2025-02-22 08:00:00
After nearly 4 years of continuous usage at work, taking calls and listening to audiobooks during long walks, my wired in-ear Bose QuietComfort 20 MK2 Active Noise Cancelling Earphones are finally starting to become faulty1, so I went on a search for a replacement.
To my surprise, not only have these types of earphones been discontinued by Bose, but the selection of wired in-ear active noise cancelling headphones is incredibly slim. After an extensive search, I’ve found Asus ROG Cetra II and Bang Olufsen B4, which appear to offer inferior quality in terms of Active Noise Cancelling (ANC), when compared to recent highly rated Bose, Sony or Apple headphones, which are either wireless or are over-ear / on-ear. Quality in-ear2 ANC earbuds are almost exclusively wireless.
I understand the popularity of wireless earbuds. They are extremely practical and neat. It is not surprising that penetration of bluetooth headphones has jumped considerably in recent years, but given that I use my headphones for several hours each day, it is not an enticing proposition to have two wireless devices extremely close to my brain, even if they output a low amount of EMF radiation. The (cumulative) dose makes the poison.
Several experts 345 claim there is no danger in prolonged usage of these devices, because they don’t emit ionizing radiation, but it has been reported both in studies and anecdotally that exposure to high levels of EMF radiation might have detrimental effects long term.
I’ve found it challenging to uncover quality studies that correlate the usage of bluetooth headphones and health effects. I assume this correlation is hard to experiment upon with statistically significant results, due to how long this exposure needs to happen, and other confounding environmental and behavioural factors. Regardless, one of these studies draws a significant link between the usage of bluetooth headset and thyroid nodules.
Widespread adoption of these devices is still relatively recent, and we should be humble enough to acknowledge that we don’t have the full picture clearly laid out of the all repercussions related to their long term usage, especially when in close proximity to one of the most valuable organs of our body, our brain.
It’s not what is known that concerns me, but rather what is not known. Until proven the contrary, I will continue to play it safe, and avoid using wireless earbuds.
Hopefully a larger swath of the population will increasingly exercise caution and awareness on this issue, signalling manufacturers to drive the supply of competitive good quality wired in-ear ANC headphones that empower the consumer to make the best choice for their use case, and their health.
The battery is still pristine, but the left earbud started to give out a random noise when active noise cancelling is enabled.↩
I’m exclusively looking for in-ear headphones because of how challenging it is to find over-ear or on-ear headphones that doesn’t cause discomfort after several hours, when using glasses. I also appreciate the style of in-ears, although that is secondary.↩
Effect of Bluetooth headset and mobile phone electromagnetic fields on the human auditory nerve - Marco Mandalà, Vittorio Colletti, Luca Sacchetto, Paolo Manganotti, Stefano Ramat, Alessandro Marcocci, Liliana Colletti↩
Are Bluetooth Headphones Safe? - Dr. Matt MacDougall & Dr. Andrew Huberman↩
How Unhealthy Are Your AirPods? - Doctor Mike↩
2025-02-10 08:00:00
I’ve recently finished reading The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease, a book from Daniel Lieberman of how the human body evolved over millions of years, that I would recommend all Humans to read. These are are my main takeaways:
Us humans and other living beings are essentially organisms that use energy to reproduce and maintain ourselves.
Hominid bipedalism was likely to have been initially selected to help the first hominids forage and obtain food more effectively in the face of major climate change
Between 10 and 5 million years ago, the earth climate cooled considerably, and overall effect in Africa that caused rainforests to shrink and woodlands to expand. If you were to be in the heart of the rainforest, you likely wouldn’t have noticed much of a difference, but if you were in the margins, this change must have been stressful. As the forest shrinks and becomes woodland, ripe fruits become less abundant, more dispersed and more seasonal. These changes would require you to travel farther to get the same amount of food.
Walking on two legs is more energy efficient for longer routes. Main trade off is less speed, because we could not gallop. We are 3x more efficient moving a distance of 6km than a chimp.
Not only was endurance walking useful, but also long distance running was likely selected for scavenging. Running to fresh carcasses, running with food and, persistence hunting, where a big animal is followed by running and walking on sun. They need to find shades and pant, and eventually collapse due to heat stroke.
Other features that help us to run effectively. Some of them not specially helpful for walking, like shorter toes:
All of these walking and running adaptations made us clumsy climbing trees, like shorter toes, but also freed up our hands to interact with the world, create the first tools and throw objects (we are especially good at throwing, having shoulders and upper body that makes it ideal for it), which not only provided some protection, but also allowed us to obtain and process fallback / lower quality foods (which were essential due to scarcity from global cooling climate).
Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun ― Noël Coward
In the average adult human, the brain represents about 2% of the body weight, but accounts to about 20% of total energy consumption.
As the ability to create and use tools allowed the gathering and processing of fallback foods, more usable energy was able to be extracted. Processing foods to smaller chunks, or cooking it, largely increases how much energy can be obtained during digestion, but also requires less intense chewing (we didn’t need as bigger teeth as australopithecus, which resulted in use losing the snout due to less space being needed in the head) and shorter intestines, which reduce energy required for digestion, increases surplus energy to be used by the brain. These factors selected hominids with better manual dexterity and better cognition.
Our manual dexterity, and what it unlocks, plays a big role in our evolution.
If our brain1 is deprived of glucose for even 1 minute or two, it causes irreparable damage. This likely selected humans to become unusually fat. 400 to 500 calories daily, are for the brain alone. Extra intense thought only increases hourly usage by 5 calories per hour.
Hunter gatherer mothers have to expend about 2.3k calories for themselves alone to raise kids. Babies are unusually fat. 60 percent of their energy consumption is for the brain. It takes 12M calories to grow a child into a full grown adult. Twice as much as those needed for a chimpanzee.
Our way of living affected the size of our gut so profoundly, that now we are pretty much dependent on cooking to get the caloric intake we need for our body and brain.
Exercise is not great to lose fat (unless you don’t succumb to overeating after exercise) but it’s good to prevent fat gain. It increases muscle (and not fat) sensitivity to insulin and makes the muscles more readily available to store energy, and also increases the number of mitochondria that burn fat and sugar.
Life is fundamentally a way of using energy to make more life.
What good is it to have a good idea, if you can’t communicate it? One of the main features we developed as humans was our ability to use speech to clearly communicate thoughts, ideas, plans, and other information.
The price is that we are the only mammal that can risk asphyxiation when swallowing something too large or imprecisely2, because of the big common space behind the tongue through which food and air both travel to get either into the esophagus or trachea, a consequence of our short and retracted faces and selection of anatomy that favors clear speech. As a result, food sometimes gets lodged on the back of the throat, blocking the airway.
When you are having lunch with friends, consider that you are doing two things: speaking clearly, and swallowing a little dangerously.
We’ve created a system that makes people sick through a surplus of energy, and keeps them alive without needing to turn down the energy flow
Lieberman presents the concepts of Mismatch diseases and Dysevolution:
Our ancestors ate fruits as sweet as carrots, but as energy dense foods had their availability increased3, more humans moved from subsistence farming and physically strenuous jobs to lower physical effort jobs (in the USA, only 11 per cent are actually factory workers. The rest are in management, services, wealth management and banking services), the same mechanisms that made us effective is storing energy and craving certain foods, are also the ones that have become maladapted to our current environment.
It has been only about 300 generations since we’ve been subsistence farmers, which didn’t give enough time for natural selection and body adaptations to develop.
Your body can use glucose as energy readily, but fructose can only be worked as fat or in the liver.
Comparing an apple to a highly processed fruit roll, apart from nutritional differences:
Villages, cities, are our human fortresses from the wild. Because we have that fortress, we don’t need to carry arms and be attentive to outer animal threats, like lions. Mostly. There were costs to these though:
There is a positive correlation between cancer development in reproductive organs and high energy balance.
More exercise results in lower chances of cancer. Likely because the energy spent there is not otherwise spent on reproductive hormones that have these side effects.
Imagine you are tasked with building a robot that is aimed to accomplish a task in the future that is unknown. You can either create a series of specialized robots (e.g. only able to swim, to dig, jump, etc), or a single one that adapts to multiple situations. When you don’t know what the robot will do, the latter works best. That is how animals and plants work. But if you don’t use it, you lose it.
If you don’t chew enough when you are young, teeth will become misaligned, and overcrowding happens, leading to issues on wisdom tooth growth for example. The body needs that stress.
Hygiene hypothesis states that early childhood exposure to particular microorganisms (such as the gut flora and helminth parasites) protects against allergies by properly tuning the immune system. In particular, a lack of such exposure is thought to lead to poor immune tolerance. There are two main hypothesis for it:
Hannah Arendt introduced the expression and concept of the banality of evil, where a common person does nefarious actions, since they became accepted and normalized in their society.
Actions that we perceive as normal, such as usage of cancer inducing sodium nitrate in foods (which stems for a trade-off between structural economic gain and health), wearing comfortable shoes, reading and sitting, are in fact not normal when seen through the lenses of long term evolution.
Our feet have adapted for us to efficiently run and walk, but highly cushioned, constraining shoes deform and inhibit our feet from fulfilling their purpose
Myopia is a formerly rare evolutionary mismatch that is exacerbated by modern environments. In the USA and Europe, about one third of all children (aged 7 to 17) become nearsighted.
Evidence suggests that being nearsighted used to be very rare: that less than three per cent prevalence amongst hunter gatherers and populations that practices subsistence agriculture. In 1813, it was noted that amongst the Queen’s guards, many were myopic. On the hand, from the 10k foot guard, less than half dozen were myopic.
The mechanisms of how myopia are still not fully understood, but two main causes are suggested:
While sitting in different positions to rest after strenuous activity has been around for much of our species, only until recently have we been multiple hours sitting in a chair, day after day, which is a risk factor towards:
One solution would be to wait for natural selection to sort out these problems, which is very unlikely due to the high rate of change in our societies and environments, in short time windows. As the commander of the Albigensian Crusade said, on a mission to eliminate heretics: “Kill them all; let God sort them out.”
We are all subject to influence by advertising, availability and peer pressure, but we can be nudged to acquire behaviours that benefit us. Daniel Lieberman suggests:
Culture is roughly everything we do and monkeys don’t. ― FitzRoy Richard Somerset
Clever as we are, we cannot modify our human bodies any more than superficial ways. And it’s arrogant to think we can engineer body parts any better than nature did. There will be no Pasteur for mismatched diseases.
We should come to terms that:
Compared to other animals with the same body weight, they have a fifth of the brain size, and double the intestine system. Size of the brain correlates with the size of the group. Humans are able to interact with 100 to 200 individuals.↩
Choking on food is the fourth leading cause of accidental death in the USA.↩
Between 1985 and 2000, the purchasing power of the US dollar decreased by 59 per cent, the price of fruit and vegetables doubled, fish increased by 30 per cent, diary about the same. In contrast, sugars and sweets became 25 per cent less expensive, fats and oils 40 per cent, soda 66 percent less expensive. Portion sizes ballooned: in a fast food restaurant in 1955 order of hamburger and fries would yield 412 cals. Today for the same inflation adjusted size, the same order would have double the calories, 920 cals.↩
If you are curious of how the sewers of earlier cities smelled, the Paris Musée des Égouts provides an illustrative tour through these sights and smells ↩
Thomas Crapper did not invent the toilet. But was a pioneer in its mass manufacturing. Origin of the word “crapper”↩
For example, Hepatitis A virus stimulates T helper 1 cells, which suppress the number of T helper 2 cells↩
2024-12-31 08:00:00
It’s time to wrap up and celebrate 2024, an eventful year that fueled my yearning for internal growth and curiosity, with challenges and lessons I am grateful for.
I’ve recently built a set of Grafana dashboards to track my personal goals, which I’ve been finding incredibly interesting to explore and visualise (something that might be interesting to share in a later post).
There are other metrics I track, but specifically to 2024 content creation, these are the final statistics1:
Notice that the tracked metrics are on the volume of content produced, not their number of views, subscribers, likes. Although keeping track of topline metrics makes sense for a full fledged business, I chose instead to track what I can control, which is my output. At the end of the day, this is a hobby, a labor of love.
If I can influence someone’s life for the better, that will already fill my heart to the brim. This, added to how important posting these contents has become to consolidate and structure my thoughts, and serendipitous opportunities they randomly opened, make this an incredibly satisfying endeavor.
I’ve experienced time and time again that consistency eventually bears wonderful fruits. Who knows which doors might open one day later? I don’t, but I’m curious to find out.
With 2024 wrapped up, let’s welcome 2025. I’ve pinned down next year’s goals and will be looking forward to sharing what I learn along the way. Happy new year, and see you on the other side! 🫡
This dashboard was produced using a custom Grafana dashboard, where the RSS feeds for this blog and YouTube channels were tracked, transformed and presented in simple gauge widgets↩
2024-12-30 08:00:00
Over the past 4 years, I’ve written about 1820 pages on the 13 A5 notebooks shown in the picture above. This tool has become essential for my job, and in this article I’ll describe the simple process behind it, which I’ve found to deliver consistent results, reliably.
The process I’ve been using for several years is based on Option 3. of Solving Task Switching Through Documentation, and is broken down in three steps:
1. Write
2. Consolidate
With several notes written, their consolidation can happen in three different time spans:
3. Repeat
Just like other processes, their value only becomes apparent after they have been used several times. Build a habit. It will then become immediately apparent whenever a notebook is not at hand, or when structured notes are not written down.
2024-12-28 08:00:00
I’ve recently finished reading Diary of a CEO: 33 Laws of Business and Life, which draws from both Steven Bartlett’s entrepreneurial journey and interviews from the homonymous podcast. These are are my main takeaways:
2024-12-21 08:00:00
This ad struck me as the culmination of a long-standing trend. I struggled to articulate it at the time, but I’ll attempt to do just that in this article.
Let’s start by the ad itself. It carries implicit symbols and memes, whose interpretations will vary wildly from person to person, but in general I believe it attempts to convey these subtle messages:
Relying only on external validation, specially from foreign entities, as a means to sustain one’s self-esteem is a time honored strategy to produce nefarious results. Yet, it’s celebrated by certain influencers, mainstream media, TV shows, ads and movies that attempt to distort a small sample into a normality.
When external validation is postulated as a basic human need, and one’s default natural, vanilla body is not sufficient to garner the validation one needs (as the above ad suggests), it soon follows that external interventions are required to achieve it.
I was fortunate enough to grow in an environment where artificial external displays of vanity were seen as a quirk, and sometimes even frowned upon (depending on the situation), thus not a requirement for a happy and fulfilled life. But once one is born or dislodged into the eye of a hurricane, it is hard to see the surrounding damage, especially when peers abide by those standards, generating an underlying group integration peer pressure.
Several off-the-shelf beauty products are known for their toxicity, contributing to increased prevalence of cancer and infertility, yet they stand as one of the cornerstones of modern standards of beauty.
How we show up is important, and is a meaningful way of self expression, but when the baseline for allowing one’s self expression requires one to consume / apply several products (sometimes on the go), or even subject to invasive body modifications, then I would argue that something is wrong in the underlying societal system.
One such body modification, turned mainstream, is the injection of botox.
Botulism is an often-fatal nervous system disease, first recorded in Europe in 1793, claiming the death of over half of those patients who had become ill through eating uncooked blood sausages. botulus being the Latin word for sausage. One one-millionth of a gram this neurotoxic protein can kill a man, and one pint would be enough to kill everyone on earth.
In 1989, purified botulinum toxin was approved as a drug under the brand name Oculinum, and later renamed to Botox. In small doses, the same nerve damage that causes fatal paralysis in poisoning cases, helps to remove forehead creases and crow’s feet, with the only side effects being an inability to express emotion using your face, and an occasional case of drooping eyelids.
Today, injecting the deadliest substance on earth into one’s face is normalized, as seen in this TV commercial (where its mid-commercial disclaimers makes one question if it’s a real ad, or a parody2), or as seen in this suggestive London tube ad:
I hold nothing against those who choose to subscribe to a certain mode of expression or style. I too, have my own. I do welcome you to introspect why you chose it. If your sincere why comes from a deep rooted desire to feel accepted and valued by others (good to receive these in healthy dosages, but dangerous when overbearing), then it might be something to look out for.
Relying solely on external validation likely results in feelings of emptiness and insatisfaction. I’ve been there several times, and its not pleasant. Instead, attempt to obtain self validation by looking in, rather than out. Some simple, yet powerful strategies:
Why: friends, family and close connections likely already acknowledge you by who you really are, or at least should. Why would they need you to wear a beauty product in order for you to feel seen? Therefore the remaining target audience are acquaintances and strangers↩
Transcript from the TV commercial: (…) FDA approved to temporarily make frown lines crow’s feet and forehead lines look better. The effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Do not receive Botox Cosmetic if you have a skin infection. Side effects may include allergic reactions, injection site pain, headache, eyebrow, eyelid drooping and eyelid swelling. Tell your doctor about your medical history muscle or nerve conditions and medications including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. So get that “just saw a puppy look”! (…)↩