The Mandelbear's Musings

Signal Boost: Two health-related articles

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 19:13:29 GMT

I was pointed at a couple of fascinating health-related articles (which I should have posted about Tuesday, but procrastinated):

First, Drinking Coffee Daily May Stave Off Early Death, Study Suggests. Which I was already assuming from prior reading, but this is good confirmation. What was new to me was that a teaspoon of sugar actually enhances the effect -- I don't use it, but generally eat something fruit-like with it, which presumably counts. Good to know, given my liter/day habit.

(Supported by this research article: Association of Sugar-Sweetened, Artificially Sweetened, and Unsweetened Coffee Consumption With All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality: A Large Prospective Cohort Study: Annals of Internal Medicine.)

Second, On Your Back? Side? Face-Down? Mice Show How We Sleep May Trigger Or Protect Our Brain From Diseases Like ALS | IFLScience tl;dr: side. Lately I've found that I can't get to sleep lying on my back (I used to; darned if I know what changed), so it's good to know that side-sleeping is healthier as well.

(Supported by The Effect of Body Posture on Brain Glymphatic Transport - PubMed The Glymphatic System – A Beginner's Guide - PMC.) The glymphatic system was apparently discovered in 2013; this set of articles was the first I'd heard of it.

Sleeping on one's left side, in particular, is better for other reasons, including reducing heartburn. (See "Side Sleeping: Benefits and Which Side to Sleep On | Sleep Foundation" and "6 Hidden Health Benefits of Sleeping On Your Left Side That You've NEVER Heard About" -- although I'd already heard about several of those.) The benefits for sleep apnea and back pain appear to be less side-dependent, and there seem to be arguments in favor of both directions, e.g. Right vs. Left Side Sleeping: What's the Best for Your Health? - Sleep Junkie.

Edited to correct paste error in the coffee study link text.

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Done this week (20140810 Su - 16 Sa)

Sun, 17 Aug 2014 17:40:12 GMT

We got a little rain this last week -- nice. I also Got Stuff Done, for certain values of stuff -- put up some 1x2 battens to hold up the bamboo screen around the deck, and paid some long-overdue bills. And made dinner on Monday. But as usual not nearly enough.

We have an(other) offer on the Starport; we'll see whether this one sticks.

On the down side, Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall died. The former set off the predictable post-celebrity-suicide followup; both good and bad. Mostly good, as in advice for both the survivors (no, it's not selfish) and the depressed (see particularly Boggle-the-owl's post, I don't like the phrase "a cry for help"...). Here, have a stick.

The Shooting of Michael Brown by a cop last Saturday also had the predictable fallout, and triggered an acute case of deja vu. I've seen it before, in the '60s (civil rights protests) and '70s (Vietnam War protests). Back then we called them "Police riots". I am not feeling very optimistic right now.

Links in the notes.

( raw notes, with links )

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Done this month (20110501 Tu)

Thu, 03 May 2012 16:52:12 GMT

Yay! pocketnaomi is here visiting!

I have a new tag: "quest". It's intended to cover the job search, housing search, and moving. It's also intended to recognize that this is more than any of those separately, reframing it as a major life change. "Adventure" might have done, too, but I don't like adventures. Nasty, uncomfortable things. Make you late for dinner. Oh, wait.

Took a webinar about changing careers on on LHH's website, added "mentoring" and "technology transfer" to my lists of skills, and started to research green and ethical companies by chasing links from ricoh.com, which has received awards in both areas.

I've been waking up horribly early, mostly worrying about finances, and especially about the effect of the move on the YD. Monday I managed to get back to sleep, and slept through my alarm as a result. Yesterday I woke up somewhere around 4:30, and gave up and got out of bed around 5:15. Slept well last night, so maybe I'm more-or-less reset now. Hope so. Though I could do with a couple of hours less sleep.

Some good conversations last night about the move. Sort of encouraging.

A couple of links in the notes; nothing extremely noteworthy.

( raw notes )

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Done this weekend (20120301 Th - 04 Su: Consonance)

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 04:18:10 GMT

It was a good con. Thursday I packed. The netbook sleeve I'd ordered over the weekend had arrived; it takes up *much* less space than the Belkin bag.

Friday, we got to the con hotel about 12:30. I quickly found out that the hotel's WiFi was among the worst I'd ever seen. It worked pretty well, though slowly, in the room, but was flaky in the lobby and unusable in the function space. Bletch. At least, because I'm an AT&T subscriber, I didn't have to pay for it.

My concert was at 7:30 on Friday evening; it went surprisingly well, and I got quite a few favorable comments on it. Including some on the way it flowed together -- I'd taken a page from Naomi and done a fully-scripted theme concert, on the subject of places and journeys. You can find the script and all but one song in the expected place.

I've gotten used to thinking of myself as a good songwriter; it still feels weird that some people consider me a good performer as well. I think what made the difference this time was that I was able to actually put some emotion into the songs. The occasional trainwreck probably went mostly unnoticed. Well, except for the lights going out one verse into my last song. That was just funny -- three people with flashlights lept onto the stage, and I simply started over. It was good.

I left two music stands in the concert room; they saw a lot of use over the course of the con.

After Friday, we ate most of our lunches and dinners over at Nijo Castle. Cold, raw fish. Yum. Some of the best sashimi I've ever tasted.

The (other) concerts were uniformly excellent. Most of them had Amy McFiddler in them. Everything is better with Amy in it. The Three (4) Weird Sisters' GOH concert was particularly spectacular. All of them were just on.

I'm not going to go into much detail; if you want that you can read the notes, as usual. I didn't take many notes about the concerts I went to, and I did very little singing in open filk. But, yeah. Good weekend.

( raw notes )

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Done yesterday (20110110 Tu)

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:21:00 GMT

Um... right. You can tell it was a productive day from the small number of notes? Something like that.

Because, aside from not taking a walk due to working through lunchtime, it was a very productive day. I got a couple of overdue bills paid, practiced a couple of songs, blew through my JIRA task list at work, helped the coworker who's integrating audio into the client, and did some long-delayed web stuff in the evening.

I also spent the entire evening in the living room with Colleen working on Cygnus -- it's a real pleasure to have a netbook that has a full-sized keyboard with good (i.e., IBM-like) key feel.

I finally folded up at 11:30. DO NOT LIKE this "need to get more sleep" thing. I know, self-care and all that. It still sucks.

I don't know what it was about those two bills. They're from Kaiser, because my employer switched our plan from a from the HMO plan we've had since forever, to one that sends me two totally incomprehensible bills every month. And because I tend to put off anything that smells of paperwork. Which reminds me to get my W2 out of my bag.

Anyway, that's done.

I also don't know what it is about some of my coworkers. I mean, R is an experienced contractor, and can't be all that much younger than I am. But he's a Mac expert, uncomfortable with the command line, and shows an appalling ignorance of such Unix fundamentals as processes and PTYs. I've seen this before -- S back at my previous gig had similar problems.

I really don't like to think of myself as smarter than most people -- when you're one of a handful of researchers that doesn't have a PhD it's hard to hang on to that illusion -- but I probably do have a much broader range of experience than most. Starting in the days of vacuum tubes and Hollerith cards can do that, I guess.

One link, to Whose site is it anyway? | Files That Last. Worth a read if you have someone else maintaining your website; my employer ran afoul of this last year.

( raw notes )

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Done yesterday (20110830 Tu)

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 04:37:16 GMT

( raw notes )

A pretty good day. I put in an hour's worth of work on the router upgrade (and made good progress), then headed North to the Menlo Park office to triage the stuff I'd abandoned there in advance of the last move. On the way I stopped at the Cupertino building to looked at the new offices there. It turned out that they hadn't selected one for me, and I was the first to show up, so I got my pick. I picked the one with a huge U-shaped desk -- it'll be the first time in decades I've been able to have my monitor facing away from the door.

Whether there's going to be room for all my stuff is another question. I have 10 boxes worth in my cube. Fortunately I was only able to find one box worth of stuff up in Menlo, the rest can be recycled or put up for grabs. Go me!

I left a little before 3pm for a dentist appointment. No problems -- which has been pretty typical for the last few years, but it's a major and comparatively recent improvement. Part of that, no doubt, is that first item up in the notes -- writing it every morning is a powerful reminder.

On the way back I stopped at Office Max for a new box of Pilot G2 pens (I got blue this time). I hardly ever actually use them up; they just mysteriously disappear.

Just down the block in the same strip mall as Office Max is a Whole Paycheck, and the YD had an evening class, which meant that I was cooking dinner. Coho salmon and asparagus. I pan-fried the salmon with butter, pepper, and lemon juice. Yum.

I crashed around 11pm. I really hate having to go to bed before midnight, but I seem to need the sleep. Grumble.

Only one link in the notes; nothing very exciting -- that's mainly because I went up to Menlo without my netbook. Silly bear. But a good day.

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