[FRIAM] off-label technologies, exaptatiion and exponential technological growth.

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Thanks, Pieter, 

 

As a 40 year late-onset, lean diabetic, my ears always perk up when I hear that it is avoidable.  It sure would be nice to avoid it.  As for obesity, I have known quite a few people to struggle with it and their metabolisms just seem to be mercilessly efficient.  In that connection, I wonder about brown fat, an organ for spilling excess calories.  

 

Anyway, Pieter, thanks for what you wrote. 

 

n

 

Nick Thompson

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Pieter Steenekamp
Sent: Sunday, August 8, 2021 1:19 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] off-label technologies, exaptatiion and exponential technological growth.

 

Nick,

Thanks for the question.

Before I start, just a clarification. I'm referring to diabetes type 2, which is strongly linked to lifestyle and not diabetes type1.

1. From the NIH article https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5741209/:
" Obesity is a chronic metabolic disease affecting adults and children worldwide. It has become one of the leading causes of death, as obesity is known to be the main risk factor for a number of non-communicable diseases, in particular type 2 diabetes. This close relationship led to the connotation ‘diabesity’, highlighting the fact that the majority of individuals with diabetes are overweight or obese. Until today the BMI is still used to classify overweight and obesity. Since reduced muscle mass is highly prevalent throughout the BMI range, the measurement of body composition is strongly recommended. Moreover, it is essential for monitoring the course of weight reduction, which is part of every effective anti-obesity treatment. Weight reduction can be achieved via different weight loss strategies, including lifestyle intervention (diet and exercise), pharmacotherapy, or bariatric surgery. However, not all of these strategies are suitable for all patients, and any further needs should be considered. Besides, attention should also be drawn to concomitant therapies. These therapies may promote additional weight gain and further trigger the deterioration of blood glucose control. Thus, therapeutic strategies are warranted, which can be easily used for the management of obese patients with type 2 diabetes to achieve their glycemic and weight loss goals. "

Just a comment before I go further, We all "know", as per the above, that diet and exercise lead to weight loss, but for some people (including myself)  it's very difficult. I started to follow David Sinclair and as part of his longevity recommendations he includes intermittent fasting. It works wonders for both my wife and me.  I mention him briefly below, and it's worthwhile to evaluate everything he says, but for now, because it's more directly related to your question, I merely focus on intermittent fasting. 

2. I follow the work and recommendations of dr David Sinclair https://sinclair.hms.harvard.edu/people/david-sinclair ,a Professor in the Department of Genetics and co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School. IMO, if you are interested in staying healthy for longer, it's worthwhile to lend him your ears or read his book https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-Why-Age_and-Dont-Have/dp/1501191977 .

3. I quote from an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about Intermittent Fasting https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1905136 :
"We then present and discuss findings from preclinical studies and more recent clinical studies that tested intermittent-fasting regimens in healthy persons and in patients with metabolic disorders (obesity, insulin resistance, hypertension, or a combination of these disorders). Finally, we provide practical information on how intermittentfasting regimens can be prescribed and implemented."

 

4. Finally, if you are really interested then you might want to listen to dr Pradip Jamnadas' lecture on Fasting for Survival  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuOvn4UqznU 
Dr. Pradip Jamnadas is the founder and medical director of Cardiovascular Interventions and has practiced in Central Florida for over 31 years. Widely recognized for his skill in interventional cardiology Dr. Jamnadas has been awarded Orlando Top Doctor by Orlando Magazine consecutively for over a decade.
He is on staff at AdventHealth Orlando, and teaches medical students as an Assistant Clinical Professor at Florida State University, the University of Central Florida College of Medicine, and residents in Florida Hospital’s teaching programs.
Educated in England, at the University of London College Medical School with internships in London and Kent, he completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Maryland and his cardiology fellowship at Yale University. In addition he completed an interventional cardiology fellowship at St. Luke’s Hospital in Milwaukee, WI. 

P





 

 

On Sun, 8 Aug 2021 at 16:47, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > wrote:

Pieter, 

 

I am interested in your assertion that metabolic disorders like diabetes and obesity are preventable.  

 

N

 

Nick Thompson

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > On Behalf Of Pieter Steenekamp
Sent: Sunday, August 8, 2021 5:16 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] off-label technologies, exaptatiion and exponential technological growth.

 

The CDC reports that among 4,899,447 hospitalized adults in PHD-SR, 540,667 (11.0%) were patients with COVID-19, of whom 94.9% had at least 1 underlying medical condition. https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2021/21_0123.htm. 


My reading of this is that it is mainly preventable conditions and my simple conclusion is that if you live healthy you are well protected against covid.
 
My wife and I got a wake-up call with loved ones that died of covid. They were all obese. Our focus is now to live healthy. It not only gives additional protection against covid, but against many other causes of illness and poor quality of life too.

 

On Sun, 8 Aug 2021 at 10:26, David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu> > wrote:

Hi Frank,

 

Only because Marcus responded….

 

This article

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/08/05/covid-19-vaccines-dont-really-work-as-hoped/

Isn’t a good start.

 

I didn’t read the whole thing, so I will confine my remarks to the title and second paragraph, relative to the reported data.

 

74% of people in the P-town outbreak had been vaccinated.  What does that tell us?  Very nearly nothing.  This is the like the textbook question given to any undergrad in statistics.  (And remember: “She’s an actuary!” — be ready to take her word for things.)

 

There were, if I remember the number, 60k visitors to P-town.  How many of them were vaccinated?  Don’t have numbers on that.  Suppose 99.67% of them were, for the sake of making a point.  800 cases (rounded out).  600 among the vaccinated.  Suppose everyone in P-town was exposed (also not reported, I have no idea how many were).  At that rate, the number of infections among the vaccinated would be 1%.  Sounds well within the range of a vaccine that tests as 94% effective against infection.  

 

Suppose that only the state average of 64% were vaccinated and everyone was exposed.  Then the fraction infected becomes 1.5%.  Since P-town is a destination for the educated and rich, and known as a gay-friendly place so probably lefter than Mass as a whole, I would be very surprised if the vax fraction of the visitors were not above the state average.  Not least because they were going to a party.

 

How many were unvaccinated among the 60k?  Again, not reported, presumably not something one is even allowed to ask about, and so probably impossible to know with precision and not easy to estimate.  But again to make a point, suppose the number of unvaccinated was 200 ppl.  Infections among the unvaxsed: 200.  Wow!  That would be 100% infectivity among the unvaccinated.  

 

Suppose the fraction actually vaxxed was 50/50 and everybody was exposed.  Well, then, the vaccines were terrible; increased your chance of being infected by 50%.  But of course that would require that the unvaxsed were also only catching delta at <2%, which is improbable.  So presumably, if we knew the other numbers, we could guess at about what fraction of people actually had exposure.

 

But then to use that, we need the correlation between degree of exposure and vaccination status, and who the hell knows even what the sign of that number would be?

 

MY POINT (sorry to be so ugly all the time): we can find any interpretation you like, from completely anodyne to totally absurd, from within feasible ranges of other variables on which we have little or no information. 

 

How much drama does any of this warrant?

 

Well, we were told that, what, 5 people landed in the hospital?  Out of 60k visitors plus locals.  Of whom 3 had preexisting problem conditions.  No reports on whether the ones with problem conditions were vaxxed. Even in that tiny sample, we know nothing about correlation information that would change the direction of its implications qualitatively, from moving 1 or 2 people between categories.

 

One final thing: those positive cases are outcomes of tests.  I don’t recall seeing anything on how many were symptomatic.  Could be all of them, but in many of these cohorts that use any contact tracing, it is fewer.  That’s PCR in the nose or throat.  

 

So really?  Is the title “the vaccines don’t work as believed on the delta variant” warranted?

 

Speaking in slightly fuller sentences, what did we “expect” from experience with vaccines up to now? The vaccines enable the learning phase of immunity to be done and stored, so that one may or may not have antibodies in any given quantity (variable across people and probably usually degrades with time; six month numbers being given a a guess at a time frame, with considerable imprecision), but one does have whatever genetic memory there is to activate antibody-producing cells quickly.  That has been reported for about 1/2 year in dribs and drabs, and the variance in the results gives us an idea of roughly how much uncertainty we should have.

 

So virus establishes a beachhead in the nose and throat, and rather than taking a week and a half to figure out an immune response, during which time it makes you much sicker, you knock it out (for most of those who do get sick) in a few days.  All this seems to me well within the range of things that have been publicly reported.

 

Zaynap Tufecki had a nice piece in the NYT a few days ago, something like CDC should stop confusing the public.  It sounds like a dramatic title, but the content is good and sensible, and I think she mentioned part of this as well.  Let me look:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/04/opinion/cdc-covid-guidelines.html

 

The Crooked guys also did a nice interview with Ashish Jha from Brown, here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SddFBebSk-c

where, in addition to being asked interesting questions and given time to give coherent answers, he was able to relax a bit and talk as if from thought instead of from script.

 

So it strikes me that, so far, we are getting small updates to how viral attacks and immunity are relating, and a little info on distributions.  None of it seems very surprising, and the early estimates are still closer than we have any right to hope for, given a new disease in the period of rapid change.  The fact that you can get high PCR titers in the nose of a vaccinated person is useful to know, perhaps not predicted per se, but not bizarre either.

 

—

 

I have thought, throughout the attention to these topics during the past year and a half, that we swim in viruses all the time.  We catch a cold once every few years, and suppose that is because our exposure Is intermittent.  But I’ll bet what is going on with the ambient virosphere looks much more like this business we are seeing with COVID than we would ever have guessed, with the important exception that we are all naive to COVID, and not to all the other stuff.  I have wished there were time and manpower to use this unprecedented effort at measurement, to revamp our mental pictures and epidemiological models of how ambient viruses are moving around.  It may be that a lot of this is already known, and I am just ignorant of it (that would be my first assumption), but I can’t imagine all this measurement doesn’t have _something_ of a general nature that we could learn from.

 

Eric

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Aug 8, 2021, at 6:16 AM, Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com <mailto:wimberly3 at gmail.com> > wrote:

 

Gail Tverberg:  does anyone have an opinion about her?  Based on her career as an actuary she writes various blog posts and articles warning of imminent disasters related to Covid, oil prices, etc.  When I search for commentaries about her I find almost nothing except items that she has written.  She is associated with "Our Finite World".

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Sat, Aug 7, 2021, 1:28 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com> > wrote:

No need for victims when there are (pandemic) volunteers.  

 

On Aug 7, 2021, at 11:43 AM, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com <mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com> > wrote:

 Marcus -

The pushback on everything from low wattage lighting to mask mandates leaves me thinking that there is really only one thing that motivates certain people:  That they can do whatever the hell they want and, crucially, that other people cannot.   A living wage infringes on that ranking and so must be terrible.   What if there were physical space for everyone, food for everyone, and many optional ways to invest one’s time?   What if one didn’t need a wage at all?  What if you had to decide for yourself what was worth doing?  Heck, what if one (some post-human) didn’t even need food and didn’t need to reproduce?

 

Sounds Utopian... erh... Dystopian... no... UTOPIAN!   Uhm... I just hope posthumans collectively find the rest of us boring enough to leave alone and interesting enough to not need to extinct us.   Homo Neanderthalenses had a long run (~.4My?) before Homo Sapiens Sapiens found our way into their territory and apparently ran over them with our aggressive adaptivity (over a period of tens of thousands of years).   I suspect *some* trans/post humans will also have a somewhat more virulent (or at least very short time-constant) adaptivity indistinguishable (to us) from extermination-class aggression.

I like the fairy tale Spike Jonze wove on this topic with HER <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)> , and in particular the virtual Alan Watts <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts>  conception.  But I highly doubt we might be so lucky.   More likely some version of "the Borg" or "Cylons" or "Replicators" or (passive aggressive) "Humanoids" (minus the gratuitous anthropomorphism).   To us, it will probably look more like a "grey goo" scenario.  Or perhaps more aptly hyperspectral rainbow-goo.

At the current rate of change/acceleration/jerk in technosocial change I may even live to see the whites of the eyes of the hypersonic train headlights I mistook for "light at the end of the tunnel".

I'm going to go now to get my telescoping (drywall stilts) runner's legs fit in place of the organic ones I grew (and then abused/neglected) over the past 65 years.    I'm holding out for AR corneal transplants for a few more months, I think it will be worth the long wait for the upgraded features and the new neural lace interface specs.

- Sieve

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