Loose Ends

By: | June 5, 2018

I usually avoid talking to people at the gym. But a few weeks ago, the man next to me had his shoes untied, and I couldn’t help myself. The laces were bright red, and extremely long. He was doing side steps that looked like they had high trip potential. And I was extra-sensitive to falls that day–my mother-in-law had ended up in the hospital after losing her footing in her backyard, and this gentleman looked about the same age, and was approaching his exercises with the same determination I imagined she would.

“Could I tie those for you?” I asked. I felt like I needed to give some sort of explanation. “I tie a lot of shoes,” I said.

He laughed, and thanked me. “You must have kids. I remember that,” he said. “When my son was little, even if I double-knotted them, his shoes always came untied, too. I don’t know how he did it.”

That’s the thing, we don’t even have to do anything. Except move our feet. Continue reading →

Redux: Fasting – The New Fad Diet?

By: | June 4, 2018

This story was originally published in 2013. Since then, evidence for the benefits of fasting has mounted. See here, here, and here. But so many questions still remain. What is clear? Dieting is hard. For example, this study, which examined an every-other-day-fast regimen and a more traditional calorie-restriction diet, lost 31% of its participants.  

 

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A couple of weeks ago I found myself in a beautiful rural home that belongs to my parents’ friends, a slim and sophisticated couple who enjoys bird watching and international travel. I was meeting this pair—let’s call them George and Marsha—for the first time. I’m inherently nosy, so while the rest of the group chatted, my eyes scanned the room. On the fridge, I noticed a slip of paper that looked to be George and Marsha’s weekly dinner menu. That night they’d be having polenta and pork roast. The other days had meals written next to them too, all except for Monday and Wednesday. Next to those two days, Marsha (or George) had scrawled “Fast.”

Fast as in not eat? Marsha and George didn’t seem like the type to fall for juice cleanses or fad diets. My parents said the couple had probably seen the same documentary they had. The show follows Michael Mosley, a BBC journalist and former physician, on his quest to become slimmer and healthier through fasting.

I’ve never heard of Michael Mosley, but I’m not sure how I missed him. Lately Mosley is everywhere — on the BBC, on PBS, in the news. In January he launched a bestselling diet book co-authored by journalist Mimi Spencer. Here’s the approach they’re advocating: To lose weight and improve health, dieters should fast two days each week. On fasting days, women should consume no more than 500 calories. Men are allowed 600. The other five days dieters have no restrictions. Continue reading →

The last word

By: | June 2, 2018

May 28 – June 1 2018

This week, LWON guest contributor Robin Meija takes a look under the hood of the Puerto Rico death toll numbers – and finds something disturbing in the statistics 

On a lighter note, do you like insane apocryphal philosophy and AI? Then you’ll love my story about Descartes’ robot daughter.

Environmental thinkers sometimes dream of communicating with other species about our common problems and shared fates, but few have imagined the everyday practicalities: who would translate? Who would speak first? And what in the world would we all eat for lunch? Michelle tells us about the Third Annual Slime Crisis Conference, as imagined in a new play that I now really, really want to go see.

Three years after her first cry for help, Christie is still digging out from her email</a>, and may never surface. There’s got to be a better way!

Emma, LWON’s anthropocene correspondent, interviews Christopher Preston about his new book, which asks for a conversation about geoengineering that’s a little less enthusiastic about technology and intervention.

 

Guest Post: What’s the Story with Puerto Rico’s Death Toll?

By: | June 1, 2018

When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico last fall, it killed power to most of the island. The toll was catastrophic. Damages have been estimated at $90 billion. For months, entire cities had no electricity, sanitation, and access to health care. Which is why the government’s official death toll from the storm—64 people—always seemed suspect.

On Sunday, a team from Harvard confirmed those suspicions. In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, they showed that the hurricane killed more than 4,600 – 70 times the government’s number.

Why the difference? How can one entity count 64 people and another 4,600?  When what they’re counting is something as important as dead American citizens? It turns out counting disaster deaths is harder than it sounds.

To be fair, the government and public health researchers used different definitions for what counted as a “hurricane death.” The government only counts those deaths it can attribute directly to Maria. The academics looked for something called excess deaths: the total number of deaths beyond what should have happened if there’d been no hurricane. To get at this number, researchers don’t even require a complete count of deaths, they just do a survey.

In an ideal world, when disaster strikes, we’d always know exactly how many people died and what from. However, that’s an ideal we never get. As the government response in Puerto Rico shows, it’s just not realistic to expect officials combating a hurricane to accurately track all individual deaths and find each root cause.  And sometimes, getting to an individual root cause is impossible. In the wake of a natural disaster, more people die from almost every cause you can think of. Certainly people drown, but rates of stroke also increase. Rather than trying to tease out if a given stroke was caused by the hurricane, an excess death estimate simply notes how many more there were than would have been expected. Continue reading →

The Third Annual Slime Crisis Conference

By: | May 31, 2018

We’re in the very near future, on a quiet beach, with seven young interns from the Third Annual Slime Crisis Conference. In many ways, this conference is like any other; there are misunderstandings, arguments, and moments of insight. There’s some weird food, and some sleeping around.

This conference, though, isn’t just for humans. It’s for representatives of almost every species on the planet, and it aims to save life on earth from a toxic slime that, accelerated by climate change, is quickly taking over the oceans. The interns are studying various animal languages—toad, dolphin, seal, seabird—and they’re here to translate for the delegates. “We’re second-generation animal communicators,” one intern says proudly. “So, like, linguistically evolved.”

Continue reading →

Descartes’ robot daughter and the zombie problem

By: | May 30, 2018

You’ve heard of René Descartes. 17th century French philosopher; cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am); first principles of enlightenment philosophy and science and all that.

You might be less familiar with Descartes’ robot daughter Francine. The tale of her birth and gruesome death makes for a wild historical(ish) ride in its own right, but it is also finding new relevance in the 21st century. The people who study artificial intelligence and robotics are finding it a helpful tool in thinking through one of the most controversial problems now roiling these academic disciplines: just how humanlike should we make AI and robots?

Anyway let’s back it up before we all get a nosebleed.

In 1635, Francine Descartes was born, the real flesh-and-blood (but illegitimate) daughter of Descartes and a Dutch servant girl. It seems that he loved them both so much that he broke with fairly serious convention to live with them. Just as he was getting ready to bring five-year-old  Francine back to France for a proper education, however, the little girl contracted scarlet fever and died. And that’s when things got weird. Continue reading →

Email is an Untamable Beast, 2018 edition

By: | May 29, 2018

In 2015, I thought my email was out of control. Hahahahahaha. When I remember back to 2015, all I can think is… girl, you have no idea. But back to email: I recently went almost a week without receiving emails from my work address. I didn’t notice that my email program had developed a glitch, because it took that long for me to miss an email I cared about. It’s gotten to where I don’t even open half the messages that land in my inbox. Every time I’ve used one of those timers to log where I spend my time, I find that email is the biggest time suck. Which is why I am offline this week. I’m taking a much-needed vacation to somewhere far away, and I’m logging off of email and all those other distractions on the internet. It’s quite possible that I’ll just delete all the emails that came in while I was gone. Life is ephemeral, and it seems silly to let email take up so much of my attention. When I return from vacation, I might spend half a day slogging through the emails that arrived and the other half of a day rebuilding some of those filters and tools that once helped me make email more manageable. Or, I might just spend that time outside inhaling some fresh air and soaking up a little sunshine. In the meantime, here’s what I wrote about email in 2015.Email

It’s not my imagination. Even gmail is telling me that my email is out of control, threatening that if I don’t dump some of my tens of thousands of emails (or pay them money) I will be “unable to send or receive emails.” That’s starting to sound appealing. I’ve caught myself fantasizing about creating an auto reply: sorry world, email no longer works for me. If it’s important, find me another way.

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On November 30, I had 78,787 unread emails in my main email account. Today, that number is up to 78,929. Do the math and that works out to 142 unread emails in eight days, or just under 18 per day. Which does’t sound so bad, until you consider that this is just one of my five email accounts — the one with the best wheat to chaff ratio. Continue reading →

In the “Synthetic Age,” can technology save nature?

By: | May 28, 2018

Christopher Preston is a philosopher at the University of Montana, but he’s originally from England. Moving to the American West changed him. “First I was in Colorado and then Alaska and Oregon. Here I was having encounters with spectacular charismatic animals and elemental processes like glaciers grinding through valleys.”

His first week in the states he visited Rocky Mountain National Park, where he puzzled over a strange, twisted object on the ground that turned out to be a dead pine tree “100 years into its decomposition process,” he says. “In England, no one lets a tree decompose for 100 years.” Preston found himself impressed by “The moral weight of these historic processes,” and paying special philosophical attention to natural things and places ruled by forces shaped by millions of years of geology and evolution. “There is some sort of moral significance to the history, to the deep time,” he says.

But as Preston was coming to appreciate the wild world, he also mulling over our species’ massive influence on nature: moving species from continent to continent, turning land under the plow, polluting land and sea, and changing the climate. Our influence has become so pervasive and impossible to miss that some people are calling our era “the Anthropocene”—the epoch of man. And it alarmed Preston to hear that many proposed solutions to problems of the Anthropocene were to intervene more in nature, not less.

Continue reading →