Google Maps turns 20, adds AI features, new countries to beat Apple: Next month sees Google Maps' 20th year anniversary; it is kind of hard to imagine life without this type of software.
Recently I read:
‘I’ll kiss the ground’: chaos feared amid Gaza ceasefire as families head home: Many of the 90% of Palestinians who have been displaced by the war are about to set off to see what remains of their homes, presumably under the assumption that the cease fire holds.
TikTok ban: App shuts down in the United States hours ahead of a ban: Whether the ban will last is a different story.
Maybe the irrationality of monarchies is why they sometimes work
I’ve been something of an anti-monarchist every since I can remember, primarily based on the general idea that holding the privilege and powers associated with the office, both explicit and implicit should not be something that someone gets based on who their parents happened to be and whether their ancestors won a battle hundreds of years ago. There are also convincing arguments that the institution is expensive, unaccountable, and so on.
To me, the UK has really just been lucky that for so long we’ve had a queen, that at least as far as I know (which is not all that far), in recent times has been a committed, principled and dutiful holder of the post, not being unduly meddlesome or inflammatory. Quite the opposite, you’ll not find too many hot takes on the Royal Family’s Twitter account. It feels sad that she has left us, irrespective of whether or not the institution itself is valid. But it’s a bit of a risky proposition to say that all future holders of the crown will be of a similar type.
The usual “pragmatic” argument I have heard about in favour of the British monarchy is, sure, they cost money, but they also generate a lot via for instance tourism. I haven’t looked into it in any detail, but given most tourists don’t get to meet the queen or king themselves, I wonder how we go about separating the specific impact of the power structure of the monarchy and the people involved from the more available parts of the associated tourism; the fancy buildings, soldiers dressed up in unusual costumes, museums full of jewelry, the history and mythology and so on, all of which could exist without a formal monarch.
A recent edition of Ian Leslie’s newsletter provided a take I’d not really considered before. It seems inspired in part from an essay by Clement Atlee - yes, that same socialist Prime Minister, beloved by some of the British left, no flag-waving conservative here! - who wrote that “I have never been a republican even in theory, and certainly not in practice.”
Leslie (and Atlee) note that, as irrational and hierarchical as the system of a constitutional monarchy may be, several countries that are widely acknowledged to have high levels of both wellbeing and relative equality have one - think of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands. That’s not to say this style of monarchy causes these good outcomes, but it clearly doesn’t prevent them, and perhaps may even be positively associated with them.
Why do they appear to work well? Leslie argues that the unavoidable irrationality of bestowing power and finery upon someone predicated solely on who their parents are may be part of the attraction - “they speak to the heart as well as the head.”
Humans are not purely rational beings, and perhaps the “sentimental loyalty” humans are prone to is better to be absorbed by a monarch than left to be picked up by the leader of a faction, with Atlee citing Hitler, Mussolini and de Gaulle as contenders. To the extent that a constitutional monarchy isn’t the obvious centre of day-to-day power in practice, perhaps it’s safer and more uniting to have irrational sentimentality directed that way.
The fact that the queen didn’t have to fight for votes in an election (or, to at least some extent popularity in the media) gave her the ability to not become part of any major argument. There are plenty of people who aren’t a fan of the monarchy in principle, but nonetheless the queen did seem to be able to unite swathes of people in a way that it’s almost inconceivable a leader of a more “democratic” institution such as a political party could. This may be a particular property of some kings and queens more than others - after all support for Queen Elizabeth was substantially higher than the support for Britain remaining a monarchy at the same time - but it almost by definition cannot be a property of anyone involved in a close-run battle for electoral success.
The US of course famously has no monarch, having torn themselves away from the British one in 1776, but to many external observers seems to be riven by a particularly polarised politics. Certain presidential candidates appear to attract high amounts of almost conditionless blind-seeming loyalty from their supporters, as sentimental and irrational as anything one might feel for a monarch.
Leslie also considers that the constitutional monarchy gives us a way to express positive sentiment for our fellow country-people. Not that we don’t understand that they live an incredibly privileged and unusual live, and sometimes we may quite legitimately feel jealous or resentful of that. But at the end of the day we can acknowledge their common humanity. As a human family they proxy for all the country’s families. The widespread doting over whoever the latest royal child is - who is after all just one of the hundreds of children born each day in the UK - being a reminder that we could and should feel love all those other children too.
The Queue
I see the queue of people waiting their turn to see Queen Elizabeth’s coffin - now known across the internet as The Queue - now has its own Wikipedia page. Although perhaps not for long; the discussion as to whether it should be deleted for not being notable enough for its own page is ongoing.
By reading the debate, I learned that by deliberately limiting its length to 5 miles the queue controllers are preventing it from reaching the length of the queue for the grave of the current world record holder for the largest funeral gathering. This was the funeral of Chief Minister C.N. Annadurai in India, whose funeral was apparently attended by 15 million people, with a queue of 6 miles.
Earlier today the Queen Elizabeth queue maxed out its allocated length, with wait times expected to be at least 14 hours. The Queue was thus temporarily closed to new entrants. Cue the queue for The Queue.
For people that don’t mind spoilers, a live stream of the destination of the queue is available from the BBC. Although I find the coverage a little creepy because the camera often focuses in on individual mourners rather than the coffin.
I hope that they have been made aware that their expression of sorrow is being transmitted to the world at large. For me, that would surely take something away from what I’d expect to be a solemn, personal and perhaps emotional moment.
In a particularly dour sounding move, AirBnB has introduced “anti-party tools”.
This seems to be a statistical model that uses factors like the nature of the place being booked, your past reviews, recency of signup, distance and duration of the trip and weekday to predict whether you’re likely to be making a booking with the intent of having a party. If the computer says yes then the booking is denied.
Finished reading: How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS by David France 📚.
A book about a global pandemic that appears to have been dramatically mismanaged at first with some appearances by Dr Fauci seems all too contemporary. But this one is actually about the HIV/AIDS pandemic, primarily in the US.
There was of course a staggering death count - an estimated 40 million lives lost so far - with all the associated heart-breaking pain and misery, physical and mental, for those who caught the disease and those who loved them.
But of course what was particularly insidious in this case was that the large majority of those afflicted with the deadly infection at the start of the pandemic were gay men. And this was a population that the extraordinarily prejudiced mainstream opinion at the time was all too happy to disparage, disregard, ignore or blame. The world just seem didn’t care.
A large part of the book surrounds how in the end activist groups, often largely composed of people very ill with AIDS themselves, simply had to keep fighting for years - sometimes to the extent of basically infiltrating government or medical research organisations - until the government, scientists, pharmaceutical companies, media and indeed the rest of society couldn’t ignore the devastation any more.
The polio virus re-emerges in the US
In case you haven’t had enough of awful viruses yet in 2022, it seems that polio is back in the US, at least in New York.
Polio has no known cure. Whilst most infected people don’t develop noticable symptoms, it can cause outcomes as harmful as paralysis in some patients, a fraction of which may die due to paralysis of their breathing muscles. It was once known as infantile paralysis, due to children’s heightened vulnerability to the disease.
Only one human case had been detected as of four days ago, but it’s been seen in the city’s wastewater and become enough of an issue that the mayor declared a state of emergency. The CDC has confirmed that the US should now be considered a country with circulating poliovirus again, after 43 years of polio-free status.
One driving factor is likely the fact that polio vaccination rates are really not very high in some places any more, as shown in this map from the City of New York’s website. Nearly half of Williamsburg’s young children haven’t been fully vaccinated.
Over here in the UK we’re hardly immune - polio has been detected in our sewage too, although we don’t seem to have found any reported transmission within the community. It’s also been spotted in many countries within Africa this year.
A paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that between 19-29% of the decline in US murder rates in the 1990s may have been due to the impact of mobile phones on the illegal drug trade.
The theory is that accessible mobile phones allowed the black market trade to be conducted and coordinated privately by phone. Customers could be met at discreet locations rather than trade needing to be plied directly on the street in fixed locations. This reduced street-level turf battles between gangs who funded their activities via drug sales in ways that frequently involved violence, as well as potentially “democratising” the market to allow other types of sellers in.
Survey shows that young British people increasingly support authoritarian rule
Traditionally, we might have expected the UK’s young people to be more liberal or left-wing than their older counterparts on most topics - see for example which party various age groups voted for in the 2019 general election according to Yougov’s poll. But from a recent report it seems like younger folk are not huge fans of a rather fundamental aspect of liberal democracies - the democracy part.
A poll conducted by J.L. Partners on May 2022 for a report published by Onward, a conservative thinktank, on a sample of UK respondents weighted to be nationally representative on several demographic factors found that young people are not great fans of democracy.
Starting off with a chart shown on page 20 of the report:
We see the younger age brackets having fairly low net support when asked whether a democracy was a a “very good”, “fairly good”, “fairly bad”, or “very bad” way of running the country. Around a quarter of 18-34 year olds felt that democracy is a bad way of governing the country (the equivalent figure for over-55s is 8%).
A similar net proportion of the young thought some kind of technocracy was a good way to run a country as felt the same about democracies.
Admittedly life in the UK doesn’t exactly feel well-governed to many of us at present, to put it politely - so perhaps that’s fairly understandable. A different survey, carried out by IPPR found that only 19% of UK’s 18-24 year olds felt democracy has served them well, vs 55% who say badly. What surprised me a bit more was the support for some of the rather more authoritarian options.
There was a net 23% support for “a strongman who can ignore parliament” as a good way to run the country in 18-34 year olds, vs a negative -42% in > 55 year olds. 60% of the youngest group, 18-24 year olds thought it was a good idea.
Even the rather radical “put the army in charge” only just got a negative support rating in younger cohorts - net disapproval of 8% in 18-34 year olds vs -74% in >55 year olds. 44% of the 18-24 year olds were favourable towards this type of rule.
So is this a young person thing? Maybe despite being liberal in many other domains young folk always think strongman or army rule is a decent option? As well as not really making intuitive sense, it also isn’t the case.
To be honest, I find the even the agreement level in the “good years” surprisingly high - and just look at the 2019 results! - but clearly something changed such that the younger folks still think relying on a single strong leader is a good way forward.
Likewise a pro army rule position has just gotten more and more popular over time, especially in younger cohorts.
Based on this admittedly fairly small time series, it doesn’t look to be a general age effect.
Some of the factors the report suggests are linked to this support for authoritarian rule include:
- Socio-economic circumstances, with the least secure 20% of voters being more than twice as likely as the most secure to say that democracy is a bad way to govern the country.
- Social connection, with people with more friends, or more diverse friend circles, being less likely to support authoritarian rule.
- Political leanings, with socially conservative young people being much more likely than liberal folk to support the strong man or army rule.
A lot of that makes intuitive sense at least on the dislike of democracy side of things. If you live in a democracy and you have a particularly difficult life, why would you feel like it’s a good way to run things?
Thinking one form of rule is a good way to govern a country of course doesn’t rule out also thinking others are. For example, young people who report generally trusting other people are both more likely to support democracy than those who don’t, (81% vs 69%) but also more like to support strongman leaders (72% vs 51%). In fact a higher proportion of young people who say democracy is a good way to run the country also support the authoritarian methods of rule than those who don’t. Perhaps some people just think that there isn’t a good way to run a country?
The report authors believe that the drivers of general detachment that are leading to this and many other negative effects on young people can be summarised as being the narrowness of their social networks, overprotective parenting, the treadmill of modern work and the online culture.
I'm struggling to believe the intro I have just written to a story but it's true..
— Andrew Ellson (@andrewellson) September 12, 2022
"Morrisons supermarket has turned off the beeps at its checkouts in a mark of respect to the Queen."
🤯
Although in the interests of accuracy it seems like the official policy was only to lower the volume of the beeps.
Saving money on your electricity bill - which devices consume the most?
No UK resident can have missed the news that the cost of electricity to the consumer in the UK is going up and up, to truly unprecedented levels. The way it works over here is that the government issues a cap, which limits the maximum amount the energy supply companies can charge consumers. Perhaps I’ll look in more detail as to how this is calculated in future but to be extremely simplistic about it at present, the majority of the increase is down to the wholesale cost of energy to the supplier, which is presently very high. In fact a bunch of them went bankrupt last year.
A year ago the cap worked out at £1,277 for the average UK consumer. Earlier this year it had already painfully zoomed up to £1,971. In October, had it been worked out in the standard way, it would be not-far-off-doubled to £3,549.
The Government has tried to mitigate some of the obvious impending disaster by putting a “price guarantee” on it such that the average consumer will be paying £2,500. So a lot less than £3,549 thankfully, but still substantially more than it ever has been.
One thing to understand about the energy cap is that it is not…a cap. Or at least not an overall one. You will always pay more if you use more electricity. The quoted cap is on the cost it would be for an average consumer. This translates down to a cap on the standing cost and unit price. If you have a big or energy inefficient house you may well pay substantially more than £2,500. So even if you manage to save up enough money to pay the £2,500, you still shouldn’t go wild from a financial, let alone an environmental, point of view.
At the time of writing there are apparently no tariffs that are appreciably below the maximum permitted cost to switch to, per Martin Lewis. So most of the levers we can pull at an individual level are about cutting down on the usage of electricity. Not necessarily a bad thing for other reasons too, including environmental, if it can be done without impacting people’s wellbeing. But that’s a big and often unrealistic if.
Some people, myself included, are billed at a different cost in the day vs in the night, aka economy 7, in which case perhaps retiming your electricity consumption will help. Although it seems weirdly difficult to learn what counts as day or night unless your electric meter is labelled or you have a smart meter - it’s not the same for everyone. In the end I just asked my electricity supplier. And will attempt to do my washing after 10pm from here on in!
What devices should we focus on to reduce our electricity consumption and hence costs?
The general rule seems to be that most modern electronics don’t cost a whole lot - modern bulbs, LCD televisions, charging your phone etc. It’s not zero, so there’s a perhaps a little potential saving you can do there. But unfortunately the big deals tend to be appliances that relate to heating or eating, both of which are fairly essential.
Bloomberg had a nice chart which combined the energy consumption of the average device of a given type with the average usage time to show the cost. Now the actual costs shown on it will be a bit higher than reality I believe because the £2500 price guarantee hadn’t been announced when they published this - but still the “big circles are the expensive ones” idea holds.
The washing machine cost I understand to be highly dependent on the temperature of the wash. If you can wash at a lower temperature you’ll save electricity. I’ve started trying 30 degrees for everything.
All heating-related ones are clearly the big drain. With regards to saving on central heating itself, I’ve seen tips around the internet that concentrate on heating the people rather than the entire house if times are real tough. For instance you can see in the above that using electric blankets is way, way cheaper than central heating. I’ve also seen suggestions for hot water bottles.
To get a more precise personal estimate, there are also energy cost calculators, like sust-it where you can type in the energy consumption of your appliance and the time you want to use it for to get a cost estimate. It also has guides for specific types of appliances e.g. vacuum cleaners or microwaves. It also allows you to compare models of appliances based on energy efficiency if you’re in the market for something new.
How should I dry my clothes?
I used the general calculator to help me think about clothes drying on occasions we have too much laundry to hang around the house and the weather won’t allow the washing line to do the trick. I used Martin Lewis' estimate of 34p per kWh, found here.
Our washing machine also has drying functionality. Whilst I can find that the appliance is overall energy rating B, I can’t quickly figure out how to know what that means specifically for the dryer component in watts. I’d say it usually takes 1-2 hours to complete. The Bloomberg chart above suggested £1.95 per load. Trying to work backwards from Which’s figures for the cheapest washer dryer I get to about £1.21 (and I’m sure ours isn’t the cheapest.) This page suggests the average dryer is about 3000 kwH which for 1.5 hours would be £1.53. This site has says a tumble dryer cycle is 4.5 kWH, which would equate to the same.
We also have a dehumidifier that works reasonably well, but may need leaving on the entire day, let’s say 8 hours. It has two settings, I usually use the clothes drying option which I assume is the high one, 725W. That’s mean it’d cost £1.97. Using the lower one would knock it down to £1.14.
There are also heated drying racks out there. In the Sun’s rundown of “the best” ones, the one they prefer overall is 230W. It seems that there’s great variance in how long clothes take to dry on them, but let’s say it’d take between 5 and 10 hours. That’d imply a cost of 39p - 78p.
So from that I guess there’s not much benefit in using the dehumidifier for long periods over the tumble drying facility of the washing machine. The heated rack sounds a more economical option, except that I’d have to buy it in the first place.
The Black Mirror option
Seeing as in 2022 we continue to inhabit the Black Mirror Timeline there is of course one other option. Exploitation via light entertainment! Here’s a much shared clip of a phone-in TV contest gameshow where the top prize on offer was “we’ll pay your electricity bills for 4 months”, the concept of which was fairly condemned by many folk out there as entirely dystopian. There is a touch of one of the early Black Mirror episodes, Fifteen Million Merits, about it to be fair.
Started watching Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power 📺, the LOTR prequel Amazon created.
Probably the most expensive TV show ever, with season one costing an estimated $462 million, a number I cannot begin to get my head around the idea of spending on a TV show. For reference the most expensive season of Game of Thrones apparently cost $90m. To be fair, nobody really liked it, so maybe spending more is somehow required 🤷♂️.
In one of the stranger rituals following the Queen’s death, the Royal Beekeeper has been sent around the Palace’s 7 hives to inform 20,000 bees of their owner’s sad demise.
“You knock on each hive and say, ‘The mistress is dead, but don’t you go. Your master will be a good master to you.”
This comes from a ancient belief that if you don’t let the bees know that they’ve got a new owner then they’re going to stop producing honey.
Fairly understandably, this particular responsibility was apparently new news to the beekeper in question. Mr. Chapple, despite his long-standing tenure.
The official palace beekeeper has worked with the bees for 15 years but did not realise informing the bees was part of the job.
A random downside of connecting too many things to the internet: A server error meant that some owners of Roomba vacuums couldn’t vacuum their house. Or, even more terrifyingly, tell them to stop cleaning, especially for those that had used the child lock feature to disable the hardware stop button.
Hopefully unrelated: remember that time people got drunk and attached big knives to the front of their Roombas for their very own robot wars?
How your expectations affect the way your body processes food - summary of a chapter from The Expectation Effect
I recently read The Expectation Effect, a fascinating book looking at how what you expect influences what actually happens with regard to your body and life.
Below is a fairly detailed summary of chapter 6 (prioritised as being most potentially relevant to my work). I’m sure I’ll be talking a lot more about the rest of this book in future. But for now, the main topic of this chapter was how your beliefs and expectations influence how your body and brain react to what you eat - potentially useful knowledge for anyone interested in healthy eating.
Our brain’s predictive processing means that our expectation of what nutrients a food contains directly affects how our body responds to that food, including our:
- digestion, i.e. the breaking down and absorption of nutrients in the gut.
- metabolism, i.e. how we process the food to power our cells.
If we believe we’re eating fewer calories than we really are, our body responds to that belief. The brain induces a deprivation mindset, and we feel less satiated, more hungry and inclined to expend less energy in order to preserve fat stores.
It’s known that appetite is controlled in part by activity in the digestive system - bottom-up information. However the brain also seems to need top-down info e.g. memory and expectation, to make sense of the digestive information input in order to create the appropriate feelings of hunger or satiation.
Altering how we think about food can change the brain’s assessment of what it has eaten.
Memory
A patient who had lost the ability to form new memories, was asked to rate how hungry he was on a scale of 0 -100. He rated his hunger similarly both before and after consuming a meal. After two meals in a row he felt only partly satiated.
This suggests that our appetite is not solely governed by “fullness signals” from the stomach. It’s also influenced by our memory of what we ate.
Milder forgetfulness is also associated with over-eating.
In an experiment asking students to taste test cookies, they consumed 45% less if they had first been prompted to remember their lunch by noting down what they’d eaten.
Working, watching TV or using the internet whilst eating may create a distraction that impairs our memory of what we ate, leading to eating larger meals and more snacks afterwards.
Expectation
The sense of fullness and satisfaction participants had from eating either 300ml or 500ml of soup was largely based on how much soup they thought they’d eaten, rather than how much they actually had.
Participants who believed they’d eaten a 3 egg omelette felt more satiated than those who thought they’d eaten a 1 egg omelette, even though they’d eaten the same amount.
Patients who believed that they’ve undergone obesity-related surgery, e.g. stomach stapling or gastric balloon, experienced 70% of the benefits of the operation (reduced appetite, higher weightloss) even though the actual surgery never took place.
Presentation
The presentation of manufactured foods can disrupt our brain’s ability to assess its contents:
- The brain remembers eating a lot less after drinking a small bottled smoothie vs eating the equivalent portions of fruit, giving the expectation of hunger later in the day.
- Several studies show that the exact same food leads to lower satiety when it is labelled “healthy” as opposed to when it’s labelled “hearty”.
- The more viscous a drink is the more filling we expect it to be, and the higher our physiological response.
- Iron absorption from meals that have been pureed were much lower than the same meal presented in its standard form.
- “Healthy” snacks may be counterproductive - participants given a “healthy” chocolate bar were hungrier afterwards than those given nothing.
Beliefs
When presented with a choice of 2 items such as a McDonald’s hamburger and a 8.5oz grilled ocean code, most people think the burger has more calories even though they’re about equal, over or underestimating the true value by up to 50%. People who have greater mismatches in their estimates are on average heavier.
People who agree more strongly with statements such as “There is usually a trade-off between healthiness and tastiness” tend to have higher BMIs.
Mechanisms
Ghrelin is a hormone secreted by the stomach when it’s empty.
High levels induce our body to:
- lower its metabolic resting rate, burning less energy.
- store body fat.
- feel lethargic, so we don’t waste energy on exercise.
Participants who had drank a milkshake marketed as indulgent saw lower ghrelin levels, as expected after a meal. But those who drank the same milkshake presented as healthy and light, saw very little change in ghrelin.
Brain areas associated with energy regulation are also affected. People given a low-calorie drink labelled as a treat had a stronger hypothalamus response when it was labelled as a “treat” as opposed to “healthy”,
Expectations also affect the movement of food in the gut and our insulin responses.
The environment
Our environment reinforces the idea that healthy foods are less satisfying. An analysis of 26 American chain restaurants that offer “healthy eating” options saw that they were less likely to have descriptions relating to enjoyment, vice, decadence, texture and taste. They were more likely to be described in terms evoking simplicity, thinness, or deprivation.
In one study where these healthy options were described with words evoking enjoyment and indulgent, consumption of them increased 29% and were likely to lead to lower snacking afterwards. Adding the words “fuller for longer” to a yoghurt pot increased people’s satiety for 3 hours.
Low socioeconomic status is a risk factor for obesity. There are many potential explanations. One study showed that when people are primed to feel poorer and less secure they tend to choose sweeter snacks and have bigger portion sizes, corresponding to observable changes in the body and brain. People’s feelings of social and financial insecurity induced a sense of deprivation which influenced their hormonal response. For people living with this sense of vulnerability long-term, it’s possible that this response could increase your likelihood of obesity even if your food choices were healthy.
The belief that healthy foods are unsatisfying isn’t universal.
That belief is strongly held in the US and to a lesser extent the UK and Australia - but the opposite view is more common in France. It’s been shown that labelling a food as healthy in France doesn’t reduce the satisfaction and pleasure as much as elsewhere.
French people also have fewer negative sentiments associated with treats. When asked to describe which word is more associated with ice-cream, more US people pick “fattening” whereas French people more commonly pick “delicious”.
This attitude seems to affect their eating choice and body responses. French people tend to choose smaller servings and spend more time eating them.
The average BMI in France (25.3) is lower than other countries like Germany (26.3), Australia (27.2), the UK (27.3) and especially the US (28.8).
The typical French diet contains higher proportion of saturated fat from butter, cheese, eggs and cream than the UK/US equivalent, yet French people are less likely to suffer from coronary heart disease. There are many possible reasons but expectation could be one. People who believe that they are more at risk of a heart attack are 4x as likely to suffer from heart disease even controlling for other factors.
Eating is not a simple chemical process.
…exactly the same item can be nourishing and satiating, or unfulfilling and nutritionally empty – in large part because of our memories of what we have eaten, our impressions of what it contains and the meanings that we ascribe to it.
Some ways to apply these findings
- Avoid the liquid calories in sweetened drinks.
- The satiety of most drinks is low
- If you must drink juices and smoothies, make them yourself so you are more aware of the food that went into them - research suggests doing this may increase your satiation.
- Maximise the pleasure in the food you eat. Flavour and texture are important during weight loss as the resulting sense of indulgence increases satiety and hormonal response to food. The lack of later snacking due to greater satiety will outweigh the small number of extra calories this my require.
- Spicy foods or intensely umami ingredients are good options.
- Avoid food that gives a sense of deprivation.
- Thoroughly enjoy any treats - feeling guilt won’t help. One study showed that dieters who associated treats such as cake with guilt gained weight vs those who associated them with celebration progressed towards their goals.
- Do not label foods as sinful, toxic etc.
- Visualise and anticipate what you’re going to eat in advance.
- Participants who were asked to imagine the taste, smell and texture of sweet treats first opted to have a smaller slice of cake when one was offered.
- Avoid distractions when eating.
- Eat slowly, savoring each mouthful. The greater sensory experience of eating will trigger a stronger hormonal reaction to the food.
- Remember what you have eaten.
- If you feel tempted to snack then first recall what it was like to eat your last meal. Your brain may update its predictions of energy balance, making you feel less hungry.
Finished reading: The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World by David Robson 📚.
An fascinating, scientifically-oriented, book, examining how your expectations and beliefs can alter a huge array of vital life outcomes based on your brain’s role as a “prediction machine”. Think of the placebo effect, but all-encompassing. There are also several tips on how to leverage this effect to enhance your time on this planet. I’m sure I’ll be writing more on this soon.
No paper published yet so tbd, but researchers claim to have developed a smartphone app that can detect Covid substantially more accurately than the current Covid lateral flow tests. The app analyses people’s voices using a technique known as the Mel-spectrogram.
Queen Elizabeth II died today.
Not long after the UK temperature hit a horrible new high, a new study reports that the prevalence of hate-speech filled tweets increases as the temperature becomes more extreme in either direction.
Seems we really need to find a way to keep the climate at about 15-20 degrees C.
A colleague introduced me to Super Auto Pets 🎮, so now I’m addicted. Line up some cute animals in a row and see if they can beat another person’s equivalent. Feels like plenty of strategy to think about.
You can play it for free in your web browser, or on Steam, iOS or Android.
It happened…we’ve got a new Prime Minister, Liz Truss 😩.
Her victory speech felt decidely unconciliatory to anyone who isn’t an ardent Ayn Rand capitalism fan.
The only redeeming feature was that people didn’t applaud fast enough after she extolled Boris for his “achievements”.
It’s known that performing acts of kindness makes both the receiver and the giver happier. But new research shows that givers systematically underestimate the increase in positivity that the receivers actually feel after experiencing the kindness.
So if you’re ever in doubt about whether someone would actually appreciate you doing something nice for them, do it anyway - it’ll probably make more of a difference than you expect.
From today’s Guardian:
Shown calculations that her planned reversal of a recent rise in national insurance would benefit top earners by about £1,800 a year, and the lowest earner by about £7, and asked if this was fair, Truss said: “Yes, it is fair.”
Seems I have a very different definition of ‘fair’ than our probable next prime minister.
Here’s the data she was shown:
Jason Allen won an art competition with this picture, which was generated via the Midjourney AI. I wrote more about that, trying to figure out how I even feel about it all, over here.
One of my favourite charts found in the wild, both in terms of subject matter and presentation.
Watched EastEnders 📺 for the first time in maybe a decade. Astonished to see that I recognise almost all the characters from before. They just look surprisingly old, as I guess we all must do!
Learning how to drink scotch in Edinburgh
Had a great time visiting the Scotch Whisky Experience in Edinburgh. Thinking we were going for some kind of formal lesson in the art of scotch tasting, we were somewhat taken back by part one involving getting into a little cart which took us around an fairly trippy exhibition where a ghost explains all sorts of things about the production of scotch.
Later on we entered the Diageo Claive Vidiz collection, which apparently includes a total of 3,384 bottles of whiskey, for some actual tasting.
You don’t get to try a bit from all 3000+ bottles unfortunately. Some are pretty rare. The one in the middle below with the colourful artwork on the label apparently sells for around £80,000, if I remember correctly.
Although I guess that’s a bargain compared to a bottle that sold for £1.1 million in auction a few years ago I guess. I suppose billionaires needed something to do with their money before NFTs were a thing.
The oldest ones in the collection were these two, from the turn of the twentieth century.
Whilst it looks like someone’s drunk a fair bit of especially the right hand one, apparently that’s not the case - these are technically unopened bottles. What’s missing there is the ‘angel’s share’, an ongoing amount of whiskey that evaporates into the atmosphere over time if not perfectly sealed.
I decided I’m a big fan of whiskies from the Islay region.