"In general insulin will promote anabolic processes of a cell while causing a reduction in catabolic processes."

That's the best single-sentence description of insulin I've ever seen, from John T. Hancock's Cell Signaling (p. 246, 2nd ed.), an otherwise disappointingly unhelpful text.

A while back I wrote up a fun article about how impaired facial recognition is more common than you might expect. Turns out facial recognition is highly heritable, i.e. there's considerable genetic variance contributing to face-recognizing ability. This gels with my guess that selection pressures for it have been comparatively recent -- if it was ( Read more... )

This (via xshardsx) is a nice bit of propaganda. For most people it might even be valid; within the context of modern medicine it makes sense. It's horrid because the context it comes out of is horrid -- among other things, the assumption is always that people can't learn to take effective control of their own health and need elites to do it for them. ( Read more... )

Here is one small example (indirectly via Patri), of a multitude I could choose, of why I'm working on what I'm working on right now: in this paper the authors check how damaged the hearts of marathon runners are compared to relatively sedentary people. Surprise! Their hearts tend to actually be in *worse* shape -- i.e. they show more scarring, ( Read more... )

On the PhD Glut. (via Zeeb)

That path looks less and less appealing the more I think about it.

Don't read this.

"While it isn't hard to remain in love, it is hard to keep the totally accepting attitude toward your lover that exists in the beginning. As most love relationships continue, each partner, having no one else, begins to find fault with the other. It may not be much -- many relationships continue to grow and find new avenues for love, but few can ( Read more... )

A control system that is too rapid in its response to disturbance will be unstable. It will sense its own actions as disturbances and try to correct for them, thus driving itself into spontaneous and usually violent oscillation and thereby ceasing to act as a control system. Efficient control systems must be so designed that they ignore ( Read more... )

The notion that I'd have serviceable drafts of chapters to circulate by the end of January is comical in retrospect, but the project itself is having its first desired effect: I wanted to write a book on how to think systematically about health because I didn't know how, but knew enough to see that nobody else did either. It's forced me to go up a ( Read more... )

A friend and I have a running dialogue on whether or not some sort of major institutional cataclysm is likely to occur in the next decade or so (yes, really). The other night we started talking about things one could do that would have some benefit under stability but a potentially enormous benefit under instability. I think of acquiring skills -- ( Read more... )