Hi friends,
The highlight of my February was finding out that my friend has an imaginary dog. All this time I thought it was a real dog yet it turns out it is an imaginary dog. If there is one thing we can learn from this, it is that we are all weird and that is a b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l thing.
Here are a few things I’d like to share with you:
Apple Vision Pro. I was curious, so I drove down to the Apple Store to try on Apple’s new Virtual Reality headset.
What struck me most was spatial 3D photos, but especially spatial videos. In the demo, I was shown a video of a pre-recorded birthday party where a kid blew out the candles. It felt really immersive, like I was there. I fully expect in the future— we’ll be able to record events in our lives— that our grandkids can later watch.
Would I buy one? Not yet. But I think everyone should at least try it on. You can book a demo at your nearest Apple store. Or, as a Genius Bar employee told me, Apple has an extremely generous 14-day return policy, so you can (and many people do) order one, try it on, and return it hassle-free.
To Thy Heart. On Valentine’s Day, I was busy thinking about the heart. Here’s a little blurb I wrote.
While hearts signify love, they are devoid of feeling. These cold-blooded organs (hah, pun) perform one simple action over and over again. Pump, pump. Once per second, 100,000 per day, 3.5 billion per lifetime. The heart has two pumps (one to the lungs, to pick up oxygen, and one to the rest of the body, to deliver oxygen) and operates as a closed system, like a sump pump, meaning blood in = blood out.
Perhaps the greatest insight relates to exercise. Did you know you can “get your blood pumping” without “sweating up a storm”? That’s because there are two ways to increase cardiac output (blood / min). (1) Increase heart rate (beat / min) or (2) increase stroke volume (blood / beat). Muscle contractions are super effective at increasing stroke volume. Therefore you can have programs like SuperSlow, which looks absolutely ridiculous but is actually effective. A SuperSlow program entails lifting a weight for ten seconds, then dropping it for ten seconds. 20 seconds per rep. One rep only. It’s a super time saver, lasting only 10 minutes. But I warn you, it’s really hard! Yet it’s effective at improving strength and cardio.
Now that I’m at home, my workout consists of a remix of SuperSlow and Tim Ferriss’s Geek to Freak using the available equipment at my neighborhood gym. If you’d like to learn more about exercise, I recommend reading The Colorado Experiment or falling down the rabbit holes of Drew Baye (YouTube) or Doug McGuff.
An Occupant’s Guide to the Body. I’m halfway through “The Body” by Bill Bryson and it’s one of my favorite books. He goes through every section from head to toe and writes simply and concisely. Here are the best highlights that I have made.
Find your blind spot.
First, close your left eye and stare straight ahead with the other. Now hold up one finger from your right hand as far from your face as you can. Slowly move the finger through your field of vision while steadfastly staring straight ahead. At some point, rather miraculously, the finger will disappear. Congratulations. You have found your blind spot.
Literally speaking…
Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone. — Dorothy Parker
Race is a sliver of epidermis.
In a dissection room at the University of Nottingham in England, a professor and surgeon named Ben Ollivere gently incised and peeled back a sliver of skin about a millimeter think from the arm of a cadaver. It was so thin as to be translucent. "That," he said, "is where all your skin color is. That's all that race is—a sliver of epidermis.
We’ve lost a tennis ball-sized chunk of brain.
The average brain has shrunk from 1,500 cubic centimeters [10,000 years ago] to 1,350 cubic centimeters now. That's equivalent to scooping out a portion of the brain about the size of a tennis ball. The common presumption is that our brains have simply become more efficient and able to pack more performance into a smaller space, rather like cell phones, which have grown more sophisticated as they have contracted in size. But no one can prove we haven't simply grown dimmer.
We have >5 senses.
It's curious that we always speak of our five senses because we have way more than that. We have a sense of balance, of acceleration and deceleration, of where we are in space (what is known as proprioception), of time passing, of appetite. Altogether (and depending on how you count them) we have as many as thirty-three systems within us that let us know where we are and how we are doing.
Ah, “expert medical opinion” 150 years ago.
In one case, cited by Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man, [Cesare Lombroso] was asked to determine which of two men had killed a woman. Lombroso declared one man self-evidently guilty because he had "enormous jaws, frontal sinuses and zygomata, thin upper lip, huge incisors, unusually large head [and] tactile obtuseness with sensorial manicinism." Never mind that no one knew what much of that meant and that there was no actual evidence against the poor fellow. He was found guilty.
Song of the Month
That’s all from me! I’d love to hear from you. What’s on your mind? What has stayed with you this last week?
Another issue loaded with info ... most of it actionable and informative! Super slow exercise?.sign me up