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The Six Day Water Fast

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Ben Marcus, in his mid-forties, felt pain throughout his body. He decided to try something unconvential: a six-day fast consisting of nothing but drinking water. He chronicles his (mis)-adventures in this piece for GQ.

TrueNorth lacks the whorehouse comforts of a spa. There isn’t even a pool, which seems to violate some central tenet of California apartment complexes. It feels more like a scientific-research center. There are daily lectures and cooking demos, and the guest rooms are stocked with DVDs of slightly NSFW health documentaries. Today at the clinic they showed a grim video called The Pleasure Trap, an unflinching lecture on why we eat, and eat, and fucking eat, what isn’t good for us. Salt, sugar, and fat, combined with chemicals in processed foods, trick the brain in the same way as cocaine, and the brain flushes our bodies with dopamine, perhaps the most blissful, and addictive, homemade chemical we have. Once we find a way to trigger it, we kill ourselves to get more. Literally.

That evening, with no dinner to cook, eat, and clean up, I prepare my water smoothie, made of nothing but distilled water, and turn on the Food Network. If I can’t eat food, I’ll watch some. On TV, pre-scandal Paula Deen and her son are making corn dogs, fried okra, croissant-dough muffins with caramelized pecans. These things look gorgeous and obscene, like the invented genitalia of a new species. But after watchingThe Pleasure Trap, it seems wrong to refer to this stuff as food. More like recreational drugs for the mouth, with nasty side effects like diabetes. Still, I’m drooling. I love these recreational drugs. I go to foreign countries just to try exotic versions. I’m a user. I do food.

Just not today, and, if I survive, not for the next five days.

It appears the fast has worked wonders, though I appreciate the cautious outlook that this might have been a short-term victory:

Throughout my stay, a six-day fast has been regarded with amused smiles. Pathetic amateur, they don’t say. One doctor says everyone should do a long fast at least once in their lives. What’s long, I ask. Twenty-one days. Maybe thirty. Now I see the appeal. Once you get over the misery of the first few days, things start to look up and you get this feeling that something profoundly necessary is happening inside you. I’ve lost sixteen pounds, and a deep bend at the knees is surprisingly pain-free. My hands no longer ache. My skin is clear. The whites of my eyes look Photoshopped.

Don’t try this at home, folks. Seriously: from personal experience, even fasting for twelve hours is bound to make you dizzy, and you don’t want to be falling down stairs when you attempt something this bold…

How a Dog Named Pete Got an MBA Degree

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This is an interesting investigation by the BBC about how easy it is to fake credentials and get an MBA degree from The American University of London. In exchange for a fee, of course.

The American University of London (AUOL) awarded a fictitious person created by the programme a Master’s in Business in exchange for a £4,500 fee.

AUOL has insisted it is “not a bogus university” and defended the robustness of the qualifications it offers.

Newsnight has found hundreds of senior executives listing AUOL qualifications.

The programme contacted some of them, but they all insisted that they had had to study for their degrees.

AUOL styles itself as a pioneer of distance learning, offering degrees and post-graduate qualifications in business, IT, law, education and liberal arts, humanities, and English to more than 100,000 students worldwide.

Its website claims that that all of their courses “have been designed to the most exacting standards, in accordance with the most stringent criteria, in order to provide outstanding education at an affordable price”.

However, Newsnight found that getting the university to provide a qualification without any study at all was easy.

The programme drew up a one-page fake CV for a management consultant Peter Smith, known as Pete, living in South London, which included 15 years of made-up work experience and a fictitious undergraduate degree from a UK university.

The real Pete was actually a dog living in Battersea Dogs’ Home.

Read the rest here.

On the Evolution of Serving Hot Coffee

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More than 20 years ago, 79-year-old Stella Liebeck ordered coffee at a McDonald’s drive-through in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She spilled the coffee, was badly burned, and one year later, sued McDonald’s. The jury awarded her $2.9 million but she eventually settled for about $500,000. Her story became a media sensation and fodder for talk-show hosts, late-night comedians, sitcom writers, and political pundits. The New York Times has a short piece and a video on how serving hot coffee has changed since then:

The point is, the world now caters to the coffee drinker. The idea of getting into a car without cup holders and lifting the lid off the cup in order to add milk and sugar and drink the coffee, as the facts of the case show Ms. Liebeck did that morning, seems strangely anachronistic.

Within the ensuing years, some genius invented a sculptured lid with a little sipping hole in the top, eliminating the need to open the cup and reducing the potential for spills. Sloshing grew less likely once the lip was raised above the cup rim.

Let’s not forget the evolution of the cup holder. Teams of car engineers continuously work to perfect their design for drivers in the front and those passengers two rows back.

In which you also learn about the zarf, that cupboard thingie that goes around the cup of coffee.

Why Not to Invest in Futures Funds

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If you or your family has investments in so-called futures funds, you might want to pull out your money out of them immediately. David Evans, writing in Bloomberg, has a big piece on how these futures funds have been a complete cash drain on those who unwisely chose to invest in them. While traditional hedge funds charge a 2 and 20 fee (2% fees, 20% of profits), these futures funds charge as as much as 9 percent in total fees each year (which is astronomical):

Investors who kept their money in Spectrum Technical for that decade, however, reaped none of those returns — not one penny. Every bit of those profits — and more — was consumed by $498.7 million in commissions, expenses and fees paid to fund managers and Morgan Stanley.

After all of that was deducted, investors ended up losing $8.3 million over 10 years. Had those Morgan Stanley investors placed their money instead in a low-fee index mutual fund, such as Vanguard Group Inc.’s 500 Index Fund, they would have reaped a net cumulative return of 96 percent in the same period.

The “powerful argument” for managed futures turned out to be good for brokers and fund managers but not so good for investors.

In the $337 billion managed-futures market, return-robbing fees like those are common. According to data filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and compiled by Bloomberg, 89 percent of the $11.51 billion of gains in 63 managed-futures funds went to fees, commissions and expenses during the decade from Jan. 1, 2003, to Dec. 31, 2012.

Fees: $1.5 Billion

The funds held $13.65 billion of investor money at the end of last year, according to SEC filings. Twenty-nine of those funds left investors with losses.

What’s more, it seems many of these futures funds escape transparency:

Like hedge funds, managed-futures funds haven’t been required to file with the SEC as a matter of course. However, an SEC rule has mandated that any partnership with more than 500 investors and $10 million in assets — even a hedge fund — must file quarterly and annual reports.

The SEC has no category listing managed-futures funds, as it does for mutual funds or corporate filings. Bloomberg Markets culled through thousands of filings in several categories, including one called “SIC 6221 Unknown,” to identify 63 managed-futures funds that reported to the SEC.

Even sophisticated investors should stay away from these managed funds.

The Man Who Buried his Treasure in a Poem

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Forrest Fenn, an art dealer told he was dying of cancer, has decided to leave a unique legacy: a fortune in antiquities hidden in the Rockies, and a cryptic poem that may lead right to it. But will his treasure be found? Dozens of people have searched so far, all in vain. Some think the entire thing is a hoax. The Telegraph has a fascinating piece on the subject:

The title of Fenn’s book is significant. He insists that, for him, it isn’t really about finding the treasure at all. It’s about the “thrill of the chase” – encouraging families out of the house and into the mountains; getting children away from their computer games or television shows and experiencing the wilderness. “I have thousands of emails from people, most of them thanking me for getting their family out of the game room.”

The bulk of Fenn’s wealth will be passed down to his daughters and grandchildren. But what really was the purpose of giving away part of his fortune? In his book, Fenn ponders the nature of death. He describes experiences of his tour in Vietnam, stumbling upon the unmarked graves of French soldiers. “What about those whose bones are rotting under the headstones of a thousand wars?” he writes. “Is it fair that no one recalls where those brave French soldiers fell?”

On paper at least, Fenn seems concerned about the fact that most of us will be “nothing but the leftovers of history or an asterisk in a book that was never written”. And so I ask whether this is the real reason for the memoir and the hidden treasure: that as he approaches his 84th year, he wants to ensure his legacy – make certain that history will remember him.

Dated to about AD 1150, the chest is said to contain in the region of $3 million worth of treasure: gold coins, pre-Columbian gold animal figures, Chinese jade carvings, a 17th-century Spanish ring with an inset emerald, rubies, sapphires, and diamonds.

I, for one, believe Fenn is for real. I endorse his motivation for hiding the treasure:

What Fenn wants is for people to experience history, not just read about it in dusty books. When he was an art dealer he used to raise eyebrows by letting schoolchildren touch the canvases of 200-year-old paintings. One of those was of George Washington, produced when the first President of the United States was sitting just a few feet away from the artist. By letting those schoolchildren touch the actual paint, they could, Fenn says, connect with what this really was and what it meant. “You can become part of that episode,” he says. “And that’s exciting to me.” When somebody finds his treasure and reads his memoir (a tiny copy of it, together with a magnifying glass, is included in the treasure chest), he says “they’ll be amazed at what things were like back then.”

Interesting in its entirety.

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(via @longreads)

Jeopardy! Is Now in Its 30th Season

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Jeopardy!‘s 30th season (the current incarnation of the syndicated show) will premiere tonight (September 16). To commemorate the occasion, The Daily Beast compiled videos of some of the “craziest answers, wackiest stories, and unforgettable people who helped make the iconic game show just that—iconic—for these past three decades.”:

This one might take the cake:

This is a case of an amazing answer being shot down on the technicality that it wasn’t on Trebek’s cue card. Ken Jennings, who won for 74 straight days, pulling in over $2 million dollars, threw out this little gem in response to a question about a term that can be both garden tool and immoral pleasure seeker. The best part of the video is the brief pause before everyone realizes what Jennings had just said. Even Trebek was caught off guard. 

More here.

The Rise and Toils of Hipsterification

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The hipster culture is growing. In this amusing piece, Steven Kurutz wonders if there’s ever been a subculture that’s been more broadly defined. Pretty much anything he chooses to wear can be classified as trying to be hipster. And picking up new hobbies (such as photography or bicycling) makes him hipster too.

Thirty years from now I’ll be able to un-self-consciously wear a cardigan and a tweed cap or fedora, because there is an age limit for being seen as a hipster, but, at the moment, hipsters have geezer style locked up.

Even the basic building blocks of a wardrobe have been hipsterfied. Jeans, especially slim-cut denim, are a hipster essential. So are white T-shirts, leather jackets and hooded sweatshirts. I could wear suits. But they would have to be boxy styles from Men’s Wearhouse, because anything slim or tailored is the province of high-fashion hipsters.

Hipsters have the market cornered on vintage and irony, so I can’t raid the back of my closet for the 20-year-old Smashing Pumpkins concert tee I bought at an actual concert, 20 years ago. Not content with irony, hipsters have also co-opted authentic heritage brands like Woolrich and Gant.

So what does the author think would classify as non-hipster?

The only way to safely avoid looking like a hipster, so far as I can tell, is to dress in oversize mesh jerseys bearing the logos of sports teams. Or to wear the blandest, baggiest, beige-est clothes possible, like a middle-aged tourist. Oh, wait. My girlfriend read a draft of this story and told me mesh jerseys “are kind of hipster now.” The Rick Steves look is next.

This line made me laugh:

Hipsters love their iPhones, yet swoon over antiquated technology like typewriters and record players, so Luddites can’t even stand apart.

Do you feel like you’re becoming hipster, unintentionally?

David Foster Wallace on the Mortality Paradox

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David Foster Wallace took his own life five years ago today.

This quote on the mortality paradox, found in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, resonated with me:

You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of real art-fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.

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(via Brainpickings)

Why and How Jellyfish are Taking Over the World’s Oceans

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Tim Flannery provides an excellent review of Lisa-ann Gershwin’s new book Stung!: On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean in this New York Review of Books piece. It’s such a good, thorough review that I am disinclined to read the book.

From the Arctic to the equator and on to the Antarctic, jellyfish plagues (or blooms, as they’re technically known) are on the increase. Even sober scientists are now talking of the jellification of the oceans. And the term is more than a mere turn of phrase. Off southern Africa, jellyfish have become so abundant that they have formed a sort of curtain of death, “a stingy-slimy killing field,” as Gershwin puts it, that covers over 30,000 square miles. The curtain is formed of jelly extruded by the creatures, and it includes stinging cells. The region once supported a fabulously rich fishery yielding a million tons annually of fish, mainly anchovies. In 2006 the total fish biomass was estimated at just 3.9 million tons, while the jellyfish biomass was 13 million tons. So great is their density that jellyfish are now blocking vacuum pumps used by local diamond miners to suck up sediments from the sea floor.

This particular examples notes the collapse of the fishing economy in Bulgaria, Romania, and Georgia:

Would you believe, Gershwin asks, that “a mucosy little jellyfish, barely bigger than a chicken egg, with no brain, no backbone, and no eyes, could cripple three national economies and wipe out an entire ecosystem”? That’s just what happened when theMnemiopsis jellyfish (a kind of comb jelly) invaded the Black Sea. The creatures arrived from the east coast of the US in seawater ballast (seawater a ship takes into its hold once it has discharged its cargo to retain its stability), and by the 1980s they were taking over. Prior to their arrival, Bulgaria, Romania, and Georgia had robust fisheries, with anchovies and sturgeon being important resources. As the jellyfish increased, the anchovies and other valuable fish vanished, and along with them went the sturgeon, the long-beloved source of blini toppings.

By 2002 the total weight of Mnemiopsis in the Black Sea had grown so prodigiously that it was estimated to be ten times greater than the weight of all fish caught throughout the entire world in a year. The Black Sea had become effectively jellified. 

Some of the reasons for jellyfish growth are downright frightening;

One of the fastest breeders of all is Mnemiopsis. Biologists characterize it as a “self-fertilizing simultaneous hermaphrodite,” which means that it doesn’t need a partner to reproduce, nor does it need to switch from one sex to the other, but can be both sexes at once. It begins laying eggs when just thirteen days old, and is soon laying 10,000 per day. Even cutting these prolific breeders into pieces doesn’t slow them down. If quartered, the bits will regenerate and resume normal life as whole adults in two to three days.

Jellyfish are voracious feeders. Mnemiopsis is able to eat over ten times its own body weight in food, and to double in size, each day.

So what exactly is causing the jellyfish to thrive and take over the oceans? The reasons are numerous, and the review elucidates a few of them:

Our waste, such as plastic bags, and fishing methods like drift nets and long lines are busy destroying the few jellyfish predators, such as sea turtles. We are also creating the most splendid jellyfish nurseries. From piers to boat hulls, oil and gas platforms and industrial waste and other floating rubbish, we’re littering the oceans with the kind of artificial hard surfaces that jellyfish polyps love.

Then there is the amount of oxygen dissolved in seawater. Oxygen is created by plants using photosynthesis, and high oxygen levels allow fish and other complex creatures to compete successfully with jellyfish. But the oxygen in water can be depleted far more quickly that it can be replaced. Where humans add nutrients to seawater (such as fertilizer runoff from farms), areas with depleted oxygen, known as eutrophied zones, form. They can occur naturally, but are spreading quickly as the oceans become filled with excess phosphorus and nitrogen derived from a variety of agriculture and industrial human activities. In river estuaries, and in confined waters such as the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico, eutrophied zones have spread to a frightening extent, and they appear to be permanent. Nothing that needs even moderate amounts of oxygen, including fish, shellfish, prawns, and crabs, can survive in them. But the jellyfish thrive.

Compelling read.

Learning How to Think

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A pithy post from Dustin Curtis, in which he argues that once you truly learn how to think, you’ll no longer feel constrained to be a “worker bee”:

There is an insanely huge difference between, “We’re making a site for connecting to your friends” and, “Privacy is a relic of the past, so we’re going to push people to open up their lives and share, connecting them together.”

Most people see Facebook and extrapolate backwards to the first sentence above. But the genius behind Facebook, and why it has been continually successful, is actually in the second sentence. Facebook isn’t about connecting; it’s about sharing. MySpace failed because it focused on the connections, not the interactions between those connections. Facebook had the Wall and the News Feed.

Learning how to think like this is like discovering halfway through your life as a flightless bird that you have wings and can fly. And once you discover it, there is no going back. It’s addictive and powerful. It ruins your ability to be a worker bee, because you’ve tasted blood: you become a killer bee, intent on understanding why things are the way they are, finding their flaws, and pushing the universe forward by fixing them.

For a very good start on learning how to think, check out these mental models at Farnam Street. Highly recommended.

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If you want to go even deeper, I recommend the book Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life, which offers invaluable advice in outmaneuvering your rivals/competitors. It takes a series of case studies from business, sports, politics, and more and provides useful strategies for making things happen in your daily life.