New Year's Eve Links

• The austere beauty of Euclidean geometry has been seen by many in western culture as a glimpse of an otherworldly system of perfection and certainty. Abraham Lincoln kept a copy of Euclid in his saddlebag, and studied it late at night by lamplight; he related that he said to himself, "You never can make a lawyer if you do not understand what demonstrate means; and I left my situation in Springfield, went home to my father's house, and stayed there till I could give any proposition in the six books of Euclid at sight". [Euclid's Elements]
• Eat nutrient-dense animal products, cooked yourself, with plenty of fat. If I can compact my beliefs here into a sentence: By percent of calories, an ideal diet consists mostly of nutrient dense animal products, like eggs, skyr (thick, protein and fat rich yogurt), cheeses, meats, especially red meat, butter, cream, tallow, salami, small fish, and offal. The highest quality you can afford. You should eat other things too, but you should try to get a significant amount of your calories from these dense sources. [Simon Sarris]
• Find ways to add saturated fats, particularly Stearic Acid (which is the most well studied) into your diet. This means butter and full-fat dairy, beef tallow, and grass-fed beef suet (the gold standard). For a vegan option, cocoa butter is excellent. You can also just buy food-grade stearic acid, which is mostly sourced from palm oil (don't eat palm oil though it's 10% linoleic acid dummy). The reason why you are adding more saturated fat is that your body is always consuming roughly 50% stored fat at any given time, so if you have a lot of stored linoleic acid (hint: you do) then you have to overcompensate in your diet to get the right ratio. [Drew Schorno]
• Astaxanthin is a very interesting molecule.  It’s the red coloring from salmon, lobster and flamingos. It is said to be a potent antioxidant. The term antioxidant is terribly misleading.  Did you know that the “antioxidant” vitamin C can be used as an oxidant source to generate hydrogen peroxide to kill cancer cells?​19​  Antioxidants are really “molecules that are involved in electron flow”.  Depending on the reaction, they flip back and forth between antioxidants and oxidants, giving and taking electrons as the situation warrants and depending on whether they are oxidized or reduced.  It’s more accurate to call antioxidants “redox active molecules”.  Life can be defined by the flow of electrons, so redox active molecules are central characters in the story of life. [Fire in a Bottle]
  
• 38% free cash flow yield to common equity. Undervalued mineral rights (royalty) business covering 13 million acres. Get 49% of world class Soda Ash asset Sisecam Wyoming LLC for free. Carbon sequestration business has generated $22 million of cost-free revenue over the past year - this is free as well. [Nat Stewart]
• Heck, my dad and I saw Santos, without Pelé, play at Maracana for about $0.75 in 1978, although after the game when we were looking for a nonexistent taxicab, we only escaped with our wallets and/or our lives due to the kindness of a Brazilian bodybuilder dwarf who insisted we stop trying to find a nonexistent cab and get on his bus back to Copacabana full of German soccer fans he was tour-guiding. When we mentioned to him we were from Los Angeles, he sheepishly admitted he always wanted to visit Muscle Beach. One of the nagging regrets of my life is that I immediately thought, “I should tell this 4-foot-tall great guy who just saved my life that there’s this fellow from Muscle Beach named Arnold Schwarzenegger and he’s going to make your hobby of bodybuilding the coolest thing in Hollywood.” But then I didn’t. I failed. I mean, for once in my life I knew what the future would be before even, say, James Cameron did, who wasn’t sure who should star in Terminator. And yet I was too shy/reticent/stupid to speak up in a situation in which two sentences from me would have made this bodybuilding dwarf happy for a month or a year or a half dozen years until he saw Terminator in 1984. I don’t have a lot of regrets in my life — that time I could have made a fortune in the Internet Bubble of the Nineties but I didn’t because I had cancer — eh, whatever. But not speaking up in 1978 when I had a perfectly accurate vision of the future that would have made this life-saving dwarf happy... that I regret. [Steve Sailer]