The Skeptics Guide to the Universe Forum

After two and a half months on 10 mg of Rosuvastatin and 10 mg of Ezetimibe I got a blood test yesterday. (I also take blood pressure and thyroid medications.) The previous test was after I'd been on the Rosuvastatin, so the Ezetimibe is the new one now.

My total cholesterol came down from 170 to 124; my LDL came down from 106 to 67; My HDL went from 55 to 50; my triglycerides wen down from 43 to 37; and my ratio Total/HDL went down from 3.09 to 2.48. My AST and ALT (which are tested to look for liver damage from taking statins) are up slightly, but are still in the lower half of the normal range. In fact, all my numbers on the test are normal.

(HDL going down is bad, but in the context of everything going down I think it's fine.)

My cardiologist wanted to get my cholesterol, and especially my LDL, down significantly from what they were. The numbers before were normal for a normal person, but because of my sky-high coronary calcium (1,375) he wanted my lipids much lower. I think he'll be happy with these numbers. I see him on Friday.

("Normal" coronary calcium is zero. Average for men of my age is 200. 300 is considered high enough to warrant aggressive treatment with statins.)

I would not trust a heart-rate monitor to tell me how many calories I'd burned. It sounds to me like a gimmick to sell heart-rate monitors. Sure, you burn more calories with physical activity, but there are too many other factors that differ among individuals. The treadmill I had in Spokane, and the elliptical I have here, as well as the machines I've used in gyms, tell me a number of calories, but it's a gimmick. The only reliable, objective, information they can give you is your elapsed time on the machine. Also cadence and resistance level, but those are subjective to the specific machine.

Herding sheep is near impossible without a good sheep dog. With a good sheep dog it's a piece of cake.

China's coal-based energy production as a percentage of its total energy production will decline, but its total energy production is rising so fast that the lower percentage can easily be a larger actual output. The world's CO2 output is rising, and we don't even know where the tipping point is. Melting permafrost is releasing methane into the air; melting ice is lowering the Earth's albedo; we're burning coal and oil and natural gas as fast as we can claw them out of the ground; and the nations of the world are more concerned with fucking each other over than with preserving the planet we have to share. Here at home, half the population and half, or more than half, the legislators, don't even believe there's a problem, and none of the countries with the political, economic, or military power to actually influence world affairs gives a shit about anything but their own hegemony. We have the technology to limit the damage, but the people in power just want to amass more power and more money.

Quote from: CarbShark on September 25, 2023, 06:29:39 PMThe point is that China is positioning itself to transition from Coal to renewables. They are leading the world in R&D for solar, with a focus on industrial applications, lowering costs and increasing output.

The question is will they transition in time.

I suspect that they are poised to complete the transition right about the time that all the coal has been burned and all the carbon we can possibly dig, suck, or siphon out of the ground has become CO2 in the atmosphere. 10 C. above pre-industrial levels? 20 C. above? Google tells me that the average lifetime of a coal-fired power plant is 45-50 years, though 60 or longer is possible. So it will be around 2075 before all these new Chinese plants BEGIN to be retired. Unless, of course, climate change brings about a massive collapse in the global economy before then.

Quote from: gcason on September 25, 2023, 04:48:38 PM

Quote from: daniel1948 on September 21, 2023, 08:52:10 PM

Quote from: arthwollipot on September 21, 2023, 08:16:04 PM

Quote from: daniel1948 on September 21, 2023, 10:07:46 AM

Quote from: bachfiend on September 20, 2023, 11:17:59 PM... Chess is not a sport.  It's a game, which many people take very seriously.

Agreed.

(But some folks here seem to think it's a "sport" because there's competition, and there are winners and losers.)

As I said before, I think it's both. It's a game when played casually between friends, but it is also an organised sport.

Here's another possible factor of demarcation: Professionals do not play games.

Sure they do. They play games for money. Professional football matches are called "football games." American fans of football will ask each other "Did you catch the game last night?"

Quote from: arthwollipot on September 21, 2023, 08:16:04 PM... If there are people playing it professionally, then when they're doing so, it's a sport.

Sports can be games. Games can be sports. But not all games are sports, and not all sports are games. All three of the activities called "football" are games which are sports, and can be professional, amateur, or casual. Bicycling is a sport, but not a game. It can be professional, amateur, or casual. Chess is a game, but not a sport. It can be professional, amateur, or casual. Sometimes the lines are not clear. I personally do not consider the game of ping-pong to be a sport, but I understand the view of people who feel that it is. It can be professional, amateur, or casual.

Once ESPN started showing poker tournaments, all the definitions when out the window! 

A lot of people enjoy watching other people play games. Some of those games are sports, and others are not. Poker can be exciting if there's a lot of money at stake. ESPN can show whatever they like, and they can call themselves a sports network, but that doesn't make poker a sport. (Poker is a bluffing game, and bluffing is a skill. It's ridiculous to call it a game of chance.)

BTW, I enjoy looking at great chess games, but not in real time. Years ago I used to play out games from a book. Nowadays there are websites and you can select a game, and then click through it at your own pace. It's fun to try to figure out what the grandmaster's next move will be.

I don't much care for watching lighting chess games, of which there are many on YouTube: They go too fast for me to follow. And pressing pause/resume constantly is annoying.

Quote from: Quetzalcoatl on September 25, 2023, 01:16:01 PM

Quote from: Harry Black on September 24, 2023, 07:44:07 PMJust to say that the malice/incompetence bit is not an actual logical rule.
It is a heuristic and one that becomes less useful every year as the malicious scumbags learn that they can hide behind it.
There is no inherent truth to it. It is just a handy way for people in power to avoid accountability.

It is a useful rule of thumb though.

If Bush had any direct influence or knowledge of things, why not blame it on Saddam Hussein immediately instead of spending two years trying to link al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein?

There were no links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Bush had a bug up his ass about Hussein going all the way back to his dad's presidency. He wanted an excuse to invade Iraq and jumped on the first one he found. Which happened to be not a link to al Qaeda, but the supposed (actually nonexistent) chemical weapons.

Quote from: Harry Black on September 24, 2023, 07:44:07 PMJust to say that the malice/incompetence bit is not an actual logical rule.
It is a heuristic and one that becomes less useful every year as the malicious scumbags learn that they can hide behind it.
There is no inherent truth to it. It is just a handy way for people in power to avoid accountability.

Of course it's not an actual logical rule.

I just think that G.W. Bush was a moron but not a psychopath.

I have decided that Becky and Wrath of Becky are my two favorite movies, displacing The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, which was my favorite.

I don't need a calculator to tell me how much to eat or exercise. I need somebody to whack me upside the head halfway through each of my meals, and tell me to fucking stop!

(My weight is well within the healthy range. But fat is buoyant and I want to be less buoyant for freediving. So I want to lose some fat.)

I thought he said "car key therapy." "CAR-T" makes more sense.

It happens all too often that one of them is explaining something interesting and several of the others interrupt and start shouting and I can't hear the substance. That happened in this episode when they were talking about the uncoiled length of a DNA strand. I could not hear the length because several of them were shouting at the same time!

If westerners want China to stop building coal-fired power plants, we need to give them massive aid to help them raise their population out of poverty in a sustainable manner. But of course, America sees China as a political and economic enemy. The human race is fucked because we're too fucking stupid to cooperate and share. The west developed at the expense of the rest of the world, and they're not going to live in poverty just because we have taken the world's entire carbon budget for ourselves. Either we share our wealth with them, or they'll continue to burn coal until we all suffocate.

CONGRATULATIONS!!!! to Doctor Cara!

G.W. Bush cynically used the 9/11 attacks to justify a war he already wanted to wage. And it seems clear that American intelligence services were incompetent. Bush grossly mismanaged affairs in the aftermath of the attacks, and made the world a significantly more dangerous place by destabilizing two nations that were then taken over by religious extremists. He deserves extreme opprobrium for his stupidity and incompetence.

But I don't think he did anything with the intention of opening up America to the attacks. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence."

Quote from: bachfiend on September 23, 2023, 10:22:55 PM

Quote from: Belgarath on September 23, 2023, 08:58:21 PM

Quote from: bachfiend on September 23, 2023, 08:26:38 PMI've had my disagreements with CarbShark, but this time he's right.  Exercise is ineffective in producing sustained weight loss, and it isn't contrary to the laws of physics.  It's just that adding exercise doesn't increase energy expended over the day.  So calories in minus calories out still applies.

You're doing the same thing he is, which is to leave out information in your statements and mislead.

In order for your statement to be true, then one must be either 1) Increasing their caloric intake to compensate for the exercise or 2) decreasing the calories they spend in the remainder of their day, offsetting the increased calories expended doing the exercise. Or possibly 3) A combination of 1 and 2.

Quote from: daniel1948 on September 23, 2023, 08:49:21 PMThen how do you explain that high-altitude mountain climbers and arctic trekkers burn so many calories that it's nearly impossible for them to consume enough calories and they inevitably lose a LOT of weight? They often report that they feel sickened by the quantity of extremely high-calorie food they need to eat, and they STILL lose weight.

The amount of exercise that a casual fitness enthusiast does, doesn't burn very many calories (run a mile, burn an apple) but extreme exercise burns a lot of calories.

ETA: You can break the laws against robbing banks, but you can't break the laws of thermodynamics.

Of course he knows this.

When you adopt an exercise program to attain and maintain a healthy body weight you change your metabolism so that you're using the calories you're consuming more efficiently while not exercising. As you become conditioned, your weight plateaus, and you stop losing weight, despite doing exactly the same amount of exercise, and consuming exactly the same number of calories.

Exercise makes a relatively small contribution to calorie burn for most people only because most people do only enough exercise to burn an apple or two. And you have it backwards: Jogging three miles a day, while it only burns three apples, increases your basal metabolism, aiding in fat loss. Of course you still need to reduce your calorie intake if you want significant fat loss. OTOH, if you reduce your calorie intake WITHOUT exercising, your basal metabolism will decline as your body attempts to maintain homeostasis. Fat loss requires BOTH exercise and calorie reduction, OR extreme exercise at a level that only serious athletes are capable of.

Quote from: bachfiend on September 23, 2023, 10:22:55 PM... There's no other way of explaining why hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari Desert have the same daily energy expenditure to American couch potatoes despite having widely different activity levels.

Hunter-gatherers, contrary to popular perception, are not all that more active than people in industrialized countries. They don't have couches or TVs but they have a lot of leisure time.

Quote from: bachfiend on September 23, 2023, 10:22:55 PMIf you start an exercise program then you have to continue forever.

The above statement suggests that starting an exercise program causes a change which requires you to continue it. This is ridiculous! Exercise is necessary for good health, REGARDLESS of whether you exercised previously or not.

Quote from: bachfiend on September 23, 2023, 08:15:47 PM... exertion doesn't affect energy expenditure. ...

Quote from: bachfiend on September 23, 2023, 08:26:38 PM... adding exercise doesn't increase energy expended over the day. ...

Then how do you explain that high-altitude mountain climbers and arctic trekkers burn so many calories that it's nearly impossible for them to consume enough calories and they inevitably lose a LOT of weight? They often report that they feel sickened by the quantity of extremely high-calorie food they need to eat, and they STILL lose weight.

The amount of exercise that a casual fitness enthusiast does, doesn't burn very many calories (run a mile, burn an apple) but extreme exercise burns a lot of calories.

ETA: You can break the laws against robbing banks, but you can't break the laws of thermodynamics.

The laws of thermodynamics always hold true. Calories in vs calories out always holds true. But the metabolism of an individual is extremely complex and varies from one person to the next, and unless you happen to be "the average person" you're going to have to find the numbers that work for you and the ways that work for you to overcome the urge to eat.