Notes &c.

 I am struck, reading 3rd Nephi where Christ says, be ye therefore perfect even as I, or your father in heaven is perfect. The change from the Sermon on the Mount is that Christ has finished his race, he has become perfect. This works both for the meaning of the greek telos . translated into English as perfect which means to fulfil ones destiny, or to complete your growth or life's journey. Christ grew and progressed going from grace to grace. He said that he was the vine, and his father the grape farmer, that he cuts off every branch in him that does not bear fruit. At the time he visited the Nephites that was done. He had gone up to the father and been glorified with his glory, which he had before he came into the world. I wonder some about this glorification. He tells Mary not to touch him because he was not yet glorified, but then invites the apostles to thrust their hands into his wounds. Then presumably he was glorified in Acts 1 when he ascends into heaven. (I ascribe to the...

 I've started introducing my boys to the games I liked as a Kid. I started with space 4X. I played MoO1 and MoO2. Those games are dated so I introduced them to what I consider the spiritual successors.  For MoO1 it is Sword of the Stars, for streamlined management and a focus on war, not building like almost all other 4Xs.  For MoO2 it is stars in shadow. It is a building focused game. Its building system is much improved from MoO2. It didn't bother me at the time, but it is a micromanagement hell. Stars in Shadow has an interesting system without a universal solution. It would be perfect if it had an additional top economic layer like slipways. However, the love of my life doesn't like them spending so much screen time. She has a point. Kids need blue skys for good eyes. As much as I liked those games, my development might have been better served with more social entertainment. So I decided instead to buy my kids a space strategy board game. It turns out that they don'...

 I'm re-watching H ow I Met Your Mother . I'm skipping episodes, based on its IMDB rating and whether it sounds interesting - I've ended up watching only about half of them.* That show has been mostly forgotten compared to Friends, maybe its time will come, retro-nostalgia seems to be on a 25-30 year clock. But probably its forgotten because it really goes into the player making his plays, which is misogynistic and not at all flattering. I read the show as satirizing this, not approving it, but that is the sort of nuance that is completely lost since the Great Awokening. One way it parodies this is that the player, is played by a gay actor. I wonder too if a gay was chosen for that role as a sort of joke, based on the fact that a player looks like a gay man: 1. high body count - the average gay has had 200+ partners which is the same as the character in the show. It has been said - and I think there is some truth in it, that your average straight guy would be as promiscuous...

 My coq10 supplement ran out. I've decided not to renew it. It appears to be an anti-oxidant, that may suppress ROS. While ROS is bad, it is an important signal that your body uses to determine if you are in fat burning mode or not. If you suppress this signal, mitochondria do not get the appropriate metabolic support for whichever metabolic mode it is and their function is impaired. Your body produces its own anti-oxidants as needed. For help with my fibro I started taking vitamin B1 (Benfotiamine) and coQ10 as far as I could tell are the only supplements with evidence of helping. However, there are more co-q-enzymes than just that one and that system they regulate is very complicated. I'm not convinced that chronic flooding it with coq10 is the best. I did learn that to build these co-Qs your body does need six of the different B vitamins.  So my plan is to get MitoQ, which is supposed to boost CoQ10 quickly and powerfully. I will use it whenever I feel a fibro episode comin...

 For my workouts I use the ALACTIC protocol, which for weightlifting is 3 reps followed by a 30 second rest, and then 3 more reps until I get to the target which is usually 30+ reps. So here's the deal with lactic acid. It stresses your body. Raypeat even suggests that avoiding it altogether would extend vigor and life. He recommends not even eating lactate,  which occurs in fermented foods such as sauerkraut and yogurt. I was looking for ways to reduce the stress of working out because of my age, and because I noticed that hard workouts tended to trigger fibro episodes the next day. I'm interested in ways to get a decent workout without running myself into the ground, and ALACTIC seems to be one such technique. Now, I don't go as far as Raypeat. The problem with lactic acid or lactate is inside the cell, and I would assume that if it were harmful, there would be some protection against it going from the stomach inside the cell. My best guess is that the amount of lactate i...

 I completed my first 4 week cycle today. I didn't go all out on the max, because there was no building phase. That said, I did 4 reps safety bar squat as my faux peak. It felt pretty strong. OLD -> NEW Monday DB press 4 reps at 140 pounds ->Press off the rack, starting at 170 pounds to max Safety bar squat gripping rack 4x285 pounds ->Seated good mornings 4x? ->5 sets One side farmer walk, partial grip (two fingers, tips of fingers, from set to set) 50 lbs. Last set will be full grip 100 lbs. Will continue OH Cable side bends, as it felt like it took a few weeks to start doing them right. 50 lbs  Thursday. High rep work (mostly ALACTIC_ GHR ->  2-1 Ham Curl Continue the safety bar half squat gripping rack, (this progressed well, I don't think I've maxed it out) Standing cable crunch -> hanging Leg Raise replaces   I really liked this crunch Clavicular Flyes -> Hi incline Press, machine, Incline Crunch -> Lesser reps, to pad out the hangi...

 I am changing my mind from an optimising nutrition view towards a ray peat view of vegetables.  The optimising nutrition view is that getting nutrients with low amounts of calories is an unalloyed win. My evolving position is that improving your metabolism will improve your nutrition. Since your metabolism can vary widely +/- 25%, that will effect your micronutrients drastically. Its much easier to get your RDAs on 3500 calories a day as opposed to 2800.   Ray peats view, is that plants evolved to kill us if we ate them, so we should avoid them. His starting point was a study designed to counter concerns about carcinogenic chemicals in manufactured products. It showed that many plants were as mutagenic as the industrial agents, with the point being that they were as safe as all natural plant products. RP took that to show that plants were somewhat dangerous. He reasoned that being immobile they would evolve chemical defenses to protect themselves - poisons of variou...

 Reading 3rd Nephi and noticing a lot of parallels with events at the end of the gospels of the second day. First and most obvious is the Intecessory Prayer (John 17). Some differences: Jesus chooses the people there, not the Father. Believing in Jesus is the stated criteria, not recognizing that Jesus is sent from the father / all his words are from the father. I assume this is basically the same thing. Being purified is emphasized in 3 Nephi. I think the account in Nephi is clearer. John tends to break off to give definitions of things, which interrupts the chain of thought, though probably usefule. This is life eternal... The Garden of Gethsemane Particularly Jesus withdrawing himself a little ways three times to pray. The Nephites here don't cease to pray, and get to hear great things that nobody in Jerusalem was privilged to hear. (Yet the twelve in Jerusalem are clearly senior to the Nephite disciples)

 This weekend was the 4H expo. Our oldest entered in multiple events - cow, rabbit, and duck. He was at the cow show til very late, and up early to prep his small animals for their show. All in all the turn around time was 10 pm to 5ish am. It turned out his cow was disqualified because it didn't have a TB shot. Apparently during the days long cow camp, a vet had taken the parents aside and told them about this. One of the organizers told my wife that she should have been there for all the days of cow camp, because 4H is supposed to be a family event, then she would have known about the shot and there wouldn't have been this problem. I am floored. What a massive commitment, so lightly imposed on its members. Before our church dropped boy scouts, I noticed the same thing with that organization whenever we interfaced with the larger body. I suppose what happens is that only the most gung ho members go into the leadership of the organization who cannot imagine anything better than...

Every generations has 50-100 mutations that their parents did not. Every once in great while these mutations are useful. Mostly they are defective. Luckily the organism has many redundancies to provide for continual functioning in the presences of so many defective genes. The greatest of these is to have redundant copies of DNA, one from your mom, and one from your dad. That is why inbreeding can be so deleterious - if the redundant copies are both from the same source, there is no correcting errors. Of course these errors only get eliminated in extreme cases. So mutations pile up generation after generation, gumming up the normal biological processes like sand in the gears of a machine. ( Ironically, inbred populations will, in the long run, have less of these bad mutations, as they are more exposed to them - except most of these cultures have mechanisms to get their idiot children married off despite their shortcomings .) Thus it is reasonable to expect that each generation is a litt...