Pink granite Merrimack Point

From Ram Island:

Deprivation Dieting

I have been dieting hard. I was thinking of starting a YouTube channel to explain my "Deprivation Dieting" but, for now, here were the main thoughts:

Dieting is a way of life. You have to commit to it and figure out how to embrace the discomfort. So -yes- it involves discipline but not so much on a day-to-day basis as with an overall discipline to "enjoy" the dieting. You can do this if you feel lighter on your feet and physically healthier; but you do it primarily by planning some nice low calorie meals. Get ready to de-prioritize everything else because dieting will be your main activity.

After 3 years of Covid pandemic, I was seriously overweight at 200lbs. I knew well that I had to start getting my life together as the pandemic started to fade. Currently I am at 165lbs and hoping to lose another 15lbs. Then I'll worry about how to get back to "normal" eating. 

After Covid, I went to the Doctor and was told I had Type II diabetes and needed to start taking lots of pills. I am now taking a few, notably Berberine, but I refused to buy into the diabetes framing and by blood glucose and blood pressure have dropped back closer to "normal" range because of the dieting [and also blood pressure pills]. My initial problem was too much glucose. So the essential premise of my dieting has been eliminate carbohydrates - or replace them with carbohydrates (like graham crackers) that also have a lot of fiber. I am supposed to be eating more vegetables but fat and protein are OK. 

The feeling of losing weight is precisely the feeling of being hungry. So get used to being hungry all the time. Going to bed hungry, waking up hungry, and waiting for lunch. This is how a nice meal can become a delicious meal.

Supposedly a body my size and age needs 1,500 to 2,000 calories per day. So my goal was to eat fewer than 1,000 calories per day until I lost the weight. I also try to have an occasional "austerity" day, where I try to stay below 700 calories for the day. I am estimating calories and surely kidding myself more than a little. I was losing weight quickly two months ago. Now it is getting slower and I am having trouble keeping the discipline. Gosh I want a croissant!

So the fun part of dieting is discovering new foods. When you are hungry, things taste better. For example I am enjoying cod-liver oil. Awful as it is, it is giving me some good "Omega 3" fat. 

Standard foods are: 

 - a bit of protein on a bed of seared arugula.

Salmon:

Hard-boiled egg, with side of homemade tomato soup:

 - small bowl of oatmeal

 - soups (tomato and beef)

Ingredients of beef soup:

 - salads

Tuna and salad - a bit of hummus makes it all worthwhile.

Stuffed Turkey Breast with coleslaw and cherry tomatoes

 - walnuts and prunes for desert

 - kefir and kefir/fruit shakes

 - sauerkraut (just started)

 - protein with other fancy vegetables:

Chicken and ratatouille

Salmon and eggplant (with tomato and mozzarella) [and a tbs of rice]

Another favorite meal is a friend egg with cheese and ham, inside a "carb-balanced" tortilla which as only 80 calories and lots of fibre.

Typically I will have one of these meals, and follow it with desert consisting of a small portion of yogurt with agave syrup, or a 1/3 glass of almond-milk with 1/2 tsp of agave syrup. I usually follow this with a small handful of walnuts and two prunes. I also have a couple hundred calories of alcohol after 3PM. 

"Intensity" as a standard attribute of any verb

I have been toying with the idea that verbs are represented by nodes in the thesaurus of words, with their own peculiar attributes. Intensity seems like a reasonable candidate. Just like efficiency [the verb's version of THE GOOD]. 

I just made an error, the kind that gives you insight into cognitive processing (which I am purporting to understand in terms of narrative). I was going across the room to widen the opening of the living room sliding door and forgot what I was doing - to some extent. So I found myself across the room trying to open the slider but forgot how wide I needed to open the door. I forgot the intensity in my plan for "Peter crosses the room and opens the door".

Some pictures from a recent (ongoing) trip

Things started out normally, with the sorts of Fauvist scenes you would expect.

I was trying to draw actual things:

And of course things got a little weird, after I fell in love with the turquoise/lead-pencil combination. Not sure where I was going with this:

This is what happens when you don't know what to draw and are sitting there with your heart in your mouth.

[Note I am starting to look a bit like Selman.]

I started to calm down after an hour or so and went back to trying to draw real things. The flowers in the garden seemed inviting and a challenge to handle the details. I failed but was still enjoying playing with the colored pencils.

And now I am having some tea.

Fish Freeding Frenzy

 

September Shrooms

 Don't hurt:

For reference, here is a non-trip effort from a few weeks later:

An approach to systematizing Truisms.

 The latest list of Truisms is as follows:

TRUISMS
(X->Y)_/[place, time, manner] (events have implicit localizers)
X_/A :: X_/[A] (attributes remain constant)
X_/A_/GOOD :: X_/B_/[GOOD] (virtue is transferred between attributes of an object)
(X->Y)_/GOOD :: Y_/GOOD (efficient actions have virtue)

X->person::person_/feeling (affects cause feelings)
person_/feeling::person->Y (feelings cause actions)
(person->Y)_/[GOOD] (actions are efficient)

X*::X (contrast is resolved)


JUST-IN-TIME TRUISMS
Nar([Z]),Z (the implicit MAY become explicit)
Nar([Z]*)::Z (the blocked implicit MUST become explicit, eg "ready")
Nar(X),Nar(Y),[Nar(Z)] (lists - patterns are expected to continue)
A, B, [Nar(A,B)] (tropes - familiar pattern are expected)

***************************************************************

I have been trying to figure out some kind of logic that would reduce these to a fewer number of more fundamental parts, with little progress. I was saying to Barb: "I would like to understand how these Truisms are interrelated".

So here is an approach that should have been obvious:

Truisms are relations between narrative structures that relate topics in a "topic tree" to each other. The Truisms can be analyzed as behaviors between topics in the context of their position in the tree.

Not sure how this may work out but I can come back with at least one fruit from this tree approach (ha ha pun). 

The first Truism says: events have context. We have that events 'X-v>Y' are the simplest connection between two topics 'X' and 'Y'. First, the event name 'v' has some presence in the tree, with the typical attributes (and parts?) of any topic. But second, it connects 'X' and 'Y'. So the Truism takes the form of activating the common denominators between 'X' and 'Y' in the tree. For 'X' to act on 'Y' they must share enough context for the verb to make sense. Bob cannot slap Mary if they are in different places.

This dingy little piece of "fruit", incomplete as it is, shows the possibility of using a tree structure to explain the Truisms.  But it is an awkward formalism because other Truisms seem to corresponds to quite different tree mechanisms and principles of tree modification. It would be surprising if such quite different mechanisms would manifest as similar usages of the word "but".

The Mystery of Beta Decay

A fellow named Unzicker on YouTube has been explaining that "beta decay" is not well explained by postulating a "beta" particle that nobody can detect. He says the theorists are replacing something they do not understand (the loss of mass of the neutron when it decays into an electron and a proton) with something they cannot observe. 

Listening to another video from the same guy he pins a nobel prize winner to the wall when that person says he can ignore gravity because it is too small to detect in the situations he is measuring. 

So, here on my own blog, I am allowed to make a fool of myself and suggest that physicists should consider that the so-called weak forces holding a neutron together, are losing out to gravity when the particles get far enough apart. Perhaps it is during the conversion of weak force into gravity that mass is lost.