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crdrost commented on A two-person method to simulate die rolls (2023)   blog.42yeah.is/algorithm/... · Posted by u/Fraterkes
AlotOfReading · 10 days ago
Another procedure based on a similar problem I worked on with a friend: you both pick positive integers a and b, then add them together to create c. Either sqrt(c) or sqrt(c+1) is irrational and the fractional digits provide your random numbers. If you need a new sequence, you take some digits from the current expansion and sqrt() them again.

Might not be unbiased, but good luck proving it.

crdrost · 10 days ago
I'm not entirely sure what algebraic property you would prove with this, but you probably could prove something about it. The issue is that they have repeating continued fraction representations, and large numbers in the continued fraction correspond to very good rational approximations, and so you'd find that a bunch of these chosen at random have pretty good rational approximations, which assuming the denominator is co-prime to 10, probably means that it explores the space of digits too uniformly? Something like that.
crdrost commented on Blasting Yeast with UV Light   chillphysicsenjoyer.subst... · Posted by u/Gormisdomai
sheepscreek · a month ago
Wow. My mind is truly blown.

For anyone else wondering, I learned that in order to naturally create bacteria that aren’t going to be labelled GMO, you can blast regular bacteria with UV, then look for the ones with the same mutations as the engineered ones (with desirable traits), and now you can legally use the “natural” bacteria in Non-GMO labelled products.

Putting my personal views (from a consumption pov) on this topic aside, that is some clever “engineering”.

crdrost · a month ago
There are a bunch of tricks like this. So for instance to make antibiotic-free chicken without a commitment to being antibiotic-free and organic, raise a bunch of chickens, take any who gets sick enough to need antibiotics and put them into a separate field with their antibiotics, sell the ones that happen to not get sick as antibiotic-free, sell the other ones as usual.

Or, if you're making orange juice, make the ingredients label say oranges. But you can split it up, take the peels, put them into a hydraulic press, extract out oils that have the concentrated aroma and flavor of oranges, homogenize some of that into the juice. Or you can centrifuge the juice, or you can pass it through osmotic filters to remove some of the water and concentrate the flavor. No rule saying you can't treat some of the juice similar to sugar beet juice and try to isolate its sugars. At the end, you reassemble a perfect consistent mixture. The label doesn't have to tell you about any of this, it just has to tell you that the ingredients were oranges.

(The recipe for the best lemonade you'll ever make is like this, it's just lemons and water and sugar, but you zest the lemons into the simple syrup you're making with the sugar water, then strain it with cheesecloth or a coffee filter, before adding to the juice and water and pulp.)

Imported oils, you can basically do anything that some middleman country allows you to do with the oil (in particular mix with cheaper oils) and then say "oh this is imported olive oil, olive oil according to someone else's standards”...

crdrost commented on American Heart Association says melatonin may be linked to serious heart risks   sciencedaily.com/releases... · Posted by u/pogue
pedalpete · a month ago
Can you point to a source about the body down-regulating melatonin?

I also thought this was the case, but everything I've seen suggests that taking melatonin does not alter the natural production of melatonin.

You are correct about everything else though.

crdrost · a month ago
I mean it's understudied, but at the very least you have [1], children given high doses daily of melatonin developed delayed sleep/wake cycles when measured by DLMO (the time of day that your endogenous melatonin starts to rise) and that “Nearly all children who temporarily discontinued melatonin experienced a delay in sleep onset time,” both of which strongly suggest downregulation is happening. (Usually endogenous melatonin skews earlier with melatonin supplementation, see [2].)

Similar inefficacies have been seen clinically e.g. in [3] and are (caution, anecdata) widespread on the internet, with "melatonin doesn't work" being a popular search term with tons of articles about it. An honest to goodness test seems to have been done at [4] where they made sleep disturbance symptoms "disappear" by resuming treatment at a lower dosage, but instead of blaming the neurons they are blaming the liver, saying that it got overloaded and couldn't clear melatonin out of the bloodstream anymore in some patients—I just want to include that as a plausible alternative explanation so that you don't take my words as gospel truth or anything. I’m trained as a physicist, not a physician, and there is this meme of people with physics degrees thinking that everybody else’s field is their expertise and like I want to be deliberately self conscious about my limitations here.

[1]: PDF Warning: https://www.herbogeminis.com/revista/IMG/pdf/melatonin-adhd....

[2]: https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article-abstract/33/12/1605/2...

[3]: https://www.psychiatrist.com/jcp/effects-exogenous-melatonin...

[4]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20576063/

crdrost commented on American Heart Association says melatonin may be linked to serious heart risks   sciencedaily.com/releases... · Posted by u/pogue
crdrost · a month ago
PSA that melatonin use was way out of control before this study was even published.

Sleep aid melatonin is shipped in pills containing ridiculous amounts of the stuff—I’ve seen 10, 12, and 20mg myself, Amazon has a 40mg fast dissolve and 60mg gummies.

This spikes your blood amount with 100x-1000x of your natural cycle of melatonin. Why? Because melatonin is not, repeat not, the signaling molecule that makes you sleepy. It responds to light levels and triggers the cascade of other molecules that make you sleepy, several hours after it peaks. So that's why the 100x overdose—you are trying to kick those secondary mechanisms into overdrive, “hey everyone it is black as the abyss of hell I guess we gotta sleep!!”, because Americans taking melatonin want to pop one just before bed and have it knock them out.

And it does that for like 2 or 3 days before your body starts down-regulating all of its sensitivities to those melatonin byproducts. Nerve cells like to be tickled, not zapped, when you shock them like this they react angrily.

You want to use melatonin to reinforce circadian rhythm and fight jet lag, you do it with amounts in the ~100 micrograms range, slow release if you can find it, and you take that at sunset and let it reinforce your normal cycle. If you're looking for an acute sleep aid, take a walk, get fresh air, drink water, and if those don't help pop a Benadryl/Unisom (it's the same drug either way). If you have doctor’s orders of course follow those, but if you're just trying to self-medicate that’s how you do it.

Absolutely unsurprising that punching your sleep apparatus in the gut once every day for five years increases some sort of stress on your heart.

crdrost commented on Why I love OCaml (2023)   mccd.space/posts/ocaml-th... · Posted by u/art-w
seanw444 · a month ago
I'd rather have that issue than seeing "AI" plastered all over the place. I'm of the opinion AI should be reserved for artificial general intelligence. These things aren't intelligent yet. They're just em-bloat-ified traditional machine learning techniques. Not that they're useless. I just hate the terminology.

If people start using the term AI, we better be living in I, Robot. Not whatever the hell this is.

Tangential rant. Sorry.

crdrost · a month ago
We lost this fight at least by 1994 when Sun acquired “Thinking Machines,” which to its credit was bankrupting itself by making highly parallel supercomputers, at least. Now of course there is a new AI company of the same name. If the wrestling world echoes the computing world, one can only wonder what in 5-10 years will be the equivalent of Undertaker throwing Mankind off of Hell In A Cell to plummet 16 feet down through an announcer’s table...
crdrost commented on Why I love OCaml (2023)   mccd.space/posts/ocaml-th... · Posted by u/art-w
pluralmonad · a month ago
I believe many people use PL to mean programming language. I'm wondering if your joke just wooshed me.
crdrost · a month ago
I mean pohl's joke above whooshed kjmh so it's all fine. The important thing for threads like this one is for us to name drop all of the weird programming languages that we have used, publicly avow the greatness of ones that we have not, and make a New Year's resolution that we will never follow, to actually pick up those great languages and write something in them...
crdrost commented on Why I love OCaml (2023)   mccd.space/posts/ocaml-th... · Posted by u/art-w
skybrian · a month ago
What does deployment look like? Can you get a static binary easily like with Go?
crdrost · a month ago
You don't get it from language tooling because you are compiling to a bytecode that runs in a virtual machine (BEAM).

The current tool to wrap your bytecode with a VM so that it becomes standalone is Burrito[1], but there's some language support[2] (I think only for the arch that your CPU is currently running? contra Golang) and an older project called Distillery[3].

1: https://github.com/burrito-elixir/burrito

2: https://hexdocs.pm/mix/Mix.Tasks.Release.html

3: https://hexdocs.pm/distillery/home.html

crdrost commented on Fiber reduces overall mortality by 23%   empirical.health/blog/die... · Posted by u/brandonb
bjoli · a month ago
I am not saying that is wrong, but there are many mysterious claims in that book. I especially found the claim that "the most expensive burden to society is sugar" by a large margin was pretty astonishing. It lacks wide support in literature. As do many other claims in the book. Like refined carbohydrates being the main cause of weight gain through a rise in insulin. That is - at best - generally disputed, but is touted as fact.

I mean, what he prescribed is fine. Eat "real food". But how he comes to that stance is rather opaque to me. He is obviously literate, but checking some sources in the book very few of them strongly supported the claims he made with that reference.

crdrost · a month ago
I also found that first one surprising, even if he gives his back-of-the-envelope calculation (He guesstimates, 75% of healthcare spending is for metabolic-syndrome type chronic diseases, and then he guesstimates that 75% of that is preventable, $3.5T times .75 times .75 gives his figure of $1.9T/year.)

But even if the margin is not quite as wide as the back-of-the-envelope calculates, it's still bigger by a decent margin, right? For instance [1] estimates with more detailed methodology that it's $2.9T over 3 years or ~$1T/year, with at least 44% of that attributable to obesity, so like ~$400B/year, whereas [2] talks about $240B/year cigarettes, $250B/year alcohol.

Of course Lustig would say "TOFI people exist, obesity isn't the problem, obesity is just another symptom of metabolic syndrome, so 44% is an underestimate for the costs of bad nutrition." Not sure I agree there but he'd defend higher numbers even if we agreed to use these sources as kicking off points.

And yeah I agree that the question of "what do we do about it" is something that he appears to have a very opinionated take on, but I'd like to see more hard data. Like I'm happy for him that he had a big study that showed reversal of metabolic syndrome symptoms just by switching sugary food out for starchy food while holding weight and calorie consumption constant, but how we get from there to "eat real food -- the problem is not what's on the nutrition label but all of the antibiotics and adulteration that they don't have to tell you about on that label" stuff seems a bit opaque.

[1] https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/the-economic-co...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/chronic-disease/data-research/facts-stat...

crdrost commented on Fiber reduces overall mortality by 23%   empirical.health/blog/die... · Posted by u/brandonb
thisislife2 · a month ago
I don't know about my physical health, but mentally I feel more calm / content when I eat fiber rich food. I partly understand that this is because fiber rich food ensures slower release of sugar, from the food you eat into your blood, preventing the sudden spike and fall you get in sugar levels from food with low fiber (most retail snacks and junk food). I can also assert that bowel movement does feel "good" with fiber in your diet. And you feel satiated faster, and for a longer period of time, with it.
crdrost · a month ago
Yep! Lustig has a book, Metabolical, that goes into kind of a simple explanation of the underlying mechanism here, and it's roughly like this: fiber-rich foods contain a combination of soluble and insoluble fiber, the insoluble fiber basically forms a sort of "net" of chunks and strings and such that you can't digest, and the soluble fiber forms a "gel" which gets stuck in the net and traps other foods. This gel is infused with various enzymes to break down foods in the duodenum, and then passes to the first and second half of the "zig-zag" parts of the small intestine -- the jejunum and the ileum.

The combination of fibers then leads to a given packet of calories traveling further down the jejunum as it gets absorbed, which makes more of the bacteria living along the length of the intestine happy with you, as well as protecting from blood glucose spikes that come with concomitant "crashes".

crdrost commented on Fiber reduces overall mortality by 23%   empirical.health/blog/die... · Posted by u/brandonb
dizlexic · a month ago
To be slightly obtuse, I've never understood these studies because overall mortality is 100%.
crdrost · a month ago
Yes, here "overall" is being used as a synonym for "from all causes" not "over the full length of your life," and there's this frustrating thing for those of us with physics educations where people frequently leave off a unit of time: so like if it's a 5 year study, and your all-cause mortality is lower by a factor of 20% over those 5 years, that means 80% survived and you should compute the fifth root 0.8^(1/5) to find that 95.6% survived per year on this account, and then you can say "reduces mortality by 4.4% per year," and that sounds much more reasonable.

This happens all over the place. You're just supposed to know in investment that a price-to-earnings ratio is measured in years, or people will say "the Buffett indicator is 200%" not "the Buffett indicator is 2 years."

u/crdrost

KarmaCake day3529January 22, 2019
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