- Heinz bought Weight Watchers
- Obesity is the second most common cause of death
- Type 2 Diabetes used to be called “Adult onset diabetes” but was renamed because so many kids have it
- Flavor is the original craving
- Flavor detection is the largest chapter of our genome
- Chickens needs more than corn to live
- Vitamins were discovered, revolutionized plant and animal growth
- Young animals lack the flavor of adults
- Fried chicken used to only need salt and pepper, now it needs all sorts of spices to flavor it up
- “Further processing” is when we add flavor back into things
- Chicken strips are in their way out because chicken nugget eaters are getting older and think strips are too tough
- Carbs and water are replacing flavor while letting things grow faster
- The importance of vine ripening is the energy to make sugars
- Imitation vanilla started with pine cones
- “Need states” track what people are looking for across demographics
- Restaurant kitchens are more like prep areas
- Raw meat and almost everything else has some flavoring
- Natural vs artificial flavoring is about the extraction method, not the chemicals themselves
- A hundred years ago, we used 0.5 pounds of spices per person per year, now it is close to 3.5 pounds
- Flavor dilution is affecting almost everything
- Food addicts crave food more and are satisfied lees
- Substance abuse is a continuum
- Making a narcotic more available increases addiction
- The human nose was not meant to sniff but to taste food
- Plants send caterpillar specific chemicals as they are being eaten
- Flavor cravings are learned and can be connected with nutrients
- “A little bit of something bad could be good”
- Anti-oxidant pills do not do much
- Flavors drive feels
- Left with natural food, children naturally balance their diets on their own
- “Throat burn” is a sign of good olive oil
- Artificial sweeteners are not reducing calorie consumptions
- Adding micronutrients confuses the body because we can no longer associate nutrients with food
- Glutathione makes things taste better but only if paired with other things
- The gut has taste sensors too
- Most animals stop eating to avoid an overdose, not because they are full
- Adding a fruity aroma to water makes it taste sweeter
- Appendix
- Where did the flavor come from?
- Try different foods
- Eat foods that you find satisfying
Category: Notes
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“The Dorito Effect” by Mark Schatzker
-
“Shifting the Monkey” by Todd Whitaker
- “Monkeys have shifted to the wrong peoples’ backs”
- Don’t let monkeys move
- Ask
- Where is the monkey
- Where should the monkey be
- How do I shift it to where it belongs
- Treat everyone well
- Protect your best people first
- Assume good intentions
- Ignore excuses
- Try to not have barriers between you and someone else
- Give targeted feedback for underachievers
- (This is to prevent them from spiring under your feedback)
- Try to not threaten
- Only threaten when you mean it and can act on it
- Let them know how peers are responding
- (A little bit of peer pressure is nice 😁)
- Ask if everything is all right before jumping into questions
- “Give anonymous public praise”
- So people acting good get praise and people acting poorly become generally jealous
- Focus on correcting behavior, not changing minds
- Efforts matter more than results
- Offer to talk outside of working hours to filter “nonsense” requests
- Give permission to not volunteer (especially to high achievers)
- “Discover” errors together with good employees
- “Treat everyone well but not equally”
- Let people resent you but not your best people
-
“Seeing With Fresh Eyes” by Edward Tufte
- Autocorrelation, serial correlation, bang-bang duplicate, or pseudo-replications are when a piece of data follows another without new measures
- There is a difference between having questions to be solved by a database and poking around a database looking for interesting answers to question
- Early screening boosts “survival time” in useless ways
- Adjust measures to avoid errors rather than modeling them away
- “Guide to Bad Data” by Chris Groskopf
- Values missing
- Zeros replace missing values
- Data missing that you know should be there
- Rows or values duplicated
- Total differ from aggregates
- Suspicious values present
- Spreadsheet have 65536 rows or 255 columns
- Margin-of-error to large or unknown
- Benford’s Law fails
- Too good to be true
- Fix bad names immediately
- Survivor bias: “Most medieval castles were made of wood”
-
“Time Travel” by James Gleick
- Concepts of time travel started in 1914
- 1876 was the first record of a centennial celebration
- No one pondered the future or the past until the 20th century
- New (remote) lands filled the roles of time travel in fiction
- We should not think about time as the same as space
- We cannot freely move through time like we can through space
- “What the balloon does for space, the time machine does for time”
- Prior to clocks, time was relative based on the setting
- Newton has to define time so acceleration could happen
- “If the speed of light is fixed then time cannot be.”
- The Olympics replace starting pistols with speakers to ensure everyone can hear the signal at the same time
- “Souls cannot move that fast so one needs to wait”
- We are always looking into the past
- All time was local until the train
- Is the arrow of time because of entropy?
- “You cannot stir things apart”
- In many Latinx cultures, you look forward to the past and back for the future
- (This makes a lot of sense because you observe the past, in front of you, and cannot see the future coming behind you)
- Eternity is “outside of time”
- Nostalgia originally meant “homesick”, not wanting a different time
- In 1955, we redefined “a second” from a fraction of a day to an independent time frame
- A nano second is about the length light travels a foot
- Mental Time Travel let’s us project forward and back over time
- “Now” is generally 2-3 seconds lumped together by the brain
- We need at least 1/10th a second to accurately differentiate the order of two events
-
“Chaos: Making a new science” by James Gleick
- Science became really interesting when looking at weather
- Warm coffee just cools; Hot coffee has convection
- Modern scientist have iterated on the past but that assumes everything that came before was true
- “Sensitive dependance on initial conditions”
- Physics and maths divorced in the 30’s but started getting back together in the 60’s
- When studying systems, scientists tended to assume oscillation was around a steady state
- Measuring non-standard shapes requires an infinitely small measuring tool
- Fractals allow for infinite length in a finite space
- “Dimensions” are the number of identifiers needed to identify a single point
- At a distance, a ball of string is a point and so one-dimensional; up close it is a one-dimensional object arranged to occupy three dimensions
- All physical touching is described by fractals
- Turbulence is very poorly understood and may be unknowable
- The Manhattan project was really about turbulence
- Attractors bring stability, even if not predictability
- Poincare return map
- Cross sections of the transit to track movement over time
- In order to be universal, it has to have scale
- Universality was originally rejected from publication
- Flow = shape + change or motion + form
- Control the space so you can manipulate time
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set
- “In biology, randomness is death”
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnsley_fern
- Computer experimentation really let fractals take off
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_system
- Random (spread out and undefined) vs chaos (deterministic and patterned)
- Chaos brings a wealth of information (because steady states can have their information compressed)
- A map needs to simplify the things it maps
- Giving mosquitos a photo burst at midnight will destroy their circadian signals
- Mode locking is when things lock into frequencies
- “Is it possible that mathematical pathology, i.e. chaos, is health and that mathematical health, which is the predictability and differentiability of this kind of structure is disease?”
- Snowflake’s non-equilibrium phenomenon
- They have 6 sides based on the stress of surface tension