Mike Linksvayer

I gather that Glenn Reynolds writes the most read blog in the world, though I don’t recall ever visiting it, until now. Regarding today’s NYT story on calorie restriction he writes:

Calorie restriction is unlikely to work in humans — and I’m not sure it’s worth it anyway — but drugs that mimic its effects are another thing entirely.

If CR is unlikely to “work” (I assume Reynolds means “extend maximum species lifespan” as CR clearly does have immediate health benefits) how does he expect CR mimetics to work? If the effect works then a pill will be worth it for many more people than practice, but that’s another thing entirely.

Fortunately the rest of Reynolds’ post makes perfect sense, so I won’t go on, and may visit again.

A few months ago reporter Michael Mason contacted me for a story about calorie restriction via my writeup of the first day of CR IV (I still have notes from the other two days and will write them up in the fullness of time). The story appears in tomorrow’s New York Times, now online, as One for the Ages: A Prescription That May Extend Life. Just a few notes on the paragraphs that mention me and accompanying photos:

Mike Linksvayer, a 36-year-old chief technology officer at a San Francisco nonprofit group, embarked on just such a diet six years ago. On an average day, he eats an apple or some cereal for breakfast,

Cereal is pretty much junk food, and whether I eat any is a pretty good indicator of how well I’m doing. I can go for weeks without any, then eat some every morning for a week at work if I’m procrastinating on a project. I skip breakfast more often than not. Natto and garlic (pictured) is my favorite breakfast.

followed by a small vegan dish at lunch.

However, it must be noted that most people practicing CR are not vegan.

Dinner is whatever his wife has cooked, excluding bread, rice, sugar and whatever else Mr. Linksvayer deems unhealthy (this often includes the entrée). On weekends, he occasionally fasts.

I cook a fair amount, too. The dishes pictured are typical of my cooking — more or less random vegetables and vegetable protein mixed together with lots of spices.

Mr. Linksvayer, 6 feet tall and 135 pounds, estimated that he gets by on about 2,000 to 2,100 calories a day, a low number for men of his age and activity level, and his blood pressure is a remarkably low 112 over 63. He said he has never been in better health.

My first estimate was 2,200, which includes some fudge factor, as I know how easy it is to underestimate intake, and I am not super meticulous. But they wanted to go with a lower number.

I am on relatively mild CR. For example, in at least one human CR study the median blood pressure was 99/61.

“I don’t really get sick,” he said. “Mostly I do the diet to be healthier, but if it helps me live longer, hey, I’ll take that, too.”

True, though I learned of CR through life extension circles and that was definitely my initial motivation. It doesn’t really matter to an individual whether CR squares the mortality curve or extends maximum life — only whether that individual gets more healthy years (easy) and yes, perhaps a better shot at hanging on long enough for real life extension technologies.

Regarding the food pictures, the photographer wanted food on plates, but I typically eat multiple servings or from a salad bowl, as in the photograph with me in the picture. The lunch and dinner pictured are low calorie density for their volume. Some people on CR eat a huge salad every day.

The clarifications above aren’t intended as criticisms. Overall the article is pretty good and I was impressed by the amount of legwork and research the reporter and support people put into the story. Seeing a real photojournalist at work was very interesting (picture of two of his cameras I took while he carried the rest of his gear down the stairs), even if I didn’t really enjoy being a subject. Maybe the MSM is worth keeping around after all. :)

There have been several stories about CR published recently. I recommend checking out The Fast Supper in New York Magazine, which features people far more hard-core and interesting than myself.

Also check out the Calorie Restriction Society. I rarely blog about CR, so subscribe to April Smith or Mary Robinson, who do so intelligently (though most people on CR seem to be male).

Better yet, ignore all of the above and contribute to the real fight against aging — from December 2005:

Excepting the very laws of nature (see arch anarchy), aging and its resulting suffering and death is the greatest oppressor of humanity. As far as I know Aubrey de Grey’s Methuselah Mouse Prize/Foundation is the only organization making a direct assault on aging, so I advise giving generously. Fight Aging! is the place to watch for new anti-aging philanthropy.

Addendum: The meal photos left out dessert.

Or do copyright enforcement technologies attract people who would be kooks anyway?

Obvious case in point: DRM.

Now this from Paul Hoffert, apparently associated with “Noank Media”, commenting on Rob Kaye’s blog:

The Noank counting system is unique. We count usage by ALL players. Players can be time-based, such as iTunes, Windows Media, open source, our own Noank player, or your own favorite. They can be Microsoft Word, Acrobat Reader, Photoshop, or any other application program. The Noank client reports consumption of all content within our catalog on Windows, Mac, Unix, or recent cell phone devices.

Rob’s response is too polite:

This is nothing but empty hand-waving, I’m sorry. If you were to hire me to implement this system, I would have to politely tell you that this is impossible. I could not code such a thing and I have over a decade of client application programming experience. Please do elaborate on how you’re going to do this. If you’ve solved this I assume that you’ve already filed for some patents, right? What are your patent application numbers? I’d like to look up these exciting details — this is got to be amazing stuff you’re working on!

To which Hoffert responds:

Our tracking system is operational now and we are scaling it for large numbers of users.

Uh huh.

Voluntary collective licensing may have a role to play but I’m afraid I’m going to have to completely write off “Noank Media” before they even have a website.

Copyright mania hass the side effect of reducing perpetual motion research, who knew?

Addendum 20061031: Lucas Gonze writes that collective licensing will never happen. I think I buy his argument:

Users and businesses are moving away from filesharing networks and to the web, where DMCA safe harbor allows many disputes to be resolved peacefully. User-created content has become a substantial part of the media ecosystem over the last few years, and it doesn’t need collective licensing to exist.

Update 20071126: Noank does have a website now and a how it works page that leaves out lots of details but is not implausible. When more details are available I hope to post a retraction. Hoffert’s language was just too easy to make fun of, and that urge turned me into a technology idiot!

I almost entirely agree with Mark Birbeck’s comparison of RDFa and microformats. The only thing to be said in defense of microformats is that a few of the problems Birbeck calls out are also features, from the microformats perspective.

But worse is better.

I will reveal what this means later.

Another quip: My problem with microformats is the s.

Evan Prodromou provided a still-good RDFa vs Microformats roundup (better title: “RDFa and Microformats, please work together”) in May. I somehow missed it until now.

Ah, metadata.

Update 20061204: I didn’t miss Prodromou’s roundup in May, I blogged about it. And forgot.

At best, as (arbitrarily) measured by years of adult education or years (10) to becoming an expert in something.

Inspired by the oft-heard ‘JD/MBA is the new BA’, Arnold Kling’s slightly more verbose statement

The point is that what used to be a college-degree premium is turning into a graduate-degree premium.

and MC Plus+’s The Empty Set (mp3):

this chip hop shit is a celebration of hustling for whatever degree, whether it’s a PhD or a GED or even if you’re just trying to make ends meet

Not a particulary great track, but ugh, I am too amused by nerdcore and looking forward to seeing MCPP at BoCon next weekend in Boise, where I’ll be speaking.

Throwaway thoughts above, I am against credentialism. Many current forms anyway.

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia says to dream a little:

Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?

…

I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what we dream of, that we can’t accomplish on our own, or that we would expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.

One shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth and this could do a great deal of good, particularly if the conditions “can’t accomplish on our own…” are stringently adhered to.

However, this is a blog and I’m going to complain.

Don’t fork over money to the copyright industry! This is defeatist and exhibits static world thinking.

$100 million could fund a huge amount of new free content, free software, free infrastructure and supporting institutions, begetting more of the same.

But if I were a donor with $100 million to give I’d try really hard to quantify my goals and predict the most impactful spending toward those goals. I’ll just repeat a paragraph from last December 30, Outsourcing charity … to Wikipedia:

Wikipedia chief considers taking ads (via Boing Boing) says that at current traffic levels, Wikipedia could generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year by running ads. There are strong objections to running ads from the community, but that is a staggering number for a tiny nonprofit, an annual amount that would be surpassed only by the wealthiest foundations. It could fund a staggering Wikimedia Foundation bureaucracy, or it could fund additional free knowledge projects. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has asked what will be free. Would an annual hundred million dollar budget increase the odds of those predictions? One way to find out before actually trying.

Via Boing Boing via /.

Last night I saw Diamanda Galás perform Defixiones: Orders from the Dead, about the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides carried out by the Ottoman Empire 1914-1923.

The music was in vintage Galás style: her voice (three and a half octaves and very dark), undulating drones, hints of jazz piano. Most of the words were not English, which is a good thing — one could focus on the music rather than reel in horror. Most of the time images from the genocides were projected on a backdrop, and matching the sound, were usually mercifully undulating and distorted.

A brilliant success.

Included in the program is this atavistic screed, “published by the large circulation Turkish newspaper Hürriyet on 18 July 1974, just 48 hours before the Turkish invastion of Cyprus by order of the Bulent Ecevit government”, titled HATRED:

As long as the vulgar Greek exists in this world
By Allah, my hatred won’t leave me
As long as I see him there like a dog
By Allah, this hatred won’t leave me
A thousand heads of infidel Giaours cannot wash away this hatred.

My only aim is revenge
When my turn comes to go to battle
In one day I’ll butcher a thousand Giours
By Allah, this hatred won’t leave me
A thousand heads of Giaours cannot wash away this hatred.

Even if I crush thirty thousand of their heads with a stone
Even if I wrench out the teeth of ten thousand
And throw a hundred thousand of their corpses into the river
By Allah, this hatred won’t leave me

A thousand heads of Giaours cannot wash away this hatred.
The whole world knows how superior the Turk is
Who crashed the Greek’s fucked world over his head
Even if I burn in stokeholes the heads of five thousand of them
By Allah, this hatred won’t leave me

A thousand heads of Giaours cannot wash away this hatred
Even if I slash forty thousand of them with my bayonet
And send eighty thousand of them to the devil
And hang a hundred thousand of them
By Allah, this hatred won’t leave me

A thousand heads of Giaours cannot wash away this hatred.

…

A one minute excerpt of The Desert Part I from Defixiones, a list of recordings by Galás with audio excerpts. I especially recommend Let’s Not Chat About Despair and Wild Women With Steak Knives, but you really have to listen to the entire tracks, especially the latter.

Someone mentioned to me today that if the web were like iTunes you could only connect to msn.com, which reminded me of speculation that earlier aggressive intellectual protectionism online could have led to a proprietary cul de sac in online services. In that post I said without explanation that aggressive protectionism is being allowed to kill or stunt online music.

People have been noting for awhile that protectionism enabled iTunes’ dominance, or as Techdirt put it “How The Recording Industry’s Obsession On DRM Made Apple So Powerful.”

iTunes’ dominant lock-in will end soon enough, that is unless we get some additional very bad copyright rulings and laws.

A nice quote that brings the general web and online music analogy full circle is this from Ross Karchner commenting on Songbird:

It’s like taking iTunes, ripping out the music store, and replacing it with the rest of the internet.

I’ll take the rest of the internet.

Check out the just released Songbird 0.2, which despite the low version number I find very usable.

Addendum 20061020: Ironically for me the company behind Songbird is called Pioneers of the Inevitable.

Last month I watched The Bridge, a scientology docudrama, after hearing about it on Boing Boing. It is a pretty well done and low key film, considering the nuttiness of scientology.

Copyright is one of the weapons scientology uses to hide the hilarious absurdity of its beliefs, so it is no surprise that The Bridge has has been taken down (at least some of the copies) from YouTube, Google, and the Internet Archive.

I remember that it was published to the Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license. Sadly http://www.archive.org/details/BrettHanoverTheBridge is not in the Wayback Machine nor WebCite, so I can’t demonstrate this. If I am correct, the filmmaker has no cause to stop non-commercial distribution, as CC licenses are irrevocable.

If you can’t find the film on the lightnet fire up a filesharing client (I recommend LimeWire) and click on the magnet link below to start your P2P search and download.

Scientology-The_Bridge.mp4

It is not completely unreasonable to guesstimate the average value of a U.S. jurisdiction citizen’s life at around $9 million, given that it has been guestimated at between $4 and $5 million in 1980 and apparently increases about 15% given a 10% increase in income. See Is Your Life Worth $10 Million? for an explanation and Economic History Services for income data.

Then it is also not completely unreasonable to guesstimate the average value of an Iraq jurisdiction citizen’s life at around $250,000, given per capita income of $3,600 at PPP.

Now assuming the Lancet study is roughly correct (I know, controversial, but if it overestimates then the Iraq war is an even worse “deal”) in estimating 600,000 Iraqi excess deaths and that the U.S. government has spent $335 billion so far on the Iraq war (only direct costs; including more controversial costs would again make the “deal” worse), it is straightforward to see that the U.S. has spent over $550,000 for each Iraqi life.

What a ripoff! And we were expecting a great deal.

(Intended as irony. Too bad if post seems autistic, outrageous, or sick.)

I finally tried out the Songbird media player (I noticed that it is now available for Linux and that the developers were throwing a party, which I attended). The killer feature is web integration. Browse (Songbird is built on the same platform as Firefox) to a page that links to music or video files or a podcast feed, Songbird displays all available media and allows you to play, subscribe, or add to your media library immediately.

It feels as if there’s no distinction between files on your computer and those on the web. In fact the only gripe I have is that once a file is added to your library from the web, there’s no facility for getting back to the web page you obtained the file from.

Check out the Songbird screencast, which does a good job of demonstrating Songbird’s web features (Songbird is also a good all-around media player).

Screenshot of Songbird 0.2rc3/Linux browsing ccMixter.

Nathan, I see a MozCC for Songbird in the future. :)

I’ve been meaning to write a version of the aphorism “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” to say something derogatory about metadata. Something like “those who can, code; those who can’t, twitter about metadata standards.” But it doesn’t flow and like the “teach” version, is highly contestable. Plus, I’m projecting.

However, I realized that the general pattern of this aphorism is that those who can’t, do something “meta” relative to those who can, e.g., an extension of “teach” is “… those who can’t teach, administrate.”

Presumably those who can’t administrate, run for school board. And those who can’t write a pointed aphorism, write about aphorisms.

All of the “can’t” statements are metadata about a subject that does something more meta than the things he can’t do.

So I got my metadata out of it after all.

I’ve been wanting to blog that phrase since reading the Communities as the new IPR? thread on the Free Software Business list. That thread lost coherence and died quickly but I think the most important idea is hinted at by Susan Wu:

There are two elements of discussion here - a singular community, which is a unique entity; and the community constructs (procedure, policy, infrastructure, governance), which are more readily replicated.

Not said but obvious: a singular community is not easily copied.

Now Tim Lee writes about GooTube (emphasis added):

YouTube is an innovative company that secured several millions of dollars in venture capital and used it to create a billion-dollar company in less than a year. Yet as far as I know, strong IP rights have not been an important part of YouTube’s strategy. They don’t appear to have received any patents, and their software interface has been widely copied. Indeed, Google has been in the video-download business longer than YouTube, and their engineers could easily have replicated any YouTube functionality they felt was superior to Google’s own product.
…
Like all businesses, most of the value in technology startups lies in strong relationships among people, not from technology, as such. Technological change renders new technologies obsolete very quickly. But a brilliant team of engineers, visionary management, and a loyal base of users are assets that will pay dividends for years to come. That’s why Google was willing to pay a billion bucks for YouTube.

Loyal base of users does not do justice to the YouTube community. I was not aware of YouTube’s social features nor how critical they are until I read the NYT story on electric guitar performances of Pachelbel’s Canon being posted to YouTube (I commented on the story at the Creative Commons weblog). Some of these videos have been rated by tens of thousands of users and commented on by thousands. “Video responses” are a means for YouTube users to have a conversation solely through posting videos.

Google Video could have duplicated these social features trivially. I’m surprised but not stunned that Google thinks the YouTube community is worth in excess of $1.65 billion.

On a much smaller scale the acquisition of Wikitravel and World66 earlier this year is an example of the value of hard to duplicate communities. The entire contents of these sites could be legally duplicated for commercial use, yet Internet Brands paid (unfortunately an undisclosed amount) to acquire them, presumably because copies on new sites with zero community would be worthless.

There’s lots more to say about community as a business strategy for less obvious cases than websites, but I don’t have the ability, time, and links to say it right now. The FSB thread above hints at this in the context of software development communities.

And of course community participants may want to consider what allowances they require from a community owner, e.g., open licenses, data, and formats so that at a minimum a participant can retrieve and republish elsewhere her contributions if the owner does a bad job.

In elementary school I won a Columbus Day essay contest sponsored by the Roman Cultural Society of Springfield, Illinois for making the audacious claim (so I was told) that Columbus did not discover America. I have ignored Columbus since then, except as a disease vector. I doubt I would have managed to win that contest had I known of another aspect of Columbus, which I only learned about today:

By the time Christopher Columbus appeared in Lisbon in 1477 an Old World slave trade was thriving in the eastern Atlantic between West Africa, the Atlantic islands, and Europe. In his famous letter on his first voyage he informed Ferdinand and Isabella he could, with their help, give them “slaves, as many as they shall order.” On his second voyage Columbus loaded five hundred Indian slaves aboard returning caravels. On the last leg of his voyage to Cadiz, “about two hundred of these Indians died,” a passenger recorded, appending, “We cast them into the sea.” In this manner the discoverer of the New World launched the transatlantic slave trade, at first in Indians and from west to east.

–James Rawley, with Stephen Behrendt, The Transatlantic Slave Trade

This via Byran Caplan’s timely post Columbus: The Far Left is Dead Right, which includes an always timely plea to dishonor ‘great men.’

It is long past time to terminate officious recognition of Columbus Day and remove representations of slave owners from currency and other objects of jurisdiction worship. I consider this a mild compromise position on the road to smashing hero worship, which I admit has near zero constituency.

This evening I stumbled upon the California gubernatiorial debate on the radio during the opening statements. At one point the moderator claimed he would be “brutal” but was completely ineffective. Every question evoked a vacuous response from each candidate, nearly all of which completely ignored the question asked. Angelides in particular needs to be banned from saying “hard working” and “middle class”, which seems to cover annual household icomes from $18,000 to $500,000 — feel the vacuity! Both need to be banned from saying “education” (and what the heck does “fully funding” education mean? relative to what?).

But a response from Schwarzenegger was the most offensive. Asked what he would do to balance the state budget in the face of an economic downturn, he said “Talking about hypotheticals is not my style.”

Try using that in a job interview.

…

Please stop this insane deference to royalty. Start by addressing by name, not job title or former job title. Yes, president, vice president, senator, governor and the like are job titles, not peerages.

Although raised Catholic I did not realize there was a difference between purgatory and limbo. According to the BBC the Roman Catholic Pope may shortly “abolish” the latter:

The Pope, himself, has been quoted in the past as saying that he would let the idea of limbo “drop, since it has always been only a theological hypothesis”.

That would be rich if it weren’t redolent. Get back to me when the theologians have a test for this hypothesis.

Limbo may deter sheep in regions with high infant deathrates from joining the Roman Catholic flock, so doctrine may be changed such that unbaptised infants and the unborn go straight to heaven instead of languishing in limbo, to improve the competitive position of this particular earthly church. I’d rather they switch back to RCC’s old mythology — the unbaptised go straight to hell. Otherwise, new signs will be needed, and that would be a waste.

Ratzinger head from here.

Via Mahalanobis, where I also found a nice cartoon two years ago.

Brady Forrest writing about unconferences:

Unfortunately, a common piece of feedback I hear is that they got more out of hallway conversations than the sessions. I’ve also found this to be true.

That’s exactly what people say about, um, conferences.

Conference sessions, whether of the lecture and presentation type associated with normal conferences or the more interactive type associated with unconferences, only work for me when the presenter or organizer is extremely knowledgeable and articulate about the topic at hand. Otherwise you get a sleep inducing spiel or bullshit session.

So perhaps some conference should drop sessions almost completely, as they are implied to be low value, and concentrate on making hallway conversation, claimed to be valuable, even moreso.

Update 20061004: Above is the most thoughtless post on this blog so far. I should have only made an ironic comment on Forrest’s post. But I’ll write now what I should have written yesterday, given that I bothered to post here on a topic I don’t know any more about than any other bozo who has groused about conferences:

• Everyone says they get a lot out of hallway conversations, but they don’t. Hallway conversations largely are merely enjoyable and easy (well, not necessarily for me, but I’m pretty introverted) lightweight social chit-chat. Saying hallway talk is the best part of conferences is also self-flattery.
• The post title implies that the way to increase the value of hallway conversations is to add structure, a claim that may be without merit.
• Many unconference practices do make sessions a lot like hallway conversations.
• The real problem is that speakers don’t have the right incentives. If a presentation blows, people blow it off. Maybe you get one or two negative comments weeks or months later, if the conference solicited feedback and makes it available to speakers. There should be immediate and public reputational and perhaps financial (if it is a rich conference) repercussions. Any dodo can think of implementations and problems, so I won’t go on.

Today is Defective by Design’s “day against DRM.” Defectivebydesign.org says:

There is no more important cause for electronic freedoms and privacy than the call for action to stop DRM from crippling our digital future. The time is now.

The first bit is hyperbole, but you could cover fighting DRM and several related causes by taking the opportunity to join the EFF or FSF.

I don’t have anything new to say about DRM, so see Digital Rent-a-Center Management from June.

Download DRM-free music.