What I Just Read

"I spent untold thousands of dollars on the "best" foods and supplements, trying to get an antioxidant or immune boost that can be had for free when you simply skip breakfast." --Mark Sisson Good introduction/primer for anyone interested in intermittent fasting and HIIT-style exercise. This book is too basic for anyone who is already practicing these domains, although it contains many good reminders and useful concepts for review for the intermediate/advanced practitioner.  The book also offers helpful reminders and practices for mindfulness, meta-awareness of one's mental and emotional state, cues that signal overtraining, etc.  Also a good articulation of the various flaws in traditional/government-approved dietary and health guidelines and why they're flawed, while offering better, more explanatory dietary hypotheses and eating recommendations. Again, this will be review material for anyone already conversant in these topics, but still a useful review no...

Good book. Useful distillation of Buddhism into layperson's terms applicable to athletics and daily life.  Notes/quotes:  "...stress itself can create a vulnerability to being injury prone"  "Freedom is now or never. I chose now."  AOF: ass on fire: desperation as a gift that compels us to move forward. Also, the idea that it's dangerous to be too comfortable in life. [ Am I too comfortable in my life?? ] "The five superpowers": mindfulness, concentration, insight, right effort, trust. Mindfulness: Dealing with monkey mind conception that the mind is restless, agitated, confused, hard to control. Calming and pacifying that monkey using mindfulness, to help you pay attention to your thoughts in a non-attached manner, slowing down your experience of time and reconnecting you to the present moment.  Flow is your ability to stay in the present moment. Focusing too much on winning, or trying to hard to be spectacular (the destination), these things take...

Not a great book, but still useful for understanding certain motivations of the healthcare industry to culturally universalize medical conditions that are anything but universal. Also a good source to illustrate the circularity of many health conditions: how symptoms and conditions are shaped by the expectations of doctor and patient, and how psychological conditions become "contagious" thanks to further expectation shaping by the healthcare industry and the media as it "discovers" a new disease.  Finally, it's always helpful to get regular reminders of how little medical science actually knows. To repurpose the old joke: half of what medical science thinks it knows is wrong, we just don't know which half!  Watters scratches at this idea when he writes "Indeed modern day mental health practitioners often look back at previous generations of psychiatrists with a mixture of scorn and pity, wondering how they could have been so swept away by the cultural b...

Excellent, readable history of the last 40 years of secrets, and of those who felt it was right to reveal those secrets. It starts with Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers and thereby exposed years of government foolishness, greed and stupidity in the Vietnam War, and it ends with the various schisms and dramas surrounding Julian Assange's WikiLeaks and its descendant organizations. This is good book to complement the best-known recent books about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies:  The Bitcoin Standard , Digital Gold and  Bitcoin Billionaires . It turns out that cryptography and anonymity are just as necessary for protecting whistleblowers from political repression as they are for protecting an undebasable digital store of value like Bitcoin from repressive monetary repression. Also noteworthy are the contrasts between Daniel Ellsberg's efforts to leak the Pentagon Papers, and Bradley (uh, Chelsea) Manning's leaks of US military secrets to WikiLeaks. Ellsberg wa...