Two Mildly Depressing Non-Fiction Books: Part 2

The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance
-by David Epstein

We grow up with the notion that if we set our minds to it we can do anything. The nature vs. nurture argument tends to sway towards the latter, because the former would cause us all to just give up and pack it in if we don't have all the right genes in all the right places. But here's the thing; we learn as we get older that we may not be as quick witted as others, or we learn at a slower pace, or that in spite of studying hard we fall short of the pack. Unfortunately for us (unless some Olympian is secretly reading my blog) the same works for physical pursuits, and from birth we were doomed to fall short of the top of the heap. David Epstein, a former Sports Illustrated writer, delves into the science behind the best of the best and just why they're so far above the lowly masses doomed to mid-level soccer in Edmonton (sorry, that got personal).

There are a few obvious examples to show how genetics can play a role in sports, and one needs to look no further than basketball. If you're above a certain height (a height that is rare enough you garner looks on the street) your chances of joining the NBA rise exponentially. This is no news - but what about a sport where no one obvious physical trait would make a great player? Let's hop on the current Blue Jays bandwagon as so many others have, don a crisp, previously unworn Jays hat and pretend we know something about baseball. But let's talk about Barry Bonds, because like most bandwagoners, I can't name a Toronto player either. He may have shown us that size certainly helps, and strength is something that falls more on the nurture side of things - we can all technically become strong, but we can't all become tall. No amount of steroids that I know of are going to push Barry up to stand eye to eye with Yao Ming.  So is baseball a sport that is the great equalizer, requiring no genetic gifts? Unfortunately, no, and I don't believe one exists. Baseball requires from birth bonuses to find success just like anything else.

Baseball players can - quite literally - see better than the rest of us. A great number of them have actually much higher than 20/20 vision, and a disproportionately high number have vision that's pushing the limits on just how well human beings can see. This is critically important because baseball isn't about a batter reacting to the ball coming at him, seeing where it's going to go, and hitting it - if that were the case it would be impossible. The ball is moving at almost a hundred miles an hour and getting there in a fraction of a second. That pushes well past the limits on how quickly a human can react, let alone hit the ball out of the park. The key is to know where the ball's going right as it's leaving the hand of the pitcher. This is where sight comes in; the batters can see things others with lower vision can't, like the pattern on the ball as it's coming towards them (indicating the variety of pitch and the level of spin) and the pitcher's hand placement (much the same). Someone with lower levels of vision just can't do that, but someone with 20/10 certainly can. That being said, practice obviously comes massively into play - they still can't react fast enough, but react intuitively after learning how the ball will likely move. It's not a conscious thing as there's simply no time for that, so a batter will hit the ball through knowing how it will move from countless experiences in the past. So in a nutshell: if your eyesight is bad, good luck, but if your eyesight is flawless, after hours and hours of practice in what has to be the most mind-numbingly boring sport out there, you have a shot at reaching the majors.

Pretty well everything that is physical will find some people excelling and others coming up short. The size of our heart and lungs vary. The amount of red blood cells and the hemoglobin within them is different from person to person. The kinds of muscles we have cause variation in our running ability as well. But what if we simply train harder than the rest? What if we make up for a lack of genetics by pushing harder at every turn and making up for our crappy DNA by blood, sweat and tears (but mostly sweat)? Well... that may not pan out either. As it turns out our physiology doesn't really throw us a bone in that regard.

Let's say we take two runners of presently equal ability. They each train equally, eat with similar diets and have no advantages in bone structure or all that. What can very easily happen is one of those two gets in much better shape simply because of his genetic material going the extra mile for him, as our bodies respond to training at wildly different speeds. To become the very best - and I mean record breaking - you must possess a perfect storm of traits: a willingness to train intensely (don't forget, even those that are genetically gifted need to train), a body with an ability to receive the benefits from that training quickly and effectively, and a body type that lends itself to the sport you're pursuing. You have to win the lottery not once but three times consecutively - but if your parents were both Olympians you're bound to be holding a heck of a lot of tickets.

There's also one more thing that will certainly help you out along the way, and no, it's not just being male (although skeletal structure and levels of natural fatty tissue pretty well ruins you - sorry, women of the world). It's a little more controversial, even though it absolutely shouldn't be. If you want to run well, which helps in gosh darn nearly every sport you can think of...

It would certainly help if you're black.

Kenyans dominate long distance running to an incredible degree. For a relatively small population they have a staggering number of medals. In addition to being in an elevation "sweet spot" where levels of oxygen are perfect for long distance running training, they have a body type that perfectly suits long distance running - thin lower legs. If you're wondering why that makes a difference, think of it like this; if you hold a book in your hand and hold your arm way out wide, you'll tire very quickly. If you tape it to your body up near your shoulder, you'll be able to hold out much longer. The same premise works for legs - a weight on the lowest part of your body will have a much, much greater effect than, say, a heavy belt.

When it comes right down to it, training and effort seems to account for half of the final sum. Maybe this doesn't depress you. Maybe you think, hey, we get to see people that are hardly human in their ability due to a spectacular mix of chance and opportunity mixed with a great degree of effort. But for me, at least, I can't help but feel that little twinge of frustration thinking what could have been if only I had been spectacularly lucky. At least that's what I'll blame it on the next time I get cut from a team.

Two Mildly Depressing Non-Fiction Books: Part 1

Salt Sugar Fat: Michael Moss

It's no secret North America might be packing on an extra couple pounds. Somewhere around one in four Canadians are obese, with Americans even higher. Mind you, that's one of those statistics that's somewhat misleading; the literal definition of obese is much lower than what we'd think, with obese closer to what we'd call "pretty fat". Nevertheless, it's one of the largest risks to our collective chubby hearts and souls. "Salt Sugar Fat" details the rise of the processed food industry, and just why it's so common for us to be struggling with our ever increasing bellies. But that in itself isn't what's so distressing; throughout the book you realize just how stacked against you the odds are, from how they make it so irresistible to the cravings that are there naturally to the convenience of it all.

First: our bodies really, really enjoy the taste of sugar, which should feel like a freebie but it's even more than you would think. We love it from literally the very first moments of our lives, as when we put a tiny amount of sugar on the tongue of an infant they'll light up right away. It's hardwired in our system. How much we enjoy is a bit of a different story, and finding the point where we feel something is too sweet is a science in and of itself. The major food companies have shocking numbers of scientists working on this, to find what they describe as the "bliss point", the peak level of enjoyment of sugar that doesn't cross over to being too sweet. That's why sugary treats taste as incredible as they do - they know exactly what you want, and they'll cater it directly for you. They'll even know how much you want according to your age and race, as well. It's not only a science, but they've worked it down to an exact one, and it's up to you to take those perfect, designed for pleasure pieces of sugar and deny your access to them.

But it's not just sugar.

Fat works in much the same way, and we crave it about as strongly as we do sweets. The "bliss point" for fat is also staggeringly high, allowing food producers to really amp it up to make their wares all the more attractive. Eventually it gets to the point where we won't want to eat it if it becomes too fatty (maybe it's a shame and not a taste thing) but there's a wonderful way that they've fixed that problem. If you pair sugar with the fat, that fatty "bliss point" moves on up, allowing it to become this unholy concoction of artery clogging, blood-pressure surging, beauty-reducing bites of pure joy. Sugar, for whatever reason, has this strange capability of masking how much fat is in foods and making it harder to detect for the consumer. So not only are your fatty foods fatty, but it's more fat than ever because they can add sugar on top of it all. It's like a wolf not in sheep's clothing, but a bear's.

Salt works slightly differently; we don't really have a natural taste for it (the same test with babies with the sugar produces the opposite reaction). We develop that liking, and if we go off salt for long enough we don't really crave it as strongly. However, a small amount of sodium is healthy (actually, necessary) but we're not talking small amounts. Some of pre-packaged dinners have as much as three and a half days worth of salt in one single sodium bomb that tastes pretty awful anyways. For those of you who have had those Michelina's Frozen Entrees, you know exactly what I mean.

So what happens when we remove some of the salt, sugar or fat? It's more than just the taste. The chemical composition of the food changes, and unfortunately, much of the food becomes unpalatable. This can mean colour, consistency, texture, or any number of things that makes food great other than the obvious. At least that happens a lot of the time; sometimes we just don't like it.

Low-fat foods often fail miserably in the stores, and even when they don't it can lead to overeating anyways. The food companies have a history of drawing people in with the low-fat foods, having them find a lack of satisfaction in them, and eventually having them head on back and pick up the same full-fat version of the thing the consumer was avoiding in the first place. They use healthier foods to lead you back to the worst versions. Ultimately, it's the consumer (as in the consumer, not an individual) that's simply too cheap or too lazy to change it. Making your own food is one way of fixing it, but that's inconvenient; better ingredients become too expensive, and people wouldn't buy it. The food being deprived of nutrients isn't even necessarily the producers' fault. Take soup, for example. It's higher in salt than pretty much anything you're going to find, but that can easily be changed without losing the flavour by replacing it with herbs and spices. However, salt is astoundingly cheap, so it's kept in the process. But here's the thing; if consumers collectively purchased the higher cost, higher health foods, the food companies would be the first to accommodate that desire. But that's ultimately not what we want.

Lastly, even if we're trying for health, it doesn't quite pan out (and here's where those same producers I just defended turn really scummy). Tang is a notable example, as it was marketed as an orange (the fruit) drink - but really it's just an orange (the colour) drink. They tried adding the same nutrients and vitamins from oranges to Tang, but every time they did so it would alter the colour and the taste, and suddenly it would turn to a horrible mess. Fortunately for them, they discovered if they strip it absolutely bare of anything healthy, and add the one part of oranges that the average consumer knows is healthy (vitamin C) and add just that, then it still tastes fine and they can market it with oranges on the front as if deep down it's not quietly helping to put you in an early grave. The grocery store is littered with stuff like this, and while it used to be worse (lawsuits by consumer advocacy groups really helped here) it's been going on for ages with no signs of stopping.

So maybe at this point you're thinking "well, I'm going to be a better consumer, and stop eating all this garbage." Good! But don't forget that you're fighting companies that are throwing millions and millions of dollars of advertising against exactly that. But it's not only advertising - they go all out on making these treats perfect in every way, right down to the obnoxiously described "mouthfeel", which focuses on exactly what it sounds like. This excerpt from the book pretty well sums up what I mean.

"[Frito Lay employed nearly five hundred chemists, psychologists, and their technicians conducted research that cost up to $30 million a year. Their tools included a $40,000 device that simulated a chewing mouth to test and perfect the chips that snaps with about four pounds of pressure, no more or less."

We're all fighting giants. Every time we hit the store we have to actively choose over convenience,  taste and cost, and opt for the healthier option, all the while resisting the enticing manner in which the companies draw you in with their near limitless marketing power. But that's not easy to do. Not everyone has the money, the time, or even the desire to do so. "Salt Sugar Fat" shows us just how massive and often terrible the processed food industry is, and suddenly it seems like that one in four number for those that are obese is surprisingly low, if anything. But don't worry. They're not lonely. Much like our waistlines, their numbers are growing.

Blood in the Cage: Book Review

"Blood in the Cage: Mixed Martial Arts, Pat Miletich, and the Furious Rise of the UFC" chronicles the history and main players involved in ultimate fighting's sudden, explosive burst of popularity. The story itself is genuinely really entertaining - and this is coming from someone who has no vested interest in the sport. The struggle of going from an underground fighting league to popular pay-per-view television and mainstream appeal makes for a good read, and on that the book delivers very well. The transition from the first matches of horribly mismatched opponents and tournaments that have fighters battling multiple times a night to the highly trained super-athletes on television today is worth more than a passing glance.

The early days of UFC are essentially a twelve year old's dream; a schoolyard argument between "I bet this kind of fighter can beat up this kind of fighter" brought into reality. The author himself speaks to that when determining who are the toughest guys out there in his explanation on who would win between a boxer and a mixed martial artist: "If an MMA fighter slipped the punch and kneed the boxer with a Muay Thai clinch or got him on the ground and manipulated a joint, the fight would be over just as fast [as if a boxer connected on a strong punch]". While it sounds comically similar to ten year olds discussing if The Hulk can take Iron Man in a fist fight, this sort of stuff is where the book flourishes; the basic history of how it came to be and the intensely violent and slimmed down rules of the early days, pitting sumo wrestler against kickboxer, boxer against wrestler, karate master against some other form of karate master.

The book also details the later years when the UFC began to find a foothold legally (the league had tremendous difficulties legitimizing the sport) and when it finally started enticing mass audiences. It also provides compelling arguments about the high levels of safety (relatively, considering what is happening). The story behind the scenes is compelling and the individual fighters adds a great deal of personal interest and appeal.

What the book lacks is an even hand. The author, L. Jon Wertheim, is so obviously in love with the sport he cannot see any flaws behind his rose-coloured (blood-tinted?) glasses. A chapter dedicated to the flaws of the UFC (issues with cheating and rampant substance abuse) is an insignificant footnote, reaching only six pages. Any negatives towards ultimate fighting are either dismissed or mentioned only in part. Just a few chapters after his abridged version of the low-points, he opens with comparing ultimate fighting to "space travel and neurosurgery". Later he likens it to ballet. I understand that there is a tremendous level of technical skill involved in the fighting, but at the core of it it's two men beating the life out of each other in a cage. It's not art. It's not beautiful. It may require countless hours of dedication and training but it's one sport that won't find the nickname "the beautiful game" (even though in the first chapter of the book he calls it "majestic").

Wertheim somehow sees no irony in claiming it's a "sport for Hemingways in a society of Dr. Phils" when on the same page they quote the UFC president as saying the league "is going to be the hugest f***ing thing in the f***ing world since sliced f***ing bread." I haven't read much Hemingway, but I don't recall a strong resemblance to that sentence and anything from "The Old Man and the Sea." This and countless other examples cheapen the book, as it tries to make the UFC something that it most assuredly is not . You cannot call the fighters "authentic and accessible" when later talking about Tito Ortiz's former meth addiction and his proclivity for wearing shirts with slogans such as "I just f***ed your a**" after defeating an opponent. He tells the stories of how these men, perceived as barbarians, are always willing to give autographs - but mentions afterwards they're contractually obligated to do so.

Yes, this book is flawed - but give it a read. It's an undoubtedly interesting topic that amid a few frustrating problems is laid out well. You just have to take everything - including a number of unverifiable Pat-Miletich-is-hardore stories - with a grain of salt. That, and ignore a bunch of lazy metaphors like "applied a chokehold" when referring to gaining a demographic and providing a "stiff jab" to overprotective people as those tend to pepper the pages throughout. But that shouldn't be enough to dissuade anyone from reading it; it's fascinating, for fans and non-fans alike.

Dataclysm: Book Review

If you searched for this blog, you theoretically typed in "Dataclysm book review", sifted through the results to about page fourty or so, and decided on my blog for reasons beyond my understanding. Through that, you've done much more than you've realized; you've given Google a very minute amount of money for your search, added a tally on their search results, perhaps slightly altered the ads that will appear on your future pages, and provided one more page count on my blog (bringing it up to, in all likelihood, one). If you write about this book on Facebook, that throws you into many more metrics. Whatever race and gender you fall under, you're throwing a dime in the well for what you and yours collectively gravitate towards. You helped describe what your demographic talks about, how they speak and what's important to them - all by simply going about your daily routine. This in turn can be used to create ads that use this data from agencies that are run by people I can assume look something akin to the child of Snidely Whiplash and Mr. Burns due to their secrecy, wealth, and menacing hand motions. Now lets say you steal that line from me, post it on Facebook, and 'like' your own status as all good people do. Well, what you 'like' also says an awful lot about you as well - and don't think they (that mysterious, all-knowing 'they' that records such things) aren't paying attention. There have been programs created that judging strictly off Facebook likes that can predict within fairly reasonable accuracy whether or not you're a gay male (88%). It also has a high chance of guessing if you're black or white, Republican or Democrat (or some third party voter, or even stranger, Canadian) and it might even know if you've got a bit of a drug habit - whether you admit it or not. So if you're interested in the same sex and cocaine, be careful - your family might not know, but Facebook has got a good feeling.

All of this comes together in an umbrella term called metadata. It's all about the clicks and likes and tweets that we do on a daily basis, and how they're recorded. Dataclysm takes those numbers and shows them to us raw and uncut to demonstrate the relations between race, gender, and dating profile preferences. It's important to note that the author, Christian Rudder, is one of the founders of OkCupid, the online dating service, which provides a wealth of information on much more than you would consider at first glance. Many of the numbers and statistics come from that very site, many of which are rather expected, things you feel like you sort of knew all along but now have proof; for example, Belle & Sebastian, an indie band from Scotland, is not particularly well-received by African-Americans. I mean, if you had to bet on it, you probably would. Then it delves into some other, more surprising territory. A prime example is how men and women view each other according to attractiveness on average. Men, in spite of all the perfectly photoshopped models that abound on television, magazines, billboards, and... well, everywhere, view women's average attractiveness almost on a perfect bell-curve - in a sense meaning it's somewhat right where it should be. Women on the other hand view men much more harshly, making the average man only slightly above a 2/5. 

Rudder hits you with these facts chapter after chapter, backed up by numerous very telling graphs on each segment. The result is an enthralling page-turner that allows you to look deeply into the collective lives of large groups - which is the essence of metadata itself. It's slightly unnerving that we participate in these numbers, either unwillingly or unwittingly or both, but nevertheless they're fascinating. The range is so vast and the sample size so massive and encompassing the numbers are terribly hard to deny. It leaves precious little room for argument. On an individual level, we may not be able to use much of it for more than dinner conversation but I can guarantee you that if you read this book you certainly will wish to discuss it. It's not like it's far from the media as it is - you've almost certainly heard of the NSA and their spying tendencies as it's been at the forefront of the news for some time now. Canada just passed Bill C-51 in spite of massive opposition. This kind of information is only just dawning now, with little in the way of long-term studies to harvest from but still there is so much that can be taken from it (and argued about). Metadata is not something that will slow - we're far past that point now - and it will only become more pervasive in the years to come. Dataclysm, if anything, provides you with an early taste. 

Rudder gives his take on whether or not all the personal (yet almost undoubtedly impersonal) data collection is an evil or a blessing. We wouldn't have such wonderful free features like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Reddit and so forth if it weren't for that ad revenue that's largely fuelled by metadata. On the other hand, at what point does it feel like a flat out invasion of privacy? Like all things there's a balance somewhere in between, and it's an awfully delicate one. Dataclysm shows you the results of all that mining, for good, evil, or simple human interest. Or, just to know for sure that a very rare thing for an Asian person to type into a dating profile is "6'4". 

House of Leaves: Book Review

The first words are "This is not for you".
Oh, the hours I would have saved if I had
 listened...

"This book will blow your mind!"

"It has such a unique style!"

"It's such a mind trip, it's like acid in book form!"

That's pretty much the gist of what the reviews were for this book. As usual, there were the occasional ones scattered throughout that were at least somewhat negative, a few middling and so forth, but the majority were claiming some great feat of literary genius that takes you to other worlds. Heck, I wanted a part of this, and I wanted a part of it now. Everywhere I looked I ran into gushing praise about this book where a house seemingly comes alive, and the book finds a life of its own along with it. It makes you turn it upside down, read pages out of order, the colour and font change, sometimes the words on the page form shapes... well, I was intrigued. I ordered the book online, and soon enough it was on my doorstep and I was brimming with excitement - excitement that is usually reserved for video games, so really, this was out of the norm.

The main selling feature of the book is a house that has boundaries that defy logic. Inside a hallway lies an endless chamber of rapidly changing dimension, and on the outside it appears mostly normal with the exception of the fact that the inside and outside length and width do not match up as they should. All of this is detailed in a documentary called The Navidson Record that follows a family within the house and their expeditions around the corridors of endless blackness. That basic description grabbed me. It sounded original, a little creepy, and I was genuinely curious where it was going to turn. A second storyline follows Johnny Truant, a drugged-up, semi-attractive man who stumbles upon a series of notes on the Navidson Record and feels compelled to complete them in one way or another. Through his travels he meets prostitutes, does more drugs, and any variety of things that make him "edgy" to the point it feels absurd and forced - oh, he's a tattoo artist too. The style was interesting at the very least, and the plot of the house showed potential, even if Truant did not.

Unfortunately, as the story wears on (it's far too long and filled with excessive, needlessly wordy description), you begin to realize most of it relies on gimmick; it's a clear-cut case of style over substance. I mean, I get it - placing one word on each page makes it seem like everything is being read in slow motion. Sometimes the words are near the top or the bottom of the page, symbolizing the difference in space in the subject matter that's going on at the time in the novel. They're neat little tricks, and they're enough to captivate your interest for the first few times it happens. However, the book is staggeringly long, and my patience started to run dry when I realized that beneath all the gimmicks lies a painfully uninteresting series of characters and events.

Not once did I feel the slightest moment of interest in a character in the novel. Johnny Truant is painfully bland; his character slowly grows insane, but since he's such an unlikeable character at the core I feel nothing for him. His personality is never really fleshed out properly, as with literally every other side character. Even the positive reviews (and there are inexplicably many) so rarely mention the characters which take so much of the space in the novel. To reference some television moments here, as T.V. makes everything easier, take a look at Breaking Bad. It wasn't just the events that capture you in that show - it was that you legitimately cared deeply for what happened to the individuals in the show (except Skyler, I hate Skyler). Here, some die, go crazy, and other things which should elicit a response but in the end you feel absolutely nothing for them as you're too busy focusing on being in awe that a book makes you turn it upside down for a few pages to read it.

The book reads as if the author, Mark Danielewski, is patting himself on the back with one hand and typing with the other. It is so heavily laden with pretension it practically oozes out of the pages. Gimmick after gimmick, supposedly dark and deep conversations, reminiscent of True Detective but falling well short, and an ambiguous Lost type ending that serves more as a cop-out than a proper closing. Similar to Lost, I feel I have been robbed of my time; they build up so much, promising you, urging you to finish them to explain what is going on but then neatly packaging it with an unfulfilling ending that explains nothing but the fact that they didn't know how to end it all along. It goes to show how easily you can build up a mystery if you don't have to solve it. It's like calling a puzzle the most difficult one on the planet simply by removing a piece.

House of Leaves made me turn the book upside down, read a variety of font types and colours, had me flip pages quickly, frustrated me with the order in which to read them, and sent my eyes all over the book for footnotes - but one thing it certainly failed to do was entertain. With incomplete, bland characterization and a plot that ultimately goes nowhere, I can't find it in me to turn even a slightly positive spin.