In F.lux

If you, like 40% of Americans, sometimes have trouble falling asleep, consider blaming your computer.

Turns out, melatonin (the sleep hormone) is largely regulated by blue light. That makes evolutionary sense, as the sun gives off blue light during the day, while the moon, and fire, both give off much redder light at night. So your body monitors blue light levels, emitting hormones accordingly, to create a circadian rhythm: tired at night and alert during the day.

Problem is, we screw with those signals on both ends: we spend too many of our waking hours inside, getting less blue light than we should; and then we spend much of our post-sunset evening in front of boxes like computer screens, getting too much blue light.

To fix the day side of things, you’d need to spend more time outdoors, with more of your skin exposed to the sun. Which, during the winter, probably entails moving to Hawaii.

But fixing the evening side of the equation is much easier: just download F.lux, a great little piece of freeware for Macs, PCs, and Linux.

In short, after sunset, f.lux changes the color temperature of your display, from its default 6500k (even bluer than the 5000k of daylight) to something between 2700k and 4200k (depending on whether the rest of your room’s lighting is tungsten, halogen, or fluorescent).

Give f.lux a whirl for a week. Though it may take a few days of adjustment – your screen will look awfully pink/orange to you at first – by week’s end, I’m betting you’ll have a tough time using your computer without it.

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Crossing Over

I used to read about Boy Scouts helping old ladies cross the street, and wonder. Where did they find these old ladies? Could the old ladies not cross on their own?

Apparently, though, the old ladies find you. And, no, they can’t make it across solo – or, at least, they’re worried the light will turn on them before they do.

I’ve deduced as much over the past few months, during which time I’ve become a magnet for street-crossing old ladies.

“Young man!” one will exclaim as I pass by. “Can you help me across?”

Indeed I can. Looped arm in arm, we’ll slowly head from one corner to the other, making small talk along the way. This afternoon, crossing Irving at 14th St., a lovely woman and I discussed the weather, how much the city changes each year, her grandchildren here in NYC, and my own grandmother (hi Grammy!), who lives not too far off from that very intersection. Amazing what you can fit into a single street-width of conversation if you shuffle across in sufficiently small steps.

I seem to be averaging about a crossing a week at this point. And I’d be happy to do it more often if asked. Though, between this and my attempts to direct lost tourists, I’m pretty sure Mayor Bloomberg at least owes me a merit badge.

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Obesity Explained

Over the past fifty years, Americans have gotten fatter and fatter. By now, some 63% of American adults are overweight, and 26.5% are obese.

Over the time we’ve fattened up, we’ve also been arguing about the cause. It’s dietary fat. It’s dietary carbohydrates. Etc., etc. By now, the story has changed so many times that most people have entirely given up on trying to follow along, retiring to a sort of nutritional relativism: it doesn’t matter what we do today, as, in ten years, we’ll probably be advised to do the exact opposite.

That’s not an unfair position, given that most of the research on both sides of any nutrition issue has tended to be pretty terrible. Our best young minds, and the lion’s share of our grant dollars, have gone to solving cancer and AIDS, not to resolving whether egg yolks are healthful or not. But, in the past five years or so, things have started to change. For whatever reason, the amount and quality of nutrition science research has gone up exponentially. Now, though public knowledge and opinion hasn’t caught up, we’re coming to a scientific picture of obesity as clear as that of any other well-studied biological process.

The rough shape of that consensus points to three main causes of the American (and global) obesity epidemic:

1. Toxic foods like wheat, fructose, and omega-6 fats. In excess, these make us fat and sick, yet they represent an increasing majority of our diet.

2. Deficiency of important micronutrients like choline and iodine. As more of our calories come from those nutritionally empty toxic foods, we end up micronutient deficient (several of which deficiencies lead to obesity directly), while also instinctively eating more to shore up those micronutrient levels (with such overeating leading to obesity, too).

3. Viruses like Adenovirus 36. While you can get fat pretty effectively with just the two steps above, you can do so even more quickly when infected with an obesity-causing virus; AD-36, for example, is found in obese children at rates four to five times children of healthy weight. Here, too, it’s a vicious cycle: toxic foods lead to gut permeability, and micronutrient deficiencies lead to a compromised immune system, both of which leave your body less able to fight off such an obesity infection.

And that’s it. Certainly, a slew of other factors play in, too (things like non-exercise activity thermogenesis). But those three factors explain the majority of the obesity problem. And, increasingly, it looks like they’re implicated in pretty much every other terrible thing that happens to us, from Alzheimers to acne, from cancer to cellulite.

Of course, agreeing on the problem and implementing a solution are completely different issues. Consider the AIDS epidemic, where, despite our strong understanding that sexually transmitted HIV infection is the primary cause of the spread of the disease, the global number of HIV cases continues to steadily climb. With obesity, too, I fear that even agreement among the science, nutrition, healthcare, and public policy crowds may nonetheless leave us far from effectively addressing the problem in the real world.

Still, it’s worth noting that we’re closing in on such consensus, even if a read through Shape or Men’s Fitness would give you no indication of that. As I said, I think we’re simply five to ten years off from popular opinion catching up to the emerging science.

But catch up it will. You heard it here first.

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10k

There’s an excellent story in a recent edition of Tampa’s St. Petersburg Times, about Dan McLaughlin, a guy who’s decided to take up golf.

Or, rather, a guy who’s decided to really take up golf. Despite having never played before, he’s set his sights on a slot in the PGA tour. His plan is simple: practice golf for 10,000 hours over the next six years. (That’s six hours a day, six days a week, for those without a calculator.)

It’s a great, albeit clearly insane, experiment, that puts to test an academic theory popularized most recently by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: that becoming truly excellent at something requires less talent and natural skill, and more a willingness to put in about 10,000 hours of hard, focused work.

If that theory is right, by the end of six years, Dan should be one hell of a scratch golfer. If not, then perhaps some of the research on expertise is bound back to the drawing board, and Dan is clearly headed back to a real job.

Either way, I’m curious to see how this pans out, so I’ll be following along at his blog, www.thedanplan.com. But I’ll also be giving some real thought to where the 10,000 hours idea might apply to my own life.

Because, at some basic level, much as I’m impressed with Dan’s commitment and focus, I’m also pretty sure I wouldn’t want to spend six years of my life devoted to nothing other than being a better golfer.

What I’m less clear on is, what would I devote six years to? And, similarly, where have I already been chalking up serious practice hours?

There’s trumpet playing, for example, which I’ve been doing regularly since the age of nine, and where I’ve, by napkin calculation, amassed about half of the expert count, weighing in somewhere near 5,000 hours total.

But there, too, I’m not (and don’t want to be) a full-time professional trumpet player. I do consider myself a full-time entrepreneur, however. Though, on that front, I’m not sure my daily work really qualifies as hard, focused practicing of entrepreneurship. In the world of practice research, that would be ‘deliberate practice’, which roughly boils down to:

1. Focusing on technique as opposed to outcome.
2. Setting specific goals.
3. Getting good, prompt feedback, and using it.

So I’ve been thinking about how I might make my work more deliberately practiceful. About what other areas of interest might warrant 10,000 hours of focus. And, finally, about how, as I’m certainly unwilling to put in 10,000 hours of practice on it, I’ll likely always be terrible at golf.

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Kindle UI

And while I’m griping about usability, how to greatly improve the Kindle:

1. With paper books, I (and every other reader I know) will occasionally glance ahead to see how many pages are left in a chapter, to see if it’s worth pushing through for a last few pages before putting the book down mid-chapter. A ‘lines remaining to the end of the chapter’ count, under the current location data, would accomplish the same thing, and would be trivial to implement. (Or, at least, it should be; as the Kindle knows the chapter head locations for use in the table of contents, Amazon must already be encoding this information somehow.)

2. Several Kindle books I’ve read have footnotes. But skip ahead to a footnote, and when you return to the body proper, the Kindle has registered the footnote page as the ‘further read location’. Every time I turn on a Kindle or Kindle app (on iPhone, iPad, or laptop), it then tries to synch to the book to that footnote page, and never again remembers my place in the body text. Surely, Amazon could add the option to set the ‘furthest read location’ to the current one, to easily solve this problem.

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Subway UI

Why do the turnstiles of the New York City subway system display the remaining balance on a regular MetroCard, but not the expiration date of an unlimited one?

As it stands, I’m caught off guard each month when my 30 days expire.

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“First and foremost, a start-up puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced. You flip rapidly from day-to-day – one where you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again. Over and over and over. And I’m talking about what happens to stable entrepreneurs. There is so much uncertainty and so much risk around practically everything you are doing. The level of stress that you’re under generally will magnify things to incredible highs and unbelievable lows at whiplash speed and huge magnitude. Sound like fun?”

– Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape

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