A fair question to ask, straight off the bat, is “Who’s the headless dude with the ball and shorts and has George lost his mind?”

That fellow happens to be a reader whose moniker is Red Dog and he sent in a marvelous discussion of how he’s been doing that one major Chemistry Experiment in life (changing our eating, and thus our appearance and fitness) and it’s a dandy first-hand report.  I removed his head because that would make him personally identifiable, and our massive legal department wouldn’t hear of it without a release and I didn’t think to do that Friday…such is life.

(As to the second part of the question – Has I lost my mind? – the answer should be self-evident.)

Here’s his report:

George you recently asked about thoughts on living locations and weight loss.  For weight loss I suggest you look at Tim Ferriss’s book, The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman Tim believes in PAGG (see chart below) eating beans for breakfast, and chilling your core body temp once a day.  I take cold showers in the summer.  Look at the pictures.  I went from 178 to 153.  

As to living location.  My requirements are I need a place for clean fresh flowing water, where it rains enough for growing veggies, inexpensive land for a runway, land to create a self sustainable life style.  I looked at a map of the US and created a triangle from:

Nashville TN, to Huntsville AL, to the Pickwith dam in SW TN.  I would buy 50 to 100 acres within that triangle.  

I also use Apple Cider based hot sauce on my beans in the morning.  

Policosanol	117	23 mg day.  Fat Loss & cholesterol lowering.
Alpha Lipoic Acid	117	Liver Disease.  Store Carbs in your muscles or Liver, Not Fat cells.
Green Tea	118	EGCG.  Epigallocatechin Gallate:  Inhibits storage of carbs as body fat.  Kills fat cells.  Suggest decaffeinated green tea extract pills.  Mega Green Tea Extract, decaffeinated, 725 mg.
Garlic	119	High doses of Allicin.  Inhibit Fat regain.  Allicin 6000 garlic
		www.fourHourBody.com
Beans	83	Epazote from Mexican groceries.  Lentils.  Soak beans overnight.
Whole Grains	91	Whole Grains or Oats, NO.
BreakFast	95	Eat within 30 minutes of getting up.
	105	Lime or Lemon Juice.  P
	106	Air squats before eating, After eating.
Fermented	111	Sauerkraut & Kimchee.
Cooling Body	129	Ice pack on back of neck in evenings.  Swim in cool water.
	144	Cinnamon good lowers glucose levels.  In coffee?
	146	Eat slower.  At least 30 minutes.
	164	Kettleball swing.
	167	Flying Dog & 2 legged glute.
	172	Kettleball swing from Home Depo.
	176	Back ball myotatic crunch

“Red Dog”t

Just have one more try — it’s dead easy to die,
It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.

I have to say, I am totally impressed.  The reader is not a young fellow (I forgot to ask his age, but I’m sure he’ll send that along) but his results lead to all kinds of interesting thoughts in the arena of life extension.

Policosanol was a new one on me, so you can Wiki it – though there is more on the Wikipedia site…

Policosanol^{[pronunciation?]} (or polycosanol) is the generic term for a natural mixture of long chain alcohols extracted from plant waxes. It is used as a nutritional supplement intended to lower LDL cholesterol (“bad” cholesterol) and increase HDL cholesterol (“good” or “healthy” cholesterol) and to help prevent atherosclerosis, though some studies have raised questions about the effectiveness of policosanol.

A second opinion from WedMD is here and when you’re researching, always be sure to check their side effects and cautions tab.  NOW Foods Policosanol 20mg Vcaps will run you about $16-bucks at Amazon.

What we’re really dealing with here are two issues:  One is the effect of weight on life extension while the other is the effect of weight on quality of life.

Looks to me like Red Dog is at about an ideal weight.  What’s more, he’s got the elements going here that will likely lead to an optimally long life.  Much thinner, though, and then the risks come back up.

A Wikipedia entry on the effect of being too lean from calorie restriction is worth some study:

Malnutrition may result in serious deleterious effects, as it has been shown in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.^[8] This study was conducted during World War II on a group of lean men, who restricted their calorie intake by 45% for 6 months, and composed roughly 90% of their diet with carbohydrates.^[8] As expected, this malnutrition resulted in many positive metabolic adaptations (e.g. decreased body fat, blood pressure, improved lipid profile, low serum T3 concentration, and decreased resting heart rate and whole-body resting energy expenditure), but also caused a wide range of negative effects, such as anemia, lower extremity edema, muscle wasting, weakness, neurological deficits, dizziness, irritability, lethargy, and depression.^[8]

§Musculoskeletal losses[edit]

Short-term studies in humans report loss of muscle mass and strength and reduced bone mineral density.^[9]

The authors of a 2007 review of the CR literature warned that “[i]t is possible that even moderate calorie restriction may be harmful in specific patient populations, such as lean persons who have minimal amounts of body fat.”^[10]

§Low BMI, high mortality[edit]

CR diets typically lead to reduced body weight, yet reduced weight can come from other causes and is not in itself necessarily healthy.

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Three things are a foregone conclusion this morning:

1.  The Emperor has not clothes.

2.  The jobs report will show rising employment.

3.  The devil is in the details.

So here we go…

“Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 295,000 in February, and the unemployment rate edged down to 5.5 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in food services and drinking places, professional and business services, construction, health care, and in transportation and warehousing. Employment in mining was down over the month. Household Survey Data Both the unemployment rate (5.5 percent) and the number of unemployed persons (8.7 million) edged down in February. Over the year, the unemployment rate and the number of unemployed persons were down by 1.2 percentage points and 1.7 million, respectively.

But wait – there’s more:  Fine print says there were 178,000 fewer people in the workforce.  Huh?

Which then means the labor participation rate dropped back to 62.8% after ticking up in previous months to 62.9%

As always, the CES Birth Death Model (the measurement of “statistically estimated into existence”  jobs is key:  But no, the CES Birth/Death model hadn’t been updated so it’s on my “Saved guffaws for later” list.

CES Updated:  132,000 jobs were estimated into existence, out of the 176,000 claimed in the general report, so net provable was…..no hints here… 44,000.  Futures turned down on the confessional…down 60 I looked.

And the alternative measures of labor underutilization – which is the PhDs flipping burgers index, shows a drop from 11.3% to 11.0 percent (good)_ but we wonder about the impact of long term aid running out on these numbers.

You ever see a government report showing the national homeless number?  Me either.

On, one other foregone conclusion:  The market should be down at the open.  The Baltic Dry Shipping Index is up 2 to 561…around 2009 low levels.

Shhhhshhhh!

Listen closely….. hear it?  Air escaping from a bubble is what it sounds like…or is it?  Maybe not just yet. The pop is still in the fridge.

New Trade Figures

From Commerce:

The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S.

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Actor Harrison Ford is in the hospital – doing fine – after having to land his Ryan PT-22 trainer on a golf course near the Santa Monica Airport due to engine failure on takeoff. 

Ford, who’s quite expert at the flying game (including a helicopter/ rotorcraft endorsement if I recall correctly) is not the first fellow to lose an engine. 

The plane he was flying, a WW II vintage PT-22 is a very seriously collectible airplane according to Wikipedia:

In 1941, as the natural development of the earlier ST series, the PT-20 and PT-21 was the military production version of ST-3 with a total of 100 built as the U.S.A.A.C.’s first ab initio monoplane trainer. The rapid expansion of wartime aircrew training required new trainers, and the Ryan PT-22, essentially similar to the PT-21, was ordered in large numbers.^[3] Named the “Recruit”, it entered operational service with the U.S. Orders also were placed by the Netherlands, but were never realized as the nation capitulated to Axis forces. The small order of 25 ST-3s was redirected to the United States and redesignated as the PT-22A. Another order also came from the U.S. Navy for 100 examples. The PT series was in heavy use throughout the war years with both military and civil schools, but with the end of the war, was retired from the U.S.A.A.F.^[4]

As a pilot, I tend to look at stories – like the Ford landing – a little more closely than most.

Back in 1999, Ford as a close brush, too.  That was when a Bell Jet Ranger 206 he was practicing emergency landings in (with an instructor, the landing process for engine out in a helo is called autorotation) back in 1999.

What’s missing in the media reports of Thursday’s event is just where Ford was when his engine conked-out.  If the engine failed when his plane was very low (300-feet, or less) then he would have been trained to fly to the closest thing to land on that was roughly straight ahead.

On the other hand, if he had taken off, was well past the golf course, had more altitude, he would have been inbound attempting the return to land and, seeing he wouldn’t make the field, would have chosen the next best thing – a golf course.

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Yes sir:  A record report from the National Weather Service up the road a piece in Ft. Worth:

“A record snowfall of 2.5 inches was set at dfw Airport yesterday.

The previous record for March 4 was 0.3 inches in 1989.”

So it is with overflowing generosity that we have packaged up the cold front and sent it east overnight where it should be arriving any minute to ease the sweat glands that I just know have been overworked with Global Warming effects this winter.

I would mention that suggesting the cold is because of warming is like suggesting that we all need to eat more to lose weight, slow down to get somewhere faster, and die in order to live.  However, I’ll just bite my tongue (which happens to be frozen to my teeth now).

I’ll just point to the records here and wonder if the folks in Mississippi aren’t maybe overdoing it a bit in declaring an emergency in advance. 

Do you realize that “Woodall Mountain” is the highest peak in the state (806-feet) and that’s just a lump out west or in he Poconos.  I mean, come on, now!  Cowboy up a bit.  Texas highest point is Guadalupe Peak at 8,751 feet…

(Sorry, I will stop teaching geography and how to read thermometers and just skip to the economics for which this site is better known.  Although there is much in common between climateers and mainstream economystics.

Job Cut Report

The ADP Employment Report giveth and the Challenger Job Cuts report taketh away:

Planned job cuts declined slightly in February, as US-based employers announced workforce reductions totaling 50,579, five percent fewer than the 53,041 in January, according to the report on monthly job cuts released Thursday by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.

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This is rather amazing. – to the point that I figure I should share it with you:  I am now a pound lighter than I was when Elaine and I took off on our cruise 13-days ago.

The numbers?  I put on 7-pounds during the cruise.  No, I wasn’t particularly proud of it, but lately I have been eating on a regular diet of two meals a day, within 8-hours of each other because of a lot of research I’ve been reading on apple cider vinegar.

One upshot of the reading was to find out that modern dietary ideas – like multiple meals per day – are not really how humans grew up in the wild.  Instead, people apparently used to walk around, looking for food, hunting and foraging, until they found something.

Then they ate to their hearts content….and moved on,

There’s a rhythm, apparently, to how this works.

When ancient ancestors had a meal, it often raised the blood sugar.  The blood sugar converted to fat, the fat was stored.  No mysteries to that.

But according to the data I’ve been reading (before going on the cruise), when the body is not given additional food (remember the wandering off part?) the first calories consumed were the easy-to-get-to sugars. 

Once those were gobbled up, the stored fats were eaten next by the cells.  And, at the tail end of that, the next to go were the heaviest of the fats – the kind that tend to accumulate around the belly in old men like you-know-who.

The idea comes into focus that eating kicks off this sequence of blood sugars increasing, fat storage, sugar burning, and finally fat burning.   Which is why people have different “breath” throughout the day.  Good breath mostly after eating but once the body moves into hard fat conversion, there’s likely some ketosis.

The part of ketosis that matters, when comes to eating habits, is this bit on the mechanics of ketosis from Wikipedia:

“During the usual overnight fast the body’s metabolism naturally switches into ketosis, and will switch back to glycolysis after a carbohydrate-rich meal. Longer-term ketosis may result from fasting or staying on a low-carbohydrate diet, and deliberately induced ketosis serves as a medical intervention for intractable epilepsy.^[6] In glycolysis higher levels of insulin promote storage of body fat and block release of fat from adipose tissues, while in ketosis fat reserves are readily released and consumed.^[5][7] For this reason ketosis is sometimes referred to as the body’s “fat burning” mode”

What I’ve gotten back into is waiting until Elaine gets up and cooks breakfast, instead of cooking my own.

Her schedule, and mine are offset a good bit:  I’m up at 4 AM writing.  She rolls out sometime between 7 AM and 8 AM…and gets hungry around 8:30 so that’s when food appears.

What this means is that instead of “breaking the fast” of overnight – which is where the word breakfast comes from – I’m adding about 4 1/2 hours to my fat burning time daily by eating when she gets up.

Then, I eat my second meal of the day by 4 PM, which means being up and about 3-4 hours after eating, which helps resolve lots of old-people problems like acid reflux.

But none of this should lose 9-pounds in less than a week. 

What Else was Going On?

Therein lies the tale…

For some reason, part of my “home chemistry experiments with my body” had not yet gotten to the bottle of apple cider vinegar pills that were coming up on my personal testing.  Now I’m into it.

Long-term readers will recall the idea here:  Make up a notebook for yourself and then systematically go through what works well for you as you test every vitamin and supplement you can get your hands on.  There is quite often something in the way of a supplement (or mineral) that when taken will change how you feel.

For example, when I want to learn at an accelerated rate, I will take Source Naturals Huperzine A, 200mcg, 120 Tablets.  The effect of taking one of these bad boys is that within an hour, there’s a marked improvement in mental acuity. 

Taken with a baby aspirin and a small something to eat, it is my “before flying” routine.  Since flying an airplane is a somewhat complex task where you need to have all your faculties, I figure anything that can bump up short-term IQ a bit is worth doing.  So a half cup of coffee, food with lots of protein, and a Huperzine A – plus a baby aspirin – I’m good to fly.

By the way, the baby aspirin is not to keep away pain or prevent heart attack.  Although, sure, it may do these things.  The real reason to take the aspirin is that it increases the body’s uptake of oxygen. 

I can actually tell the difference on the treat mill, too, as well as mental acuity on long flights where we’re up at 7,500 feet, or higher.  (We have oxygen, too, but don’t always carry it unless flight at 9,500 and higher is planned.  Requirements roll in (going from poor memory, 12,500 feet) for supplemental oxygen, but another long discussion…not this morning.)

So there was this bottle of apple cider vinegar pills (similar to High Potency Apple Cider Vinegar 625 mg 180 Caps by Swanson Ultra) in my test queue and I began the four week trial period on those.

WOW!

I was shocked.  9-pounds gone!  I doubt the rate of weight loss will continue as high, but to even lose 3-pounds a week would be phenomenal.  Hell, a pound a week would be fine.

There were a number of dietary changes between the cruise ship weight and this morning’s.

On the cruise ship we ate three squares a day.  Breakfast, lunch, and fabulous (bringing tears to your eyes and triglycerides or your cardiologist’s) dinners.

Restaurant food is generally much higher in sodium (salt), than we’re used to eating around here.  We are using ,Morton – Lite Salt Mixture that contains half the sodium of regular salt, with the balance of saltiness coming from potassium chloride…and since potassium is good for body chemistry….

Shipboard we had alcohol before and with din-din.  A cocktail (or two) and wine (or sake) with meals.

And I ate breakfasts.

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CompSec is computer security.  And we’ll get there, but first we need to go back to Monday’s column to pick up the scent…

Our discussion of the local gas company bill reported out of Australia received a numbers of fine comments from folks on the discussion side of UrbanSurvival, including an historical perspective from a reader Down Under that was most excellent:

Being an Aussie in Qld AUS I couldn’t help read your funny anecdote about the guy from Mudgee and the local gas company.
True or not it is believable as anybody in this country or yours would know. Great indicator of how as Voltaire put it “common sense is by no means common” .
Seems the western world especially left wing politics in your country and mine ergo Democrats and our Labor Party this lack of practical approaches to real world issues is rife.
In Aus like yours we have a general shift of wealth from the big middle class here to the genuine wealthy where they aren’t encumbered by heavy debt.
The big transnational corporations in both our countries hide their profits via “transfer pricing” in our case and no doubt ring around the rosey accounting in yours. Isn’t the Balance Sheet and P & L the devices that are the blind hiding the truth?
Off topic I know but I wished to vent.
I have always admired the USA and it’s wonderful citizens. I was in middle / primary school here when your country inspired me with your Apollo and 69 landings just because you felt like it. Now nearly 50 yrs still NO other country can do it. You’re all amazing.
Now it seems many voters there have lost their faith in the USA and what it represents both historically and in the future. Professional advocates, nefarious pressure groups (on a way bigger scale than here in Aus) are polluting your nations system and are beginning to have a big impact here too.
Many here in Aus are conscious of 1942 Coral Sea efforts of the US and the subsequent placing of US troops here, The blood and treasure that was lost by you is noted by many but like all history time dims memory and importance. Your citizens like ours only think in sound bites and believe the propaganda that’s why sites like yours are important to get folks to think outside the square. To question the conventional wisdom and spin. The truth is way weird and scary.

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Coming back to the ranch Saturday morning, where the noisiest thing heard all weekend was the air conditioning coming on, is a huge difference from Houston.

I’m not sure what to call the experience of driving back from the cruise ship terminal.  May be the best word for it is “combat driving shock.”

Houston, thanks to the boom in energy over the past few years, has ballooned up to more than 6-million people.  Departing from the docks area, we were still in the continuous band of development of Greater Houston an hour and a half later.  The spreading monster will consume Huntsville, TX shortly, I’m sure.

The city has the same overbuilt feeling to it that I first experienced driving through Los Angeles 40-some years ago.  Being from Seattle, and driving down I-5, L.A. was culture shock personified and there’s a kind threshold that takes place with a city as it passes through the 5-million mark, or so.

Not that lots of cities aren’t bigger…they are.  Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles all line up as bigger.  But something happens when a city gets to be the size of New York:  the population density is high enough that things like subways and trains coming in from the suburbs to an extreme island population core, actually makes sense.

The difference – if I can say this right – is that NYC has the feel of a well-raised loaf of bread.  High density, crusty in places, but damn entertaining.

Houston, on the other hand, while going up a bit in the central core area, is more like a pizza than a loaf…and the only other city I’ve been through in the past 10-years that has the same vibe is Sacramento.  Like Houston, it just seems to go on and on, forever.

According to this report, Chicago’s growth has been faltering – on the other of a quarter of a percent in a year in 2013.  Job creation in Chicago seems to have failed, as much as anything.  Houston by comparison claims job creation of 4.2% more jobs in the past year.

As you know, Elaine and I have been contemplating moving “out west” to get closer to our kids.  But driving through Houston at 8 AM on a Saturday has a totally Los Angeles vibe to it, complete with the grayest gray there is when the sun’s not out.

It’s a grim reminder that we “can’t go back” to the era of “right-sized cities.  The damn planet has gotten too big for that.

You’re welcome to play along as we keep tossing darts.  Eugene, Oregon is close to the kids, nice flying country yet lots to do, but without pizza-city vibe to it.  The Washington Coast towns (from Astoria, OR north are interesting, but run a bit too gray for our tastes.

Friends are having a house built in the hills north of Phoenix, but the closest airport is a 30-mile drive down the road to Deer Valley.  Plus, too close to the dissolving border for our comfort.  That ACLU 100-mile “Constitution Free Zone” is worrisome. 

You’re welcome to toss ideas in the hat.  As interesting as the Texas Outback is, being out west again has a certain calling to it.  So if you have ideas, please send ‘em along.

Drone Regulation

I keep forgetting to mention that the FAA is working toward regulation of those increasingly popular drones we’ve been reading so much about:

The FAA proposed a framework of regulations that would allow routine use of certain small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in today’s aviation system, while maintaining flexibility to accommodate future technological innovations. The FAA’s proposal offers safety rules for small UAS (under 55 pounds) conducting non-recreational operations. The rule would limit flights to daylight and visual-line-of-sight operations. It also addresses height restrictions, operator certification, optional use of a visual observer, aircraft registration and marking, and operational limits.
            The proposed rule also includes extensive discussion of the possibility of an additional, more flexible framework for “micro” UAS under 4.4 pounds. The public will have until April 24, 2015, to comment on the proposed regulation in the Federal Register, which can be found at http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=FAA-2015-0150. For more information and links on the proposed rule, see the FAA’s press release page at www.faa.gov/news/press_releases/.

As a pilot, I’m not very happy with the “micro UAS category, since even with a 1/4” thick windshield, I’m pretty sure 4.4 pounds hit at 80-miles an hour would go through it.

Not that I should worry:  The FAA hasn’t been able to go with a driver’s license in place of a third class medical – and that issue has been around for at least 10-years.  No reason they shouldn’t study this decision until it become irrelevant, as well.

Reminds me of the old saying “I’m from the government and I’m here to help…”

Speaking of Which (Lighter side of things)

Grady up at the www.nostracodeus.com project found this one circulating out on the web as an email headlines “Gas Bill”:

A man living in Kandos (near Mudgee in NSW Australia) received a bill for his as yet unused gas line stating that he owed $0.00.

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