Ben Mann Monthly August: work, keto, animal welfare, running shoes, pair programming, parents
Purpose
An index for my memory
A menu of topics for my next conversation with you
A faster way to share what I’m excited about without the barrier of writing a complete blog entry on it
A skimmable way to spread content I found valuable
Experiments and experiences
Parents visit
Mostly we walked around SF and chatted. They convinced me that research on health effects of meat eating is still inconclusive. We came up with a physics model of interpersonal reputation dynamics. We meditated and hot tubbed. We talked about management practices and how to get employees to do the right thing.
36h fast into ketosis
I wanted to shorten my keto flu, which can take up to a week while the body depletes its supply of glycogen and switches over to ketone bodies. I took a long run and fasted for 36 hours. By the morning the fast was to end, I felt so weak I almost couldn't walk, but I broke the fast with some nuts, broke out in a full body sweat, felt like I needed to vomit, and then 30 mins later felt great. I've been in ketosis for the last two weeks, have lost 9 lbs (probably ~5lbs water weight), and have felt generally high energy despite not that much sleep. My desire to eat ice cream etc is slowly ebbing just like my desire for alcohol when I quit that 3 years ago. I bet if I continued this for a month I'd break my sugar habit. Unlike last time I'm not taking weekend breaks and I think it's working a lot better. Stress eating is down ~90%.
India is largest beef exporter
Apparently India is tied for the largest beef exports in the world by weight. By monetary value they're #4. You might ask how this is possible for a country in which it's illegal to slaughter cows in most stats and illegal to export cow meat. It turns out water buffalo count as beef and are not subject to any of the cow restrictions. Most of their exports go to Vietnam, the Middle East, and the rest of Asia. Boneless only for some reason.
Animal welfare metrics
Girish raised the idea that a possible proxy for animals' ability to suffer is the mass of neural tissue per individual. This suggests you should eat animals with either minimal neural tissue like mussels, which have no brains, or cows, which have a high ratio of edible mass to neural mass. You might think shrimp would rank highly, but it turns out catching shrimp also catches many fish, which are left to asphyxiate on the deck for long periods. Mussels also rank as one of the least environmentally impactful meats. So when you can, eat mussels, otherwise consider well-treated cows. We also considered neural metabolic consumption, but this seems hard to measure for animals like whales and elephants that don't fit in an MRI.
Meditation buddies
For the last week Diana and I have kept each other accountable. I've only missed once so far.
New running shoes
I went to A Runner's Mind on Peter & Razzi's recommendation and had an incredible experience! We started with foot measurement, a gait analysis, and arch measurement. They really know their stuff and made buying my new Altra Paradigm 4.5s easy. I tried on 8 pairs and ran around the block in each one, then also tried insoles for the first time and felt a huge difference. In the ~30 miles I've run in them I can safely say they're my favorite running shoes ever.
Pair programming is underrated
Me and my pair partners have learned a ton from each other in the last few weeks. It takes a lot of mental energy but I think the output is at least as good as one person coding alone. It probably doesn't take that much more time since the code review is integrated into development. And it's really fun to boot!
Life updates
Work work work! 70hrs/week? Sorry If I've been unresponsive. I'm hoping this will relax in the next few months but no guarantees.
Too good at Beatsaber
Content
5 point Likert ratings for “I would recommend this content to a friend”, sorted
Carole & Tuesday ep1 3/5
From the creator of Cowboy Bebop & Samurai Champloo, similar pacing and art style, takes place on Mars in the near future
I like the world building and the music isn't bad
List Of Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of Ages Of Discord 3/5
Fascinating offhand mention that maybe government triage of crises hasn't helped at all or has hurt, despite popular opinion that unfettered capitalism is broken. We need better ways to experiment with this.
The Great Battle of Fire and Light 2/5
Standard apocryphal tale of how humans arose to sentience but are saddled with their now maladaptive animal brain
Felt like a more friendly but maybe dumbed down introduction to An Alien God
A Game of Giants 2/5
Short intro summary of The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
"us vs them" tribe mentality was evolutionarily adaptive