Nutrition science has come up with acceptable macronutrient distribution ranges (AMDR). The recommendation for adults is 45-65% of total calories from carbohydrates, 20-35% from fat, and 10-35% from protein. That is definitely not low carb.
The sources of those macronutrients also matter. The ideal range for saturated fat is 5-10% of total calories. Meat consumption, especially red meat, is associated with higher risk of colorectal cancer. Dairy consumption is associated with higher risk of prostate cancer.
I haven't read the new guidelines in detail but if they're recommending red meat and whole milk as primary foods, then they are not consistent with the research on cancer and cardiovascular disease risk and I doubt that people following them would meet the AMDRs or ideal saturated fat intake.
To be fair, those macronutrient guidelines were established not because of any special properties of those macros (give or take the nitrogen load from protein) but because when applied as a population-level intervention they encourage sufficient fiber, magnesium, potassium, etc. You can have 50% of your calories be from fats and still live a long, healthy life, and you can do so as a population (see, e.g. Crete and some other Mediterranean sub-regions in the early/mid-1900s). You can have a much higher protein intake and have beneficial outcomes too.
Your point about the sources mattering isn't tangential; it's the entire point. The reason the AMDR exists is to encourage good sources. A diet of 65% white sugar and 25% butter isn't exactly what it had in mind though, and it's those sources you want to scrutinize more heavily.
Even for red meat though, when you control for cohort effects, income, and whatnot, and examine just plain red meat without added nitrites or anything, the effect size and study power diminishes to almost nothing. It's probably real, but it's not something I'm especially concerned about (I still don't eat much red meat, but that's for unrelated reasons).
To put the issue to scale, if you take the 18% increased risk in colorectal cancer from red meats as gospel (ignoring my assertions that it's more important to avoid hot dogs than lean steaks), or, hell, let's double that to 36%, your increased risk of death from the intervention of adding a significant portion of red meat to your diet is only half as impactful as the intervention of adding driving to your daily activities.
The new guidelines seem to be better than just recommending more steaks anyway. They're not perfect, but I've seen worse health advice.
Well, there are two factors that go into the recommendations. As you mentioned, one is adequate micronutrients. The other is chronic disease risk reduction. The 5-10% of total calories from saturated fat recommendation falls into the latter category. The risk of meat and dairy is not just cancer, but saturated fat.
I would agree that with proper knowledge and planning, it's possible to reduce carbs and increase protein/unsaturated fats while maintaining adequate fiber and micronutrients. But in practice, I think it's much more common to see people taking low-carb diet recommendations as a license to eat a pound or more of meat per day, drink gallons of milk per week, and completely ignore fiber intake, which is objectively not healthy.
That has nothing to do with whether excesses of those nutrients cause cardiovascular disease, though. The general consensus is that the healthiest diet is one with 5-10% of total calories from saturated fat. For most people, it's necessary to restrict saturated fat to land in that range. We also need to distinguish between sugar and carbohydrates. Again, the general consensus is that intake of sugar and refined carbohydrates should be minimized, while 50-75% of total calories should come from sources of complex carbohydrates like vegetables, beans, and whole grains.
Carbohydrates are sugars (from the first sentence on wikipedia): "A carbohydrate (/ˌkɑːrboʊˈhaɪdreɪt/) is a sugar (saccharide) or a sugar derivative." Saying you need "50-75% of your energy from [sugar]" illustrates why that is a somewhat odd statement. Yes, glucose is much better than fructose, but eating a ton of glucose will still lead to high insulin spikes and inflammatory diseases. Complex carbohydrates are better in that they take longer to digest, not because they're magically different. Vegetables are good for nutrients not because you need their carbs.
GP was talking specifically about calories, not other nutrients. My impression is when a vegetable provides significant calorie content it tends to be in the form of carbohydrates.
You have to get your calories (ie raw energy) from somewhere. If you limit saturated fat to 10% then what's left for the other 90% is (roughly speaking) unsaturated fat, simple sugars, carbohydrates (ie complex sugars), and protein. In terms of long term habits converting protein to calories is probably not a great choice for your health. If you decide to go for complex carbohydrates over various oils then vegetables that provide those are a good option.
People are on ketogenic diets for years and even decades with no adverse affects. There's nothing wrong with getting energy from other sources, your body can manage it fine.
Ketogenic diets are high fat. I suggested that a diet where the bulk of your calories comes from protein (not lipids, carbohydrates, or simple sugars) was probably not great for your health.
Your body can certainly "manage" on a high protein low fat low carb diet but I don't understand it to be good for you.
Funny you should say that after today's FDA announcement. (Not taking any side here just interested in how we determine what is a consensus these days)
It's hard, because when an issue becomes politicized everyone has their own preferred "consensus". I would say it should come from the scientific community, not government agencies. Sometimes government agencies agree with the scientific consensus, but not always.
My go-to source for nutrition information is Understanding Nutrition by Whitney and Rolfes.
There is a third option: looking at the diets of your closest ancestors with the best longevity.
There may be a misconception that there is one single best diet for everyone, when in reality we people (over generations) evolve with our diets, and your best diet and my best diet may be completely different.
The problem with using science as a guide is that there are just too many variables and not enough time, data and money to isolate them all sufficiently.
However that is distinct from the idea that too much of something like refined sugar might be unhealthy for just about everyone. So science does have an important role to play, I just don't think it's advanced far enough to fully answer the question for everyone.
That’s not correct. See physically based rendering (pbr book) chapter 8.
Non-antialiasing is just taking fewer samples and not attenuating the aliasing artifact band with a filter.
A gui is more complex. Most graphics are collections of blocks. But then if you do any effects like filling a bezier curve or shadow you are back to the point sampling model.
This comment is also misleading. First, $/watt is not how levelized cost of electricity is measured, you need to use $/watt-hour (or more commonly, $/MWh) over the lifetime of the project. By definition, levelized cost of electricity does not include storage.
The cost is also affected by the percent of energy coming from wind+solar+batteries vs. from natural gas. Wind+solar+batteries are cheap when they are used to supplement natural gas. If they were supplying 95% of generation (Levelized Full System Cost of Electricity 95%, LFSCOE-95), then the price of wind+solar+batteries would be $97/MWh compared to $37/MWh for gas, and $96/MWh for nuclear. For LFSCOE-100, the price of wind+solar+batteries increases to $225/MWh, compared to $122/MWh for nuclear and $40/MWh for natural gas.
So yes, natural gas is much cheaper than nuclear. But that doesn't mean that nuclear shouldn't play a large role going forward. The moral of the story is that the price of energy is complicated. It's likely that a combination of nuclear, wind, solar, and battery backup would be the best option in terms of price and carbon emissions.
I didn't disagree that there is price parity for the levelized cost. There is still not price parity for levelized full system cost. If we used wind and solar for 95-100% of generation, the price would be much higher.
My point is not that we can or should replace wind and solar with nuclear. It's that it is far cheaper to use a combination of nuclear, wind, and solar than it is to use 100% wind and solar.
I think it’s quite conceivable that nuclear would be cheaper for a 100% carbon free grid.
But I don’t understand how the combination of nuclear, wind and solar would be low cost. Wouldn’t you effectively have to build out enough nuclear to cover still cloudy days at which point your wind and solar is not very useful? That sounds expensive.
I suspect we won’t end up building much nuclear because we will already have built out so much wind and solar. Nuclear is a poor fit for filling gaps in generation by intermittent renewables because fuel costs are negligible so it costs the same whether you run at 50% or 100% of rated output.
To eliminate carbon emissions entirely we will need some green hydrogen for turning into aviation fuel and as chemical feedstocks. Perhaps the gas backup will eventually burn that.
Green hydrogen is prohibitively expensive and are still way more expensive than using fossil fuels to create hydrogen (called black hydrogen). Burning green hydrogen for electricity when we have yet to make green steel economical viable is not a good idea. Nuclear is still a magnitude cheaper than that.
Green hydrogen has to first prove itself that it can become economical viable. One of the biggest test trials for that is the Swedish initiative, and that one is mostly paid through subsidies and grants. Sadly it isn't looking very great even if the government did decide to continue sending more billions into the project.
I completely agree that green hydrogen is prohibitively expensive at the moment and it currently makes no sense to burn it for electricity generation. But it will likely be necessary in the future if we are to decarbonise aviation fuel, steel making, fertiliser production, etc. What matters at the end of the day is reducing total carbon emissions for the whole economy.
Intermittent renewables and batteries will get us to 80% carbon free electricity generation for more quickly and cheaply than nuclear. While nuclear might make sense in the very narrow use case of 100% carbon free electricity generation, given we also need to decarbonise non-electrical emitters, it will probably reduce more carbon emissions per dollar spent to instead spend that money on even more cheap intermittent renewable generation capacity and use the excess to generate hydrogen. At the point hydrogen based fuels may make sense to use as a buffer for intermittent electricity generation.
Agreed. I misunderstood your comment and got too hot-headed. Sorry about that.
Yes, the 95% renewables is the number we should be shooting for not 100% as that causes battery backup price to explode.
I have been pro-nuclear for a long time, to disappointing results naturally. So, with how well renewables are doing I've really just jumped on this train and seen nuclear as more of a distraction from the critical next 10-20 years given how long it takes to come online.
At the end of the day the grid is only about 30% of the emissions problem (depending where you look).
I may have misinterpreted your original post as saying we should be going full renewables. I think we're basically in agreement about prices. We might just disagree about the percent of energy that should come from nuclear.
I don't see nuclear as a distraction, I see it as a piece of the puzzle. We will always need a source of reliable, uninterrupted power. Whether that comes from natural gas, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, etc. depends on geographical considerations and what tradeoffs we are willing to make in terms of cost and carbon emissions. I'm still optimistic that small modular reactors are going to see success in the coming decades.
Yeah, my opinion on how much should come from nuclear is that current levels (~20%) are enough to fill the rest in with renewables.
I'd love to be France (~50%) but there is so much pushback against the technology due to accidents that happened decades ago with generation II plants (chernobyl + three mile island). We're now building tech for gen III+ plants and there is just almost no appetite to build them, we finished the vogles and now are completely pivoting to SMRs, which is fine.
SMR is probably what makes the most sense even if they're less efficient because until now the nuclear plants have not been very standardized which increases costs.
Why do I think nuclear is a distraction? Because I don't think it's a like-for-like replacement of fossil fuels and this admin knows that. They're willing to invest because it won't disrupt their biggest donors. The time horizon on nuclear is long, and there is a future (I hope) where we have nuclear plants hooked up to carbon capture technology and we pull these gasses out of the atmosphere. But until then what is the cheapest and most efficient path between current emissions and a massive cut in them? Renewables and battery tech (that's currently undergoing very dramatic cost reductions!).
> We will always need a source of reliable, uninterrupted power.
Which can be for example gas turbines running on carbon neutral fuels. Optimizing for lowest possible CAPEX and acceptable OPEX.
The nuclear power lock in are engineer brained imaginary perfect solutions rather than accepting good enough.
> I'm still optimistic that small modular reactors are going to see success in the coming decades.
We’ve been trying to build ”SMR” since the 50s. It has never worked out. The industry likes producing fancy PowerPoint reactors in hopes for handouts and stupid money investment.
When they get far enough and have to present real costs and timelines the projects are shunned and forgotten. Like NuScale and mPower. And the boosters online move to the next juicy SMR project.
When they calculate that Solar + battery would cost $50-131/MWh, how is that number reached? What is the number of charge cycles and over what time span? It seems obvious that the cost of producing, installing and operating a 1MWh system of solar and batteries will cost more than a one time payment of $50-131.
Most of the time when I try to find any data there is the underlying assumption that the charge cycle is a day and night cycle, where the day produce the energy needed during the night, and not a seasonal storage that basically has a single charge cycle per year.
First. $120/MWh for new built nuclear power is cheaper than any modern western reactors. Real costs are ~180-220/MWh when running at 100% 24/7 all year around. As based on Vogtle, FV3, HPC, proposed EPR2s, proposed Polish reactors etc.
The problem with these ”system costs” analyses is that they don’t capture the direct physical incentive structure of our grids.
Why should someone with rooftop solar and a home battery buy $180-220/MWh when they have their own electricity available?
Why should they not sell their excess to the grid cheaper than said nuclear power? It is zero marginal cost after all.
You can call it tragedy of the commons but new built nuclear power simply is unfit for our modern grids.
We need firming for near emergency reserves coming from production with the cheapest possible CAPEX without an outrageous OPEX.
Likely gas turbines running on carbon neutral fuels. But only if we determine that they are needed in the 2030s.
New built nuclear power simply doesn’t even enter the picture in late 2025.
A cost model has a lot of independent variables. It can be a weird function of the quantity you want of each technology. Not everything gets cheaper at scale. And you need to be able to manage time-varying demand.
For easy example: a few solar or wind farms cost $X to bring up, but to go large scale you need to also store or transmit the energy, plus keep fallback options. That makes 95% or 100% reliance prohibitive.
There is also the speed of powering on/off. Gas combined cycle turbines are fastest to come online/go offline, followed by hydroelectric (if you have it). Coal and nuclear are at the slow end. You need to have the ability to match total sources and loads at any time.
Just some intuition why total cost is a complex function.
This is one of the major political problems of the 21st century, convincing people that many of the problems they see in society are in fact free choices made by individuals, and not necessarily something that needs to be fixed from the top down. The human tendency to impose one's own preferences on others is strong, and it seems every generation needs to learn the lesson anew.
I tend to think that banning things is almost never the right answer. Who gets to decide what counts as an ad? What's stopping governments from designating speech they don't like as an ad?
The mistake is thinking of Google as a library. Google is a commercial product. The equivalent of the Library of Congress would be something more like Wikipedia, or the Internet Archive, or Library Genesis.
I certainly think that we should be spending more resources as a civilization on storing and categorizing human knowledge in a more systematic and not-for-profit way. Expecting a for-profit corporation to do that is just a category error. I'm not saying this in an anti-capitalist sense; I'm in favor of for-profit corporations. People have unrealistic expectations about what they can or should accomplish.
There is also Naive Lie Theory by Stillwell, which is targeted at an undergraduate level. I haven't read it yet, but it's been on my radar for a while.
Procedural generation can be useful for finding new musical ideas. It's also essential in specific genres like ambient and experimental music, where the whole point is to break out of the traditional structures of rhythm and melody. Imagine using cellular automata or physics simulations to trigger notes, key changes, etc. Turing completeness means there are no limits on what you can generate. Some DAWs and VSTs give you a Turing complete environment, e.g. Bitwig's grid or Max/MSP. But for someone with a programming background those kinds of visual editors are less intuitive and less productive than writing code.
Of course, often creativity comes from limitations. I would agree that it's usually not desirable to go full procedural generation, especially when you want to wrangle something into the structure of a song. I think the best approach is a hybrid one, where procedural generation is used to generate certain ideas and sounds, and then those are brought into a more traditional DAW-like environment.
I've actually tried all of the approaches that you've mentioned over the years, and - for my needs - they're not that compelling at the end of the day.
Sure it might be cool to use cellular automata to generate rhythms, or pick notes from a diatonic scale, or modulate signals, but without a rhyme or reason or _very_ tight constraints the music - more often than not - ends up feeling unfocused and meandering.
These methods may be able to generate a bar or two of compelling material, but it's hard to write long musical "sentences" or "paragraphs" that have an arc and intention to them. Or where the individual voices are complementing and supporting one another as they drive towards a common effect.
A great deal of compelling music comes from riding the tightrope between repetition and surprising deviations from that scheme. This quality is (for now) very hard to formalize with rules or algorithms. It's a largely intuitive process and is a big part of being a compelling writer.
I think the most effective music comes from the composer having a clear idea of where they are going musically and then using the tools to supplement that vision. Not allowing them to generate and steer for you.
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As an aside, I watch a lot of Youtube tutorials in which electronic music producers create elaborate modulation sources or Max patches that generate rhythms and melodies for them. A recurring theme in many of these videos is an approach of "let's throw everything at the wall, generate a lot of unfocused material, and then winnow it down and edit it into something cool!" This feels fundamentally backwards to me. I understand why it's exciting and cool when you're starting out, but I think the best music still comes from having a strong grasp of the musical fundamentals, a big imagination, and the technical ability to render it with your tools and instruments.
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To your final point, I think the best example of this hybrid generative approach you're describing are Autechre. They're really out on the cutting edge and carving their own path. Their music is probably quite alienating because it largely forsakes melody and harmony. Instead it's all rhythm and timbre. I think they're a positive example of what generative music could be. They're controlling parameters on the macro level. They're not dictating every note. Instead they appear to be wrangling and modulating probabilities in a very active way. It's exciting stuff.
I don't think any of that is an argument against the use of procedural generation, it's just an argument for the tasteful use of it. Partly it also depends on what works in your own workflow. I find that it's an essential component in the creative process of lot of the artists I admire. Autechre is a great example. I think a lot of the pioneers of early IDM like Autechre and Aphex Twin have found ways to incorporate randomness at the micro level, while maintaining control at the macro level over the shape and direction of the composition. I don't see this as competing with traditional composition methods, it's just leveraging code-based tools to give the artist more control over which elements are random and which ones they control.
When you learn to use it you can throw a lot of intention into it, knowing the output even before you hit play. Yes, you can go the other way and "subtract" your way out of a chaos, but you can also intentionally piece together the components and produce an output you imagined beforehand. The missing pieces here for this format, my instinct tells me, are layers of abstraction or additional UI elements that will help in composing a final piece, using code for the fundamental components plus something else that hasn't been invented yet or noone has thought of glueing it together.
The sources of those macronutrients also matter. The ideal range for saturated fat is 5-10% of total calories. Meat consumption, especially red meat, is associated with higher risk of colorectal cancer. Dairy consumption is associated with higher risk of prostate cancer.
I haven't read the new guidelines in detail but if they're recommending red meat and whole milk as primary foods, then they are not consistent with the research on cancer and cardiovascular disease risk and I doubt that people following them would meet the AMDRs or ideal saturated fat intake.
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