More evidence isn't likely to get change people's beliefs.

Welcome to the club of people proclaiming in the late nineties that Microsoft Windows would immediately grow to fill any conceivable hard drive capacity gains. I couldn't disagree with you more.

People believe stupid things until they don't. The heliocentric theory ultimately made it over the bar. I guess the ignoramuses eventually defined this small distinction as unimportant; perhaps instead they all switched over to belief in the egocentric theory of celestial creation. Nevertheless, heliocentrism is rarely contested in the modern age.

The genetic tsunami is going to trigger a massive denialhood exodus. What's the stupidest thing you can believe after conceding that life appears to have deep generational linkages? I don't know yet, but have no fear we won't find out.

The gene sequencing situation has gone from discovering one alien transmission with a blueprint for one giant machine, to discovering five billion sub-channels of situation comedy featuring a taxonomist's fantasyland of busty green mermaids. Sometimes quantity prevails over quality in herding the dipshits from one grassy knoll to another.

Continuing with another thought after racking my wine: it wouldn't surprise me that some sub-cohort of the ubermensch aspirant class actually does go on to achieve fame, prosperity, and eternal death tax exemption--more by luck than good management (see Columbus, Christoper) but then again, you can't win if you don't try. According to a popular Christian doctrine, success and prosperity are evidence of God's blessing. God means us to behave this way.

In mathematics, you need to test your infinite series for convergence before making grand claims. With eugenics, the discriminating mind tests whether the starting assumptions are invariant under the conclusions reached. Given human nature during a land grab, I suspect that any gene that correlates with careful thinking is just as likely to fall under the stampede to riches as to excel on merit.

advantageous at the point in time the selection occurs

Mais non! We select genes that are advantageous in whichever frame of reference occupies our tiny little brains in the social context around making the decision. The easy cases are defective genes that severely incapacitate. Every other decision can go any number of different ways depending on how the deciding group integrates over a contingent future.

Perhaps a broad consensus emerges that certain genes are linked to sexual predation, at which point advantageous becomes self-referential: any gene with a high coefficient of socialized abortion is disadvantageous by definition. Call these the pariah genes or genoma non grata.

An entrepreneurial eugenicist might soon begin to speculate which genes are at risk of becoming genoma non grata. It would be advantageous to jump the gun to give your progeny an early advantage on convergence to the genetic ubermensch. We can make some early guesses already. Genes correlated with success at calculus in kindergarten are likely to appeal to people with this mindset. A helicopter parent is going to select genes that predispose the offspring to thriving under the rotor wash.

This is more of a social construct than a rational assessment of advantage. Post ante, the genes winnowed out of the population were clearly disadvantageous. Just look at the results.

Most wide-eyed researchers started off expecting 60,000 genes in the human genome yet we found something closer to 20,000 when the mist settled.

By my early childhood instruction in improper fractions, it's not impossible that all 20,000 genes are holding down multiple jobs to make ends meet.

The rest of your life will, unfortunately, now no longer live up to something you accomplished when you were 16.

Imagine the freedom of no longer having to live up to anybody's expectations. ;)

Better yet, he doesn't have an Erdos number less than his age, so he can still hope for a normal sex life.

The One Percent

47:45 Nicole Buffett describes her life, then gets booted from the family for good for having said not much at all. Her claim to the Buffett name was indirect, and it might not have been the first time she said more than Warren liked, but still it's hard to imagine such a cold business.

I would love to see sardines cans with a BPA-free liner where the fish scoots right out without having to bang the can around upside down while spraying stinky fish oil all over the counter-top.

The last large sardine in my can today had such incredible BPA suction I had to pitchfork it out. Even after I slid it around, it still didn't peel off when inverted.

Health studies usually report that the benefits of high omega-3 diets outweigh the notorious toxins also contained.

went the way of the dinosaurs

I'm not reading one more word from a glib duffus prime who still thinks the dinosaurs went the way of the dinosaurs.

You might factor into your model of the mainstream media that few people find the behaviour patterns of decrepit old farts newsworthy.

Youth are early adopters, and many youth and young adults lack the judgement to step back from the new stupid. Also known as a sex drive. A young adult using text to A) get laid, or B) indulge in the fantasy that you might someday get laid is not worrying that taking a driving license away from an 80 year-old widow with failing eyesight and reaction times deprives her of her last vestige of independence. "Get out of my way, old bird, I'm trying to get laid. #horny"

SMS accident template

Two young adults are stuck behind some slow-moving great-grandmother, but neither notices initially since they are both busy texting and the slower speed makes it easier to divide attention. The man is writing a shorter text and looks up first, sees that he's going to miss a major light because of the slow-moving old bird two cars ahead, but has just enough time to make an abrupt lane change into an open space and gun the intersection. Young women in front finishes her text moments later, decides to make the same move (with less testosterone) sees the same gap, but doesn't take into account the asshole multitasking male who was driving behind her one seconds ago careening into the same opening with twice the acceleration.

Asshole male finishes his abrupt shoulder check and swings his head forward just in time to sense his impending impact with the young woman making the same lane change in front of him. He tries to protect his precious chrome bumper by swinging yet further around rodeo style and clips a bicyclist in the oncoming lane who had moved inside for an upcoming left turn.

It's a lot like wifi spectrum. If you're the only driver on the highway who texts, you enjoy the protection of every other driver having their eyes on the road. But then other cheeky drivers start to behave the same way, and soon you experience packet loss. The problem on the road is that some packets are more fragile than others. How come the car wash is out of service? Because the drain is clogged again with little strips of Lycra.

One has to take into account the human momeostatic preference. Inflate like a blimp after a decade or so, or wander around in a low blood sugar haze all the damn time.

Hall's model actually demonstrates how consistently most people maintain their long term calorie intake. In the model, my extra 20 pounds correspond to a long term dietary excess of about 10% In many contexts, regulation within 10% is pretty good.

The problem with dietary controls is decision fatigue.
Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?

You can expend a lot of will power depriving yourself of a little craving hundreds of times per day. That will show up in making poorer decisions elsewhere, unless you alleviate your decision fatigue with a dose of sugar.

In the food studies, when you put a person on a restriction diet, there seems to be a large osmotic term over and above what the subjects report. It doesn't take many weak moments to rupture the envelop in a ten percent caloric restriction. One tablespoon of olive oil has 120 calories. I get that much extra oil just licking the spoons if I whip up my Caesar salad dressing with too much gusto.

In the appetite system, fructose is particularly problematic. HFCS used in soda pop has about the same amount of fructose as table sugar (sucrose breaks down to glucose and fructose extremely promptly after ingestion).

Dr. Lustig's excellent presentation

Dr Mercola is a strange man. I think he would sign up to live in the Matrix with that tube coming out of the back of his scull if he was promised that it was a feeding tube, and that all the nutrients were purified by reverse osmosis to ten nines purity level. A bit like the space engineer in Contact: Why eat good and wholesome food when you can double the purity for ten times the price? His OCD purity compulsion notwithstanding, many of his links are highly informative.

A while back I also watched an excellent video by Dr Brian Wansink about the psychology of portion size. There was another good resource from his food lab at Cornell IIRC. Wansink won an ignoble for his bottomless soup bowl.

Here's another of his tricks: Gluttony even when the food tastes lousy.

Another odd duck is Gary Taubes. He's not all wrong, and he's not all right.

Science of Weightloss and Fat Accumulation

The obesity epidemic and metabolic syndrome are harder to unwind than 90% of the people here thinking they are posting wisdom for the unwashed.