.[↩]
#Linkdump for March 22nd
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And to keep it balanced, a quote from FrumForum:
This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.
UPDATED: looking at this again, this here might be the more relevant pull quote1:
Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994. [...] Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan.
And perhaps that was the take-home lesson about the Republican obstructionism? and why they all voted “nay”? Because in their heart-of-hearts they knew that they could live with the outcome either way2?
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at Talking Points Memo:
Again, I don’t want to paint any rosy pictures. And, as I said, I don’t want to hazard any predictions. But I think this conventional wisdom is quite mistaken. Hard fought victories don’t deplete political capital; they build it. And political wins themselves often have a catalyzing effect that shapes political opinion far more than we realize.
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at NYTimes.com:
Here is a look at some of the main ways the health care overhaul might affect household budgets.
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at NYTimes.com:
“This isn’t radical reform,” he added, “but it is major reform.”
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at The Daily Dish (by Andrew Sullivan; via DF) — good round-up of responses to last night’s historic passage
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at Sprinkle Bakes — what could be better?
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at ReadyMade Editors’ Notes (via S. McC.) — nyuk-nyuk-nyuk…
#back from Myrtle Beach
Back from Myrtle Beach! Aside from being sick pretty much the entire time, it was awesome. The Boy loved the ocean, otters, and eating cheeseburgers whole. We loved the fresh seafood, catching up with the family, and the non-freezing temperatures1.
- Not that Vermont has exactly had the coldest winter this past season.[↩]
#Linkdump for March 6th
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at DzignSpace (via B²) — absolutely OMG awesome Star Wars + Goodnight Moon mash-up
UPDATE: Something seemed to shove in a whole bunch of “500 Error” links into this linkdump. I’ve since removed those (leaving “Goodnight Forest Moon” all by its lonesome) and am looking into the cause to prevent future occurrences of that annoyance.
#Linkdump for March 3rd
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via lawnczar — just in time for the 20th anniversary of the Steve Jackson Games raid; Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown in HTML
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at Beyond The Beyond (via lawnczar) — 20th anniversary of the Steve Jackson Games raid
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Steve Levithan at Flagrant Badassery and his "95 [regex] theses nailed to the ES3 cathedral door"; or, what's wrong with regular expressions in JavaScript, and a more than a few suggestions on how to fix it.
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at 52 Weeks of UX:
In its place is embedded support: directions, tips, cues, and other signposts that can nudge us back on track.
…this is a trend about which I have mixed feelings.
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At lazytweet.com — my question about syncing the Dock Stacks and Places in the Finder sidebar.
#dream.20100302: katana at the spire at the end of the world
Post-apocalyptic? Under a subterranean sky? Civilizations crumble; infrastructures crumble. You band together with whomever is left, with whomever you are close to when it all went down. Folks from work; the odds were in favor of it being them. Holed up somewhere, we all load up—stuff backpacks full of provisions: food, rope, matches, green metal bottles full of whatever water will still run out of the sputtering taps. I go back for a sword—a gleaming katana. My travel-mates poke fun at me (“What good will that do us?”) but I don’t see any of them going back for weapons. And why shouldn’t we carry at least one of these, at least something like this? There are bound to be more folks out there—some of them may even be marauding. Didn’t any of you read The Road? So they press on ahead. ”I’ll catch up.” And it takes a while but I figure out a way to get the katana attached. But it’s difficult to move with both the blade and the backpack over-stuffed with gear and food. I run a rope out the window and rappel down the side, looking up at the stone sky, hoping that everyone is already safe at the bottom when I get there.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.