Rucking
• Check out this calorie estimator from Outside online, by Alex Hutchinson (PhD with a few books about exercise, Endure is excellent). It is pretty wild to see the caloric effect of unstable terrain, incline, weight on your back vs walking speed. Get out there and walk!
Podcast
• I recently talked to Dr. Gerard Rabalais on UofL’s Faculty Feed. We talked about exercise, stress making you stronger, nutrition, integrative medicine, some pitfalls of mainstream medicine, and more. Check out the episode here.
Genius
• Economist Tyler Cowen thinks that Bach might be the greatest achiever of all time. His brief description is worth reading.
• Also check out these interesting notes on Bach from one of Cowen’s readers:
His family died young, and his day job for much of his life was a school teacher! In addition to the daily demands on him to teach Latin and theology and supervise teenage boys and so on, there was the thousand small practical challenges of life in the eighteenth century. No electric lighting. Crappy parchment and quills. The cold, the disease, the lack of plumbing, the restricted access to information, talented players, and the manual nature of every little thing. And, perhaps most of all, to continue such a volume of high-quality output when the world seemed not to care. Yes, he had a local reputation among those in the know, but there were never any packed concert halls or grand tours to validate his efforts. He seems to have been entirely internally driven by his genius and his commitment to the eternal and divine.
Doctors
• A few people have sent me a video with Dana White, discouraging people from seeking help from doctors on disease prevention. There is certainly some danger in telling millions of people NOT to see doctors, but I understand where he is coming from. He did qualify his statement by admitting the medical system’s effectiveness in acute trauma and infections. I agree that in aggregate, the US medical system isn’t exactly flawless in the realm of prevention. We can and hopefully will do better.
• Always be careful with online gurus who offer to provide an answer that everyone else is missing. White’s coach Gary Brecka has some, um, interesting ideas.
Is it time to decode your genome
• If you were thinking about having your DNA analyzed, now is a good time. Peter Attia had a regular podcast with a geneticist and then an AMA on some of the practical aspects of getting tested. He carefully discussed his opinion on the ‘best’ companies to use for DNA testing.
• Attia speaks highly of SelfDecode. With most of these companies, you pay a one time $100-200 fee to analyze your DNA, then you own the raw data. But many of them charge an annual fee to have access to the interpretation of your DNA data, because so much new research continues to establish various actionable genes. In a few days, Self Decode is going to raise the price of its annual subscription from $100 up to $300. Self Decode makes the following claim regarding safety: “We never sell your personal information, and protect your privacy with HIPAA-grade security and advanced encryption methods.”
Hit the Weights
• Strength training might be more effective than aerobic exercise to prevent heart attacks. Recent newsletter from Dr. Gabe Mirkin with several references, including one very recent study performed in Type 2 diabetics.
Anger
• Here are some interesting quotes about anger. Thanks Sal.
Quotes
Every parting is a foretaste of death, and every reunion is a foretaste of resurrection. That is why even people who were indifferent to one another rejoice so much when they meet again after twenty or thirty years.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Where a man’s wound is, that is where his genius will be. Whether from an alcoholic/abusing/shaming father or mother, isolation, disability, or disease, that is precisely the place we will give our major gift to the community.
— Robert Bly, Iron John
