Halloween is one of my two favorite holidays (the other being Groundhog’s Day), but last year we had a slight mishap: The kids who knocked on our door had already opened the screen door, so when I opened the door, Ashley ran outside and chased the kids around.

She was really just doing zoomies, but the little kids were very reasonably terrified to be chased by a dog.

So this year we’re not going to open our door. But we will be giving out candy. There’ll be a bag on our doorstep, with this sign on the door itself.

I’ll put it out at 5:00 PM or so, and then do my best to remember not to open the door until trick-or-treating time is over.

It seems like every business now has its own app, which usually offers remote ordering, as well as discounts. I do my best not to use any of them, because they demand (and transmit to the business) all sorts of private information from my phone. This seems to me like something my phone ought to fix.

It ought to be pretty easy on the phone to provide a virtual machine which only passes to an app whatever information the phone owner wants to pass on. For example, you could configure a video loop to provide, if the app wants to turn on the camera, or an audio file to provide if the app wants to turn on the microphone.

You could get quite fancy about things like location, if you wanted to. For example, a fast food app could be provided a random location, but one that was a configurable distance from the fast food restaurant. (I’m imagining that the fast food apps either already do, or soon will, adjust the price based on where you are. For example, if you’re already in the parking lot, they can raise the price, assuming that you’ve already decided to buy from them. They can cut the price if a competitor is closer to your location, to reduce the chance that you’ll stop there instead. The phone could pick a location to maximize your discount, to the extent that people had been able to figure out and share the algorithm.)

These sorts of tweaks would be easy to implement, but there’s no functionality in phones to provide them. It’s as if the manufacturers of the phones want to rat you out to every business with a phone app.

I resist by strictly limiting which apps I install on my phone. But I’d be a lot happier with a virtual machine which would put me in control of what data about me those installed apps could get.

For much of my life I thought that the key to losing weight was just exercising more. Especially in the mid-1980s, when I lived in Utah and California, I’d get out for some long hikes in the mountains and deserts and think, “If I could just do this all the time, it would be easy to maintain a proper weight.” That turns out to be both true and false.

The fitness influencer types like to say things along the lines of “You can’t outrun your fork,” meaning that you simply can’t burn enough calories to get ahead of eating way too much. I knew that wasn’t completely true. Read about any long-distance endurance athlete (ultra-marathoner, Tour de France rider, etc.) and you’ll have a window into really extreme efforts to eat enough just to keep going, let alone enough to recover for the next day’s effort.

I also have a slightly more ordinary example. A couple of guys I knew tried to bicycle around Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, and had to abandon the effort halfway through, because their riding (100+ miles per day) burned so many calories (perhaps 5000 calories on top of their basal metabolic rate, so maybe 7500 calories per day total), they ran out of money for food.

It’s tough to eat 7500 calories per day even without the financial limit, so it seems like, if you have all day to do nothing but exercise, and the will to exercise hard for several hours a day, perhaps you could “outrun your fork.”

Recent research shows that this is not the case, except in the very short term. People who are very active all day, like hunter-gatherers (but also subsistence farmers, and laborers of other sorts), burn more calories than people who are sedentary all day, but only modestly more.

A recent study showed that among of Hadza people, activity was almost insignificant as a predictor of total energy expenditure. They were remarkably active, but their calorie consumption was pretty ordinary. The study suggests that body size is just about all that matters

In that study, average total energy expenditure among Hadza men was 2649 calories per day. The average is higher among western men, but only because their body size is greater. (Hadza men averaged 50.9 kg (112 lbs), while Western men averaged 81.0 kg (179 lbs). Differences in BMI are more stark, with Hadza men having a BMI averaging 20.3, while Western men’s BMIs averaged 25.6.)

The point here is that it seems like your biology is attuned to wanting to eat 2600 calories and wanting to burn 2600 calories. (Adjust for frame size. It seems the Hadza men averaged about 5′ 2″.) You can be sedentary, under-eat to match, and not gain weight, but it’s not in tune with what you’re body wants, so you’ll be hungry all the time, as well as having all the side-effects of under-movement.

You can also try to exercise enough to burn more than 2600 calories, but it seems that as soon as you go over that level, your body starts trying to compensate—turning down whatever is easy to turn down, such as your immune system, and muscle-building system.

That doesn’t happen immediately. If you go on a century ride you will burn the extra 5000 calories that simple arithmetic would suggest. That would probably continue if you went on a three-day bicycle tour. But pretty quickly—probably just in a week or so—less-essential body functions would ramp down (and of course fatigue would ramp up) bringing your total consumption back down toward 2600 calories.

You can see how this would work well for hunters. You go for a hunt one day (or two or three days), hiking or running for miles, finding prey, tracking it, and finally killing it. Then you (and your whole tribe) have lots of food to eat for a day (or two or three). During extended periods of excess activity maybe your immune system and muscle-building system ramps down, but then during periods of ample food and less activity, maybe it ramps up extra, allowing for full recovery.

Consuming more calories than you burn for more than a few days, however, quickly leads to problems. Increased fat storage is probably the least of them. Insulin resistance is another. Systemic inflammation is another. Those extra calories will go into the things that get turned down when you’re extra-active, such as the immune system. I don’t know that there’s any evidence, but an obvious possibility is that a lot of auto-immune disorders are just an immune system that never gets turned down because people are never active enough to burn more calories than they eat, if only for a day or two.

I think it’s true that you can’t out-exercise excess calorie consumption. However, you can definitely under-exercise—and trying to under-eat to match that will also cause problems. Humans evolved to thrive with an ideal level of activity.

It’s also true that you don’t need to hit that particular level of activity and food consumption every day. In fact, I’m sure you’d be better off to be moderately active most days, and then very active 1–3 days a week. My long-ago dream of being able to hike 10–15 miles every day and then eat all I want turns out to be a terrible idea. Rather, you want to walk 5 or 6 miles most days, and then hike 10–15 miles just once or twice a week. (Feel free to swap in bicycling or rowing or whatever you like for the long days of vigorous activity, although you probably want to keep in the basic walking if you possibly can.)

I don’t get why people are treating Helene like some unpredictable catastrophe, rather than just the way things are now.

I’m like, “Hey, it’s going to be like this all the time from now on—either impending disaster, disaster occurring, trying to rescue people from the disaster, or recovering from disaster—from now on.”

It’s weird that people don’t understand that. I mean, it’s so obvious to me, but people are still treating each new disaster as an unpredictable one-off.

Although some people are getting a clue. Zillow, for example, will now show climate risks for property listings in the US.

There’s a small creek that runs behind Winfield Village. It feeds the ponds in the Lake Park subdivision, and then the water flows on to the Embarras River.

It usually has only three or four inches of water in it, but after heavy rain it swells quite a bit.

For years now, I’ve been trying to figure out (and writing about figuring out) how to exercise in ways that support all the different things I want to do. My latest hobby, HEMA (sword fighting), has seemed like it required more support than most of my other activities, which prompted more (and more different) exercise than I’d been doing before. I’ve worried for a while that I was overdoing it, and I’m now pretty sure that’s been true.

The specific experiment that convinced me was skipping a few HEMA practice sessions. My HEMA club has two-hour practice sessions on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Two weeks ago I just wasn’t feeling it on Tuesday, and then again on Thursday. Each of those two days I skipped practice, but otherwise did my regular workouts—and started feeling more energetic each day. Last week I repeated that. Not only did I continue to feel better, I also was able to step up my regular workouts a bit.

I’ve had two specific issues: a sore elbow and a sore neck.

I’m pretty sure the sore elbow is not HEMA-related, but rather dog-walking related. I think I’ve fixed the issue with how I was handling the dog, but my elbow has been slow to recover—probably because of either how I was handling my longsword, or else how I was exercising to support my longsword training. Having taking a break from longsword training (just going on Sundays, when we’ve been doing rapier training), and having my elbow get much better, even while I continued doing the rest of my exercise regimen, I’m pretty sure it was the actual longsword training that was keeping my elbow from getting better. As I write this, it’s feeling entirely better.

The sore neck, I suspect, is also HEMA-related, I think due to the asymmetrical stance of longsword. (Rapier stance is even more asymmetrical, but I haven’t been doing it as long or as vigorously.) Anyway, after a couple weeks of less training, my neck was, and is, feeling much better.

Of course I’m doing all the regular stuff to enhance recovery: stretching, good diet, trying to get plenty of sleep, etc.

I’m still working toward a plan for exercise. My current thinking is to give up one of Tuesday or Thursday HEMA practice. Then I’ll do four days a week of general exercise focused on support for my HEMA activities: Specifically, I’ve started two different programs of steel club swinging, one 1-handed and the other 2-handed, with a plan to do each of those two days a week. That would add up to 4 days a week. Add to that 2 days a week for HEMA training, and I’d be exercising 6 days a week, with one day of complete rest.

No one day of that should be completely exhausting, so maybe I’ll be able to recover better than I have been.

I use micro.blog to send out my newsletter. I’m generally pretty happy with its newsletter system, but it does have a serious mis-feature: There’s a very narrow window for editing the newsletter between when it generates it, and when when it sends it out.

The main thing I want to edit is the front text that goes at the top of the email, ahead of the blog posts that I’ve identified as ones that should go into the newsletter. As near as I can tell, there’s no way to create that text until micro.blog gives me the draft newsletter. By default (the way I had it set up until a few minutes ago), there is then only 30 minutes before the newsletter goes out.

That might be fine, except in practice it turns out that the alert arrives after I’ve left on my main morning dog walk, and then the newsletter goes out before I get back.

As a stop-gap I’ve increased that gap to 3 hours (the largest gap the system allows, it would appear). That’s not perfect—I’d like to be able to write the front-matter anytime in the month before the newsletter goes out, and then edit it repeatedly over the month. But it’s good enough that at least I won’t keep missing it just because my dog gets to luxuriate in a long morning walk every day.

Somebody in the local HEMA Discord shared:

“The fact I gotta train 3–5 days a week to keep my body at “moderately broken,” while my cat sleeps all day, and can do parkour with ease, is a crime.”

Another guy said:

“Maybe the reason the cat’s ok and needs to sleep all day is because it spends all it’s waking time doing parkour. If you did parkour all day and then slept for 12 hours you’d probably be able to keep up with the cat.”

To which I said:

“I have spent the last 15 years of my life trying to arrange it exactly like this. I have not yet achieved complete success, but I haven’t given up.”

As someone who’s been paying attention to AI since the 1970s, I’ve noticed the same pattern over and over: People will say, “It takes real intelligence to do X (win at chess, say), so doing that successfully will mean we’ve got AI.” Then someone will do that, and people will look at how it’s done and say, “Well, but it’s just using Y (deep lookup tables and lots of fast board evaluations, say). That’s not really AI.”

For the first time (somewhat later than I expected), I just heard someone doing the same thing with large language models. “It’s just predicting the next word based on frequencies in its training data. That’s not really AI.”

Happens every time.

I have written very little in a long time. But today I started working on something new, and I have a plan to get another (related) thing that I wrote a while ago ready to submit.

The older thing is a bit of steampunk-esque whimsy that I started as an experiment in voice, and found I rather liked. As it grew, I realized that it was longer than a short story, and a market I was interested in was about to open to novella submissions, so I thought I’d just let it grow.

One thing I do when I’m writing is to just drop bits in that seem cool, as possible set-ups for later bits. This often works out very well. Sometimes, though, those bits of set-up imply stuff that doesn’t get written. That happened this time, and I made a list of bits that either needed the follow-up stuff written, or else be deleted.

Since I was aiming at novella length (and I wasn’t there yet), I figured that I could just write those bits out. But several didn’t end up working out. So now my plan is to make another pass through the planned novella, delete the bits that didn’t go anywhere, turn it into a novelette, and get it submitted somewhere.

But that is all work for another day. Today I’ve started on something new: a sequel to that story. I remain delighted by the characters, by the steampunky world, and by the voice I used to write the story. And yesterday I came up with part of a new idea.

Just now I jotted down a few sentences, which I very much hope to get back to later today.

As one of many pleasant outings during our visit, Steven took us to the New England Botanic Garden. It was a good choice for the group, providing opportunities for walks of all different lengths for people who wanted to walk further or less far.

There were, of course, lots of plants to see (f you’re a fan of diverse hostas, you’d be in heaven), but I found myself drawn to the art, and particularly enjoyed the sculptures. Although not religious myself, I don’t mind religious art, but I do find the endless Christian iconography one tends to find especially in the Midwest to be tedious. So I always enjoy anything different.

The New England Botanic Garden had a lot of western classical art, one sort I particularly enjoy. (I always like allegorical personifications (like Liberty and Justice, but lots of others as well), and I saw figures for Summer and Autumn (although I failed to get pictures of those). I also like classical western architecture—especially faux architecture, such as follies, which they had one of, along with a Temple of Peace. And I did manage to capture a photo of the statue of Pan.

Well worth visiting, if you’re in the area, and like botany or classical western art.

I’ve been thinking about longevity too long and too hard. It isn’t something that I suddenly started doing when I reached my 60s, or even when I hit middle age. I can remember as a high school student figuring out that I’d need to live about two thousand years to have time to learn and do all the stuff I wanted to learn and do.

Sadly, everything we know now suggests that lifestyle improvements can get you a life extension of 7 years—maybe as much as 11 years, if you get serious about it. I mean, that’s not nothing, but it’s not going to get me to two thousand years, or even to eleventy-one, like Bilbo. (That’s what I lowered my sights to, when I realized that two thousand years was unlikely.)

I was briefly pretty hopeful in the late 1980s, when it looked like nanotech might produce amazing longevity gains. But, no. Turns out except for a few materials-science things—stuff like that tweaking the surface of glass to make it self-cleaning—the only nanotech that anyone has been able to get to do anything remotely interesting is biotech. I mean, MRNA vaccines are awesome, but nothing like the nanotech we were promised.

Considering how much is written about longevity, the stuff that actually works offers pretty minimal benefits. Getting a life extension of 7 to 11 years look pretty easy, just by doing the obvious, boring stuff, and practically none of the fancy bio-hacky things have any evidence behind them at all.

So what are the boring things that work?

Eat food

Don’t eat industrially produced food-like substances. Eat in reasonable amounts. Eat diversely. I saw one study that suggested that any exclusion-based diet—keto, carnivore, vegan, etc.—seemed to be associated with poorer health outcomes. (On the other hand, if one of those things produces benefits in the short term—for me, it’s eating low-carb—there’s no reason not to do it long enough to reap those benefits. But long-term you want a diverse diet.)

Exercise

Until recently the only real evidence-based exercise advice was for 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity exercise (brisk walking, basically). But recently it has become very clear that maintaining muscle mass, strength, and power are beneficial in multiple ways (everything from reducing falls to providing a glucose sink). Separately, a high V̇O₂ max is strongly associated with a longer life. So although there’s little evidence for weight lifting, running, or high-intensity cardo, there is now very good evidence that the entirely expectable results of those exercise modalities are excellent for longevity. So: diverse exercise is going to help you live longer.

Manage your blood pressure, blood glucose, and blood lipids

Really good diet and exercise can maybe eliminate the need for drugs. But taking the drugs if you need them can help a lot.

Enjoy life

There’s good evidence of benefit from social connection. There’s good evidence of benefit from time spent in nature. There’s good evidence of benefit from having a positive mental attitude. (All those are suspect, because being sick makes them tougher to do, so you’re selecting out some fraction of the people who are going to die young, which makes the statistics misleading. But there’s not much point in a long life unless you’re going to enjoy it, so why not?)

Other stuff

I’ve refrained from mentioning the bio-hacky stuff that I’ve spent way too much time thinking about. Not just the nanotech stuff, but also all the rest: All of the supplements, sleep hacks, drinking more (or less) coffee (or tea or bone broth or mushroom-enhanced beverages), etc.

It’s not that things like sleep aren’t important. It’s that there’s essentially no evidence that any specific intervention is going to help in a measurable way. In fact, there can’t ever be any such evidence. The experiment can’t be done. And if it were done, the effect wouldn’t be measurable.

I mean, if you have a diagnosis for a problem—sleep apnea, for example—then treating that problem could very easily be transformational, not just for your longevity, but for your life right now. But giving everyone a CPAP machine would do no good. Furthermore, picking a few random sleep hacks—avoiding caffeine after mid-day, wearing blue-blocker glasses, or tweaking your pre-bedtime routine—isn’t going to make any difference across the population. (Any one of those might help you in particular, and if it does, more power to you. But none of those, even if adopted by 100% of the population, is going to add a year to the average lifespan.)

If you’re interested in details, you might look at the recent New York Times article “The Key to Longevity Is Boring.” Another option would be to read the Peter Attia book Outlive, or listen to his most recent podcast episode, Longevity 101, either of which does a great job of covering the handful of things that will give you that extra 7 to 11 years of life.

I’m finally sending out my newsletter! An “issue zero” just went out, but starting next month you’ll be getting actual newsletters. My first cut at a title is “Sword fighting, writing, and a dog,” because that’s what I seem to be spending my time on these days. (I’ll try to get more writing stuff in than I have been just lately.)

If you’re interested, subscribe here: https://philipbrewer.micro.blog/subscribe/

Last night, in celebration of my birthday the day before, my local HEMA club (Tempered Mettle Historical Fencing) honored me with what’s called a “bearpit”: I faced all comers with rapier or longsword for three passes each.

I made a video:

All consumer-grade heart rate monitors have issues. Chest straps are pretty good. The optical captures from wrist (Google Pixel watch, etc.) or finger (Oura ring) are quite a bit less accurate.

I’ve generally just tolerated it—taking the reported data with a grain of salt—but sometimes it would be nice to get good data. Today I did a little experiment with my Google Pixel watch—tightening the strap at the midpoint of my run—and found that it seems to give me pretty good data this way.

What you see is my warm-up, followed by 1 mile out and then 1 mile back. The HR shown for the “out” phase (averaging maybe 180 bpm) is ridiculous—what it’s capturing is not my HR, but rather my step rate.

In the second half my HR goes from about 160 to slightly above 170 (gradually rising as I get tired), and that’s probably just about right.

(The standard formula for estimating your maximum heart rate is 220 minus your age, which would give a max HR of 156 for someone of my age. But that’s clearly wrong for me. I pretty regularly see peak HRs of just over 170 that seem entirely legit. I assume that my genes and my training history just give me a higher max HR than typical. Sadly, it doesn’t make me faster, as you can see from my average pace for this run. I was running literally as fast as I thought I could maintain for 2 miles.)

Anyway, I think I can recommend tightening up the Pixel watch band as tight as tolerable, for getting the most accurate data.

In my previous post, I talked about RDL (Romanian dead lift) the exercise. In HEMA practice RDL refers to something else: the writers of three famous glosses of Lichtenauer’s Zettel (a long didactic poem on sword fighting) by Sigmund ain Ringeck, Pseudo-Peter von Danzig, and Jud Lew.

So far, I’m reading a different gloss of the poem (although I’ll probably get to those as well):

I recently bought a new adjustable kettlebell. I got it specifically because the adjustable kettlebell I already had has a rather large gap in weights: It goes from 25 lbs to 35 lbs (11 kg to 16 kg).

I’d been doing clean and press at 25 lbs. (I do a reverse ladder, where I do 5 left and 5 right, then 4, 3, 2, and 1, then put the weight down. That’s one set.) I started at 4 sets, and over a few weeks worked up to doing 10 sets, at which point I figured it was time go up in weight.

Sadly, it turned out that I couldn’t make the jump. After a failed attempt, I cut the reverse ladder down to start at 3 (rather than 5), and started at just 3 sets. I managed one workout like that, but when I tried to do another workout, I didn’t even make it as far as I had the first time.

So, I bought a new, more adjustable kettlebell: the Wildman Athletica competition adjustable kettlebell. It will allow me to make ½ kg jumps, if that what it takes to be able to go up in weight successfully.

It starts at 12 kg, which by happy coincidence is right where I need to be for my clean & press workouts.

The downside of the Wildman kettlebell is that it isn’t so easy to adjust the weight. Whereas my other adjustable weight kettlebell can be adjusted with a quick click of a dial, the Wildman adjustable kettlebell has to be opened up with a hex wrench, and then have weight plates added (or removed), and then tightened back up again. This is no big deal if you have to do it once or twice a month as you finish one cycle in an exercise program, but is pretty tedious if you have to do it every day or two as you switch between exercises—and 12 kg is rather low for lower-body exercises (for me). My other adjustable bell goes to 40 lb (18 kg) and my fixed-weight bell is 53 lb (24 kg)), and either of those is a much for appropriate weight for, let’s say, kettlebell swings.

So, I was trying to think of a lower-body exercise I could do with just 12 kg, and still get a reasonable muscle-building stimulus. I thought about hand-to-hand swings, which would work okay for the upper body, but wouldn’t make much difference as far as the lower body goes. Then I thought of single-leg Romanian dead lifts.

If I were doing regular (2-legged) Romanian dead lifts (RDL) with a barbell, I’d be able to use close to 135 lbs. You might assume half of that would be about right for a single-leg RDL, but the SLRDL turns out to require a much higher level of skill, because it’s a tricky balance exercise, as well as a strength exercise. In particular, it really works the smaller muscles of the feet and ankles—needed to keep from falling over.

All of which is to say that I think SLRDLs will turn out to be a very fine exercise for my purposes, at least for a while. I started at 5 sets of 5 left / 5 right, and just like with the clean & press expect to be able to run it up to 10 sets. Then, just like with the clean & press, I should be able to go up in weight. At some point—when I get the skill component nailed—I’ll probably see the weight I want for the lower-body exercise go up faster than the the weight for the upper-body exercise. But at least for a little while, I think I’m all set.