Friday, August 22, 2008

King Arthur

More news on the diet front to back the ideas of Arthur, Superman's Grandad.
First the irrepressible Dave Lull sends this news of a study that suggests carbohydrates and sugar destroy appetite control cells in the brain.
And then this from Nassim Nicholas Taleb who introduced me to Arthur's world.
'He specializes in uncertainty in the movies/ complexity in economics  and contacted me after the publication of my book Fooled by Randomness as we had similar views concerning the Black Swan  structure of uncertainty --we tried to collaborate on a paper. I used most of his results for The Black Swan and the accompanying papers --as movie returns provided great empirical evidence of fat tails in economic life.  As I was then a workout fanatic, he convinced me that my views of the structure of randomness in the world did not match my views on energy expenditure on the part of humans. Then I realized that in fact my energy output (and to some extent my input) needed to match the randomness in my natural habitat: long periods of inertia, burst of expenditure with a FRACTAL power law distribution (alpha ~2).  This is how we humans spent most of our time. Even heartbeat follows a power law! Mandelbrot had showed that much of biology was a power law (medicine took a lot of ideas from fractals).'

3 comments:

  1. Yes, thanks to the miracle that is Youtube, linked to the combined efforts of Mark and Elberry, I have finally seen Bryan chatting with Richard and Judy.

    Bryan, you look great. Handsome, relaxed, modest. And I like your shirt.

    Richard, however, has got the diet I want. He's in his 50s, right? Looks to be about 30. I think it's probably more than celery on his plate!

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  2. Richard, Susan, is an alien:http://www.bryanappleyard.com/article.php?page=9&article_id=116

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