The Key to Ultimate Health: Bioresilience
This essay proposes increasing and sustaining bioresilience as a method to achieve low mortality rates, much longer healthy lifespans and, eventually, ultimate health.
Let’s envision a model for healthy, functional longevity based on evaluating and improving the body’s bioresilience.
Bioresilience is the body’s capacity to respond to stress. One way to visualize bioresilience is to imagine a WeebleTM, the toy that self-centers when pushed. Evolution selects for increasing bioresilience, and it and so effective during youth that we notice it more by its decline after midlife when recovery from biologic stress—be it a late night, hangover, jet lag, cough, injury, wound, or a rollercoaster ride—diminishes. Our tolerance of environmental variation, such as changes in temperature or altitude, weakens. Our pupils respond inadequately to changes in light, so menus are harder to read at dinner.
Now consider objective changes that we can’t feel. When we are young, our bioresilience returns elevated blood pressure, glucose, and inflammation to baseline. As we age, those levels may no longer self-tune sufficiently, leading to hypertension, diabetes, and inflammation, respectively. If loss of bioresilience is a common framework that helps explain the diverse features of aging, could enhancing the body’s bioresilience mitigate the aging process and promote healthy, functional longevity
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Is The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference Still Relevant?
Photo by Scott London
The 36th annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, happening in San Francisco, has become the Burning Man of biotechnology.
It’s no longer the under-the-radar West Coast pilgrimage of eclectic pioneers gathering to have brief encounters with interesting people, share insights about drugs, and behold a blossoming movement. Like Burning Man, the Conference in 2018 is mainstream. At least Jamie Dimon, the keynote speaker, won’t be wearing a pink tutu.
With success comes congestion—those who have been to both agree that Burning Man is the lesser fire hazard. In the gridlocked corridors, old-timers small-talk about the way things used to be. Nostalgia reigns, and so does the status game among attendees as to what year they lost their Conference virginity (mine was the same year I went to my first Burning Man).
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Retail’s 2017 Trend of the Year: Hypebeast Arbitrage
Hypebeast arbitrage was retail’s 2017 Trend of the Year.
Even in a retail year marred by increasing store closures and bankruptcies, one phenomenon is bucking that trend. The oldest strategy in the hype business — giving buyers an opportunity to speculate and profit in the secondary market — has resurfaced in a big way in the Technology Age. Think Beanie Babies meets cryptocurrency ICOs.
Let’s call the phenomenon what it is: hypebeast arbitrage is the simultaneous buying and selling of extremely popular merchandise to exploit differing prices in the market. The hyped merchandise generally are birthed through a scheduled “drop,” a strategic, highly-choreographed manna release from high above Madison Avenue at volumes and prices far lower than would be justified by demand. Instant sellout and hype are inevitable, though it’s not quite clear which of these two was engineered first. Look behind the curtain and you might find a math wiz optimizing the relationships between retail price, secondary price, release volume, number of retail outlets, and distribution of stock keeping units.
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Hypebeast Arbitrage
Hypebeast arbitrage is the simultaneous buying and selling of extremely popular and hyped retail merchandise released in limited quantities in order to take advantage of differing prices in the market.
Hypebeast arbitrage opportunities are created by brands’ retail strategy based on a point-in-time release of merchandise at limited volumes and at prices low enough relative to the secondary market so as to enable immediate sellout and hype.
Retailers shift some costs and inventory risk to scalpers. However, these costs and risks to scalpers are mitigated by a robust secondary market (example: StockX).
Brands manage the degree of hype by optimizing the mathematical relationships between retail price, secondary price, release volume, number of retail outlets, and distribution of stock keeping units.
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National Institute of Nutrition and Food Health
Establishment of the National Institute of Nutrition and Food Health (NINFH) is envisioned, with a mission to seek fundamental knowledge about food and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability. This mission would be distinct from other public institutions that serve various food system functions.
One way to establish the NINFH is within the National Institutes of Health (FY 2017 budget $33.1 billion) as the 28th institute and center. Another way to establish the NINFH is as an independent institution—similar to the founding of the National Cancer Institute (FY 2017 budget $5.4 billion) through the National Cancer Act of 1937—that requests budget directly from the United States Department of Health and Human Services (FY 2017 budget $1.1 trillion).
Rationale:
- Connection between Food, Illness, and Health
- Funding Gap
- Separation of Duty to Agriculture and Duty to Public Health
- Trusted Authority for Public
To Husband
It’s fun when the universe leaves us Easter eggs.
The verb form of the word “pet” (to stroke lovingly) explains how best to treat the noun form of the same word.
The verb form of the word “kid” (to be silly with) also explains how best to treat the noun form of the same word.
I was disappointed that this pattern doesn’t work for the word “husband,” where the verb form means “to conserve.” Then I looked at the definition of the verb again…
hus·band
ˈhəzbənd/
verb
“use economically”
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Cryptoassets Pose Existential Threat to the Financial System and It’s Not in the Way You Might Think
The ascension of cryptoassets exposes an inherent weakness of the current financial system — the feedforward dynamic between marginal price change of assets and the size of the total balance sheet in the financial system.
In financial systems that rely on mark-to-market pricing of assets on balance sheets, even a small rise in marginal price of an asset results in a large expansion of the aggregate balance sheet (i.e. paper gains). That expanding balance sheet serves as increasing collateral for potential leverage and as demand capacity for other assets (seeking additional returns, safety, diversification, rebalancing, wealth effect, etc.), which represents potential upward pressure on the marginal price of other assets (or itself).
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DNA is Nature’s Blockchain
Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a blockchain, selected through competition among energy-expending participants. It reflects a history of biologic transactions without the burden of recording its entire past. It has done rather well over time.
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Dr. Joon Yun on KDOW Radio, Dec 2017
High-Alignment Food
The single most important thing that has changed about your food is the alignment of interest. Until modern times, your food was provided by kin with a vested interest in your well-being. Today, food is provided by counterparties (food companies, restaurants, etc.) who profit from your consumption. They compete among themselves to bait you with food coloring and salty, sweet, and fatty flavors while using chemicals, antibiotics, preservatives, pesticides, substitutes, and additives that increase profits, irrespective of their long-term effects on your body. There is a never-ending food fight in society about what constitutes healthy food as counterparties game every healthy food trend to their advantage. The future of food will be about managing counterparty risk, understanding food chain provenance, and restoring alignment between you and your food provider.
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