Bike Newbie

Gut Bacteria and a Youthful Brain

Middle age is in most respects a good age to be. You are hopefully making enough money to do the things you want to do. You know enough about yourself to know what you want. And you know enough about the world to figure out how to get what you want. But…there is one master you still can’t outwit. Time.

In middle age you begin to experience what time does to a body. Activities that were once effortless and without consequence become possible only through great concentrations of energy, and the price is exacted through days of soreness afterward. Brain activity is similarly hampered: complex exercises and recalls are only possible with ever-increasing effort, and sometimes not even then. You walk into a room with purpose, and then suddenly you realize you haven’t a clue what that purpose is. Sometimes the purpose comes to after a quick think, sometimes not, or only much later.

Since the dawn of time this phenomenon could only be shrugged at as inevitable. But recent research in lab mice shows that an old brain can be made younger. It all has to do with gut bacteria. Older mice, some with gut bacteria transplanted from young mice, some without, were made to memorize a path through a watery maze in order to reach a dry platform. The mice with the bacteria transplant performed far better than the others.

This is very preliminary research, as well as kind of gross (they basically took poop from young mice and shoved it into old mice colons), but it reveals hope of someday producing similar results in old humans (I sincerely hope the transplant method is refined by the time consumer products are available). With any luck I may someday soon eat yogurt that is healthy for my brain as well as my body. Now where did I leave that spoon?

Here endeth the lesson on gut bacteria and a youthful brain.

The Art of Small Talk—Asking Questions

I am probably the last person who should be giving lessons on small talk. Judging from my comfort level with it, I’m not very good at it. Even at my advanced age I don’t chat easily with strangers or casual acquaintances. But I’ve picked up a few tips over the years.

One tip is that, generally, people like to talk about themselves. That is, as long as they’re not overly guarded and don’t feel that any “prying” is taking place. Also, as long as they’re not embarrassed or offended by the questions. But, those caveats being said, people usually talk about themselves pretty willingly.

If you’re ever in an awkward moment with someone you just met, searching for anything to break the ice, the old standard is, “So what do you do for a living?” or “What line of work are you in?” The question might have to be adjusted to past or future tense, depending on the age of your company.

There are other questions, too. I’ve noticed lately that young cashiers are being trained to ask “Do you have any plans for the rest of your day/weekend?” to soften any potentially harsh silences while waiting with a customer. It can be helpful to tailor the question to the exact timeframe and context of the situation, too.

One thing I always have to remind myself of: When asking these small-talk questions, be sure and actually listen to the answer. Asking follow up questions or referring back to an earlier answer signals to your audience that you have been listening. If the person ever starts to feel they aren’t being listened to and their story is just a time killer, you are in danger of wasting your conversational efforts as they may well shut down.

On the other side of the coin, if the person starts to feel interrogated or that their story may be somehow used to their disadvantage, they may similarly shut down. The key is to find the right balance between not being interested enough and being too interested in the person’s answers. And with any luck, the person will engage and perhaps ask questions of their own, and soon you’ll have a true dialogue going.

Here endeth the lesson on asking questions.

Staying Warm

In many places north of the Tropic of Cancer it is already cold, getting cold, about to get cold, or some combination thereof. The best and most obvious way to beat the cold is to be in a location that’s warm…but that isn’t always possible, and often folks want to get outside and do something anyway. So here are the best ways I’ve learned for staying warm in the cold.

1. Stay Dry. This is a basic one but still important. Getting wet or damp will cause you to lose heat many times faster than if you’d stayed dry. Often when you’re active you’ll sweat and/or produce condensate, even when cold. Fabrics that are water resistant, breathable, and warm you despite dampness are critical in this regard. Which brings me to the next one…
2. Cotton Kills. Don’t wear cotton or cotton blends if you’re planning to be out in the cold and damp. This includes underclothes. Find wool and/or synthetic clothes to wear in the cold…they can get damp and still keep you warm, unlike cotton. Once cotton is even a little wet (slight condensation from your body can do this), it’s all over; the cotton will hemorrhage warmth from you until it’s either bone-dry or removed.
3. Keep Moving. The thing that makes you warm is your metabolism and blood circulation. The more your heart beats and your muscles move, the warmer you will feel and be. There is one condition where you may want to stay still, however…
4. Stay Out Of The Wind. If the wind is howling, find shelter if you can and hunker down. There’s a reason weather sites report the wind chill factor…it really does make a difference.
5. Layers. Nineteen times out of twenty, when I’m too hot or too cold I would have been better off dressing in layers, especially when I’m too cold. Where I live, in the winter it’s good to have three: a base layer, a warmth layer, and a rain shell.
6. Heat From Within. Bring a thermos or container of hot tea, coffee, cocoa or even just hot water. This has been shown to be the most effective way of warming up a cold body. Avoid alcohol as it doesn’t really warm; in fact it just brings blood vessels to your skin surface cooling you down even quicker.
7. Head, Hands, Feet. From my experience, if my head, hands, and feet are warm it isn’t difficult to keep the rest of me warm…if any of those are cold it can be quite difficult to warm up. Invest in good socks/footwear, good gloves/mittens, and good hats/headwear.

Here endeth the lesson on staying warm.

Palindromes

A palindrome is a word, phrase, sentence or number that reads exactly the same forwards as backwards. As with units of measure, I don’t know why they fascinate me but they do.

I realize now that I should have saved this post for Dec. 2nd, as that is a palindromic date (12/02/2021), at least in the mm/dd/yyyy format. For many countries in Europe and elsewhere, that date was Feb. 12th, 2021.

The next palindromic date will be Feb. 22nd of 2022 in the dd/mm/yyyy format. For the U.S. and other countries that commonly put the month first, it won’t be until Dec. 12th, 2121 that we have another palindromic date.

The Internet contains many lists of word/phrase palindromes in different languages. One of my favorites in English is “Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo.”

Here endeth the lesson on palindromes.

The Distances Between Things

Why I find this topic interesting I don’t really know. I only know that I do. There are many ways to measure and document the distance between two things, and they mostly depend on how big or small the things are (as compared to our physical bodies).

When you have a unit of distance that is based on a known physical thing and easily scalable by powers of 10 (which the world does have, the meter, by which I mean the world outside of Myanmar, Liberia, and the U.S., a topic I intend to explore in a future post), you pretty much have the ability to measure anything, no matter how big or how small. But when you start talking about very big or very small distances (compared to our physical bodies) the numbers can be a little laborious to express. For example, the distance from Earth to the Sun is about 150 billion meters or 149,597,870,000 meters. The radius of an atom’s nucleus, meanwhile, is about one quadrillionth of a meter or 1/1,000,000,000,000,000 meter.

Those numbers start to contain a lot of digits or scientific notation when they are placed in meters, so we’ve come up with different ways of expressing them. For outer space we’ve come up with the light-year, i.e. the distance light can travel in one Earth year. For tiny atomic measurements we’ve named the femtometer (the one-quadrillionth meter measurement discussed above) as the standard, and started expressing those little distances in fm rather than m.

As we explore more of both outer space and the smallest regions within an atom, it will be interesting to see what units of measure are invented to express those distances. Here endeth the lesson on the distances between things.

The Sierpinski Triangle

Sierpinski was a Polish mathematician who expressed in numbers the intricate, self-repeating patterns that occur when you split an equilateral triangle into smaller triangles using the midpoints of edges. As far as I know he was the first to show this mathematically, but he was nowhere near the first to express this visually.

Examples of Sierpinski triangles can be found in artwork such as tile mosaics hundreds of years old. When examining Indigenous art forms such as the Columbia River Form of the Pacific Northwest, the artwork is sometimes a thousand or more years old. This leads me to believe that knowledge, while often talked about as being “discovered”, is new only with respect to how it is expressed by us humans.

As mentioned in a previous post, my ability to talk about math is more than fairly limited, so I will stop here and encourage folks to look up this and other repeating patterns on their own.

Here endeth the lesson on the Sierpinski triangle.

The Mandelbrot Set

In nature there are patterns that repeat, sometimes at many different scales within the same structure. Look at a seashell or a fern frond and you can see evidence of this.

I’m not any kind of mathematician, math scientist or math student, so I’m very limited in how much I can intelligently write on this topic. And it follows that this will be a pretty brief post.

When Mandelbrot first expressed this set of numbers mathematically in the 1970s, there weren’t a lot of available tools to graph this set out accurately. Most computers of that time had very limited monitor screen displays, if they had monitors at all…most output then was printed on paper. This had to be frustrating to Mandelbrot and his associates. But what had to be even more frustrating (albeit amusing today to read about), is that when he finally had this set of self-repeating patterns plotted out on large-format paper, the plotter technicians had taken it upon themselves to “clean up” and erase the small intricate spirals and patterns dotting the edges of the Mandelbrot Set, assuming they were dirt, ink traces, or other anomalies left mistakenly by the plotter heads.

Today there are several online tools to explore, zoom in/out, and otherwise experience at trillion-x scale the miniscule self-repeating (and I daresay beautiful) patterns of the Mandelbrot Set. Rather than further reveal just how limited my math understanding is, I will encourage people to look some of them up online and see for themselves.

Here endeth the lesson on the Mandelbrot Set.

The Halfway Point

As I make this post, I am passing the halfway point of the 63 posts that make up The Neurocycle. Woohoo! It’s all downhill from here!

Which makes me wonder, why do we tend to make such a big deal about the halfway point of anything? It seems like a very arbitrary point at which to celebrate, and yet somehow it just feels right to celebrate. After giving it some thought, here are a few reasons I’ve come up with.

First, there’s the ease of measurement. It doesn’t take a math genius to figure out that 31.5 is half of 63; most of us can do this arithmetic in our heads without even trying. True, in most cases we have only calculated half of the length of the task, not the actual volume of effort required to complete it, but that’s the point. The length of the task (either in time or in distance) is usually the part that’s easy to measure, and that’s why we can be certain (and happy) that we’ve reached the halfway mark.

Second, there’s the notion of repeatability. The logic goes that if you can do something once, then you can do it again, so if you’ve done the first half of a task you can do the second half. There are of course dozens of assumptions built into that if/then statement: the assumption that you haven’t depleted your available resources including time, that the two halves of the task are completely identical, and so on. But in general it’s a sound notion, and we stick to it unless we’re shown good reason not to.

Finally, there’s the need for encouragement in the form of finish line information. Have you ever finished a long bicycle ride where you didn’t know exactly where/when it would end? Those last few miles seemed to take forever, didn’t they? That’s precisely because we didn’t know for sure they were in fact the last few miles…we thought the ride might be much longer, so we were preparing ourselves mentally for a much longer ride and getting more anxious by the minute until we finally saw the finish line with our own eyes. When we know and are reminded of the finish line’s proximity, we are much more confident in pushing ourselves all the way to that point.

Here endeth the lesson on the halfway point.

Procrastination

I chose this topic because it is precisely what I’ve been doing the last 7 days with my blog. Oh, I’ve had some very good reasons for not blogging (see my earlier post on Rationalization), but the bottom line is I could have prioritized my blogging had I really wanted to, but the fact that I didn’t is evidence enough that I didn’t really want to.

What makes us procrastinate? It’s puzzling, especially when it comes to an inescapable task we absolutely must do. Somehow it’s still better to us to put it off, even though it will be more painful to do it later than now. “Tomorrow guy” is the constant recipient of our screw jobs, and we have a hard time grasping that we in fact are “tomorrow guy”. If we could perform the mental math accurately and truly put ourselves in our “tomorrow guy’s” shoes, I would imagine very few of us would procrastinate nearly as much as we do.

But the ugly truth is that we don’t quite feel bad enough for “tomorrow guy” to alter our behavior. So we procrastinate until the task has somehow achieved mythic and monolithic attributes in our brains. It begins to be associated in our minds with words like impossible, infeasible, and daunting. We notice this and start to tell ourselves that we have put things off for too long, and need to get back on the horse, but how?

Many folks agree the most important (and hardest) part of ending a cycle of procrastination is to just get started on the task, without worrying about how we can possibly finish it. This is usually far easier said than done, and it often seems pointless and/or depressing to begin a task for which there is no hope of any possible completion. One method that is often touted online (I’ve tried it and it works for me) is breaking up the task into small pieces that are each easily measurable and easily completed. As these small pieces are accomplished, your brain registers the progress that’s being made and thus the self-defeat is defeated. More often than not, when I put this method into practice I find that I’ve made my small pieces too small, and I can easily knock out 2-3 of them in one go, giving me even more confidence and positive energy. It isn’t perfect but it’s good enough for me.

Here endeth the lesson on procrastination.

Online Reviews

If you try hard, you can probably remember the days before online reviews were a thing. Remember what that was like? Trying out or even finding a new business was like doing research for a college final paper. You put a lot of time in, and at the end of the day you were still left gambling on whether the store, restaurant, etc. was any good.

Now finding information on any business in existence is quick and effortless. Not only that, but you can also leave a review on any business quickly and easily. Is that such a great thing, though? Most people would agree that, all other things being equal, the more information the better when making a decision. But are all the other things equal?

The truth is that online reviews are big business. They’re not just convenient for customers, in today’s swipe-and-click marketplaces they are an absolute necessity for a business to get started and survive. Would-be customers trust online reviews (to a fault), and a low average score, or worse a lack of substantial reviews can kill an otherwise promising business in its critical first 5 years. A business manager or owner who doesn’t know how to recruit good reviews and bury/delete bad reviews is less than competent these days. On the consumer side of the equation, there are at least 30 websites (a conservative estimate) offering cash or discounts for people to write reviews…the reviews don’t have to be honest, and for the writing to really pay off the author would have to write a huge amount of reviews quickly (i.e. without a lot of thought or attention to detail/accuracy).

So, with all this in mind, are the reviews you read when researching a business a true and accurate cross-section of customers’ experiences? Almost certainly not. Of all the reviews out there in cyberspace, only a small percentage were actually motivated by someone’s desire to provide unbiased, accurate information to the masses. A large percentage were paid for (even though not paid for a necessarily good review, being paid at all definitely impacts the content and quality of the review). An even larger percentage are “flame” reviews seeking revenge on a business for any slight, real or perceived, no matter how great or small…maybe a waitress looked at a reviewer the wrong way, or maybe they didn’t honor an expired coupon where the reviewer thought there ought to be a grace period. And then, along with the exaggerated negatives, are the exaggerated positive reviews…maybe they are friends and family of the business owner, or maybe paid or somehow compensated for a good review.

I believe it was Mark Twain who said, “Don’t believe anything you hear, and only half of what you read.” Since all reading in his day was done on paper, to his quote I would add, “…and only ten percent of what you read online.”

Here endeth the lesson on online reviews.