My Quiet Life

I've been meaning to write this up for a while, so i can have a reference to send people to rather than rambling incoherently. I'm sure that everyone has been in or overhead a conversation such as this:

Person A: [something about their diet. anything, really]

Person B: *rolls eyes* UGH, *nerd snort*. you're so STUPID. Losing weight is easy. It's simple math: eat fewer calories than you burn. I am a left-brained computer/math nerd, so these facts are irrefutable. It's science!! All your pathetic fad diet attempts are hopeless. It's impossible for me to be wrong, because I understand the law of thermodynamics.

Of course, anyone that actually knows anything about nutrition would want to punch this person square in the nose, whether they were in the conversation or a passive third-party overhearing it. It's not simple, actually. The human body is not simple, and "simple math" does not apply. Even from a really gross first-pass analysis, it should be obvious that your body couldn't possibly be "burning" all the energy you eat, or you wouldn't have bowel movements. Obviously something still passes through your system, because, shocker, your body can't use everything it consumes.

First, a quick primer on what calories are (you'd be surprised at how many people don't really know): "calories" in our nutritional lexicon are really kiloCalories (or sometimes kiloJoules). It's a measure of the energy contained in food. In traditional science, you'd determine this by using a bomb calorimeter -- which is a type of scientific instrument for measuring heat (energy) changes in certain reactions -- burning it, for (a crude) example, and measuring the energy (heat) that is released. But obviously the human body is not a bomb calorimeter (tm). It's a super complex system full of lots of different organs that do lots of different stuff with food depending on what it is, how much we eat of it, and what our bodies have been doing exercise-wise lately. So we can't realistically use a calorimeter measure, because our body doesn't burn its food. Instead, the kiloCalorie quantities we see on most foods are determined via estimates of their impact on the body based on their digestibility and other factors. I honestly don't know what their methodology is, because it's pretty hard to find. The important part to understand is that it's just that: an estimate. And it's an estimate that doesn't (and couldn't) take into account the interaction between different food types in the body.

An easy example of this is what happens in your body if you stop eating carbohydrates entirely (as recommended during the "induction" phase of the Atkins diet): your body no longer gets glucose from the carbohydrate. Your body needs glucose, but fortunately your body can produce glucose in the liver by building it with amino acids derived from ingested protein. However, this process is terribly inefficient and keeps your liver so busy making glucose that it doesn't have the capacity to metabolize fat. Thus, your body literally can't do anything with the fat it ingests -- no matter how much. You can eat 10,000 calories of fat a day, but if your body isn't consuming carbohydrates as well, it can't do anything with it.

Conversely, consider what happens if you ate nothing but refined carbohydrates (ignoring for the moment that you would die -- your body can make glucose from amino acids via protein, but it can't manufacture the 20 essential amino acids needed for life from carbohydrates). This is where, as Gary Taubes put it, it gets "unavoidably complicated", but this video does a pretty good job of explaining it. The long and the short of it is that it results in a something called "hyperinsulinemia" -- a condition where your body will be stuck in a bloodsugar/insulin loop wherein you will continue to get fatter while not having any actual energy available to your body.

There are other examples, but these are direct evidence that calories-in/calories-out is just wrong. It's science, but it's anything but simple. So, that's fine, you might say, but aren't calories still a useful reference? Maybe, but in conclusion, I'd argue not, for the following reasons:

1. Counting calories leads you to prioritize quantity over quality in such a way that leads you to make poor quality decisions: reaching for the "low calorie" baked Lays instead of something more calorie dense -- ignoring that something more calorie dense (an egg, for example) is more balanced nutritionally and will make you feel more full longer.
2. Most people following a calorie-counting diet paradigm are the same people that have had the low-fat paradigm beaten into their skull and will thus wind up eating something closer to an all-carbohydrate diet (which in its strictest sense would kill you, but as practiced, would just leave you fat, lethargic, and malnourished). Nevermind that carbohydrates are the most calorie-dense form of food, but hey -- go look at where most of the calories in your average "low calorie" foods come from. It ain't protein.
3. It encourages a hopeless aversion to exercise. If you are focused on calories, they become the reason you exercise. And why bother exercising when that cursed readout on the treadmill indicates that your entire hour of running only got you an extra helping of Lean Cuisine when you're done? This sort of attitude is wrong on many fronts: first and foremost, exercise helps build muscle, which also raises your basal metabolism (the energy you spend just sitting around being alive) -- which is where, unless you're Michael Phelps, you're spending most of your energy.. Further, exercise is also good for you in a million other ways that have nothing to do with calories or weight.
4. It encourages ignorance in general.

Much better is to foster an understanding of what you eat: "oh, I want to bulk up, so I need to eat a shitton of protein, but I know that even though I'll feel full, I need to eat a ton of it and some carbs, because I don't want my body burning it for energy", or "hey, i'm overweight and i have hardly any lean mass -- i wanna cut fat, so i am gonna cut carbs out of my diet for a while", or "hey, i'm about to run a marathon, i need to eat a shitton of carbs so my muscles have plenty of glucose available". People aren't stupid, but they've been cowed into this ignorant oversimplification of how the body works that isn't even remotely accurate.

I am usually pretty well immune to this sort of stuff these days, but this really made my blood boil. From the article "Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin", in time.com's "Health and Science" (in which the science is obviously optional), we have this sidebar:

What. The. Fuck. First, allow me to not mince words here: linking to an article about how carbohydrates "help you lose weight" flanked by two articles about diabetes is beyond ironic: it borders on criminally negligent. It's hard not to get conspiratorial when you see shit like this. Health.com is a (formerly women's) health magazine bought by Time, Inc. in 1991. I don't even know where to begin with how fucked up the article itself is, but like most nutritional "journalism", it's mostly garbage. Paradoxically, I agree with its conclusion that exercise won't make you thin. But so the fuck what? Exercise is good for you, and being thin is not what it's important: being healthy is. So, in one convenient package brought to you by Time, Inc, we have them:

1. Implying that thin is ideal (Attack the body image.)
2. Suggesting that you don't really need to exercise (Appeal to laziness.)
3. Justifying it by saying that exercise just makes you eat more calories (Blame the victim, and toss in the ol' energy-in/energy-out calorie-counting fallacy.)
4. Completely ignore the constitution of one's diet as a factor -- in particular, ignoring the wealth of science demonstrating that excess carbohydrate intake is literally responsible for type 2 diabetes and obesity -- while simultaneously: (Deliberately mislead.)
5. ... linking to an article claiming that carbohydrates can help you lose weight. (Lie.)

You just can't make this shit up.

In which I comment on a news story about a pointless bill that passed the house but will never pass the senate:

The bill (HR 1076) as stated, would "prohibit Federal funding of National Public Radio and the use of Federal funds to acquire radio content". What does that actually mean? Lots of people claim that NPR doesn't actually get any money from the federal government -- so what's the point? Well, that's not exactly true. A quick rundown of the situation, as I understand it (which may be wrong. okay, it's probably wrong):

• NPR produces content. It's not a radio station.
• NPR is funded by a bunch of different sources, including some federal competitive grants amounting to around 2% of its budget. However:
• It also receives a large amount of revenue from member stations (around 34%), which buy its content. Those member stations are funded by lots of things, including the CBP (around 10%), and various governments (including federal -- about 6%).
• The CBP is funded almost entirely by the federal government (as of 2010, around $422 million)

What does this mean if the legislation would pass? (which it won't)

• Member stations could no longer use the ~16% of their budget from the federal government to purchase NPR content (all things considered, morning edition, etc etc).
• So, NPR would lose some portion of the 34% of their revenue which comes from member station purchases. The exact amount, I guess, boils down to how many member stations wish to continue buying the content versus finding alternative sources (local content, PRI, etc).

In conclusion, it doesn't sound like that big of a deal, really. I half-wish it would pass just so we could stop arguing about it -- the whole situation has been politicized into oblivion, and it doesn't seem like anyone would fare too badly if the bill passed. My question is: if the Republicans are supposedly so opposed to the use of government funds for this, why are they attacking NPR (a non-profit provider of content) instead of just floating legislation to take apart the CPB? The CPB is the actual source of federal funding. My guess: attacking CPB doesn't win them as many points with their base as attacking NPR.

So, there's that. Now we can move on to arguing about things that actually matter. Isn't there some war or something?

I don't know why, but rape and rape culture seem to have been cropping up in my reading material a lot lately. I don't know if it's just coincidence, or maybe my broken google reader recommendations or what. I spent a good long while reading about and contemplating the Penny Arcade "dickwolves" controversy. If you don't know what that is, I'd recommend reading the previous link, but in a nutshell, it boils down to: Penny Arcade dudes publish a comic joking about dickwolves raping people in the night, and feminist blogs criticizing it for promoting rape culture (because Rape is Never Funny) and the whole thing becomes a giant clusterfuck of Internet retardation escalating to the point of death threats. (via twitter, but still).

Skip forward a few months, and I'm contemplating the meaning and ramifications of Odd Future's choice of misogyny and rape as subjects. Is it art? Is it saying something? Is it promoting "rape culture"? Food for thought.

Then my friend Melissa sends me an article about Colin Meloy's persistent rape-culture-promoting misogyny. Wait, what? Colin Meloy? The Decemberists? Come again? But no, really. I could crudely paraphrase the article's angle as: Colin Meloy writes a lot about bad things happening to women a lot. He does it ironically by framing it in old-timey cadence and language. But if you strip away the irony, it's just violence towards women. Thus he's a misogynist. Well, yes, if you .. remove irony, it becomes no longer ironic. Funny how that works. Colin Meloy also pens epics involving plenty of other Bad Things to all sorts of non-women -- but hey, let's not mention those, because that would undermine our point that Colin Meloy is a rape-culture-promoting woman hater, right?

So, excepting for the Odd Future thing, which is arguably a little more complicated, most of these examples are stupid. Colin Meloy writing about a woman prostituting herself is not condoning it. A comic with a joke about dickwolves (which are imaginary, by the way) raping is not promoting rape culture. When I came to this conclusion, it angered me, because not only is it stupid to accuse them of promoting rape culture -- it's actively dangerous.

Why? Rape culture is a real thing. In many very real ways, we do live in a rape culture, where misogyny and rape are subtly or overtly condoned. It's a real thing, and it's a very bad thing. So when you have bullshit like this taking the spotlight of attention, we have a very real signal-to-noise problem. There are actual ways in which rape culture and misogyny are promoted, and they are insidious and hard to identify. But when they are, they should be confronted headon.

Which brings me to this story about the gang-rape of an 11 year old girl in the New York Times. Many have identified some pretty odd and mysterious choices by the author, best explained by this recent Mother Jones article. Short version: the story refers to the men (18 men that raped an 11 year old girl) being "drawn into" the rape. The story includes only 3 quotes: one bemoaning the destruction of the community, one asking where her mother was, and another bemoaning the destruction of the community. And lastly, an account that "some said" she hung around a playground, and "they" noted that "she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s". The relevance of this (unsourced) quote is unclear. It's also unclear why we could get an unsourced quote blaming the victim, but not a sourced quote of anyone empathizing with the 11 year old girl that just got raped. Not one.

When I first encountered this story, it was via a petition on change.org -- a petition which, incidentally, is a little hysterical and calls for some silly actions, but I digress. When I discussed this article with some friends, they dismissed it out of hand. It's the New York Times, come on. They are just reporting. If "some say" that the 11-year old girl dressed like a 20-year old, it's their JOURNALISTIC DUTY to report that. Apparently, though, it's not their journalistic duty to get even one quote from someone saying "hey it sure is fucked up that 18 guys raped an 11 year old girl". I mean hey, it's just the New York Times, right? The discussion then derailed into some brief criticism of change.org and how froufrou their causes look, and the conversation fizzled. I'd characterize their response as "eh, just another bullshit accusation of rape culture".

What I'm getting at is: people are used to accusations of misogyny and promoting rape culture being complete bullshit. Because so, so many of them are. And now, when one legit and valid example of real rape culture is highlighted, it gets lost or dismissed out of hand. I'm not excusing the dismissal, because it's lazy, and it's not that hard to read the article and see it. But to me this is a real problem.

Rape is a terrible, terrible thing. But it's not the only terrible thing, and it's not sacrosanct. People are going to make comics, pen songs, write novels, and tell jokes about rape -- just like they do about many other terrible things. And when they do, it doesn't (always) mean they are promoting rape culture. Constant, hysterical false accusations of it are only muddying the stream to the point that no one can see clearly -- and they're shrugging in apathy instead.

So, you know.. stop it.

I've heard a lot of people bemoaning the death of RSS the last few years, and I didn't really understand it. "RSS isn't dead," I'd say, "I use it every day! Everyone uses it! They might not know what it is, but they use it. Google reader, hellooooo." Except.. apparently not so much.

I posted a while back about how Google Reader recommendations are broken. I've since learned from a little birdie that the reason, more or less, is that Google has all but gutted the reader team. I was pretty amazed to hear this, and I expressed confusion as to how Google could be defunding what had to be one of their biggest products. Right? Well, er.. no, apparently. I was shocked to learn that hardly anyone uses google reader these days. Why? One word: facebook. Apparently, we can add google reader to the long list of things that facebook has obsoleted via the sheer numbers of people it's sucked into its network.

I don't have any long-winded prognostications about what this means, but I do find it a little depressing. This is how people read the Internet, these days: twitter and facebook. I should put "read" in scarequotes, there, since people don't go to twitter or facebook to read. They just get the occasional link/story shared there in the general stream of their social networking. Google Reader (and other RSS aggregators before it) were very efficient machines for doing one thing: aggregating content and reading it. Now, I'm not a twitter/facebook hater (okay maybe facebook a little), and I'm not knocking them as information dissemination machines. Obviously they are incredible for that: rapidly and efficiently spreading top/breaking news stories. Although this has its downsides, as well: useless but irritatingly popular memes. Just because everyone is talking about Charlie Sheen doesn't mean I wanna fucking hear about it.

So where do people go to "read" the Internet? How do they choose preferences and filter their input? Have people abandoned RSS aggregators for curated aggregators like Huffington Post, et al? If so, that's depressing too -- and if you have to ask why, I have to ask if you've gone to the Huffington Post in the last, uh.. five years.

Is there a piece of the puzzle I'm missing, or are people really existing in this "river" of information that is nothing more than a circular loop of "top" stories that filter through their social network?

I truly hope that Google Reader sticks around -- I can't imagine what I'd do without it. Go back to Bloglines, I guess.

I've been listening to a lot of the catalog of Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, aka "Odd Future" -- the hiphop collective out of LA that is garnering a hefty amount of critical acclaim, and no small amount of criticism for their dark and brutal lyrical content -- often centering around dark murder/rape fantasies, misogyny, homophobia, and so on. For a brief intro, see the lyrics to Blow, or VCR. Much has already been written, so I won't reiterate what's already been said.. The charisma and appeal of the music itself is undeniable -- and it's the primary reason that people are so excited. But not everyone is convinced. In one corner, we have the apologists, decrying criticism by pointing out that one of the members (Syd, their producer) is herself a lesbian, and drawing parallels to predecessors like Eminem, Cam'ron, Clipse, et al, whose lyrical content is alternately fictional or at least not meant to be taken at face value: shocking for shocking's sake. In the other corner, we have the (usually sympathetic) critics, who acknowledge the musical prowess but are not content to dismiss the content as childish antics or shock-value provocation: rape, homophobia and misogyny are problems that are simply too real to chuckle at or turn a blind eye to.

My jury is still out, but I think my take is pretty well summarized by feministmusicgeek:

This brings me to the major source of my boredom, which emanates from being too grown for this nonsense. I don’t think Odd Future are subversive. I think they need to grow up. I would like them to broaden their scope, hone their skills, and diversify their lyrical content. I don’t necessarily think they should get into message rapping or “elevate their people” or any of the other things white liberals ascribe to young black people who make them uncomfortable. I also think that some folks’ objection to the group’s rape narratives stem from the racist myth of the black sexual predator, which the group may be responding to. However, I think I’m meeting people more than half-way on that one. Because I never, under any circumstance, find rape funny. I also cannot abide by any of their casual homophobia and jokes about ass rape.

To me, there’s little difference between the intent of many of their rhymes and what the kid who sat next to me in the first grade was trying to accomplish by flipping his eyelids. Or what a high school acquaintance was after when he said that girls who get raped should just lay back and enjoy it. Or why young men (Tyler among them) develop obsessions with A Clockwork Orange (I recommend they read Gary Mairs’ critique of its legacy before donning bowler hats). Or what a group of homophobes are up to when they wail on a couple of gay men leaving a bar. It’s supposed to seem bad and cool, but it’s just childish and frequently awful. And please don’t tell me that as a feminist I have no sense of humor. I do. I’m also really funny when I go off on a rant or spill queso on my shirt. I’m just not laughing because you aren’t funny. You can do better. Odd Future can do better, but I’m not willing to give them the mantle of the new big thing until they do.

I'm inclined to agree. There are a lot of things going on here -- the debate in a lot of ways reminds me of the Penny Arcade "Dickwolves" controversy. I read a lot about that whole thing and I think I can safely say I sided pretty heavily with the Penny Arcade dudes. Rape (or anything else) is not offlimits for art -- and that includes humor. As for Odd Future, it's pretty clear that they're not actually kidnapping, homophobe ass-raping misogynists. But I'm also just not convinced that anything worthwhile (with respect to the shock value) is being said.

Aaaaaand then you have Nostalgia, Ultra, the new album by Frank Ocean (a OFWGKTA member), which is a pretty solid more-straightforward R&B effort that's worth checking out on its own. It certainly provides an interesting contrast to the rest of the OFWGKTA material.

Further reading:

• Zach Baron on Odd Future at the Village Voice
• Feministmusicgeek weighs in
• Pitchfork on Odd Future

Maybe it's just mine, or some facet of the bizarreness of things I read that makes it impossible to predict, but I have found google reader recommendations to be increasingly broken over the last 6 months. Possibly this has something to do with a botched migration to google apps, or some way in which the recommendation engine fails for google apps accounts.

Things that I read on google reader:

• Nashville political blogs
• libertarian/individualist anarchist/mutualist blogs
• handful of political/world news sites
• photography blogs
• food/restaurant blogs
• a handful of hiphop music blogs
• a handful of friends' blogs

What google reader has been recommending to me lately:

• home craft/decorating blogs
• Fashion blogs (i initially thought this was a stretched (but failed) assumption that because i liked photography I also liked .. fashion? but now i think it's just a general screwup a la the rest)
• weirdly hyperlocal blog posts from cities I don't live in (Dayton, chicago, portland, etc) about New Things in that city
• stupid cat memes
• celebrity gossip/news
• news about android or iphones
• christian mommy blogs
• and now, this morning.. religious antichoice abortion blog posts

That is -- basically, my "recommendations" appear to be a nonsensical/random slice of the Internet in general. Certainly not tailored to me, and almost bizarrely antithetical to anything I'd ever want to read. No amount of clicking "Not interested" seems to be making any difference. I also still don't have any "Recommended Sources" at all -- leading me to think something is just busted.

Anyone else seeing this? It's sad, because I used to like the recommended items feature quite a bit.