Tuesday, September 24, 2024

What Can You Do to Get Type 2 Diabetes


In type 2 diabetes, the body is unable to regulate sugar levels in the blood. Several factors are involved in sugar level regulation in type 2 diabetes, including genetic and environmental interactions and increased calorie intake (high fat diet) and lack of exercise. All of these factors induce insulin-related abnormalities, ultimately leading to events that cause late-onset type 2 diabetes. Overall, the elevated level of blood glucose is due to the failure of beta cells in the pancreas to produce insulin or to regulate insulin resistance.

Some lifestyle choices that can increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes include: 

  • Extra weight, especially around the waist, can lead to insulin resistance and increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. 
  • Not being physically active at least three times a week can increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. 
  • A high fat diet can increase calorie intake and lead to insulin-related abnormalities. 
  • Regularly drinking more than 14 units of alcohol per week can increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. 
  • Snoring, short sleep duration, and long sleep duration can all increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. 
  • Sitting for long periods without standing up can increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

How do you know if you're developing diabetes?

  • Urinating often.
  • Feeling very thirsty.
  • Feeling very hungry—even though you are eating.
  • Extreme fatigue.
  • Blurry vision.
  • Cuts/bruises that are slow to heal.
  • Weight loss—even though you are eating more (type 1)
  • Tingling, pain, or numbness in the hands/feet (type 2)

Saturday, September 21, 2024

You Think You Might Like Doing Business in Japan? Think Again





"Of course it was torture."

"I was in solitary confinement for 17 months. Two showers in six-and-a-half months. What civilized country does that?"


"99.4% conviction rate—what chance do you think I had?"


"It was a business decision. Plead guilty and serve 2 years or wait 3 and a half years for trial and then get convicted and spend 2-3 more years"

Mr. Taylor, having planned and executed what some would call the greatest escape, many people are praising you for the ingenuity. Others say you assisted a criminal, therefore you yourself have committed a crime. How do you see yourself?

Article 103 of the Japanese Penal Code says clearly it's not a crime. Bail-jumping is not a crime in Japan, which a lot of people around the world don't realize, cause most Western countries and even in the Middle East, if you're out on bail and you depart that country, it's a violation of law. That's not the case in Japan. So people are entitled to their opinions. But the fact of the matter is the law is the law. Article 103 of the Japanese Penal Code is clear. It says that it's only a violation of law if you help somebody get released from incarceration such as prison, a police car in handcuffs.

But you pleaded guilty. Guilty of what exactly? And if you don't think you committed a crime, why didn't you just go ahead with the trial?

Very simple. It was a business decision. To get to a trial in Japan, as we saw with Greg Kelly, it takes an average of three- to three-and-a-half years. So to get to a trial, I'd have to sit there in jail, in solitary confinement at the Tokyo Detention Center for three- to three-and-a-half years.

But you apologized to the prosecutor and Japanese justice system for helping Ghosn escape. Was this done under duress?

Of course it was. I was in solitary confinement there. I was in solitary confinement for 17 months. I was allowed to have a shower two times in six-and-a-half months. What civilized country does that?

So you think your trial in Japan was rigged from the get-go. You clearly don't think highly of the Japanese legal system, do you?

Of course, it was rigged from the get-go. It was a political decision. You know, (former US President Donald) Trump and (former US Secretary of State Mike) Pompeo are the ones that, you know, (who) extradited us. Trump beating his chest constantly saying he protects veterans. And the number one job of the president of the United States, of any nation, is protect their citizens.

As we saw recently, the British courts denied an extradition request to ship some British citizens to Japan because they say, the British courts say very clearly, that Japan tortures people and violates their human rights. Therefore, they will not extradite them.

There were allegations that you and your son Peter were subjected to torture in prison. Is that true? Take us through the way you were treated.

Of course, it's true. Well, you have no attorney-client privilege, first of all. So to speak to my attorneys and to tell them about the briefings that I had with prosecutors, the interrogation, I have to write it down on a piece of paper that says privileged communication.

However, your privileged communication is a farce because I have to give those papers to the guard. The guards copy them, do whatever they want with them. And you know, 20, 30 minutes later, they get to my lawyers who are sitting on the opposite side of the glass. So, and after you plead guilty every time you see your lawyers, yeah again, you're monitored by a guard and an interpreter there who's writing everything down.

So you don't have attorney-client privilege as well. And as far as the torture, yeah, 17 months in solitary confinement. One ? two showers in six-and-a-half-month period of time. There's no heat. You get frostbite daily, no air conditioning or ventilation during the summer. People are passing out from, you know, heatstroke. So yeah, I would say, and according to the United Nations, that's clearly torture and violation of human rights.

And how is your son doing now?

He's doing fantastic. He's got his health back. He's young. He is vibrant, so he's doing quite well. Thank you.

Well, if what you're saying is true, your country, the United States, must have come to the rescue. Did the US government help in any way?

No, the US government did not help. They helped the Japanese. You know, there's some rumors going on that, you know, I hope that some good investigative journalists somewhere work on (it). And that is that there was some type of business arrangement made where quid pro quo for Aegis destroyers, Aegis radars for Japan, which we found interesting.

I don't know if it's true or not, but we would love to see somebody investigate that to see if it was a quid pro quo and that, you know: You purchase these Aegis radars from us, we'll look favorably upon an extradition request.? It's just amazing that we get extradited for what legal scholars say is not a violation of law whatsoever.

Yet three Japanese citizens from Takata airbag (Tokyo-based Takata Corp. is a company found guilty of manufacturing defective auto airbags) who's now responsible for the death of 29 human beings, don't get extradited when they're indicted in federal court in Michigan back in December of 2016. Where's that logic? Would you consider you and your son collateral damage? How does that make you feel? Especially that you were also incarcerated when you arrived back in the US? Well, anytime you're collateral damage, yeah, you feel like your country betrayed you.

Would you consider you and your son collateral damage? How does that make you feel? Especially that you were also incarcerated when you arrived back in the US?

Well, anytime you're collateral damage, yeah, you feel like your country betrayed you. And they did. And you know, you know that old saying, karma's a ? Well, I understand Trump just got indicted again in Georgia.

Clearly, you seem, you went through a lot. Was the money worth it? How much did Carlos Ghosn pay you? I have heard something between $3 (million) to $5 million. Is that true? And did you get the full amount?

Well, I'm not gonna go into any conversations about finances, but I could tell you my legal fees are still outstanding and they're very high.

Anytime you're dealing with legal fees on both sides of an ocean like that, both the United States and in Japan, your legal fees end up, you know, tallying up quite high. And I had some wonderful lawyers on both sides. You know, I had Dan Marino, Tillman Finley, Abbe Lowell, Paul Kelly, Ty Cobb. And Ty Cobb, former general counsel in the White House, didn't even charge a dime for his time and his service, trying to help prevent this from happening.

And, you know, one of the main things is that, one of the motions they filed in federal court in Boston, was that no American should be extradited to Japan because there will be torture. Judge (Indira) Talwani, the judge requested that the State Department provide her with a sworn affidavit saying that we will not be tortured.

And of course, they play with the diplomatic language saying: ?It's more likely than not, they won't be tortured.? They know very well there's gonna be torture because on the State Department's own website, they publish documents saying that, you know, in the prisons, people were getting frostbite because there's no heat.

Mr. Ghosn, if he was here, would say that he settled the amount as per written agreement with your son. Do you dispute that?

Again, I don't comment on anything like that, and I don't know that he would say such a thing.

So what's next? Will you be suing him? How will you get the money you think you are owed?

Again, it's the financial issues that we don't discuss in a public domain.

So clearly you think Carlos did you wrong, but what are your views on his whole lawsuit with Nissan? Was he a villain or a victim?

You know, that's not for me to say. You know, my whole involvement with this was, and as it was presented to me, that there's a man over there being tortured, and to the point where he can't even, according to the court, talk to his wife.

Tell us about the upcoming Apple TV documentary and how it's different than the one which appeared on Netflix and MBC Shahid.

Well, the Apple documentary's coming out and I understand it's gonna be a four-part series and it will be aired on Aug. 25th, so very shortly.

What is next for you?

Well, next I'm working on my company, which is Vitamin One. It's a healthy hydration drink full of vitamins and electrolytes and no sugar.

Sunday, September 15, 2024

Think You Have What You Need to Trade? Think Again - You Need a Solid PC!

And who says you *have* to have a superfast computer to trade? Eddie Z, prize trader, that's who.

The same folk who says the seven biggest mistakes traders make are:

  1. Trading on an old, outdated computer system (costs you slippage)
  2. Trading on a low-end laptop computer
  3. Going to a local retailer
  4. Buying a mass-manufactured machine
  5. Not having backup systems (UPS and redundant internet connection!)
  6. Not doing enough research
  7. Not keeping a calm state of mind while trading


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Monday, September 02, 2024

That's Why They're So Great. Professor Chen-Ning Yang Introduces Yang-Mills Gauge Theory

Let's see you pull this off when you're 84 years old! (Let alone having that much black hair:)


You know what the fundamental physics is about? It is to ask how matter is put together. In the 19th century, people realized that everything is made of atoms and molecules. In the 20th century, we learned that molecules are made of atoms. Atoms are made of protons, electrons, and neutrons. But what are protons and neutrons made of? Now we know they are made up of quarks.

So, that is one aspect of what we do. Namely, we want to take matter apart and look at the constituents. But there's another part of the endeavor: how these parts are put together. The reason they are together is because there's a force between them. In daily language, we call it a force; in physics, we call it an interaction. So, the question is, what are the interactions between these constituents? The interaction of force is well-known already. Since Newton's time, there's gravitational force. Through the 19th century, we knew there were electric and magnetic forces. In the 20th century, we learned there are two additional kinds of forces. They are called nuclear forces, which are responsible for the atomic bomb, and weak forces, which are responsible for things like radioactivity.

So, there are now four types of forces. The question is, what is the precise nature of these four types? We know that gravity, through Newton, follows an inverse square law. You probably learned that in high school physics. One of the basic, fundamental questions we face is, how are these three other forces structured? They are not inverse square laws, but what are they? That's where the Yang-Mills Theory or gauge theory comes in. Gauge theory gives a principle that governs how these forces are structured mathematically and precisely.

Originally, in 1918 and 1919, stimulated by Einstein, Hermann Weyl, a great mathematician, proposed what is called gauge theory. He used that to describe electricity and magnetism, and that was successful, but it does not apply to the other two forces: nuclear forces and weak forces. What Mills and I did was generalize what Weyl did, and that became a general principle of forces, including gravity. That principle is now called the gauge principle. The gauge principle's detailed mathematical structure is what we wrote down in 1954.

At the time we wrote it down, nobody believed it was important, and we didn't know it was that important. But we said this is a beautiful idea, and the mathematical structure is very elegant. So, we published a paper about it. Then, 20 years later, various experiments showed that this was approximately the right direction. After struggling for another five years, it became clear that it was not just approximately right, but exactly right. So, that became something that is now the universally accepted principle of how these forces are formed.

1954? Yes.

How do you feel about the fact that 50 years later, something you created has been so important to your field?

Well, of course, I feel good about it. But I tell my students that the structure of everything often has a hidden beauty in it. If you can vaguely sense some of this beauty, do not let go. The reason that in 1954, Mills and I were able to do it is that it was not in agreement with the experiment, and nobody believed it. But we saw the beauty of the structure, so we wrote it down.

By the way, I should add the following, and this has something to do with Stony Brook. This theory was published, and gradually, people didn't believe it, but more and more people saw the beauty of it, so they began to work on it. It was only in the 1970s that it was confirmed by experiment. By the 1960s, there were not many papers, but every year there were 10 or 20 papers about it.

I came to Stony Brook in 1966, and one day, it must have been 1968 or 1969, I was giving a talk. I was giving a course on general relativity, a graduate course, and I wrote down on the blackboard a long formula—a famous formula called the Riemann tensor. Riemann was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 19th century. The Riemann tensor has something to do with Einstein's gravity theory. So, I copied down the long formula of the Riemann tensor on the blackboard. As I was copying it down, it suddenly flashed through my mind that the structure of this Riemann equation is very similar to the equation that Mills and I had written down in 1954. We didn't notice it at the time because we were not doing general relativity.

During that lecture, I found they were very similar. After the class, I went to my office and checked in detail. Sure enough, they were not just similar; they were exactly the same if you defined some quantities correctly. I was a bit excited, but I didn't understand it. So, I went to see Jim Simons. Jim Simons, as you know, was the young department chairman of mathematics at Stony Brook, and he was a great geometer. He knew Riemannian geometry very well.

I went to his office—we were still in that old red-brick building, both his office and mine. I said, "Jim, here's the Riemann formula that you are very familiar with. Some years ago, Mills and I wrote this formula. Look, they are very similar." He thought about it for a while and said, "Yes, yes, that's not strange. They are both fiber bundles."

I asked, "What's a fiber bundle?" He gave me a book written by a famous Princeton mathematician called Steenrod, called *Fiber Bundles*. I went back with the book, but it was impossible for me to understand. Mathematicians have a tendency to write very dry, very abrupt statements. They are precise, but there is no flesh to it, so it's all bones and impossible to understand. So, I didn't understand it. I went back to Jim and said, "This book is useless for physicists, but we want to understand what this fiber bundle business is about. Could you explain it to me?" He said, "Fiber bundles are a new thing in mathematics too, but earlier than in physics. Starting in the 1940s, there were already many papers in mathematics on fiber bundles, and it's now an important branch of geometry." 

So, I asked, "Could you give us some lectures understandable to theoretical physicists?" He said yes, and he gave a series of lunch lectures, very informal. There were maybe 10 of us, faculty and graduate students of the Institute of Theoretical Physics here at Stony Brook. He must have talked for about a whole month, and that was very useful for us.

At the end of that, we decided to give him a gift for the series of lectures. We chipped in money and decided to buy something for him. I went to Irving Kraw, a mathematician I knew very well, and said, "Irving, we want to give Jim a gift. What should we buy?" He said, "Jim cannot spell, give him a dictionary." So, we bought a big dictionary and gave it to Jim. He told me recently that he's still using it.

What we learned from Jim in those lectures was very important, not only for me and for Stony Brook, but in fact, it launched a new trend. That came about this way: after I understood the gist of what the mathematicians were doing with fiber bundles, I realized that indeed both general relativity of Einstein and gauge theory were fiber bundles. I wrote a paper with T.T. Wu of Harvard immediately after that, in which we explained in detail the relationship between the mathematicians' ideas and terminology and the physicists' ideas and terminology. We made a little dictionary. The little dictionary had maybe 15 entries. On the left side were the physicists' terminology; on the right side were the mathematicians' terminology, and there was an exact correspondence.

We called it the dictionary, but there was one item which physicists used repeatedly. Its technical term is called "source." The idea of a source was due to Ampère, you know, the electric current—three amperes, five amperes? That was named after the great French physicist of the 19th century, Ampère. Now in physics, Ampère's idea of a source was a crucial concept. So, we had to have that in our dictionary on the physics side. But on the mathematics side, I went to ask Jim, "What do you call this?" He said, "We don't deal with this concept." So, we left it blank. It's a dictionary with maybe 15 entries on one side and 14 entries on the other side.

Then Isadore Singer from MIT, a distinguished mathematician, came to visit. I had known him, so I gave him a copy of our preprint. He looked at it, and there's this blank. He thought about it and decided that it's a very interesting concept and that they should deal with it. Somehow, in their 20 or 30 years of dealing with fiber bundles, they had never touched on this idea. So, he went to England immediately. He was a great collaborator of perhaps the greatest mathematician today in Great Britain, Michael Atiyah (now Sir Michael Atiyah; at that time, he was not a "Sir" yet). They looked at it and found that this concept, which they had never used but we had dealt with since Ampère, was most interesting. That became a new branch of mathematics.

What do they call it?

Well, there are many names. In particular, a student of Atiyah called Donaldson did the pioneering work in it,   so it's called Donaldson theory. But all those are related to that blank spot.

In some sense, you know, in the first half of the 20th century, physics and mathematics were divorced. In earlier centuries, physics and mathematics were in close collaboration, but in the first half of the 20th century, the mathematicians became more and more abstract. They were very happy. In fact, one of them wrote an article saying that the greatest achievement of 20th-century mathematics was that it finally liberated itself from the shackles of physics. That was by a famous mathematician. But with this fiber bundle business, the mathematicians and the physicists are now coming together again. If you want to say, how did that coming together come about? I would say it has something to do with me and Jim and that blank spot in that dictionary and with Stony Brook. So, we are very happy that Jim continued to be interested in physics and math. You know, now he's a billionaire, and he just announced he would give $25 million to Stony Brook.




Saturday, August 24, 2024

Class Act : Brent Staples' "Just Walk On By" - One You Don't Want to Miss

Charles Duhigg → Claude Steele → Brent Staples




Another time I was on assignment for a local paper and killing time before an interview. I entered a jewelry store on the city's affluent Near North Side. The proprietor excused herself and returned with an enormous red Doberman pinscher straining at the end of a leash. She stood, the dog extended toward me, silent to my questions, her eyes bulging nearly out of her head. I took a cursory look around, nodded, and bade her good night.
Relatively speaking, however, I never fared as badly as another black male journalist. He went to nearby Waukegan, Illinois, a couple of summers ago to work on a story about a murderer who was born there. Mistaking the reporter for the killer, police officers hauled him from his car at gunpoint and but for his press credentials would probably have tried to book him. Such episodes are not uncommon. Black men trade tales like this all the time.

Sunday, July 21, 2024

11 Razors You Can Use to Keep Your Analysis Stubble Free


From the experts at The Mind Collection

#

Name

Summary

1

Sagan’s Standard

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

2

Grice’s Razor

Address what someone meant to say instead of the literal meaning of the words.

3

Hume’s Guillotine

What ought to be cannot be deduced from what is.

4

Alder’s Razor

If it cannot be settled by observation or experiment, it’s not worth debating at all.

5

Feynman’s Razor

If you can’t explain something simply, then you don’t really understand it.

6

Hitchen’s Razor

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

7

Occam’s Razor

Simpler explanations are more likely to be correct; avoid unnecessary or improbable assumptions.

8

Hanlon’s Razor

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

9

Riker’s Razor

If someone’s incompetence is too staggering to be true, they’re most likely faking it and you should find out why.

10

Jung’s Razor

If you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences — and infer the motivation.

11

Chatton’s Anti-Razor

If three things are not enough to verify an affirmative proposition about things, a fourth must be added and so on.



Thursday, July 11, 2024

You Want Excellence - Start with Juran's Quality Handbook

From the master himself, who lived to be 103! Quoting Richard Koch : 

One of the great heroes of the last century — although with good reason, more honored in Japan than in the United States, the land of his adoption — was Joseph Moses Juran. More than anyone else, Juran pioneered the quality revolution that made the second half of the twentieth century a time of unprecedented, and increasingly global, advances in the quality of consumer products from cars to computers.

Juran made little headway in America in the two years after he published his great work. But his 1953 lectures in Japan caused a sensation. He stayed on to work with several major Japanese corporations, causing them to approach, then to catch up, and finally to exceed the best American quality standards. It was only in the 19705 and 19805, when Japanese competition rnenaced Europe and America, that Juran and his movement were taken seriously in the West.

Start here :


They're so nice, they even let you download them: https://www.youtube.com/@JuranInstitute/search?query=quality%20planning





Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Think You Know Your Management by Drucker? Prove It!


I was totally overwhelmed by it. I had had a good musical education as a boy, as the Vienna of my youth was an extremely musical city. Although I had heard a great many operas, I had never heard anything like this. I have never forgotten the impression that evening made on me.

When I made a study, I found, to my great surprise, that this opera (Falstaff), with its gaiety, its zest for life, and its incredible vitality, was written by a man aged eighty! To me, then just eighteen, eighty was an incredible age. I doubt that I even knew anyone that old. It was not a common age when life expectancies, even among healthy people, were around fifty or so. Then I read what Verdi himself had written when he was asked why, at his age, a famous man and considered one of the nineteenth-century’s foremost opera composers, he had taken on the hard work of writing one more opera, and an exceedingly demanding one. "All my life as a musician," he wrote, "I have striven for perfection. It has always eluded me. I surely had an obligation to make one more try."

Done? Please comment to let us know how you liked it :)