General

Here’s a long debate. Charlie vs. 25.

From Rebecca Harvey on Facebook:

She thought she was studying milk. What she uncovered was a conversation. In 2008 evolutionary anthropologist Katie Hinde was working in a primate research lab in California, analyzing breast milk from rhesus macaque mothers. She had hundreds of samples and thousands of data points. Everything looked routine until one pattern refused to disappear.

Mothers raising sons produced milk richer in fat and protein. Mothers raising daughters produced a larger volume with different nutrient balances. It was consistent. Repeatable. And deeply uncomfortable for the scientific consensus.

Colleagues suggested error. Noise. Statistical coincidence. But Katie trusted the data. And the data pointed to a radical idea. Milk is not just nutrition. It is information. For decades biology treated breast milk as simple fuel. Calories in, growth out. But if milk were only calories, why would it change based on the sex of the baby? Katie kept going.

Across more than two hundred fifty mothers and over seven hundred sampling events, the story grew more complex. Younger first time mothers produced milk with fewer calories but significantly higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. The babies who drank it grew faster. They were also more alert, more cautious, and more anxious. Milk was not only building bodies. It was shaping behavior.

Then came the discovery that changed everything.

When a baby nurses, microscopic amounts of saliva flow back into the breast. That saliva carries biological signals about the infant’s immune system. If the baby is getting sick, the mother’s body detects it. Within hours the milk changes. White blood cells increase. Macrophages multiply. Targeted antibodies appear. When the baby recovers, the milk returns to baseline. This was not coincidence. It was call and response. A biological dialogue refined over millions of years. Invisible to science until someone thought to listen.

As Katie surveyed existing research, she found something disturbing. There were twice as many studies on erectile dysfunction as on breast milk composition. The first food every human consumes.
The substance that shaped our species. Largely ignored. So she did something bold. She launched a blog with a deliberately provocative name, Mammals Suck Milk. It attracted over a million readers in its first year. Parents. Doctors. Researchers. People asking questions science had skipped. The discoveries kept coming. Milk changes by time of day. Foremilk differs from hindmilk.

Human milk contains over two hundred oligosaccharides babies cannot digest because they exist to feed beneficial gut bacteria. Every mother’s milk is biologically unique.

In 2017 Katie brought this work to a TED stage. In 2020 it reached a global audience through the Netflix series Babies. Today at Arizona State University’s Comparative Lactation Lab, Dr. Katie Hinde continues shaping how medicine understands infant development, neonatal care, formula design, and public health. The implications are enormous.

Milk has been evolving for more than two hundred million years. Longer than dinosaurs walked the Earth. What we once dismissed as simple nutrition is one of the most sophisticated communication systems biology has ever produced. Katie Hinde did not just study milk. She revealed that nourishment is intelligence. A living responsive system shaping who we become before we ever speak. All because one scientist refused to accept that half the story was measurement error.

Sometimes the biggest revolutions begin by listening to what everyone else ignores.”
– thanks Dale McElroy

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I’ve been having difficulty “doing” things in my office. Two big reasons: one, it is freaking cold. The other, optics.

Our basement is unheated, and we lose way to much heat through the floor into the basement. One of the things that I need to do is to make sure the basement is properly sealed and then to look into insulating it a bit.

With dead shoes, my feet were cold. My hands were cold. My head was cold. It isn’t uncommon to enter my office, which is isolated from the woodstove-heated parts of the house, to see 52° on the thermometer. I have a silent oil-filled heater. Over the course of about an hour the temp will come up to around 63°. On a good day, it might climb over 65°.

That issue was mostly solved by good, fur-lined moccasins.

What I didn’t realize was that my optics were failing me.

Back in the 80s, while at university, I would drive my friend around to different places because he was legally blind. He would tell me street names from memory. And I would miss turns all the time.

It took a couple of trips before I found the right place to turn. I had to find landmarks. I was not driving by street names; I was driving from landmark to landmark.

If you want the epitome of this, just ask a New Englander for directions: Turn left on School Street; it is just past where the machine shop used to be. Yeah, I’ve become that guy.

Regardless, I knew where I was but couldn’t name the street I was on. Then I did something weird: I got my eyes examined and new glasses.

Suddenly I was driving by street names. Why? Because I could actually see the damn street signs before I was driving past them.

Well, my prescription for driving appears to be good. My progressives are not. I need new glasses.

How does this affect working at my computer? Umm, I’m embarrassed to admit, but I put on my computer glasses tonight to see if it makes a difference.It does. I can actually read what’s on the screen.

So when we are talking about optics, remember that they start with the optics that you wear on your face.

…and to all, a good night!

It isn’t often you get to compare your writing with that of your father and grandfather. My grandfather was a PhD with published works. I should try to find his thesis and other publications. I have read his unpublished autobiography.

My father had a few articles published, and I’m sure he wrote more. I should attempt to get his master’s thesis from ODU.

Yesterday my daughter stumbled onto a couple of articles published by my father. I write like he did. I guess I speak like he did as well.

I’m positive that much of my very dry humor comes from him.

His layout was what was known as an “operational” layout. This meant that you could run it realistically. He had cards that represented loads and destinations. The yard operators would have to make up trains, which would then be moved over the main line to different yards by other operators.

Still other operators would run the locals. These were the little trains that went to the different businesses to pick up and drop off loads.

A standard operating session would be 7 or more operators working over 3 hours on a 6:1 fast clock. In other words, they would simulate 18 hours of operations in just 3 hours. Generally, was made up by the fact that the locations did not have real distances between them. So the dairy was only a 1/2 mile from the yard, while it was more like 6 miles in reality.

Regardless, I love and miss Dad. If you feel like it, go read his entire article. He has pictures and more.

There are some things Chris wants me to write, and I will get there probably, but not this week. This week is “getting the finances up to date,” put up the tree, put up the lights, clean up the living room of Friendsgiving stuff, do all the laundry associated with Friendsgiving (hint: it’s a lot), dishes upon dishes… You get the idea.

Chris talked about his version of Friendsgiving, and I wanted to throw my two cents in. Well, maybe more like $0.25, but anyhow… 😉

Years ago, when I still lived with my parents and was not yet adult, Thanksgiving was both a joy and a horror. My mother, bless her heart (said in Ally’s most southern ma’am voice, thick with sarcasm), was an abusive and alcoholic soul, and she made every holiday miserable. But I got to see my Hungarian grandparents, which was almost always a happy thing. As with all things that involved my mother in any way, it was very complicated.

We would wake up early, and my mother would be resentful and angry about it. These days, I realize it’s because she was likely hung over, but I don’t know that for certain. In any case, we would have a light breakfast which my father would make (my mother generally didn’t cook), and then we’d get dressed in our nice clothes and go on the two hour car ride out to my Nagymama and Nagyapa’s house. The times it was just myself and my father were nice. We had things to talk about, music we could share, and it was generally pretty chill. With my mother there, it meant we played what she wanted to listen to, and we didn’t talk much because it bothered her, and you really didn’t want to bother her.

We’d arrive at my grandparents’ house about noon or 1pm, and the turkey would just be coming out of the oven. Nagymama would always cook a massive turkey, 20+ lbs every time (in fact I didn’t know they came smaller than that until well into my adulthood!), and stuffed to the breaking point. My father would carve it up, my mother would set the table (something she was good at, thank heavens), and I would help organize the platters of food. Nagymama would bring out a big pot of turkey neck soup with perfectly clear broth (always simmered, never boiled) with homemade noodles, bits of fresh turkey meat, and a single large carrot in the center of each person’s bowl which you had to cut up with your knife. We would enjoy our soup, and then Nagymama was up again, bringing in platters upon platters of food.

She’d grown up in Hungary, in Mezőkövesd (mezo kovesh-d), which sits nestled in the shadows of the Carpathian Mountains. They were just south of Poland by about 40 to 50 miles, as the crow flies, but the mountains were in the way. My Nagyapa had been drafted into the Russian army at gunpoint during WWII, and escaped when his squad was slaughtered by the Allies. He lay under piles of his dead comrades until everyone left, then crawled out and walked some 400 or more miles home. He only ever talked about it once, and after that he’d just pat my hand and tell me “Nem bántsad,” or “Nem zavar.”  They had nothing for a very, very long time. When they came to the new world, they came with a handful of photographs, two sets of clothing, their son (my father), and hope. They turned that hope into a tobacco farm, which turned into big money. They were hardly millionaires, but they were vastly comfortable.

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Feast time. We spent the entire day preparing, and then people showed up. Then more people showed up.

I hope you are having a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend.