The Three-Thousand-Calorie Meal You Didn't Know You Ate

I recently had dinner at Chili's. (To steal a line from Bill Hicks, "I'm not proud of it, but I was hungry.")

Although it isn't the best restaurant in the world, there are many good things to say about Chili's. So, let me begin by listing a few qualities I genuinely appreciate as a Chili's customer. First, I almost never have to wait a long time to get a table, and it's not necessarily because Chili's is unpopular. More likely, there are enough Chili's restaurants, and their subsidiary restaurants, On the Border, in a given geographic region to service their clientele without making us wait. Second, Chili's restaurants aren't merely ubiquitous, they are often located in attractive locations within close proximity of other establishments I want to be near: movie theaters, shopping centers, and so on. I don't have to make two separate trips -- one to go shopping, and one to get dinner, for example -- because Chili's is always nearby wherever else I want to be. Third, their loyalty program regularly provides valuable coupons that help my family minimize costs and maximize value. Fourth, they are an unabashedly kid-friendly restaurant chain that has always been welcoming of my daughter, starting from infancy and continuing to the present day. Finally, there is enough variety on their menu that, no matter how I feel, I can almost always find something I want to eat at Chili's, and so can the rest of the family. I've been there for casual and impromptu outings, date nights, daddy-daughter dates, celebrations, happy hours, and so on.

Considering all of the above, it's no surprise that Chili's has been as commercially successful as it has been.

With that out of the way, let's make one thing absolutely clear: Chili's will never be a health food restaurant. During my most recent visit, I paid close attention to the calorie count on all the menu items. I have to do this in order to properly manage my blood sugar, because a meal's total calories is one of the things that plays a role in my blood glucose control. (All other things being equal, a higher calorie count means a higher postprandial blood glucose level.) With very few exceptions, all of the main menu items were more than 1,000 calories apiece. There is a calorie-conscious section of the menu, featuring items that are about 400 calories each, but 400 calories is a little on the low extreme for me.

It's not that Chili's coats all of their food in cheese, bacon, and/or barbecue sauce (although there sure is a lot of that going on at Chili's, too). Some of the calorie counts are downright inexplicable. I cannot understand how, for example, half a dozen buffalo wings could amount to 1,000 calories. I'm under no illusions about the health status of buffalo wings, but six pieces of bone-in wings involve a lot of inedible mass in the form of bone and cartilage, and less than a serving of real chicken meat. This would suggest that Chili's' chefs have somehow found a way to more than double the caloric content of chicken.

Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that Chili's' salads are over a thousand calories, too. A bowl of lettuce and vegetables, no matter how large, should never add up to 1,000 calories. That's just… odd. I understand that salad dressing is a calorie-dense food, but there is about 50 calories in an entire head of iceberg lettuce, which means that Chili's adds 950 calories' worth of condiments to their salads. Suppose, for the sake of argument, the salad comes with 400 calories' worth of chicken on top; then, that's 50 calories for the lettuce and a remainder of 550 calories of salad dressing. Compare this to a serving of a best-selling brand of ranch dressing here in America: two tablespoons of which amounts to 130 calories. This seems to suggest that Chili's uses half a cup of salad dressing on its salads.

Mind-boggling.

Well, in light of all these 1,000-calorie foods, I opted for one of the lowest-calorie items on the standard menu: a 10-ounce sirloin steak. I repeat, ten ounces of pan-seared sirloin steak with an enormous pat of butter on top and a cup of cheese-and-bacon drenched mashed potatoes is one of the lowest-calorie items on the standard menu.

The truth is, my steak was tasty, even if it was slathered in garlic butter and pan-seared in probable vegetable oil. And I was able to find a menu option that worked for me both in terms of overall nutrition and blood-glucose control. So I really shouldn't be complaining.

Still, it's important to be aware of what we're putting into our bodies. I had to do some careful menu analysis to find something that worked for me. The average diner, especially in my area, will be more inclined to choose something that looks tasty and rich, add a beer or two, perhaps an appetizer, and finish it off with dessert. If so, that person could very easily consume more than 2,000 calories in a single sitting; perhaps even 3,000 calories.

When we talk about America's "obesity epidemic," it exists in the context of inexpensive, highly convenient, family-friendly restaurants that serve 3,000-calorie meals.

Comparing Garmin's Training Status And Strava's Fitness & Freshness

There is nothing new about using biometric data to estimate an athlete's level of "fitness." Researchers have been perfecting various measurements of fitness for over forty years. But it wasn't until the advent of the fitness tracker or GPS watch that the underlying equations behind these measurements could be applied to the average weekend warrior. You won't find this data in Samsung Health, and likely not in Apple Health either, because those companies are more interested in producing consumer products for people who like to count steps and receive phone calls through their wrists. The companies that are serious about competitive training, though, do provide us with this data.

Every company that is interested in providing this kind of data to users has their own preferred approach. It is all more or less based on upon the same underlying principles, but it's served up slightly differently. The numbers mean slightly different things, depending on how they've been calculated. For our purposes here, I'll compare Garmin's "Training Status" and Strava's "Fitness & Freshness" measurements.

Both Training Status and Fitness & Freshness are calculated based primarily on moving averages of "Training Load," and both approaches are pretty interesting based on what the teams who designed them wanted to accomplish.

To be brief, "training load" is a measurement of how much exercise you've done recently, and how vigorous that exercise has been. "How much" is easy to determine simply by adding up how many hours, minutes, and seconds you've spent exercising over a given calendar period. "How vigorous" is a question that ultimately comes down to a physiologist's preferred measurement of workout intensity. Strava's team prefers to analyze heart rate data during exercise. The higher your heart rate, the harder you're exercising. Garmin's team, by contrast, prefers to measure exercising intensity with a slightly more technical analysis: excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC). To that end, my guess is that Garmin estimates EPOC by analyzing how long it takes the athlete to recovery from a given exercise session.

Both of these measurements have pros and cons. One mark in Strava's favor is the relative simplicity of the calculation. Time + heart rate = load. (That's not the exact calculation, but you get the idea.) But the drawback to a calculation this simple is that anaerobic activity can increase a person's heart rate without doing much in the way of training load for, say, cycling. A competitive cyclist can get her heart rate up during a 30-minute arms workout without impacting her overall "training load" for cycling. In fact, she might go out for a 30-mile ride immediately following the arms workout without feeling too much different than she would have otherwise. By contrast, Garmin's EPOC calculation will capture that level of nuance here. That same cyclist's post-weight-lifting EPOC will be quite short compared to her 30-mile ride, and her Garmin-calculated Training Load will adjust accordingly.

But a mark against Garmin's concept of Training Load is that it fails to account for real-world factors. What I mean is, Garmin can't measure EPOC directly through biometric testing, so they estimate it through heart rate measurements. If I go for a ten-mile run, and then get caught in bad traffic on the drive home, Garmin's calculations will erroneously assume that I'm having a hard time recovering from my run, and my Training Load number will rise. If I take a nap or sit in a hot tub immediately following my run, I'll have a much better EPOC profile, and my Training Load number will fall. So different non-exercise circumstances can impact Garmin's estimate of Training Load even when they probably shouldn't.

To complete things, Garmin outputs a "Training Status," based on a 7-day moving average of Training Load combined with the athlete's VO2 max data. That's not a bad estimate, but there is a problem in that VO2 max is a measurement that doesn't tend to move much. When it does, it moves steadily over time; it doesn't tend to fluctuate a lot over a 7-day period. It likely doesn't change much at all in a week. Some of the underlying data used to estimate VO2 max, however, can change: namely, if you have a birthday this week, your age will change; if your weight tends to fluctuate based on water weight, or diet, or menstruation, or any of the other things that make small impacts to a person's weight, the number you see on the scale will change. These things can have a statistically relevant impact on the output of the VO2 max estimation equation. But remember: it's just an equation. It aims to estimate VO2 max. If your estimate changes by a point here and there, it's unlikely that your VO2 max actually changed. It's far more likely that you had some slight weight fluctuation or something.

The result of all this is a "Training Load" and "Training Status" output that is roughly on point, but somewhat confusing. Take a look at mine:

Over this period, I inexplicably vacillated between "productive" and "maintaining" before finally ending up at "unproductive." Then I went back to vacillating during my recovery week. It wasn't until the last three days that Garmin recognized I was actually recovering. And, I hasten to add, I am training under a training plan supplied by Garmin through the Garmin Connect app itself.

That said, Garmin did get things right in general. At the end of my third week of training, I had run nine consecutive days and was feeling tired, so "unproductive" might not be linguistically accurate, but it was certainly true that I needed some rest. And Garmin did recognize the recovery week eventually.

Strava's "Fitness & Freshness" curves are based on what they call an "impulse response model." That sounds fancy, but all it really means is that Strava uses a weighted moving average of training load based on activity duration and heart rate. Precisely how they choose to weight the moving average is a mystery to me, but when compared to Garmin's data, Strava's seems to place slightly more weight on the past. While Garmin states with certainty that their output is based on a 7-day moving average, Strava does not state how long their time window is. I would venture to guess, though, that their time window is three weeks.

Why three weeks? Because when you access Strava's "weekly effort" graphs from their mobile app (these graphs are strangely unavailable in the browser portal), the area denoting "consistent training" on the graph adjusts based on the previous three weeks. I can see this by watching how it moves with my week-to-week effort.

The result of this longer time window provides what I believe to be a better overall measure of a person's fitness level. Here's a piece of my Fitness and Fatigue curves, covering my recent training regimen:

As you can see, Strava tracked my fitness level as increasing over the first three weeks of training; then, during my recovery week, my fitness curve stayed relatively flat, while my fatigue curve fell. This is, at the least, an accurate representation of what my training schedule was supposed to achieve.

On the other hand, take a look at the local maximum in that graph. On March 10, I went for a long run and in doing so achieved a fitness level of 81, and a fatigue level of 114. How should an athlete interpret that kind of information? Strava supplies a third number, called "Form," which is nothing more than the arithmetic difference between Fitness and Fatigue. This should correspond to how "fresh" I was feeling that day. Using this data, I can say that I was fit, but fatigued. Strava seems to have accurately assessed my feelings. What they didn't do was give me a direct recommendation, as Garmin did. Garmin told me right then and there that my training was getting unproductive and I needed rest.

There is no "right answer" here. I find both sets of data useful in their own way. But I am a very atypical athlete. Most people who use GPS watches aren't used to calculating various weighted averages and applying statistical models to time series. It just so happens that I do this for a living, and my great familiarity with data science puts me at an advantage for interpreting calculations like these.

The average athlete -- i.e., the average person who does not work in data science -- needs a little more help interpreting this information. To that end, I can tell you this: Garmin's Training Load and Training Status numbers jump around a bit, because they only look at your most recent training week; but they tend to get close to a good recommendation if you're seeing the same output two or three days in a row. Meanwhile, Strava's Fitness & Freshness gives you good perspective in your overall response to training, but you should probably not take the data too seriously if you are not actively engaged in an actual training plan of some kind.

Always take this data with a grain of salt. But if you can manage to think like a biostatistician, you can get some good information out of these numbers.

The Killer Was Sick, Not Suggestible

My social media were filled with think-pieces and hot takes on the tragedy in New Zealand over the weekend. This is inevitable; tragedy strikes, and people want to talk about it, to think about it, to write about it.

Unfortunately, much of the discussion I saw centered on the killer's manifesto. It seems that people wanted to delve deeply into his ideas and figure out which of those ideas are particularly dangerous. The implicit concern among these thinkers appears to be that some ideas can turn good people into killers; that we ought to hunt down these evil ideas, expose them for what they are, and…? Eradicate murder?

These folks mean well, but their thinking is sadly misguided. First of all, death and destruction has used any and every available philosophical justification. The fact that people use a given idea as a pretense to commit murder says nothing about the quality of those ideas. Murder has been committed in the name of god and anti-god, christ and antichrist, communism and capitalism, individualism and community. Every conceivable belief system has had its fair share of zealots and crazies, ready to pull the trigger at a moment's notice. Zealotry -- even murderous zealotry -- is not unique to any particular set of ideas. And since it isn't, we can't use the existence of a murderer who believed XYZ as evidence showing the bankruptcy of belief XYZ.

Secondly, though, and most importantly, we are talking about a killer, a mass murderer. We are talking about a young man who created some kind of manifesto for the world to analyze, and who then went on a media-captivating killing spree so that his manifesto would be analyzed. We're talking about a man who was callous, opportunistic, and bold; a man who was immoral, deceptive, and manipulative; a man who was shameless, arrogant, entitled, envious, and exploitative.

In other words, we are talking about a deeply disturbed individual with an atypical neurological construct. A sick man. A madman.

To be sure, understanding the pathologies of the criminally insane is a worthwhile endeavor; but rooting-out bad philosophies from the screeds of a psychopath is a fool's errand. This was a nutcase who wrote nutty things. His problem wasn't that he was a perfectly well-adjusted individual who, once having stumbled onto a bad philosophy, grew into a murderous savage. No, his problem was that his brain wasn't normal or healthy, and that he could use literally any philosophy he encountered to justify his terrible rampage.

I do understand the impulse of a philosopher, having encountered a disturbed manifesto, to poke holes in that manifesto's flaws in an effort to somehow defeat the evil he's encountered. But this is a defense mechanism, or a type of grief. This is an exercise in trying to shun the evil ex post facto. The truth is, evil will always be there, because in many cases evil is biological. That's what happened in New Zealand, tragic as it might be. The key to stopping this kind of evil in the future is in recognizing sick people and giving them therapeutic treatment before they have an opportunity to act out. Trying to prevent evil ideas from corrupting sick minds is foolish, because sick minds can corrupt even the best of ideas. That's precisely what makes them sick minds.

Libertarianism And The Light Triad

Most people are familiar with the so-called "Dark Triad" of psychological traits that are sometimes used to define people as being evil. That triad of traits is: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

Now, a new study seeks to define a "Light Triad," three traits associated with particularly good people and prosocial outcomes. Psychology Today reports:

The three subscales of the Light Triad Scale are conceptualized as follows:

Faith in Humanityㅡor the belief that, generally speaking, humans are good.

Sample item: I think people are mostly good.

Humanismㅡor the belief that humans across all backgrounds are deserving of respect and appreciation.

Sample Item: I enjoy listening to people from all walks of life.

Kantianismㅡor the belief that others should be treated as ends in and of themselves, and not as pawns in one’s own game.

Sample item: When I talk to people, I am rarely thinking about what I want from them.

Whether these three factors truly comprise a "Light Triad" is certainly a matter of opinion, but it's hard to argue that anyone who significantly expresses these traits is anything other than prosocial.

What I found most interesting about this proposed "Light Triad" is how closely it corresponds to run-of-the-mill libertarianism. Libertarianism in the classical tradition is based on the belief that human beings can figure out tough problems emergently, without the aid of government decrees to force it to happen; that's faith in humanity by anyone's measure. Libertarians also believe deeply in a profound sense of human dignity (via freedom) and respect (via equality); and that's humanism through-and-through. Finally, freedom in the libertarian sense of the word is steeply rooted in the belief that human beings are not slaves and should not be forced to do anything. We often contrast this to the implications of things like socialized health care, which seem to suggest that patients are entitled by right to the labor of doctors and nurses. In other words, we object to such things because we don't think doctors and nurses ought to be treated as means to someone else's end. And that is the essence of Kantianism.

Naturally, none of this should imply that libertarian individuals should score high on the "Light Triad." All I mean to suggest is that libertarianism is consistent with the "Light Triad," and thus we can consider it prosocial, at least by that measure.

Adventures In The Long Form

Two rest days in one week!? What am I supposed to do with myself!?

Not being accustomed to de-training, otherwise known as mixing in a recovery week between periods of heavier training load, I find myself getting antsy. It's easy to let my mind wander too far, especially with the availability of all this training data my fitness watches and apps give me these days. It's easy to let fear creep in, too: what if I lose my fitness?

That is absurd, of course. I can't lose all my fitness in a week, and I especially can't lose all my fitness during a week in which I spend most days working out! It is physiologically easier to maintain fitness than to build it; that's one reason why recovery weeks are important for good training. If I spent three weeks ramping up my training load, I'd need some maintenance time -- that is, time spent maintaining my current level of fitness, without pushing too hard -- in order to decrease my overall levels of fatigue and prepare my body for the next three weeks of heavy training.

This morning was a case in point. I woke up at the usual time: early, so that I could get a workout in. Today, however, is a rest day, so I closed my eyes for another fifteen minutes of rest before having to take a shower and get dressed. I closed my eyes momentarily, and when I opened them again, I discovered that I had slept for an extra hour! This was technically no cause for alarm; I still had plenty of time to get ready for work. What's remarkable is that, five days into my recovery week, my body was still so exhausted from the previous three weeks of training that I unintentionally nodded off for a whole hour.

The same thing happened to me a couple of days back, too. On the agenda for the day was a 60-minute Z3 (tempo) run, which I happily completed in the warm March sun with a smiling face, a lifted spirit, and spring in my step. When I got back to my desk at work, I nearly nodded off. That evening, when I got home from work, I took long nap, an hour or more of sleep that I normally wouldn't need.

I've never been one for napping, not one to try to get more than my share of sleep. I like to get up and be active. The fact that my body was basically taking me by the proverbial shoulders, shaking me, and crying, "Nap, you dolt!" indicates just how much fatigue it's currently dealing with. This kind of fatigue is precisely what recovery weeks are aimed to alleviate. By next Tuesday, when I kick off a planned ten consecutive days of running with a two-a-day, I should have recovered enough to go back to killing my workouts with style. Or so I intend.

However, fatigue is not the most interesting feeling I have as I work through this training schedule. Anticipation is. I find myself looking ahead, not just at the workouts coming up this weekend, but at the workouts coming up over the next two weeks.

Saturday, it will be rather enticing 20-minute Z4 aerobic threshold run. Sunday's a bit of a downer; it's a long run day, but I only get to run for a measly 60 minutes. Monday is a prescribed cross-training day; the prescription is for 30 minutes of cross-training, but how much fun is a 30-minute bike ride? Not as much fun as a 60-minute bike ride, that's for sure! Then, the next two weeks will be dominated by exciting "Mixed Runs," consisting of intervallic alternations between not just aerobic threshold pace and recovery pace, but also tempo pace and random pace variations. There are so many different kinds of workouts coming up over the next month that I have to look forward to. I'm positively bubbly over it.

This anticipation, this effervescence, demonstrates something that has been missing from my training for quite some time: real variety. I haven't had this much training variety to look forward to in years. Even my P90X training, which emphasizes "muscle confusion," and thus variety, hasn't offered me the same kind of variety that this half-marathon training schedule has. (To be fair, it is economically infeasible to produce a video-based workout series with this amount of variety. You can't produce 112 workout videos and expect to make money on a venture like that! Besides, most people cannot commit to the full 90 days of a P90X program, much less to sixteen week of serious training for distance-runners.)

But print-based training schedules, or perhaps we should say long form training schedules, have that advantage over home video series and "couch-to-5K" beginner programs. Freed from the confines of a flashy package and every-man marketing principles, unconstrained by the need to sell non-athletes on a quick fix, long form training schedules can get an athlete down to business, offering difficult workouts, comprehensive recovery weeks, and a wider variety of workouts than people normally get from online home workout programs. That's their advantage.

It's not so very different from watching a movie or reading a book. Most people appreciate the flashiness and shorter timeframe of a good movie, but those of us who can commit to a thousand pages of Moby Dick gain access to the advantages of long form storytelling. Physical fitness works much the same way.

Faster "Recovery"

I'm on my fourth week of half-marathon training. Today, I had to run "40 minutes in heart rate zone 2," which I have taken to calling a "40 minute Z2 recovery run."

Each one of the runs on this Garmin half marathon training schedule include a "5-10 cool down" segment, which I have taken to just interpreting as "keep running for another 5 to 10 minutes." It's an easy way to squeeze an extra mile into your workout for no reason other than, hey, let's go nuts. So, today, I went nuts-er than usual and ran the full 10-minute cool-down in addition to the 40 minutes prior, for a grand total of a 50 minute Z2 recovery run.

Put your calculators down, I'll help you with the math. I averaged 7:22 per mile, which is not particularly fast for running in general, but as a recovery pace, it's a little interesting.

But what makes it really interesting is how it compares to my recovery runs from the last few weeks. I kicked off this half marathon schedule with a recovery run, and I ran it at an 8:10-per-mile pace. Granted, I had really high blood sugar that morning, but still, if that were my Z2 benchmark, I've almost increased my recovery pace by a minute per mile.

More accurately, here is every recovery run pace charted against date, with a trend line added so that you can better see how I'm improving:

Not too shabby, considering that the overwhelming majority of workouts on this schedule so far have been recovery runs. I'm about done with Z2 -- psych! There's still more than twelve weeks of this to go!

But I'm not really getting tired of it; after all, it's working. The data is right there. Aside from that, my qualitative analysis is that these runs are getting easy. I know they're easy runs to begin with, but they feel like strolls to me now. I feel as though I could go outside and Z2 myself all the way to Abilene, if I had to. Double entendre intended.

More data to come.

Institutions Of Higher Social Status

By now, you must be aware of this week's "scandal," which is that B-tier celebrities and other folks committed what the police are calling "mail fraud." In this case, the "fraud" consists of pretending that their kids were athletes or faking their kids' SAT scores, plus paying a few hundred-thousand dollars, to gain admittance to universities like Stanford and USC.

Well, I'm not a legal expert, so I can't comment on the integrity of the legal case against them. It does strike me as being a little odd that faking your SAT score counts as "mail fraud," instead of just "application denied." But melodrama is sign of the times, and calling this turn of events "mail fraud" helps insulate the reputation of the universities involved. After all, you can't blame the universities for running a payola college-entrance scheme if they were poor, pitiful victims of fraud!

And there is plenty more cynicism to go around. Some are calling it "a victory for the signaling model of education," which states that education is itself meaningless beyond the system's ability to give you a certificate that says, "let the bearer of this bond be paid $40,000 per year or more." Others are saying that colleges brought this scandal upon themselves by submitting to Affirmative Action; after all, a policy that admits unqualified applicants for demography reasons is no better than a policy that admits unqualified applicants for financial gain, or so their argument goes.

For my part, the question is much different. All of the above commentary is based on the assumption that universities ought to be high-status institutions. Even though the majority of college educations are financed by debt, even though we all know that the average holder of an English Literature degree is no more intelligent than the average high-school-educated network administrator, even though anyone can learn any of this material for free on YouTube, we still cling to the notion that universities are super-special places where only the best people in society go.

That assumption belongs to one of the two competing ideas of what education should be. If we assume that universities are "institutions of higher status," then the university model as it currently exists makes perfect sense. Of course you should fund your education with debt; this is your ticket to the high life! Of course universities should be extremely choosey about who gains admittance; if they left everyone in, then we'd never be able to tell which ones of us really deserve higher social status! Universities are places for the Beautiful People to go, so that they can learn how to Be Beautiful. We can't question this assumption without rupturing the whole system.

But there is a competing viewpoint, one that I first encountered some fifteen years ago. I, too, resisted this viewpoint when I first heard of it, but eventually I got over my resistance and warmed to it. Here's the pitch: Universities should admit everyone. By "everyone" I mean 100% of applicants who can pay their tuition. College, you see, ought to be a place where you purchase lectures and graded exams, and ultimately diplomas. If you can afford the price, who cares how many times you fail a class? Who cares what your high school grades were? Who cares what your SAT score was? If you can afford to buy a seat in the classroom, does any of that other stuff really matter? Of course not, not if college is just a place where you can go to buy lectures, grades, and diplomas.

There are usually two objections to this competing idea of college. The first is raised by proponents of free college, who warn that by making college a matter of money, we'll create a two-tiered society of people who can afford to buy their way into college, and those who can't. Well, gee, take a look at the news headlines this morning. What do you think you see?

The second objection is the one I raised when I first heard the idea: If colleges let everyone in, then they'd run out of space and resources. The answer here, of course, is to just use the tuition money to build more space. So long as tuition is covering the cost of doing business, there is no problem. Let everyone in.

The unstated assumption behind both objections, however, is the tacit plea that college "mean something," that it retain its protected position as an "institution of higher social status." We can't leave it up to crass things like the ability to pay. We have to keep it exclusive; after all, ever everyone could get an Economics degree, then I wouldn't be any better than anyone else!

And isn't that what we really want?

Do You Need A Break?

Over the last few days, I've seen a number of local news stories about young children drowning in the bathtub. This news is heartbreaking, just awful. While we all know that the blame for these tragic deaths lies with the parents, simply wagging our fingers over that and moving on with our lives isn't particularly helpful.

Raising a young child can be a lot of stressful work, of course. The earliest years of child-rearing involve some level of sleep deprivation, and as much as we all look back on that period fondly, the simple fact of the matter is that sleep deprivation impairs cognitive function every bit as much as drinking does. Under some conditions, it impairs cognition even more than drinking.

When you combine that level of sleep deprivation with the stressors that come with child-rearing -- crying, pleading voices that demand our constant attention, competing priorities at work, housework responsibilities piling up at home, emotional obligations to our partner and to our other family members, and even mental health obligations to ourselves -- it makes for an enormous mental and emotional burden to carry. The right set of circumstances can set any parent in that condition off on a series of bad judgments.

The news is replete with the very worst examples of those bad judgments, and small children who die while taking baths is only one example. We've all seen the news stories about the strange accidental, and not-accidental, deaths of children caused by parents who somehow, inexplicably reached the edge of what they were prepared to tolerate and it simply broke their ability to cope. I don't mean to excuse it or to minimize these parents' moral culpability. Still, it's important to understand how such things happen, and if you want a hint of understanding, take a look at the stress that can sometimes arise when rearing small children.

Of course, these crimes are at the far end of the spectrum of parental failure. Most parental failure is much less harmful and certainly non-criminal. But that doesn't mean that any parent who has never committed a criminal act has never responded to parental stress in a way that caused their children emotional or physical harm.

Every parent has probably responded to their child more harshly than circumstances required on at least one occasion. Every parent has paid inadequate attention to their child from time to time. Every parent has had to take a phone call despite their child being in a vulnerable position of some kind. We're only human. Parents often make mistakes. Thankfully, most of these mistakes are minor and easily corrected. But we do make mistakes.

So, when we combine sleep deprivation and stress with a human tendency to make occasional mistakes, it all adds up to a situation in which children can be harmed despite parents' best intentions. Children can be unfairly yelled at, blamed, or punished; they can be wrongfully ignored or left alone for a few too many minutes, they can be left to too much screen time or exposed to scary images in books or on TV. Bad things can and do happen when parents are pushed to the edge of what they can tolerate.

For all of these reasons, it is vitally important for parents and other caretakers to make regular use of the following phrases:

• Do you need a break?
• Do you want to take five minutes while I finish up here?
• Should you go calm yourself down while I take over?
• Is it my turn to do this tonight?
• Should we plan a date night this week?
• Should you plan a night out with your friends or alone this week?

In my experience, it doesn't take very much time or effort for a parent to simmer-down when they're feeling stressed out. Usually a five or ten minute break is all a person needs to reset their emotions, catch their breath, regain their patience and their composure, and return to the child in a calmer and more productive state of mind. And, yes, it's that parent's responsibility to take that time when it's available.

But it's the other partner's responsibility to learn to recognize when those offers are needed, and to make them. It's the other partner's responsibility to recognize when parent and child are not communicating well anymore and a third person needs to step in. It's the other partner's responsibility to be there for both the parent and the child when things start to wind up tightly.

It also goes without saying that, for single parents, this third person doesn't have to be a partner. It could be a grandparent or a sibling, a good friend, etc. Whoever exists within the child's emotional support network, who lives close enough to make a difference, ought to be involved in stepping in to offer help, even just five or ten minutes, when it's needed.

This is a vitally important, and too often neglected, ingredient to child-rearing.

Felicitous Circumstances

I was talking to someone this past week about what it’s like to increase your running mileage, or your commitment to exercise in general. The two metaphors I came up with were spinning plates and shifting gears in a car.

Let me begin with shifting gears. When you’re driving (or even riding a bike), you don’t even think about shifting gears until you’ve pretty much maxed-out the current gear. You get going as fast as you can efficiently travel in one gear, and then you shift up to the next gear. If you try to shift too early, it’s far more work than you can handle. As you travel down the road, there’s nothing demanding that you work toward a higher gear. If you’re comfortable in your current gear and it’s getting you where you want to go and matches your commitment level, then stick to your current gear and be happy. Sometimes, though, you might find yourself in a situation where it just makes sense to shift to a higher gear. Go for it, and see how it goes.

The comparison to running mileage is fairly obvious. Don’t shift into higher-geared running until you’re ready for it; and, if you never want to be ready for it, fine, just stick to your current gear and enjoy yourself.

Now, regarding spinning plates. The comparison is similar, but the analogy has some slightly different implications. Living your life is a lot like spinning plates. You have obligations at home, and that’s one plate. You have obligations at work, that’s another plate. Going for daily exercise is another plate. A good diet. Spending time with your kids. A second daily workout. And so on. A lot of us get comfortable managing some number of plates — one or two plates. That’s fine, and that is where their comfort level is. Over time, you may find that you’re interested in adding another plate. You may find that an additional plate is manageable, or you may find that you have to drop one plate in place of the one you added. Whatever works for you is what you should do.

I think that analogy is relatively clear. There is a supposition baked in that “it’s better to spin more plates.” It is, but only because I’m assuming that each plate is one that you genuinely want to spin. If you find yourself spinning a plate you hate to spin, drop it. You don’t need unwanted crap in your life. Replace it with something that brings your life joy.

As a faithful reader, you already know that I’m finishing up my third week of half-marathon training today. Taking on that challenge was like taking on another spinning plate or shifting into a new gear. It’s been manageable, and thus fun. I’m really enjoying it. But I was already exercising a lot and running almost every day, so in terms of commitment, it hasn’t been all that much more than my previous status quo.

But committing to all this running has changed my diabetes management a little bit. I have to think through my meals a little more carefully. I have to make sure I’m eating enough, and taking the right insulin doses. Also, as I previously mentioned, the demands of my training regimen have altered the content of my diet. I can no longer seem to tolerate beer or spirits, and I can no longer seem to drink much more than a glass or two of wine with dinner. I drink a lot more water and a lot more tea. While this has been happening, I coincidentally ran out of diet soda and when I went to the grocery store, I simply opted for flavored soda water instead. My in-laws came for a visit, so we bought a ton of extra vegetables. All these factors came together all at the same time, and I suddenly find myself running 60 miles this week (!!!), drinking far less alcohol and diet soda than ever before, eating more vegetables.

Sometimes circumstances come together in such a way that it enables you to shift into a higher gear, or to spin more plates in your life. You don’t have to, but if you want to, it’s nice to be able to take advantage of some confluence of events that enables you to start doing a lot of new, productive things.

The trick isn’t so much in taking on new projects; the trick is in recognizing a good opportunity when you see one, and seizing it. If you notice your body rejecting beer, then take that opportunity to buy something else at the grocery store instead, and ditto soda. If you happen to notice that you have some extra time, why not get in an exit ra workout and see how it goes? Maybe you buy a new watch, like I did, and take on a new training regimen, like I did, just to find out how your watch works.

These are felicitous circumstances. Recognized them, and avail yourself of them. See how it goes. 

Nazis

A coincidence occurred this morning.

One of my libertarian friends on Facebook posted a link to an article outing another "libertarian" as a neo-nazi. This apparent neo-nazi was "mutual [Facebook] friends" with 101 other libertarians of note. That's a conservative estimate, since the person who posted this is surely not Facebook friends with every libertarian of note. So, it is disturbing to my friend that over a hundred famous-among-libertarians people would be friends with a neo-nazi.

Meanwhile, another libertarian friend of mine posted evidence on Facebook of famous philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer's being an actual, literal nazi. Gadamer is not well-liked in libertarian circles, but his ideas have infected the sort of woke left-libertarian social justice and/or disingenuous Niskanen Center crowd. One even rose to defend Gadamer until this libertarian friend of mine presented so much evidence that no one could argue favorably for Gadamer in good conscience.

Gee, are we libertarians getting it from both sides, or what? What the heck is going on with all this nazi stuff, anyway?

I'd like to present a hypothesis that aims to explain the pervasiveness of such pernicious ideas, not just among libertarians, but among people in general. I hope that part of what I write here will unsettle you about your own beliefs. We get nowhere in life by refusing to confront the uncomfortable. Sometimes the world is uncomfortable in ways that threaten our most highly regarded mythology.

Let me begin by saying that this is not a uniquely libertarian problem. Gadamer, for example, is beloved by the left, as is Heidegger. So, the left has been quite affectionate toward the philosophies of nazis. Nor is there any shortage of former clansman among right-wing politicians. Most famously just this past month high profile Republicans and Democrats in Virginia were both outed as people with a history of wearing blackface.

This kind of thing probably seems bewildering to any of you who have never been to the "deep south." It was bewildering to me for a long time, too. I spent the first 30-odd years of my life outside the deep south. Then I moved here and gained some new insight. The ideas behind the Confederacy are still very much alive down here. Not all of those ideas involve race hatred, of course, but we'd be fools to deny the race hatred involved. I have seen a lot of heart-wrenching mistreatment of African Americans since moving down here, to say nothing of mistreatment of Latino and South Asian immigrants. It's bad. And, as far as I can tell, it is based in culture, not in political affiliation, which is to say that it's not a Republican problem or a Democrat problem or a Libertarian problem. It's a people problem. People are messed up, and the Confederacy played a big role in messing people up.

While I'm at it, let me follow a brief tangent here. I recently took a short trip to South Carolina. While in Charleston, I took the time to visit some old Confederate memorials. It was my first time ever having done so, and I can pretty much guarantee you that it will be my last.

It's one thing to think about Confederate memorials in the abstract, statues of war generals and such. One can imagine a big bronze statue of Robert E. Lee on a rearing horse or something. We've all seen statues like this, even if not explicitly Confederate ones.  What makes Confederate memorials different -- what makes them physically nauseating to me, and I mean that literally, as I was moved to physical nausea when I saw these memorials -- is the bizarre, cultlike religious fervor baked into them. There is a sort of "savior complex" idea permeating all of these memorials, religious undertones and references to god, and the statues are super-human. The people depicted in the statues are made almost into Ubermensch. The style reminded me instantly of the art carved into the desert rock of Moab, Utah by a literally insane man:

Anyway, back to nazis. In the early days of nazism, the German government was presented as a sort of miracle. No one could believe that the loser of World War I could make such an economic and social turnaround as Germany had made. For that matter, Germany was one of the great cultural centers of the world leading up to World War II, but also before. All of the great music composers and philosophers were from Germany. All of the great social scientists were German. Many of the great physicists who revolutionized our very understanding of reality were either German or trained in Germany.

This is important because these days nazis have a tendency to be the patsies in our social commentary. "Nazi" is a general term for "mindless evil zombie." To claim anything positive about nazis is to present yourself as a fool, and if you happen to be writing fiction, nazis are the best possible villains because none of us feel any kind of sympathy for nazis whatsoever. Our current understanding of nazis is quite simply that they were all brainwashed dolts who committed great atrocities because they were brainwashed dolts. They are both maximally evil and maximally stupid.

Therefore, to recognize the truth about Germany is to rupture an important story we're telling ourselves. The truth is that Germans were great, Germans were brilliant, Germans achieved wondrous things. Germany was a cultural center of the universe for hundreds of years.

All that cultural greatness culminated in nazism. That's the scary part. The scary thing isn't that stupidity and brainwashing overtook a good nation. The scary part is that nazism is the ultimate result of all the ideas that made Germany wonderful and great prior to the rise of nazis. If you wanted to avoid re-creating a nation of nazis, part of what you'd want to avoid is all the great sociological and philosophical innovation produced by Germans in the 19th Century. You'd want to avoid the conclusions of Marx, and Engels, and Heidegger, and Gadamer. You'd want to throw those things away, recognizing them as the gateway to nazism that they are.

Unfortunately, that is not what people in today's world want to believe. People would much rather believe that nazism is just something Hitler made up that somehow overtook every good brain in Germany, turning it to evil mush. People would much rather believe that there are important things to salvage from Heidegger and Gadamer. People would much rather believe that the Confederacy was a legitimate states' rights movement.

These notions are "escape hatches" designed to protect us from confronting the horrible realities of life. The realities are that nazi Germany was a lot like pre-nazi Germany, and even a lot like post-nazi Germany. People who aided in the slaughtering of Jews had children whose views toward Jews are only improved at the margins. And, indeed, here in the States, the ideas of the Confederacy still infect the south, because the south was inhabited by intelligent people who had abhorrent ideas. Those intelligent people had intelligent children, whose ideas were only marginally less abhorrent. And those children had children, and theirs had children again, and so on marches time. Ideas have slowly improved over time, but we trace their legacy back to something abhorrent.

In order to improve the world, we must learn to discard what is abhorrent. We must not try to salvage a good "states' rights" message out of the Confederacy. We must not try to find worth in Heidegger or Gadamer. We must also not pretend people who believed in the Confederacy or the "reich" were brainwashed morons. We must recognize that terrible, noxious, infectious ideas can very easily take hold of intelligent and good people, and cause them to act in evil ways.

Remembering that ideas can be evil, and that they can infect good people as well as bad people, is the only thing that will help us prevent greater evil in the future.

Now having said that, I realize that it is a core part of Jordan Peterson's message, as well.

Haidt On Trump

Yesterday, I read an interesting interview with Jonathan Haidt, who non-libertarian leftist Paul Crider once referred to as a "crypto-conservative." (For those of you who don't understand this reference, "crypto-conservative" is a rephrasing of the term "crypto-fascist," a pejorative term meant to describe politicians who pose as reasonable, but are secretly fascists. For the record, I take Haidt at his word when he describes himself as a left-leaning centrist.)

The whole interview is interesting for many reasons, but one part stood out for me the most:

What we found—because we actually knew how do progressive and conservatives fill it out—what we were able to show is that conservatives can pretend to be progressives and they can accurately fill it out as though they were one. But progressives can’t pretend to be a conservative and fill it out accurately because they don’t really get the group loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity or purity. They don’t really get those so they kind of dismiss those and they assume that conservatives just like to kill puppies and things like that.

That was the case for a number of decades. Trump has shifted a lot of things around. The Republican Party is no longer the social conservative party. I believe, in other research I’ve published with Karen Stenner, a political scientist in Australia, Trump is appealing to more authoritarian tendencies. It’s very hard to see how Donald Trump is a conservative. So the psychology that I just described a moment ago no longer quite applies. The Republican Party, I don’t know what’s happening to it, but it is bringing in elements that are overtly racist. It is bringing in desires for rapid change, which is not a conservative virtue, generally.

 So I think we’re in a time of chaos in which both parties are in flux. What might come out is we might get ever further away from having a center-left Democratic Party and a center-right Republican Party, which is what we had for a number of decades. We might have two much more polarized or ideologically disparate parties and it could make for some very interesting politics and even less cooperation than we have now.

Most of this is not something any reasonably well-read person will find surprising, but it stood out to me because of what it signifies. When a famous volcanologist says something like, "We're seeing all the stuff that corresponds to a big volcanic eruption like Mt. St. Helens," then that's enough to perk anyone's ears up. When a famous expert on human morality and moral affiliations says that the president appeals to authoritarian tendencies on the right and bringing out overtly racist elements, it perks my ears up.

This is not because I had never heard this line of argumentation or that I hadn't considered the possibility. It simply means that the theory has evolved past the point of being "stuff politically engaged people say about abhorrent politicians" and into the point of being "stuff claimed by academic experts on moral affiliation." (So much for "crypto-conservatism," by the way!)

That's what it means to me. What it inspires in me, and this is the reason I chose to write about it today, is a sense of obligation to highlight more important links on my blog. This is something I once used to do all the time, but I stopped doing it out of a sense of duty toward explaining more about myself and my views. Now I think I ought to go back to highlighting important links when I find them.

The above interview with Jonathan Haidt shall be the first of these. Read the whole thing.

Oh, So You Want Crazy, Do You? I Can Do Crazy.

The training plan I've been following for two weeks now is heavily structured, with that structure relying on heart rate zone training rather than pace-work. It's a meticulously designed program that at least appears to be doing some good. (Of course, it's still quite early to say much about the program's overall efficacy, but as I already wrote in a previous post, I have made week-over-week progress.)

So, you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that my Thursday evening workout was simply listed as "fartlek run." When I clicked for more details, I read the following: "Run, 40 minutes. Vary intensity throughout the run. Cool down, stretch." These are very definitely not highly structured instructions. From my perspective, they are more than a bit vague.

I have down fartlek training before, of course. I even have a comprehensive article on fartlek training here. (It's really good. Read it!) Only, the thing of it is, when I do fartlek training, it's usually all spelled out: 5 minutes at this pace and then 2 minutes at that pace and then 4 minutes at the other pace… Never have I been tasked to "just go for a 40-minute run and vary the intensity." See you in 40 minutes, kid. Do what you gotta do.

So, in preparation for this workout, I started researching what sort of fartlek workouts other half marathon athletes generally do. Although not surprising in hindsight, what I discovered was that nobody knows anything about fartlek training that I don't already know myself. After reading half a dozen of the best articles I could find, I fired up my trusty spreadsheet, ready to map out a fartlek workout that was as close to exactly 40 minutes as I could get.

Then, suddenly, hiding in a throwaway prepositional phrase in of one of these articles, I discovered something I genuinely didn't know: "classic fartlek is based on feel and inspiration." (Emphasis mine.)

Somehow, in more than thirty years of running and training, it had escaped me that fartlek training was originally intended to be unstructured and fun. Who knew? No wonder I've always had a difficult time explaining to people why they should do fartlek training and interval training. After all, a structured fartlek workout is just an interval workout! The one is the other and the other is the one. But that wouldn't be the case if the whole workout is intended to be a lighthearted 40-minute outing with inspiration serving as your primary guide.

Thus far in my half-marathon training, I've thrown myself into the program whole-hog. I don't usually train by heart rate zone, and in fact the running I've been doing over the last several years has been very different from this program. But, I figured that if I was going to do it, I should do it like they laid it out. Garmin paid experts good money to come up with this program. It's not guaranteed to work, but what are the odds that it won't?

In that spirit, I decided to head out for an unstructured 40-minute fartlek run. If this schedule wants me to let loose and get a little crazy, then let's unleash some crazy!

Deliberate Training

They say practice isn't good enough. It's deliberate practice that makes a difference. In other words, showing up at the basketball court every day will certainly make you a better player than someone who does nothing at all, but it won't really make you a better basketball player than yourself. You'll never improve that way. In order to improve, you have to do more than show up. You have to analyze your weaknesses and take deliberate strides toward reducing or eliminating them. That's deliberate practice.

In the spirit of engaging in deliberate practice, let's take a look at my last two Z4 threshold interval runs; one from last week, and one from this week.

But first, some background information. I haven't done any serious training in the form of speed work for at least a couple of years. The last time I even attempted anything like this, I injured myself. This time, my body is strong, my muscle imbalances have been corrected, and I'm ready to give training a good, solid try. Last week, I ran over fifty miles, which is the first time I've done so in at least ten years. Thus, I am not merely training, or engaging in "deliberate practice," I am also relearning how to train, in a sense, because it's been so long.

With that in mind, let's take a look at the 4 x Z4 threshold runs from the last two weeks. Here's the Strava workout analysis output graphs "by split," where a "split" in this case is the auto-lap feature on my Garmin watch. When the watch goes from "10 minute warm-up" to "6 minutes at Z4 threshold," that's one lap. When the watch goes from "6 minutes at Z4 threshold" to "1 minute recovery" that's another lap. And so on. Here's the Week 1 graph:

The darker blue bars represent the speed intervals: six minutes of running in heart rate zone #4, which is the "aerobic threshold" zone. Anything beyond zone 4 is anaerobic effort (assuming the zones are configured accurately).

Strava rated the relative effort of this entire workout at "84." Garmin assessed the workout at a 3.7 for aerobic training effect, with no anaerobic training effect at all. The average pace times for the threshold intervals are as follows:

• 5:44/mi pace
• 5:57/mi pace
• 6:33/mi pace
• 6:23/mi pace

Here's the Week 2 graph:

Strava's relative effort of this workout was "89." Garmin's aerobic training effect was 3.8, and this time I was given an anaerobic training effect assessment of 1.1. This time the average pace times were:

• 5:46/mi pace
• 6:08/mi pace
• 6:26/mi pace
• 6:16/mi pace

It's worth noting that the two workouts were slightly different. Week 1 was four repetitions of 5 minutes at aerobic threshold, with 1 minute of recovery; while Week 2's workout was four repetitions of 6 minutes at aerobic threshold and 1 minute of recovery. The longer duration of the workout - by four minutes - probably accounts for the full 5-point difference in Strava's "relative effort" score. That is, I didn't expend a lot more effort during Week 2's workout, I just worked out a little bit longer.

As for pace, my first two intervals were run at a faster pace on Week 1 versus Week 2, but my last two intervals were done at a faster pace on Week 2. Overall, the paces were close to each other: 5:46 pace for less than a mile is less than two seconds behind 5:44 pace; but keep in mind that I sustained 5:46 pace for a full minute longer.

Most importantly, despite my having to run each interval a full minute longer than the previous week, on Week 2 my average pace never dipped slower than 6:30/mile. By itself, this would suggest that I either improved my endurance in a week, or that I got better at doing interval training. On Week 2, however, unlike Week 1, I spent some time in heart rate zone 5. That fact combined with the lower reduction in pace times from interval to interval tells me that this really is an endurance improvement, not just a skill.

All the same, I think I did manage to improve the interval training skill this week, even though that fact doesn't show up in the data. This week, my threshold running felt much more comfortable, like I knew what to do. I felt far more self-assured about entering Zone 4, and the running itself felt more like confident running, and less like flailing through a struggle.

All in all, I consider this a week-over-week success. I look forward to building on that success in the coming weeks. Remember, this workout schedule is sixteen weeks long, so there is plenty of time for me to get faster and train better. It should be a good journey.

Book Review: Robert Jordan - Winter's Heart

It took me much longer to finish Winter's Heart than it has to finish the prior novels in the "Wheel of Time" series thus far. The reason was that I have started losing the ambition to read the full series. Perhaps this is a simple matter of "binge fatigue," or perhaps it is because the novels themselves become less interesting as the series wears on.

While I cannot fault the author's prose, which always makes the reading pleasant, the major flaw in Winter's Heart is that I cannot tell you what the plot of the book is. This is because the plot of Winter's Heart is simply that it is a continuation of the previous novels. There is no final resolution in the novel, no beginning and no end. The novel begins by describing various events that occur to the series' main characters, and ends much the same way. In between, we are treated to many episodes of activity, none of which goes anywhere.

One of the strengths of a novel like this one is that the never-ending cliff-hangers keep you turning pages, waiting for more. Still, at this point the only reason I keep turning pages is because I know there are more books ahead of me. Had I chosen to read this book when it was first published, I would have been furious, absolutely furious. The fact that a reader can plod through nearly 800 pages of storytelling without a beginning-to-end plot is a terrible condemnation of Jordan's work.

Gone are the philosophical underpinnings of the story. Gone are the fantastical descriptions of mysterious, far-away places. Gone are the sword fights. Gone is the political intrigue. In place of all that, we have an unfolding of various events that neither build on what came before nor allude to what will come later. The prologue of the novel finds Rand plotting to rid saidin of its "taint," and across the subsequent seven hundred pages, we learn nothing of this. That part of the story does return… eventually… in the last 70 pages or so!

While previous installments of the series have felt like mere interludes, tiding the reader over until the next novel, this is the first in the series to dupe the reader completely. The reader is tricked into believing that the book is about a thing that is never addressed, never once, across 700 pages, until the very end. In between, we are treated to a few frustrations, but nothing so engaging as for me to be able to recall, ex post facto, that it happened at all.

The antagonists in the novel, "The Chosen," make only a few sporadic appearances. Well, some of them, anyway. Others seem to have disappeared. The ghastly creatures that played such a major part of the early books -- trollocs, myrdraal, ghrolm, and the like -- are nowhere to be seen here. In fact, those creatures haven't been in the series for three entire novels now. Why on earth did we learn so much about them in the early novels if they are to simply disappear for months on end, with no one having to worry about them?

Early in the series' first book, The Eye of the World, Rand acquires from his father a magic, heron-engraved sword that cannot be destroyed. This sword disappears after the series' third novel, never to return. In the meantime, Rand acquires another sword, but not a magic one, from a love interest, and carries that sword with him throughout the subsequent six books. This missing magic sword is emblematic of every problem with the "Wheel of Time" series. Time and again, important, compelling plot elements are simply dropped, never to appear again; in their place, we get lesser plot elements as thin replacements, trinkets that serve a thin purpose in the present novel, but which fail to do justice to a cohesive 14-book series.

In the end, I fear that Robert Jordan began an epic tale that he stretched too far to be great; he ended up with a serial instead, and fantasy readers are the worse for it.