Ask HN: No intrinisic motivation to build stuff - twink
Dear HN crowd,
I'm not particularly happy in my life. My main problem is lack of intrinsic motivation to create stuff, in the widest sense. For example, I don't contribute to open source projects. I don't have any own programming projects. I don't have a personal web site or a blog. I'm not a member of a political party trying to change the world. I find the start-up scene thrilling, but as long as I don't change, I will probably never be part of it.
I think the underlying problem is that it's quite easy for me to find things that interest me, but very hard not to get bored after a day. For example, think about topics like lock picking, composing electronic music, web development, functional programming languages, [insert random technology here], etc.
As soon as I understand the basics of X, I lose interest. After I had managed to open a very simple lock, I stopped practicing. After I had roughly figured out what the knobs on a synthesizer do, I stopped trying to make electronic music. After I understood which technologies are required to build and deploy a modern web site and how to get a basic "hello world" running, I stopped building web sites. After a few hours of "Learn you a Haskell for Great Good" and seeing the main differences to other programming paradigms, I stopped reading (same for the Erlang equivalent). I've had a look at so many different programming languages in my life, but after I understand syntax and basic design principles, I lose the motivation to actually build something with it.
As such, I have no chance to become an expert in a particular field. It's frustrating.
I perform very well at university, though. It's easy to see what you have to do to get the reward (a good grade), so I do just that. Actually, (graded) university projects are the only projects I've finished in my life. Why do I need grades to motivate me? What the fuck does optimizing for good grades matter, while others actually do and learn useful stuff in their free time?
Why don't I feel the urge to build kick-ass stuff, while so many people here do? Why can't I stay focussed on a single thing without external pressure (grades)? I'm close to graduation now. I could know far more than I do, if I had learned past what is required for getting an A.
Something needs to change. I already see myself decaying at $BIG-CO, the monthly pay-check as my only reward. But what other option is there, without any passion.
PS: HN is very inspiring for me, though. My brain loves the rush of information. It's typical for me to open 40-something tabs of news stories, just to skim through them, without reading a single one in detail: Read the introduction, read the conclusion, close tab, read top HN comments. Understand what it is about and what smart people think about the subject. Then go to next story, repeat. Maybe it's ADHD. Medication (stimulants) did not really help, though.
======
sgentle
Here's the problem, as I see it: who is your manager? Because a manager is
normally paid a lot of money to help you be productive. It's a hard job, the
kind people get degrees in and work for decades at before they can do it well.

If you're trying to work for yourself, then your manager is you. You're giving
yourself a very difficult job, a job that you're trying to do at the same time
as your creative work (and, if I'm not wrong, all of that while still working
9-5, so 3 jobs total). You may not even realise it, but you are a manager at
the moment. Not knowing that doesn't stop you from being a manager, it just
makes you a bad manager. An absentee boss.

Here is some evidence from your own words that tells me you're crying out for
good management:

"As soon as I understand the basics of X, I lose interest. After I had managed
to open a very simple lock, I stopped practicing." <\-- This is classic lack
of perspective - a manager needs to keep focus on the big picture, to give
direction and focus to the work being done. Without that, you end up just
doing whatever's in front of you, whether or not it's useful.

"Actually, (graded) university projects are the only projects I've finished in
my life. Why do I need grades to motivate me?" <\-- Because grades can be very
motivating. A good manager understands that people aren't robots. You need to
have your work structured in a way that makes you want to do it. At university
you get tasks divided into small packages, each properly structured with a
clearly defined goal and scope, steps to achieve the goal, and a metric for
measuring your success at the end. Can you say the same for the work you set
yourself?

"It's typical for me to open 40-something tabs of news stories, just to skim
through them, without reading a single one in detail" <\-- Have you considered
that you do this because you're interacting with a very simple manager-bot?
"Hey, HN", you say, "give me something to do". Well, HN will give you stuff to
do, with a (small) reward for a clearly defined action.

Here's my suggestion for you: Be a manager. Set aside an amount of time each
day to work as your manager. Ask yourself about your goals, figure out what
you need to excel at those goals, and _make sure that you get what you need_.
Is your work structured the right way? Is what you're doing now working? If
you can't figure out what to do next as a manager, go learn. Read a book or
online article about management to get ideas. But, mostly, just make sure you
actually do it.

Your trade, if you want to be a self-motivated creator of worthwhile things,
is both creation and management. You have tools and skills and time invested
in the former. Invest in the latter too.

~~~
twink
First of all, thanks for the helpful input.

> Here's my suggestion for you: Be a manager. Set aside an amount of time each
> day to work as your manager. Ask yourself about your goals, figure out what
> you need to excel at those goals, and make sure that you get what you need.
> Is your work structured the right way? Is what you're doing now working? If
> you can't figure out what to do next as a manager, go learn. Read a book or
> online article about management to get ideas. But, mostly, just make sure
> you actually do it.

It's easy to find blah-blah blog posts and books written by self-proclaimed
life advisors, usually with very low information density (which makes it
impossible for me to read carefully). Can you recommend any particular
material?

~~~
sgentle
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey is a pretty seminal
personal management book. It's my top recommendation in terms of
"foundational" material. It's not got much in the way of practical tools, but
the ideas are applicable everywhere.

I would recommend Drive by Dan Pink if you're interested in learning more
about creative motivation. It's pretty short, and actually very well
summarised here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc>

Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is very good programmer-specific
management material. They cite a lot of work benchmarking the productivity of
different workplaces, so it's very "x is good, x is bad".

Jim Collins' Good to Great is an examination of businesses that succeed vs
fail, and the attributes that get them there, it's essentially an extended
summary of a longitudinal study he and his team did of businesses that
outperformed the stock market by a high factor over 10 years. It's more
leadership than management, but still very useful.

One that I haven't read yet (damn my stupidly big reading list) but recommend
on reputation alone is First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham and
Curt Coffman. Here's a summary:
[http://www.slideshare.net/gregcrouch/executive-summary-
first...](http://www.slideshare.net/gregcrouch/executive-summary-first-break-
all-the-rules)

I share your frustration about blah-blah blog posts. With the exception of
First, Break All The Rules (which I haven't read yet) and 7 Habits (which I
forgive because it's so damn good), the books I mention are based on actual
research which is cited in the book, not just some dude going "I think this
because I know stuff". Because they're books for busy people, they have
summaries and bolded sections and callout boxes too. :)

Overall, though, I would caution you to not put the cart before the horse.
There are a thousand books on management that could teach you something new,
but it will all just go on the big pile of irrelevant information unless you
actually need it. You won't unless you're actively trying to manage. If you
start by spending that time you'll be much better placed to contextualise the
knowledge and, therefore, actually benefit from it.

------
solarmist
It seems to me that you're problem isn't that you don't have motivation it's
that you need rewards right ways. I used to be the same way. Learning a few
tricks in each of those areas gives you a thrill, but once that thrill wears
off you lose interest and go off to find your next thrill.

Grades are just a slightly longer term reward. You work hard for a few weeks
or a month then you get rewarded with an A or a B.

Instead of beating yourself up over these things you need to find a way to
"reward" learning something in more depth.

Discipline isn't forcing yourself to do something it's more like tricking
yourself into doing it until it's second nature and that's what you naturally
do. For example, surround yourself with Haskell materials and environments to
the exclusion of all else AND have set up some kind of reward system for
yourself. Or removing junkfood from your house in order to get hungry. If
you're hungry and search the house for a snack and all you have are salads or
pre-cooked chicken breasts then odds are you aren't going to go to the trouble
to leave the house to find something else, you'll just eat what you have.

Basically you need to find a way to make delayed gratification more gratifying
to you than instant or short term gratification.

Follow the example of Khan Academy. They use game mechanics to keep people
coming back. Do the same for things you want to study.

The other thing to realize is that at some point you need to commit to a path
and ignore everything that's not applicable to that path. You can't be know
everything. If you want to be a PHP developer don't go off and read a book
about embedded C programming. It's outside of your area.

~~~
twink
How to trick myself into building an awesome web project? Remove all software
other than a text editor? Wouldn't I need at least a web browser? :-)

I think it's not that easy in all cases. However, I already practice the food
use-case you've mentioned (I simply don't buy unhealthy food).

~~~
solarmist
No it's not easy, but removing distractions helps keep you on track.

A lot of people on HN I've heard say they use a web filter on themselves. Only
allowing most web sites for certain times of day, otherwise they're locked
down to "productive" web sites.

Also, when you're looking for something new to learn instead of picking a new
breadth topic, pick a depth topic you don't know about and learn about in one
of your hand picked languages. Like if you're learning about networking or
machine learning, use a language that you want to know better, but have "lost
interest" in instead of one you already know well.

------
creativeone
I have started numerous websites, web businesses, blogs, and spend nearly $10k
on a project and left it because I didn't have enough money to complete it. I
also get too much satisfaction from small successes. I also get demotivated
when a project of mine doesn't "take off" immediately. I am starting a new
project now and I have more of a sense of urgency about it. My future depends
on it and I can't fall back on school or my parents if I fail. It's all or
nothing. And I think that is the attitude I lacked and needed for all of my
past projects.

------
Mz
For me, addressing underlying health issues has helped. I also read a book a
long time ago about "psychology" (for lack of a better word) which talked
about how people have different profiles for what stuff they _will_ do in
varying amounts. You figure out how much of different types of things you need
to do and find a lifestyle that gets the results you want (in terms of money
or whatever) and do that.

Real life example: I'm a middle-of-the-road extrovert, so I need a certain
amount of social interaction but I have my limits. When deprived of the
minimum necessary amount of social interaction, my functioning is impaired.
When I reach my limit, it's time to stop and go be alone for a bit. That
doesn't mean I'm a flake and now abandoning folks or some such. It means my
"budget" has been spent for this particular thing and I need to recharge
before I can do more of it.

Folks on HN sometimes talk about being only able to code X number of hours per
week and no more, so they can't manage to work full time as a coder and also
do a side project. Others talk about needing to code a certain amount and
being unable to just stop until they have done a certain amount of problem
solving or the like. Some "needs" can be channeled somewhat into different
pursuits but when the limit is reached, that's all you can do. So maybe part
of the issue is that being in college uses up so much of what you have to give
that there isn't enough left to finish something else on top of it? If so,
then doing a start-up full time might work but trying to do it on the side
might not.

------
billswift
I think the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is grossly
overblown, especially for getting stuff done. You might notice that all of the
research (at least all of it I have seen reports of) uses very short term
operations, things that can be done in minutes, or hours at the most, to show
the contrast. I do not think intrinsic motivation can be maintained without
something outside of itself to keep it focused. I don't think it an accident
that nearly all advances in knowledge (explicit or process) comes from
academia with its obsessive status games or from for-profit businesses with
the need to make money.

I have mostly used work to help maintain my focus over the years. While most
of my projects were not directly part of my job, I used the requirements of my
jobs (and expected jobs) to guide my learning from project to project, for
some continuity. Those that were not related to work were a lot more
scattershot.

ADDED: Before someone brings up examples of people who weren't currently
academics contributing to science, like Einstein writing papers while he was a
patent clerk, there is no reason to go through the extra effort to write up
results into publishable papers (which is a lot of work) if you are not aiming
for something more than the sheer joy of discovery.

------
auganov
Wow, hits close to home.

I tend to see it as the bi-polar disorder of learning. There are periods of
maniacal interest in a certain topic. I can acquire vast knowledge in a matter
of very short time yet it always quickly wears of.

The lack of immediate recognition, reward etc. is definitely a factor. I too
always knew school didn't mean much, but being straight A has always been sort
of a thing I had to do, it was my responsibility. How could I let other people
see I am not the smartest guy?! Haha.

I was actually thinking about finding some projects partners on-line in a
similar situation so all of us could work to gather on fairly simple projects
(and perhaps building those out later on), it's definitely far harder to just
dismiss a project if there's other people expecting you to perform.

I know I have all the capability to deliver crazy performance. And hey, I
still do from time to time, it's not like we're doomed. We have already proved
that we have the mental capability to achieve great things, now it's time to
utilize it.

~~~
twink
> I know I have all the capability to deliver crazy performance. And hey, I
> still do from time to time, it's not like we're doomed. We have already
> proved that we have the mental capability to achieve great things

Yes, sure we are. But isn't it sad how much of our potential is wasted?

> now it's time to utilize it.

Motivating words, but I need more than that ;-)

~~~
auganov
Wasted sounds too dramatic, misallocated I would say.

I would love to be able to achieve a 100% focus at will. But I think acquiring
knowledge in so many different fields has also allowed me to have a pretty
unique personality that I'm satisfied with. Sometimes I look at those people
that are completely sucked into one thing and I just think I wouldn't like to
be like them. I would love to have tons and tons of money, but would I want to
be Warren Buffet? No way.

For example I spent a year learning Chinese (completed an equivalent of 3
years of study for a 'normal' person + naturally expanded over the next year
without effort or loosing too much time). I know it's something pretty much
without use unless I want to get a crappy job, but I'm happy I did. I just
like having that extra knowledge. It's no different than how I want to have a
fancy car. If I was to put a price tag on that knowledge it would definitely
be millions.

My point is that although there's no doubt we need to improve let's do it our
way. A good analogy is when you play a game, say soccer and you invent your
own way to kick the ball, you know how other, better people kick it, you know
your way is 'wrong' but it's so much more fun. And who knows maybe one day it
turns out you can still win that way.

Let's not get depressed (you sound a little hopeless there, haha). We can
adjust this and that and we'll be fine.

------
scotty79
Same for me, good at grades, competitions, having fun with prototyping but
rarely building anything finished.

I rarely find motivation to build stuff, but I am strongly motivated to find
out why stuff doesn't work and how to fix it, even sometimes to actually fix
it.

My advice for you is to pair up with a builder, look at what he's doing, help
him when he gets stuck on some bug and struggle to keep up with his
creativity.

------
CyberFonic
I think you are perfectly normal. Suspect that your frustration comes from
comparing yourself to other people who are intrinsically very different to
you.

You come across as being smart, clever and high energy levels. Try stuff that
is much harder intellectually, physically, etc. Get out of your comfort zone.
You might find your passion in the most unlikely place.

------
dcolgan
I'm pretty sure you just described me to a tee. I completely understand how it
is to hop from hobby to hobby, trying to find the next new novelty.

In high school I spent a lot of time learning tools but never really made
anything with them. I must have started 50 games, but would always throw them
away at 300 lines of code because they were not interesting anymore. One time
I got the idea to make a Flash cartoon website like HomestarRunner.com. I
learned the Flash IDE, and the time that I started to get good at it was when
I started losing interest.

In college I discovered that there are better tools out there than the ones I
had been using. I traded Windows and Gamemaker for Linux and Python. I still
never finished anything, because I kept finding new and better languages. For
a while there I tried out almost every popular language there is, including
Haskell and Erlang.

Once my friends and I decided to make a game, and as the "lead programmer" on
the team, I wanted to use the best language there is for making games. I
started on Python, then switched to Perl (yes, Perl for games!), then C
(because the others were "too slow") and finally back to Python because C was
too hard.

Some things that I have noticed include:

-Perfectionism is a nasty beast. Are you a perfectionist too? I will go back and forth between things because I want to find The Optimal Way (TM), but after a certain point you can't really find a better way that helps more than the cost of changing. My dad, a mathmatician, once told me, "Life is not an optimization problem." I am coming to see that he is right.

-You mention that you do well in college even if you can't stay focused on your own projects. I have found that true for myself as well. I think the structure helps to keep us on track. Personal projects and side hobbies have no inherent structure, and all it takes to give up is to just stop working on them. I have found success when my hobbies and side projects intersect with each other. I finished a Flash animation when it was for a class project. I actually did learn a Haskell for Great Good when I made my senior research project "An Investigation of Lesser-Known Programming Languages." Then learning Haskell was not just a thing that might be cool but rather a school project that I had to finish. I recently finished a three year long programming project with a professor advising me. I wanted to quit several times, even though it was a great project, but my advisor half convinced/half forced me to stick with it, and I am glad that he did now that it is done. If something like school motivates you, then use that to your advantage!

-The biggest thing that gives me motivation to do anything is the people who will benefit from it. After thinking long and hard about the meaning of life, I have come to decide that love is what is most important. As such, I can turn away from the most interesting project in the world if I am just working on it for myself, but if I know that people are really going to benefit from it, that provides motivation. I think of all of the times that I have failed to complete a side project like a game or Flash website, I failed because they weren't really helping anyone, and as such they weren't really worth doing to me.

So, I suggest that once you leave college, find a lean startup that fulfills a
need you care about. Maybe you wouldn't do well founding a startup, but you
could work as an employee at one. Then you have structure similar to what you
have in school, only this time with an employer, but you don't waste away at
$BIG-CO. (I too have this dread of $BIG-CO!)

Do note that knowing a lot about a little does give you some unique
advantages. If you ever do need to really learn something for a job or school
project, it will be much easier than if you knew nothing about a subject. You
are also more aware of what tools are available for various projects, and you
can select the right tool for the right job.

As a final thought, I notice that you have been registered for 250 days or so
and have 5 karma. That is almost the same as me. I usually don't say anything
because I don't feel like I have anything to add, but I've been trying to
comment more recently. Lurking allows me to just be a passive observer, but I
take in less when I'm actually invested enough to comment.

If you'd like to talk, send me an email. Info's in my profile if you are
interested.

~~~
twink
> Perfectionism is a nasty beast. Are you a perfectionist too?

Unfortunately, yes. And I'm definitely treating life as an optimization
problem. However, most of the time I don't see the big picture. For example, I
spend hours or days figuring out the "best" piece of hardware to buy (e.g., a
new monitor), and then another day trying find the best offer. Usually I get
frustrated the more options I find. Quite often, after many wasted hours, I
end up buying nothing at all.

Other people would just "google" for "monitor test 2011", take #1 from the
list, get it from their local dealer, and spend the rest of the day working on
an interesting project or earning money (or both). What a happy life.

> I have found success when my hobbies and side projects intersect with each
> other. I finished a Flash animation when it was for a class project. I
> actually did learn a Haskell for Great Good when I made my senior research
> project "An Investigation of Lesser-Known Programming Languages." Then
> learning Haskell was not just a thing that might be cool but rather a school
> project that I had to finish.

Jup. The only programming projects I finished were school projects. That's
when I have no problems getting incredibly productive, but a few minutes after
the submission deadline, everything is back to normal and I waste my time
sucking in random bits of information on the web. There's no way to become a
great programmer (builder/creator) if you only code (build/create) seriously a
few times a year.

> If something like school motivates you, then use that to your advantage!

Yes, school is the only thing that really motivates me. But well, now I'm
close to graduation, and I don't know yet what could replace it. That's scary.

> Do note that knowing a lot about a little does give you some unique
> advantages. If you ever do need to really learn something for a job or
> school project, it will be much easier than if you knew nothing about a
> subject. You are also more aware of what tools are available for various
> projects, and you can select the right tool for the right job.

That's true. I often notice that my tech knowledge is very exhaustive/broad
compared to people who I consider experts in their particular field. They know
one thing very well, I know a little about countless things.

However, I don't really know if that helps me as a programmer. Good
programmers have to become experts in a at least a few technologies. Maybe I
should not force myself to become a programmer. Maybe I should pick a route
where there is no need to become an expert. Suggestions?

> If you'd like to talk, send me an email. Info's in my profile if you are
> interested.

I definitely should do so. But somehow I'm already starting to lose all
interest in fixing my problems. I'm already onto the next thing: Skimming
through the Python twisted docs, just to see that I don't actually want to
build anything. Sigh.

~~~
solarmist
If you are an over optimiser (i.e. the word BEST appears in your head when you
try and do something rather than Good enough) you should read The Paradox of
Choice by Barry Schwartz
([http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...](http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html)).

------
eurohacker
like written by myself ..

custom-made soft development service could suite you, or poker game if you are
looking for suitable business, or travel business

do you have business ideas evolving in your head all the time ?

looking forward to hear the cure ..


Ask HN: Best forum for web application development? - ssn

Could you please advise me on forums or q&a sites for discussing technical issues related to web application development?<p>Where do webapp developers meet online?
======
RoyceFullerton
<http://stackoverflow.com> is a good place for answers to specific technical
question.


Ruby Plus – Coding in the Browser - bparanj
http://rubyplus.biz/

======
bparanj
Learn C, C++, C#, Elixir, Go, Haxe, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python 2, Python 3 and
Ruby on a browser in any device for free.


The enigma behind America's 20-year lobster boom - katiey
http://qz.com/506376
======
hammock
It's a mystery? Have always believed it due to the overfishing of cod.
Historically there has been an overabundance of lobsters.

 _When the colonists first arrived on the shores of New England, ...lobsters
used to wash up on shore in drifts two-feet tall. One 17th century British
historian by the name of William Wood visited Newfoundland and noted, "Their
plenty makes them little esteemed and seldom eaten [except by the Indians who]
get many of them every day for to baite their hooks withal and to eat when
they can get no bass."_

[http://factually.gizmodo.com/lobsters-were-once-only-fed-
to-...](http://factually.gizmodo.com/lobsters-were-once-only-fed-to-poor-
people-and-prisoner-1612356919)

 _Some contemporary Canadians remember kids from poor towns, as late as the
1940s, trading lobster sandwiches for peanut butter and jelly in the school
cafeteria._

[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/03/how-lobster-
claw...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/03/how-lobster-clawed-its-
way)

------
claar
Yet you still have to pay $20+ for it in a restaurant.
[https://econfix.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/a-glut-of-
lobsters-...](https://econfix.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/a-glut-of-lobsters-but-
why-are-prices-in-restaurants-still-high/)

~~~
douche
And it's $3-5 a pound off the boats. Cheaper than burgers for your New England
summer barbecue.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Same thing with Alaska salmon. Reds (sockeye) were netting the fishermen 50
cents a pound this summer, but try pricing it in a store, much less in a
restaurant.

I'm really surprised that someone hasn't disintermediated the seafood industry
in a big way. Too many middlemen, plus an ultra-perishable product that would
benefit tremendously from fast transactions.

~~~
hammock
The whole foods by me has been selling wild caught sockeye at a great price
for weeks now... figured they had a good source and didn't think much more.
Makes sense that there's a glut as you say

------
douche
Nice article.

They touched on it, but lobster fishing is not really a fishery - it's a farm.
To highlight a point from the article: one-third to one-half of most lobsters'
diet is herring, stolen from the lobster traps.

------
dsfyu404ed
This is a great article, now if only someone would make an in depth comparison
to the situation in Massachusetts where they procrastinated when enacting
catch limitations while fishing themselves into oblivion and now want the
state to help them out...

------
Pinatubo
It was a pleasant surprise to read a balanced article related to climate
change.

~~~
antod
Yeah, climate change gets such a bad rap. It's so unfair. Nobody takes the
time to get to know the real climate change - the poor thing is so
misunderstood. Deep down it only wants to help. /s

Why is this a pleasantly balanced article relating to climate change? Just
because it points out that rising temps was a possible factor (amongst others)
for a lobster population boom? Don't worry at least we've got lots of lobster.

Did you keep reading until the bit where that temperature sweet spot for
lobsters might have already been exceeded, and it could be one of the factors
that might now be adversely affecting lobster breeding?

~~~
Pinatubo
I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with or find offensive.

~~~
antod
Not offended at all. It just struck me as an absurd thing to bring up.

The article was about lobsters and the multiple hypotheses on why the
population exploded and why/if it might soon collapse again.

~~~
Pinatubo
Most articles that mention climate change rarely discuss alternative
hypotheses for what we observe.

------
PeterWhittaker
Fascinating tale of complexity and unexpected causes and effects.

~~~
pvaldes
Yes, marine biologists deal with those devilish complexities all the time. And
this is only a small part of the entire picture. There are also crustacean
viruses for example.

------
mostlylurking
Seems to me if you are actively marking fertile lobsters and throwing them
back in they might be also actively selecting for the propagation of overly
fertile lobsters.

~~~
leoedin
Surely that's already entirely the point of natural selection.

------
chrisbennet
I recommend reading "The Secret Life of Lobsters" if you find this
interesting. It was a best seller a few years back.

------
nsxwolf
Now, can someone tell me why the live lobsters at Red Lobster smell so fishy
and taste so rotten?

------
davidhariri
If you haven't read David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster" you should.
It's fantastic.
[http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_l...](http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster.html)

~~~
pvaldes
Meh, lots of drama. The author claims that in Europe lobsters are cut in half
alive before to kill the animal. Not, this is not the common procedure.

------
jpatokal
The baby lobster looks remarkably like a cockroach. Maybe we should start
bioengineering 20-pound roaches and serving them from food trucks instead...

[https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/lobster.jpg?quali...](https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/lobster.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=640)

~~~
dankohn1
Or like spiders: [https://xkcd.com/1268/](https://xkcd.com/1268/)

~~~
maxerickson
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_spider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_spider)

(I just assumed it must be the case that someone somewhere does eat
spiders...)


Evite: your data for sale - fezz
http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/assets/cloud-data-directory/index.html#/page/59

======
greenyoda
Misleading title - this document lists data for sale from dozens of
businesses, not just Evite. (Which actually makes it much more interesting
than the title implies.)


Increased acidity found in schizophrenia and bipolar patients’ brains - kurtisdipo
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-some-psychiatric-disorders-a-ph-problem/
======
Mz
My medical condition makes the body too acidic. This is a well known thing.
Doctors know it. Patients know it. Yet, it is not treated as a primary issue.
It only gets treated secondarily to help control specific developments, like
acid reflux.

I have known a number of bipolar people and I tend to easily click with them.
I don't think I am actually bipolar, but I do suspect my medical condition
sometimes impacts my brain functioning in a similar manner.

Without bothering to get into lengthy anecdata I think a) acidosis likely is a
root cause of mental health problems but b) solving it isn't as simple or
straight forward as just controlling the acidity.

If your body functions different from the norm such that the result is high
acidity, there will be a lot of other knock off effects.

So, it is a little like saying "Deserts are deserts because they lack water.
So let's just add water." Well, no, they typically lack water because they are
in the rain shadow of a mountain range. Importing water doesn't fix that.
Importing it consistently, for many years may allow you to mitigate many of
the effects, but you will have to keep working at it. You will not find that
climate in the area "normalizes" just because you imported water and grew
plants. You will still be in the rain shadow of a mountain and if you stop
importing water and stop lovingly tending to human planted flora, it will
eventually revert back to desert.

~~~
tominous
Interesting analogy but it doesn't always hold. Take the greening of Ascension
Island [1] where planting trees created a virtuous cycle: the trees trapped
more moisture which promoted the growth of more trees.

In biology there are many complicated feedback loops and in some cases a
parameter seems to get stuck outside of the normal range. In those cases,
bringing the parameter back into the normal range can be enough to allow the
normal feedback mechanisms to work properly again.

Some examples:

* Eczema: There can be a loop between irritation, inflammation, damage to the skin, more irritation. Treat the skin with steroids to both improve symptoms and disrupt the loop.

* Myopia: Studies have shown that undercorrecting for near-sightedness actually makes it worse [2]. Bringing it back into the normal range doesn't just help the symptoms, it also makes it progress slower.

* Depression: Maybe operating at a higher level, but there's a clear loop between changed behaviour and improved motivation.

Even something like acidity could be like this. You could speculate a link
between gut bacteria and acidity, whereby changing the acidity directly could
alter the balance of bacteria which locks in the change in acidity.

[1]
[http://faculty.washington.edu/dcatling/Catling2012_GreenMoun...](http://faculty.washington.edu/dcatling/Catling2012_GreenMountainSubmitted.pdf)

[2] [http://www.journalofoptometry.org/en/under-correction-
human-...](http://www.journalofoptometry.org/en/under-correction-human-myopia-
is/articulo/S1888429613000885/)

~~~
Mz
I am aware that the existence of trees tends to promote rain, so, no, it isn't
an absolute, black or white thing.

My medical condition is genetic in origin. I have reversed a lot of my
symptoms and, yes, maintaining my improved condition is easier than I
expected.

I have come to believe that "the normal progression" of my condition is rooted
in a nasty positive feedback loop. If you can interrupt it, it is game
changing.

But interrupting it isn't for sissies, so to speak.

Even so, my body will never be normal. But it is sort of like being a Kosher
Jew: As long as I abide by particular dietary and lifestyle restrictions, I
don't have to be sick all the time, even though it means I can't live
"normally." I am happy to accept that deal over the alternative.

------
tim333
This reminds me of research from a while back suggesting schizophrenia was
related to an ancient retrovirus that entered our DNA millions of years ago
and occasionally causes problems (Discover mag, "The Insanity Virus," June
2010). Reseach is ongoing: ([http://discovermagazine.com/2015/sept/6-insanity-
virus](http://discovermagazine.com/2015/sept/6-insanity-virus)).

From the 2010 story:

> Sixty million years ago, a lemurlike animal—an early ancestor of humans and
> monkeys—contracted an infection. It may not have made the lemur ill, but the
> retrovirus spread into the animal’s testes (or perhaps its ovaries), and
> once there, it struck the jackpot: It slipped inside one of the rare germ
> line cells that produce sperm and eggs. When the lemur reproduced, that
> retrovirus rode into the next generation aboard the lucky sperm and then
> moved on from generation to generation, nestled in the DNA. “It’s a rare,
> random event,” says Robert Belshaw, an evolutionary biologist at the
> University of Oxford in England. “Over the last 100 million years, there
> have been only maybe 50 times when a retrovirus has gotten into our genome
> and proliferated.”

>...Perron in 2008, found HERV-W in the blood of 49 percent of people with
schizophrenia, compared with just 4 percent of healthy people.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
> _It may not have made the lemur ill_

I've often wondered how many viruses we contract that don't present any
obvious symptoms.

How would we know to look for them?

Does anyone know if this idea has been looked in to?

~~~
DamnInteresting
Two I am aware of that kinda fit this category are _Toxoplasma gondii_ [1]
(not technically a virus) and _Adenovirus serotype 36_ [2]. The former has
been associated with a wide array of behavioral changes, the latter is
associated with obesity.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii#Immune_respo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii#Immune_response_and_behaviour_alterations)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenovirus_serotype_36#Role_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenovirus_serotype_36#Role_in_obesity)

~~~
saas_sam
T. gondii also being the parasite that can cause toxoplasmosis in rare cases
where the infected individual suffers an immune system issue (like HIV). This
is the condition treated by Daraprim, aka the drug bought by Martin Shkreli's
old company ('pharma bro').

I asked him once about the alleged behavioral changes associated with T.
gondii and he said the research on that is bunk. Shrug...

------
tcj_phx
> Other research has revealed that the brains of people with panic disorders
> produce elevated levels of lactate—an acidic source of fuel that is
> constantly produced and consumed in the energy-hungry brain.

For me, this further confirms that metabolic problems are causally-associated
with 'mental disorders'.

      Lactic acidosis is a medical condition characterized by
      the buildup of lactate (especially L-lactate) in the body,
      which results in an excessively low pH. It is a subtype of
      metabolic acidosis, where excessive acid is due to a
      problem with the body's metabolism.

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactic_acidosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactic_acidosis)

I used the courts to get the mental health system to reduce the harm they were
perpetrating upon my friend, who they thought had a 'persistent mental
disorder'. Really she was just self-medicating depression with the street
pharmacy. (Cocaine and the amphetamines are not very good for people's
mitochondria/metabolism, which is why they're illegal.)

In response to my bullying, the treatment provider did a genetic test, and
decided that she needed Folate (Vitamin B-9), as she can't convert folic acid
like most people. She's doing much better on the reduced dosages of
tranquilizers ('anti-psychotics')/etc.

~~~
Madmallard
What's the test?

~~~
tcj_phx
This page has a write up about folate & mental health:

[https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-
integrationist/2014...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-
integrationist/201409/genetic-mutation-can-affect-mental-physical-health)

------
rrggrr
We know recurrent episodes of apnea, over months and years, may cause an
increase in carbon dioxide levels that can change the pH of the blood enough
to cause a respiratory acidosis. We also know sleep apnea may be prevalent in
patients with bipolar I disorder. It would be great to see a comparison study
of patients with OSA versus CSA (specifically REM-related sleep apnea)
examining acidosis, mood disorder prevelence, and outcomes in treated versus
untreated populations.

~~~
sradu
Can you share any studies around this? Especially about sleep apnea and
bipolar 1.

------
pella
> "A main source of these temporary surges is the carbon dioxide that is
> constantly released as the brain breaks

> down sugar to generate energy, which subsequently turns into acid."

The "Ketosis" / "Ketogenic diets" are helping in this case?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet)

~~~
DiabloD3
Go look up Dr Dom D'agostino's work on using "medical keto" (as in, 4:1 ratio
(in grams) of fat to carbs+protein, while keeping carbs at below 30g and
enough protein to maintain muscle) to control epilepsy in drug resistant
patients.

That kind of answers your question, but not directly.

------
Ovah
Contrary to what the article states, elevated levels of lactic acid per say do
not cause acidification. In fact, the increase in lactic acid correlates to
but is not the causation of acidosis. According to Robergs (2004) [1], it is
the hydrolysis of ATP outside of the mitochondria (ATP produced in glycolysis)
that increases the concentration of H+ and lowers pH. Yet, still, if the
concentration of lactate increases it's a good indicator of acidosis from
oxygen deficiency.

[1] Biochemistry of exercise-induced metabolic acidosis.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15308499](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15308499)

Note: During low oxygen levels in tissue, metabolism becomes anaerobic ->
lactic acid is produced. Lactic acid <-> lactate + H+.

------
marcsquared
Two words: Buteyko method

See e.g. [http://www.normalbreathing.com](http://www.normalbreathing.com)

CNS/Diseases of the Brain Are Caused by Low Brain O2/CO2 Levels

[http://www.normalbreathing.com/diseases-
Brain.php](http://www.normalbreathing.com/diseases-Brain.php)

Sedatives | CO2: Natural Sedative and Tranquilizer
[http://www.normalbreathing.com/CO2-stabilizer.php](http://www.normalbreathing.com/CO2-stabilizer.php)

After 15 years of panic attacks, anxiety, migraines, hay fever... if finally
found the solution: learn to breathe correctly again. The best and cheapest
thing I've ever learned for my health!

This is just one site, but there are many more on the web. Not affiliated to a
single one of them, but hopefully I can share the joy of a panic attack free
live with at least one other person. :)

~~~
whiteandnerdy
I'm pleased that the technique worked for you and don't want to denigrate your
experience, but looking around it seems that there's very little evidence to
support the Buteyko technique, and a fair few red flags:
[https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/buteyko-breathing-
technique...](https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/buteyko-breathing-technique-
nothing-to-hyperventilate-about/)

If it works for you it works for you, but I'd caution readers to be skeptical
when trying it out.

~~~
marcsquared
Thank you for your respectful reply.

I agree that everyone should be skeptical and look for evidence.

For me personally it has been a godsend, that's what I can state. I also know
about 5 other people who have applied this knowledge and all had noticeable
improvements in various areas.

Experience may vary of course. Bodies are also different.

You can go the Buteyko way, Chi-Gung, Yoga, Wim Hoff method etc etc. whatever
works if you need it.

Generally I do however think that breathing is way, way underappreciated as a
cause for various diseases.

I've seen 5 medical specialists who overlooked my breathing _patterns_. I've
been hooked up to heart monitoring devices, gave plenty of blood to examine
and all that jazz.

The solution was literally right under my nose.

In the end it was a $5 USD discounted book about Buteyko's research that made
all the difference.

Breathe through your nose, your mouth is for eating and talking. That will
already help many people. :)

------
wu-ikkyu
>researchers continued to puzzle over if the increased acidity seen in
schizophrenia and bipolar patients was truly disorder-related—or the result of
other factors, such as a person’s history of _antipsychotic drug use_

Excuse my ignorance, but I don't see how they ruled out the possible link
between antipsychotic drug use and increased acidity?

I'm also puzzled by how they can confidently diagnose rodents with human
social disorders based solely on "genetic indicators" when the links between
genetics and disorders like schizophrenia are still far from understood.

------
withoutclass
Wim Hof Method, baby.

~~~
jkaunisv1
I'm not interested in paying for the online video course - does this article
[http://highexistence.com/the-wim-hof-method-revealed-how-
to-...](http://highexistence.com/the-wim-hof-method-revealed-how-to-
consciously-control-your-immune-system/) capture the gist of it? Does the book
include anything else that's significant?

------
pdq
Could this explain why Lithium is sometimes an effective treatment?

------
amelius
So after decades of research, and thousands of different markers they could
have looked at, they found that pH is a significant marker?

~~~
jack9
Hard to analyze lots of brains of dead schizoids until we had a methodology to
diagnose, permission to analyze them, and then looked closely enough.

[http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v9/n7/full/4001511a.html?fo...](http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v9/n7/full/4001511a.html?foxtrotcallback=true)

Sometimes lots of theories come out of a minute variation correlation and
sometimes it's just a sampling coincidence (like it's just how schizoid brains
break down). I'm VERY sure, someone has altered a schizoid's diet to a more or
less acidic diet before. I will bet that pH therapy won't be very effective,
but it might lead to some other discovery.

~~~
shaggerty
I've never heard someone refer to a schizophrenic as "a schizoid".
Schizophrenia and schizoid personality disorder are distinct disorders with
different symptoms.

~~~
cat199
not in the field, but I think it's both somewhat slang for schizophrenia (see
also woody allen movies), also somewhat antiquated or at least highly specific
term from (iirc freudian) psychopathology

------
lostInTheWoods3
Yet another reason to stop drinking Soda, one of the most acidic things that
can be in a person's diet.

~~~
all_blue_chucks
People don't usually inject it inside the blood/brain barrier...

------
kenneth_reitz
I'm bipolar!

------
deadmik3
all this time we thought acid would make you crazy

------
pdog
More evidence for the health benefits of an alkaline diet.

~~~
travmatt
Isn't the body very good at maintaining homeostasis? Meaning you could eat an
alkaline diet, but if your body composition is such that you have such a given
acidic composition then your body has processes to maintain whatever it's
'normal' is.

~~~
rando444
Exactly. And many home remedies that actually work rely on the opposite
technique.

In this case, you'd try an acidic diet in order to coerce your body's natural
processes to bring yourself to a more normal pH.

Obviously I don't know if that would work, but nobody can really say one way
or the other without doing some proper research.

------
Madmallard
Increasingly acidic diets and micronutrient malnutrition

Bacteriocidal antibiotics which enduce mitochondrial dysfunction

Chronic sleep deprivation and stress

People with problematic genetics having children when 200 years ago it
wouldn't have been possible

Lots of things that contribute to the increase in the incidence of various
mental illnesses

Solutions are not easy at all either. If you ever see a diagram of what we
know about metabolism it's ludicrous.


English rivers polluted by neonicotinoids, first tests reveal - Red_Tarsius
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/13/english-rivers-polluted-by-powerful-insecticides-first-tests-reveal
======
jesperlang
This reminds me of trophic cascades and e.g the unintuitive link that killing
wolfs affects riverbeds:

[https://shadowproof.com/2014/02/20/trophic-cascade-how-
wolve...](https://shadowproof.com/2014/02/20/trophic-cascade-how-wolves-
change-rivers/)

It like we can't understand complex systems very well. Almost everything we do
seem to have to have major unintended consequences. We see this over and over
again, we have to abandon the "as cheap and fast as possible" thinking !

~~~
projectileboy
FWIW, this is why some people have fears around GMO foods. It's not that they
can't appreciate the benefits, it's because they fear that we're testing
systems in production that we don't fully understand.

~~~
tstactplsignore
You can say that about all agriculture ever even more than you can about GMOs.
We understand exact, precise genetic changes that have a much higher standards
of testing than all of the genetic changes we've made to food using
traditional techniques (mutagenesis, cross-breeding, selection) which modify
dozens or hundreds of genes in highly unpredictable ways. We should be careful
about all agricultural changes in a way proportional to what changes we made
in the system, and not classify using modern science as always "too scary" to
rely on.

~~~
scott_karana
If we're talking about Mendelevian use of alleles that exist in a species
already, sure.

But have you seen those glow in the dark aquarium fish? Or the tomatoes that
use flounder DNA to make them hardier in the freezer? How rigorously is it
possible to test ramifications from those things?

------
a3n
The primary concern of industrial food is moving large quantities of food
efficiently, the same as gasoline or, well, insecticides; safety and nutrition
only have to be barely high enough to support that. It's why we're absorbing
insecticides and high fructose corn syrup, for example, in our bodies.

------
qwerty456127
A friend of mine once told me that swimming in Thames would be a serious
mistake as its water is poisonous. Are the neonicotinoids the reason or are
there other dangerous chemicals too?

~~~
jl6
That might once have been true, and it’s far from perfect, but the Thames is a
cleanup success story:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20151111-how-the-river-
tham...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20151111-how-the-river-thames-was-
brought-back-from-the-dead)

------
amelius
There exists an automatic bird-repellent system: [1].

Can't we use the same idea for insects?

[1] [https://birdcontrolgroup.com/agrilaser-
autonomic/](https://birdcontrolgroup.com/agrilaser-autonomic/)

~~~
hycaria
But some are good to have around, that's the whole problem...

~~~
amelius
We can use deep learning for that :)

------
arethuza
If that is the Dubh loch at the head of Glen Muick then I wonder how on earth
stuff would get in there - it's fairly remote and reasonably high up. No
farming territory for miles.

I wonder if anti-midgie lotions have these things in them?

~~~
xiaq
They can travel through the air (which was how DDT ended up in Antarctica).

------
baxtr
I wonder what the effect of neonicotinoids on humans is... it can’t be good

~~~
a_bonobo
The NIH has a metastudy here:
[https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/ehp515/](https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/ehp515/)

>As reviewed here, four studies reported low rates of adverse health effects
from acute neonic exposure. Even the most severe outcomes, including two
fatalities, may have been mediated by other factors (age, underlying health
conditions, undetected coexposures). The acute poisoning studies did, however,
elucidate clinical findings important for the diagnosis and treatment of acute
neonic exposures, including a better understanding of neonic toxicokinetics in
humans.

~~~
Karnickel
Keyword here: "acute". Nothing about chronic exposure, which is what is
relevant here. Even if they did have a long-term study of low-dose exposure,
it would be an extremely limited one (rats, mice, controlled conditions)
missing the mix of much more stuff we are exposed to all the time.

Having suffered from (finally clinically diagnosed and clinically treated with
chelators DMPS and DMSA - with _great_ results) low-dose long-term heavy metal
poisoning I had to find out, both myself (studying as much as I could) and
from the doctors, that there basically exists next to zero clinically relevant
research for a) low-dose exposure, b) long-term, c) (and this one is by far
the worst) a mix of chemicals rather than examining just one or two at a time
in isolation. The last one is very relevant - mixing stuff often dramatically
changes the effect. I once found an LD (lethal dose) heavy metal poisoning
study on rats where mixing lead and mercury was about a thousand times more
lethal (i.e. 1/1000th the dose of both) compared to poisoning the rats with
only one of them.

The reason isn't a conspiracy of course, it's just impractical to impossible
to study anything but acute poisonings and only of one or very few chemicals
at a time.

Also, each time somebody recites officially allowed values I cringe - for
example, the medical science opinion about the desirable lead exposure is
zero. However, of course this isn't _practical_ \- and this is what all those
official limits are: Administrative practical values, considering what can be
done, where the research stands (always erring on the opposite side of caution
- you have to _prove_ the bad effect before the limits are lowered) and at
what cost.

So no, science does not have the answer about any of this. The internal
medicine + environmental medicine research doctor that was my main doc is
pretty pessimistic about the stuff we (humans) do, and this guy lives with the
research, always citing this or that new study when we meet.

Maybe I should add that there indeed _are_ lots and lots of studies. However,
they are incredibly specific, they won't be the basis for tougher
legislation/lower official limits, because even if you take a hundred (good)
studies of that kind you did not prove that the specific effect observed in
the lab is relevant "in the world setting", and/or on humans, and/or what the
combined net effect of "everything" might be. Which is, at least today, pretty
much impossible.

~~~
amelius
> Having suffered from (finally clinically diagnosed and clinically treated
> with chelators DMPS and DMSA - with great results) low-dose long-term heavy
> metal poisoning I had to find out, both myself (studying as much as I could)
> and from the doctors

Wow. I'm extremely curious about how you found out, what your symptoms were,
and what resources you used to educate yourself. Do you think that people with
your condition are misdiagnosed on a large scale?

~~~
Karnickel
> I'm extremely curious about how you found out

Exclusion and desperation. I got nothing from various doctors despite problems
that I thought _should_ be treatable. It had very, very slowly gotten worse
over two to three decades. It is very, very subtle, and until a threshold was
reached I described myself as "100% healthy" \- completely ignoring a myriad
of increasing little problems. Because each and every one of them has
alternative explanations, usually: aging, office/computer work, stress, wrong
food, "everybody has problems", etc. Soooo much went away under chelation
treatment that I didn't even have on the radar, things that I had attributed
to the mentioned untreatable problems, mostly aging or stress or food. But it
wasn't!

I thought that my problems seemed very treatable/diagnosable, but nobody even
tried. "You take Nexium (a PPI) for the rest of your life" said a professor of
gastroenterology, which to me was pure torture, I never felt as bad in my life
as when I used that stuff. Then I found that I had a _massive_ Candida
problem, which had started when I took the PPI. A doctor confirmed it (the
professor had ignored everything I had told him and thought it's all in my
head), I was even given systemic anti-fungals (fluconazole), with huge
positive effect, but then my hands where yellow... I then learned that Candida
never is a root cause, always a symptom. Apparently I didn't have any of the
usual medical textbook problems that lead to such a problem. The only thing
left was something I found in the forums of the "crazy people": They claimed
Candida often is a problem of people with a heavy metal problem. With nothing
left to try and to lose I went down that route: Take measurements, find a
specialist (I had to go very far), start chelation and see if it helps. Well,
the measurements should middlish amounts of mercury, "You are in a gray zone
but I can justify chelation therapy" said the doctor. The real proof came with
the unexpectedly large success over the years.

.

If I was a doctor I would _not_ treat this condition. It is next to impossible
to detect - basically, there is no known method to conclusively test if heavy
metals are a problem or not. You can get indications, but only acute
poisonings with large doses can be shown through a simple test. So how did we
know in my case? I was "lucky" enough to have had a few special conditions
that lead to an acute surge, so I actually had significant levels (of mercury)
in blood, hair and urine. Most people with chronic poisoning won't have that
though. The rest of the proof that that indeed was the problem was all the
things that started to improve after starting chelation - many of them
completely unexpectedly. For example, during chelation, after each round, the
tissue around my right-side thyroid was "working" (very active, some pain).
The result, shown a year afterwards: A 5 mm nodule in the twice-normal-size
thyroid had completely(!) disappeared, and the thyroid was almost normal size.
I had had endocrinologists show that nodule and the double-sized right thyroid
unchanged over almost three decades. The endocrinologist examined me with
ultrasound TWICE because he did not believe his results. There is a lot more,
that was just one of the highlights because people like undeniable biomedical
imaging proofs, so much better than me saying "I can sleep _much_ better".

So anyway, as I was saying, if I was a doctor I would not treat this
condition. The problem is that you need _crazy people_ like me. This requires
a long-term commitment for an uncertain outcome. You also need resources -
money, TIME (you cannot go on living a regular employee life, the chelators
only help get things started, your body has to do most of it, and it requires
lots of time and you need to rest or it (the body) won't do anything). Most
people would never have that patience, as a doctor you will make your life
much harder if you offer those treatments. Not to mention that there is the
potential to be right - _and_ make things a lot worse: If somebody indeed has
a heavy metal problem chelation may make it worse (it mobilizes more than it
can bind, since no chemical bond is eternal and perfect), and if their body
already is on edge...

Also, the whole subject is itself poisoned. On the one hand you have few
options to show anything conclusively, no good tests, on the other hand the
whole topic of heavy metal poisoning, or just poisoning, is extremely popular
in "alternative health" circles. So even if you are a doctor, you really,
really don't want to be seen working in this area by your colleagues. It's
much more acceptable (by both your medical colleagues as well as insurers!) to
offer homeopathy, as an MD, than offering chelation. At least that's my
observation.

.

> Do you think that people with your condition are misdiagnosed on a large
> scale?

I have no opinion about other people. A lot of things are very special in my
own case. I certainly think the problem could be much larger than people
think. On the NIH website I found a document that stated that mercury is far
more toxic than lead. I took a course from Tufts University [0] about water
treatment. Of the four weeks they spent one entire week, 25% of the whole
course, only talking about lead. There were two professors, one for the
engineering side, one for the medical side, and the medical professor cited
study after study and showed graphs that the state of medical science is that
the only safe level is zero (technically not feasible - thus not possible to
have as an official limit). So there is a lot of attention on lead, has been
for decades. I don't see nearly as much on mercury, supposedly much worse,
despite there being quite a bit of mercury around us. For example, are you
sure eating all that tuna and other sea fish, especially the predatory ones,
is such a good idea? In my experience, the one I gained the last few years,
involuntarily, the signs are extremely(!) subtle. You don't get "sick" or a
fever. You may have a little bit of trouble with your eyes. Or you get
problems with your carpal tunnel (RSI). The easy explanation will be, in both
cases, that you spend too much time in front of computers. Or you have a bit
more trouble finding good sleep. Your digestion acts up - but just a bit, if
you went to a gastroenterologist they'd send you home "we found nothing
wrong". The list goes on and on.

Are people misdiagnosed?

Maybe, I'd say probably - but there is no proven alternative. None. We just
don't know.

.

There is a general mismatch problem with medical knowledge based on
observation and statistics: It is one thing to know that x percent of a
certain population have a problem. It is a completely different problem going
the other way: If you have an _individual_ , in front of you, does (s)he have
the problem or not? The probability you have is of no use to you, you have to
make a decision, yea/nay?

A prudent doctor, knowing that the odds are low, will always say "no" in such
a case, and statistically speaking that's the winning strategy from a public
health point of view. You know you lose a few, but that's the minimum, if you
tried finding out who actually has the problem (that you cannot reliably
diagnose on an individual level) your overall statistics would get worse. That
means knowledge of a problem on the scale of the population is almost useless
when it comes to making individual treatment decisions. You need something on
that (individual) level. In the case of long-term exposure (or any exposure)
to low-dose poisons we don't have much that we can use, not on the individual
level.

.

[0] [https://www.edx.org/course/biology-water-health-
fundamentals...](https://www.edx.org/course/biology-water-health-fundamentals-
oecx-ph241x-0)

~~~
exhilaration
Where did the mercury in your body come from? Do you have any guesses? I avoid
eating tuna and other large aquatic predators to avoid mercury but I've never
looked into it other sources.

------
jimnotgym
After years of rubbish in the UK press about the impact of regulations from
the EU, they can add protecting fish, bird and most likely human health to the
list of 'harm' done. I'm glad the EU still cares about the environment.

~~~
akhatri_aus
The UK is still in the EU and yet the river is still polluted.

~~~
Hendrikto
Did you even read the article?

> EU vote to extend the ban to all outdoor uses is expected soon.

~~~
akhatri_aus
Did you? The runoff still comes out of greenhouses where the insecticide will
be allowed to be used after the ban. What the article implies is the ban will
have little effect & advocates a total ban. Commercial interests won.

> The proposed EU ban would still allow neonicotinoids to be used in
> greenhouses and as a flea treatment for pets. A new Greenpeace study
> suggests neonicotinoids are frequently found in waterways close to
> greenhouses where they have been used.

~~~
posterboy
How's that supposed to happen? I'd suspect drainage would flow vertically into
the ground water. Is the water table as high as to level with the river so the
pesticide can move sideways?

~~~
jdmichal
A river's depth is basically defined by the water table. That's how it stays
full of water instead of simply draining into the ground. The first diagram on
the Wiki article for water tables shows this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_table)

(The first time I heard this was a big "aha" / "of course it works that way,
how else would it work" moment for me. Ala XKCD 10000 [0]. Hopefully you're
one of today's lucky winners!)

[0] [https://www.xkcd.com/1053/](https://www.xkcd.com/1053/)

~~~
Retric
Most ground > flowing water interaction happens at streams, but overall this
is correct.

------
nlperguiy
How would there be a capitalist incentive not to do these things? Do we really
need regulations? Why do these things happen? Why do people think it is
acceptable to pollute?

~~~
fsloth
"Do we really need regulations?"

Yes. You need to read on industrial history if this is not obvious to you.

The nature of business and industry is such that they prefer local short term
optimizations. In this context an environmental hazard is not considered a
concern for various reasons, including, it incurs no immediate negative impact
on the factory, the impact of one factory would be insignificant because
everyone else is doing it and cutting chemical X would give competitors a
financial edge, etc.

The only way to curb culture which creates negative externalities is to pipe
those externalities back to it's source. Regulations and fines are a one way
to make sure there is a feedback from negative externalities back to their
source.

Think of it as an algorithmic problem - local optimization seldom leads to a
global optimum. Hence, sometimes global tweaks can benefit an entire system.

The good news is that regulations _work_ , and damage can heal.

See for example how CFC:s destroyed ozone layer before banning them.

~~~
wav-part
Why does this apply to one group of people (private industry) but not the
other (govt) ? Both are money-seeking.

~~~
lucozade
It applies to both. It's just the mechanisms for regulation and feedback are
different.

When you don't have a mechanism for regulation in government, such as
democracy, you tend to get very bad government.

That's not to suggest that fines or elections are particularly effective but
they serve similar purposes.

~~~
wav-part
What about voters ? They are money-seeking. Who would save them from
themselves ?

~~~
pmyteh
No single voter has control, so they check each other.

In principle, anyway. Democracy obviously isn't a perfect system.

------
userbinator
One thing to keep in mind is to try to imagine what the world would be like
had insecticides like neonicotinoids not been put into use. Sure, there
wouldn't be pollution from them, but would there be other negative effects?

Let's not forget that DDT, PCBs, and CFCs have contributed greatly in positive
ways too. If they weren't used, the planet would be less polluted but we might
have nowhere near the same quality of life as we do today --- just imagine how
people lived several hundred years ago. It's hard to say, really.

~~~
amelius
> If they weren't used, the planet would be less polluted but we might have
> nowhere near the same quality of life as we do today

Those "organic/biological" products in the supermarket look fine to me.

~~~
userbinator
_Those "organic/biological" products in the supermarket look fine to me._

...but can the whole population survive on those exclusively, or even afford
them?

~~~
spodek
Hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, in which our ancestors
colonized the planet, suggests so.

Do we want to temporarily overshoot the carrying capacity by poisoning our
environment at the risk of collapse if we lower that capacity in the process?

------
refurb
Analytical techniques are incredible today. It's not unusual for the lower
detection limit to be parts per billion or parts per trillion.

One ppt is 1 mg of material (smaller than a match head) dissolved in a cube of
water that measures 100m on each side. Bigger than an Olympic sized swimming
pool.

So the fact they said neonicotinoids were detected means nothing. The real
question is how much was detected and dose that level have an impact on living
organisms.

~~~
lucaspiller
The linked paper says this:

> we recommend here that ecological thresholds for neonicotinoid water
> concentrations need to be below 0.2 μg/L (shortterm acute) or 0.035 μg/L
> (long-term chronic) to avoid lasting effects on aquatic invertebrate
> communities

I assume the map refers to these values. μg/L is the same as parts-per-billion
in case anyone was wondering.


The highest ROI way to increase signups: Make a minimal homepage (Guest Post) - instakill
http://andrewchen.co/2013/07/29/the-highest-roi-way-to-increase-signups-make-a-minimal-homepage-guest-post/
======
krapp
Whenever I see a minimal homepage with nothing but a glib sentence and a
signup form I just assume this is a service that only cares about getting my
data and bleeding me like a turnip.

I understand that it might work and why it might work and yes, a minimalist
layout gets the clutter out of the way and comes straight to the point but
personally it's not a model that inspires confidence.

How well would it work if I walked into a store, and they insisted on having
me agree to a purchase before I even got to see what it is they sell? Much
less a tiny store whose interior was nothing but a blank white room with a
credit card machine inside, that just said "The Best Thing Ever" over the
door, and nothing else?

... actually that _would_ probably work and that's what annoys me.

------
pushkargaikwad
Just like Manish, I too do not agree with what Andrew is saying. It is
ridiculous to compare DropBox, Linkedin, Quora, pinterest to the home page of
some unknown startup. I am also not convinced you can do any kind of testing
for homepages for startups which have very low volume traffic.

IMO, I think you should just stick to your gut feeling, do what looks and
feels right for home page, if this mean putting more content, so be it.

------
manishsharan
This is easy if you have an established brand. The home pages in example made
perfect sense to me as I know those companies. I am not sure this would work
for startups that are new to the market.


An Overview of Curcumin in Neurological Disorders - mrfusion
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2929771/
======
theseatoms
I've been incorporating turmeric in my diet for the past few months. I enjoy
the taste and the placebo effect, so why not?) I'm curious if others here have
done the same.

I wouldn't go as far as to make claims regarding it's effectiveness.

One tip I've heard is to take it with black pepper to increase
bioavailability. I don't understand the mechanism, but the active ingredient
is apparently piperine.

~~~
mrob
I mix cocoa powder, turmeric, black pepper, and enough extra virgin olive oil
to form a smooth paste. I then add hot water and it forms a suspension and the
oil mostly doesn't separate out. I think the bitter taste and the fact that
all the ingredients are plausibly active makes it an effective placebo, even
if it turns out not to actually do anything.

------
Toast_
This isn't too surprising considering curcumin is a mitochondrial
uncoupler[1][2]. For the curious, another example of a mitochondrial uncoupler
would be 2,4-dinitrophenol, which is currently being looked into as a
potential anti-Alzheimer treatment[3]. Cool stuff.

1:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19715674](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19715674)

2:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1567840/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1567840/)

3:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16754295](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16754295)

~~~
fasteo
Thanks for the references 1 and 2. I had no idea that curcumin was a
mitochondrial uncoupler. Incidentally, I was looking at curcumin to help with
my mitochondrial myopathy, but for its anti-inflammatory effects - I have a
really hard time to recover from my workouts possibly due to a systemic
inflammatory response caused by my genetic condition.

I have always thought that low-dose DNP would be a potentially good treatment
for mitochondrial myopathies, as they induce mitochondrial biogenesis [1], but
DNP can be dangerous and I have been hesitant to try it.

Maybe I just need to add curcumin to my current supplements regime.

[1] Caldeira da Silva, C. C., Cerqueira, F. M., Barbosa, L. F., Medeiros, M.
H., & Kowaltowski, A. J. (2008). Mild mitochondrial uncoupling in mice affects
energy metabolism, redox balance and longevity. Aging cell, 7(4), 552-560.

~~~
Toast_
Any uncoupler ought to induce mitochondrial biogenesis, as it's a systemic
response due to a lack of energy (I may be mistaken?)—same goes for [vascular]
endothelial growth factor and EPO (just to name a few).

Also, I really can't recommend reading the paper associated with the third
link enough.

Have you tried ephedrine to help with the post-workout swelling? The common
'ECA' stack might be right up your alley.

~~~
fasteo
>>> Also, I really can't recommend reading the paper associated with the third
link enough.

Just read it. Very interesting indeed.

>>>Have you tried ephedrine to help with the post-workout swelling? The common
'ECA' stack might be right up your alley.

Do you have any reference for this ? What is the mechanism of action ?

------
vondur
I wonder if the rate of these diseases that is can affect (Alzheimer's,
epilepsy and depression)are lower in India where tumeric is widely used?

~~~
shivpat23
The rate is in fact significantly lower:
[http://www.newsmax.com/Health/Health-News/turmeric-spice-
cur...](http://www.newsmax.com/Health/Health-News/turmeric-spice-curcumin-
alzheimer/2015/01/19/id/619412/)

~~~
tptacek
It's tricky to say, right? Diagnoses across the whole Indian population is
much, much more difficult than it is in the US.

~~~
vondur
You are probably correct. India has a _huge_ population, and I'm sure access
to healthcare is spotty.

------
pixelglow
Curcumin is poorly absorbed but there are several ways to increase the
bioavailability[1]. Otherwise too little will be absorbed to be effective, and
you'd just be ingesting an expensive placebo.

You could

* Combine it with black pepper, warmth and/or oil.

* Use the Meriva or BCM-95 form.

* Use nanoparticles, marketed as Theracurmin/Theracumin.

Most nights, I combine two caps of Theracurmin with fish oil and lukewarm
water for my wife to drink. It does seem to help with her arthritis.

1:
[http://examine.com/supplements/Curcumin/](http://examine.com/supplements/Curcumin/)

------
joeyspn
Another study that shows the awesome properties of this spice. I included it
in my weekly diet few years ago (along with walnuts and red wine) as meat/fish
seasoning and salad dressing. Ideal replacement for things like ketchup or
mustard. Mix turmeric with olive oil and/or vinaigrette and you get a tasty
and healthy sauce.

------
shivpat23
An easy way I incorporate it into my diet is by taking it in capsules (you can
buy them on Amazon).


Show HN: PDFlower – Reflow PDF papers for small-screen reading - chengchang
https://pdflower.com
======
chengchang
The majority of scientific and technical papers are delivered by the PDF file
for portable presentation. However, it difficult to read the PDF paper on
small screen devices, such as tablets and eBook readers.

So I wrote PDFlower to reflow PDF papers for small-screen reading.

Compared with plain-text extraction based tools, PDFlower reconstructs the
object level - columns, formulas, tables and figures - layout using some smart
heuristics, and then renders them for new page size.

~~~
ericmo
Example pictures are kind of small, hard to see the quality of the result.
Also, I'd use this for a Kindle device, not an iPad, so it'd be also good to
see how it looks in a Kindle.

~~~
chengchang
\- The output is a reflowed PDF. It keeps 'PDF quality'. \- Any PDF
reader/device could display new version paper technically. \- Kindle has
supported.

------
aw3c2
Does anyone know an open-source solution for this? What I read is no one's
business and I would never used a web-hosted service for something like this.

~~~
jasim
k2pdfopt works ok for me.

(bash function)

        tokindle () {
          ~/Software/k2pdfopt $* -dev kpw -mode fw -wrap -hy -ws 0.375 -ls-
        }

~~~
nattaylor
There's also koreader, which just uses k2pdfopt on the fly.

~~~
jasim
koreader looks fabulous! Last time I checked, the Paperwhite could not be
jailbroken. But it no longer seems true. Thanks for the link.

~~~
redwards510
Yes! All versions can now be easily jailbroken. The main features (to me) are
installing KOReader to view epubs and pdf files, and hacking the screen saver
display. The process only takes about an hour, mostly because you are reading,
doublechecking, and downloading the right files. This guide[0] is a very good
overview. I find mobileread's site to be too wordy and difficult to follow.

[0] [http://lifehacker.com/how-to-jailbreak-your-
kindle-178386407...](http://lifehacker.com/how-to-jailbreak-your-
kindle-1783864074)

~~~
voltagex_
Which version would you buy if you were buying a Kindle today? I only owned
the one before the DX... managed to crack the screen in an unfortunate elbow-
related incident.

~~~
jasim
Paperwhite has been really good to me. Both Oasis and Voyage look great as
well - they have higher resolution than the Paperwhite. And they have real
buttons to move between pages, so if I were buying a Kindle today I'd buy one
of them depending on my budget (Oasis is more expensive, but slimmer).

~~~
dustinblake
Current (and previous) generation Paperwhites have the same resolution as the
Voyage and Oasis. I have a Paperwhite and the screen is fantastic. I'd love
hardware buttons for page turning, though.

While the Oasis is expensive, if you add a nice cover to the Voyage you're
close in pricing. Either go solidly midline with the Paperwhite or go all out
with the Oasis, depending on your budget.

------
daphreak
I would like a "pricing" and a "privacy policy" link on the front page.
Probably won't spend time trying it out due to the omission.

Luckily there are interesting self-hosted / local options mentioned in this
thread.

~~~
franciscop
Exactly the same here. I won't go through the [maybe] lengthy process of
creating a new account to get a paywall then. Same goes with the privacy
policy, I don't want to use it with my own PDFs and lose their rights or with
other people's and screw things legally.

------
anigbrowl
Very cool. How hard would it be to go in the opposite direction? When I'm
using a desktop or a laptop computer it's most annoying that almost all news
sites, blogs, eg. optimize for a portrait orientation. I can only see a
relatively small amount of text so I have to scroll constantly, despite the
acres of available whitespace to either side. It's really annoying when
reading anything complex where you'd want to refer back to previous sentences
or paragraphs frequently to make sure you've understood the substance
properly. I would love to be able to reflow into 3 or 4 columns though...

~~~
chengchang
Thanks for your comment.

The PDF format will ignore some structures of paper and `draw` contents on a
fixed-layout flat document. For a char, e-readers cannot know it belongs a
paragraph, a figure caption or a formula. Plus, publishers render original
paper with the specific style. It is a problem. Some research concentrate to
improve PDF format, extract infos for scholarly papers, like articles on
DocEng - a compute science conference:
[http://dl.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE135](http://dl.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE135).
Then I read the spec of PDF format...

Anyway, that's hurt.

------
eb0la
That's the feature Kindle PDF reader should have built in from beginning.

Waiting in the queue for my account.

~~~
diab0lic
Unfortunately the kindle is optimizing for users buying Amazon content, not
for being the best general purpose eReader. This incentive mismatch between
Amazon and the end users is probably why we will never see such a feature
built in.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
If you jailbreak your Kindle and install Koreader (mentioned upstream) you can
have high quality PDF reflow, with support for two-column layouts as well as
math and displayed equations, on your Kindle today.

Here are some example images:

[http://www.epubor.com/how-to-install-and-use-koreader-on-
kin...](http://www.epubor.com/how-to-install-and-use-koreader-on-kindle.html)

~~~
ComputerGuru
Wow, that's quite the (both) useable and useful software - thank you for the
link. I'm not normally part of the "x should buy this out" group, but in this
case, Amazon really should.

~~~
TeMPOraL
No, they shouldn't - because if it goes against their business interest
(having Amazon-bought books look better than manually uploaded content),
they'll shut the project down.

------
towelrod
Interesting and I might have a use for this professionally. But there is no
indication on the main page about how it works (web service? code library?).
And it forced me to login on the second page, so I closed the tab.

------
edgartaor
I thought I'd give it a try. But... Signup Queue? I had never seen anything
like that.

Signup Queue

Hi, <my_email>

* You are on your way to PDFlower.

* 269 people in front of you.

* 0 people behind of you.

* Sharing this referral link may change your position in queue. Have a try. <referral_link>

~~~
wccrawford
I've seen that before. It's a pathetic attempt to force viral sharing. I never
participate on principle.

------
scivey7
This is something I haven't found an ideal solution for yet. There are
existing iOS PDF readers with reflow, but each seems to have its own issues.

To echo what others have said, this is an actual pain point and I'm very
willing to spend money on a solid solution. I've bought a few different PDF
readers just on the chance their reflow would be better than what I've found
elsewhere.

So I clicked on your link pretty ready to throw money at you, but I'm not sure
what I'm looking at. Is this an iOS app? Android app? It seems like some kind
of service, since it wants me to login, but I can't tell.

Consider working on the messaging and then reposting this. There's definitely
a market.

~~~
yaroslavyar
Could you please name it?

------
saint-loup
Adobe Reader has a little-known function similar to this. Go to Display > Zoom
> distribute (the last entry). It works reasonably well with simple, clean
documents. You can check wether the document is compatible in its property
panel.

------
adrianh
If you're interested in doing this for sheet music (sort of a similar-ish
problem), check out my product soundslice.com. Auto-reflowed sheet music
depending on your device width.

------
ldenoue
I'm also working on this PDF reflow and posted a video demonstration on my
twitter. Ping me if you would like to test:
[https://twitter.com/ldenoue/status/785142066665971713](https://twitter.com/ldenoue/status/785142066665971713)

------
MidoAssran
Cool concept. This should be built into all smartphones and tablets and
automatically run when they open PDFs.

------
estrabd
I just want something that'll collapse 2 columns into 1.

------
israrkhan
would be great, if you could provide a guest account to try it out. I closed
the window as soon as I saw the signup form..

------
chrismorgan
Ah, reminds me of the Celery tool Flower, pronounced flow-er rather than
flour. How is this one supposed to be pronounced?

------
nmca
Just want to comment that if this worked well I would pay for it. Probably up
to ~5 or maybe even 10 dollars a month.

~~~
ldenoue
I'm working on a similar system. Would you like to test it?
[https://twitter.com/ldenoue/status/785142066665971713](https://twitter.com/ldenoue/status/785142066665971713)


New green tech generates electricity 'out of thin air' - hhs
https://phys.org/news/2020-02-green-technology-electricity-thin-air.html
======
filoeleven
From the linked Nature abstract:

> The devices produce a sustained voltage of around 0.5 volts across a
> 7-micrometre-thick film, with a current density of around 17 microamperes
> per square centimetre.

How good is that? They talk about powering smart watches with this, and other
personal electronics. So it sounds like it’s within range of a useful amount
of power?


Shedding some light on "dark social" - vikrum
http://5f5.org/ruminations/dark-social-dubious.html

======
vikrum
This is a pretty cursory look into some other possiblities of refererless
traffic. Given an ordinary browsing session or interaction from an end user,
what else could be leading to HTTP requests without the referer header?

~~~
asparagui
1) proxies

2) clever antivirus/firewall software

3) htaccess tricks will often drop headers

4) javascript

5) things like amazon silk

6) people spoofing things to make their browser work

7) anonymizer services

8) proxies

~~~
nostromo
9) links followed from https -> http

10) bookmarks

~~~
papsosouid
The article in question claims that links followed from https facebook do have
a referrer header:

>In testing links from Facebook and Twitter over HTTPS the referer is present
in most cases.

~~~
nostromo
That's definitely not to spec if the browser is doing it.
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-15.1.3>

"Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referer header field in a (non-secure) HTTP
request if the referring page was transferred with a secure protocol."

However, it's possible that Facebook is passing users through an HTTP gateway.

~~~
vikrum
It looks like the intermediate 301's referer is being passed thru (For
example, all links on Twitter get wrapped as a t.co link, and that's what
shows up on the server). I'd imagine that analytics being mined are
intelligent enough to collapse twitter.com and t.co as the same social origin.

Give it a try yourself:
<https://twitter.com/vikrum5000/status/256898972478763008> Note the protocol.

------
0wza
Off topic a bit, but I just want to say I like the layout and the general
approach of your blog. If it's a template I haven't seen it before.

The "pondering" section is intriguing. What if you could accept input as to
what topics readers might prefer?

~~~
vikrum
Thanks! It's not from a template; it's super basic HTML I wrote up by hand
with simple CSS behind it. Take a look at the source for
<http://5f5.org/ruminations/> — I copy and paste that into a new file and use
that as a template for new posts.

The pondering section is where I keep notes to my self for future topics.
There's a file in that directory that has a bunch of sentence fragments and
ideas for other, not yet formed ideas.

I like the idea of suggesting new topics :)

------
fraserharris
Regarding mis-measuring "dark social": For ecommerce, Pinterest traffic is
estimated to be 64% larger b/c of the popularity of the iPad app. This is
significant given that Pinterest is now the 2nd largest referral source
(depending on which ecommerce sites you are measuring).

[http://llsocial.com/2012/07/pinterest-traffic-being-
signific...](http://llsocial.com/2012/07/pinterest-traffic-being-
significantly-underreported/)

~~~
vikrum
With the Facebook and Twitter apps (and iOS apps, in general), they have
complete control over how the network call is being made — and the referer
makes it to the server (for the post part.) One would imagine Pinterest would
want to maximize this number.

I'll try posting the referer detector to some more native apps and see what
happens.


CIOs’ top 5 wolves’ rules of information management - bootload
http://blogs.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/cios-top-5-wolves-rules-of-information-management/

======
bootload
_" Nunno posits the Wolf as the ideal archetype for a senior IT executive,
describing it as an apex predator who rules with a dual nature."_

Anyone familiar with the _" wolf, sheep, sheep-dog"_ paradigm? Being the wolf
is not the role I'd use here.


Fears plane computers could be hacked - _mgr
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11433012

======
_mgr

      The avionics in a cockpit operate as a self-contained unit and aren't connected to the same system used by passengers to watch movies or work on their laptops.

      But as airlines update their systems with Internet-based networks, it's not uncommon for Wi-Fi systems to share routers or internal wiring.

I assume an executive overrides the engineers when they design this crap. It
worries me that someone who cheated their way into a CCNA cert. is likely
setting this stuff up.