81–90 of 247 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also patently wrong; a paleolithic human could not have subsisted on a diet of tubas, as they were not invented until the mid-19th century.
Parent said "modern", not "paleolithic". You are not a paleolithic human, and if you are, welcome, time traveller.
Via Wonkblog: For those of us who generally don’t like food, consider it an annoyance, and yearn for a way to avoid eating it, Soylent sounds immensely promising. But is it safe? Surprisingly, the answer from nutrition experts seems to be, “Yeah, probably.” Jay Mirtallo is a professor of pharmacy at Ohio State and the immediate past president of American Society for Parental Enteral Nutrition, which focuses on the sc…
And that's the question that's gone unasked, because we're focusing (understandably) on the health implications first: Could Soylent be scalably produced to feed 10% or more of the world's population? Would the material prices skyrocket in response to demand? Let's set aside the physiological consequences for a moment, what are the potential economic and environmental ramifications of Soylent?
The profit margin on their product, I suspect, is pretty large.
Why aren't liquid foods like this being supplied to under-nourished children in the 3rd world already? Because they are not a profit source.
The world is optimizing to the wealthy. Whole Foods isn't cheap for a reason.
> Some people tell me going "ketogenic", or reducing carbs is healthy. I am now skeptical of this claim as lowering carbs makes me feel hungry and tired, and the drink taste less sweet. Perhaps it would be possible after an unpleasant transition period, but I don’t see the ultimate gain... Their advice seems to fall in line with the paleo/primal philosophies—in a nutshell: man only started eating a significant amount…
I don't eat sugar sugar anymore, but consume plenty of fruits, so I wouldn't consider myself addicted to sugar. However, I simply could not eat enough calories through the day to fit my lifestyle without eating carbs. I tried, it didn't work. Burning ~400 calories every day before breakfast and adding another ~900 calorie burn at boxing practice every two days ... just nope. I can't even fulfill my caloric goal when…
Sorry, but after reading the following (elsewhere on that blog), I'm hard-pressed not to dismiss this as an elaborate troll. "I read a book on Number Theory in one sitting, a Differential Geometry book in a weekend, filling up a notebook in the process."
How is that implausible? He's an engineer by trade, mathematics is close enough to computer science that most half-way decent programmers should be able to read that level math casually given a good 'brain day'. I spent most of my twenties neglecting math, decided one day to learn calculus, found it pretty easy.
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Honestly the only two things I'm missing on low carb are ice cream (that's okay though) and coke (which is why I'm searching for a pure stevia alternative). I had way less problems then I would have expected. edit: a) I'm in Germany, not that many products available here. b) I always steered clear of Coca Cola, Pepsi and so on, those were too sweet for me and the caffeine level was rather low anyway.
Have you tried just the fizzy flavored water you can buy at the grocery store? The taste takes some getting used to (not really sweet when compared to cokes) but I've found that what I liked most about soda is the fizz. After dropping soda I can't even drink half a can because of the sweetness but YMMV.
Via Wonkblog: For those of us who generally don’t like food, consider it an annoyance, and yearn for a way to avoid eating it, Soylent sounds immensely promising. But is it safe? Surprisingly, the answer from nutrition experts seems to be, “Yeah, probably.” Jay Mirtallo is a professor of pharmacy at Ohio State and the immediate past president of American Society for Parental Enteral Nutrition, which focuses on the sc…
Nestle produces something called Modulen specifically for people with IBD. The idea is for people with Crohn's to switch to a liquid diet during bad flare ups to settle things down as digesting food causes inflammation.
It is rather expensive. Luckily for me, my insurance covered it (I'm from Israel, so YMMV). The hard part is that you have to pound a dozen glasses of the stuff every day. Some people can't even drink that much water and this is a heavy drink.
Soylent may be an improvement in terms of price and preparation because Modulen comes in powder form and doesn't mix well with water and goops up quickly. It is simply not easy getting it down.
To those of you suggesting this sort of thing can solve world hunger - doubtful. I'm the only one my doctors know of who actually was able to adhere to a liquid only diet for a stretch of multiple months, people simply don't have the willpower.
You miss food quite badly and are never satiated. What I think Soylent could possibly be is an ultimate supplement, like a protein shake - in fact, fitness companies like Beachbody (P90X) hawk all kinds of dubios concoctions, it is a lucrative market. One that actually works would be neat.
Crazy name. Grab-bag, ad-hoc nutritional doctrine. Still, I'm glad such fringe self-experimentation happens. My biggest concern would be that healthy adaptive systems benefit from variety, challenge, and chaos. Intermittent fasting is good. A little contamination from things that are normally unhealthy is good. (See, for example, the hygiene hypothesis or the idea of hormesis.) Chewing is good -- as is the somewhat r…
Zing!
After reading the first Soylent post, I felt inspired to try and come up with a recipe for a "nutritionally complete" soup. I used an online tool that calculates the total nutrients for a recipe and came up with this: 3 potatoes 1 onion 500 grams of wild alaskan salmon 1/2 cup of mushrooms 3.5 tbsp of olive oil 30 grams of sunflower seeds 1 tbsp of dried parsley 2 tbsp of ground thyme 50 grams of parmesan cheese 3 cl…
Neat experiment. If the cod liver oil's for vitamins, I think cooking will mess that up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"in a nutshell: man only started eating a significant amount of carbohydrates about 10,000 years ago." This is a myth and patently wrong. Anatomically modern humans evolved on a diet of cooked food, the bulk of which was tubers and other root vegetables. EDIT: 'tubas' -> 'tubers' derp.
I like how your typo first gave me a hilarious mental image of a man eating tubas, and then a hilarious mental dialogue of Arnold Schwarzenegger saying your sentence
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Firstly, you don't read a textbook (especially a math textbook) in one sitting. If nothing else, books like that have problems that the authors expect you to go through. They are also often based on lectures for courses that take at least a semester to absorb. Secondly, number theory is not calculus; it requires you to be familiar with college-level math courses (e.g. abstract algebra) before you can even start makin…
Well, clearly nobody could ever do it then. Wait, no, people study those things all the time. They're difficult, but maybe he has unknown prior background in math, or is gifted in that regard. It's not as though he achieved something that no human ever has before. It's a reasonably routine though difficult task - akin to perhaps completing a marathon.
A marathon is usually run in about four and a half hours. The best marathon runners in the world (i.e. current record holders) ran one in about 2 hours.
The university that I'm at has about 45-48 hours of classroom instruction per semester; you're expected to spend between two and three times that preparing; that's an assumption of between 135 and 192 hours of work per semester. I find that for my upper level mathematics courses (first year graduate), I spend about 2-3 hours outside of class working on problem sets and reading the material. This is also, as far as I can tell, about how much the other students in my courses are working. My understanding is that this is the expectation across most high tier universities and math programs.
If we assume that the average marathon runner is roughly equivalent to a normal mathematics student in terms of experience, saying that you learned (and completely understood the implications of) an entire semester of mathematics in a day (16-20 hours) is equivalent to claiming you are able to run a marathon in 40 minutes. For the record, that's a rate of about 1 mile every minute and a half.
This is an imperfect metaphor, since math has the same benefits that CS has of being able to absorb material faster the more you already know. On the other hand, my experience (and what most professors I have asked also say) is that most hard math requires a sort of 'processing' time to really start to get it, so the actual case might be worse: I don't think you'd actually learn much math if you just spent 135 consecutive hours (with sleep as required) working on learning math.
Suffice to say: I don't think what he claimed to do is within the realm of reason.
Personal bio, as to why I'm a semi-reputable source: I'm currently both finishing an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a masters in math at highly ranked public university (in general and in math). Most of my time is currently spent learning math, either in class or self taught (for a seminar). The professors I interact with regularly are about as mathematically talented as it is possible to get.
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The above being said:
I would, however, say that someone with a good handle on multivariable calculus and differential equations, along with a really good background in math, could learn a decent amount of applied differential geometry in a weekend. Similarly, you could learn/memorize a lot of the results of number theory in a weekend.
Both of the above could give you the illusion of having learned all of a subject without building a deep understanding of it. Both are also in line with the 'hacker tendency' to be able to stuff a lot of information in your head in a short amount of time. The computer science equivalent would be learning that there exists an algorithm called quicksort that runs in O(nlog(n)) that doesn't work well on sorted data without modification, but without learning how to implement it.
The take away is that it's very easy to fool yourself into thinking you've learned a lot from a math book when you're reading it like a novel. In practice, though, if you aren't doing the exercises (or if they don't exist, working through your own), then you probably aren't actually engaging with the material in any deep and significant way.
I actually think this is in line with many of his other claims: he seems to be a person who seems to believe he has learned everything important about a field in a relatively short amount of research time, without having a deep background in it already, either through reading a single textbook or by spending a few hours/days/weeks researching and reading. I think most of his claims should probably be considered in that light.