Gastrophysics – The New Science of Eating by Charles Spence

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Charles Spence, Gastrophysics, Love Your Life, The New Science of Eating

As background research for my book Love Your Life, I read Gastrophysics – The New Science of Eating by Charles Spence. This isn’t a book about dieting in the usual sense of losing weight but rather about how to enjoy eating. It’s about much more than the simple act of putting food in your mouth, chewing and swallowing. In part, it’s about what restaurateurs can do to make that experience as pleasurable as possible, or in some venues as memorable as possible and damn the shallow definitions of pleasure. “The aim nowadays is to prepare the best-tasting food possible and to complement that with the most immersive and engaging multisensory stimulation ‘off the plate’ as well.”

Spence traces the historical roots for that approach to the table experience of the Italian artistic group of the 1930s known as the Futurists. It was “conducted” by Filippo Marinetti, who introduced natural sound backgrounds, big fans blowing wind across the table, perfumed dishes, textured clothing for your companions to stroke while eating, perhaps with some loud Wagnerian opera engulfing the party. Probably naked girls strutting about with leopards. Who knows? The weirder the better!

This book explores the science that is trying to discover the statistical specifics behind what makes our eating experiences memorable. Would fur-covered dishes and silverware be appealing or repulsive? Would a trout be more appreciated placed vertically or horizontally across the plate? Neither. A diagonal from lower left to upper right is preferred by most people.

The primary aim of the book, which is aimed at the top chefs, is to explore how to create the most robust memories possible. People have great difficulty in remembering the taste of the culinary experience, but they can remember the weird things surrounding those experiences and that helps them to remember how much they enjoyed the food.

Because I am writing a book that is based in part on food and because it has such an impact on human social interactions, his points about memorability are important for me to consider when designing the book. It is to be a strange little book more in the tradition of Epictetus than Spence. No! On second thought, it is a blend of these extremely opposite styles of people and of living. And yet, strangely enough, almost identical. Epictetus was a slave in the infamous Roman Emperor Nero’s court and no doubt personally observed amazing activities that Spence would applaud as his ideal. Spence is promoting strange and extraordinarily expensive dinners and that is exactly what Nero was reveling in, and Epictetus was participating too, in his own way. Read my rendition of Epictetus. He based his theory of Stoicism, without much doubt, on what he had observed in Nero’s personal life of extraordinary luxury.

Spence is heading toward what Epictetus had experienced and was rejecting.

A Crack in Creation by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg

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A Crack in Creation, Book review, Jennifer A. Doudna, Jennifer Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg

On January 1, 2014 I chose Jennifer Doudna as Probaway Person of the Year 2014. I choose a person who did something so significant the year before that it will be remembered 500 years in the future. At the time I made that prediction Doudna was almost unknown to the general public but her creating a workable CRISPR technology has been picked up by thousands of research scientists since her discovery. It has propelled her into a position of having to make ethical and political decisions and statements so she wrote this book.

A Crack in Creation by Jennifer Doudna & Samuel Sternberg is about the creation of CRISPR and thus the human ability to control the exact DNA of any living, dead, or potential species. It is a significant event, perhaps with even more long-term effects than the creation of life itself. I make that audacious statement because the natural processes of life are limited by natural selection. That process is a blind adaptation to past experiences of a given species. CRISPR is different in that it can be directed by human forethought and even computer forethought to create living creatures to do our bidding. Life now can have a forethought and a preconceived purpose. It is a God-like purpose rather than just a natural selection of some random life form that didn’t die before it reproduced!

Most of the book is about the people, technology, and history of creating the CRISPR technique of modifying DNA. It is valuable having an overview of what these research scientists are doing and discovering. There is a discussion of what technologies are presently being developed that will be making an impact on various living things.

With that background information laid out in terms a general reader can follow but probably not make any personal use of, Doudna explores the immediate future uses of CRISPR. As a scientist, she is eager to explore all the nuances of what nature has provided for us, but as a responsible human being, she is concerned that a technology this powerful will create problems humans may not be able to cope with.

The last chapters of the book deal with the physical and moral implications of how CRISPR may be developed in the near future. She has called high-level conferences of the chief scientists and policy makers in this field to discuss these almost imponderable problems. They are trying to create international guidelines for the development of cures for diseases and especially to go very slow on modifying the heritable parts of human DNA that would be carried forward to descendants. Her thoughts may be noble and responsible, but there are already others with other motivations, like creating descendants with super abilities of various sorts, and of course of making money. With a technology with this power, there are infinite possibilities.

CRISPR is the genie out of the bottle that may prove bigger than humanity.

 

Why? Why? Why?

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Book review discussion., Recycling the question - Why?, Stealing Fire, Why? Why? Why?

This evening Debbie and I attended a book club potluck dinner. After the first hour of general conversation and a half hour of eating, the group of two dozen people formed a large circle and we discussed the book Stealing Fire. I reviewed that book a couple of weeks ago and didn’t care for it much; consequently, I didn’t enter the conversation. Why bring a good party into a conflicted discussion? About a half hour into the conversation the question was asked … Why?

Why, what? Just why! Why should we pursue the question of stealing fire, intellectual/motivational/emotional fire from the gods? I liked the question and mentally tuned out of listening to the conversation because it had moved on to other ideas and instead I thought repeatedly over the recycled question … why?

The others never got specific about that question and never related it directly to any particular potentially productive task they were attempting to do. But I started thinking about my current project, the writing of a diet book based on what I think will make a real impact on the billion overweight people.

But – why should I do that? Because I want to help those people. Why, why not let them take care of themselves? Because I am involved in humanity, they are my fellow species members, my DNA, and I want to preserve my humanity and thus a portion of myself. Why? Because I won’t live many decades longer, and humanity might, and so I should help them, and in so doing help myself into a partial future life. Why? Why help humanity? Because it is helping the Universe become all that it is capable of becoming. Why? Because it is the natural flow of things to form an organization of matter and interactions of matter that form thoughts. Why? Because it seems like the right thing to do.

And those are the kind of thoughts I was mulling while the others were Stealing Fire.

Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal – book review

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How the Mighty Fall, Stealing Fire book review

For those people who are bestselling authors, Silicon Valley geniuses, top performing Navy SEALs, and top-level scientists, this book is well worth reading. If you are a regular attendee at Burning Man you will enjoy this book. However, of the seven and a half billion people on this planet, the number of people who would clearly fall into the combined group above is probably less than ten thousand. If we liberalized the definition a bit to those who aspire to those lofty ranks we might get the number up to a hundred thousand. For the rest of humanity, the odds against you being members of this elite are a million to one, and this book Stealing Fire – How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work will probably be counterproductive to your life.

I came away from this book feeling that promoting activities for people that are beyond their abilities will hurt far more people than it helps. Granted there will be people for whom psychedelic drugs will enhance their performance, and for whom taking huge risks will have an enormous payoff, and their odds may be better than a million to one that it will work, but the odds are stacked against them. I would recommend reading Jim Collins’s book, How the Mighty Fall and why some Companies Never Give In before you read Stealing Fire. Collins’s book is about the perils of overreaching. It is an analysis of big companies that failed compared to their competitors that succeeded. The lessons to be learned in that book about companies have a direct correlation to personal strategies for winning. Stealing Fire is about the glories of overreaching and the authors interview those who have succeeded with that approach; however, they don’t dwell on the vast majority that tried that super-risky path and failed.

Of course, there is some good advice in stepping up to those people who have succeeded with your good ideas and brilliant conversation, but if you don’t have great qualities in abundance even those contacts won’t work. If instead, you can spend some time and energy figuring out a way to provide for the common person’s needs in a way that will scale up with a product you can sell to the whole world you are more likely to succeed than by taking mind-altering drugs.

The harder you work on your good ideas the luckier you will become.

 

Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes by Clarke and Eddy

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Book review, Cassandra, R.P. Eddy, Richard A. Clarke, Warnings, Washington insiders

This book makes a convincing case that many things such as artificial intelligence, pandemic disease, sea-level rise, nuclear ice age, Internet of everything, meteor strike and CRISPR gene editing will bring humanity as we know it to an end. Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes by Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy is a fun read for people who are accepting of the fact that we live in a dangerous world that might crash at any minute. For everyone else, it will be a spine-tingling thriller that probably portends humanity’s future demise within a few decades if not our personal one in a few months.

Having departed from my young adult occupation as a B-47 H-bomber pilot back in 1960, I have lived under the realization of how easy it would be for those bombs to fall and our civilization to vanish. Consequently, I read Warnings with a cool head and a sanguine heart. I am basically a cheerful person but gloom and doom are not far beneath my pleasant exterior.

In my annual Probaway Person of the Year, which now has ten entries, there are five individuals who are creators of things that would fall into the book’s Warnings list: Albert Einstein and his promoting the creation of the American atomic bomb is one, and Jennifer Doudna and her creation of CRISPR is another.

Without any intent to have it so, I have had strange personal connections with top people in all of the new warning categories in Chapters 10 through 16. But what interested me most was the final chapter on what we could and should be doing to eliminate or at least mitigate the disasters that are already imminent.

Ouch; immediately we, you and I, hit a problem because the authors cut us out of the loop and put the responsibility for action exclusively into the hands of a rarified few people. The authors have been functioning at the White House level for much of their careers, and they limit the people whom they are willing to even consider listening to, to those very few people who are at the absolute pinnacle of their chosen field. The rest of us should go suck our thumbs like a bunch of spoiled children. Such statements as, “The White House, with its decision-making power, is best suited for creating and hosting such a forecasting office,” p. 355. This statement becomes truly chilling when we consider how unwilling our current president is to carefully analyze anything, let alone predicting and responding well before catastrophe strikes.

A few sentences later he mentions how one of the most informed people in Silicon Valley, Bill Joy, got to talk to the Chief of Staff, not the President, and nothing happened. Rock Stars can get interviews with the President, but not people who are really informed on a critical subject. That’s the definition of insane.

I came away from this basically good book with a realization that we humans are in deeper trouble than I imagined because of the mentality of the insiders. They talk about listening to Cassandras but then they put their fingers in their ears and their heads in the sand and they leave all of us with our asses sticking in the air.

It’s Nassim Taleb’s complaint in a new department. Only trust people who have skin in the game.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel C. Dennett

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Book Review Dennett, Evolution of minds, From Bacteria to Bach and Back

Do we humans as a species have an inherent limit on our intelligence and thus a limit on how much we can understand? Daniel C. Dennett in this book From Bacteria to Bach and Back on pages following 372 gets into that idea, but he sidetracks the issue with, “As soon as you frame a question that you claim we will never be able to answer, you set in motion the very process that might well prove you wrong: you raise a topic of investigation. … Asking better and better questions is the key to refining our search for solutions to our “mysteries,” and this refinement is utterly beyond the powers of any languageless creature.” (p. 374)

What I would contend, actually quibble, is that we have many very smart people and very refined educational systems to hone those people’s minds, but even those minds elevated to their finest moments are capable of meeting questions that might have answers in their minds but which they can not demonstrate to others even if they presented the answers clearly. But even this isn’t facing the question, because if one mind can answer a question then another one can too if given enough time and opportunity.

With every greater refinement of an obscure question, it becomes possible to tweak it into something else which may bring to everyone’s attention a satisfying answer but which isn’t answering the original question. What inevitably happens is that the community of inquiring minds will get bored with a problem and move on to others. I’ve attended many discussions where people discuss defined questions quite heatedly and bring up a plethora of fancy responses, but in a round-robin summation, each individual presents their understanding in terms that they like and which have only modest overlap with the other people’s opinions. Unless there is a real-world, that is, scientific-type testing of the arguments, these conversations end up in fluffy nebulosities. Everyone leaves these conversations feeling happy and that they are right and in their own minds they are right.

When in these conversations, I try to force people into physically actionable intellectual positions. That is, that they go out and do things that real functioning people can do. Chopping wood, carrying water as the classic sages purportedly did, but with a difference in that their actions were helping humanity.

Perhaps with CRISPR technology, it will be possible to generate bigger and better-organized brains that can answer specific types of questions that our present brains can not answer, but those creatures might not be considered humans anymore. These uber-humans might provide working realities for us ordinary humans to use effectively even though we don’t have a clue as to why these new things work. We routinely flip a light switch and the lights come on, but we don’t have an even rudimentary understanding of why the new light bulbs actually function or how the electricity is generated. So, in many ways, Dennett’s mysteries are already being presented to us every day in a myriad of functioning situations. Dennett wrote, “The interaction of our world culture is presently one that can answer mysteries that are beyond the powers of any languageless creature.” I would add, humans have evolved our power of speech and combined with an evolved capacity to accept other people’s stupidity.”

Read Dennett’s books as a point of departure for your own discoveries to share with the rest of us.

 

3,500 posts on Probaway WordPress

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3500 Probaways, Probaway milestones

For me, this is a celebration day because the automatic post counter provided by WordPress just turned over 3,500 for probaway dot wordpress dot com. Of all the people on Earth, I am the only one to give a hoot. But, hoot, hoot, hoot!

People occasionally ask me what my favorite post was and my standard answer is today’s post. When I look back every post astonishes me! I can’t imagine having that huge number of ideas and that I posted another new one last night.

In the very first post on January 1, 2008, I laid out my general strategy for writing these posts and the direction that these posts would go. I named my blog Probaway – Life Hacks ~ Many helpful hints on living your life more successfully.

The next day, the first post about a subject rather than strategy, was on Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer. That post is still relevant for demonstrating the way I wanted to go and went. I was lucky to have chosen Cesar Millan of all people for my beginning. His main subject is dogs and their relationship to people but what he does is surf right past all the intellectually profound philosophers, psychologists, historians, scientists and he demonstrates how we as individuals can relate effectively with dogs and people.

I think of Cesar Millan as in the same ranks with Sun Tzu, Lao Tzu, Machiavelli, and Jesus, each of whom saw to the core of human relations and presented their ideas in ways that could be used effectively by thinking people in positions of authority over their relevant environments.

The super milestone will be 3,650. Will we live to see it?

Presenting the Beatitudes to my atheist friends.

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Sermon on the Mount, The Beatitudes revealed

I have mentioned this before to my atheist group of friends that Jesus was by some definitions an atheist himself. This would not be accepted by most believers, but if you read with an open mind the beginning of his only recorded sermon, called the Beatitudes, you will understand that it is a possibility. Read lines 7, 8, 9, 10 as a progression to a higher state. Lines 4 thru 7 describe a progression to a more developed state of being, but he doesn’t mention heaven. However, in line 8 we have people who have developed spiritually to the condition he calls pure in heart and they are rewarded by seeing God, but only as spectators. Line 9 – those who are peacemakers are called children of God; that is, the males could be called sons of God and the females daughters of God. What could possibly be higher than being a child of God? To be Gods themselves! And that is the zinger implication in line 10. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The clear implication is that children of God when they behave properly become the Lords of Heaven. What else could the unambiguous phrase mean? – Theirs is the kingdom of heaven!

Matthew 5 King James Version (KJV)

5 And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him:

² And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying,

³ Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

⁴ Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

⁵ Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

⁶ Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

⁷ Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

⁸ Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

⁹ Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

¹⁰ Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

When the Beatitudes are read as suggested above, Gods and Heaven become a very different thing than visiting with an old dude sitting on a Golden Throne listening to harps and singing angels forever and listening to a hundred billion dead humans confessing their guilt and lamentations.

Being persecuted for righteousness’ sake is the highest state and it is being punished for doing the right things for other people, meaning humanity as a whole. That it is other people being helped is stated in the previous line where those doing that are called children of God because they are creating peace between contentious people. The higher thing beyond helping individual other people is helping the whole of humanity. That is the highest form of helping and thus the highest reward is granted to them and theirs is the kingdom of heaven. They have become … God.

This approach to Jesus is too practical and real-world for the otherworldly inclined.

My Wednesday’s writing group’s prompt was – Dancer

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Bali Ram, Bend Oregon, Dancing, Kathmandu, Nepal, Tour with Miss India

1:15 PM, 10-minute writing prompt – Dancer

Bali Ram just gave us an introduction to his introduction to dancing.

From his infancy in Kathmandu, Nepal, he was interested in rhythm, and through seemingly magical circumstances he ended up in a dancing school in Manhattan, New York. There he endured endless hours of training in Indian-style dancing, and because he was such a beautiful youth, and such a beautiful dancer, he was linked up with Miss India to go on a promotional tour. That turned out to be so popular that they toured together for several years around the United States and the rest of the world.

That was back in the 1960s, and it is now 2017 and Bali Ram and I are now 82-year-old kids living in Bend, Oregon. Both of us are remarkably youthful looking for our recently acquired geriatric status. He is three months older than I am so I must give him his due as my elder, and listen respectfully as he tells his magnificent stories. Occasionally, he lets me squeeze in a sentence, sometimes two, about the famous people I have met and the astonishing things I have done. But it always seems so pathetic compared to his stories

However, I am presently writing a book which will be a best seller. And I will be famous for saving billions of people’s lives. He can’t say that. At least not yet.

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Bali Ram was with us as we wrote our short stories and he said he really liked this piece about us.

A Most Improbable Journey by Walter Alvarez – book review

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A Most Improbable Journey, Understanding Big History, Walter Alvarez

Back when I lived in Berkeley there were many opportunities to hear important scientists give lectures. Some of the best lectures were by Walter Alvarez and the beauty of living in Berkeley is you occasionally get to meet famous scientists personally. I took advantage of that opportunity several times with Walter in the typical after lecture queue. We all are in awe of his discovery of the Chicxulube crater and his considerable number of proofs that that event some sixty-six million years ago led to the demise of the dinosaurs and permitted the rise of mammals and us humans. Without the event that he exposed I wouldn’t be writing this post and you wouldn’t be reading it.

A Most Improbable Journey by Walter Alvarez is a book for the general public. It covers Big History, all the way from giving us the numbers of how very big our Universe of a home really is, to us. There are roughly a hundred billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy times a hundred billion galaxies, or roughly a number one with twenty-two zeros number of stars. And, as you may have noticed from the published deep space photos taken back toward Earth from afar by space probes, Earth is a tiny place even in the Solar system. This book is about the history of the Universe and how this tiny thing we call our home came to be.

The pages on how common sand came into being were eerie because that common element silicon required a history of repeated concentrating events before it could come onto the beaches and sand dunes that seem so common to us. The book makes many obscure things clear and even obvious. When spoken by a man who knows what he is talking about, many things become easy for an ordinary person to understand.

Everyone, even experts, should read “A Most Improbable Journey” because it demonstrates how to make difficult subjects comprehensible.