Beach Read #1: Being Peace

Took last week off and hit the beach. Did some fun reading and dominating of young cousins in various sand-based athletic competitions.

Beach Read #1 was the classic BEING PEACE, by Thich Nhat Hanh. Loved every word. It's highly relevant, 25 years after publication.

We have to be in the present time, because only the present is real, only in the present moment can we be alive. We do not practice for the sake of the future, to be reborn in a paradise, but to be peace, to be compassion, to be joy right now.

 

The Problem With Netflix

I love Netflix. I love their content, their library and their balls. I own the stock. But they have one glaring issue, as analyst Michael Pachter pointed out in this piece.

He also thinks Netflix will be in trouble if it doesn’t start owning its content, rather than leasing it. “Someone else produces content, Netflix buys exclusive rights for a very limited period of time, and then Netflix doesn’t own the content anymore,” Pachter said. “This is not the same as the HBO model. They are nothing like HBO. They have a three-year window to show House of Cards. After that, nothing. They don’t own it; they can’t exploit it further unless they pay more. That’s not ownership of content.”

The Morality of Hunting Deer →

Had a blast shooting this one. Jim, James and Clayton are some funny motherfuckers.

The Credits

Directed by Kevin Brader
Written by Matt Houghton

Produced by Anthony Deptula

Director of Photography - Evan Urman
Editor - Jeff Sharpe

Production Design - Heidi Seidell
Production Sound - Aaron Gray

Cast:
John - Quinn Emmett
Jackson - James Zimmerman
Dylan - Jim Mahoney
The Woodsman - Clayton Froning

Special Thanks:
Kenny Brader
Claro's Italian Markets Inc.
The Paymozds

Range Productions

 

Fertility Today: Where Don't Babies Come From? - The Atlantic →

Important fact: 

But human babies, compared with other mammals, are particularly helpless. Is there an evolutionary reason for this?
It’s because of our big brains. In most primates, a baby develops in a mother’s body until it has half of its brain size. A lot of brain growth occurs in the womb. At birth, human brains are a quarter of adult size. We can’t give birth to babies any later because the brain will just fit through the pelvis as it is. It takes about a year for us to get to the position where monkeys and apes are at birth. That makes human babies particularly dependent on care for their first year of life, which has implications for social organization. Special social support is necessary.

 

And why is our pelvis of this particular size and orientation?

So we can walk upright. 

So we sacrifice initial mobility and safety for the bigger brain and being able to walk on two legs -- arguably the two most important pieces of our evolutionary success. 

I heart science. 

On Dinosaur Time →

"You can't understand dinosaurs without a sense of time...less time separates us from Tyrannosaurus rex than separated T. rex from Stegosaurus."

I love this. It's the much larger scale version of us being off on Stonehenge by 5000 years. Which is still something to consider, btw: 5000 years is all of the time post-historical Jesus, times two. A lot happens in 5000 years.

To get truly nerdy: this is why a real Jurassic Park would technically be a shitshow. Most of these animals never encountered each other. They lived tens of millions of years apart. So to let them run wild amongst one another would inevitably instigate a fight to the top of a new food chain, probably resulting in the quick and bloody extinction of many of your theme park's finest attractions.

On that note: where do I buy tickets?

Why The City of Miami Is Doomed to Drown →

I love this piece because it lets both sides of the climate change debate have a say.

And then we hear from countless intelligent people who work day-in and day-out on the city's myriad water issues, and people who actually understand S-C-I-E-N-C-E and they tell us just how fucked Miami really is. 

I like this quote best, about idiots like Marco Rubio guiding their state into the abyss: 

"I have a solution for that," says former speaker Tom Gustafson. "We need to all march up to the capital in Tallahassee and burn the fucker down. That's the only way we're gonna save South Florida."

I also like the part where they talk about building a city on the water. Ok.

 

Let's Talk About Poop. →

Really enjoyed Michael Pollan's piece in the NYTimes Magazine a couple weeks back about "the 100 trillian bacteria that make up your microbiome."

...it appears increasingly likely that this “second genome,” as it is sometimes called, exerts an influence on our health as great and possibly even greater than the genes we inherit from our parents. But while your inherited genes are more or less fixed, it may be possible to reshape, even cultivate, your second genome.

It's a fascinating read, especially having just welcomed a new baby into the world. I've never been a germ freak, but I'm more excited than ever to let him lick the floor.

I'm 95% vegan (cookies, sushi), but it's good to know there's more that I can do to stay healthy, besides avoiding drugged meat and eating a shit ton of fiber. Pollan's on the front lines of the fight against industrial farming, but it's always scary how detrimental otherwise life-saving antibiotics can be to our bodily ecosystem.

Children in the West receive, on average, between 10 and 20 courses of antibiotics before they turn 18. And those prescribed drugs aren’t the only antimicrobials finding their way to the microbiota; scientists have found antibiotic residues in meat, milk and surface water as well. Blaser is also concerned about the use of antimicrobial compounds in our diet and everyday lives — everything from chlorine washes for lettuce to hand sanitizers. “We’re using these chemicals precisely because they’re antimicrobial,” Blaser says. “And of course they do us some good. But we need to ask, what are they doing to our microbiota?” No one is questioning the value of antibiotics to civilization — they have helped us to conquer a great many infectious diseases and increased our life expectancy. But, as in any war, the war on bacteria appears to have had some unintended consequences.

Lastly, I'm not surprised to find the probiotic industry is mostly a sham. Unless it's from your backyard, anything you're putting in your body that's unregulated seems fairly questionable. It might not hurt you, but who knows if it'll help.

These guys are trying to find out. 

A long read, but very worth it.