Official BBO Hijacked Thread Thread No, it's not about that
#3901
Posted 2022-February-11, 17:26
Well, that certainly ought to make her shake in her bytes.
#3902
Posted 2022-February-24, 19:08
Tara Parker-Pope at NYT said:
A few years back, I organized a sold-out event for The Times. The planners marveled at my success, but I knew the real reason so many people wanted to attend. I had invited a secret weapon.
Her name was Jane Brody.
Since my earliest days as a health journalist, Ive witnessed the power of Jane, a 4-foot-8 dynamo who has blazed a trail for women since she began her journalism career 59 years ago at The Minneapolis Tribune. She also pioneered a revolutionary new form of service journalism at The Times that forever changed how we talk about our health and well-being.
This week, after 57 remarkable years at The Times, Jane Brody published her last Personal Health column.
Jane was among the first journalists to recognize that better health doesnt happen in the doctors office its rooted in the small decisions we make every day, like the foods we eat, the amount we sleep and whether we wear a bicycle helmet. In fact, when Jane first interviewed at The Times in 1965, she told the managing editor, Clifton Daniel, that she thought the papers science coverage fell short of serving its readers. It doesnt go far enough, she told him. It doesnt help people live better lives.
While Jane got the job as a science writer, it wasnt until 1976 that she was able to fully realize her vision for science-based personal health journalism. Arthur Gelb, the assistant managing editor at the time, asked Jane to produce four writing samples for a proposed weekly column on health. Jane wanted to be sure shed have the freedom to explore any topic, so for the tryout, she included a column on impotence. Her column, named Personal Health, was approved and became a runaway hit.
Jane continued to push boundaries and force her cautious editors to publish stories about topics previously deemed too embarrassing for Times readers. While writing about the risks of cervical cancer, Jane became the first writer to get the words sexual intercourse on The Timess front page. She insisted on using the word penis when the paper previously had used the phrase male sexual organ. A former editor killed a column she wrote about masturbation, but Jane published a version four years later, after he retired. Jane recalls that her colleagues at the time called her the sex editor of The New York Times.
The Personal Health column prompted an outpouring of support from both readers and physicians. Jane recalls being shocked when she saw copies of her articles posted in her doctors office. In 1986, Time magazine named her The High Priestess of Health and gleefully recounted how she had chased down a 6-foot teenager who had snatched her watch. The kid must not have been following her exercise regimen, the writers joked.
Over the years, Jane has helped to broaden the definition of what personal health means, writing about the healing power of poetry, the importance of being a mentor and how to nurture kindness in a new generation.
But my favorite columns, by far, were those that featured Jane herself, embracing her aging body, sharing her struggles and enjoying all that life has to offer. In 2005, Jane famously chronicled her double knee-replacement surgery, bringing honesty to the challenges and pain of rehabilitation after the procedure. Some people feared the column would discourage others from seeking treatment, but Jane always believed that more information was better, even if it was not always what others wanted to hear. Happily, she wrote a sequel: 3 Years Later, Knees Made for Dancing. Janes new knees have hiked in Costa Rica, Tasmania, Peru and Australia, and bicycled through Vietnam, South Africa, Chile, Poland and Portugal.
I first met Jane in 2007 during a Science Times meeting as she sat at a conference table with her fellow reporters, knitting up a storm. (Janes knitting through meetings is part of her legend at the paper.) She would stop on occasion to give her two cents about a health story idea. Years later, when Jane moved to the Well desk, I convinced her to write about her passion for knitting. The column was a blockbuster.
Jane has always been ahead of her time. Long before the Great Resignation, Jane wrote about the opportunity to reinvent yourself, sharing her own goals to travel, learn Spanish and attend more concerts and lectures. In her 70s, she took her four grandsons on an Alaskan nature cruise and a tented safari in Tanzania, which she also wrote about. She adopted a Havanese puppy, Max, and shared the story of how she turned him into a therapy dog. Shes still looking for a teacher to help her learn to play the bandoneon, an accordionlike instrument popular in Argentina.
I think Janes greatest strength, however, has been to serve as a comforting voice during times of uncertainty. She tackled a taboo topic in her book Jane Brodys Guide to the Great Beyond, a primer for helping families prepare for the end of life. Just a year later, Jane put its precepts into practice when her husband, Richard Engquist, was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. She always thought of her readers, sharing her personal story of living with her husbands fatal diagnosis; then, after he died, she wrote about her anguish in The Pain of Losing a Spouse Is Singular.
At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Jane wrote about how she coped during life in lockdown. Jane crafted one of the most popular columns of her career at the age of 80, when she shared thoughts on how to age gracefully. I was delighted she agreed to host a lively conversation with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci about living well into your 80s and beyond. To mark her 80th birthday, she shared this advice:
Strive to do what you love for as long as you can do it. If the vicissitudes of life or infirmities of age preclude a preferred activity, modify it or substitute another. I can no longer safely skate, ski or play tennis, but I can still bike, hike and swim. I consider daily physical activity to be as important as eating and sleeping. I accept no excuses.
While Jane accepts no excuses for herself, shes quite compassionate about the health struggles of others, including my own challenges with losing weight. People come in all shapes and sizes, Jane told me. Were not all meant to look like fashion models or ballet dancers, nor should we want to.
That said, being in Janes presence does tend to bring out the best in people. I remember waiting for an elevator with some guests at a Times event a few years ago, when suddenly we heard Janes voice booming from down the hall.
Janes coming! someone said. It was immediately clear that none of us wanted Jane to see us taking the elevator, so we all sprinted toward the stairwell just as she power-walked around the corner. Jane, of course, headed straight for the stairs, and we all dutifully followed her.
And that is the power and joy of Jane Brody. For more than five decades, Janes wisdom, wit and writing have lifted us up, motivated us to try harder and nudged us to be just a little better than we were before.
#3903
Posted 2022-February-27, 13:15
I've been looking for an organization like Dignitas as a contingency plan if ever needed.
#3904
Posted 2022-February-28, 10:04
Quote
And in addition to that, we often dont even realize weve opted into one, either because everybody around us has opted into the same one and so it just seems like the way the world is. And I guess this is one of my big questions for you as somebody who studies this, which is how do you develop a sensitivity not a cynicism and maybe not even always a skepticism, but just first a sensitivity to being able to see all the different game-like scored, simplifying systems that youve adopted and all of the values they are pushing you towards? How do you develop game mindfulness?
C. THI NGUYEN: Thats a great phrase that I may steal and credit to you. I actually think theres a tiny hint in how pleasurable games are. And this is going to make me sound kind of awful, but the way I navigate the world right now is Ive developed a fair amount of defensive suspicion about certain kinds of pleasure. A marker of design game-like systems is that theyre very pleasurable to operate in.
So if someone out there was trying to create a belief system to get you onto it using game-like design theory to get you into this exciting usable space, then you should expect it to just feel really good when you adopt that belief system. And I think this is one of the markers, right? The real world is extremely frustrating, extremely difficult, full of things that you dont want to believe, full of things that are hard to understand.
And sometimes someone will present me with a system of belief. And as I adopt it, it just gives me everything I want. The world seems to start to make sense. I feel empowered. I feel good. Everythings falling into place. And Im not saying thats necessarily false, because sometimes thats what it feels like to really figure things out. But Im saying sometimes you just need to be suspicious.
And I feel like my evolution towards someone that didnt eat so much crap food that I always felt like crap is, now when Im eating something, sometimes I can have this internal marker thats like, oh, thats just too delicious, thats just oh, thats too yummy. And I immediately pause and Im like, wait, has this been designed for me to over-consume and just buy lots of bags of?
Im trying to develop the same kind of instinct in belief systems. Someone hands you a belief system and youre like, oh, this feels so good. Thats and then you have to pause and be like, wait, is this designed just to make me feel good? So the short answer is Im now suspicious of pleasure, which I hate.
EZRA KLEIN: I was thinking while you were talking about this about Baba Is You, the game we were talking about earlier, which I began playing after reading your book. So Ive been very attentive to what it feels like to play the game, what it feels like to work with that agency and work with those means. And Ive really noticed the feeling of pleasure when I solve a level. The emotional experience of playing Baba Is You is curiosity, frustration, some more frustration, a little bit of excitement, then some more frustration, then, ah, like got it.
And I understand what youre saying as being partially that life doesnt really give you that many of those, ah, got it moments. And because part of my concern is that whats really working to give these games a lot of pleasure, and these platforms and so on, is the way they flatter our groups, the way they split us into social ecosystems, and then give us points for looking better and better and better in our ecosystem.
I think that when you started looking at the world in a way where your view of your own ecosystem is, ah, we got it, we got the truth nobody else has, the morals nobody else has, thats the thing it seems to me you want to be really suspicious of. Because its pretty unlikely that you and your buddies figured it all out.
C. THI NGUYEN: Wait, can I be optimistic for a second?
EZRA KLEIN: I would love you to be.
C. THI NGUYEN: I am both worried about the overuse of pleasure in getting us to hook onto the truth. The true does not correlate perfectly with pleasure, so you need to be suspicious there. But I also think one of the things that understanding what games are and how they do really deeply helps us see is how much pleasure there is in the world that we might be missing.
So the essential insight that I got from Suits is that in so many games, the target isnt the point. The point is this rich experience along the way. And I think a lot of the mistakes we make with games is we get into these things and we forget about these larger purposes. The fact that they can be fun. The fact that they can be beautiful. We just hyper-obsess and hyper-narrow on the product at the end. And Im worried that in a lot of other cases, this attention to product over process is poisoning us and making us miss out on possible pleasures.
So in the book, I end up distinguishing between two kinds of aesthetics object aesthetics and process aesthetics. So object aesthetics is like when an artist makes a thing like a painting. And you look at the thing and the thing is beautiful. And process aesthetics is where games fit for me. The artist makes a thing. And you interact with the thing and youre beautiful. Your actions are beautiful, or comic, or thrilling. And I think theres actually all this process aesthetics elsewhere in the world that a lot of us who have been trained to be hyper-oriented towards just the measurable output miss out.
Heres my best example. I started thinking about this a lot in cooking. Because I got really interested in why so many cookbook reviews focus on how good the dish is and not many cookbook reviews focus on how fun, or entertaining, or lovely, or awful the process of cooking is. I mean, I dont know how much you cook. But I found that there are a lot of restaurant cookbooks, that if you follow the directions perfectly, you do yield this incredible dish. But the process is just this miserable, grinding, gross things.
And then other recipes where theyre kind of looser and more casual and the end product isnt as perfect, but the whole process of making them is delightful. Everything flows. Youre smelling things. Youre tasting things. Youre listening to the sizzle. Everything just feels right. And one of the things I worry about in thinking about games and processes is that a lot of activities they have a capacity to be rich and pleasurable in the doing and then yield a good outcome.
And then we do this thing where we hyper-focus on the outcome or the product and we trade away all the richness or beauty thats possible in the process. So I mean, heres one thing when I cook for a party, I often cook for like two hours, three hours, and people eat for like 20 minutes. In some ways, whats most important is the richness and aesthetic quality in the process of cooking itself.
EZRA KLEIN: I think thats a lovely point. And it speaks very deeply to your point about games as this inversion of means and ends.
C. THI NGUYEN: Yeah, so I mean, Im trying to tie this in some galactic way to all the stuff about Twitter. But thinking about games shows me two possibilities that are like two flip sides of the same coin. And the richness of games is when temporary hyper-focus on a goal opens up all this rich, sculpted, interesting activity, all these amazing movements, or decisions, or calculations that are just lovely. Thats the promise of games.
And the danger of games and the game-like attitude is when we hyper-focus on that goal and we forget about all the other stuff that could happen along the way. And we just narrowly see the goal. And like, games for me are good when you engage in a duality of experience of them. You spend some time buried and trying to win, but you realize that winning isnt the point. And then you step back and you see, oh my god, the process of doing it was so rich and so lovely.
And games are toxic for me when we just get hyper-narrowed on the point system and we never think about the larger outcome of the point system. We never think about what our life is like or what the activity is like under that point system. We never think about what follows from it. The big worry with the impact of highly gamified external systems is it encourages us not to step into a game and step back from it and think about the richness of the activity and whether it was worth it. What Im worried about is those cases when the point system blocks out everything else from your universe and you dont see any of the other stuff.
EZRA KLEIN: I like that as a galactic bow on it. So instead of ending where we normally do, which is requesting three book recommendations, I want to get three game recommendations from you. And tuned to I basically have played no adult board games. Ive played some video games. So if like me, youre maybe somebody who played games when you were younger, but youve not exactly kept up, what are some games thatll really tie you into that pleasure of adopting a new sculpted, as you put it, agency?
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#3905
Posted 2022-March-01, 14:02
#3906
Posted 2022-March-01, 14:59
#3907
Posted 2022-March-06, 05:26
#3908
Posted 2022-March-09, 10:11
Noah Trevor said:
#3909
Posted 2022-March-13, 10:54
Sam Sifton at NYT said:
Good morning. How are you doing? Im moved to ask that question every couple of months because I think its important to acknowledge that you might not be doing well at all. We are two years into the pandemic and some two weeks into the war in Ukraine. Theres heartbreak everywhere, and there are times for all of us when it seems too much to bear.
That we bear it anyway may be a sign of our humanity, but it can come with a psychological cost. So, try to give yourself a break today or some day real soon. Get out of your head. Reboot and recharge. (These nostrums are clichéd, I know. But theyre no less important for that.) You might take a long walk or a long drive, might spend a day on the couch with a book, might fix something difficult or go to the store.
And of course you should cook. No person in the history of the world has ever spent a Sunday making the Big Lasagna and not emerged from the experience thrilled (and exhausted), with an amazing meal to serve to family or friends. You cannot control the darkness that surrounds us. But you can make a lasagna and, in so doing, experience a kind of temporary, mood-lifting escape.
#3910
Posted 2022-March-14, 10:20
#3911
Posted 2022-March-14, 15:33
y66, on 2022-March-14, 10:20, said:
If you get exponentially Pi eyed, and add one for good measure, you are a big fat zero.
Don't ask!
#3912
Posted 2022-March-14, 15:53
kenberg, on 2022-March-14, 15:33, said:
Don't ask!
Or as my Dad used to say, Pi r round, cornbread r square
#3913
Posted 2022-March-26, 12:44
Matt Yglesias said:
#3914
Posted 2022-March-29, 18:32
Matt Yglesias said:
O. J. Simpson said:
#3915
Posted 2022-April-04, 14:10
Quote
https://kottke.org/2...-sun-ever-taken
#3916
Posted 2022-April-04, 14:13
Eric Topol said:
https://www.thelance...0369-5/fulltext
Enjoy your bacon.
#3917
Posted 2022-April-04, 14:58
y66, on 2022-April-04, 14:13, said:
Except that there are plenty of studies highlighting the dangers of processed meats. So while taking additional salt may or may not be a risk factor (a single study is not conclusive evidence in itself) bacon is surely not the best suggestion regardless.
#3918
Posted 2022-April-04, 15:48
Gilithin, on 2022-April-04, 14:58, said:
Heart failure is a much more dangerous disease than most cancers.
The outcome from the day of first diagnosis is still abysmal.
In 2019 it was reported in the BMJ that "Survival rates in patients with heart failure were 75.9% (95% confidence interval 75.5% to 76.3%) at one year, 45.5% (45.1 to 46.0) at five years, 24.5% (23.9 to 25.0) at 10 years, and 12.7% (11.9 to 13.5) at 15 years. Table 3 shows survival rates by age and sex. Women had worse short term and long term outcomes than men (one year survival 74.5% v 77.2% (P<0.001) and 15 year survival 11.0% v 14.1% (P<0.001)). Age at diagnosis was a significant determinant of subsequent survival."
The reason that a reduction in dietary salt is recommended for the whole population is that it is associated with an increased risk of high blood pressure.
Persistent high blood pressure causes target organ damage (blood vessels, heart, kidney brain etc) that may in turn lead to heart failure.
By the time you have heart failure the benefit of not eating salty bacon is considerably attenuated.
It's worth noting that a high-salt diet is generally associated with a high-fat, high-sugar diet.
Do the food mall experiment: where do you see the candidates for heart failure - at the salad bar or at Ray Kroc's cafe?
Plucking a single association (or comment from Topol) without understanding the full context is like opening 4NT and wondering why partner doesn't respond with 5H - 2 key cards and no queen.
#3919
Posted 2022-April-04, 16:00
y66, on 2022-April-04, 14:13, said:
Your link doesn't work. And your comment bears no relation to the current debate about salt intake.
Or was it just an attempt at humour?
In any event a quick search reveals this from Eric Topol's twitter feed:
"Salt substitute really worked well to reduce major cardiovascular events in a large randomized trial conducted in China
@NEJM
today #ESCCongress2021
https://nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2105675?query=featured_home".
So you seem to be reprocessing a comment that Topol made about a study conducted using data from China that was based on information from 600 rural villages.
Suggesting that if you are a rural villager in China and have a very large salt intake (and where the rate of smoking is much higher) then maybe...
#3920
Posted 2022-April-05, 12:27
Reduction of dietary sodium to less than 100 mmol in heart failure (SODIUM-HF): an international, open-label, randomised, controlled trial
Topol's tweet
re: the link problem -- it looks like the forum software incorrectly parses links containing parentheses.
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