Omnipresent
#143 That is, all over the place
We are a quarter of the way to 2100. We are living in the future. Will any of us reading this make it? Probably not, but the standards of health may change and, who knows, maybe we’ll all end up centenarians.
My health “plan” needs some work if I’m going to make it there. I’m going to make up my 2025 plan right now, but it’s pretty accurate based on my personal habits (real and desired).
You can skip this part if you don’t care, it’s mostly for my own documentation, but why not share too.
Eat & Drink
Whole ingredient foods and minimize processing; mostly fruit & veggie, then meat, then everything else. This includes cooking oils too - more natural, more better (pardon my english to make it sound fun).
Don’t eat so many damned breads, cookies, snacks, etc. Even though they’re delicious. Fight the urge to make EVERYTHING a sandwich.
Drink a little more water than I think I need, I’m not one to drink enough.
Avoid coffee in the afternoon, even though I love it. Decaf is still risky but ok if still kind of early evening.
Minimize alcohol, but don’t say no to going out for a couple of drinks with friends, socializing is equally or more important.
Do/Don’t:
Walk a lot; probably at least 15 miles a week. Walk to the grocery store or after meals, while listening to audiobooks, it adds up quick.
Go to the gym at least 3x a week; focus on strength and compund movement. Throw some harder cardio in there sometimes.
Don’t buy so many treats and stuff to have in the house. If you want one, walk to the store and buy it. You’ll probably opt for the healthier version on hand. If you choose to walk, you paid the tax and you deserve it. I’m very good at this but I live with people who like to have lots of treats on hand and I am very bad at avoiding these — I’m looking at you Cheez-It, stop being so tempting while I’m cooking.
I hate to say this, but a sleep schedule kinda works. It doesn’t make it easier to sleep, but the consistency seems to have a positive effect. There are lots of “bedtime tricks” like staying off your phone etc that work sometimes. I’m no sleep pro so I’m still working on this. Reading is the most effective way for me to wind down, but there are occasions where that keeps me up a few extra hours so that’s a risk if the book is good enough….Anyways, try to sleep more and consistently.
I saw this “new food pyramid” which I mostly agree with though, I’d change a few things.
My changes: I don’t have access to raw butter, spring water, or real milk. But that’s an easy sub for nice butter like Kerry Gold or something, filtered water, and not drinking milk. I’d move coffee and veg cooked right to absolute staples. I’d scrap organ meats and cod liver altogether. I’d move ice cream down to sparingly and trade it with the entire sparingly section, which I’d like to eat more often. I also ignore completely the optional supps section.
Ok enough of that, no one cares about individual people’s diets or habits, I don’t mean to have bored you here, but it came to mind this morning and now I have a reference if ever needed. If you did like it, you’re welcome.
Are you sick of me sounding like a whiny food instagrammer? Good, me too. On to the next part.
Weekly Appetizer had a lot of bangers this year, imho, but the most popular posts of 2024 were the following five. In case you wanted to re-read them OR you missed them in the first place, tsk tsk.
Want to go the full nine yards this week? Enjoy this 46:38 minute video. It reminds me of the one law class I took in college that I abosolutely loved; I still find myself yelling “fruit of the poisoned tree” as my professor did. (tldr; evidence not useable if obtained illegally). That memory also takes me back to high school when my english teacher leapt across the room yelling “gerunds!”, verbs acting as a noun//ending in -ing.
Coffee Thoughts on Automatic vs. Manual
We kind of touched on this a few weeks ago, but I had some more thoughts when making a cup of coffee in my moka pot.
Here’s what I jotted down to not forget.
As I’ve mentioned before, I think manual things have been regaining traction and gravitas. But it’s important to remember that simply being manual does not make something better. It only gives you more control — control that can be used to exceed average results or fail miserably.
Automatic was created in large part to bring better results to the unskilled, to prevent human errors from screwing things up, and to simply make things easier and faster. But when you look at the highest performance of well, anything, really, your see people using manual formats. Why? Because it allows customization that performs better when used with skill.
Coffee; a good barista adjusts/selects beans, roast, pressure, watertype, temperature, etc. Automatic allows you to buy a type of bean and use your tap or maybe filtered water.
Cars; Racers switch manually, us lasy folks have automatics. Us plebs can’t stall an engine if the car shifts for us.
Cameras; Photographers change lenses, brands, films, aperature, and a whole number of factors I don’t know about. I use the first commercial automatic camera and there are very few settings. The new ones focus and process the images for you - phone cameras especially.
The point is not that manual is better. If I only had manual options I would have to relearn how to drive and spend hours avoiding blurry pictures.
We can select which things we want to learn and focus on to use manually so we can get the results that we want.
Now, with that out of the way, we can think about the future - namely that AI tools are the same type of automation, for now.
AI will bring the floor up for most people who aren’t capable. It will make most people generic but that generic output will be better than what they could have done normally.
But the experts will not want it. Not for the hard stuff, the creative work. Nor will we want to consume those things. (Broad generalization here because I know many people will consume those things and even the pros will use AI to support themselves)
Think of art, writing, design, or anything else that should be unique and human. These things will still be the domain of the human mind.
AI will probably at some point catch up, but in the mid-term we will see people actively rejecting AI creative works since they will be “for the masses”. Human-made will maybe get the same aura as “Made in America” or “Made in Japan” for certain goods. Or even the well known, but not so sought over, “Hecho en Mexico”.
I’m losing steam on this point, but my “advice” (I don’t give advice) is to begin cultivating your manual skills and honing whatever your hobbies and intererts are. If even in 20 years we scrap a lot of the basic tasks that waste time now we’ll have a lot more free time and having these skills that could pivot into a second career or simply a break from the machines will be very nice.
When you start seeing creations Made by Gringordo or written by Brandon Cohen and/or ‘Nobody In Particular” you’ll know I listened to myself and that it’s time to go swoop up whatever limited edition thing just came out. Thanks in advance!
Lastly, my brother poked fun at “math rock” to me again, so here are some tracks to convert or confuse you, depending on how your taste works. I tried not to include songs I’ve shared before.
And these two which are part of why we had this conversation in the first place..
This one however is not “math rock”, but they toured with Ben Quad leading my brother to find out about them and thus providing the ammo for the conversation.
This song (most likely) is referencing fellow alt rockers, Tigers Jaw.
Note: some of these band/song names hit my old favorite schema. Oddly enough, last night I listened to the first song mentioned in the below issue.
P.S. Apologies for the typos; unfortunately the (supposedly automatic) auto-correct is not working. I caught several misspellings in the proofread and none of them were underlined. Surely I missed one, Mr. Feynman.