Goal setting journal (March 2016)

[-][anonymous]10y80

finally finish and post the astrobiology post on my hard drive - I did a shit ton of math in an attempt to rigorously place the sun and the Earth in their position in star and planet order (spoiler alert, we're smack in the middle of when you'd expect things like us to happen under the first set of assumptions I pulled together)
finally decide if I should tie the astrobiology posts to my professional persona
try out a new molecular cloning method at work that could save me months of making new modified yeast

[-][anonymous]10y50

Explore counterphobic attitudes
Eat chocolate in the mornings
Ask for consultation with a rheumatologist
learn about Definitions and methods for analytic time horizon, discounting, and inflation.
Try to understand price cap regulation - price cap regulation wherein a cap is placed on the pre-tax cigarette manufacturers' price but not on the retail price that consumers face.
What can you learn from Julian Blanc?
Apply to become a US professor for lower barriers to entry and career capital

Competition for assistant professor positions in many fields is rapidly growing; the number of PhD graduates is rising, while the number of assistant professor openings remains roughly constant.[16] The opposite is true, however, in business disciplines, where the anticipated shortfall of business faculty may reach 2,400 openings by 2012.[17] The U.S. Occupation Outlook Handbook notes that a significant proportion of any growth in academic professor jobs will be due to "part-time and non tenure-track positions."[1] As of 2003, the average age at which scientists received tenure in the United States was 39, which can make it difficult for professors to balance professional and family obligations

-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professors_in_the_United_States#Non-tenure-track_positions

So I'll be sure to go for a business PhD

special project: friday

My incompetent psychologist forgets to consult with her liaison psychiatrist about my MRI brain scan results. I have no idea what they indicate. It's been weeks now. The obvious thing to do is to find a different psychologist. However, I'm going to have to get that MRI result one way or another.
apply to finance jobs

[-]Fluttershy10y50

Eating chocolate in the mornings isn't going to boost your intelligence, or make you any more likely to win a Nobel prize, though it might help you put on a few pounds if you don't adjust your daily calorie balance (calories burned minus calories eaten) after adding it into your diet.

The article you linked to even concedes this point at the very end. ;)

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke10y40

I'd like to see follow-ups to this post. Specifically: For which of these did you already take action or see any results?

[-]gabrielrecc10y00

I once TA'd a statistics class in which the chocolate/Nobel Prize thing was used as the prototypical example for why correlation doesn't equal causation. Scientific American describes some problems with the study and plausible alternative explanations.

On the other hand, the cocoa may have some health benefits with respect to all-cause mortality, and the flavonoids likely have cognitive and other health benefits.

On the other other hand, the sugar surely doesn't, and chocolate has a lot of aluminum and maybe lead -- the latter is definitely not good for your brain, and the former might not be.

In any case, if you're going to take it up for health reasons, a spoonful of unsweetened cocoa in your oatmeal or coffee every morning is probably better than a Cadbury's egg.

[-]Lumifer10y00

chocolate has a lot of aluminum

Let's follow your link. It says:

Extended data on the aluminium content of food items in France are available from the 1st French Total Diet Study, conducted in 2000. The results showed that an aluminium level > 3 mg/kg fresh weight was only observed in the following food groups: ‘Bread & rusk’ (4.1 mg/kg), ‘Biscuits’ (5.3 mg/kg), ‘Vegetables’ (3.2 mg/kg), ‘Nuts and oilseed’ (4.1 mg/kg), ‘Ice-cream’ (3.9 mg/kg), ‘Chocolate’ (3.7 mg/kg), ‘Salads’ (4.9 mg/kg) and ‘Shellfish’ (17.1 mg/kg) (Leblanc et al., 2005). Mushrooms, spinach, radish, swiss card, lettuce and corn salad having the highest levels in the vegetables group ranged from 5 to 150 mg/kg.

So, out of that list you think chocolate is especially problematic? X-/

[-]gabrielrecc10y00

I guess whether > 3 mg/kg is a "lot" compared to other food types is relative to the number of food types the study considered.

I haven't dug up the France study to see how many foods they looked at that didn't make the >3 mg/kg cut, but the first study that I clicked on after searching Google scholar just now is a German study that found a median mg/kg of 160 for "cocoa powder" and 39 for "chocolate". Of the 1,431 food samples they tested, "77.8% had an aluminium concentration of less than 10 mg kg-1. Of the samples, 17.5% had aluminium concentrations between 10 and 100 mg kg-1. In only 4.6% of the samples, aluminium concentrations greater than 100 mg kg-1 were found.". Looking at the histogram in Figure 1, we can place chocolate's median aluminum level of 39 in the top 13.7% percent or higher, and cocoa powder's of 160 in the top 4.6% or higher.

I'm well aware of the irony that in my above post I suggested substituting cocoa powder for chocolate.

In particular, the study notes that "Table 4 shows that the PTWI for aluminium can be reached only by consumption of large amounts of chocolate [42–44]." (PTWI = provisional tolerable weekly intake used by the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives).

Are there plenty of other foods with as much aluminum as chocolate? Sure. Am I cutting chocolate out of my own diet anytime soon? No. But since the original poster is planning to take up chocolate consumption specifically for brain/intelligence -related reasons, I figured it was a relevant consideration.

edit: It's kind of an odd list of foodstuffs the German study considered. The introduction implies but doesn't state that they selected foods that they expected to have at least some aluminum content based on prior research. I also can't account for the huge discrepancies between the French and German studies in terms of mg/kg aluminum levels detected.

[-]Lumifer10y10

I guess whether > 3 mg/kg is a "lot" compared to other food types is relative to the number of food types the study considered.

It's also relative to the amounts of these food types people normally consume.

When chocolate has about the same amount as bread and vegetables, I don't see any reason to worry about chocolate.

[-]Viliam10y40

Finish my currently half-written article for LW. (I am not going to be more specific, because any debate on this would draw my attention away from actually working on the article.)