That is... not what your link says at all. Rather the opposite:
> Fatal atherosclerotic events were more common in the control group (70 v. 48; p<0.05). However, total mortality was similar in the two groups: 178 controls v. 174 experimentals, demonstrating an excess of non-atherosclerotic deaths in the experimental group. This was accounted for by a greater incidence of fatal carcinomas in the experimental group [the vegetable oils group].
This makes perfect sense, given that fatty acids become more susceptible to oxidation (accelerated by heat, light and air exposure) the more unsaturated they are. One can very, very roughly think of the increase in susceptibility as increasing an order of magnitude moving from saturated->monounsaturated->polyunsaturated, though the exact amount will vary depending on the particular fatty acid. Rustic survival foods with long ambient temperature "shelf" life such as pemmican was generally made with fat from ruminants, which is generally very saturated (compared to monogastric animals like pigs and chickens, who tend to bioaccumulate polyunsaturated fats from their feed). The best fat to use was basically the saturated hard wax found near the kidneys of bison, which could last many months before going rancid (oxidized)
When things like polyunsaturated fatty acids degrade, they release free radicals, lipid peroxides and other toxic compounds like aldehydes (which are known to be cytotoxic and genotoxic), and it seems very plausible that these things could be outright carcinogenic, or force cells to spend their resources cleaning up this additional load instead of repairing or protecting DNA after damaging sun exposure.
If all of that is true, then you have to answer for why "seed oils" improve human health outcomes in RCTs.
Here's Layne Norton making this point yesterday in response to Huberman in a Twitter thread you should read: https://twitter.com/BioLayne/status/1704477570417254530. He lists some of these interesting RCTs as well, but here's the summary:
> If you only look at epidemiology & in vitro/mechanistic data you can hack together a horror story for almost any nutrient
> In RCTs where n-6 PUFAs (aka seed oils) are used in place of SFA there are neutral/positive effects on health
You can speculate all day about how bad certain mechanisms like oxidation or compounds like phytates might be for us. But why would that be convincing to you when these foods, whether it be seed oils or legumes (which have phytates for example), improve human health outcomes in the highest tier of evidence?
There's a reason why "seed oil disrespecters" on social media hang around the lowest tier of evidence like Ray Peat'ian narratives and mechanistic speculation rather than stick to RCTs and metaanalyses.
The increased carcinoma in the experimental group was an anomaly. It was pretty much all accounted for by non-adherers, which cuts against the notion that PUFA increased the risk. There were no significant differences in the higher adherence strata.
> Many of the cancer deaths in the experimental group were among those who did not adhere closely to the diet. This reduces the possibility that the feeding of polyunsaturated oils was responsible for the excess carcinoma mortality observed in the experi- mental group. However, there were significantly more low adherers in the entire experimental group than in the controls (table vI). In both groups, the numbers of cancer deaths among the various adherence strata are compatible with random distribution (table V). A high incidence among high adherers would be expected if some constituent of the experi-mental diet were contributing to cancer fatality.
Many of the negative comments here seem to have missed something important:
> Consider this a pre-registration. I intend to share my test results here.
How about, instead of totally dismissing this - in classic HN fashion - with "this can never work" or "this is magical thinking", we let the guy share his results?
If it works, that will be a massively important result. If not, it won't be surprising, but _at least he will have tried_. I for one think the expected value leans overwhelmingly in favor of at least one person actually trying.
> If it works, that will be a massively important result. If not, it won't be surprising, but _at least he will have tried_. I for one think the expected value leans overwhelmingly in favor of at least one person actually trying.
It won't be an important result, at all.
Vaccines are tested on the thousands, one person having a positive response isn't interesting at all, especially when you already have effective vaccines rolling out globally.
>If it works, that will be a massively important result.
1. No, it won't be a massively important result. It might have been important a year ago, but now it will be completely and utterly useless. Testing a vaccine takes a long time. It maybe kind of working and maybe kind of being safe is irrelevant when we have already started mass vaccinations.
2. The author has no good way of testing it. He will take an off-the-shelf antibody test, but no one will know how to interpret those results.
> How about, instead of totally dismissing this - in classic HN fashion - with "this can never work" or "this is magical thinking", we let the guy share his results?
Sure. How about instead of sharing wishful thinking covered in "this will work because science" OP waits until there are actual results before posting?
Anyone can make a vaccine candidate. Few can make a vaccine. Even fewer can make a safe vaccine.
> How about... OP waits until there are actual results before posting?
It seems to me there's value in posting the details before the results are in:
- Helps prevent publication bias, by encouraging posting negative results
- Elicits comments from knowledgeable people who may be able to help
- Discourages doctoring the story after the results are in
> Even fewer can make a safe vaccine.
I don't know, the article, whitepaper, and comments seemed to make a pretty convincing case for the nasal vaccine attempt here to be not very dangerous - probably useless at worst. Do you have a more substantive counterargument?
That's not what we're really seeing here, is it? The article is lowkey touting success when it's just an early experiment. OP is not "making vaccine" as the title states.
> - Elicits comments from knowledgeable people who may be able to help
Also not the case here.
> - Discourages doctoring the story after the results are in
Not really. One thing doesn't prevent the other from happening.
> I don't know, the article, whitepaper, and comments (...)
Do you have a more substantive counterargument?
Yes, the scientific method and bona fide peer review
You are misunderstanding. The bloom filter is only a preliminary check; if it indicates a revoked certificate, you then verify that it's a true positive the traditional way.
LA has an order of magnitude more population than is required for functioning public transit. But you're right they don't have the density.
The key is to realize the cars themselves killed density.
Parking lots, parking spaces, and extra lanes all conspire to push humans and human spaces further apart. This then makes walking less feasible, cars more required, and more space required to accommodate those cars in a feedback loop.
Taller buildings are not required for density, far from it. Look at Somerville, MA, where just about nothing is higher than 3 stories, yet they fit almost 20,000 people into a square mile -- and they like it. What they don't fit is 20,000 parking spaces, and that makes all the difference.
A small number of people like Robert Moses wielded enormous power over how our civil infrastructure was built in the post war period. Moses was famously opposed to public transit, going so far as to deliberately build bridges with overhead clearance too low for buses on routes to one of his beach developments.
During this period the federal dept of transportation was offering to pay 90% of urban freeway projects. There are a few famous examples of people negotiating a different outcome, like the light rail vs mt hood highway in Portland, Oregon. But the bulk of local politicians simply took the free money and built massive freeway infrastructure without much consideration of the future.
So no, this was not some broadly democratic choice or invisible hand of the market. It was a small number of politically powerful people making unilateral decisions using vast government funds.
People wanted to live in the suburbs. It was definitely promoted by government and business leaders, but it was also desired organically by people. It may not seem obvious now, but prior to the suburbs, a lot of people lived in ragged tenement buildings that were in bad shape. The suburbs were a boon to the economy, to standard of living, to incomes, etc. I found a great video from a filmmaker on this subject:
> It may not seem obvious now, but prior to the suburbs, a lot of people lived in ragged tenement buildings that were in bad shape.
A lot of people still do. The people that could afford to move to the suburbs were also people that could afford to move out of tenements in the city, too, generally.
OTOH, it allowed them to be farther from (and outside shared facilities like schools, etc., with) the tenements and the people stuck living in them. (Which, due to economics and outright, overt discrimination in both lending and things like restrictive real estate covenant, especially meant non-Whites.)
I'm aware, and spent a decade living in that sort of neighborhood where most of the buildings are still original to their 20's construction.
The point is that suburban sprawl was something that was ultimately lead by a small group of people, and was done without a lot of foresight, particularly about induced demand.
Of course many people chose the new suburbs. One of the problems with this style of building is that it is indeed very appealing when it's at it's initial lowest density state. The problem is that as people move into the suburbs and congestion begins to rise, suburban sprawl has no answer. Those wide open freeways that felt so fast and convenient initially become the bane of your commute or even doing simple errands.
Then people get frustrated, and believe the only answer is still that same default idea to return to that initial utopia: just expand the freeways even more! Except as we see today, that simply doesn't work, and the pattern just repeats.
The whole context could have been different, and that would have resulted in very different decision making from consumers, particularly today.
I'll use Portland as another example, as I'm both familiar with it and it's something of an outlier on these issues historically. All the cool neighborhoods that are desirable to live in now are where the old streetcar lines used to run. The entire shape of these neighborhoods is different, with high walkability, because of the remnants of that transit system.
The streetcar system here was deliberately deconstructed here, again, largely due to powerful special interests. The auto and tire industry worked quite hard on promoting buses as the new modern approach, a vision local politicians also helped promote.
Today Portland is reconstructing the street car system, as part of a larger overall transit plan. 100 years later we can see we wished we'd just kept and maintained the original track system, and designed our zoning around it.
That's really the core point I want to make: suburban sprawl is a mirage, that appeals initially. However it fundamentally cannot deal with congestion, which means sprawl only has three possible futures: Door one is continued cycles of expansion and induced demand where congestion just gets worse in the long term. Door two is a mode switch, to provide a meaningful transit option to relieve the pressure of congestion without freeway expansion. Door three is economic collapse, where the whole question is mooted because entire subdivisions become blighted places no one wants to live in.
A large portion of US suburbia is headed for door #3 atm over the next half century. Hopefully we can be smarter than we were half a century ago.
There is absolutely nothing like a free market in housing. Many low-density suburbs would already have naturally densified if they were allowed to. The reason they have not is that it's illegal. People aren't choosing less density. They're banning density.
Somerville, MA is in the middle of the Boston metro area. It's saturated with three and four story buildings and the downtown is 10+ story buildings. It's tall buildings.
LA County is full of detached single family homes and undeveloped land.
If your talking about Assembly Row, that’s a “town center” development. Used to be a movie theater and a sea of parking lots. It doesn’t factor into Somerville’s style of urbanism.
You could argue Davis Square or Union Square I suppose. Bit, no, there's really no urban core the way Boston has one. I'd note that, in spite of that, Somerville is the 16th densest city in the US (with the caveat that comparing city densities involves somewhat arbitrary political boundaries). Cambridge is pretty much in the same boat and is at #26.
OP called out "skyscrapers". What counts as the precise cutoff for "tall buildings" is always going to be a matter of opinion.
But I live in Cambridge, MA and I can assure you Somerville would remain one of the densest cities in the union if every last building therein was lopped down to 3 stories by a giant lawnmower.
> The key is to realize the cars themselves killed density.
People have very naive explanations of why the US is so bad at density and urbanism. Canada and Australia, which are very similar to the US, have very dense cities like Montreal, Toronto, and Melbourne. Do they not have cars in Canada and Australia? If you want to find the real reason why all other developed countries have dense cities with good public transport, but the US doesn't, you need to look at what's different between the US and all other developed countries.
Canada might have certain urban areas with public transport, but huge swaths of the country depend on cars. That is the same situation as the U.S. except we've got 10x the population as Canada...so we've got more people in more places. As for Australia, a huge chunk of the country is desert, and most people are situated along the coasts.
The U.S. doesn't want urbanism. People by and large do not want to live in dense urban areas. Some people like it, but it's not everyone's cup of tea. With the remote work revolution, it's going to become even less appealing to live in a dense urban area.
There's a trope here that the US is some incredible outlier when it comes to per capita auto ownership. It's not. It's in the same ballpark as other wealthy developed countries. It's poorer countries (in Europe and elsewhere) that have lower rates of car ownership. According to a recent Pew survey [1], the US has slightly lower per capita car ownership than Italy and is in the ballpark of countries like France, Germany, South Korea, and Japan.
People who don't want density should be free to avoid it. What they should not be allowed to do is pass laws that prevent the rest of us from enjoying the benefits of density. The primary reason we don't have increased density in the United States is that it's illegal in most cities to build enough new housing to meaningfully densify neighborhoods.
Even Vancouver—Canada’s densest major city with 5,493 people per square kilometre—ranks 13th out of 30, and is significantly less dense than San Francisco (7,171 people per square kilometre), a comparable west coast city. In Toronto, there are 4,457 people per square kilometre. In fact, Toronto’s population could triple and the city would still barely have the density of Brooklyn (14,541).
And crucially, Toronto’s population density is less than many other American cities including Philadelphia (4,512), Chicago (4,594) and Boston (5,376).
>Even Vancouver—Canada’s densest major city with 5,493 people per square kilometre—ranks 13th out of 30, and is significantly less dense than San Francisco (7,171 people per square kilometre), a comparable west coast city.
The transit systems in both cities operate across the entire metro area not just the "city" proper.
Vancouver Metro Area: 2,463,431 / 2,878km² = 856 persons per km²
San Francisco Metro Area: 4,729,484 / 9,128km² = 518 persons per km²
(Numbers from Wikipedia)
>Toronto’s population could triple and the city would still barely have the density of Brooklyn (14,541)
Brooklyn is not a city. It's a densely populated subsection of one.
>crucially, Toronto’s population density is less than many other American cities including Philadelphia (4,512), Chicago (4,594)
I'm not sure why you think Chicago and Philly are not comparable to Toronto despite being being only 1% and 3% more dense. They're effectively all the same density for the purpose of this discussion.
To put those density numbers in a bit more perspective: the entire country of the Netherlands has a population density of 521 persons per km². This is including the rural areas. While I wouldn't want to be without a car and happily own two, I can take public transit within walking distance from home, and I'm on the far outskirts of the country.
My (simplified) understanding is that it's more about the ideals. Back in the day, part of the American dream was to live in a semi-secluded suburban neighborhood and own 2+ cars per family. Only the poor and young people were expected to live in city centers. Therefore, the affluent citizens spread out, and cities evolved to cater to their needs, i.e., support private cars and the road system at the cost of not properly funding public transportation. In European cities the ideal was the opposite, and it was thought that only peasants would stay secluded and all the affluent people should live in the cities, which in turn should have great public transportation for practical reasons. I'd imagine that ideal extended to Canadian and Australian cities as well.
The difference is the treatment of poor & homeless. Public transit buildings/vehicles are some of the only inside spaces where they can spend time. Then people with enough money avoid public transit as much as possible. Then they vote against more funding for transit because it is not useful to them.
Well…OK, the core of Toronto is pretty dense, but the megasprawl that is amalgamated Toronto is not that dense.
But good luck getting by in any non-major metro area in Canada without a car. Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver…maybe Ottawa…it's doable, but the second you get into the suburbs, or cottage country, it's Subaru time.
LA also happens to have a vast bus system that is heavily used.
We do not have subways partly because it would be very hard to build them in LA's geology. Seismic activity as well things like natural tar pits.
Historically I don't think its right to say cars killed the density. LA was several cities that grew into each other. Part of the reason LA is so wide is because of white flight to the outskirts. Do you build transit for something like that?
1. The appeal of the city is drastically reduced by coronavirus + remote work
2. Boston cost-of-living is really expensive
Put them together and moving to New Hampshire or Vermont starts to seem really attractive. Just compare Zillow for Manchester, NH vs, e.g., Somerville, MA.
Combine with 3. Most MA residents live in Greater Boston, and it's easy to see MA at #5.
I still remember the day I found out the "98.6 degrees" human body temperature was just an oversignificant conversion from "about 37 C, or maybe lower."
> I still remember the day I found out the "98.6 degrees" human body temperature was just an oversignificant conversion from "about 37 C, or maybe lower."
Fahrenheit was initially intended to have 96°F be equal to body temperature (in fact it was one of the three fixed points in the temperature scale, designed to have 64 steps between the freezing point of water at 32°F and human body temperature).
However after the introduction of Celcius, Fahrenheit was redefined slightly (with the freezing and boiling point of water being the fixed "nice" values for the scale -- to match the model used by Celcius) which resulted in human body temperature no longer having such a nice value. This also moved the 0°F value. So while technically Fahrenheit does predate Celcius and it did have a "nice" value for body temperature when invented, it was soon afterwards redefined such that arguably the value is just a conversion from Celcius.
Imagine you've just made yourself a thermometer by marking off the 0° and 100° points. Now delineate the 2° intervals, using only the tools you would have had available in the early 18th century.
Now imagine making a thermometer by marking off the 32° and 96° points (64° apart). Now delineate the 2° intervals.
Considering those two tasks, 64 seems a much better number to me (only have to divide unit lengths in half) than 100 (have to divide something by 5).
Could've sworn I remember hearing in grade school that one of then was actually calibrated with cow body temperatures. Don't remember which scale, though.
Where it comes from, I think, is that cow body temperatures are about 100°F, and someone assumed that the scale must have been calibrated using 0° and 100° as specific endpoints.
According to Wikipedia, Fahrenheit seems to have chosen 32°F as the reference point for the freezing of water [it's not clear why this number specifically], and found the body temperature of a human to be 64° more than 32°F [i.e., 96°F]--it being much easier to divide a unit distance in 64 = 2⁶ than to divide it in 100ths.
That does bring up an interesting point, though: while we modern people may think of the metric, base-10 system as being much easier to work with since it's all about lopping off digits, trying to divide a unit length into tenths with high precision is actually far more difficult than halves or thirds. This is why pretty much every customary system involves a lot of units that are twice or three times the next smaller unit. The metric system isn't really feasible until you get the dividing engine [1], which doesn't show up until about the 1760s.
> This is why pretty much every customary system involves a lot of units that are twice or three times the next smaller unit.
I think easily of units that step up by a multiple of 6 (inches and the various time steps), but nothing immediately occurs to me where one unit is directly twice or thrice another. (Oh, except tablespoons, which are three teaspoons.) What examples am I missing?
If I'm searching for a murderer in a town of 1000, it takes about 10 independent bits of evidence to get the right one. And when I charge someone, I must already have the vast majority of that evidence. To say "oh well we don't know that it wasn't Mr. or Mrs. Doe, let's bring them in" is itself a breach of the Does' rights. I'm ignoring 9 of the 10 bits of evidence!
Using a low-accuracy facial recognition system and a low-accountability lineup procedure to elevate some random man who did nothing wrong from presumed-innocent to 1-in-6 to prime suspect, without having the necessary amount of evidence, is committing the exact same error and is nearly as egregious as pulling a random civilian out of a hat and charging them.
> Fatal atherosclerotic events were more common in the control group (70 v. 48; p<0.05). However, total mortality was similar in the two groups: 178 controls v. 174 experimentals, demonstrating an excess of non-atherosclerotic deaths in the experimental group. This was accounted for by a greater incidence of fatal carcinomas in the experimental group [the vegetable oils group].