Having just seen Life of Pi 3D I returned to and reread the book (movie is quite close, unusual) and saw one little tidbit that tickles my fancy. A little anecdote ends up with the line:
No sir! There is no bamboozlement here.
I can just hear the Indian accent of the train station clerk in this snippet of dialog and it completely describes some thoughts buzzing around in my head.
I also learned a new (not that obscure) word I like: disquisition. Yep, that’s my new description of these posts (rather than boring digression, disquisition sounds better).
Yep, disparate ideas are buzzing around and I can’t quite coax my normal post out of them, yet! So here’s the ideas I’m trying to connect:
- I have a personal issue to solve. It’s very specific. I need to get a particular number on a blood test to be lower. That has led to my latest obsession with exercise and predicting weight loss, but then my research into what to do long-term.
- Weight loss is the easy part – sustaining the loss will be the hard part. That has led me to open my mind to at least reading all the “conventional wisdom” (mostly unsubstantiated) about nutrition and there is a lot of bamboozlement going on there (plus just wrong dogmatic thinking instead of sound reason based on facts). I’ve got multiple blog posts buzzing around in my head about this.
- I’m now intrigued by the possibility I can eat bread (and thus have fun baking it) as I’m exploring Peter Reinhart‘s new book Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor and that’s triggering lots of new ideas. Fortunately no bamboozlement here.
- I’m reading Michael Specter’s Denialism How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. Certainly something hitting a bunch of my hot buttons (lots of previous posts) but I think there is some bamboozlement going on here too, but I haven’t quite found it yet. Specter is having a lot of fun skewering left-wing nuttiness (the trigger for several unwritten posts) but somehow avoids right-wing or liberatarian wingnuttism and therefore my antenna are flickering that this is one of those fake books (actually doing exactly opposite of what it says) like this post is describing of one of Heartland Institute’s con jobs with their lies about climate change. Something just isn’t right with Specter, but given he’s attacking some of the same nuttiness as I will (when I write some posts on my #2) naturally he’s succeeded in suckering me into his web, for the moment.
- And finally there is my latest gadget, my BodyMedia Link armband (a four sensor measuring device that nominally calculates my calorie burn for all activities) and its associated log and analysis software, Activity Monitor, at the website. And there is some bamboozlement going on there and I’m doing my Applied Nate Silver thing to try to figure it out.
So I’ve got all these thoughts, still to inchoate to even begin to compose a series of posts, but I wanted to at least record this work-in-progress.
In an interview with NPR, Specter says:
So I’ll take this at face value and assume he isn’t doing some whitewash on those.