For endurance athletes

Apparently in the realm of "extreme sports", a young woman has gained a medal, and some notoriety, as she soiled herself, and a few things around her (like the track), with explosive diarrhea as she won a competition.  No, there will be no pictures.

And it struck me that having done endurance sports throughout my life, and having had the opportunity to be very worried about whether my bowels would stay put through the entire race, and having run quickly to the bathroom or the woods at times, I've got some experience with handling this sort of thing.

The first thing to remember, in my view, is that the porta-potty is there for a reason, and is a medal so important that it justifies exposing everyone to one's personal bowel microbiome?

The other thing that comes to mind comes from an experience I had as a young man.  When I got my first apartment and started cooking for myself, it occurred quickly to me that the maple syrup I'd treated myself to really overpowered the white flour pancakes I was making.  Hence, I started using whole wheat flour for my breakfast pancakes, and then I noticed fairly soon that I wasn't needing to take nearly as many potty breaks as I did before.  It was a bonus both for flavor and my own health.

Moreover, as I consider athletic performance foods--protein bars, gel packs, protein powders, and the like--what I see very often (not always) is that there's a lot of sugar in most of them, and very little fiber in many of them.  Now look up how excess sugar, and a lack of fiber, can lead to diarrhea.  Yes, sugar goes quickly to glycogen and muscle energy, but it also has other effects.

Your fellow runners will thank you.  Take it a little easy on the sugar, get some good fiber (oatmeal is apparently key for many Olympians at breakfast), and have a great, filth-free race.

A terrifying thought with AI

As much as I am on the side of Ukraine in their war against Muscovy (Russia), there is one thing that terrifies me; that the drones which are doing most of the killing will become more fully autonomous, and the end result will be armies that can simply commit mass murder by launching the drones in the general direction of the victims, something of a "Skynet" kind of situation, but without the dry one-liners for which Ahnuld is rightly famous.

I would say that we could simply trust that world leaders are sane enough not to do so, but with Vodka attacking mostly schools and apartment buildings, Pooh putting millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps, and Sparkles Khamenei murdering and executing tens of thousands for the "crime" of not liking the current government, I don't think that I can take that assumption to the bank.

So what do we do?  Well, the Kyivan Rus has shown us a way to start with massive investments in jamming and anti-aircraft defense, and until Skynet really gets going and becomes more fully autonomous, that will be an effective, if very expensive way of preventing things from going too far.  Finding and destroying launch sites will further limit things.  

But that noted, I think we have some very real things to deal with with AI, as the Poohs, Vodkas, and Sparkle-Mullahs of the world love the idea of projecting power without needing to persuade people.

Say what?

Back in the day, in the 1960s through the 1980s, it was said that one could fail an FBI background check for classified clearances if one had lived with someone outside of marriage--the logic was, rightly or wrongly, that the embarrassment of having that revealed could induce someone to wrongly share classified data.  That is certainly the logic behind the "honey traps" engaged in by the KGB.

So I was shocked yesterday to see that today, bestiality is not an automatic disqualification for FBI employment.  Now is this horrific?

Well, not really, and Kash Patel needs to work on his messaging.  What Patel is actually referring to was that the FBI will not automatically disqualify those who have been sexually abused by being forced into things like bestiality, and (within the reality that sexual abuse leads to mental illness and such) I can go along with this--and Patel should have said "what the policy actually says is that a history of being sexually abused does not automatically disqualify a candidate."

A bit more about big buildings

A few years ago, I noticed something very interesting; that modern masonry buildings tend to have an expansion joint filled with a rubber-like material every 20-40 feet, while older ones can go on for blocks with no such expansion joint. I also noticed that modern cinderblock buildings tend to crack a lot, and providentially, I visited the home of a friend who is a mason, and asked him what was up.

He explained to me that the mortar is different; older buildings use lime mortar, which apparently is a little bit more flexible and tolerant of thermal cycles, while for the past 80 years or so, most builders have used Portland cement, which is more rigid and thus brittle.  Hence newer masonry buildings need expansion joints, and will crack if they are insufficient.  You'll see the same thing in finished garages if they don't have adequate climate control (like mine), or even large rooms finished with sheetrock.  Brittle materials don't do well with thermal cycling.

Lesson for those who would build gigantic monuments to themselves is that engineering-wise, it gets difficult with modern materials, and hence building on a smaller scale, and using materials that will flex better with thermal cycles, will be wise.  We might say that physics tells us to create our homes and businesses on a more human scale.

Urban planning; let's make more targets

This is something of a follow-up to something I posted over a decade ago; that in many ways, gigantic buildings like the Sears ("Willis") Tower and World Trade Center really don't make sense except as a statement of ego.  The cost then was about 5-10x the cost of construction on a normal scale, and there are developments with the war in Ukraine that make this even more so.

Specifically, we're seeing how "Shahed" drones can, when they crash into an apartment building (war crime, yes), put several families out of a home and make significant portions of the building uninhabitable.  We are seeing how warfare, at least by the Russian and Iranian model, is to attack hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings with swarms of drones.

Now in the best of situations, this is bad, and it's even worse when one realizes that to get to shelters, residents need to go down stairs or the elevators--exposing them to more danger from those same drones.  And in that light, I think we need to remember the example of the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts, which famously tricked the Yamato into firing on her as if she were a cruiser--using armor piercing shells that simply went through Roberts, as well as other ships like the escort carrier Gambier Bay.

In other words, architecture can try to withstand this kind of assault (like a cruiser or battleship), or it can simply serve as a target for very expensive munitions, and while jet Shaheds are relatively cheap, their price is still....about the price of a home, $100-200k.

And so we might wonder whether, as we consider this new (and horrific) way of war, we might combine de-Sovietization (removal of gigantic apartment complexes) with smaller scale (and nicer) buildings that....let's just admit it....would be far more inviting to not only residents, but also prospective businesses that might want to set up shop, and--as the mess of war recedes--even tourists.

Really, for the past 150 years or so, urban planning has been working on a model built around the steam engine--where factories and buildings were made ever more massive more or less to keep the steam engine working and justify its cost.  Now that the production of energy can be done on a much smaller scale, it's time to reconsider that model.

Driving the world to drink

I am told that a common nickname for "Vladimir" is "Voda", really something of a diminutive, and that "ka" at the end of a name is also a diminutive.

So we might wonder if we might refer to Mr. Putin as "Vodka", or "little little Vlad".  Somehow it fits as he drives the world to drink. It is also fitting that Mr. Putin is, like the beverage whose name he reflects, the worst enemy of the Russian people.

The main reason not to do so, of course, is because there are some good uses for the beverage, but not so much for the bald-headed judo boy.

Never mind those pogroms, says Dana Nessel

In a mind-boggling twist on the story of Esther, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is imploring Michigan Jews to put a "collective future" above the good of their own people--as if it means nothing that Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has made a bunch of anti-Israel and flat out anti-semitic comments, and as if it means nothing that El-Sayed's good friend Hasan Piker is even worse, and was allowed to campaign for El-Sayed.

In Nessel's, um, defense, she is a lesbian, so we might infer that tight fidelity to Torah and Tanach is not exactly in her rhetorical wheelhouse, but still....

Personally, I get that many have great discomfort with the fact that Hamas is hiding their military assets behind apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, and the like--but at the same time, I have to ask what Israel is supposed to do.  Are they supposed to allow Hamas to remain armed for another mass attack?  Our world has a huge issue with bad actors--Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Iran, and (ahem) Russia--using the laws of war not to restrain their own actions, but to seek advantage over those who do try to follow the laws of war.