Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Saturday, January 28, 2017

"Vitamin C – an update"

Five-fold reduction in death from sepsis. Impressive.

Link via Dr. Malcolm Kendrick

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

"The Great BirthdayShoes Garage Clean-up"

Please help this man!

Link via Toe Shoes, Barefoot or Minimalist Shoes, and Vibram FiveFingers Reviews, News, Forums | Birthday Shoes

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

"Climate Change Activist’s Barefoot Walk Across America Ends in Tragedy"

RIP.

Link via NYT > Home Page

"How a decade-old sports science article changed my relationship with running for the better"

In the span of a few pages, anthropologist Daniel Lieberman and biologist Dennis Bramble explained how human physiology is better suited for distance running than almost any other animal’s. And what’s more is that running was critical in allowing our ancient ancestors to out-compete other predators for prey. Running wasn’t an invention of modern fitness culture, it was as natural and uniquely human as the capacity for abstract thought.

I had a similar reaction to learning about Lieberman and Bramble's research, although my exposure was through Born to Run, which is a fantastic read on its own.

Prof. Lieberman is one of the most learned individuals I've ever had the pleasure to encounter. If you'd like to learn more about his research and thinking, I highly recommend his The Story of the Human Body.
 

Monday, January 23, 2017

"More evidence the Wisdom of Crowds is crowding out the nonsense"

The government is just starting to acknowledge the problem, the market is fixing it.

Link via Fat Head

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

"“This Way of Eating Saved Me“"

Great story. The trick is realizing what is and isn't food.

Link via Diet Doctor

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

"In the past we knew how to run for our livelihood"

Progress. Sigh.

Link via Tracking Science

Review: "Dune: The Butlerian Jihad"

Dune, if you're not familiar with it, is the most popular and well-regarded science fiction novel ever written.  It's one of my personal favorites, I've read the entire six-book series many times over.

Meh.
Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, is not one of the original six books, however, and is not written by the same author.  It's the fourth pre-quel book written by the original author's son and his co-writer.

I've avoided the Dune prequels for the same reason I avoid most other attempts to capitalize on successful stories by other authors.  They usually disappoint.

In this case I skipped the first three pre-quels and started with the fourth, as it's largely an independent story, and I hoped they'd gotten their writing and story-telling sorted out, as I'd heard not-good things about their earlier efforts.

Luckily, I took it out of the library.

I won't go into great detail about this book, other than to say the low-star reviews at Amazon or Goodreads reflect my views.  The writing is poor, the story-telling implausible, character motivation is often questionable, and large swathes of what this book was supposed to be about were discarded. The authors do away with the religious motivation for the jihad, for instance, which guts the story. Happily that's not made clear until the very end. Dune was notable for its intelligence,  they did away with that, too.

So if you're looking for an extension of your experience with Dune as I was, skip it.

I did find the story some what entertaining, however, as some of the attempts to fill in the story from the original novels was interesting (it was supposedly based on the original authors notes), but it was soured by the poor and in-your-face story-telling.  So I'm not entirely unhappy that I read the thing.

But I am very happy to have taken it out of the library.  I'll skip the rest.

Dune and the other five books in the original series are magnificent, however.  I cannot recommend them highly enough.