Purely by accident, in the mid 1990s, I bought a CD of Janacek’s Piano Works. It’s just possible that it was playing when I was browsing in the old Music Discount Centre on Ludgate Hill of a lunchtime. For economy, it was packaged in a cardboard sleeve on the Harmonia Mundi label; I associated them with early music and had had a lucky streak of enjoying everything I’d bought from them, sight unseen, as it were. That probably clinched it.

Despite what I now know of its relative lack of grand melodic themes cf. Rachmaninov and relative inaccessibility to early audiences, I soon found I really liked it. I’d dream that if I were to have kids, and they ever played piano, they might play this.

Before I met the Janacek, there were times in my twenties and even thirties when, feeling particularly mortal, I’d console myself that I’d at least played some (if not all) of a Mozart horn concerto. And, to be accurate, the slow movements of a couple without obvious error. I even won that competition in Yorkshire when just 12.

For that momentary brush with the hem of the musical gods’ raiment I always thought that I could count myself blessed: it was not fame nor fortune but it was a quantifiably better condition than most people in human history might have hoped for. Even within my own extended family, the only other person to have reportedly graced the public with musical performance was a bugler in the Northampton Boys Brigade. With my horn I’d somehow defied, if only for a little while, a more philistine destiny.

For reasons that are very complicated, I stopped playing the horn aged 18, two years after the only available teacher in the district moved away. I continue to dwell on this fact because of my faith that it may well illuminate the difficulties we all face in adhering to the protocols necessary to succeed in a complex discipline; we need a better understanding of fallibility if we are to create robustness.

The consequence of my giving up the horn (or was it the horn giving up me?) was that both metaphorically and neurologically some musical pathways became sadly overgrown; I lost that knowledge of music “from the inside”.  More recently, however, when I took the horn out and went through the warm-ups recommended in a manual that I acquired back in 2001 during an earlier attempt to reopen those paths, I reached a top B: that is, the B above third line C. There was even a hint (though not a full tone) of top C itself. Whether it is just over the summer holidays, or a period of 25 years, the extent of that overgrowth will be different: your mileage may vary (or YMMV, as they like to say on Twitter).

As a technology of inspiration for mid-life extension, Janacek would command a five-star review. A spiky character, his career was marked by relative obscurity until he was around 50, whereafter it took off. Unusually for a composer, his work got better and better until he died. I’m just about to start reading his biography, The Lonely Blackbird.

Oh, and before I forget, the music shop called today to say that the sheet music for On An Overgrown Path has just arrived.

Following VIII. Unutterable Anguish, is IX. In Tears.

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Down in the comments of an earlier music post I dug up a seminal BBC documentary about Richard Feynman.  I must have seen it when it first came out.  I recommend you plug your computer into the TV, sit down and watch it with any children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces or godchildren; there may be no greater gift.  A few minutes in he says this:

When you are thinking about something that you don’t understand you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called ‘confusion’. It’s a very difficult and unhappy business.  So, most of the time you are rather unhappy, actually, with this confusion.  You can’t penetrate this thing.  Now, is the confusion… is it because we are all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid working against this? Trying to figure out to put the two sticks together to reach the banana and we can’t quite make it? …the idea ? And I get that feeling all the time: that I am an ape trying to put two sticks together.  So I always feel stupid. Once in a while, though, everything — the sticks — go together on me and I reach the banana.”

Last Journey of a Genius

When it came to deciding on a business card for the blog, there must have been some spooky action operating at a distance, for this is what we came up with.

Long-time readers will remember my own grappling with bananas only to find that, as usual, I was thwarted. Parce que…

banana photo credit -eko-

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Anyone who has read Gerd Gigerenzer’s Gut Feelings will recall the description in Chapter 10 of how the pressure to conform creates moral hazard. A powerful heuristic or default seems to operate: “don’t break ranks”. Failure to adhere can result in peer hostility. The experience of Paul Moore in trying to restrain HBOS executives reveals just how powerful and enduring a force that can be, assuming he is an accurate witness to his own experience at the bank. It goes some way to explain how groupthink can operate in the face of compelling contrary evidence. To quote from his memo to Tuesday’s Treasury Select Committee hearing:-

I am still toxic waste now for having spoken out all those years ago!

This might also reflect why today’s FT report leaking of an “independent inquiry” into Paul Moore’s allegations contained the following observations from the HBOS directors of his behaviour. A case of shooting the messenger?

They told KPMG that while Mr Moore’s technical abilities were “recognised as strong” and he gave his team a “strong sense of purpose”, they doubted his ability to work with his colleagues. His behaviour in one meeting was described by people interviewed by KPMG as “ranging from prickly to ranting to extraordinary to outrageous”.

For those not following these events, Moore was the head of Group Regulatory Risk Management for HBOS until 2005. He alleges that he argued with the board that HBOS’s sales culture was running out of control, creating huge risk for the bank should the economy and housing market turn downwards, and that there was a reluctance on the part of executives to have their decisions or behaviour challenged. At the time, HBOS CEO James Crosby dismissed his concerns and terminated his employment. Crosby then moved on to become deputy chairman of the Financial Services Authority. He resigned yesterday morning.

The full text of Moore’s memo is here. For the time being, it may be one of the most readable and historic documents of modern finance. One suspects there will be others.

Well, in his deposition to the Treasury Select Committee Moore mentions it, but I doubt that this five-minute module is mandatory yet at any business school. Let me know if I’m wrong.

Photo credit: Tim Penn

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What has the French Horn to do with the science of uncertainty? The Economist review of journalist Jasper Rees’s book I Found My Horn may have nailed it.  The book chronicles Rees’s mid-life crisis in which he picked up his childhood instrument rather than running a marathon .  It’s now being published in the US as A Devil to Play: One Man’s Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra’s Most Difficult Instrument.  More pertinently, a play starring co-writer Jonathan Guy Lewis opens this very night on the London stage.

What makes the horn quite so hard to play is the length of tubing necessary to produce its tonal range; despite three valves, it is very easy to hit the wrong note, or fall off the right one. There’s a level of doubt about each outcome that does not trouble other musicians to quite the same degree.  Even professional orchestral players are more exposed than most to public musical catastrophe, because of the horn’s expressive value to composers.  For this, among other reasons, horn players are considered a breed apart.  This is how Simon Rattle puts it:-

You never eyeball a horn player. You just don’t. They’re stuntmen. You don’t eyeball stuntmen when they’re about to dice with death.”

Given the Knackered Hack’s quest for antidotes to hubris, perhaps mastery of the horn (if that is not a contradiction in terms) should be considered an essential qualification for public or corporate office?  I’ve noticed that this website seems to attract a disproportionate number of horn players (at least two).  Perhaps there’s a connection? You can purchase a CD by one of those readers below.

[By way of full disclosure, the Knackered Hack was placed first in the under 12s brass section of the Harrogate Festival in 1976, performing the second movement of Mozart's Fourth Horn Concerto K495, cough... ]

Photo credit: vtengr4047

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I only know the one Georges Brassens song. But that one song, La ballade des gens qui sont nés quelque part (ahem, roughly translated: The ballad of those who are born somewhere), sprang to mind the other day, and I can’t shake it off. It is a satire on chauvinism in general, and tells the story of those who get too excited in relating the merits of their particular locale.

So it could be about me. I live in Bath, a World Heritage City, don’t you know. Beautiful stone buildings, wonderful museums, great shopping, and don’t get me started on the music festivals. Have I mentioned the Children’s Literature Festival?… I did? You’ll not be surprised then that, happy fool that I am, I think Bath is different!

Well, not really. Closer to the truth may be that the Knackered Hack’s somewhat nomadic path thus far is more characteristic of the Beatles’ Nowhere Man.

But the reason why we live in a place now has scientific form, according to researchers at Cambridge University:-

The authors of the new study argue that the strongest personality traits within a given population become self-reinforcing by influencing the region’s life and culture.

For example, where the population is creative, imaginative and intellectual (as was found to be the case in states including New York and California), one might expect to find people who are interested in art, literature and science. This may in turn lead to the establishment of institutions such as universities and museums. These institutions then influence the views and values of the local populace, encourage more creative and imaginative people to move to the region, and give people who do not fit that profile less reason to live there.

Dr Jason Rentfrow, who was also behind a recent paper The content and validity of stereotypes about fans of 14 music genres, is cautious but nevertheless fairly confident that the findings stack up:-

Obviously it’s not as simple as saying that a person is guaranteed to be more anxious if they come from West Virginia or more religious because they happen to live in New Mexico; but we did find pretty clear signs that there are meaningful differences in the personalities of people living in different areas of the United States.

What is particularly impressive is that the results show the effects of personality on people’s social habits, values and lifestyles are so pronounced that they have an impact on much bigger social forces.”

I wonder if this is specific to the US, where population migrations and the evolution city identities might be a little more recent. About Bath–joking aside–I’ve tended to think that it has historically sat at the cross-roads between “mainland” England and the more independent and remote Celtic parts of the British Isles, making it a kind of cultural cross-roads, where metropolitan money meets Glastonbury grunge. And that this probably goes way back.

Before you think this is all hokum, a little more about the methodology:-

Using an established framework called the “Five Factor Model” they divided personality types into five broad categories: “Extraversion” (sociable, energetic, enthusiastic people); “Agreeableness” (warm, friendly, compassionate); “Conscientiousness” (dutiful, responsible, self-disciplined); “Neuroticism” (anxious, stressful, impulsive); and “Openness” (curious, intellectual, creative).

Over six years, 619,397 people from across the US took part in an online test in which they were asked to read 44 short statements, such as “I see myself as someone who is outgoing” and “I see myself as someone who is very religious”. The respondents had to mark their level of agreement with each statement on a scale of one to five.

When I’m next in the States, I’ll have to consider carefully how to plan my trip around the geographical clustering of personality traits that the study revealed. Turns out it’s not random:

“Neuroticism” was, for instance, highest in the east along a line stretching from Maine to Louisiana, and lowest in the west, suggesting that the country has an identifiable “stress belt”.

The Wall Street Journal has more here (possibly behind the subscription wall). Below is Georges Brassens. Lyrics (in French) are here, including a reference to Montcuq, which I think is now a legal requirement of the Académie Française. Loosen your ceinture a notch, crack open a bottle of red, strike up a Gauloise, kick back and enjoy.

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This term is being bandied about a lot at the moment. It has a formal definition in the literature. But in extreme environments — and we are in one now, economically speaking — behaviours that speak of the big risk-taker may be misleading. I came across the following in Finance Director Europe by risk management specialist Duncan Martin who authored the book Managing Risk in Extreme Environments: Front-line Business Lessons for Corporates and Financial Institutions:-

Critically, risk aversion does not necessarily make you safer. Many people or communities express a low-risk enthusiasm but baulk at the expense of reducing their risk to match their appetite. They simply hope that the rare event doesn’t happen. However, in the end, even rare events occur. The results of mismatching risk appetite and resources were devastatingly demonstrated recently as Hurricane Katrina smashed into New Orleans.

Conversely, a large risk appetite is not the same thing as recklessness. A counter-intuitive aspect of risk management in extreme environments is that although the individuals concerned are very comfortable with risk, they come across in conversation as somewhat risk averse. While they accept risk in the sense that ‘everyone dies sometime’, they work hard to eliminate or mitigate tangible risks as far as they can.

Anyone who fails to manage risk in an extreme environment tends not to last too long. One former UK Special Forces officer relates the following episode:

‘We were in the back of the Land Rover, expecting contact [battle] any minute. Everyone was quiet, going through the plan in their heads, controlling their fear – except for one bloke at the back, who was mouthing off. He hadn’t been in a fight before and I guess this was his way of compensating. I decided that the first thing I would do when we got out of the Land Rover was hit him in the head with my rifle butt. He was too dangerous; I couldn’t accept the risk that he posed to the operation.’

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This preoccupation with refined carbohydrates and their exclusion from diet may look odd, but the evidence confirming the significance of removing or moderating their intake continues to mount. Nature, via Science Daily, has published research from Dr Zane Andrews of Monash University (and others) showing that appetite-control cells are damaged over time, with carbohydrates and sugars playing an important part in that damage process:-

Dr Andrews found that appetite-suppressing cells are attacked by free radicals after eating and said the degeneration is more significant following meals rich in carbohydrates and sugars.

‘The more carbs and sugars you eat, the more your appetite-control cells are damaged, and potentially you consume more,’ Dr Andrews said.

Interestingly, the effects start to occur from early adulthood:-

‘People in the age group of 25 to 50 are most at risk. The neurons that tell people in the crucial age range not to over-eat are being killed-off…

…A diet rich in carbohydrate and sugar that has become more and more prevalent in modern societies over the last 20-30 years has placed so much strain on our bodies that it’s leading to premature cell deterioration,’ Dr Andrews said.

Full Nature abstract here. Thanks to Jess for the pointer and bunchofpants for the photo.

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Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that today Bryan Appleyard published his long-awaited interview with Art De Vany in The Sunday Times Magazine.

For new subscribers to this blog, Professor De Vany is a long-term advocate of a lifestyle that mimics that of our paleolithic ancestors, at least in terms of diet and exercise. The Knackered Hack has been echoing this approach, with increasing strictness, for well over a year now. Appleyard, who has himself adopted the diet and shed about a stone, noted how vigorous the professor was for a 71-year-old in various domains, about one of which I am myself still gathering data . If the professor’s nocturnal experience can be replicated, then this will probably be the clincher for a lot of people as they realise the value of the paleo diet in helping them with more than just weight-loss.

More seriously, you can’t help but feel pleased that De Vany’s devotion to the study, practice and dissemination of a more natural way of health is getting the recognition that it surely deserves. This is perhaps an important landmark when you consider that it was Nassim Taleb who told me in the same context that press coverage overstates the risk to society of terrorism and understates the risk of insulin insensitivity, so that we wander around with the wrong probabilistic map. Gary Taubes‘ The Diet Delusion gets a mention in the piece too.

One objection that could be raised is that economic pressures might now be pushing people towards a more refined-carb diet because it might appear cheaper. But in my own experience of stress — and there has been no shortage this year with a double bereavement and other tricky family matters to attend to — the cognitive benefits of the paleo lifestyle can also provide a necessary fresh energy and focus to tackle these new challenges. My basic advice would be to avoid “comfort” food at all costs.

I’m reading James Le Fanu‘s book on The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine at the moment (a tip also from Art’s early blogposts which I’m also in the process of re-reading). Like Taubes, Le Fanu debunks various post-war social and dietary theories of health, particularly with regard to cancer and heart disease. Cancer, Le Fanu says, is best understood as a disease of ageing rather than lifestyle. And yet, in contrast, it’s evident that De Vany (as Appleyard makes clear) is no quack, but someone who has applied the sciences of complexity to a rigorous examination of what we “modern lab-rats” really should be doing to forestall that process of terminal illness. Weight-loss is clearly such a central issue that a diet capable of returning you to your weight when you were 21 must be taken very seriously indeed.

Well, on my desk for a number of weeks (apart from many august tomes that I should have been reading and absorbing) one has stood out. It’s a 1936 children’s book, entitled Uncle Ray’s Story of the Stone-Age People. It looks like it came out just before De Vany was born. It belonged to my father-in-law: himself a sometime professor of mathematics, WHO health statistician, and poet. Alas, it certainly did not encourage him to follow anything like a paleo lifestyle. The one seemingly useful piece of science that the book contains is the suggestion that our ancestors broke the bones of their prey in order to consume the marrow.

Of course, while our diet may have changed a lot in the past 100,000 years (and arguably for the worse), this humble volume would indicate that casual male efforts to combine DIY and childcare have been alarming womankind for millennia with remarkable consistency. A more up-to-date orange-coloured book of Stone Age advice will soon be available here.

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I was feeling guilty about my carbon footprint as I drove four teenagers to the airport on the other side of London last night, so I decided to swing back via the Royal Albert Hall. Although five minutes late for the start of the late night BBC Prom concert, I was nevertheless admitted halfway through at 10:40pm on a £5 standing-room ticket.

It was a serendipitous opportunity for me to hear the world-renowned Tallis Scholars sing some Renaissance Franco/Flemish choral music by Obrecht, Ockeghem and Josquin Des Prez that was completely unfamiliar to me. You can listen too by going here for the next few days on BBC iPlayer.

Well what has this got to do with broken things, the putative subject of this blog? The answer is contained in the poetic words used in the middle piece to replace those lost in the mists of time. The music by Ockeghem remains, but with its title only, Malheur me bat, which might be described as the French opposite of “opportunity knocks”. It has not been sung in modern times, so the Tallis Scholars, under Peter Phillips, commissioned a modern French poet to pen something new. And here is a translation of that chanson for three voices (to be found 49 minutes in):-

Misfortune has struck me/battered me,

My heart is sad.

Joy has moved away,

My birds have all taken flight.

Sorrow lays me low.

I am the tree in the night that will not see the morning light;

That will not see the morning nor hear them sing in Latin.

Misfortune has battered me,

Sorrow lays me low.

Well, it doesn’t come much more knackered than that. And it was almost 3am by the time I got home. For someone who is making a point at the moment of observing a fairly strict sleep regime, this looks like a category error. But, as Steve McQueen said in The Magnificent Seven, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Listen and I hope you’ll agree that it was.

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I had a migraine a few weeks ago. As migraines go it was a breeze, really. There was no piercing headache, just a vice-like tension that I would normally associate with the before- and, to some extent, the after-effects. It was not a muscular tension-headache nor alcohol-related.

I didn’t experience the normal visual aura, but I’m sure it was a migraine because it was preceded by a strange faintness accompanied by shifting vision. I felt funny for most of the following week, then had a severe headache last Friday. The previous day I’d worked out hard in the gym. So I took medical advice. They said it was probably a virus that had triggered the original migraine; it was not surprising for the symptoms to be there a week later. Take paracetamol, they said. You’ll be fine. And so it turned out.

I’ve had one or two really severe migraines, but I’ve been very lucky. Apart from the couple in my teenage years that would conform to the agonising archetype blighting many people’s lives, I’ve been a light sufferer, by any measure. For 10 years of adulthood I had none. Then just a handful with no pattern or recognizable trigger. And some of those were easily knocked on the head by the early ingestion of paracetamol.

Most recently, my first half-marathon triggered one. And after the London marathon in 2005, I succumbed. In both cases my training had been incomplete: I’d overstretched myself. That would constitute a huge stress: an obvious trigger. I’ve wondered too if the demand for calcium/magnesium following that excessive hammering on bones and joints might not have helped. Too much to know.

Because I’ve escaped lightly, my knowledge of the significant progress of migraine science has been almost (but not entirely) non-existent. I noticed only yesterday, for instance, that Oliver Sacks wrote a book called Migraine in 1970 (with a revised edition published in 1992).

But the subject hove back into my view for a couple of reasons recently. I learned, for instance, that migraine as a neurological condition has a close genetic alignment with epilepsy, and that migraine sufferers are more susceptible to background noise; there is a similar phenomenon (which I don’t fully understand) in relation to eyesight.

My late brother suffered from epilepsy. But, because his epilepsy was apparently brought under control by a similar progress of pharmaceutical research, the family had been largely able to forget the underlying seriousness of a condition which reportedly affects 60 million people worldwide; migraine, by contrast, may affect as many as 300 million. The general impression — certainly one that my brother held — was that the major risk to his health came from the long-term effect of such chronic drug dependency on his vital organs. But it seemed that we could feel blessed that it wasn’t a whole lot worse; going back a generation or two, some family members’ lives had been completely wrecked, and this had chronic knock-on consequences for their carers. These days there are still those whose condition does not respond to treatment.

So, when I was researching my earlier post on Didier Sornette and the housing market, I came across a presentation he delivered in Oxford in January. It revealed some of the wider applications of complexity theory beyond the geophysics where Sornette started. In collaboration with several others, Sornette has published a paper or two explaining how the study of data sets of the brain activity of epileptics (specifically those whose condition does not respond to drugs) showed patterns akin to seismic data of earthquake incidence. The hope is that this might lead to some better method of prediction for sufferers.

The maths is rather intimidating and I’ll try to paraphrase the following as I go along, and link to definitions. Fingers crossed:-

That the pdf [probability density function] of SZ [seizure] energies E follows a power law, and more importantly that its exponent is beta almost equal to 2/3 (as for EQ [earthquake]), has far-reaching, statistical-clinical implications: the mean and variance of E are mathematically infinite, which means in practice that the largest SZ in a given time series controls their values (3). As a consequence, variability is dominant and “typical” has no meaning. The energy pdf, and specifically its heavy tail, also suggests an explanation, at a mathematical-conceptual level, for the proclivity and capacity of the human brain to support status epilepticus, a potentially fatal condition characterized by prolonged/frequent SZ during which the brain does not return to its “normal” state, even when SZ activity abates.

Well, I think the key point is ‘variability is dominant and “typical” has no meaning’, which we liberal artists would tend to capture with the expression ‘to be in a constant state of flux’ although that does not quite cover the sense of unbounded potential for an extreme spike. The problem is that we like to convince ourselves that there is some “normal”, some stability. And, on the surface, so it may appear.

And then Sornette explains:-

In seismology, it has been recognized that the many small, undetected EQ provide a major if not dominant contribution to the triggering future of EQ of any size (7). Prolonged recordings of brain cortical electrical activity (ECoG), the equivalent of seismographs, from epileptic humans and animals contain frequent, low intensity, short bursts of abnormal activity unperceived by the patient and observers and interspersed with infrequent, but longer, more widespread, and more intense bursts (convulsions) (4). The SZ-EQ analogy, including the evidence presented here for an inherent capacity of SZ to trigger future SZ, suggest that a workable prediction scheme should use the triggering by, not only past perceived (clinical) SZ, but also the myriad of unperceived (subclinical) abnormal neuronal bursts.

Sornette’s applied work highlights the cross-disciplinary relationship of the science of complexity and reminds us too that some part of our population suffers from extreme non-linearities in their day-to-day lives. And how more vivid can it be, as the picture above shows, than the fractal manifestation that is the migraine aura; when I first used to experience it, it would mark the beginning of hours of debilitation.

Meanwhile, news was reported a few weeks ago that untreatable epilepsy in children responded to a high-fat/low-carbohydrate diet. This is not particularly new. I notice now that Mark’s Daily Apple picked up a Science Daily report back in January to similar effect. Mark was also the original pointer to the picture above (thanks again Mark). So-called ketogenic diets have been known to be effective in treating even the worst sufferers from epilepsy as far back as the 1920s. And I even found a 1910 medical report quoted on a low-carb forum where a doctor had noted high levels of candy consumption among two chronic epileptic sufferers, one adult, one child, he’d been asked to treat. Drug therapies became preferred later because the higher-fat diets were found to be more difficult to follow, ostensibly for cultural reasons. Today there is a shortage of dieticians to help apply what you might call a clinical diet, where each gram of carbohydrate is very closely measured.

Well, it makes more and more sense to me that diet — and our modern carb-laden diet — has much more to answer for than we allow when we think that we are eating a “healthy mixed diet”. But it’s a struggle to remove easy grain-based carbs, and one has to wonder whether it is a sustainable option for the planet as a whole. Since I can afford it, I’m making the switch, but mainly because of the evidence that grains may play a role in activating cancer genes. I can’t ignore those pointers; I’m 43 and since January the oldest surviving member of my immediate family. Both my parents lived ostensibly healthy lives. That alone should predict that at least one would still be with us since my grandmother was alive just 7 years ago at 91.

Because of the complex, fast-moving chain of events that led to my brother’s death in January, it was hard for the surgeons to provide the family with a satisfactory narrative. I missed the chance to speak in person with the clinician; I was racing down the interstate in (melo)dramatic fashion in order to arrive before what turned out to be a technical pronouncement of death. My brother’s state on arrival in hospital the previous day was not materially different from when I arrived 10 minutes after the certification; he was on life-support simply for the purposes of organ-donation.

But that does not matter. What was described was a total neurological event — a seizure that affected all his vital functions. SUDEP — or sudden unexplained death in epilepsy — is what I understand it to have been, although that was not the word the doctor used. Or perhaps it was status epilepticus.

It’s ironic that neither SUDEP nor status epilepticus was something we knew about beforehand, or ever discussed as a possibility within our family. As I said, my brother’s principle pre-occupation in terms of epilepsy-related health (based on counselling I assume he received quite early on in his life) was that his long-term health would be compromised by the medicine he took rather than the diet he was exposed to. I think it made him fatalistic. I have no recollection that a low-carbohydrate diet would have improved his teenage outcomes, and it was something my mother would surely have responded to, had she known.

Later in life, my brother ate a standard North American diet, and there is no suggestion that this was a contributory factor to his SUDEP, but I have to wonder. Not least because the science of low-carb and the science of earthquakes both point to epilepsy from different perspectives. And scientists like Sornette and De Vany are using the same maths across these various domains.

Changing diet may not be a panacea, and I may already have sown the seeds of my own demise, but you don’t not pay into a pension scheme because you didn’t pay in before. That sort of fatalism does lead to literal and metaphorical penury. But above all else, these findings all suggest that a lot more critical reporting should be applied to questions of public health, preventative medicine, exercise, diet fads and even agricultural subsidy. That obviously ain’t happening at the moment. Indeed, the recent coverage of the ketogenic diet in the BBC/Lancet does not consider whether a lower carb diet contributes to a reduced risk of seizure more generally, and therefore might act to forestall a sufferer reaching the kind of tipping point that Sornette’s science is point toward. It is dealt with in the specific of untreatable epilepsy with no extrapolation that more general metabolic risk factors need to be considered or highlighted for all sufferers.

Well, when I asked in one of the leading cookery shops with a vast, if not complete, array of cookery titles if they had anything on the paleo diet, they had no clue what I was talking about, unsurprisingly. So there is much work to be done. That said, Nassim Taleb‘s advocacy in The Sunday Times the other day certainly has led to more Googling of “paleo diet” and other associated terms, from what I can see here, including searches for Prof De Vany.

Photo credit Auntie P @ Flickr (CC)

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