The right-turns on FB and Twitter make for big openings in the space.
It strikes me as quite an opportunity to eat FB's lunch, just as BlueSky has been eating Twitter's lunch.
I like communicating with friends, old and new. It's not hard to eliminate the cruft by using chrome extensions and filtering only by friends' posts, ie https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends
So again, it strikes me as a huge opportunity, especially for someone who just does the basics.
Plants must extract nutrients from the soil. An important such nutrient is phosphorus. Because arsenic is chemically similar to phosphorus, any arsenic in the soil will get extracted also, ending up in the plant. The soil in Louisiana and Arkansas, which is good for growing rice, happens to be high in (naturally-occurring) arsenic.
So is the rice itself also high in arsenic/cadmium? ie, are people issuing warnings about the protein powders but not the original material the powder is made from?
Rice grown in Louisiana and Arkansas (i.e., most rice grown in the US) is indeed high in arsenic.
My guess is that the protein powders are made from brown rice or even rice bran and rice germ whereas most rice in the US is eaten as white rice (i.e., rice without bran or germ). I'm guessing that makes a difference.
Also, if you cook rice as if it were pasta (i.e., in much more water than needed, which is then discarded at the end of cooking) as recommended by the USDA, the amount of arsenic is cut in half. The manufacturers of protein powders probably don't bother to process the rice this way (whereas I do when I cook rice).
It sounds like there should be warnings on the raw elements of protein powders, not just the powders, which makes me think (adjusts tinfoil hat to filter proper wavelengths) that the issue raised by the original article is more about FUD and selling their version of protein powder.
Maybe, maybe not: there is not a lot of protein in rice, and it might be that whatever process is used to extract the protein from the rice also extracts most of the arsenic and that the process of making white rice (again, the kind most Americans eat) gets rid of most of the arsenic, making rice-protein powder much higher in arsenic than the same amount of calories of white rice.
Important to note is that when arsenic is in rice, a lot of it is organic arsenic and therefore not easily picked up by the body like inorganic arsenic.
> and the other co-inventor of the integrated circuit was Fairchild Semiconductor, which as far as I can tell didn’t operate anything like a basic research lab.
Kind of a strange statement. Fairchild took the "traitorous eight" from Shockley Semiconductor, which was founded by William Shockley, who famously co-invented the transistor at Bell Labs (and who named the "traitorous eight" as such.)
So while Fairchild "didn’t operate anything like a basic research lab", its co-invention of the IC was not unrelated to having a large amount of DNA from Bell Labs.
> Challenging scientific conclusions should be encouraged not cancelled.
Vaccines are on the docket for cancellation, which to be fair, will last only as long as a swath of the population sees their kids incapacitated by some completely preventable virus infection. But do we really have to go through an epidemic (again!) to understand that the science of vaccines is solid?
There is such a thing as settled science.
There is also such a thing as people too uneducated and non-expert to understand what science is settled.
There should be such a thing as not listening to non-experts about settled science.
The science on vaccines is solid, but there are potential side effects (that's also solid science). So when it comes to, for example, giving kids the vaccines, we have to balance the likelihood of serious side effects with the necessity of preventing the disease. In the case of COVID, the disease's risk to kids is extremely low, but they are still vaccinated. That is a political decision, and it is perfectly reasonable to dispute it.
That's a particularly clear cut example. There are many more complex scenarios where "trust the scientific experts" is dubious because science has a limited domain of applicability. When you pretend that non-scientific decisions must be made on a scientific basis, people see through it and become sceptical.
> That is a political decision, and it is perfectly reasonable to dispute it.
"Political decision" as a euphemism for allowing non-experts to decide how to minimize deaths? The same non-experts who couldn't even get the Monty Hall problem right, let alone the complexity of medical probability and statistics of [false | true] [positives | negatives] in Bayesian scenarios?
There's the problem with naive utilitarianism. The experts want to minimize deaths across the population. I want to minimize the risk to my otherwise healthy children (hypothetically. I don't have children and I am vaccinated). These legitimate desires can and do conflict. Who has precedence is entirely political, not scientific.
And plenty of medical experts get the Monty Hall problem wrong.
> And plenty of medical experts get the Monty Hall problem wrong.
Then they're not experts on prob and stats in medicine, and you shouldn't choose them to guide policy making when prob and stats in medicine are relevant. The alternative is to choose those who aren't experts in prob and stats in medicine, which results in policy bred from ignorance of the relevant math and science.
Choosing people who are ignorant of the relevant math and science over those who are knowledgeable is certainly one way to make policy, and it seems that is what folks want, so I guess we'll see how well that it works out.
Maybe just me, but I'd like a column (and checkbox on the left) about packaging. I don't know why protein powders require plastic cannisters, and it would seem to me that they are well-suited to something more environmentally friendly, but for some reason so many of them want to use plastic.
Most important IMO is third-party testing along with published results. Concentrating nutrients also concentrates contaminants like lead and PFAS, and many powders have cocoa, which is also notorious for lead contamination.
Whether contaminants are also concentrated depends on the concentration method that is used.
For example, the protein concentrates from whey or milk are obtained by just two filtrations through filters with different pore sizes, the first coarse filter retains any larger particles, including bacteria, while the second fine filter retains the protein particles and passes the water with lactose and fat and also with any contaminants that are soluble in fat or in water.
Thus the protein concentrates from whey or milk normally have less contaminants than in the whey or milk used for their production.
Seriously, why is it so hard to find a protein powder that doesn't include Stevia (or its distilled, chemical name). I don't care about my protein powder being sweet, but if it's gonna be sweet, give me some raw sugar. Stevia is bitter and ruins the whole shake.
Unfortunately, "environmentally friendly" is not compatible with a long storage time.
In a suitable hermetic packaging, e.g. in a metallized plastic bag, protein powders may be stored for years without refrigeration, which I find extremely convenient and I consider as one of their important advantages over other protein sources, such as meat or dairy, together with the advantage that the protein powders require much less storage space and they are much lighter, being composed of almost pure protein.
The latter advantage, in volume and mass, is also an advantage over the vegetable sources of proteins, e.g. dry legumes or wheat flour, which can be stored for a long time, but which contain much more starch than proteins.
The only real viable alternative is a metal can with a metal screw on lid and a rubber seal.
Even then, unless it is recycled aluminum, I'm not sure how much you're gaining, environmentally. Heavier to move, harder to form, probably covered in some sort of coating on the inside anyway. Plastic isn't great- pretty much everything except weight, water impermiability and ease of forming are downsides, but metal isn't free either.
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