A lot! Maybe it's obvious, but I've long thought that religion's primary function is to help people process death (and other suffering). Now that life isn't constant suffering, many of us have discarded religion, but then we are blindsided by death.
I was very religious for 30 years, and have a very religious family. I've been athiest for more than a decade now, and it's sad to me that to leave religion behind I had to give up all my family traditions to process death. Those traditions are still there, but I can't relate to them since they are based on a belief I no longer agree with
Have you happened upon Keith Barr’s work on tendon repair? Up to a few years ago tendon injuries were thought to be mostly unfixable (you could strengthen what was left of an injured tendon at best) but Barr’s work is proving otherwise. And using a very low risk isometric exercise protocol.
It won’t make you feel 32 again but it might help you get rid of a lot of lingering aches and pains.
I combined vitamin C with a daily dose of collagen and it did wonders for my tendons when combined with stretching exercises. My Achilles went from constant pain and at least a couple hours every morning of hobble walking to no pain and just feeling like normal. The doctor recommended surgery and even then made no promises. I still can't run for any real distance but the quality of life difference of just being able to walk without pain and do heavy calf lifts in the gym is immense.
Note: I also aggressively supplemented with BPC-157, GHK-cu and TB-500 to get to where I am.
How good! Have you tried isometrics at ~30-50% of maximum exhertion instead of stretching? Seems to be about the right dose to promote tendon repair. 3 months to a year will do ya.
(Full protocol if you haven’t seen it is a ~30 second isometric repeated 4 to 5 times, twice per day)
Edit: I’ve not seen any other treatment published w/ peer review etc etc that demonstrates actual tendon repair. If anyone has seen others I’d love to read through the literature.
Glad you found some relief. But take note everyone! Running is probably not that good for you if you plan to live longer than average-lifespan-in-the-past! Cycling, swimming, walking are all low on joint damage. Running isn't.
Keith Barr focused on musical technology at MXR, Alesis and eventually Spin Semiconductor. His legacy is MXR pedal effects like the Phase-90, the MidiVerb digital reverb series and the Spin FV-1 digital reverb chip.
Had a series of injuries from about 25-35, then changed things up due to concerns about aging. Lighter weights, actually following proper training plans/shoes for running, etc. No injuries since and I'm about to hit 50. Aside from raw strength, don't think I feel any different now than at my athletic peak in my early 20s.
Having lived in San Diego most of my life, I've routinely met people in their 60s doing Ironmans. When you're around that enough, it's clear the difference is training smart than simply training hard.
The loss of twitch/fast muscle makes it feel much different for me. Even if I work out and have strength, it's not to same kind of strength I had at 30 even if it's the same/higher weight amounts.
Evolution doesn't care at all if we get to the top of the food chain. I think that we, as the dominant species on the earth, mistakenly assume that we are the most evolved since we are in charge. Which is more evolutionarily successful, the human or the wheat plant?
If another mass extinction occurs, we are toast (See "The Ends of the Earth"). Relatively minor ecological changes may even destroy us. Sapience has not yet proven to grant any long-term advantage.
I've learned a good way around this flawed thinking. "More evolved" is purely a question of the amount of time that the organism has had to evolve. You are more evolved than a T. Rex, because you've had some 66 M years more time to evolve. You and that wheat plant out there right now are exactly as evolved.
(Assuming life arose on Earth only once. That seems like a convenient moment to start the clock.)
Is it only a matter of time, though? "More evolved" means "more adapted". I think that organisms with fast reproduction cycles generally adapt faster. But it is probably difficult to define a scale for adaptation as well.
Yeah they're an expression of an "evolutionary clock" that ticks faster for species with shorter generations. But then there's also evolutionary pressure from surroundings, niches left empty after disasters, etc, so trying to measure any of that is just not very objective. And you have to remember there is no "goal", no one direction, it's a brownian walk so mutations happening faster doesn't really change anything unless there's enough advantage in them.
For anyone else who discovers they are a fast metabolizer of coffee: try eating a big breakfast before drinking coffee to slow absorption.
I wanted to be a coffee drinker for YEARS, but it made me really high, and I felt super tired later in the day. I don't know why I didn't connect the dots until I searched my genome, but once you know whether you are a fast or slow metabolizer you can play all sorts of games. I can now drink coffee before dinner, and the crash hits right at bedtime.
For me, I found the secret was eating anything other than cereal (or egg & toast) for breakfast. Those seem to make me jittery. Eating something like yesterday's dinner leftovers for breakfast turns the coffee into an on switch instead of leaving me exhausted but adding jitters and sleeplessness.
What about the book made the difference? I'm 100% convinced that it's better to do as you say, and forget about the accounts, and also unable to resist the temptation to check them every day. I'm constantly tempted to make changes.
The full analysis is too long to go on here, but on the chapter "Narrow Framing on the Upper East Side has this conclusion: "The implication of our analysis is that the equity premium - or the required rate of return on stocks - is so high because investors look at their portfolios too often. Whenever anyone asks me for investment advice, I tell them to buy a diversified portfolio heavily tilted toward stocks, especially if they are young, and then scrupulously avoid reading anything in the newspaper aside from the sports section. Crossword puzzles are acceptable, but watching cable financial news networks is strictly forbidden."
Of course there's the usual caveat about rebalancing as you approach retirement, basically the target date strategy. Really, the book gives great context into just how irrational we humans are. It has lots of studies, examples and anecdotes on behavioral economics. It was the book that actually helped me make sense of sunken cost fallacy.
I work for the National Solar Observatory, creating Level 2 data for the DKIST Telescope’s observations of the sun. (For example, an image of the Temperature that lines up with the observation)
Just the other day, the solar physicist I work with said “yeah, that code that runs on the supercomputer needs to be rewritten in Fortran” (from C, I think.
He’s nearing retirement, but it’s not that he’s behind the times. He knows his stuff, and has a lot of software experience in addition to physics
The plastic straw thing makes me sad. We spent our societal outrage on those instead of single-use plastic bottles. Sigh. I think they're a distraction.
#2 is true of everyone. I'm not arguing against the kind of empathy you're describing, I just think we should extend it to all sorts of criminals. The murderer and rapist in the cell was screwed the moment they were born to dysfunctional, probably abusive parents. They have to fight hard to break the generational cycle.
All this means is that crime and violence are a systemic problem. Thinking about free will as the cause of crime isn't useful compared to thinking about how we might support and treat abused children and help them take a different path.
