About a year ago, I wrote this post about continuous glucose monitors, that’s sorta ‘part 1’ of these two parts. Since then, and parallel to this most recent time with the sensor, I’ve encountered improvements to the ecosystem. The sensor technology is way better, as is the app/rendering of the data. The long story and comparison between the new system and the old the technology has gotten way better and now costs $50/sensor instead of the $100/sensor it was as recently as a year ago, and I’ve updated my mental models in this space. It was time for an update on that post. Here it is. My disappointment with the original implementation of the CGM device was that it was difficult to obtain and expensive, at $100 per two-week-long sensor, the sensor stored only a few hours of data on itself and needed frequent syncing, and the syncing was delicate. The phones NFC reader had to be almost exactly on the sensor itself. The apps for viewing the data were clunky and slow as well. There were two of them. That’s all gone now! The default Amazon device is finally good enough! Lingo Continuous Glucose Monitor. I also don’t have diabetes, and don’t have any warnings signs of pre diabetes or ‘metabolic syndrome’. I’m simply an intensely curious person. The last time I checked the ecosystem for continuous glucose monitors, the sensors were still costing $100 per sensor, which lasted for two weeks. Wildly expensive, for something that doesn’t have too much going on inside of it. The actual cost to manufacture the sensor must be low numbers of dollars, to perhaps maybe even less than a dollar per sensor, at a certain scale of production. Anyway, in the greater united states the price is now down to $53 per two week sensor, and is finally available via Amazon, instead of jumping through insurance-related hoops. improvements in the sensor/app The sensor collects the data, the app displays it. The old sensor had a crappy app, and allowed for a brittle and slow third-party integration so the data could get off the ‘walled garden’ of the company that produced the sensor, and into a usable app. The integration was so slow I’d mostly use the default app, even though it was pretty bad. Now the default app has a better UI than the third party app I used before, and the data syncs immediately. The device uses bluetooth to talk to the phone. The old CGM used near-field communication (the same technology for a cell phone’s ‘tap to pay’ feature. I had to tap my phone against the CGM to read it) Now, because the device uses bluetooth, I no longer have to tap my phone to my upper arm to read the data. I open the app, and it pulls the data in in just a few seconds. The app supports meal logging and exercise logging. (when one is exercising, often enough blood glucose goes up. Muscles are requesting energy, the liver responds by dumping a little bit of the 150 grams of glycogen it stores into the blood stream as glucose.) The app is opinionated, and is designed f with diabetes, and labels all spikes in glucose as potentially troubling - if you log exercise it won’t count the rise as a negative thing. If it’s food-related, it counts the rise as a bad thing. When I eat low-carb, no-sugar meals (which is my default meal) it’s sorta uncanny to see my blood sugar change not at all compared to the giant rise and eventual fall in my blood sugar after eating something carb-y and/or sugary. How much glucose is in a human body anyway? At one point I was trying to figure out how much glucose was in my body anyway. Here’s my math, I was surprised at how small the actual figure was. Supposedly, people who weigh what I do have about 4.5 liters of blood in their body. Imagine four 1 liter bottles side by side. normal blood glucose readings are above 70mg/dL and below 140 mg/dL if we were to convert those readings to grams per liter, what would it be? How much sugar would i add to each liter of water, before it has the same sweetness level is normal in blood? Does 7 gram per liter sound right? It sounded plausible to me - 7 grams of sugar mixed into a liter of water would make it perceivably sweet. it couldn’t be 70 grams of glucose per liter of blood. What about .7 grams of glucose per liter of blood? TURNS OUT THAT IS THE CONVERSION! so my entire circulating supply of blood, when the reading is on the lower side, contains 3.15 grams of glucose. And at the higher side, contains 6.3 grams of glucose. That’s wild to me. That figure is so much less than I expected. I use a food scale for brewing coffee and baking, so I know how small 5 grams of something is. That’s how much baking soda I’ll put in a single loaf of banana bread. I might put 70 grams of brown sugar into that loaf. so, when my blood glucose is on the lower side of things, at .7 gram of glucose per liter of blood, with 4.5 liters of blood, I’d have 3.15 grams of glucose, in my entire blood stream. A high level of glucose is 140mg/dL, or 1.4 grams of glucose per liter of blood. My whole blood stream would be containing about 6.3 grams of glucose, max. I notice that this is less than I expected, and I’m sorta impressed with how quickly perhaps my body can use what’s in the blood stream, and can get more glucose into it. Now I’m more impressed with my body’s ability to metabolize carbs and sugar than I was before. I was sorta off by a factor of 5 or 10, in my mental model for how this worked in my body. Whoops. I’m also impressed at my body’s ability to manage digestion in such a way, that even when I eat tons of sweet and carby things, the blood sugar doesn’t go through the roof. Giant qualifications about health and eating Supremacy and purity culture/abstinence goes together. I talk a lot about food, but I don’t abstain from anything (including sex! but also food!) sorta ever. I’d rather feel extremely nourished, and when it comes to food, I do. When I talk about fasting or fasting essentialism stuff, it’s from a place of satiation and curiosity, sorta a sense of wow, I’m shocked to not yet feel hunger, how convenient all the other things I can do with my time/life/energy… sorta way. Not suffering. This concept is why I hate the concept of ‘counting calories’, either in or out. More on that another time. I also try pretty hard to avoid anything that feels too eating-disorder adjacent. For fun, I read a memoir from someone with an eating disorder, to see if my relationship with food seemed sufficiently different than the one modeled in the book. Indeed, my suspicion/hope is satisfied, it doesn’t seem like an eating disorder. It’s simply an idiosyncratic, adaptable/flexible/consistent form of feeding myself, alternating between periods of not eating, interspersed mostly with eating really nice, healthy meals. I mix in a bit of ‘working out’. Same as how I sorta hate american hunting culture, I sorta hate gym culture. anyway… I’ve been freaking loving these “isometric bar holds” I’ve been doing. That’s part 1, and I have a part 2 soon to land. It’s been huge, for me, and a bunch of friends have tried these lifts with me, and they give pretty good reviews. mixing it all together - slightly timing meals, and eating plant fat + mushrooms + cruciferous stuff The original thesis was mostly that intermittent fasting is cool (like skipping breakfast) and otherwise model sugar as to be avoided and bread-type-things as overall delicious but best avoided. Fat, especially olive oil, I treat as a health food. The more the better. I hope we all add at least 10-15 g of olive oil to every meal for the rest of our lives. if there’s enough fat, and/or glucose isn’t extremely plentiful/overly-saturating, eventually the body burns through some glucose stores (seemingly mostly in the liver, a few hundred grams of it) and then turns on this whole cool-as-heck freaking ‘energy generation via ketone bodies’ thing. the tl;dr is the body CAN make glucose out of fat, and can metabolize fat directly for energy. The liver can make molecules out of fat (it can also make glucose out of fat), and some of these molecules are called ‘ketones’. and then mitochondria, which usually use glucose to generate energy can also generate energy via these ketone bodies. There’s urine tests one can use to measure ketones, or breath ketone detectors, or blood ketone detectors. All look at different molecules, but in all cases nearly levels of any of the looked-for molecules count as ‘being in ketosis’ Mid levels of ketone readings, in the blood, is like .4 grams per liter, once that system is in operation. Close in amount to the amount of glucose that is in the blood. And it’s not ‘glucose OR ketones’, it’s always ‘glucose AND ketones’. There simply will not be any ketones made by the liver until the glucose levels stay low for a long enough time. Then the liver begins to make ketone bodies, along with glucose. A reluctant book recommendation: Brain Energy I encountered a few more books. Turns out the brain functions pretty differently in a high/medium sugar environment vs. low-sugar and ketones environment. Brain Energy by Christopher Palmer was… adequate. I sorta hate books written by western doctors, usually. They seem patronizing and self-aggrandizing, but maybe that’s me projecting my own least favorite parts of myself onto the author. lol. The book Grain Brain was interesting enough to justify renting it from the library and listening to the audiobook. I dislike something that seems to be common among books written by medical professionals. It seems nakedly condescending, and paternalistic, at times. alas, still worth sifting through. The focus on the brain was distinctive. After reading it, I began to appreciate that my brain is like three pounds of pure fat, and my spinal cord and the main parts of the 11 or 22 cranial nerves is probably most of another pound of fat. Another splash of olive oil. Some coconut oil, too. Those are the two plant fats I eat lots of. Crucial point of distinction: it can be done without meat Nearly every book I’ll link to, in this piece, and in most books one encounters about a low-carb high-fat consumption pattern, seems to take as a given that meat can or should be consumed, daily, or in every single meal, and the authors (maybe they’re too propagandized by the american agricultural industry) cannot bring themselves to even mention the possibility of this thing being done with zero or very low amounts of meat. Some of the books seriously advocate for the ‘carnivore diet’, which is mostly eating pure meat. sidebar: after originally writing these words I sorted out what ‘glutamate’ was, and how interesting it is now when I notice that some cancer cells are known to be able to ferment glutamate IF glucose isn’t available. I almost don’t eat any meat. I do sometimes eat some fish. (salmon or sardines, very occasionally. Certainly at least once a month, never close to daily) Mushrooms are a complete protein - every essential amino acid is available via mushrooms. The paper Edible mushrooms: A potential source of essential amino acids, glucans and minerals. Int. J. Food Sci. Technol. could be an interesting read. It was for me. So, a few years ago, I started ensuring mushrooms are present in my diet regularly, as consistently as some people might eat meat, and I think with a similar sense of savory nourishment. I literally tripped over the agaricus bisporus mushrooms at a local park, and have since then been picking all my mushrooms from there and I eat them regularly. I’ve foraged dozens of pounds of mushrooms from the park, now. But before foraging them from the park, I’d always have mushrooms on hand from a local grocery store, and would add them to my meal, described below. Autophagy The body is always taking old cells apart for parts, and rebuilding structures as needed. Some cell types (epethelial cells) regenerate/renew relatively quickly, lasting for just a few days or weeks, and others turn over slowly, lasting for months. ‘Autophagy’ is the sciency term for this. The process is determined by mitochondria. The cell doesn’t decide it’s time for itself to die, mitochondria decide it’s time for the cell to die, and basically induce a suicide for the cell. (the book, power, sex, and suicide is all about mitochondria and their rather interesting relationship to the cells they operate within and around) healthy mitochondria are hella smart, and it’s very very nice for the body to do some autophogy. Fasting and fasting-mimicking nutrition patterns encourage autophagy. The cool thing is, it seems mitochondria are smart enough to consume to unhealthiest parts of the body. So, one can sorta replace the oldest/most-worn-out parts of oneself, if one is having lots of autophagy going on. Augophagy is low when glucose levels are high. Atophagy is high when glucose levels are low and ketone bodies are high. Meat is wildly over-consumed Something that annoys me a little in the ketosis-discussing books is how the authors (or posters online) seem to all hold oddly strong beliefs about the “obvious” need for nearly daily consumption of meat! I find this super disappointing. It seems possible that meat is not bad for you. Yet the consumption of factory-raised-and-slaughtered animal products, the scale at which it’s happening, and the legit concerns about the actual product, even if one had no ethical qualms about the animal slaughter itself… i remember when I was eating meat regularly and couldn’t imagine stopping eating it. Bacon was in my daily omelette, I didn’t think I could give it up. Then I read eating animals and that’s basically the last time I ate meat. I have had a few bites of meat here and there in the decade that’s elapsed since I read the book. I’m certainly not a vegan. I eat eggs, so many eggs, almost never less than three per day, and I put heavy cream in my coffee, usually, and sometimes eat cheese, and I bake with butter. It’s been almost ten years since I’ve bought meat in a grocery store and taken it home to cook, but it’s been twenty years since I’ve not eaten at least three eggs every single day, except for rare days when I’m fasting. I keep dancing around the idea of eliminating eggs from my consumption, but have not found a way yet. I now think it probable that eating a lot of meat is unhealthy. Drinking milk seems obviously problematic, for the same reasons as meat, and maybe some extra ones as well. (animals when drinking milk in normal states are in a period of growth, so the rich hormone profile of animal milk, reasonable for babies, makes less sense for adults. Milk to me is sorta carby, too. Anything that ends in -ose is a sugar. Glucose, fructose, lactose) So, if one takes meat and most dairy away, and if one treats grains like bread and rice as unhealthy and best avoided - is there even anything left to eat? yes. endless varieties of vegetables, mushrooms, eggs, and an abundance of olive oil. So, that’s what I eat, nearly exclusively. For things to taste ‘good’ vs. bland (I grew up in a white peoples cooking culture - bland and unseasoned) I use lots of spices. I keep a big bag of ginger and garlic nearby - every meal gets a little of that, diced. Spicy peppers. Salt & pepper, of course, and I’ve lately been spicing the meal with garam masala, curry, tumeric, cumin, and more. I’ll splash some lemon juice and scallions over the whole thing when plating it, and the food is so good that even now, after making variations of this meal hundreds of times, it is still remarkable to me how good it tastes. On meat & protein & ‘gaining muscle’ sometimes I’m a bit angry when I’m penning some words, if it’s not obvious. there is something in gym culture that is distasteful to me. Seems like ‘getting big muscles’ is the presumed good and ideal outcome of nearly all exercise? At least from one POV. There’s people who add tons of protein powder to every meal. There’s things floating around that says someone “should” eat 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body mass, or per kg of lean body mass. I’ve never counted calories and never counted grams of protein. When I do count up my regular protein consumption, it works out to way less than half the ‘recommended’ amount of protein. I rock climb, and would gladly accept a lower weight, if it didn’t come with any strength penalty, or hunger. No meat, no protein powder, and I’m doing just fine, though I must mention I don’t consider myself to be particularly good at rock climbing. even a gram of protein per KG of lean body mass is wild, to me. No one’s body is simply adding muscle to the frame because there’s extra protein in the system. I simply wanna name that, because I’ve been seeing a comical amount of new muscle lately with these isometric bar holds, for the first time in my life. Small amounts of muscle, small amounts of protein, small amounts of high-quality exercise-adjacent stimulus. Calories in/Calories out I hold the Calories In/Calories Out model, for what is implied on both the inputs side, and energy expenditure side. Literally never in my life have I looked at the calory count on a food package. literally all I look at is the quantity of carbs. But it’s physics … say the CI/CO people. I also don’t know what it means to ‘burn a calorie’. Like, whatever is meant when someone says “walking burns so and so calories.” or “i ate a , so now I have to <'exercise' a certain amount>." I think that mental model is unhelpful at best. The body manages itself pretty well. weight gain is driven by insulin levels. If insulin is stuck in the system, cells that can store fat, will store fat. If insulin is low, the body can access energy in normal ways, including metabolizing fat that already exists in the system. If insulin is kept high, eventually ‘insulin resistance’ happens, all sorts of other troublesome effects happen. ‘Weight gain’ is extremely NOT related to ‘eating more calories than one expends’. The Case Against Sugar goes through the stories of so many different people groups who encountered industrialized food systems, even into the 1950s. Sugar/carbs causes the blood glucose levels to rise, and eventually insulin gets secreted to bring the glucose back down, but if more and more stuff is in the system resulting in insulin needing to stay up, bad things happen. Sustained, ‘chronic’ reliance upon insulin leads straight to metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is the same as insulin resistance, is the same as pre-diabetes. Fasting will very, very quickly bring back insulin sensitivity, if it’s been absent. “exercise” cannot address the issues of elevated levels of insulin, except for a bit of movement after eating, maybe? I use my glucose sensor, a low carb meal + a five minutes of walking sometims around seems to let the blood sugar levels stay completely flat. Even if I don’t walk around at all, after this ‘sorta weird’ meal I usually eat, there’s zero bump to blood sugar, in a way that I maybe seems surprising. It was to me, at least. Sidebar on Oral Health This whole thing is talking about food, and digestion. The gut is pretty cool. (I really liked Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ). Part of oral health is keeping the mouth clean and inhospitable to bacteria while letting the mouth do its own thing. Fasting and/or no-sugar eating seems obviously gentle on the teeth, compared to using the mouth constantly. I stumbled across a thing called oil pulling once. I saw that coconut oil was one of the suggested oils. I already think of coconut oil as nearly pure ketones. The story goes: MCT (medium chain triglycerides) Oil is really expensive and fancy ‘pure liquid ketones’, supposedly. Coconut oil has a lot of the biological precursors of those ketone-specific form of MCTs, and is antibacterial, and great for the skin, lips, body anyway. It seems that most people who subscribe to oil pulling spit out the oil, but it cannot go into a sink because it contributes to clogged pipes. The solution that seemed easiest to me is to pick an oil I already consume and think highly of, and simply swish it around for a bit before eating it, so that’s now what I do with coconut oil, in a way that relates to oral health. I also found some gum with nano-hydroxyapatite, seems to help resurface the teeth, and floss, and have a home de-scaler so I can make sure plaque doesn’t build up around my permanent retainer. So far, my oral health has been nice in a way it’s historically not been, but the biggest intervention I made was fixing my tongue tie and my mouth no longer is open when I sleep or when I’m awake, so that alone could have more of an improving effect on my oral health than all over interventions combined. Mitochondria are cool as heck I was one of the folks with a certain mental model of mitochondria as sorta passive ‘energy making things’, left over from some high school biology textbook. I quite liked this book about cellular biology: Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. Mitochondria as energy generation (including the aerobic oxygen+glucose pathway, the anerobic glucose fermentation pathway, and the pathway that uses ketones to generate energy, when there’s not glucose in the environment). The ‘suicide’ part of the title of that book refers to how mitochondria decide “for the cell” when the cell is to be deconstructed for parts. From the cell’s POV, it’s an induced suicide, from the mitochondria’s POV, it’s taking apart a structure for the bare materials and re-assembling a fresh or related or different structure. In american scientific english, that is called ‘autophagy’, and healthy/happy mitochondria do a lot of selective, necessary cell removal. Related, Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind: A Powerful Plan to Improve Mood, Overcome Anxiety, and Protect Memory for a Lifetime of Optimal Mental Health I hate the title. Again, american medical establishment paternalistic talk. And yet, worth sifting through. Talks about low-sugar brain function vs. high-sugar brain function. The former is quite a bit different and improved from the latter. I’d never conceived of a high-fat low-carb feeding pattern as a tool for ‘managing moods’ until pretty recently, but I encountered it on reddit (example search), eventually found the above book, and was glad I did. Other Reading Just a few months ago, I found Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection. I’d long heard of Otto Warburg, in the history of cancer research for his encounter of that interesting feature of call cancer cells - that their normal cellular metabolic functioning is broken and they laboriously ferment blood sugar. The book is fascinating, Otto Warburg was a bit of an ass, and the vignettes about Hitler and other Nazis were top notch. (Lots of american purity culture is in common with some nazi norms around purity culture). Tripping over the Truth this book is nearly the origin story, I first read it many years ago now, and still think of it regularly. Seems reasonable now to say “cancer is a reasonable result of ‘everything is too sugary too much of the time’.” that means resolving THAT issue, and keeping things low-sugar for a while and seeing what happens, works so well. note on fast-adjacent things I keep noticing a pattern when medical people talk about this low-glucose state, and I think they’re overstating aspects of it. But maybe the technology wasn’t available when they wrote these books - a good continuous glucose monitor + app integration became widely available only in 2024 or however long Lingo figured out how to get $50 two-week CGM sensors on Amazon available to anyone with a credit card. as I’ve read some of the books like finally finding an e-book copy of [Thomas Seyfried’s book]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13719723-cancer-as-a-metabolic-disease?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=B9UvTfpzvN&rank=1() that kept getting mentioned in other texts. Cancer as a metabolic disease, libraries and had no luck getting a physical copy…. I found the PDF on thepiratebay, and started skimming around the document. I notice that I sorta find myself eating in a way that could be called ‘keto-ish’ sometimes, was curious to see what they said about it all. For instance, they talk about caloric restriction a lot, but I don’t think that’s part of the solution at all. Turns out cancer can also or maybe ferment something besides exclusively glucose - sometimes maybe it can do glutamate too? (if your next question is the same as mine, ‘what he hell is glutamate?’ and you google ‘sources of glutamate’, you’ll say “oh that makes sense”) If someone drops meat out of their diet, and backfills it with cruciferous vegetables, mushrooms, eggs, and olive oil & coconut oil, and occasional salmon & sardines (those fish in particular!), that person probably wouldn’t consider themselelves to be starving, but while keeping that pattern, their blood sugar will go to levels that some medical people think is ‘dangerously low’ (it’s not) and their body will go into pretty hefty ketosis. I think then there’s no sugar in the system for fermentating energy systems to ferment. Supposedly cancer cells can also ferment glutamine. I didn’t know what glutamine was and how it was different than glutamate, or what their relationships to anything else was. a med student on r/medicalschoolanki had a beautiful answer. anyway, knowing now what glutamate is, could you imagine a way to have less of it floating around, because just like glucose the body can apparently fabricate it itself? One would simply stop eating meat, if one was eating meat. Knowing that perhaps cells can ferment glutamine same as glucose, or that they can in at least some situations, was an interesting connection for me to make. I think there’s plenty of other good reasons to gnerally not eat meat, though. (except for, again, occasionally, sardines and salmon, or maybe fish overall but not very much. Certainly never pigs, dinosaur birds (chickens) or cows). So I think a crucial mistake ppl might make when thinking they’re avoiding sugar is not avoiding the glutamate. Model an ideal nutrition source as ‘not glucose’ and ‘not glutamate’, and drop meat out of one’s diet completely, and good things might happen. all the meat-based amino acids float around the blood stream perhaps, same as sugar? anyway…. I want to introduce ‘the meal’ and eating it once or twice-ish a day. And always eating once or twice-ish a day. If this meal is one of those regular meals, it might count as…. I donno. solves a lot of problems, in a pretty humble package, kinda. But still enough pretentiousness that it can be appreciated, and it’s delicious enough and can be done in just a few steps. A preference for spending most of the time not eating also gets fun. perhaps. Visualizing Mitochondria I had always thought of mitochondria as sorta passive blobs that did biochemistry to generate ATP, which was used by the body to ‘do shit’. Turns out they are busy as hell. A book titled Power, Sex, and Suicide really did it all for my brain when it comes to mitochondria. (The book is about mitochondria) For instance, cells do not want to ‘die’ and strenuously resist apoptosis until the very end. It’s mitochondria that get in there, and in a rather surgical and ruthless way, sorta eviscerate the cell from the inside out, and then they leave the cell and carry on in other places I thought mitochondria were stuck inside of cells, floating, sorta like plastic balls floating on the surface of a pool. Turns out that isn’t the case at all. The first 3 of these videos were the first ones I saw and really surprised me. As I’ve since tried to re-find those videos from years ago, I’ve linked a few other short timelapse videos of mitochondrial movement/dynamics 5 hr timelapse mitochondria, in like 6 seconds 30 minutes of Mitochondrial transport along microtubules, 10 second timelapse 11 second video, mitochondria moving in a cell Mitochondrial transfer between pre-adipocytes? mito movement (12 seconds) Golgi and Mitochondria Dynamics in Fibroblast Cells Under a Fluorescence Microscope Visualizing mitochondrial trafficking in neurons Mitochondrial dynamics through cell division A note on calories in/calories out this model, ‘calories in calories out’, is total bullshit. so many issus with the input side of calories, and in the ‘output’ side of calories. I AM SO SORRY I CANNOT HELP BUT LEAD WITH HOW I FEEL ABOUT IT! I’ll explain. Unfortunately, though, I never really ever thought CICO was true, it felt intuitively wrong to me my whole life. Even the last youtube video above, right after the timestamp it opens to, the creator says “too much nutrition”. It’s not that! It’s not too much energy or nutrition or over-feeding, it’s too much glucose and ‘too much’ and ‘too long’. Body composition things is OBVIOUSLY a hormone issue! It’s so screamingly obvious and assumed as true by every other related domain that it’s wild that anyone still says CICO! If that were the case, hormone therapies of all kinds would not be an option! Weight gain and loss and muscle recomposition is such a known part of horomone therapies. They’re either the entire point, or they’re the entire obvious downside. if the body is soaked in sugar for too much of the time, insulin gets created and sent into the system in excessive quantities. Insulin has an effect on hormones of all sorts. Insulin resistance is synonymous with miss-calibrated everything else. “working hard” is a waste compared to “moving enough that the muscles are involved in drawing glucose out of the blood, if there is 1) too much sugar in the blood, or 2) there is sugar in the digestive tract that needs to be metabolized and released into the bloodstream, _because there’s no where else for it to go. Is it possible for the intestines to preferentially avoid digesting sugar and/or carbs? Can it be ‘spent’ in the gut biome, instead of going into the blood stream? If a dog were to eat shit post-sugary meal, would it taste sweeter than a regular shit? the body absolutely does not need any sort of steady input of nutrition, to maintain itself in a perfectly suitable fashion. ‘calorie restricted’, ‘calorie deficit’ is the same attitude calorie deficit is propaganda, counterproductive to think in the concept of calorie deficit, or to try to retain it like an emotional pool noodle is harmful. source is everything. Fat is far better as fuel than sugar, which is obvious when you see both burn in a fire. fat will puddle, bubble, it obviously has a higher heat retention capacity, catagorically different than cellulose (woody stuff, bready stuff, wet sugar). That said, here’s some interesting videos I recently watched on mitocohndria. (I was looking for some videos I’d seen where mitochondria were ‘tagged’ with some thing and able to be seen moving around) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQBmtzT4VTU Mitochondria generate energy inside of neurons & mitochondria prefer to consume ‘ketone bodies’ ketone bodies are made by the liver, same sorta process as the liver makes glucose. (the liver makes glucose, it stores it, and releases into the blood stream if the muscles or whatever asks for it) ketone bodies theoretically generate like 10x molecules of ATP per input molecule than glucose molecule. (8 in, 30 out?) I don’t exactly remember. It’s the ‘krebs cycle’ or ‘cytric acid cycle’. The krebs cycle happens inside of the physical structure of a mitochondria. That sorta grooved membrain thing. It’s a shape that maximizes internal surface area, same as the folding grooves of the brain. mitochondrial health and ‘brain/neuron health’ are 1:1. I did not know until like a year ago that there was any correlation between ketone bodies and mental/emotional stuff. read that again the book power sex and suicide posits that mitichondria are their own type of organizem and sorta colonized/invaded/helped regular cells, sorta an inside out version of the harmonious relationship between bacteria and plants in the “rhiozome”. (in the top layer of soil, plants deposit sun/water combined energy, it’s eaten by bacteria, bacteria create as a result certain metabolic products that is then taken up and used by the plant.) These systems could be considered to have their own independent existences, but happily exist with each other, wherever there’s metabolizing to be done. brain energy was an adequate read. a huge tldr of all this is to just get a continuous blood glucose monitor, eat a high fat, low-carb, low protein meal next, and then begin successive 18 hour fasts. perhaps within one day (for me) but maybe more one will see one’s glucose levels stay pretty low, except during exercise or activity. climbing, walking, running, throwing a frisbee, walking stairs, etc. Though if I did those things after eating a big meal, and seeing my blood sugar go up, with a little activity, it would sorta dive right back to normal. At least until a little more of the meal was digested, then it might go up again. big part of the demand side for getting blood sugar down is ‘any process in the body requesting energy’ so if one walks long/fast enough (or, my favorite stim, walking up and down a few flights of stairs) for the body to request energy, one can see one’s blood sugar plummet, in the space of a few minutes. It’s like wringing out a sponge, how quickly the few nalgine bottles worth of blood in our body to pick up 4 grams of glucose, it gets pulled out of the blood and the digestive tract can dump another few grams of glucose, which it’ll do smartly and with reasonable timing, if you set it up well enough for success. more on that later (I can be fasted for one, two, three days, and my glucose levels stay pretty similar during the day to when I’m eating normal low-carb type shit. ) in the space of a few minutes, if I do intense exercise, like hill sprints or climbing or lifting, or walking around for five minutes, or walking up and down the stairs in the six-floor building in which i live…. while wearing a cgm, i can see blood sugar go up, then down, then up, then down, quickly, right after having a big meal of bread, or doughnuts, or pizza, or indian food buffet with naan, or this, or that, or whatever… so, it’s not ‘too much calories’. blood sugar does not budge at all when I eat this meal. TODO: insert a few screenshots of Libre CGM data? this needs to be it’s own blog post. anyway, this meal is good, everyone loves it. ✨ The Meal ✨ todo: make this its own page I have a meal that I eat basically every day. If I eat a meal that isn’t this meal, my other meal for the day will be this meal. I eat almost exclusively twice-ish a day. Sometimes less, sometimes more, never breakfast. TODO: Add a photo of the finished result? Google doc of printable instructions I like it because while I can cook it easily, I always make it in bulk and get a few meals out of a single session with the cutting board/cast iron skillet meal vibe. I note that it is something that in some communities is a big deal, or even an impossibility. It’s a ‘keto-friendly’ meal, functionally zero carbs or zero net carbs. This meal as eaten is both deeply satiating and will cause not a single point increase in your blood sugar. It HATE counting calories and never have and never will, and i dislike the concept of ‘macros’, but this meal is zero carb, high fat, medium protein, zero meat, some eggs. i don’t eat meat which matters to me when I talk about keto things, because some keto communities eat wild, horrifying amounts of meat. Cows, pigs, chickens. I don’t eat those anymore. I do sometimes eat fish. But I can easily go weeks without eating any sort of meat, not even fish, and not miss it or think about it or feel that I am in any way nutrient deficient. I’ve cooked this meal or a version of this meal every day for at least 12 years. I’ve cooked this meal in like 18 countries, many dozens of kitchens. It’s easy to grocery shop for, flexible based on if any produce is in the refrigerator and going bad, but can also be made out of vegetables that only slowly go bad. onions and carrots, for instance, will keep for a long time (weeks), and can be a perfect base of the meal. But it can also take spinach or any other ‘delicate’ vegetable. I cook it because I am dumb and lazy and am sometimes using unfamiliar kitchens. I am not dumb, but some people have literally made fun of me for learning some of the things I’ve learned related to the kitchen, making fun of me for not having already known something. what the fuck. for instance, mushrooms can be/want to be cooked ‘dry’ on a pan. No oil needed. Lots of veggies can accommodate this method. Also, if the pan is getting hot or you want to steam the contents a bit you can add water to a hot pan while the food is cooking, and the temperature of the pan goes down, food sticks a bit less, and sometimes steam is created. I was 36, burning food to the bottom of a stainless steel pan in an unfamiliar kitchen, trying unsuccessfully to scrape burnt food off the bottom of that pan, when I learned this, and immediately found the obviousness of ‘add water to a pan’ breathtaking. I use it often when cooking, now, even in my cast iron, and love it for me. today’s 10,000, explanation it’s good as hell. I’ve gotten particularly good with it in the last year or so, but even the ‘basic’ version of this meal is delicious, and many others have reported as such to me. When I do my standard, current, at-home meal, it’s mouth wateringly good. And still, I cook it because it’s the fastest way of putting heat and food together and then shoveling the results into my mouth. People who know what they’re talking about have remarked on the speed and voracity with which I sometimes consume my food. The first time this was pointed out to me, in such a gentle and interesting way, I was instantly shocked that I’d never noticed it before. I’ve since gained lots of ‘mindfullness’ around food, or at least I can observe myself and have awareness when I’m deep into what seems to be pouring food into my body (and sometimes water) in a way that gives ‘camel’. todo: insert photo of the pan sitting one step away from where I type these words… I have a printable version of this ‘recipe’/instruction combination. I could/should include perhaps a timelapse video that shows the prep. It’s relatively quick, and I consider myself skillful with a chef’s knife and enjoy the chopping of the veggies and the prep of the meal. Because of a few decisions/tools/workflows, this meal is also for me easy to set up and easy to clean up. I can finish cooking with a cleaner workspace than what I start with, because most of the meal time is spent with the food sitting quietly & sauteeing, not needing active tending. It makes zero dirty pots and pans. side note, the convection cook top unit I use makes it even easier to get this meal done quickly and effortlessly. It’ll maybe show up in the time lapse some day. Google doc of printable instructions interestingness is next to beauty, sorta. I think deliciousness is next to beauty, too, and this meal sometimes tastes delicious and interesting. Basically, as many of the first line with one or two items from the second line for bulk: mix as much of this as possible: garlic, ginger, tumeric, lemon juice. Salt, cumin. Mushrooms. Spiciest peppers possible, at least a little Fill volume of cooking container with one: Broccoli, cabbage, carrots, onions, Oil/fat: olive oil or coconut cream. Acid: lemon. Mix it all together, cook it up, add eggs, mix the eggs in somehow, cook it all through, serve it up. Top with green onions, squeeze a lemon slice over it if you can, and then pour a HEAVY drizzle of EVOO, maybe sriracha or something spicy. It’s a meal, satisfying as hell. I can eat this meal once a day and hardly even detect hunger in my body between meals. Cast Iron is crucial, and a ‘cookie turner’ spatula. This would mean there’s iron in a very healthy way. The point isn’t iron, it’s ease and effortlessness. I can scrape my pan clean with a metal spatchula if I want, i never have to put water on it to clean. It perhaps makes sense in the video timelapse… that I’ve not yet published. I’ve got some time lapses of chunks of this meal prep. Maybe I’ll just combine them all and link it here. i recently started adding fresh squeezed lemon to all sorts of things. And energy generation in the body is named the citric acid cycle, so maybe the deliciousness relates to how useful it is to have in the body. Similar as the ‘lemon in lots of things’, I started wearing socks inside of my climbing shoes, virtually 100% of the time, from the first time I tried it. I never want to stick my bare feet in a climbing shoe again and it’s unlikely I ever will. consider trying it with a sense of curiosity, if you can. I’m weird, but not for this. Thank you, person who introduced me to these things. Garlic, as much as I can get in a meal and in my life. I found this delightful book in the library attached to the botanic gardens. I was already pro-garlic because of taste, and now I’m all the more pro-garlic. Garlic is a ‘natural antibiotic’, but unlike most normal antibiotics, it works on both gram positive and gram negative bacteria cell wall types. penaccilin works on only one of those types of bacteria. something something all bacteria have cell walls that are either gram positive or gram negative, but it affects how they interact (or don’t interact) with traditional antibiotics. Super cool. Again, this book that I stumbled across was great. Garlic has been used sorta by everyone, across time, to do useful things for all sorts of life-related domains. this 1996 book is a nice compendium of what is known in english about garlic, the chemical compounds within it, why they seem to do what they do Pulse oximiter, blood oxygen level & breath holding this could be it’s own article. There’s an interesting little device one can get off amazon, it’s quite cheap, a fingertip pulse measuring device, it also detects blood oxygen levels. footnote? “technically something about oxygen carrying capacity of available total as detected in the capillary network of the fingertip” I got it around the same time that I started using a ‘breathholding training’ app. I wanted to know what my pulse was, and this was a simple way to measure. So, I can clip this to my finger, and immediately see my pulse printed out, and the blood oxygen level. And, turns out that when doing breath holding training, the blood oxygen level sometimes does really interesting things, and I’ve not seen other people talk about this yet. I can watch my blood oxygen level change (or not change) as I hold my breath. Sometimes I’d be at the end of my breath, it felt like my body was screaming for me to take another breath, and my blood oxygen level would be close to the max value, 99 or 100%. I noticed this but it didn’t really mean anything of interest to me, for months. I can do some breath holding training, and do a ‘one rep max’ breath hold test, and always was able to do above two minutes, maybe close to three. with a little practice, I found myself easily doing three-something minutes. Sometimes during long breath holds, when my body was still, I’d see the blood oxygen level tick downward to the low 90s or 80s. Nothing too severe. And then a tiny realization clicked, it was based off observations of how I sometimes observed my blood oxygen level going down, and then DOWN QUITE A LOT! and then popping right back up within seconds once I started breathing again. I gained an appreciation for how quickly blood that was allowed to pick up oxygen would reach the tips of my finger, to be read by the blood oxygen level sensor. turns out the thing that makes you want to breath is buildup of CO2, not lowering blood oxygen levels. This was always something I knew academically, but I’d not had much experience with it. So, a few weeks ago, a new mental model of my own respiration and metabolic processes clicked into place. I’ll do deep breathing for at least 30 seconds before starting a breath hold - in my mind, I’m running blood that has some amount of CO2 in it through my lungs, and i’m draining it of CO2 faster than my body is placing CO2 back in the blood cells. I believe my body circulates my entire 4.5 liters of blood at least once a minute, so this deep breathing moves more CO2 out of my blood than normally would be displaced if I were not doing that deep breathing. Then, when I take a deep breath and hold it, I have much more space in my blood supply to store CO2, which is being generated, slowly, throughout the breath hold. This means I can hold my breath much longer before the same amount of ‘pressure to breath’ builds. And, consequentially, much more of the oxygen that is in my blood gets consumed, before I take another breath. The same day I had this realization, I did far and away the longest breath hold that I’d ever done - over four minutes. I was shocked! It’s so interesting. I also was able to see my blood oxygen level go far lower than I ever had before. At no point did I experience any sort of cognitive effect or any sort of loss of conciousness, but I was comforably holding my breath while watching the pulse oximiter show values in the 70s, and then even into the 60s. It always dips a few more points after I start breathing, so the lowest values I’ve ever seen are always a few seconds after I begin breathing. This time I even saw it dip down to 51% for a brief moment, and then a few breaths later it was back to 100%. It feels like a form of training, no different than sprint workouts or heavy isometrics or climbing - I am imagining that some aspect of my respiratory or circulatory system is getting ‘tuned up’ by this practice. I find it deeply regulating and peace-promoting. I use the ‘STAmina Apnea Trainer app’ for android. it’s free. There seems to be an iphone version too. here’s the app I always do the breath holding while lying in my bed or hammock, by the way. Zero interest in water, never will have any. I also sometimes am in deeper-than-usual ketosis, when doing the breath holding training, and that almost certainly extends how long I can hold my breath. I’ve not tested it very much, but maybe i’ll update this section with more on that sometime. ‘ketone bodies’ whatever the heck those are this is extra drafty, I’ve been curious about this all, and I’ve long ago occasionally used some ‘ketone urine test strips’ (like this on amazon, i don’t do affiliate anything fwiw) and those are fine, whatever, but sorta hard to read, and usually I was sorta low, but way more often than I’d expected I was getting positive ketone measurements. also, I didn’t/don’t have too much of a mental model of how much is what, what it means. blah blah blah. Those are just a few dollars on Amazon, so just a few cents per test. But still not free. More expensive per test, but something that was more interesting to me was a blood ketone testing kit. It’s basically a blood sugar testing kit (finger prick, then measure with a disposable stick) which I’ve used in the past, prior to my first test with the continuous blood glucose monitor. I’d never had them both at the same time. Anyway, the first batch of those tests, I remember being surprised at how often my body was in slight ketois. .2 mmol/liter or .3 or .4, and ‘nutritional ketosis’, whatever that is, is generally considered by american medical people to begin at .5 mmol/liter. I’d be at/above that value quite often, too, when doing my normal nutritional pattern around ‘the meal’, I describe elsewhere. Anyway, that was a long time ago. More recently though has been a breath ketone measuring device! this is what I got It’s cost-per-use is free, and I’ve always noticed and/or wondered about value changes around exercise, fasting, pseudo-fasting, binging-on-pizza-and-ice-cream or having regular or occasional foods like that. Sorta testing the Standard American Diet on myself sometimes, and also testing my normal/default eating pattern. the breath meter is super easy, way easier than a BLOOD PRICK of course, generates zero waste, is just battery powered. Perfect. But then I was like “what tf is this thing measuring”, and what is the possible relationship between the number this thing prints out, and metabolic processes inside my own body. I’ve so far seen plenty of readings as low as 1 for myself, including times that I had thought I wouldn’t be in any form of ketosis, and values of 4-6 WAY more frequently than I would have thought. It does read zero, as well, at reasonable times. I’ve also seen values as high as 46!!! I’m pretty healthy, I like how I eat, and it turns out I’m in ketosis way more than I ever thought I would be, and I think it’s a big deal. Basically, it’s easy, healthy, and I’m low-key advocating for more people to consider some of the same patterns. It’s a bit feral, unconventional, and even low-capitalism. My personal implementation of these norms are very interesting to me, and I’d have done more of this long ago if I knew some of what I know now. breath acetone is what the breath thing measures - acetone is one of the three main ‘ketone bodies’ (whatever the heck those are) the other one is what is measured in the urine test strip, and the third is measured in the blood. Turns out they all seem to sorta follow each other, but I don’t know how closely. breath meter -> acetate (might be/probably ‘downstream’ of being burned for energy) urine stick -> ACETOACETIC ACID (might be ‘upstream’ of being burned for energy) blood stick -> I sometimes have done all this experimentation while exercising, or various amounts of time since my last meal, or my last high-glucose meal. I now have an intuition for the answers to all these options. I seem to usually have positive values on the breath ketone meter, even at times I thought I wouldn’t. Sometimes the values are quite high, _even when I am consuming my normal eating patterns, which doesn’t set out to accomplish any of this kind of thing. More lists of books that have been quite interesting to me Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer I was able to find the PDF on the peer to peer file sharing prot=ocol Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life best cell biology book I’ve read. Dense, I was able to get it via the library’s interlibrary loan system, was exceptional, mitochondria have a sorta…. adversarial relationship with the cell. Seems like mitochondria developed independent/before cells, very interesting relationship between volume of mitochondria, density of them within cells, some biological power laws that are the energy equivalent of the size/volume power laws. And the book has a great name! which serves as an outline of the concepts: the three big divisions of what mitochondria as active organelles do is: 1) generate power in impressive and diverse ways, 2) drive and control the different sorts of functions and roles the cells create, like sexual bimorphism, and 3) if mitochondria decide the cell needs to die, even if the cell does not quite want to die (it does not) the mitochondria induce the cell to kill itself. It’s no more difficult to read then the power broker/the story of robert moses Footnotes

I was out and about by scooter a recent warm january saturday evening. Earlier in the week a few companies had been operating drilling equipment in the area. I’m not sure what they were doing, but they were scattered all about the neighborhood. The work was done, but traffic cones were also spread all around the neighborhood. Sitting on the curbs and such. TODO: add link to photo album of the before/after I’ve done a lot with cones before, of course. I’ve a refined process. technically compliant with any formal body that deems to consider itself authoritative. There were many, many more traffic cones in the vicinity than I used. I set the cones up on the way to a local climbing gym, did a board session, checked in on them on the way home. Every cone was exactly where I placed it. Shout out Silva construction, for sure, for the cones. So, the next morning, sunday morning, I was at cheesman, and from the park, one can see down maybe six blocks of 10th ave, and I could see that even the next day, the cones remained. TODO link to photos down 10th from cheesman? so I did the park thing, then walked from the park to corona, where I’d placed the cones the night before. I passed more cones, and dotted those into the road in spots that caused delination and a bit of attention to be attracted. Vast improvements for everyone. I decided to treat an adjacent junction with another bunch of cones, and thats what this video is of: It’s in a 4x timelapse. visible changes brought about Some phenomina is hard to even write about. It’s best seen with the video slider going back and forth, showing something about the path a car took on a turn or whatever. But it’s the internet, we all like lists, here’s a list: the changed width of the crossings. originally 30 feet wide on all four sides. post-treatment crossings reduced in size to half or less. reduced width means reduced time spent in the crossing. Much less space one has to be concerned about being inside of. Sharper delineations between the spaces. I reduced the area of the junction and increased the vehicle throughput, so these few cones improved the vehicles per square meter per minute calculation. Even if ‘only’ by taking it from say 60 square meters to 40 square meters. (i’m making up those figures, I cannot eyeball the dimensions. TODO: perform an actual vehicles/sq meter/minute calculation for the before/after), the efficiency would be proportionately improved. I note that it could be reduced in size quite a bit more than I reduced it in the video. before-size: 260 square meters. After-size: 1631 the sounds improved. It used to be that many vehicles were accelerating through the junction. It’s one block from a traffic light and super market exit and it looks super open and wide. With the cones, almost every vehicle coasted or at worst very gently accelerated through it. At one point in the video, one sees a vehicle on downing stopping to let passing pedestrians. my ideal junction treatment turns it into a ‘shared space’ (vs a car-dominated space) where the larger/motorized vehicles defer to smaller/non-motorized/leg-powered vehicles. (counting walking people as vehicles here) the experience for turning left and right off of downing is much improved improved turn radius for vehicles going right. Less taking the turn wide and carrying too much speed. Lots of dangerous situations created by those right turns. similar thing with left turns, especially because of the shadow. Bad visibility, really dangerous to carry too much speed into. The cones telegraph the correct turn, every single driver rallied and landed it. There’s a tremendous rear-ending danger in the original intersection design.2 If a car were turning right, for instance, and suddenly stopped, noticing a pedestrian in the space in front of it, and got rear ended, it could end up bouncing into the space the person was occupying anyway. this turning/rear-ending dynamic is common on junctions around denver/the greater united states. It’s made better when the trailing/potentially rear-ending vehicle knows that it cannot overtake and pass closely the vehicle ahead of it. These cones clearly telegraph that. many more things. manifesting Repair as a Service In this capitalistic hellscape we live in, I could imagine Repair as a Service, sorta like Software as a Service. (in some circles, SaaS is the stuff) if something were a service, that means it can be purchased, and this is america, so if something is available for purchase, that means it’s available at all. Currently, however, one cannot, to my knowledge, quite purchase a repaired junction, the same way one can purchase a repair to some commonly repaired physical items, like vehicles, houses, devices. In the spirit of write it now and the iterative nature of the internet, here’s two different options plausible ‘junction repair as a service’ solutions, and everything technically works so I can get this page live. the ‘let josh truthfully say at any point in the future “someone has hired me/is hiring me at this very moment to run a pop-up experiment right here”:’ option: 👉 purchase ‘Josh’s Junction Coning’ via Stripe. google pay/apple pay works A three-cheers-for-capitalism option. Includes above plausibility beard, and some recorded outputs and magical calculations: 👉 purchase ‘Josh’s Junction Repair Writeup’ via Stripe. google pay/apple pay accepted Additional Reading prior coning adventures the traffic bean calculating vehicle efficiency metrics Footnotes I popped this open on google earth. Not the clearest satellite images, this is my rough interpretation. Still, 260 meters to 163 meters is almost a 40% reduction in size. the junction was never ‘maxed out’ in terms of vehicles moving through it for a time frame, so a direct count of vehicles per minute doesn’t quite make sense, but the principal of it’s efficiency being unaffected even as the space required is reduced by over a third is, I think, clear enough. Here’s much more about this vehicles per square meter per minute value ↩ and of course ‘danger still persists’ with this treatment. ‘spot fixing’ a mobility network isn’t a thing. One fixes a route, for a vehicle class, at minimum ‘legs’ is a vehicle class, and ‘the other side of the street’ is a valid route, but most trips will include at least a few junctions in sequence. This treatment is best applied to junctions in sequence, a little of the video I have shows an adjacent junction a block away I fixed. I think three fixed junctions in a row is a nice thing, so doing two in a row is getting close. To appreciate three of these in a row starts with experiencing one. ↩

Introduction I’ve long liked to accrue certain lists of things I like within certain categories. to list appreciable books invites a similar list for movies and movie-like things. It feels strange to list all of these movies like this, in some ways, especially the first two documentaries, juxtaposed against some of the other recommendations I have around here. Some of these shows I found or watched on Netflix, or Jeff Bezos’ internet. Some I searched the pirate bay, and found them there. Example: https://thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=homebodies+1974&cat=0. I’m using Folx as my torrent manager most recently, and NordVPN. Two documentaries I just finished an incredible documentary. One of the more substantial I’ve ever seen. By a distinctively-named Joshua Oppenheimer. Full warning, it’s about recent acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing, a coordinated campaign of mass killing, in Indonesia. The Act of Killing The first is about recent, recent events in Indonesia. The Act of Killing, 2012, IMDB. It’s worth skimming the wikipedia page Useful additional contextual reading could be the book The Jakarta Method, and How to Hide An Empire 1 The Look of Silence Oppenheimer did another documentary, after that one, with a similar theme. The Look of Silence, 2014 Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentaries repeatedly land in unexpected ways. he shows interviews of the people who carried out the killing campaigns in Indonesia, and movies they direct about what they did. They speak very openly, and approvingly, of their own actions. The last ten minutes of The Look of Silence were distinctive. 2 Scooter-themed Of course I will find something arbitrarily more interesting than otherwise if it involves a Vespa-style scooter, in any way. I like scooters, of course. I once looked through a few lists of movies having scooters in them, and have since watched at least a few from the list. That’s how I encountered some of the following. Super Cub Super Cub is about that super classic motorcycle-style vehicle that is very similar to a scooter. It’s a peaceful show (sorta gives Studio Ghibli at times) about a kid who gets a moped and the unfolding of adventures around it. I found it on Crunchyroll. Here’s a youtube video about the series. The Interpreter From the same list (‘all movies that feature scooters in any way’), I encountered The Interpreter, 2005, and quite liked it. It ended up having satisfying and subversive messages throughout, in my opinion. I have a page of notes I took, as I watched it, I might add here or in it’s own post. The protagonist’s mode of transportation is a scooter, which is how it got on the list of movies I considered watching. I ended up liking the movie a lot more than I expected! The person’s use of the scooter is unrealistic in only one way - at one point there is a vehicular chase, and the people in the car are able to keep up with the person on the scooter. I kept wishing the scooter user would pass through a gap too narrow for the car and ‘solved’ the problem that way, instead of failing to utilize it’s primary beneficial attribute. I liked many other parts of the movie, too. Amalie wikipedia 2001 French-language romantic comedy film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet absolutely delightful in 100 ways. One of the best I’ve ever seen. Totally unexpected. I was moved, watching it. The description only touches on a portion of what is delightful about it. It’s about love, indeed. Robert-Moses-themed movies I still maintain Robert Moses as a delightful conceptual compression for ‘why are things the way they are’ (I.E, why do the greater united states not have any functioning inter/intra-city rail system? why are highways virtually always approved with dollars and permissions and signed contracts and rights of way, seemingly of their own volition? Why is the american urban transit system devoid of the people that built the tram systems of the 1920s?) Robert moses ran those kinds of people out of the industry. Not only did he employ thousands of engineers, and would fire anyone who advocated for rail transit solutions, but he would instruct the people he issued contracts to, to not hire those people either. The theme here is movies directly featuring Moses and/or his slum clearance/urban renewal/ethnic cleansing-via-displacement programs. Often enough reading about it feels very academic, talking about him as an urban planner. He’s so worth discussing because his effect on the world was not academic at all. I discuss Robert Moses quite a bit more here Motherless Brooklyn, 2019, Edward Norton Motherless Brooklyn, 2019 film written, directed, produced by edward norton a bunch of well known actors, including the person playing robert moses himself. I wish I could cut the scene that is lifted directly from the power broker. Robert Moses (called Moses Randolph, in this movie) is in a very distinctive way bullying the mayor into giving him another board seat, for instance. It’s all about Robert Moses, and the way he was destroying a neighborhood and community in pursuit of whatever it was he was pursuing. Told in a film-noir murder-mystery style. I’ve not (yet) read the book it’s based on (the book titled motherless brooklyn, but I have read the other book it’s obviously based on, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York City) “I Won’t Go” a 1960s-era 25 minute comedy show, titled “I Won’t Go”, available on youtube from the 1960s, depicting a 1950s-era event - the destruction of housing in order to make way for a piece of a highway, an approach to the George Washington Bridge. I cannot help but think of the land of Palestine, and the many different forms of settler colonialism/occupation pushed into that area. The kinds of justifications used for this sort of action, all around the world. the many similar themes (bulldozers, the different authorities and permits and men with guns) about an entire municipality and police force evicting an old lady from her house, and her various ways of trying to remain in her own house. Episode ends with her pointing out to everyone where her house used to be, under what was then turned into an approach road for one of Robert Moses’ bridges. Homebodies, 1974 satirical comedy horror Homebodies, 1974 satirical comedy horror film The film centers on a group of elderly residents in a Cincinnati tenement building who resort to murder when their building is condemned in the wake of urban redevelopment. (wikipedia) It is, in short, a close up and personal, look at what it was like for the residents of a single building, as they were being made to be without housing. Please note how similar the scenes in that movie are, and the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the palestinian people. The buildings, the torn up streets. It’s a lovely film. To find it online, something like this might work. Or Jeff Bezos’s internet, i believe. Lots of bulldozers, urban renewal, wrecking balls, destruction of neighborhoods for highways and luxury apartments. This movie is entirely centered in robert moses’ world. So many poignant scenes. A cool depiction of a certain use of power, defensive power, perhaps. No particular theme Maybe anime? Delicious in Dungeon Delicious in Dungeon A delightful show, prominently featuring cooking, food prep, foraging, creative problem solving, and lots of other nice things. It keeps delivering delight. Suzume Suzume is a delightful film in 100 different ways. I’ve seen it at least three or four times, probably will watch it at least three or four more times. The Way of the House Husband wikipedia, also delightful. Synopsis: Tatsu, an infamous and feared yakuza boss nicknamed “the Immortal Dragon”, retires from crime to become a househusband so that he can support Miku, his kyariaūman wife. The episodic series depicts a variety of comedic scenarios, typically wherein Tatsu’s banal domestic work as a househusband is juxtaposed against his intimidating personality and appearance, and his frequent run-ins with former yakuza associates and rivals. It’s delightful, at least the first season or two. I feel like I remember some of the later episodes of the latest season sometimes trailing off, but overall an incredible and delightful show. Subversive in delightful ways! Charlie Wilson’s War The story of a person named Charlie, and the war he wanted and got. Charlie Wilson’s War on IMDB. Based on the book by the same title. Similar theme be said to emerge with Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. I believe a movie or a show was released, based on the book, but I’ve not seen it. Anything by Chalmers Johnson is thematically similar, like Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire America’s/american attitude towards the rest of the world is similar to ‘its/their’ attitude towards native people (genocide, displacement, reservation-ization, not unlike Palestine) and the enslaved people that found themselves existing within ‘its’ borders, among “them”. War, death, enslavement. What a disaster to have unfolded on this continent. I wish it had never been like this. Additional Reading Recommended Reading (and watching) A Love Letter to Studio Ghibli Footnotes I view all acts of mass killings as some enactment of supremacy. I dislike the concept of refinements in the USA of some sorts of supremacy as ‘white supremacy’. The phrase ‘white’ cedes too much to the supremacists. Supremacists of all flavors commit acts of dehumanization, of all flavors, against all/most/enough people they encounter, and themselves, of course. I’ve always been interested in how and why (and THAT) things go wrong. Have you yet crossed paths with the Hutu massacre of the people of Tutsi heritage/ethnicity/class? The 1991 genocide in rwanda? in a small number of days, many people were murdered, often-enough by machete. It’s close enough to the distinctively american tradition of night riding. ↩ I’d first written horrifying, in a slow, unfolding way. The subject, who murdered a lot of people and then made a documentary about it, determined that because he played a role in a movie, being pretend-tortured and pretend killed, he had appreciation for the experiences of his victims, and thus was forgiven for his actions!!! Maybe I’m wrong. You watch it and tell me if you get something else. ↩

Sometimes I’ve told people “I ride with Asian scooter norms.” or “I ride with Taiwanese and Balinese scooter norms”. Here’s what I mean by this statement. a ‘norm’ is ‘something common, accepted, sometimes codified in law, but certainly accepted as ‘right’ or ‘acceptable’ or ‘ethical’. There’s a distinctive vibe on scooters in Bali, and since I’ve spent a bunch of time there (partially because of their lovely scooter norms!) I brought with me lots of habits and skills from Bali, and some of the scooter-specific social/technological innovations common in Taiwan. Since I ride in the USA in ways affected by what’s common in Bali. I also do some ‘mental imports’ of norms from Taiwan in some specific ways. Interesting scooter movement patterns noticed in Taiwan Lets discuss some norms common to Taiwan, first. I once had a 24 hour layover there, and it wasn’t my first time in the city, so I already knew I was looking forward to exploring it. The first time I’d been to Taiwan, I’d only a few times ridden a 50cc scooter in Greece on a few days long climbing trip. I didn’t particularly enjoy the experience, it sorta soured me on scooters, overall. The vehicle was loud and rattly and barely got even just me up hills, let alone me and a passenger and gear. Years later, I learned, in an experiential way, that a 125cc scooter can be a very different experience, much improved. I then ended up with a 170cc scooter, and loved it, I still have it, have ridden it everywhere. So, this time in Taipei, I had the motorcycle endorsement, and a new/updated international drivers license, and I had plenty of experience on my scooter in the USA, I’d ridden my 170cc scooter to Canada and back from Denver. I’d brought my gloves, my mask, ear plugs, various things to make the riding comfortable, as I planned on making regular use of rental scooters. the place I stayed was next door to a scooter rental place, it was cheap, and I love riding scooters around, and found everything about it interesting. For instance, it’s nearly impossible to rent a scooter, or even a motorcycle, in the USA. bummer. here’s a link to a map that shows my exact trip around for the day. Some of the line is the fast train from the airport.. Here’s an image of what opens on the map, if you click the above link: Taiwan has exceptional scooter norms, and most of the people moving around are on scooters. Most of the space is still given to/taken up by the small number of people in very large cars, but, unlike the norms of the greater united states, the cities were never quite torn up (‘urban renewal’) with car colonialization quite the same. Taiwan’s mobility network is still over-affected by American road norms, of course. The Scooter Box A common feature in some junctions, especially junctions of a certain size, is a box painted on the ground ahead of where the cars and large vehicles stop, where all the scooter riders collect. Click this link to open a google street view image of a junction in Taipei. See the scooters in the painted scooter box? There is a scooter logo painted inside the box, it’s a ubiquitous feature of the environment. It makes things better for everyone in so many ways. Scooters filter to this box through stopped traffic, and then they can go in a blob when they light changes. (which changes a second early for scooters vs. regular cars) I treat american intersections similarly, the (usually empty) crosswalk space functions for me as ‘the scooter box’. If there are people in the crosswalk, I’ll still go to the front, I’ll just stay out of the crosswalk until it’s empty. The ‘box turn’ strategy for making certain left turns To go left on certain roads, in Taiwan, one first goes right. Or proceeds around the junction with the shape of a box, but different than the above ‘scooter box’. Regardless, I use the concept when crossing American junctions, especially anything that seems like an arterial. Left turns on arterials, in particular, are very difficult/dangerous, or at least can be, and this box turn is a reliable problem solving strategy. Here’s a bunch of youtube videos explaining this concept: taiwan left turn, youtube. This video is particularly nice, the embed starts at the 43 second mark: Here’s my written explanation: for certain junctions of certain geometries/dynamics, to go left, one first goes right. the junction is usually marked with a sign, which means ‘it is not expected that you collect on the left to go left, but on the right’. As one enters the junction, one pulls their scooter to a sometimes painted box, at the front-most part of the column of traffic waiting to proceed straight. When the light changes for them, they go straight, so do you, and it’s as if you’d gone left through the junction. Another way of phrasing it: where there is no access to a a protected left turn, to prevent otherwise having to wait in a risky spot, darting through gaps in traffic (something so common with american intersections). one pulls to the front of the line of traffic waiting at the light to proceed straight. When it’s their turn, you go with them. It’s very unenjoyable to feel ‘pinned’ between fast traffic driving straight at you, as you’re waiting for a gap in one or two lanes, to go left, while having fast traffic passing by on the right side, continuing, because they are not going left. this is all solved by the traffic bean, by the way. Making every junction sorta roundabout-ish, with the right curve geometries to get a first-in-first out vehicle flow. The junctions can be made smaller, and can serve more vehicles at a smoother, more interleaved rate. my fantasy is to be able to say ‘coming soon to a junction near you’, plausibly. 1 Here’s what that alternative, a quick right turn to obtain a left turn, looks like: Painted on the ground, ahead of even the aforementioned scooter box, even closer to the junction, there is another square, it’s the collection point for scooters wanting to make a left turn. Thus, one first makes a right turn and stop at the very front of the traffic waiting for the light to change (in this box painted on the ground). Then, they wait the rest of the light cycle, out of the flow of traffic When the light changes and turns green for them, they now get to go through the junction with all the other scooter riders, just as protected as could be. I use this strategy to make left turns sometimes on my scooter in the states. There’s lots of signage for this in Taiwan, and after experiencing the first one, it was easy, peaceful, safe. I found riding my scooter around Taipei to be quite peaceful and safe. The Pre-green Because all scooters collect at the scooter box, they have better views to the cross streets, and are smaller and do best moving as clumps anyway. The light counts down, and in some different ways will turn green for scooters before it turns green for cars. (in the videos from the box turn/left turn section, a few different green light countdowns are visible) I call it ‘taking the pre-green’, and is something I do in America, often enough. Some junctions will turn green for pedestrians crossing a second or two before turning green for cars. I’ll treat the pedestrian walk as a green light for me on my scooter, if I want. I never assume that cross traffic is stopping because of a light, by the way, I watch vehicles pointed at me/where I want to be very carefully. but wait there is more So, I’ll take the honest pre-green, too. It still looks red in some ways, in some directions, and I’ve met some timer in my head and I go. I know when the light is going to change, especially because I’m so far to the front of the intersection I can easily see the light for the other direction of traffic. I know when it goes yellow, red, and I can stare straight down the line of traffic. Some of the junctions I’ve gone through thousands of times. I can tell (and indeed always note) if there is a vehicle, and if there is a vehicle, I note if the speed is changing or the same, what it is, where, and so much more. intricacies of where the driver’s head is pointed (even if it’s not relevant to me), or I might note whatever path they’re taking across whatever stretch of asphalt they’re on. If they seem attentive or not. Anyway, if there is no car especially, I’ll ‘take the pre-green’ and will advance through the junction before the light turns green for the larger vehicles, as is common in Taiwan. I have a well-calibrated and sensitive process I use to go through junctions, safely. I have itchy brake fingers, I rarely rush. When I’m alone and on familiar paths, and it’s early in the morning perhaps, like 6:30a, I sometimes ride with a different energy than if I have a passenger, or a load of groceries, or it’s at night or it’s rush hour instead. Honestly, I’d rather not be perceived, so to anyone who’s ever seen me on my scooter and felt personally affronted (this has happened at least a few times), to you I’d say: Honestly, I wish I wasn’t there, then, for you to have to have seen me either. And if I were there, I wish you didn’t even notice me. Better luck next time, to both of us. Can I tell you a little about robert moses? He’s sorta why the roads are the way they are, and the way that ‘enforcement’ works on them the way that it does. So, from Taipei I bring the concept of the bike box to the USA. As well as the ‘left turn via bike box’ strategy. This contributes to my own safety, as a few common ways of getting injured on a vehicle like a scooter is getting rear ended by someone not seeing you, as they’re stopping. I never stop behind a stopped car, and rarely in front of moving cars, I’m thus ineligible for this sort of accident. Masking Norms It’s odd to me in the USA that wearing masks when on/near roads isn’t more common. It’s ubiquitous in Asia, and I now wear a mask 100% of the time I’m on my scooter. It’s like earplugs, to me. Ubiquitous, I store at least one mask in my scooter seat at all times, next to my rain layer. Here’s a long thing about my head/lung/skin protection norms. Balinese innovations around scooter movements Bali is a pretty mountainous place, so lots of the cleverness of Bali’s mobility network is in the narrow, winding paths. Entire parking garages can be fit in a space smaller than two american parking spaces. This section could be 30 points long. Maybe it’ll grow with time. I have lots of video footage from Bali, I’ll add it here eventually. The ‘green for scooters first’ light cycle Often enough on the occasional light-mediated road junctions in Bali, one notices that the red lights blink red/white a few times before before they turn green. Sometimes similar to things visible in Taiwan, sometimes different. When the light starts blinking red/white (sorta a 3-2-1 countdown to the green light), the scooters can go, then when the light turns green, the large vehicles can go. in the USA, when I am on my scooter, I might treat intersections as if they’re equipped with the same feature. Because I am so close to the front of the intersection (see prior point, choosing to hang out in the bike-box/cross-walk) I can easily see long distances in both directions, and I always know exactly when the light will change, thus can choose to give myself pre-emptive green. 2 Making excellent usage of small spaces, parking edition Bali sees endless creativity with what can be packed on a scooter, where scooters can be ridden/fit, like gates and doors and ramps, and how they can be parked. (sorta anywhere) Scooters are small, can be easily moved, even if just a few inches, when parked and locked. Any event or venue or store or compound had functionally infinite parking, on site, mere steps from the destination. As parking would fill up, either parking attendents or newly arriving-by-scooter-visitors would jostle the parked scooters around a bit to park them more densely, and then would park their own vehicle. It was common to leave scooters without the locked steering column, and then the moving them around was even easier. Very convenient with parades. People walking ahead of the parade or street festival would just move around/clump together the parked vehicles, moving them as little as a few inches, once or twice as far as 20 feet up the curb. Similar to in Thailand if double-parking, or parking someone in, it’s convention to leave the vehicle in neutral so it can be rolled out of the way. These are all nice norms! If someone is making scooters orderly and trying to pack them densely, hundreds of scooters can be fit, easily, in a space that could be walked across in just a few steps. Thus, lots of parking was on the other side of a narrow gate, or a narrow path, and to pass through these small spaces was to feel very aware of having been transported from one place to another. Balinese doors and gates deserves its own blog post. I park my scooter at my house inside of a gated, locked, courtyard area. Under a roof, protected from rain and snow and sun, and with a cover on it. It’s nearly invisible in several ways, and it is the most convenient parking spot on site. I always have the best parking, because my eye is well-refined, at finding creative parking spots. Scooters flowing around I’m now used to evaluating american road networks as I evaluated Bali’s road networks - if cars are stopped, one goes around them, in a peaceful way. It’s easy and normal to give deference to whatever user of the space can be identified as most vulnerable. Pedestrians get priority over everyone, then scooters, then cars. In bali, paint is rarely placed on roads. road markings don’t often exist. Either center lines, shoulders, and much more. And where they do exist, they’re still much more of a guideline than is normal in the greater united states. Here’s a slice of what Balinese scooting norms looks like, on their most intensive highway. This is, truly, the largest highway on the island.3 wistia-player[media-id='6egwnjx8q0']:not(:defined) { background: center / contain no-repeat url('https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/6egwnjx8q0/swatch'); display: block; filter: blur(5px); padding-top:177.78%; } I’m trying to convey a sense of “every place has a distinctive way of doing something, some other places do things differently, sometimes its better”. I’ll find videos of some of the smaller roads, the ones that I usually encountered. I rode my scooter on the highway very rarely when I was there. American Legal Norms Often-enough I record myself riding my scooter around and I sometimes want to discuss how I go through junctions. I go through most junctions in a similar-enough way. I note wanting to reference this page and some of these norms. Additionally, in some places, 50 cc scooters are legal equivalents with a regular pedal-powered bicycle. So, in a stretch, a scooter can do what a bike can do. That mine happens to have a larger-than-50-cc-engine in it is… true. Bikes are ‘allowed’ to treat stop signs as yields. Rolling stop + idaho stop or something. Red lights are ‘allowed’ to be treated as stop signs. I have a firm stance on jaywalking anyway. I can move my scooter at the same speed, agility, and ‘footprint’ that I can move myself on my own two feet, so sometimes I treat it exactly as I would me on my own feet. Just better carrying capacity, and easier to move around with. An uncontrolled vs. controlled junction So, I discussed navigating a ‘controlled’ junction (those are anything where the path is affected by a stop sign or traffic light), and now lets discuss ‘navigating’ a ‘uncontrolled’ junction if you’re driving through a four-way junction, and cross-traffic has a stop sign and you do not, that is an ‘uncontrolled’ junction, in at least one, probably two, probably many more than two, ways. Another form of ‘uncontrolled junction’ is every time an alley and a street intersect. So street-street junctions can be uncontrolled, alley/street junctions. There’s more. They’re sorta like bollards. Once you know what they are/how to identify them, you might notice them everywhere. Imagine a sign hung, that says ‘cross-traffic does not stop’. That sorta implies that the junction is uncontrolled, so you must wait until circumstances support your crossing. (a traffic bean brings all inbound speeds to ~10 mph and makes it so all traffic comes exclusively from the left, at 10 mph, thus one doesn’t need to worry about ‘cross traffic does not stop’ signs/dynamics. It can be made large, sorta like a traffic ‘ribbon’, if necessary, or really small) how I go through uncontrolled junctions Because an uncontrolled junction is a matter of timing, passing through it can be a rare and special opportunity, especially for people in cars. Their mobility is less, the pressure they feel from lights and stop signs and other cars is much, much more than I feel. If I see a car with any sorta of ‘darting’ energy, or heavy on the gas, late on the brake, I stay well clear of them and anywhere they could bounce, if they hit someone else. if I see a person approaching from the left or right, as I’m passing straight, I’ll assume they don’t see me until I have reason to think they do. I might come to a FULL STOP and let them go through first. Why would I not? Because I believe in a fantasy of a thing called ‘right of way’? would never be me. I also check junctions for people crossing them by foot. I also am aware of, and stay out of, ‘the dooring zone’ The dooring zone when passing a car or a line of cars, parallel parked, imagine any of them (or all of them) opened the drivers side door all the way. Any part of the lane that would be reachable by the door (so, an aweful lot of bike lanes, of course) is called ‘the door zone’. My vehicle is not a bike, no one expects me to ride in the dooring zone, least of all me. But I’m intensely aware of it when on my scooter. That said, I might squish into the right side of a lane, to ease by some vehicle that is proceeding the other direction, or I won’t, or both. I go through all junctions sorta in a roundabout shape. Depending on speeds and cross streets, sometimes as I roll up on a junction, to reduce my exposure to complexity, I’ll plan on taking a right turn, instead of going straight. That eliminates from concern all traffic coming from the right, and I only have to ensure that the lane from the left is clear. I can do that, in a variety of ways, and based on the shapes of the junctions, vehicles parked around it, I can ‘clear’ with my eyes the left lane out a certain number of feet. Anywhere from 30 feet/3 meters (a pretty small bit of visibility, I wouldn’t go into a junction until I had a lot more than 30 feet of visibility) to 300 feet/100 meters or sometimes far beyond. So, I can plan on going right, and then sometimes I might make a u-turn, and then as I approach the junction from the opposite side, I might proceed straight (a j-turn, mentioned above) or make another right turn, which puts me as on the opposite side of the junction, going in the same direction as when I started it. Sometimes I make eye contact with other people, who’ve obviously watched the whole thing. For example, imagine the POV of a commercial vehicle driver, at the front of a line of traffic, waiting at a red light, who can see me approaching from many stopped cars away on the opposite side. I ride to the front of the line of traffic, make a casual right turn… then pop a quick u-turn after finding a good gap, making another right turn. Many a nod of appreciation has been given. Sometimes it’s a quick right turn-u-turn-right turn, or, if it’s ‘really fast’ it follows the shape of a traffic circle or a traffic bean, through the junction. At night, sometimes it’s much easier to see cars from much farther away, because most vehicles (certainly not all!) have headlights illuminated. On Headlights This can be annoying, as the recent proliferation of LED-type headlights is abhorrent, and can make visibility, especially with oncoming traffic and their headlights pointed right at you, very challenging. They blind one with the light, and cast deep shadows, making one’s ability to perceive intricacies of the surface one is riding over more challenging. At full, deep night, with no moon light or street lights, I might ride at not above 40 or 45 miles per hour, even on big roads where people in cars often go much faster. but even at that fast speed (not fast to motorcycles, very fast to someone like me used to mostly bicycle riding, before this) I can easily stop the vehicle well within the cone of light cast by my high beams. Momentum (thus breaking distance) increases geometrically with speed. I vastly prefer to be on a road alone, with no one behind me, following me, and no one driving directly at me from the opposite direction, going the other direction. On noise I don’t like to spook animals, or people, and I usually am quiet enough that I see people long before they notice me. There’s plenty of visual queues people give off when they notice me, be they walking or driving. It’s pretty clear in some situations if they have or have not noticed me, and I respond accordingly. This is part of why I dislike heavy window tint on vehicles. It makes it much, much harder to see anything about the vehicle operator. I know that’s the point, in some ways. Because of my helmet being an extension of my head, to the degree anyone cares, it’s laughably easy to see where my head is pointed, and sometimes easy eye contact can be made. Body language can be so expressive. And that’s just a person walking. If they’re in a car, I guarantee notice them before they notice me. I counted how often I check my rear view mirrors, recently, just so I know if there is anyone behind me, per block, and the answer was never less than three times. (another reason to use a ‘scooter box’ is that one of the main multi-vehicle car crash types involving two-wheeled vehicles is the driver of the car behind them not noticing that they’re stopped behind a car in front of them. Their eye never notices the stopped motorcyclist, and they just run the car right into them, from behind.) Because I almost never stop behind vehicles (and I check intensively the behaviors of the drivers of vehicles behind me, if I do), this entire accident class is unavailable for me to experience. Contrasting a gentle style of movement with American-style rights-of-way/entitlements When driving on the roads of the greater united states, or walking or biking or scooting or whatever, it’s extremely common to encounter entitled behavior. Even if you do not operate in an entitled way, it’s common to see someone else. Vehicles not slowing down for pedestrians passing ahead of them is a form of entitlement, for instance. The concept of ‘right of way’ is a form of created-from-nothing entitlement. (It’s necessary to create the concept of jaywalking). Bali’s road networks and the people who use them don’t have these american-style entitlements, and where there isn’t entitlements, there can grow things like expectations. There are very few roads with center lines painted on them, for instance, and sometimes the roads are too narrow for vehicles to pass in opposite directions at speed. No sweat, it’s easy! When encountering a vehicle going the other way, the drivers coordinate pulling around each other, letting a tire run off the asphalt and onto packed dirt, and then back. There’s much less tailgating. not none! but there’s something distinct about american road networks. I sometimes get annoyed, feels like I have to defend that sentiment, then I ask about the driving experience of the other person, and it’s limited. how do I proceed? Loud engines/racing engines as entitlement and supportive of Bad Things loud engines are very popular in the USA. I view loud engines, or loud exhausts (including nearly every motorcycle) as supporting rape culture! deep breath. Loud engines normalize the indiscriminate (or highly discriminate) harassment of others. It can be targeted, like revving an engine “at” a person as the vehicle operator passes by on the street, or it can be non-targeted, and “just” everyone with the misfortune of hearing the engine is affected. I cannot endure the company of someone who even possesses a vehicle like this. I hate this aspect of car culture. Loud engines normalize harassment, dedignifying behavior, ruthless centering of the self, it’s the same kinds of entitlements necessary for rape culture, thus, I call it rape culture. I can tell when someone who’s walking in a quiet place becomes aware of the sound of the engine on my scooter. Even at medium acceleration, it’s not very loud. When I’m trying to be quiet, I’m almost completely silent. And at max volume, it’s still not very loud and it’s certainly not harsh. I also ride in a smooth way, I don’t inflict audible assault on the people I ride pass. If someone elects to make a lot of noise with their vehicle, I log that as a form of entitlement. Other forms of entitlements common on the mobility networks of the greater united states Heavy window tints, hiding the driver’s head and making it impossible for someone else to make eye contact, or to see where the driver’s head is pointed (pretty useful when seeing if the driver is maybe about to pull out in front of you) Really bright LED headlights that blind everyone that the headlights land upon, especially if they’re way beyond the line of sight for the driver. Tailgating. it’s no different than standing really close behind someone in a line, breathing in their ear. Being heavy on the gas and brake, or driving in a way that risks anyone else’s safety. I find scooting all over the world, and even in the USA to be relaxing and peaceful, often enough. More than a bicycle, for some reasons. More than a motorcycle, for some reasons. More than a car, for some reasons. More than my feet, for some reasons. I’d like to have some videos where I try to parse or explain some of how I move through junctions or road segments safely, but recording the video, audio, editing it all together, has thus far not really happened. I tried something like that here, and don’t love it. Footnotes I told someone (sorta a gang member, I was very directly hustling on this traffic bean concept) ‘some people would certainly love the innuendo capacity of this traffic bean concept.’ and he laughed and said the more innuendo the better. So, if you are reading this, you are welcome. ↩ I also sometimes evaluate my scooter as close-enough to a bicycle, and a bicycle is basically being on foot. I do not participate in concept of ‘jaywalking’, thus I use space in ways that I want to, crossing streets however I want. In a fair world, people in cars would feel responsible to not crush people or things outside the vehicle, and thus would not feel/act entitled to space in a way that threatens others. ↩ It’s inclusive of some things common in other parts of asia, exclusive of some things. Very distinctive. I rode many, many km in Bali and found it to be comfortable. Almost never did my speeds go anywhere close to what is common on American road networks. In bali, every function of society could be done easily by scooter. Food delivery, taxi, water delivery, construction materials, and more. Entire square km were fully serviceable by a road that was, the entire length, quite narrow, well-suited to scooter tires and nothing larger. some so narrow that a single scooter was only centimeters from places one didn’t want to go: a narrow walled alley, an embankment of some sort. One paid attention! Most roads were not harrowing at all, some were certainly harrowing. ↩