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. ↩

still sorta drafty, but also its entirely possible the point is easily apprehended, and I’m way over-explaining Introduction Elsewhere, I’ve been referring to a ‘vehicles per square meter per minute’ calculation, when talking about junctions on mobility networks. The first place was this substack piece, A Pattern of Repair: The Traffic Bean, then more recently this traffic bean concept applied specifically to 17th & Monaco piece. I’ve noticed wishing for better ways to calculate some of the stunning differences in efficiency of certain road junctions. I’ve put this together partially by cutting the relevant pieces of other posts, and aggregating it here. In some circles, it’s necessary or helpful to be able to put on a very engineering-coded hat. Remove all other components of a conversation, and make some possibly judgy comparisons between things. If one was doing that, one could imagine a metric for evaluating junction efficiency, for comparing different junctions, or junction designs against each other and themselves. It allows someone to say something like: configuration A gave 1 vehicle per 20 square meters per minute throughput. Configuration B gave 3 vehicles per 20 square meters per minute, and was preferable in many other ways, so we’re going with configuration B. or: the current junction moves .5 vehicles per 10 square meters per minute It allows two different junctions, of different sizes, to be compared. If one junction moves 30 cars per minute, and a different design moves 45 cars per minute, which one is better? If the 2nd junction is twice the square meters of the first one, it’s less efficient per square meter, even though it moves more vehicles. How To Calculate Vehicles per Square Meter per Minute every junction moves vehicles, and can move a certain number of vehicles through it, in a certain time, and that junction has a certain shape/area. First, determine the size of the junction I think this is the easy part. Crack open Google Earth, and draw boxes around junctions. I’ve got a bunch of examples of other junctions here: https://zoningverydifferentthanours.substack.com/p/traffic-congestion-as-solvable-part-510 There’s a few different ways a junction could be shaped. Everything is full of tradeoffs! Consider reading that piece (or the entire series) as context for this junction efficiency metric. It lets one say: such-and-such junction is 290 square feet/26 sq meters, and such-and-such number of cars moved through it in five minutes. (3-5 minutes is probably the minimum time you’d want to do counts on a junction to get a per-minute time. One probably doesn’t need to count for a full hour to get an accurate time) If a junction was 600 square meters, and in a 5 minute time at rough hour counted it as moving 150 cars, we could calculate it’s ‘vehicles per square meter per minute’ value. in this case, it would be: v/m²/min = 150 vehicles / 600 sq meters × 5 minutes = 150 / 3000 = 0.05 thus, it could be expressed as: .05 vehicles per sq meter per minute or could be expressed in square meters per minute per vehicle: 1 vehicle per 20 m² per minute Who knows yet what the actual values are we might see for a junction. The expression seems reasonable enough, aids in reasoning about different junctions or plans. I think it might make more intuitive sense once we start looking at certain junctions. Calculating vehicles per square meter per minute of the 17th & Monaco junction What do you think the value might be for the junction in question, in terms of vehicles per square meter per minute? How many square meters do you think the junction is? These are the two questions I posed in the above drone video. Without actually doing the counts or looking yet at google earth, my predictions are: the junction size is probably about 40 meters in both directions/on two sides, which is 1600 square meters as far as throughput: The vehicles in 5 minutes is probably ~150. Thus, 150 vehicles / 1600 square meters / 5 minutes would be how many vehicles per square meter per minute? ≈ 0.01875 vehicles per square meter per minute gonna round that to .02, which is two percent of a vehicle per square meter per minute! Or flipped: 1 vehicle per ~53.3 m² per minute rounding it to 1 vehicle per 54 square meters per minute. Or 1 vehicle per 580 square feet per minute I contend that 1 vehicle per square meter per minute (1 vehicle per 10 square feet per minute) is a better reasonable expectation for an efficient, performant junction. I’ll accept getting half-way there as a mid-point. :) this 1 of a vehicle per square meter per minute goal would be like two orders of magnitude higher than it currently is. that’s a ludicrous improvement, i say impossible in the USA, but i’ll settle for half of that improvement. 1 half of a vehicle per square meter per minute, or 1 vehicle per two square meters per minute. This is, I think, realistic. A typical sedan is 90 square feet. 1 square meter is 11 feet. so, a normal vehicle is about 10 square meters. or 10% per square meter per minute. This isn’t the first intersection I’ve done this evaluation for, I’m developing an ability to estimate, the last time I did the math on Colfax & Franklin, the final figure was atrocious. Like 2% of a vehicle per meter per minute. :( I’m going to watch the video again and count the total vehicles for a five minute period. The video is running at a 3x timelapse, in a continuous fashion, so every vehicle can be counted. It was taken at the peak of a morning rush hour. On my scooter I’m unimpeded by traffic, so it’s effortless for me to pop out to somewhere, even when traffic is maxed out. five minutes is 300 seconds, and since the video is a 3x time lapse, that means I’m going to count the total number of vehicles that pass through the marked polygon in 100 ‘video seconds’: Before we start counting, lets determine exactly how large the junction is: Lets see the square foot value for both of those polygons. We’ll do the math all the way through for both, of course. Above is the view of this junction in google earth. Next I’ll use the measuring tool to open a polygon drawing menu. The image below is what this looks like: So the ‘larger’ polygon is 1691 square meters. Lets look at the smaller option: Simple enough, the smaller polygon is 1230 square meters. I’ll pause here for now, but the next step will be to measure the vehicles entering that shape. I’ll use the video I mentioned before, starting from when the intersection comes into view at the 15 second mark and continuing to the 115 second/1:55 mark, which is an equivalent of 5 minutes of real-time car counting. How I do the counts Feel free to check my math or methodology. I’m sorta counting by light cycle. Pausing and replaying sections as needed, counting all the vehicles in that particular part of the light cycle. 13 cars in initial light cycle, as the junction pans into view 38 cars on the southbound leg 9 cars on the northbound leg, ‘second blob’ after the start of the counting. 11 more on the next cycle going east 9 vehicles on the westbound cycle 13 more vehicles on the east-bound cycle, some turning south on monaco, some going west on 17th, some ending up north-bound monaco. I’m at the 59 second mark on the video, that’s about half-way through the five clock minute sample. We’ve got 93 cars that I’ve counted going through the intersection at this point. I’m absolutely going to count twice. I’ve also paused to serve myself some food. Dinner’s ready. […] 32 more cars on the next southbound monaco light cycle 14 cars on the same northbound monaco light cycle (approx 59 seconds to 1:23 in the video) 9 more cars on the westbound cycle 8 cars on the matching eastbound cycle ooh, the video pans away for a few seconds, so need to pause the vehicle counting pans back into sight at 1:39, there was 5 seconds of missed light cycle time (15 real-time seconds. I’ll extend the ‘end point’ that we time to by 5 seconds. We’re now going to the two minute mark) 27 cars in the south bound monaco cycle, that’s visible 11 cars north bound almost at time 2 more eastbound 17th 7 more westbound. We’re at time, lets count it up: 110 more vehicles, in this second half of counting. There was 93 in the first half, so 203 vehicles passed through this junction in that five minute time span. “about 203” is true, might be 195, could I have over-counted? Or 208, maybe I under-counted. And maybe under some certain situations, like a bit more traffic from one direction, more cars would have gone through the junction because there WAS some time it was green and no one was using it. oh, what a sidebar, the amount of time a junction direction is usable but empty, or the time there are people waiting to use the junction, AND the junction is completely empty, as a percentage of the time it’s in operation. The junction was completely empty while there were vehicles waiting to enter 28% of the time or something like that. So, like we’re discussing, how many vehicles in 5 minutes? 203 vehicles in five minutes Let’s plug these values into the formula: 203 vehicles | 5 minutes | 1690 square meters 0.0240 vehicles per square meter per minute Or flipped: 1 vehicle per 41 m² per minute 41 square meters is about the size of: A small studio apartment (6.4 m x 6.4 m) Half of a tennis court A single parking space (with buffer) plus some sidewalk Half of a tennis court to move a single vehicle in a minute? Seems ‘obviously inefficient’ to me. The way to make it more efficient, at first pass, would be to simply find a smaller area for the junctino. A square piece of asphalt controlled by lights does the job, sort of, but so too would a much smaller, circular junction with access/departure points for all directions of travel as needed. earlier I said, I contend that 1 vehicle per square meter per minute is a reasonable accomplishment. How might we get closer? The first pass would be to improve the number of vehicles that can use the junction, in a few ways, and reduce by a significant percentage the amount of space directly allocated to the junction. If we could get 30% more vehicles through it, and it was half the size, we’d have accomplished technically a stunning increase in efficiency. A first pass would be to reduce the junction size. Ironically, to reduce the size (and allow the continuous flow type design) would probably also increase the number of vehicles that can fit through the junction, but the number doesn’t have to budge for this to still be a gain in efficiency. If the junction was smaller, and the volume of vehicles stayed the same, the efficiency would obviously go up, relative to the reduction in junction size. For instance, compare the following: 203 vehicles | 5 minutes | 1690 square meters 203 vehicles | 5 minutes | 550 square meters 203 / 5 * 1690? 203 / 5 * 550 203 / 8450 = 0.024 203 / 2750 = 0.054  40.6 vehicles/minute 1690 sq meters = 0.02 vehicles per square meter per minute 40.6 vehicles/minute 550 sq meters = 0.072 vehicles per square meter per minute That second value would be 3x the efficiency: 0.23704142 animation of what 3x efficiency could look 3x the efficiency could be achieved purely by making the junction much smaller - 500 square meters vs 1600 square meters. Here’s a way this could be visualized. Do you see a the way that this exhibits better efficiency? This is only one possible way the difference can be viewed, obviously. This isn’t how junctions work exactly, but it perfectly shows one of the dimensions of efficiency improvements. Intersection Efficiency Comparison If you had limited space and needed junctions in three different places, and nothing else about the space could be used for anything BUT moving these vehicles, which would you want more of? Both intersections process 203 vehicles in 5 minutes const canvas = document.getElementById('efficiencyCanvas'); const ctx = canvas.getContext('2d'); const zones = [ { x: 50, y: 100, w: 300, h: 200, area: 1690, color: '#d0eaff', label: 'Large Zone (1690 m²)' }, { x: 450, y: 100, w: 150, h: 200, area: 550, color: '#ffd6d6', label: 'Small Zone (550 m²)' }, ]; const totalVehicles = 203; const duration = 5 * 60 * 1000; // 5 minutes in ms const vehicleRadius = 4; const vehicleSpeed = 0.5; // pixels per frame let vehicles = []; function spawnVehicle(zone) { return { zone, x: zone.x, y: zone.y + Math.random() * zone.h, dx: vehicleSpeed, color: 'black', }; } function drawZone(zone) { ctx.fillStyle = zone.color; ctx.fillRect(zone.x, zone.y, zone.w, zone.h); ctx.strokeStyle = 'black'; ctx.strokeRect(zone.x, zone.y, zone.w, zone.h); ctx.fillStyle = 'black'; ctx.font = '14px sans-serif'; ctx.fillText(zone.label, zone.x + 10, zone.y - 10); } function drawVehicle(v) { ctx.beginPath(); ctx.arc(v.x, v.y, vehicleRadius, 0, Math.PI * 2); ctx.fillStyle = v.color; ctx.fill(); } function update() { ctx.clearRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height); zones.forEach(drawZone); vehicles.forEach(v => { v.x += v.dx; drawVehicle(v); }); vehicles = vehicles.filter(v => v.x { const rate = totalVehicles / duration; if (Math.random() My desire with the traffic bean isn’t even necessarily to move more cars through - it’s to reduce certain forms of pollution, difficulty, distress, waste, excesses. I think of the potential harm to everyone of a crashing car as a form of pollution. Conversation with the people who live in that house indicate that everyone has become extremely aware of all sounds/implications of passing vehicles. One notes intrusive thoughts when one hears the sound of a whining, high-speed engine, wondering if it’ll take the turn or crash into a building. click here to read about how this plan handles the wide range of potential inbound speeds Different ways the efficiency could be expressed ≈ 0.081 vehicles per square meter per minute Or flipped: 1 vehicle per ~12 m² per minute Part of the reason the traffic bean would be so much more effective than a light-controlled junction is there is no need for the junction to ever be completely empty, while there is anyone queued up to use it. So, a traffic bean allows anyone to go if there is room for them to proceed, no waiting around for a light to change. The space needed would be JUST a single lane in a large enough circle/bean shape to wrap around the center island, which would be be ‘hollow’, the inner space being returned to non-car uses. It being hollow like this would allow the junction size to be considered even smaller. Instead of a fully enclosed volume of space being allocated to the junction, JUST a unified connecting travel path the width of a medium-sized car lane running in a circle. The inside and outside would be unavailable to cars, so the junction square footage could be so much smaller. There’s some image mock-ups below. I’m thinking lots of space could be carved out, on the inside and outside of the ‘bean’ thing, which is how I’m getting to such a low square meter value: 260 vehicles 5 minutes 400 square meters An audacious goal Lets see if a workable junction of that size could be achieved. Can we replace this 1600 sq meter junction with a 400 sq meter junction that moves even more cars per minute? If so, it would give us: 0.13 vehicles per square meter per minute Or flipped: 1 vehicle per ~7.7 m² per minute Which might be good enough for now. That gets us the 10x improvement I want. It’s such a ludicrous improvement, that even if it came with zero other benefits, it would be worth trying, but in reality this traffic bean thing comes with TONS of other benefits. An order-of-magnitude-improvement on efficiency, larger potential throughput, and reductions in all forms of emissions (noise, tailpipe, tire rubber microplastic, brake dust). (this is the result of the slow, non-rushed procession of vehicles through the junction, please refer to the poynton videos I have elsewhere on the page) Achieving a 400 square meter junction to get this junction, we’d want something bean shaped, with the inner shape hollowed out, like a doughnut. This frees up lots of square meters. The following shape is 147 sq meters: So, this inside space can be subtracted from the outer space. Lets jot down a shape that could work for the outside. It needs to be only a single lane wide, with entry/exit points wherever needed. How would you feel about this shape? its 360 sq meters, which of course includes the 147 sq meters we’re gonna count as ‘for the people’ and not as space for cars: its 360 sq meters. so, less the inner area that doesn’t need to be counted, 360 sq meters (outside shape) - 147 square meters (inside shape) = 213 square meters I had proposed that this junction could be 400 square meters, and we’ve used only a little more than half. I don’t think it will take 200 square meters to provide the access points for vehicles. the main shape could be clear now, I think, thus ‘the vibe of what I speak’. Lots of the remaining space would need to be ‘shaped down’ with traffic cones, until the right shape was found. Here’s a very crude example: The red inner lines are 11 feet long, which is certainly not a wide lane, but isn’t super narrow, either. The dimensions here are pretty comfortable, even for commercial vehicles, I think. A normal sedan is almost 6 feet wide (and 14 feet long) A cement truck is 9.5 feet wide, including the mirrors, or 8.5 feet not including mirrors. The above was my super wonky first mockup. Can you see what I’m aiming for, even as it’s obviously not the exact right shape? The junction has sorta widely-separated inputs and outputs, so this is a sorta extreme example of the paths that would be ‘carved out’ of the existing junction space. Additional Reading the traffic bean my first pass at this calculation, looking at a junction near my house “Traffic Congestion” as Solvable, Part 4: Junction Repair: Decrease Dangerous Complexity by Increasing Safe Complexity Traffic Congestion as Solvable, Part 3: Intro to Path Shaping Footnotes