august 2023

on a boat, it's my birthday

Sep 10, 2023

birthday month!

sailing

Recently, I've been obsessed with the idea of sailing. I can’t figure out exactly why. Contributing factors include:

my early determination to live by an ocean
day trips on a family friends sailboat
frequent viewings of Pirates of the Caribbean movies
hours spent watching this YouTube channel and this one more recently

So anyway, I signed up for sailing lessons this month. The classes were 6-9PM on Mondays and Wednesdays for 4 weeks. We were sailing in 420s which can go very fast (when sailed properly).

I enjoyed sailing immensely and want to do it more. I’ve come up with some reasons why:

No distractions

Perpetual addiction to my phone means that at any moment I can distract myself by pulling it out and scrolling. Sailing on these boats doesn't leave your phone accessible. You could definitely bring it, but there's a chance it will sink.

So I got a nice respite; a phone break twice a week.

Variable conditions

I only got a taste of it, but I learned that the wind has moods. The weather has moods. Sometimes you're caught in the water while it's angry. Other times everything is still and slow and quiet.

A low-wind day would have us lazily navigating around marks and chatting. A high-wind day would have us flying around the bay, entirely occupied with not capsizing.

I liked the fact that I was more vulnerable to that.

The view

Perspective from the water is nice. So many pretty things live by the water! Beaches, nice lookouts, expensive houses, etc.

And you can see the horizon. We rarely missed a sunset.

People

I was lucky with my sailing group. Everyone was nice, especially the instructors. It made sailing with someone else in the boat a pleasure and not a chore. Here’s me with my buddy Sam.

And here’s a little time-lapse on a quiet day:

birthday

I’m writing this as it’s my birthday tomorrow. I’m turning 25.

Not sure how I feel about it. Somewhat ambivalent I think. A quarter-century is a crazier way to describe it.

bike update

After complaining about aesthetics for half of last month's newsletter, I bought the 'ugly' one.

In my defence, I tried three vintage bikes and they all felt stiff and uncomfortable.

But not this one.

It’s not really ugly. I love it. She’s beautiful. Although I did install the old foam seat to discourage thieves.

I’m now finding any excuse I can to ride around. Great purchase. Thank you Recyclistas!

percentages and progestin

Disclaimer: This next section is basically paraphrasing this podcast ep and this article.

Percentages can be misleading. Especially percentages of percentages.

Here’s my claim:

After drinking mushroom tea every morning, my risk of getting a stomach flu goes up by 33 percent.

That’s a significant increase, right? I should probably stop drinking mushroom tea.

But hold on, there’s a piece of information missing here. What was my likelihood of getting a stomach flu in the first place?

Let’s say it started at 5 percent. After drinking mushroom tea it increased to 6.5 percent (5 * 1.33). That’s not a huge jump! In fact, that’s a small jump! 1.5 percentage points!

If I really like mushroom tea, I’d probably be okay with a bump of 1.5 percentage points! I love this tea! YOLO!

This is similar to what happened in the ‘90s. The NIH ran a study to determine the effects of hormone therapy on women (specifically taking estrogen and progestin).

They abruptly stopped the study after determining that the risks were too high for participants:

In the study, compared to women taking placebo, those on estrogen and progestin together had a 22 percent higher risk of heart disease, 26 percent higher risk of breast cancer, and a 41 percent higher risk of stroke.

This sounds bad. Stop drinking the mushroom tea! And people did; hormone therapy became a lot less popular.

But we’re missing the absolute risk numbers:

If a woman’s risk of having breast cancer between the ages of 50 and 60 is around 2.33 percent, if you increase that risk by 26 percent…then you get something like 2.94 percent.

An increase of 0.6 percent sounds much less frightening than an increase of 26 percent. But, in this case, they sort of mean the same thing. Except one is absolute (0.6 percent) and one is relative (26 percent).

Stay cautious!

lsat

I wrote the LSAT! It went well! Not sure what else I can offer on this. If you want to know my score, I’ll offer this hint: It’s a palindromic number.

end

thanks for reading! until next month!