Politics, Economics and other Stuff

Trying for a 32+ hour fast tomrrow

No food at all tomorrow, except for milk in my hot drinks.  At least that's the plan.  Last week's breakfast to breakfast fast was easy, trying for late night snack to breakfast might be a bit harder.  An upside is I get to do some late night snacking in front of the TV (watching Moneyball and what actually turns out to be a good travel show on the 'Wealth Channel').   I couldn't try fasting on an empty stomach. 

Also a rest day for running and biking.

We're the 1%

At least the American Heart Association thinks my wife and I are in the 1%:

The AHA 2020 Impact Goal is to improve the cardiovascular health of Americans by 20% while also reducing cardiovascular deaths by 20%. In order to achieve these goals, the AHA adopted a new concept of cardiovascular health, one that is made up of seven components. These components include four ideal health behaviors—not smoking, body-mass index (BMI) <25 kg/m², physical activity at goal levels, and diet that includes three or more daily servings of fruits and vegetables—and three ideal health factors, including total cholesterol <200 mg/dL, systolic blood pressure <120 mm Hg and diastolic blood pressure <80 mm Hg, and fasting plasma glucose levels <100 mg/dL.

Each of these individual behavior and risk factors are well supported by data, but there have been few studies that have addressed the relationship between clusters of the risk factors/behaviors and health outcomes. "Even though a lot of the health metrics are rooted in sound science, it's still a relatively new index," said Ford. "To me, we needed to learn about how well it predicts and how well it behaves, because this particular index hadn't really been explicitly tested."

In their study, Ford and colleagues collected data on 7622 adults 20 years of age and older participating in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 1999 and 2002. In the absence of AHA-specific metrics, such as dietary and glycemic measures, they used alternative measurements, such as the use of HbA_1cconcentrations as a stand-in for fasting plasma glucose and the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) for dietary assessments.

Overall, just 1.0% of subjects met all seven metrics of sound cardiovascular health, a disappointing number that is in line with previous studies. In total, 13.8% of subjects met five of the seven metrics of cardiovascular health and 5.4% met six metrics, while 1.5% of the study population met none of the ideal cardiovascular health criteria.

The exact seven factors, incuding healthy diet index, are [but note the update below]:

Goal/Metric 'Ideal' Cardiovascular Health
Physical Activity
Adults >20 yrs of age: 150 min/wk moderate intensity or
75 min/wk vigorous exercise (may also combine moderate and vigorous activity)
Children 12-19 yrs of age: 60 min of moderate or vigorous activity each day

Current Smoking
Adults >20 yrs of age: Never smoked or quit smoking >12 months ago
Children 12-19 yrs of age: Never tried, never smoked

Body Mass Index
Adults >20 yrs of age: <25 kg/m2
Children 2-19 yrs of age: <85th Percentile

Total Cholesterol
Adults >20 yrs of age: <200 mg/deciliter
Children 6-19 years of age: <170 mg/deciliter

Blood Pressure
Adults >20 years of age: <120/<80 mmHG
Children 8-19 years of age: <90th Percentile

Fasting Plasma Glucose
Adults >20 yrs of age: <100 mg/deciliter
Children 6-19 years of age: <100 mg/deciliter

Healthy Diet Score
Adults >20 yrs of age: 4-5 Components (see below)
Children 5-19 years of age: 4-5 Components (see below)

1) Sodium: <1500 mg per day

2) fruits & vegtables: 4.5 cups [servings?] per day

3) Fish: two 3.5-ounce servings per week (preferably oily fish)

4) Fiber-rich whole grains:1.1 grams of fiber per 10 grams of carbohydrat, three 1-ounce servings per day

5) Nuts, legumes and seeds: 4 servings per week

6) Processed meats: none (or up to 2 servings per week) [?]

7) Saturated fat: <7% of total energy intake

8) Sugar-sweetened beverages: 36 ounces per seek (450 kilocalories per week)

I'm a bit stunned that only ~1% of the US adult population makes these criteria...they don't seem very strict. I'd say it is closer to 10% or more for my social group.  Maybe even 20% or so...where do people fall down?  Blood pressure?  That's probably the first one that's going to get me. 

Update #1: if you look at the paper abstract, it's actually 1.1%. 

Update #2: Status of Cardiovascular Health in US Adults suggests, on skimming, that it is the diet score that creates the very low 1.1%.  But what aspect of the diet score does it?  Am I misunderstanding the diet score (i.e. how do 99% of the population fail more than 3 of the 8 diet categories? I may fail sodium intake -- no idea what my sodium intake is, I don't salt but I also don't avoid salt in say sea food, brines in soy sauce, but I don't add salt or eat processed food either-- and saturated fat intake, but that still leaves me one freebe category to fail, right?).

Update #3: Ah, here we are, Status of Cardiovascular Health in US Adults indicates that a perfect an 'ideal' diet score requires 4 out of these 5:

1)fruits and vegetables, >=4.5 cups per day

2) fish, 2 or more 3.5-oz servings per week

3) fiber-rich whole grains(>1.1 g fiber/10 g carbohydrate), 3 or more 1-oz-equivalent servings per day;

4) sodium, <1500 mg/d;

5) sugar-sweetened beverages, <450 kcal/wk.

So this drops processed meat limitations and saturated fat limitations.  I'm clear on all but sodium, where I disagree anyway, not that I know what my sodium intake is.  

It appears that we're at 1% of the population since most people fail both sodium and some other component, mostly 'whole grains' or, second to that, not enough fish. 

Grass Fed Beef Liver

I'm trying to eat liver once a week.  The main limitation is finding liver, it doesn't seem to be a standard offering anymore in the US.  At least it is cheap, even for the fancy and usually expensive 'grass fed beef', liver pricing is pretty much not an issue.  Very mild flavored.  No links right now to why grass fed beef liver is supposedly healthy...my wife and kids refuse the eat or taste any liver of any sort. 

The usual Zoo Photos

I took the 135mm f/2 lens, not the usual 70-200mm f/4 IS lens.  So no IS, but a larger aperture.  I forgot my white balance card, so indoor fluorescent lighting is a bit problematic. 

Just one two photos for now.  Off to run before it gets dark...

Update: now back, some more photos. Also one of the six Presidential Bell UH-1N-BF Iroquois overhead.

Back at 155.2 lbs

Due in part to Indian take-out my wife got for dinner due to time constraints. I ate only a moderate amount, but that seems to have sufficed.

I'm on a fasting day today. Breakfast today to breakfast tomorrow, with some milk.

I need more sleep to drop fat. 5.5 hours of sleep, if that, last night. I go to bed too late, not aided by kids staying up to 10 pm.

Update #1 (Jan 26, 11:45 pm): Going to bed now in an attempt to get more sleep.  Fasting has been very very easy, basically not an effort.  No hunger.  Kids stayed up past 10 pm though...now that is stressful for the parents.  Fasting is nothing compared to kids awake at 10 pm.  No wonder I don't get to bed before midnight. 

Update #2 (Jan 27): down, like last week after the fast, to 153 lbs.

UPdate #3 (Jan 28): yeah, still at 153 lbs the day after the day after the fast.  Here we go further down...actually maybe 152.8 lbs (after a 2nd pee).  I even survived eating at Outback Steakhouse...because of an award at school that kid #1 got, which has a coupon for a free kids meal at Outback.  Not a good place to eat, worse than last year when we've also gone because of the same school awards.  At least this franchise (all franchises?) is cutting back food costs and it shows.  In a big way. 

What kills slim people? (with Update)

One of the puzzles reading the literature on the effects of obesity on mortality is what kills lean people.  For instance, you get results like this from Associations of General and Abdominal Obesity With Multiple Health Outcomes in Older Women The Iowa Women’s Health Study ARCH INTERN MED/VOL 160, JULY 24, 2000.  More later, but take a look...maybe not all that bad, being light and fate, i.e. light with even less muscle, is the worst. 

Update #1: one problem with all the weight/mortality studies is that almost all of them (not all though) don't have a long history of weight for their subjects.  That is, they only have the weight of the subject at middle age or late middle age or older and then the mortality observations over a subsequent time period, usually something like 5 to 20 years.  This makes it even harder to disentangle the health-weight correlation: lots of people are low weight (due to both unintentional and intentional weight loss) because of illnesses that go on to kill them.  It isn't that being low weight causes mortality, the things that cause mortality also cause low weight, including by making people adopt healthy lifestyles.    Having a longer history of subject weight might alleviate this problem: light 25 year olds are not, for the most part, light since they are unhealthy (but who knows?).  Light 55 year old are already, it seems, a much more mix picture.  

Also an issue: it does seem like higher lean body mass is associated with lower mortality, holding body fat (not body fat percentage) constant. But here is is mostly that the bottom quartiles of lean body weight has problems, anybody above the cut point seems fine.  But it is hard to be above the bottom quartile (or is it bottom quintile?) of lean body BMI if you have a BMI of 20 or less. 

Ah, here we are, two articles.  First, Mortality associated with body fat, fat-free mass and body mass index among 60-year-old Swedish men: a 22-year follow-up. The study of men born in 1913. Here we have quintiles of fat free mass BMI, body fat BMI and BMI. 

Next we have Body Fat and Fat-Free Mass and All-Cause Mortality, a Danish study of 50+ year olds.  Here the main figure is hard to read, but it also shows, dark lines for men and light lines for women, that low lean body BMI is bad, here up to around the median lean body BMI.  Bottom line: being light because you have low muscle mass is bad.  This is not necessarily a reflect causation, again, health issues that kill you may also cause low muscle mass.  Knowing more about causality would be nice. 

On this scale for old people I'm doing fine, in my current (higher than intended post-Christmas) weight my lean BMI is around 18.7 and my fat BMI is 3.3.  So maybe I should get my lean BMI up to 19?  Should be doable, that's only 3 lbs more muscle...harder to do if you want to loose 10 lbs overall.  These guys have more fat than me, but they are older too...

 

 

Dry Lube is hard to apply

I cleaned my chain with WD40 and then applied some dry lube.  It is hard to apply, since not all that fluid, at least in the cold. Probably fine for now, but I may apply wet lube over it. 

I've been assuming Newt G. can't actually win in November

Probably no reason to panic yet, but Newt G. is now polling substantially ahead of Romney in Florida.  I've been making the rational assumption that Newt could win the Republican nomination -- since he's more in line with what vocal Republicans seems to be than Romney -- but would blow up before November, a good outcome for the country.  Still, the downside risk of a Gingrich win in November seems not worth it on my more pessimistic days. 

Grandiose egomanics have their role in society, being US President shouldn't be one of them. 

Weight Regain

I'm back to 155 lbs, maybe more tomorrow.  A bit puzzling, but maybe not 100% puzzling: chocolate and brownies.  I'll tighten up 100% on sweets intake and maybe cut back on my regular unrefined carb intake as well.  It may be a long slog back to 150 lbs. 

We've declared a household moratorium on sweets, since the kids fight for them and they crowd out healthy food in the kids' diets. 

No running this weekend, due to snow and ice on the ground.  Just stationary cycling.  Lots of supervision of cranky kids. 

Update #1 (12:35 am): my wife is now keeping me up, 40 min into last minute school volunteer work that was only going to take 10 min....

UPdate #2 (Jan. 23, 7:45 am): 156.6 lbs this morning.  How can a few brownies make that much difference?  Is this weigth gain from not tearing up my muscles by running/stregth training?

Also, a flat tire on my bike, on the rear wheel in the trainer.  Could be a standard problem.   Which points out I don't have the equipment to fix it.  I'll take it in to get fixed and I'll then get the equipment to fix it myself (which might take me a longer time). 

Update #3 (evening, Jan. 23): bike is fixed.  Easy, I'll be set up to do it myself next time.   

Birdie can fly

Her clipped feathers seems to be coming in again.  Or she's just figured out how to fly with the clipped feathers she has. In any case, she can now fly up and across the house.  Landings aren't reliable yet and she doesn't, luckily, fly fast.  She has more of a constant helicoptering approach. 

Photos of the flying birdie may require some serious ambush photography efforts, since we don't prompt her to fly given the injury risk. 

Internet Bandwith Use

I assume this is for household connections -- not clear what definitions are used.  What are people doing on iTunes?  Are there streaming services on iTunes?

The Shift in American Body Weight is large

From the CDC -- not sure what sort of smoother they are applying to the data here, I suspect they are potentially oversmoothing. Still, it looks like Americans at a BMI of 20 have halves in just 25 years. 

Trying a 24 hour intermittent fast

I've not done 24 hour fasts before. I will drink my usual Orzo with milk. I may need to take a walk or two to get away from food.

I'm doing my first cardio rest day in at least 14 days as well.

Update #1 (7:55 pm): still at it, I got through dinner unscathed.  Orzo will milk is helping, so this isn't zero calories.  Close enough though by my standards. 

Update #2 (12:07 am): going to be now...easy so far, I should make it to tomorrow morning.  Maybe I should try for a 32+ hour fast.  Or cut out the milk. 

Update #3 (6:27 am): made it easily.  Not hungry yet.  Down from 154.4 lbs yesterday to 153.0 lbs today, less of a decline than you'd expect on a water only fast.  I expect a rebound today.   All in all easy, I may want to try for a 32+ hour fast next time (next week?).  Or just do this again.  Off to run once it gets bright enough out there, if it isn't too wet and cold. 

BP seems unaffected, my currently usual 114/64.  Resting pulse of 40, also my current usual number. 

Plessy (1896) vs. the fillibustered Lodge Elections Bill of 1890

As an addendum to the Prigg (1842) as the ancestor of Dred Scott (1857) post, here is Garber on Plessy (1896):

Law professors who place canonical and anticanonical judicial rulings alongside constitutional decisions made by elected officials provide students with a more sophisticated account of how Supreme Court decisions have influenced constitutional development and the structure of contemporary constitutional conflicts. Contrary to much legal orthodoxy, the Supreme Court almost never engages in creation ex nihilo or single-handedly destroys entrenched constitutional practices. Some canonical and anticanonical decisions buttress legal foundations constructed by other constitutional decisionmakers. Plessy v. Fergusonand McCulloch v. Maryland built on the constitutional decisions made outside the Court that promoted white supremacy and incorporated the National Bank of the United States.  .... The significance of Plessy v. Ferguson22 pales by comparison to the congressional failure to pass the Lodge Elections Bill in 1890, which would have dramatically increased federal oversight of Southern elections, the congressional decision after the 1892 national election to repeal many Reconstruction election laws, and the turn of the twentieth century Southern conventions that inscribed white supremacy into state constitutions.

More later...

My Namesakes

There are not too many people out there who have my name, at least not in the US, but not in Germany either, which makes it possible for me to have a google news search on my name.  Today I got a hit for a person I'd not heard of before, at least not that I can remember.  What do I get?  Disreputable politicians or criminals?  No, one of the former national chapter heads Médecins Sans Frontières off doing emergency surgery on kids in the Gaza strip, after a stint in Somalia and Rwanda.  

The top google hit on my name, no longer me after I got out of academia, is a public interest law professor.  If I ever get in the news again I'll bring down the reputation score of my namesakes. 

Surprisingly, I'm the #2 google hit for my name...ah, that may be google's personalized search, but the result is still there when I log out of google and wipe out cookies. 

Feeling Better

Part of my continuing patronage of Cafe Nemooneh.

Cardiac Arrest during Marathons and Half-Marathons

This is from today's widely reported NEJM paper.  One result I'd not expected -- shows you have little I pay attention to marathon lore -- is that most heart attacks occur in the last quarter of races, especially the deadly ones.   Is this due to marathons only?  Supposedly the excess is mostly in the last mile (during sprints?), but the paper isn't open access. 

Back to 155 lbs

I'm back down to 155 lbs after getting up to 157.4 lbs due to Thanksgiving/Christmas/AEA Meetings. I plan/hope to move at 1 lbs/week to 150 lbs and then 1 lbs every other week down to 146 lbs.

Only one run this week due to a rest day and cold/wet weather. Indoor biking instead.

Flexibility

I'm very inflexible.  But I learned today that my wife is even more inflexible than me along at least one dimension.  The kids were messing around this morning before school and the topic of touching your head with your foot came up.  My comment was: 'hey, even I can do that.'  And I can: I can touch my head (forehead, nose, chin, ear) with either foot standing on one leg.  I assumed that if I can do this pretty, then much anybody can do this.  Turns out that my wife can't, she's not even close.  It's bizarre.  Aren't women supposed to be more flexible?  

Kid #1 can, on the other hand, touch her head with both feet at the same time, bending over backwards while on her stomach.     

Income Inequality and Current Account Imbalances

This is one case of 'popular (econ) culture ahead of econ publishing' -- the relationship has been noted previously, but I'm not aware of papers. 

Michael Kumhof, Claire Lebarz, Romain Ranciere, Alexander W. Richter, Nathaniel A. Throckmorton, Income Inequality and Current Account Imbalances

Econometric evidence shows that higher income inequality and financial liberalization—a common policy response to income inequality—are associated with significantly larger external deficits. To study this mechanism, we develop a DSGE model where investors’ income share increases at the expense of workers. Workers respond by obtaining loans from domestic and foreign investors, which supports aggregate demand but generates current account deficits. Financial liberalization helps workers sustain higher consumption but results in even higher household debt and current account deficits. In emerging markets, workers cannot borrow from investors. Instead, investors deploy their surplus funds abroad, leading to current account surpluses.

iPhone bike mount

The RAM Universal bike Mount seems to work fine.  Feels pretty solid and secure, and is easy to get the iPhone into, as well as going on and off the bike easily.  So yes, I like it. 

Prigg (1842) as the ancestor of Dred Scott (1857)

Levinson remarks on the relative standing in the legal academy of Dred Scott (1857) and Prigg (1842) in a comment on Greene.   First, a reminder of the holding in Prigg, as formulated first by Levinson and then by by Greene:

Prigg v. Pennsylvania,27in which Justice Joseph Story, for the majority of the Court:

a. held that the Constitution gave slave owners a right of "self-help repossession" to snatch back anyone they deemed to be a fugitive slave;

b. upheld as an implied power of Congress its ability to pass the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; and

c. struck down as preempted by the 1793 statute Pennsylvania's "personal liberty" law that at least would have required slave owners (or slave catchers, like Prigg) to go before a state court before taking the alleged fugitive -- and, as in the actual case, children who under no plausible theory could be deemed slaves at all -- out of the ostensibly free state and back to a slave state.

....

Prigg v. Pennsylvania could easily be called the worst Supreme Court decision ever issued. The human tragedy of the decision is breathtaking. In an opinion by Justice Story, the Court reversed the criminal prosecution of a slave catcher who had kidnapped and sold into slavery a woman, Margaret Morgan, who likely was not a fugitive slave, and her two children, who assuredly were not. The Court's holding was that the Fugitive Slave Clause prohibited states from subjecting slave catchers to a state-sanctioned civil process, except to prevent "breach of the peace, or any illegal violence." Under the logic of the opinion, however, the kidnapping could not itself be outlawed as "illegal violence." Put otherwise, violence against blacks was "legal" violence; "illegal" violence was violence against whites. The decision abided the constant threat of enslavement experienced by free brown-skinned Americans in both the North and the South. By constitutionally forbidding states from preventing private violence against blacks, Priggworked a simultaneous assault on due process and on equal protection, the twin pillars of the modern Fourteenth Amendment. . . . Prigg virtually made Dred Scott a fait accompli.28

....

Under the Court’s holding in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, which remained good law at the time of Dred Scott, a free state was constitutionally forbidden from providing a free black with due process of law if that person were kidnapped by a slave catcher. To hold in the face of such precedent that the same Constitution recognizes the citizenship of free blacks feels like the rankest sophistry. No nation worth its salt could abide the treatment of its citizens in this way. Either the treatment of blacks or their designation as citizens had to go.

Levinson goes on to complain that

the obvious question is why Prigg -- and its author [Joseph Story] -- have suffered neither the public obloquy nor the condemnation by professional legal academics, obsessed with theories of interpretation, as have Dred Scott and its principal author, Chief Justice Roger Taney. Consider that Taney, surely one our most important Chief Justices, has never been the subject of a commemorative stamp issued by the United States Postal Service (unlike, bizarrely enough, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee).29 Joseph Story, on the other hand, was one of four justices honored in 2009 by the United States Postal Service as part of a series of forty-four-cent stamps commemorating Supreme Court justices.30 The other three were Louis D. Brandeis, William J. Brennan, and Felix Frankfurter...

Google's Gmail is sending me Chinese language ads

Why is gmail doing this? I did just open an email, all in English, from a Chinese friend from her work email address...I can't see that being the cause?

Leg Asymmetry

I've started doing pistol squats, not too low and with a couch to help out.  I do okay on my right leg, but my left leg is much weaker (i.e. I can get out of the chair using only my left leg, though it's pretty straintforward using my right leg).

Well, it should be easy to detect strenght improvements on my left leg.