I picked up a copy of Burn, by Herman Pontzer PhD, at a local bookstore. I like reading about exercise research, and enjoy readable academic treatments of topics like longevity and metabolism. These often disappoint, but this book is good. No gut feelings, no buy this, no unsupported claims, no pseudoscientific feelgood bullsh*yte.
The author did a lot of metabolism research on orangutans and interesting work with isolated hunter-gatherer tribes. Few authors compare different species to humans, or hunters to sedentary modern folks, and he also does a great job explaining new research (up to about 2021) regarding burning calories, losing weight and staying healthy. (It does not discuss things like mTor, AMPK or Ozempic. If interested specifically in longevity, The Longevity Solution is more practical. Burn talks about mitochondria in some detail, but is not specific to weightlifting, though metabolism is important to skilled lifters, and mitochondria are remarkable things).
But it does a very good job discussing exercise and I learned some interesting stuff about metabolism despite having read a lot about this. It is readable but academic, quoting good journals. Some very interesting stuff on microbiomes and a great deal about calorimetry including its history and its drawbacks from a guy who does a lot of good VO2 research. Little woo.
Highly recommended. Did you know that you burn the same number of calories running a mile, regardless of what speed you are running? That running burns about twice as many calories as walking, swimming six times as muchā¦ but climbing can burn thirty-six times as many calories as walking - way more than anything else (though maybe the 500 kettlebell thing comes close?). No wonder I so like doing sprints on the seated rope pull cardio thing! The book is chock full of supported facts like this, so I highly recommend it.
Just learned Goodreads gave it 4.14, a very high score, so obviously many others liked it too.
Heh, from the cover I thought that book was going to be really old (for whatever reason). But both books were written in 2021, both have very high Goodreads ratings, both describe themselves as āmythbustingā. But Burn is very much about metabolism whereas your book seems to answer much more general questions. Still, I will look out for a copy. Looks like a good read.
(The exercise-health adjacent book with the highest rating might be the excellent Outlive by Attia, although from a Canadian view he is way too fond of expensive and unnecessary tests. We have a very different philosophy. If there was a genetic test telling you you had a 30% chance of developing Alzheimerās (his example), Attia would do the test (even if it was expensive) arguing you could change some things now to reduce your risk later.
But if you live into your 80s, your risk of developing Alzheimerās is about 30% anyway! So what did you gain from doing the test? This kind of incomplete knowledge can cause great worry and crippling anxiety in some people, so should not be done lightly unless the test results are very sensitive or specific AND it is clear what changes one might make to reduce risk. You could make these changes anyway, without increasing stressors, no test required!).
Both also seem to discuss a lot of anthropology. But I donāt think I agree with the premise humans did not evolve to exercise. I think sitting around all day is what we did not evolve to do.
From a review of Exercised:
āStrikes a perfect balance of scholarship, wit, and enthusiasm.ā āBill Bryson, New York Times best-selling author of The Body
ā¢ If we are born to walk and run, why do most of us take it easy whenever possible?
ā¢ Does running ruin your knees?
ā¢ Should we do weights, cardio, or high-intensity training?
ā¢ Is sitting really the new smoking?
ā¢ Can you lose weight by walking?
ā¢ And how do we make sense of the conflicting, anxiety-inducing information about rest, physical activity, and exercise with which we are bombarded?*
In this myth-busting book, Daniel Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and a pioneering researcher on the evolution of human physical activity, tells the story of how we never evolved to exerciseāto do voluntary physical activity for the sake of health. Using his own research and experiences throughout the world, Lieberman recounts without jargon how and why humans evolved to walk, run, dig, and do other necessary and rewarding physical activities while avoiding needless exertion.
In fact, Lieberman was Pontzerās PhD advisor and gives a positive quote on the back cover of Burn. I wonder how similar the books are if the authors are kind of drinking from the same trough.
On a slightly different note for people who are interested in true crime, the United Healthcare shooter had a goodreads page that has been set to private, but this article sums it up.
I think you could easily read too much into stuff like that. Plenty of those titles are popular and fairly mundane. If he is the guy, and he sure could be based on limited info, maybe the back pain stuff is relevant. If true, is being a fan of Jordan Peterson pertinent?
(It is probably generally wise to avoid any literature containing the title word āManifestoā).
Itāll be a bit of an unusual pick but Iām reading Hungerfords āAlgebraā from Springers GTM series.
Itās a text on abstract algebra which has the really unusual property that itās actually self contained. While ill-advised, someone particularly clever could theoretically read it from start to finish without a strong mathematical background.
Iām not so clever so Iām leaning heavily on a math degree to help get me through it but itās been nothing but exceptional so far. Really illuminating examples, great problems, and nothing left unexplained. No wasted words either (unlike Suttons Reinforcement Learning textbook, which Iām also reading and is 98% filler).
I recommend Algebra if youāre looking for a challenge ā a word of warning, none of the content deals with the common usage of the word āalgebraā to mean solving equations. Itās focused on the very abstract properties of groups, fields, sets, and even mathematical arguments themselves.
I donāt see a lot of uncles there, either. Just aunts and cousins and mommies. Should we discuss this in the single moms thread? You may want to offer that itās not the welfare, itās the tractors pushing the dads out.
I love the book intro. Little kids are so much fun - big kids, too, honestly. Theyāre just so odd, all of them, in all the best ways. (Unless they suck, which sometimes they do. Have I mentioned my familyās 7-year-old foster kid? OMG, is that kid loud, and he does actual zoomies - just runs at top speed around the house for no reason. Heās getting Magic Treehouse books. Not saying he sucks, he doesnāt, but he can be kind of a lot when weāre a dozen or more people in a house.)
Thinking about it, we should have him to our land when it warms up, let him drive the big green tractor. Hmm.
We really donāt have them in my family. My wife comes from a family of only daughters, and the other ones are either single or divorced. My brother lives in Columbia, so the kids never see him.And my step-brother is now Danielle.
The aunts are great because they have cats, let him watch cartoons whenever he wants, and are the good guys since they hand him over to me when itās bedtime and I have to tell him to brush his teeth.
Iām on team single mom. Itās mostly guys bitching anyway.
That tracks. Before bed I asked my son how many times he could run around the kitchen island, since I was reading and he was being loud. He stopped at 200 laps because that was as high as he could count. After he went to bed I got out the tape measure to figure out the distance he had zoomied. It was about 1.5 miles.
Honestly if you like geometry you could like abstract algebra. It will pretty exclusively rely on āthingsā and the relationships between them rather than numbers. If you promise to read at least the first 10 pages before giving up I can go find the right notes for you from Oxfords (very gentle) undergrad prelims course.
The early stuff will probably be basic logic stuff and maybe an explanation of what a set is. Eventually itāll give you structures which opens a lot of doors to interesting new ways of thinking about the world
Iāve been reading a book called Humankind: A Hopeful History.
The author, Martin Bregman, sets out to prove that we are in fact evolutionarily wired for cooperation rather than competition, and that our instinct to trust each other has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens. Bregman systematically debunks our understanding of the Milgram electrical-shock experiment, the Zimbardo prison experiment (a hoax, deliberate attempts to sow discord), and the Kitty Genovese ābystander effect.ā Some of the above big and dramatic psychology studies seem to have been misinterpreted, greatly manipulated or seem to be flat out false.
In place of these, he offers little-known true stories: the tale of twin brothers on opposing sides of apartheid in South Africa who came together with Nelson Mandela to create peace; a group of six shipwrecked children who survived for a year and a half on a deserted island by working together (versus The Lord Of The Flies Scenario); a study done after World War II that found that as few as 15% of American soldiers were actually capable of firing at the enemy (Many soldiers in battle show bravery but fire high or do not fire their guns at all; huge percentages of US Civil War guns were loaded but never fired; yet Andersonville was also obviously a thing). Even the history of Easter Island gets a thorough examination.
It is a very interesting read, rated over 4.3 on Goodreads, and quite optimistic. It is not naive about power politics or human history, but it tackles difficult issues head on and offers a refreshing and unusual perspective not often seen. I wonder if everything it says is true; some of the debunking boils down to people interpreting a psychology study or historical event in a certain way for self-interested reasons that are not reflected in the original documents or relevant interviews. The author writes well and is credible, but you take his word about certain original documents being misquoted by populists and demagogues. Iād like to see how historians view this book. Highly recommended. (A full 50% of 70,000 readers gave it five stars on Goodreads.)
One might reasonably argue the author has cherry-picked specific examples, but the examples chosen are often important. I agree populations of people often behave better than you expect them to, but not all people. I think the effects of social media or the polarization of politics are strong arguments that optimism has its limits. Some online criticisms say it is a Western male perspective, but I am not sure this is that true or relevant. Friendliness is an underrated virtue.
Iāve been looking at the idea that primates are successful because they āself-domesticate,ā and a scientific hypothesis suggests that humans have undergone a process of artificial selection similar to domesticated animals, but without the intervention of another species seems to be true.
If you like sci-fi, David Brin and his uplift series are fun reads. Basically humans uplifted other species like dolphins, chimps, but when an alien civilization arrives that thought they were the only ones capable of doing that and chaos ensues.
