Health Tip #17: Don't write a health book

Writing a book is an excellent, time-worn way to be unhealthy.  I'm probably at my least healthy I've been over the last few years.

First of all, I've taken up smoking.  What a wonderful example I'm setting.  I'm now on my third pack.  Smoking is a perfect break to long stretches of writing -- it takes a few minutes, it's relaxing, and is actually a pretty good time to walk and think.  And get some fresh air (???).  And it gives you lung cancer.  (But remember, correlation isn't causation...most of the smoking studies are just epidemiological studies, not randomly controlled trials!)

Second, my sleep habits got completely screwed up over the last few months.  I was regularly going to sleep from 5-7AM.  I have black-out shades, so I'd be able to get seven or so hours of sleep.  But it's totally disconcerting to wake up at noon (or later).  You feel behind on the day, and by the time everyone else is winding down, you still have lots of work to do.  Luckily, I broke out of that pattern a couple weeks ago.  I dropped the caffeine for a day, worked out super hard, took some over-the-counter sleeping aids that night, set four alarm clocks, then immediately exercised when I woke up.

Third, I'm drinking way more caffeine than I should.  I wonder if this was contributing to the sleep problems.

My eating has remained good, with a slightly higher incidence of dark chocolate rewards.  Anyhow, things are coming along and there's light at the end of the tunnel.  And trust me, if this were a diet book, it would have been out long ago.

Just another word for grilled meat

From the WSJ, this is an excerpt from the memoir of 23-year-old Shin Dong-hyuk, the only known person to have been born into a North Korean prison camp and escaped.

Many of his classmates were assigned to coal mines, where accidental death from cave-ins, explosions and gas poisonings was common. Shin was lucky—he was assigned to a pig farm, where 200 men and women raised about 800 pigs, along with goats, rabbits, chickens and a few cows. As a prisoner, Shin was not allowed to eat the meat of any livestock on the farm. But he and other prisoners could sometimes steal. The smell of roasting pork on the farm would alert guards, leading to beatings and weeks of half-rations, so they ate purloined pork raw.

And this:

In the garment factory, the superintendent wanted Shin to inform on an important new prisoner. Park Yong Chul, short and stout, with a shock of white hair, had lived abroad....

Much of what Park talked about, especially at the beginning, was difficult for Shin to understand or care about. What delighted him—what he kept begging Park for—were stories about food and eating. These were the stories that kept Shin up at night fantasizing about a better life. Freedom, in Shin's mind, was just another word for grilled meat.

Read the whole thing.  Hat tip to Althouse.

Salumi

 Three and a half minutes of beauty.

A Portrait: Olli Salumeria

Low status males

When most people think about human history, they tend to lump all men together and all women together.  As in:

  • Men oppressed women
  • Men could vote and women couldn't
  • Men rigged everything in their favor

This is historically inaccurate.

For example, there are huge differences between the lives of high status males and and low status males.  If you are a low status male throughout most of human history, then you get to enjoy the following privileges:

  • You are conscripted into military service
  • If you flee battle, you are killed by your superiors
  • You get to slowly die of scurvy on a boat
  • You end up in prison
  • If your people is conquered, men are the most likely to be wholesale slaughtered
  • You are not allowed to vote (an often forgotten fact -- it's historically rare for low status men to have the vote)
  • You are less likely to reproduce (or if you do, then you leave fewer offspring)
  • You do hard labor for long hours nearly your entire life
  • You have a miserable life expectancy

During the Agricultural Age, the best option was being a high status male.  But the next best option was probably being a woman.  The worst option was being a low status male.

Incidentally, this pattern holds true in just about any sexually-reproducing species.  Males are the high-risk sex, and thus you have some big winners, but many more losers.  Females are the low-risk sex, and thus you have a more equitable range of evolutionary outcomes.

If you look back at history and look up, it looks like men run the show.  But if you look back at history and look down, you see that a lot of men received little to no benefit simply by virtue of being a man.  In fact, low status men have generally been viewed as the most disposable and worthless people in society.

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