I wrote the following in response to this New York Times article, “Eating for Health, Not Weight” in a discussion on Hacker News. With an Ivy League PhD in physics, I’m a big fan of science. I have not observed a scientific approach to diet effective in promoting health. In my albeit limited observation, I observe no correlation between knowing a lot about food, digestion, etc and fitness or healthiness.[…] Keep reading →

In a taxi ride home last night, we turned the corner onto Donghu Lu and saw this — a car completely flipped over. I’ve seen a lot of things in life, but I can’t imagine how it happened. The stuff on the curb nearby was messed up, but not enough to explain how the car flipped over. There weren’t any skid marks or other flipped over cars. The headlights were[…] Keep reading →

Speaking about commuting, as I did yesterday, I decided to record my Shanghai morning commute. It’s normally about eight minutes. I could probably do it in six-and-a-half without running if I had to. So I brought my camera and took pictures every dozen yards or so sometimes looking forward, other times to the side. What can I say? I consider community more important all the time. I live in a[…] Keep reading →

Nobody likes commuting. Living far from where you work doesn’t make sense to me. It messes up your sense of community. If you drive it pollutes, isolates you, and keeps you from exercising. I’ve done well about keeping my commutes short. Business school, at thirty minutes door-to-door, was one of my longest commutes. Since it was by subway it probably didn’t pollute that much. Mostly my commutes have been fifteen[…] Keep reading →

I got this exercise from a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who writes on self-awareness, mindfulness, and meditation. I find it helped me understand a lot about how I perceive my world and how I can influence how I perceive it. I don’t know if he made it up or got it from somewhere. Anyway, all you need is three raisins and some free time. The Three Raisins exercise Preparation: get[…] Keep reading →

I don’t know if I have to explain how shopping for, preparing, and eating food qualifies as fundamental to self-awareness and therefore leadership. A few years ago I would have considered food shopping irrelevant to self-awareness. I’ve changed. I’ll start with an aside on how big an effect just gardening can have with Victory Gardens. During the World Wars, when mainstream food production dropped, governments promoted their citizens planting so-called[…] Keep reading →

Today’s post derives from a lesson I learned from Professor Rao, whose class I took in business school and whose lessons I’ve written about often here. I’d try to improve on it, but he did a great job of it. His book mentioned that all the stress in your life comes from one place. I remember reading that concept thinking, “how can that possibly happen? I have so much stress[…] Keep reading →