Roger McNamee's talk regarding tech investing

Elevation Partners Director and Co-Founder Roger McNamee from The Paley Center For Media on FORA.tv

Gender differences in cancer risks

In this bbc report on cancer risks, women and men are put in different category:



I consider this a progress. Next level of differences are in different ethnic groups. And once we have all our genomes sequences, we shall know our risks by genome types.

However, everything is a leap of faith. So take the report as true if you are willing to believe in today's statistical method. Otherwise, disregard it and go on living your way of life, whatever it might be.

Idler's Quotes

There are two days in the week about which and upon which I never worry ... Yesterday and Tomorrow.   - Robert Jones Burdette

Once awhile I become motivated and energetic. I usually just sit down and watch them pass by. - Author Unknown

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.  - Mark Twain

Rule number one is, don't sweat the small stuff.  Rule number two is, it's all small stuff.  - Robert Eliot

Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower. - Hans Christian Anderson

Truth vs. Usefulness

I love this essay "The Truth Wears Off" by Jonah Lehrer published by New Yorker.

People often equate truth with usefulness, perhaps because we are in America. If we take the view of William James' Pragmatic theory of truth, then perhaps usefulness is the truth.

We often apply ideas we commonly agree as useful, but we do not know for certain what the reason is. For example, "we feel better and are more energized when we spend time outdoors." Is this truth or merely usefulness?

"The truth of an idea is not a permanent property and it does not lie in it. The truth happens to an idea" (William James).

We are in an era of ideas (truths) overload. Some ideas are very true to some people (such as Seth Roberts "Effect of One-Legged Standing on Sleep"), but may seem ridiculous to others. I do not doubt that Seth Roberts one legged standing works for him to achieve better sleep, but many other methods may work just as well.

Focus was important for productivity in the past. It is perhaps essential today, otherwise we will all get lost in the piles of "truths" google search provide us.

Quotes from Lin Yutang

Lin Yutang was a Chinese writer and philosopher (here is his wiki page), who wrote mostly in English. A few of Lin Yutang quotes:

If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

Good life consists of a Chinese cook, a Japanese wife and a French lover.

A speech is like a woman’s skirt, the shorter the better.

cross published on instead-of-wishing.

Garden Dwellers

I am a garden dweller. We have a very small city garden, which is good enough to do some gardening. The river front city park is 5 minutes walk from my home. We consider that a big garden to walk in.

It is known that we feel better and are more energized when we spend time outdoors.

Recent Science Daily News reports:

In recent years, numerous experimental psychology studies have linked exposure to nature with increased energy and heightened sense of well-being. For example, research has shown that people on wilderness excursions report feeling more alive and that just recalling outdoor experiences increases feelings of happiness and health. Other studies suggest that the very presence of nature helps to ward off feelings of exhaustion and that 90 percent of people report increased energy when placed in outdoor activities.

To read the article, click the link here.

I myself experience that gardening is by far the best way to lower blood pressure naturally. Whenever I have reading of bp 135/85, after spending one hour in the garden weeding or dead heading, the reading is almost guaranteed to go below 120/80. Hot and sunny days are the best.

Why do we feel better spending time outdoors? I think the sun, green plants and physical activity are the reasons.

Most people equate the sun to Vitamin D level in our body, but I think it is more than that. On a grey day, regardless how much Vitamin D we take, my mood always goes down.

Germaine Greer in her book "The Change" writes that a garden is the best alternative therapy for women going through change. "Though low back pain and gardening go together, gardeners feel much better for gardening, back pain and all. The effect is so like the "mental tonic" effect of HRT that we may be justified in suspecting that there are volatile estrogens in living plants that do not survive in treated plant material."

To improve the mood, walking outdoors is just as good.

Unfortunately, Montreal gets cold fast. By November I feel too cold to go out walking.  Creating an indoor garden with grow lights is to experiment whether we can experience some of the aliveness we feel outdoors. 

House plants that clean indoor air

Last year we had the goal to place more houseplants for the purpose of cleaning the indoor air. We had 13 in total and they are:

3 mother in law's tongue

1 English ivy (Hedera helix)
6 Money Plants (Epipremnum aureum)
1 peace lily
1 Christmas cactus
1 Madagascar jasmine

Unfortunately, after three months staying in a transparent plastic bag (the idea is to put the plants in a micro bio-dome so they recycle water, oxygen and carbon dioxide), only the following plants survived:

1 mother in law's tongue

1 English ivy
5 Money Plants
1 peace lily
1 Christmas cactus

 70% survival rate is not all that bad. However, the ones doing good are only English ivy and money plants.

So we added 2 more English ivy (one with broader leaves) and Money plants respectively. We are trying new plants such as Spider plants (Chlorophytum comosum), Wandering Jew (Tradescantia zebrina/ Zebrina pendula), Money Tree plant (Pachira aquatica), Arabian Wax Cissus (Cissus rotundifolia), Angel Wing begonia and Silver spotted philodendron (Scindapsus picta 'Argyraeus')

3 English ivy

3 Wandering Jew

1 Spider plants
8 Money Plants
1 Money Tree plant

1 Arabian Wax Cissus

1 Angel Wing begonia

1 Silver spotted philodendron

1 mother in law's tongue

1 peace lily
1 Christmas cactus

All in all, we have 22 house plants in total, plus a few cuttings growing in water in jars. English Ivy, wandering Jew, angel wing begonia and money plant can all grow in the water.

This year we are not using humidifier. With more house plants and hang-drying the laundry, the air humidity seems to be quite balanced.

I breathe much better this fall/winter. Usually starting end of August until May, I have hard time breathing. This year, I gave in and started using Nasonex occasionally. So I am not sure whether the effect comes from Nasonex or from more house plants or both. One thing that is sure is that having green inside the house helps brighten up mood on a grey day.

What's for lunch?

What we ate for lunch this year has changed as compared to last year (here). We are now eating soup for lunch.

What typically in our soup is as follows:

Mung bean (pre-cooked)
Tofu

Potatoes (one medium or two small ones)

Carrots

Sweet potatoes (half of large or one small)

Green vegetables (variables among broccoli, zucchini, Chinese mustard green, sweet pepper).

Soup is cooked without any salt. Miso is added for flavour and to populate gut flora.

Soup is eaten with half of avocado each.

Think twice before you accept your doctor's advice

Canadians are often proud of their public Medicare system as compared to the U.S. by citing that the average longevity is higher here than down south. However, I often hold the view that we live longer because we do not get the Medicare our neighbours get due to rationing. So it is like a forced clinical inertia. I had not gone to a clinic for 8 years until last year. The clinical experience of last year was so bad, I will probably forgo another 8 years.

It is good to see that I was not alone. The NYtimes has published an article titled when doing nothing is best medicine. In this article, Doctor Danielle Ofri quoted an essay published in The Journal of the American Medical Association called “Clinical Inertia as a Clinical Safeguard”. The authors postulated that doctors who tend toward inertia might actually benefit their patients by protecting them from overzealous medical intervention.

They focused on three common medical conditions — diabetes, elevated cholesterol and hypertension — for which there are established clinical guidelines for doctors to follow and “quality measures” that evaluate medical care. For all three illnesses, “lower is better” is the dominant mantra.

But while “lower is better” is probably true for large populations, that is not always the case for individual patients. In fact, there are some clinical trials in which aggressively lowered blood sugar or blood pressure has been associated with higher rates of dying.

One of my brothers is a doctor. He says that medicine today is still only 20% science and 80% art. However, most doctors come off as if they think medicine is 100% science. If you have symptom, we must find it and treat it. Of course, every “thing” a doctor does also has side effects.

Unfortunately, every action we do towards health, such as changing diet, choosing exercise programs or deciding whether to take supplements or not, we are all advised to consult our physicians before hand. I guess we should just forgo this advice?

What we ate as compared to what average Americans ate

In January, I wrote down what we ate in 2010 as compared to average Canadian (here):

Here is some data as compared to average American (Source):

 

 

Revisiting Midlife Crisis

Almost two years after declaring that my midlife crisis was almost over (On Midlife Crisis), I realized that it is far from over. I am perhaps in the midst of it.

Yesterday, the massacre in Norway, the passing of Amy Winehouse, the continuation of extreme heat and something MrD said that I perceived to be mean,  all of a sudden, I felt this extreme sadness that I could not shake off and I started to cry.

Memory crash in your brain?

A woman cannot remember where she parked her car at a Costco parking lot. That part of her memory has just crashed. She is now getting quite angry at herself. She has a cart full of stuff she bought. She knew that she came by car and she knew the look of her car. She is a middle aged woman.

My husband said that young people are not smarter. But they know that they are not smart enough to remember where they park so they use smart phones and their apps to find their parked cars.

Cruciferous Vegetables and Cancer

Cruciferous vegetables are considered to be healthy foods. There are numerous cultivars including broccoli, cauliflowers, bok choy, Chinese broccoli, kale, napa, brussels sprouts, radish, mustard, cress, rutabaga, cabbage etc. Basically all the vegetables a kid does not like. We have been told to eat them by our grandmothers, parents, scientists, pretty much everybody. I did not like any vegetables as a child and remember being forced to drink the juice of bok choy as a punishment because I refused to eat vegetables.

Green Tea

Where I come from long long time ago (China), everyone has a tea cup in their hand with green tea leaves in it. The hot water is in thermal bottles not far way from them. Everywhere you go, the bus station, the train station, the gas station all provide hot water.

I have a cousin, who told me that he spends about 600 us dollars a year in tea for a country that a lot of people's yearly income is only that. He values tea a lot, for a good reason.

Is it you or is it your dwellers in your gut?

Some days you are happy; some days you are sad. You think it is all in your head. You read positive thinking books in order to influence your mind. Now they say, those little buggers you cannot see in your gut also influence your mood, according to this article "That anxiety may be in your gut, not in your head"

Just Came Back

Just came back from inside the great firewall (China). Will resume writing shortly. I am more convinced that the Chinese firewall is more for economical purpose than for a political one.

Posts written during these three months, can be found on http://instead-of-wishing.com/.

Why coffee protects against diabetes

Coffee has shown to be protective against type 2 diabetes.

Now scientists may know how it works.

"researchers at UCLA have discovered a possible molecular mechanism behind coffee's protective effect. A protein called sex hormone–binding globulin (SHBG) regulates the biological activity of the body's sex hormones, testosterone and estrogen, which have long been thought to play a role in the development of type 2 diabetes. And coffee consumption, it turns out, increases plasma levels of SHBG.

.... women who drink at least four cups of coffee a day are less than half as likely to develop diabetes as non-coffee drinkers.

When the findings were adjusted for levels of SHBG, the researchers said, that protective effect disappeared.

....

And there's bad news for decaf lovers. "Consumption of decaffeinated coffee was not significantly associated with SHBG levels, nor diabetes risk," Goto said. "So you probably have to go for the octane!"

There you go. Drink your coffee, preferably in black.


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resveratrol increases beneficial hormone adipopectin

The hopeful longevity supplement resveratrol is in the news again. This time it was found to stimulate the expression of adiponectin, a hormone that modulates a number of metabolic processes, including glucose regulation and fatty acid catabolism.

Resveratrol can be found naturally in grapes and other plants and sold as supplement in various purities. It became widely known after Dr. David Sinclair, biologist who studies resveratrol, was interviewed by Barbara Walters.

In the most recent study, resveratrol stimulates the expression of adiponectin, a hormone derived from cells that manufacture and store fat, the team found. Adiponectin has a wide range of beneficial effects on obesity-related medical complications, said senior author Feng Liu, Ph.D., professor of pharmacology and member of the Barshop Institute of Longevity and Aging Studies at the Health Science Center.

Both adiponectin and resveratrol display anti-obesity, anti-insulin resistance and anti-aging properties.

“Results from these studies should be of interest to those who are obese, diabetic and growing older,” Dr. Liu said. “The findings should also provide important information on the development of novel therapeutic drugs for the treatment of these diseases.”

The researchers confirmed the finding in cells and animal models.


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What we consumed in 2010

An unexamined life is not worth living.
--Socrates

Below is a list of some of the foods we consumed in 2010 as compared to average Canadian in 2008 (source):

Average Canadian in 2008 -- our consumption in 2010

------------------------ kg --------------------- kg
fruits ----------------- 47.5 ------------------- 130.7
vegetables --------- 44.5 ------------------- 145.5
(not incl. potatoes)
potatoes ------------ 35.0 ------------------- 11.0
fish ------------------- 6.6 -------------------- 36.0
poultry --------------- 13.6 ------------------- negligible
pork ------------------ 9.7 -------------------- 9.0
beef & veal --------- 12.8 ------------------- negligible
egg ------------------- 144.0 pcs. ------------------ 288.0 pcs.
wheat ----------------- 43.7 ------------------- negligible
rice -------------------- 7.0 ------------------- 4.0
rye bread ------------- ? --------------------- 14.5
plantain ---------------- ? --------------------- 24.5
refined sugar -------- 23.1 ------------------ negligible

-------------------------- Litre ------------------- Litre
wine -------------------- 15.0 ------------------ 26.0
beer -------------------- 77.2 ------------------ negligible

daily calories ---------- 2382 ---------------- 1900

When it comes to energy consumption, we consumed 78 gigajoules for our 3500 sq. ft. home in 2010 as compared to 106 gigajoules per average Canadian household in 2007 (source). Even though this number seems low, it is even lower if you convert it to consumption per sq. meter. We only consumed 0.24 GJ/m2 as compared to 0.68/m2 for a single person household.

We strive to be conscious in all our consumptions.


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