What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health

Reducing food down to carbs, fats and protein misses out on a lot of the key nutritional value. There are many micronutrients that have value that we have yet to understand. Even isolating these misses out on the benefits of the interrelation between various compounds. People have had centuries to select food for nutritional value. 

We have spent a few decades tearing food apart and attempting to provide similar benefit. Alas, we have not done a good job. Taste has previously been a key way to identify food our bodies need. However, as scientists have been able to isolate key macronutrients, they were left with bland food. No problem, they added plenty of flavors to help fool us into liking the "fake" food. Even "natural" food suffers from the same problems. Agriculture has engineered crops for yield rather than taste or nutrition. Fields are covered with fertilizer that makes plants grow fast. They have little time for defenses, thus they are covered with pesticides. This kills off the pest predators also, requiring more pesticides. 

Meat has suffered from similar problems. Livestock are fed grains that are cheap rather than nutritious. This "food" needs to be flavored to get the animals to appropriate consume it. The animals quickly put on weight, but the nutritional value and taste of the meat is lacking. (Argentine grass-fed beef tasted so much better than the feed-lot American beef.) There are also the externalities. Animal waste is great fertilizer on farms, but hazardous waste on a feedlot.

The explores the decline in nutrition in modern food with a goal towards advocating no-till "natural" agricultural processes. Many of today's crops don't work as well in organic, no-till farming because they have been bred specifically for high-fertilizer, conventional farming. Breeding for taste and more natural conditions can produce more nutritious, better tasting produce with yields almost as high as bland conventional ones. We are only beginning to better understand the nutritional benefits. (Nutritional studies remain hard because there are so many different people and different interrelated nutrients.) 

The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi

A Jewish housewife is facing a midlife crisis. She loves to cook for her family, but wants more in life. Her husband helps arrange for job for her at a literary agency. She is upset that her daughter plans to get married and fights to stop it. The strong response leads her upset. She takes solace in the book she is reading for work. She eventually strikes up a conversation with the author. This leads to her leaving her husband and her appreciation for Sufi Mysticism. The novel intertwines the "modern story" with a story from a millenia ago. The ancient story deals with some Sufi Muslims that make sacrifices to gain enlightenment. There are parallels between the modern life and the ancient story. However, the ending feels a "cop out".

"All the Real Indians Died Off": And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans

What could be a good book gets too bogged down in the contradictions of racial studies propaganda. They assume there is a monolithic "White supremacist" culture that seeks to oppress everyone else. All aspects of this "white" culture oppress the non-white victims. However, they make this argument in the context of "white" academia, and "white" culture. The arguments vacillate between identifying "Indian" concerns and concerns of individual tribes.
The authors even argue that the English developed their colonial oppression methods through the colonization of Ireland. Yet, now the Irish are grouped in the "white" group of oppressors. Huh? Why were they able to assimilate, but the Indians were not? And why can we get away with having "Fighting Irish" mascots, but not "Fighting Sioux". Is this justified because there are a good number of Irish catholics that got to Notre Dame? What about Spartans? Has San Jose or Michigan received permission of the Greeks? Or do they not need to do it because they are all "white"?
There were plenty of wrongs and treaty violation committed against the Indians by the colonizers. However, there were also many wrongs committed against "white" groups also. Trying to focus on us vs. them based on skin color may sell well in racial studies academic circles, but doesn't help in society at large. The irony is that racial studies invokes a very conservative view of the culture in question in a very liberal environment. They expect a majority culture to sacrifice their cultural beliefs and norms so that the minority culture can cling to a very conservative way of life in their culture.
The "indigenous" argument also echos "NIMBY" arguments seen in many communities today. People want a community to remain the same as it was when they moved there. What is not clearly explained is how long the American Indian culture had lasted in its present form before the European colonization. Were some tribes and cultures only recently formed? Had some lived the same way for thousands of years before? Were there some tribes that had annihilated other tribes, only to be decimated by the Europeans. Have some tribal cultures existed longer as minority cultures in a European world than they did originally on their own. These would all be great topics of exploration. Alas, that is not the topic of the book.
The myths here focus more on the "agenda". Some times the arguments are fairly clear. Indian casinos do make great amounts of money for a small number of tribes. However, most tribes barely break even. The government does provide health care for Indians as part of a treaty obligation. However, the funding is quite low.
Other arguments get muddled. The "myth of the drunken Indian" acknowledges that alcohol related crime is high among Indians. However, this is justified as something forced upon Indians by the Europeans. And then arguments are given to say that Indians are not more susceptible to alcohol. There are also discussions about "victimhood" and "wards of the state". The authors try to refute these misconceptions, even as the theme of the book seems to say otherwise.
Pan-Indian identity also gets conflated with tribal identity. Indians rightfully cringe when others attempt to mimic their sacred ceremonies. However, what if another tribe takes it? Tribal identity was said to be fluid in Indian cultures, with those from one tribe being adopted into others. Yet, now there are strict blood limits. And what about adoption into mainstream American culture?
There is a great challenge to keep minority cultures alive. However, the "Racist" approach ends up marginalizing many cultures due to their skin colors. There are many cultures among the "whites" and many among the "Indians". There is a lot we could learn from all of them.

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy

Bayes' rule seems very simple. However, it has produced a great deal of controversy throughout its history. Even the name itself is controversial. Bayes does appear to have been one of the first people to produce a paper on it. However, the paper we have was substantially edited by Richard Price and presented at the Royal Society after Bayes' death. Laplace later independently discovered the algorithm and ran with it. Since he was the more renowned mathematical mind, it would make sense to name it after him. However, it was later referred to as Bayes rule by those who popularized it, and that is what we have today.
The Theory That Would Not Die does not spend much time covering the details of Bayes' rule. It is assumed the reader already understands it, or will be able to understand it well enough by following the story line. Instead, the focus is on the conflicts between the "bayeseians" and the "frequentists". Bayes can help determine probabilities given scant data or unknown occurrences and was derided as "subjective". Frequency analysis deals with known observations as was considered a more theoretically accurate. Bayesian analysis would come and go in spurts during its history. In world war ii, it helped lead to cracking the German code and significantly helping the Allied war efforts. Alas, it was deemed so important that it was classified, and thus not disclosed to the general public. The ability to adjust probabilities based on past outcomes made it especially useful for insurance actuaries. Today it has applications in multitudes of fields from medical research to spam filters. It is great at helping to tease out the signal from the noise and find high probability answers given scant data.