Archives for August 2013

Time to get over ourselves?

As I listen to more folks in movements such as Paleo, I find that there are a set of people who have the impression that the following strategy is Truth:

The human body is made for survival. If we can channel evolution correctly, we can live forever. The holy grail. Surely the human body wants to live together right?

I don’t think that is necessarily correct. While I believe in the power of learning from our history and how it intersects with biology, I also think that the power is in propogating the species rather than a particular specimen. You know, the selfish gene.

What is the optimal life span for humans to propogate the selfish gene?

For a species such as the mayfly it is truly fleeting. How fullfilling is that life cycle for a single organism?

We have awareness, and can thus fight the system in different ways. Surely we want people to live as long as possible don’t we?

Life span had been growing fast, until the current generation. For the first time in recent history our childrens life expectancy is lower than ours (I will come back to that guilt in another epigenetic post!). Ouch.

If we are smart though we can overcome this. If you go back a hundred years you find that we died off much in part to infectious diseases. We got on top of that for the most part, but now we are dying due to degenerative diseases. At first you may think “oh, well, we died earlier before so never even got to this stage!” and “back then we didn’t even KNOW how some folks died”. Maybe, but maybe not. If we can get a handle on the environmental pollution (in all of its manifestations!) we can not only get older… but we can be healthy, active, and vibrant for so much longer.

If we pull that off, then what? We have finite resources, so we currently can’t infinitely scale. The Earth won’t be able to handle us all if the global population keeps growing, so that naturally means that if we want our species to keep multiplying we need space travel to kick in and we need to find other planets that we can occupy. Is NASA really not necessary?

Speaking of this topic and its relation to space, even Star Trek has talked about this. Do you remember the episode where Lwaxana Troi falls in love with a man who has to commit suicide as part of the culture? To balance resources and the deserve to bring in the future generations, this was their choice. It seems outrageous to some, but is it really?

Ideally, we find a way to scale in the cosmos.The good news about that scale is that hopefully we continue to diversify and breed new humans who can use the inate curiousity, imagination and ultimately… our creativety, to keep solving problems. That way, the selfish gene can keep on going.

After all, is our life span really that different than the may fly when we look relative to the history of everything?

Uncle Sam and George are too

There is a new piece on sugar in the latest National Geographic that is fantastic and painting the story of sugar and illness that the world is faced with right now.

It is short, yet manages to piece together the important strands of:

Why is sugar bad for us?

One of the biggest misconceptions is that the badness of sugar is related to calories, which misses the point. What is really happening?

If you eat too much sugar in quickly digested forms like soft drinks and candy, your liver breaks down the fructose and produces fats called triglycerides.

Some of these fats stay in the liver, which over long exposure can turn fatty and dysfunctional. But a lot of the triglycerides are pushed out into the blood too. Over time, blood pressure goes up, and tissues become progressively more resistant to insulin. The pancreas responds by pouring out more insulin, trying to keep things in check. Eventually a condition known as metabolic syndrome kicks in, characterized by obesity, especially around the waist; high blood pressure; and other metabolic changes that, if not checked, can lead to type 2 diabetes, with a heightened danger of heart attack thrown in for good measure.

“It has nothing to do with its calories,” says endocrinologist Robert Lustig of the University of California, San Francisco. “Sugar is a poison by itself when consumed at high doses.”

How did we get here? Why would we crave something that is so bad for us?

This is so key.Why would our bodies let us down like this? Our bodies are so good at protecting us in so many ways. Miraculous even.

It comes down to the stories of evolution, and geo-politics accelerating us to a point where evolution can’t help fix the problem.

On evolution we go back to the apes:

One day, perhaps five million years later, a cold wind blew through this Eden. The seas receded, the ice caps expanded. A spit of land emerged from the tides, a bridge that a few adventurous apes followed out of Africa. Nomads, wanderers, they settled in the rain forests that blanketed Eurasia. But the cooling continued, replacing tropical groves of fruit with deciduous forests, where the leaves flame in autumn, then die. A time of famine followed. The woods filled with starving apes. “At some point a mutation occurred in one of those apes,” Johnson explained. It made that ape a wildly efficient processor of fructose. Even small amounts were stored as fat, a huge survival advantage in months when winter lay upon the land and food was scarce.

Then one day that ape, with its mutant gene and healthy craving for rare, precious fruit sugar, returned to its home in Africa and begot the apes we see today, including the one that has spread its sugar-loving progeny across the globe. “The mutation was such a powerful survival factor that only animals that had it survived,” Johnson said, “so today all apes have that mutation, including humans. It got our ancestors through the lean years. But when sugar hit the West in a big way, we had a big problem. Our world is flooded with fructose, but our bodies have evolved to get by on very, very little of it.”

It’s a great irony: The very thing that saved us could kill us in the end.

Sugar made its way from Guinea to Asia, and then Europe got into the game:

Perhaps the first Europeans to fall in love with sugar were British and French crusaders who went east to wrest the Holy Land from the infidel. They came home full of visions and stories and memories of sugar.

And then everything went quickly downhill from there:

In 1493, when Columbus set off on his second voyage to the New World, he too carried cane. Thus dawned the age of big sugar, of Caribbean islands and slave plantations, leading, in time, to great smoky refineries on the outskirts of glass cities, to mass consumption, fat kids, obese parents, and men in XXL tracksuits trundling along in electric carts.

An Addiction

I have found that I had an addiction, and it is hard to break. Some studies show how it compares to cocaine, nicotine and other drugs. It isn’t anything to be sniffed at.

It could be time for an “A A” for sugar.

I find it interesting that one of tools that I use to stop a craving reminds me of smokers trying to change their habits. I use gum. Instead of nicotine gum, I use Xylitol gum because it seems to be a decent alternative. I do worry about how good it really is and try to keep it to a minimum (e.g. gum, not putting other sugar in items that I consume… I switched the black coffee), and am trying to change behavior so I don’t crave sweetness in general.

I have other tricks up my sleeve too. I drink plenty of water (now!) which fills me up, I use coffee time as another excuse to put something in my mouth (addicted to caffeine though, which I justify via the research on how coffee is good for you and can boost your metabolism [note the info on how it can have the opposite effect!]) and I get out for exercise, which seems to help too.

Little Sugar Addicts

When you think sugar, you also think about the kids. I just got the book Little Sugar Addicts in the mail and look forward to learning about how to help bring some of the tricks to my children and help shed the addiction from the entire family.

As an addict though, I know that the battle may be constant. One question comes to mind, unlike with cigarettes, is there a “safe” amount? Is my cheat day OK?

A clever, witty remark often prompted by the occasion

I don’t have anything clever or witty to say, and I have been holding back on talking about the new Quip experiences, which comes to mobile and the Web out of the gate in impressive form.

As soon as Bret Taylor rode away from Facebook to team up with the equally awesome Kevin Gibbs, I was keen to learn what they were working on. They have been beavering away for quite some time, and we now see that it isn’t that they didn’t know what they wanted to work on, but they wanted to put out a pretty darn polished MVP.

I have to admit that part of me was hoping that they were working on the cure for cancer, or a new education startup, but as soon as I got passed that I was interested to learn more about Quip.

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I am experimenting a lot with productivity tools, and currently dislike the myriad of tools that I use (Asana, Evernote, Google Docs, and the list keeps going!).

My first impression of Quip was that it was “another (interesting) Word Processor” but I am now a little more hopeful that it could potentially eat in to the number of tools that I use.

For example, I use Evernote even though I find that it ironically has an awful editor, and the collaboration isn’t there. How many times have I had the following internal monologue:

“Should I put this on Google Drive so I can collaborate with it? Or just throw it into Evernote where I can most easily get it offline? Or maybe just a markdown doc in Dropbox?”

And, then I cry a lil inside.

In general, Evernote is my “scan documents => index” tool of choice due to the OCR recognition.

Dropbox is where I sync my world, from work assets to my dotfiles, Documents folders, and my media. Basically everything I can get away with.

Asana is where I plan life. I have a “Raw Thoughts” project which basically acts as my clearing house / journal. From there I have task lists for life and work. I have separate projects for people too (use the convention of “@Their Name” because I have one for everyone, not just people in the Asana system). Here I track notes about people, tasks that relate to them, and it gets more detailed for given relationships (e.g. Direct Reports have goals, 1:1 notes, etc). I also have folders in Evernote for people where I can place scanned in docs and the like.

Google Drive documents are for real-time collaboration. This gets fluffy when you want to transition the state between collaborative and not.

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With Quip, I may be able to merge Google Drive and Evernote? I was actually thinking about going in another direction and merge to Google Drive since it can be a Dropbox and everything else.

As we see a lot of these services move “up the stack” I begin to see silo’s appearing:

• In Mailbox you have a “save to dropbox” option
• In Gmail you have a “save to gdrive” option

I don’t think it is great for customers to have to use IFTTT to make computing work for them.

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Quip Implementation

Back to Quip for a second. I am really impressed with some of the details, such as:

• The web based version is impressive: I looked into the DOM and even the thumbnails of content are just HTML elements. The animations and performance are top notch. Load a fairly large document and boom it is there for you. This could be good enough to Fluid.app-arize and use locally. The UI is a lil “looks like an iPad app on the Web”, but still very nice.
• The signup flow is smart and simple. You just start with an email and it knows how best to continue.

A very solid MVP indeed, and I wish the best to the entire kick arse team that is behind it.