Modern life is plagued by what’s been called “time famine”—the sense that we have way too much to do and way too little time to do it. Everyone seems to feel this sometimes overwhelming sense of having too few minutes, hours and days—and it leads to all sorts of untoward consequences. Perceived time scarcity has been shown to disrupt sleep, to sap our self-discipline and ability to delay rewards. It undermines health, leading to more fast food consumption and skipped medical exams. Rationing out our precious time leads inevitably to self-centered disregard for others. The list goes on.

It goes on to say that the remedy for all of this is to have or think about and awe-inducing experience.

…those who were primed to feel awe—those volunteers also saw time as much more expansive, less constricted. They felt free of time’s pressure.

This got me thinking a little and reminded me of a passage I read a while ago and posted here. The quotes, from Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, slightly expanded as found elsewhere online:

It is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours. And the wonder of that experience, perhaps more than any other, seems to be at the very heart of the human desire to change consciousness….

Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. That is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting-on a process, that is, of subtraction.

What around here is truly awesome? I suppose in the absence of ready answers to that question, I’ll just have to prime myself to think about the stuff from before. At least the wallpaper/background on my computer at work is this awesome photo of the US East coast at night, from space, right?

The gist of it appears to me that gluten is (very) bad, and most carbohydrates fall on a scale from not-good to akin-to-poison. That this seems a little dramatic may be a consequence of the… colorful language some proponents use in describing their dietary choices. There are a few accounts that are more balanced out there (I encourage you to spend some time with Google as I did) but much of what I see is characterized by language and attitudes which strike me as more proselytizing than persuading. It seems interesting, though I have a lot of questions, but that is a topic for another post.

I did read a bunch though and something that struck me was how little consensus there seemed to be on many topics regarding human diet and nutrition. We’ve got a lot of experts saying a lot of different things, and moreover, what the experts have been (loosely) agreeing on seems to shift over time. The whole situation reminded me of an excellent blog post I’d read a while back on Idle Words.

The post, titled “Scott and Scurvy“, is about how scurvy was all but eliminated as a problem, and then it came back. The post goes into a lot of fascinating detail on the history of scurvy and its treatment and how our flawed models for understanding it led to that period where scurvy resurfaced as something to worry about.

I tried to find a high profile advocate of the Paleo Diet to title this post with but couldn’t think of any and so I went with Owsley Stanley instead who adheres to a slightly stricter doctrine of food, summarized thus: “Stanley believes that the natural human diet is a totally carnivorous one, thus making it a no-carbohydrate diet, and that all vegetables are toxic.”

All that said, it strikes me as interesting to think that at some point we’re going to get this whole nutrition thing down and at that point, in retrospect, all these diets and theories of nutrition and so forth are going to look kind of cook-y just as ptomaines look to me now. I hope that it happens soon enough that I personally can see how it all turns out.

That said, far and away most of my idle internet cycles have been ploughed into Quora lately (my profile being here).

Luckily so far the only 2:30 games I’ve been really anxious to see have fallen on days where I didn’t have work the next day, and so, it’s been a lot of fun. It’s a really entertaining experience to be in a bar at 3 in the morning surrounded by equally enthused people chanting USA. It’s even more fun, I think, when the other half of the bar is English and has much more creative cheers only to get drowned out by an even louder round of U!S!A! Thankfully, the experience was a pretty fun feel rather than one of unveiled hostility or contempt. I was standing next to this Brit and he had the good humor to answer some of my rooted-in-ignorance questions (mostly about the lineups of both teams since I really don’t know anything).

I’ve started reading The Goal Post since I can’t be bothered to go out and find commentary myself, I’m relying on their “Best of AM/PM” digests to keep me somewhat informed. So far so good, I guess.

GOOO USA! (ps thx Green)

As such we’ve chatted about it a bit as I’ve played around with it. I am definitely a subvocalizer and so presumably that is limiting my reading speed in a major way. I read something like 500-700 wpm. This is about as fast as a friend of mine here in China reads English as her second language. I guess I pause less to look up words I don’t know but the notion of reading as fast in Chinese as I do in English seems impossible enough as it is. Her Chinese reading speed is probably faster than her English by a significant factor too.

When I asked if she subvocalizes, I first had to explain what I meant by that, and when I felt like I had succeeded, the answer was a clear no. I asked a few guys at work too (those adjacent to my desk, basically) and after struggling to explain to them as well, the answer was again mostly “no” (that or “I don’t understand”.

The sample size is obviously too small but I wonder if most Chinese readers do not subvocalize what is it about Chinese education or culture or ideographs or whatever that causes them not to develop the habit as I have for reading?

I don’t mean that the songs sound exactly the same, but only that maybe the same sequences of notes are used.

The whole thing reminded me of a Gladwell article I recently read, Something Borrowed, about plagiarism.

It is called Strictly Game and is apparently the single off of some new album. I think my sister told me about this band, Harlem Shakes (blocked in China? why?), before but I never got around to listening to anything before today.