Episode 164 -- The Origins of Bodybuilding

i actually attended a research talk at my school about a possible connection between ibs and anxiety and depression

The fact exercise is very good for depression is so badly highjacked by the MAHA types who want to get rid of any other kind of treatment for any mental health issues.

Doing my home barre workout with Moira in my ear telling me I am building my gendered body… 👀 Always love a journey into the wild world of the more distant past! Especially if it makes me give the side eye to my own daily routines.

listening to this at the planet fitness this morning 🫶🏼

tangentially, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" really isn't so absurd as people present it. the idea is that embryogenesis is an iterative process (e.g. a developing chicken first begins to grow a more typical therapod tail before turning back on itself to form a pygostyle). a multicellular organism is essentially an unfathomably large cellular automaton, producing complexity from a simple beginning via the application of relatively simple stepwise cell-to-cell-relationship rules (with turing-pattern-style chemical gradients for longer range, e.g. segmentation clock), and so the evolution of more complex bodyplans must necessarily build upon the evolution first of simpler bodyplans, tacking on to the same set of steps, and so if those developmental steps are followed backwards (by popping open eggs at several stages of development), one will first see things looking more like those basal organisms and then additional developmental stages changing the embryo to look more like the derived form. what the simple slogan doesn't encapsulate is that evolution is not just tacking changes onto the end of that series of steps, but rather mutations can be inserted at any point and diverging developmental trees created. it's still more right than not in the limit, however, as the added complexity of additional steps, as in all complex systems, produces sensitivity to initial conditions, and so mutations inserted at earlier steps are more likely to produce nonviable results (※ discussion is mostly applied to vertebrates, and even there has caveats at very earliest stages of just a few cells (blastulae), which have some surprising early differences

the rus-jp war dynamic was understood same way from japan's side, an interesting discussion. in suppression of traditionalists during meiji and taking up of western weapons, was understood that establishing and maintaining "empire" was even more a cultural project than one of resource extraction, with peoples to the west being treated as in need of civilising and presented so for domestic propaganda. and then taishou and 30s followed with a "but not tooo civilised" reaction, e.g. quelling nascent bluestocking feminism of of the 1910s and 20s, 良妻賢母 and 与謝野晶子 being "converted" to writing war propaganda (....thinking now, interesting parallels between the free expression turned national takeover of print media, magazines etc, in 20s~30s japan and proliferation-then-crackdown of internet videospace in mainland china during 2010s