I'm not entirely sure what algebraic property you would prove with this, but you probably could prove something about it. The issue is that they have repeating continued fraction representations, and large numbers in the continued fraction correspond to very good rational approximations, and so you'd find that a bunch of these chosen at random have pretty good rational approximations, which assuming the denominator is co-prime to 10, probably means that it explores the space of digits too uniformly? Something like that.
The approach I was thinking of is that you'd prove normality or the lack thereof, a notoriously open problem for virtually all irrational roots. Continued fractions might be fruitful, but I suspect you'd eventually run one of the many other open problems in that space instead.
There are a bunch of tricks like this. So for instance to make antibiotic-free chicken without a commitment to being antibiotic-free and organic, raise a bunch of chickens, take any who gets sick enough to need antibiotics and put them into a separate field with their antibiotics, sell the ones that happen to not get sick as antibiotic-free, sell the other ones as usual.
Or, if you're making orange juice, make the ingredients label say oranges. But you can split it up, take the peels, put them into a hydraulic press, extract out oils that have the concentrated aroma and flavor of oranges, homogenize some of that into the juice. Or you can centrifuge the juice, or you can pass it through osmotic filters to remove some of the water and concentrate the flavor. No rule saying you can't treat some of the juice similar to sugar beet juice and try to isolate its sugars. At the end, you reassemble a perfect consistent mixture. The label doesn't have to tell you about any of this, it just has to tell you that the ingredients were oranges.
(The recipe for the best lemonade you'll ever make is like this, it's just lemons and water and sugar, but you zest the lemons into the simple syrup you're making with the sugar water, then strain it with cheesecloth or a coffee filter, before adding to the juice and water and pulp.)
Imported oils, you can basically do anything that some middleman country allows you to do with the oil (in particular mix with cheaper oils) and then say "oh this is imported olive oil, olive oil according to someone else's standards”...
> So for instance to make antibiotic-free chicken without a commitment to being antibiotic-free and organic, raise a bunch of chickens, take any who gets sick enough to need antibiotics and put them into a separate field with their antibiotics, sell the ones that happen to not get sick as antibiotic-free, sell the other ones as usual.
I think I'm ok with this. It means you can't routinely feed them all antibiotics, and people aren't eating chickens who had antibiotics.
People are still eating them, they’re just people who weren’t willing to pay extra for non-antibiotic chickens.
There’s a withdrawal period for livestock medication for all slaughter, so no one should be eating animals that were recently medicated. IIRC it’s 30 days for LA200, the antibiotic I used for my flock.
American, never heard of this. Some quick searching, and I found an Australian dairy site which describes this as permeated milk. From this advert piece it might be a way of ensuring that the milk fat/protein ratios can be easily adjusted to hit some target numbers.
PSA that melatonin use was way out of control before this study was even published.
Sleep aid melatonin is shipped in pills containing ridiculous amounts of the stuff—I’ve seen 10, 12, and 20mg myself, Amazon has a 40mg fast dissolve and 60mg gummies.
This spikes your blood amount with 100x-1000x of your natural cycle of melatonin. Why? Because melatonin is not, repeat not, the signaling molecule that makes you sleepy. It responds to light levels and triggers the cascade of other molecules that make you sleepy, several hours after it peaks. So that's why the 100x overdose—you are trying to kick those secondary mechanisms into overdrive, “hey everyone it is black as the abyss of hell I guess we gotta sleep!!”, because Americans taking melatonin want to pop one just before bed and have it knock them out.
And it does that for like 2 or 3 days before your body starts down-regulating all of its sensitivities to those melatonin byproducts. Nerve cells like to be tickled, not zapped, when you shock them like this they react angrily.
You want to use melatonin to reinforce circadian rhythm and fight jet lag, you do it with amounts in the ~100 micrograms range, slow release if you can find it, and you take that at sunset and let it reinforce your normal cycle. If you're looking for an acute sleep aid, take a walk, get fresh air, drink water, and if those don't help pop a Benadryl/Unisom (it's the same drug either way). If you have doctor’s orders of course follow those, but if you're just trying to self-medicate that’s how you do it.
Absolutely unsurprising that punching your sleep apparatus in the gut once every day for five years increases some sort of stress on your heart.
In grad school I got to attend a talk by one of the researchers who was involved in the discovery of melatonin as a sleep aid for humans. He said that his team had hoped for it to become a prescription medicine dosed at 500 mcg, because anything higher gave paradoxical effects and actually made sleep worse. But it ended up being classified as a supplement in the US rather than a drug, so they had no way to control the dosage on the market.
The other useful thing I learned is that melatonin isn't primarily involved in falling asleep, its main function as a hormone is in staying asleep. I've started taking it sporadically if I wake up in the middle of the night, to make sure I get back to a deep sleep and stay there, and it seems to be super effective for this.
I suspect each brand tries to put more to out-compete with other brands.
People look at multivitamins and think “more is better”. Unfortunately they are stuffed with ingredients that can’t be absorbed well together, but do result in higher sales…
I've taken it rarely, but not found it to be a panacea on the night I'm having trouble sleeping. That is, if it isn't already early when I take it, I'm positively trashed for the morning after. The next night is when I find that taking one early helps in catching up.
> He said that his team had hoped for it to become a prescription medicine dosed at 500 mcg, because anything higher gave paradoxical effects and actually made sleep worse.
Tangentially, I'm reminded of this interview around ~31m.
TL;DR they found something that promoted deeper sleep, but people didnt necessary feel "well rested", and so it was shelved for something that subjectively improved sleep but actually reduced the quality of sleep.
There was a collection of studies about a decade ago that seemed to determine the optimal use of Melatonin was about 350 micrograms taken about 1 hour before bed. The ideal was also slow release which was the best you could do to match the bodies process currently. The doses you can buy are far too high even the 1.5mg ones.
Just so you know, some doctors recommend being careful with melatonin for kids since it’s a hormone and there’s not a ton of research on long-term effects. They say it might disrupt sexual development during adolescence. Kids produce more melatonin naturally and it is though that a reduction in melatonin production during adolescence is actually what triggers pubertal development. Might be worth looking into a bit more before making it something regular.
When I brought up melatonin with a sleep doctor a few years ago she agreed with my understanding that given a lack of uncontroversial studies its unclear whether it is a health risk or not.
It can be difficult to find low dose melatonin unfortunately. Especially in slow release.
Often kids sleep tablets are better. Also kids chewable gummies can be cut in half to get an effective dosage. I've not found a good long release version of those.
i bought a bottle from cvs. 60 gummies each 5 mg. my kid was having trouble sleeping and these worked like a sledghammer, it was great! also comical, knowing the dose was way too high, i would slice the pinky-fingernail-sized gummy into 10 tiny pieces. “do you want this gummy?” “can i have more?” “no” “do you still want the little piece” “yes”. so then she would try to make it last by sort of licking it or just taking it in and out of her mouth and it would get lost of forgotten- funny business.
anyway, we dropped off the use of the sledgehammer precipitously as we wanted her to develop her own sleep skills and avoid any of these lesser known potentially negative effects. we still keep the (lifetime supply)tool in our back pocket for rare occasions, like traveling.
> you take that at sunset and let it reinforce your normal cycle
Yes, the way Michael Grandner explains it in this podcast[0], melatonin is an ancient molecule that signals, "it is dark." If you give it to nocturnal species, it wakes them up!
Are you sure about this? Everything I can find says Benadryl is diphenhydramine, and Unisom is doxylamine. (Both linked to increased dementia risk, for what it's worth.)
Yes, I would use first generation antihistamines like those sparingly as they are anticholergenic. It's more of a long term concern rather than for occasional use.
For the low dose melatonin, Life Extension brand sells patented MicroActive formula of fast release/slow release melatonin in a 1.5mg dosage and a 6 hour time released 300mcg version. It's a quality brand and those are the dosage ranges I would recommend sticking around.
I have seen the insanely high 30mg+ amounts being sold and that's ridiculous. If you need that much, there's other factors going on. I would look into reducing caffeine intake, doing proper sleep hygiene (google it), and talk to a doctor/get a referral to a sleep specialist if it's an ongoing thing.
But, also look into l-theanine, glycine/magnesium glycinate, valerian root extract, passionflower, lemon balm and things of that sort for occasional sleeplessness or trouble falling asleep. (Visit examine.com & ergo-log.com and search for these ingredients on there to see all the references, how they work, and for more info.)
Natural isn't necessarily better, but I would recommend those any day over Z drugs, antihistamines and a lot of other rx sleep drugs. Make sure you're buying a quality brand though.
Finally, please don't give melatonin to children...
I’ll never understand the desire of people to take pills for everything. There are always side effects. If you have a medically diagnosed acute or chronic condition and there’s not another option that’s one thing. But if you can eat better, be more active, lose excess weight, etc that’s what you should try to do.
They're both first generation antihistamines and work as agonists on the H1 receptor, causing sedation. There's no reason to choose one over the other for a first time user, but they can cause rapid tolerance. So, I'm guessing the only reason they offer both is if you'd become tolerant to one of them and can no longer fall asleep on it.
I mean it's understudied, but at the very least you have [1], children given high doses daily of melatonin developed delayed sleep/wake cycles when measured by DLMO (the time of day that your endogenous melatonin starts to rise) and that “Nearly all children who temporarily discontinued melatonin experienced a delay in sleep onset time,” both of which strongly suggest downregulation is happening. (Usually endogenous melatonin skews earlier with melatonin supplementation, see [2].)
Similar inefficacies have been seen clinically e.g. in [3] and are (caution, anecdata) widespread on the internet, with "melatonin doesn't work" being a popular search term with tons of articles about it. An honest to goodness test seems to have been done at [4] where they made sleep disturbance symptoms "disappear" by resuming treatment at a lower dosage, but instead of blaming the neurons they are blaming the liver, saying that it got overloaded and couldn't clear melatonin out of the bloodstream anymore in some patients—I just want to include that as a plausible alternative explanation so that you don't take my words as gospel truth or anything. I’m trained as a physicist, not a physician, and there is this meme of people with physics degrees thinking that everybody else’s field is their expertise and like I want to be deliberately self conscious about my limitations here.
From streetlights everywhere, emergency vehicles blasting sirens at all hours, trains blasting horns (miles away but are still audible), its no surprise that Americans are struggling to sleep if this is your environment.
I know someone with a condition (I don't recall the name of it) but it actually calls for these massive doses of melatonin (up to 100 mg). The vast majority of people wanting to use it should start LOW- as in 0.25-0.5 mg.
We lost this fight at least by 1994 when Sun acquired “Thinking Machines,” which to its credit was bankrupting itself by making highly parallel supercomputers, at least. Now of course there is a new AI company of the same name. If the wrestling world echoes the computing world, one can only wonder what in 5-10 years will be the equivalent of Undertaker throwing Mankind off of Hell In A Cell to plummet 16 feet down through an announcer’s table...
I mean pohl's joke above whooshed kjmh so it's all fine. The important thing for threads like this one is for us to name drop all of the weird programming languages that we have used, publicly avow the greatness of ones that we have not, and make a New Year's resolution that we will never follow, to actually pick up those great languages and write something in them...
You don't get it from language tooling because you are compiling to a bytecode that runs in a virtual machine (BEAM).
The current tool to wrap your bytecode with a VM so that it becomes standalone is Burrito[1], but there's some language support[2] (I think only for the arch that your CPU is currently running? contra Golang) and an older project called Distillery[3].
Yep! Lustig has a book, Metabolical, that goes into kind of a simple explanation of the underlying mechanism here, and it's roughly like this: fiber-rich foods contain a combination of soluble and insoluble fiber, the insoluble fiber basically forms a sort of "net" of chunks and strings and such that you can't digest, and the soluble fiber forms a "gel" which gets stuck in the net and traps other foods. This gel is infused with various enzymes to break down foods in the duodenum, and then passes to the first and second half of the "zig-zag" parts of the small intestine -- the jejunum and the ileum.
The combination of fibers then leads to a given packet of calories traveling further down the jejunum as it gets absorbed, which makes more of the bacteria living along the length of the intestine happy with you, as well as protecting from blood glucose spikes that come with concomitant "crashes".
I am not saying that is wrong, but there are many mysterious claims in that book. I especially found the claim that "the most expensive burden to society is sugar" by a large margin was pretty astonishing. It lacks wide support in literature. As do many other claims in the book. Like refined carbohydrates being the main cause of weight gain through a rise in insulin. That is - at best - generally disputed, but is touted as fact.
I mean, what he prescribed is fine. Eat "real food". But how he comes to that stance is rather opaque to me. He is obviously literate, but checking some sources in the book very few of them strongly supported the claims he made with that reference.
I also found that first one surprising, even if he gives his back-of-the-envelope calculation (He guesstimates, 75% of healthcare spending is for metabolic-syndrome type chronic diseases, and then he guesstimates that 75% of that is preventable, $3.5T times .75 times .75 gives his figure of $1.9T/year.)
But even if the margin is not quite as wide as the back-of-the-envelope calculates, it's still bigger by a decent margin, right? For instance [1] estimates with more detailed methodology that it's $2.9T over 3 years or ~$1T/year, with at least 44% of that attributable to obesity, so like ~$400B/year, whereas [2] talks about $240B/year cigarettes, $250B/year alcohol.
Of course Lustig would say "TOFI people exist, obesity isn't the problem, obesity is just another symptom of metabolic syndrome, so 44% is an underestimate for the costs of bad nutrition." Not sure I agree there but he'd defend higher numbers even if we agreed to use these sources as kicking off points.
And yeah I agree that the question of "what do we do about it" is something that he appears to have a very opinionated take on, but I'd like to see more hard data. Like I'm happy for him that he had a big study that showed reversal of metabolic syndrome symptoms just by switching sugary food out for starchy food while holding weight and calorie consumption constant, but how we get from there to "eat real food -- the problem is not what's on the nutrition label but all of the antibiotics and adulteration that they don't have to tell you about on that label" stuff seems a bit opaque.
Yes, here "overall" is being used as a synonym for "from all causes" not "over the full length of your life," and there's this frustrating thing for those of us with physics educations where people frequently leave off a unit of time: so like if it's a 5 year study, and your all-cause mortality is lower by a factor of 20% over those 5 years, that means 80% survived and you should compute the fifth root 0.8^(1/5) to find that 95.6% survived per year on this account, and then you can say "reduces mortality by 4.4% per year," and that sounds much more reasonable.
This happens all over the place. You're just supposed to know in investment that a price-to-earnings ratio is measured in years, or people will say "the Buffett indicator is 200%" not "the Buffett indicator is 2 years."
So you can continue it beyond that circle if you like, it just happens to be the case that the thing electrical engineers and others dealing with waveguides are plotting in the source space, is impedance. (Well, a ratio of impedances—a load impedance divided by a transmission line impedance.) The real part of impedance is resistance, and negative resistance is very uncommon. The area outside the unit circle so mapped, I think also corresponds to reflected amplitude ≤ transmitted amplitude, with the center of the diagram being a perfectly matched impedance, and no reflection.
I mean they hide it as best they can. Big restaurants like Applebee's you'll see "2 for $28" not priced at $28 so you can guesstimate the squeeze but otherwise you kinda have to go straight to Starbucks or McDonalds using a mobile app to order your "usual" to compare "here's what it looks like if I use DoorDash, here's what it looks like if I go myself," to find that the actual delivery fee is some $20-25 per order. Even worse, I'm pretty sure that they test algorithms to try to selectively lower this for new customers so that in the early days when you're more aware of the cost it seems like a steal.
Of course, you can arrive at the $20 just by thinking, "okay, I need someone to go do an errand for me, they'll have to drive to the restaurant, wait there for 15-20 minutes, and then bring it back... so it'll cost $15 for the hour of their time plus a few bucks of overhead for the platform plus a few bucks of messed-up-my-order insurance..."
Which gets us to 5 years from now when the DoorDash killer comes out, it'll be called Kourier or something starting with a K, and it'll start with trying to give Target a way to call up some extra trained Target employees, but they're cross-trained in packaging orders for K. One person will pick up 10 carefully-packaged K-orders, take them all to the central delivery hub, they'll get sorted into driverless cars that plot through some neighborhood some 10 stops, it'll be marketed as a real Amazon-killer and fly under DoorDash's nose -- InstaCart might balk, but DoorDash won't. Until they reveal some pizza-delivery partnership and suddenly within a year every restaurant has some K-employee working for them, whose job it is to batch orders down to the bikes that come by.
Sure, delivery times for Kourier will be 75, 80 minutes long at first. People won't mind because you pay $4 for delivery instead of $20. And Doordash/Amazon won't die, Amazon will just buy Kourier and DoorDash will focus on more rural locales.
I'll be disappointed if it isn't like Snow Crash (1992):
> The Deliverator, in his distracted state, has allowed himself to get pooned. As in harpooned. It is a big round padded electromagnet on the end of an arachnofiber cable. It has just thunked onto the back of the Deliverator's car, and stuck. Ten feet behind him, the owner of this cursed device is surfing, taking him for a ride, skateboarding along like a water skier behind a boat.
> In the rearview, flashes of orange and blue. The parasite is not just a punk out having a good time. It is a businessman making money. The orange and blue coverall, bulging all over with sintered armorgel padding, is the uniform of a Kourier. A Kourier from RadiKS, Radikal Kourier Systems. Like a bicycle messenger, but a hundred times more irritating because they don't pedal under their own power -- they just latch on and slow you down.
