Wine and Cheese

Diet Modifications, Including More Wine and Cheese, May Help Reduce Cognitive Decline

·December 10, 2020

Summary: A new study reveals the impact of diet on cognitive health as we age. Researchers found cheese consumption had neuroprotective effects against cognitive decline. Daily moderate consumption of red wine was associated with improvements in cognitive function.

Source: Iowa State University

The foods we eat may have a direct impact on our cognitive acuity in our later years. This is the key finding of an Iowa State University research study spotlighted in an article published in the November 2020 issue of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

The study was spearheaded by principal investigator, Auriel Willette, an assistant professor in Food Science and Human Nutrition, and Brandon Klinedinst, a Neuroscience PhD candidate working in the Food Science and Human Nutrition department at Iowa State. The study is a first-of-its-kind large scale analysis that connects specific foods to later-in-life cognitive acuity.

Willette, Klinedinst and their team analyzed data collected from 1,787 aging adults (from 46 to 77 years of age, at the completion of the study) in the United Kingdom through the UK Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database and research resource containing in-depth genetic and health information from half-a-million UK participants. The database is globally accessible to approved researchers undertaking vital research into the world’s most common and life-threatening diseases.

Participants completed a Fluid Intelligence Test (FIT) as part of touchscreen questionnaire at baseline (compiled between 2006 and 2010) and then in two follow-up assessments (conducted from 2012 through 2013 and again between 2015 and 2016). The FIT analysis provides an in-time snapshot of an individual’s ability to “think on the fly.”

Participants also answered questions about their food and alcohol consumption at baseline and through two follow-up assessments. The Food Frequency Questionnaire asked participants about their intake of fresh fruit, dried fruit, raw vegetables and salad, cooked vegetables, oily fish, lean fish, processed meat, poultry, beef, lamb, pork, cheese, bread, cereal, tea and coffee, beer and cider, red wine, white wine and champaign and liquor.

Here are four of the most significant findings from the study:

1. Cheese, by far, was shown to be the most protective food against age-related cognitive problems, even late into life;
2. The daily consumption of alchohol, particularly red wine, was related to improvements in cognitive function;
3. Weekly consumption of lamb, but not other red meats, was shown to improve long-term cognitive prowess; and
4. Excessive consumption of salt is bad, but only individuals already at risk for Alzheimer’s Disease may need to watch their intake to avoid cognitive problems over time.

Participants also answered questions about their food and alcohol consumption at baseline and through two follow-up assessments. Image is in the public domain

“I was pleasantly surprised that our results suggest that responsibly eating cheese and drinking red wine daily are not just good for helping us cope with our current COVID-19 pandemic, but perhaps also dealing with an increasingly complex world that never seems to slow down,” Willette said. “While we took into account whether this was just due to what well-off people eat and drink, randomized clinical trials are needed to determine if making easy changes in our diet could help our brains in significant ways.”

Klinedinst added, “Depending on the genetic factors you carry, some individuals seem to be more protected from the effects of Alzheimers, while other seem to be at greater risk. That said, I believe the right food choices can prevent the disease and cognitive decline altogether. Perhaps the silver bullet we’re looking for is upgrading how we eat. Knowing what that entails contributes to a better understanding of Alzheimer’s and putting this disease in a reverse trajectory.”

Willette and Klinedinst acknowledge the valuable contributions of the other members of the research team: Scott Le, Colleen Pappas, Nathan Hoth, Amy Pollpeter and Qian Wang in the Iowa State department of Food Science and Human Nutrition; Brittany Larsen, Neuroscience graduate program at Iowa State; Yueying Wang and Li Wang, department of Statistics at Iowa State; Shan Yu, department of Statistics, University of Virginia; Karin Allenspach, department of Veterinary Clinical Sciences at Iowa State; Jonathan Mochel, department of Biomedical Sciences at Iowa State; and David Bennett, Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center, Rush Medical Center, Rush University.

About this cognition and diet research news

Source: Iowa State University
Contact: Auriel Willette – Iowa State University
Image: The image is in the public domain

https://neurosciencenews.com/cheese-wine-cognition-17408/

 

62 Camden Mews

ARCHITECT’S – Mews Project Profile

Name of project

62 Camden Mews, NW1 9BX

Project description 

Construction of two storey mews property on empty site at 62 Camden Mews, NW1 9BX in the London Borough of Camden. This is a part closed and part open plan house.

The closed plan sections are solid having a brickwork surround to reflect their use. The open plan sections are more lightweight, being constructed in softwood (deal) with cedar cladding to give the feel of a ‘greenhouse’ structure.

Client

In 1960 Ted Cullinan – the founder and chairman of Cullinan Studio who are a large Architectural co-operative based in Islington – purchased a site for the construction of his own Mews house. The site in North West London was semi-derelict. It had been used for light industrial purposes of a number of years. There were just two trees and an Anderson shelter.

Ted’s contact details are listed below.

Budget

Originally the site cost £2000 and the construction cost was £4000. Timbers were salvaged from an army camp he was then working on.

The value is now estimated at £1.5 million.

Design inspirations

The house uses solar principles whereby lights defuses down using the angle of the sun’s rays to enter the structure. The design provides most of the light at the top and lesser light through restricted windows to the lower floor. The top floor is used for the living rooms and the lower floor for the bedrooms.

The concrete and timber construction is designed to reflect the lightness of Open Plan to the top floor. The brickwork expresses the function and solidity of the closed lower floor layout.

At the time of construction Ted was dealing with 1950’s CLASP schools which were Cubist in style and have no overhangs. Ted learned the value of the overhangs and incorporated these into his building.

The other houses he built at the time (1960’s) were in California and in Hampshire. These were built along similar principles which all aimed to achieve most gain from the sun.

Project notes and timeline

Having purchased the site two years earlier, works started in 1962 allowing occupation by Ted and his family in 1964. The house was still a work in progress at that time and even today further works – such as the installation of triple glazing – are being carried out.

The property was completely redeveloped and this was allowed because there were no other buildings there. It is now a conservation area.

Ted did most of the work himself with the help of friends; initially he did not do the electrics or plumbing. He became adept at plumbing but left all the electrical works to others. Now past the official retirement age and whilst still active as an Architect he is no longer active in construction.

Technological appraisal and review

Camden Mews runs behind the very grand buildings of Camden Square and it is near council flats which gives it a good social mix. Ted considers that properties should follow the scale and structure of the social mix, and all properties should remain open to one another to avoid the wealthy cutting themselves off.

Ted’s philosophy is to try and get the best building on a site, but not necessarily get the best value. He aims for overall efficiency and to establish a good plan inside and outside for living. Mews are small scale world within a large-scale world and should be treated accordingly.

Ted’s view is that any progressive architecture eventually becomes adopted by others. Whilst it may be resisted initially, ironically the same powers subsequently apply red tape to preserve it.

Ted would like to see a green future for the Mews, within an urban context, with application of his principles of solar gain. Ideally he would like Mews properties to be partially self-sufficient and would encourage Mews owners to grow vegetables on the roof or other parts of the property, and use soil or other natural materials to insulate their Mews.

Drawings, photos and other details

Camden Mews – Before

Camden Mews Construction

62 Camden Mews

62 Camden Mews

62 Camden Mews

62 Camden Mews

62 Camden Mews

62 Camden Mews

62 Camden Mews

Future Mews projects

Ted is not involved in any basement projects, and surprisingly has not been involved in other Mews houses until recently.

He is now building 4 Mews at 87 and 89 Camden Mews, opposite his Mews. This project uses a 50 foot wide site which will be divided in half to create 2 Mews per 25 foot wide site. As previously he will apply solar principles, which means he can then build them in south-west direction and therefore optimise the benefits of the sun on the site.

Contact details

Ted Cullinan

CULLINAN STUDIO

5 Baldwin Terrace  

London  

N1 7RU

www.cullinanstudio.com

• Everchangingmews Ltd. 27 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AX

  Director: Martyn John Brown - MRICS MCIOB MNAEA MARLA

  info@everchangingmews.com // Tel: 0207 419 5025

  © 2020

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Gödel’s Constitutional Quarrel

“The examiner was intelligent enough to quickly quieten Gödel and say ‘Oh god, let’s not go into this’ and broke off the examination at this point, greatly to our relief” — Oskar Morgenstern

Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) was the greatest logician who ever lived. At the age of 24, he revolutionized our understanding of the limits of epistemology — the theory of knowledge—by proving mathematically that all formal systems of logic are inherently incomplete. In a highly technical paper of 26 pages, Gödel showed how, no matter how comprehensive a system of rules, laws or axioms we devise, there will always be true and false statements which ‘fall through the cracks’, meaning they cannot be shown rigorously to belong to either classification. The consequences of his discovery spanned not only the foundations of mathematics, logic and philosophy, but indeed also spurred the development of the then-nascent fields of computer science, information theory and artificial intelligence.

Gödel’s Brilliant Madness

A meticulous man, perhaps the most meticulous man, Gödel arrived at his proof in the same way he arrived at most of his beliefs, by a combination of deep skepticism, rigor and, some say, pathological pessimism. Gödel would indeed spend the whole of his life in a battle against his two fiercest enemies: a morbid obsession with illness and death and, as a result, a poor physical health. A lifelong iophobe, Gödel feared nothing more than being poisoned, and so made sure to only eat foods prepared for him and tasted by his wife Adele. Having grown up in apartments in Vienna heated by coal and coke, he obsessed over what he called “bad air” and “gases”, packing up and moving several times and refusing for most of his life to sleep in places warmed by central heating.

Gödel had fled the Nazi regime in Austria in 1940 following Hitler’s Anschluss of his native country. A visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he spent the war years contemplating what he had experienced in Europe in an eternal — often times losing — battle against his own mind and its appetite for paranoid, cynical interpretations of reality.

Becoming an American Citizen

When the time came for Gödel to become an American citizen, he invited his friends Oskar Morgenstern and Albert Einstein to come along as witnesses to his citizenship hearing. A “very thorough man” according to his close friend Morgenstern, Dr. Gödel spent the months leading up to this hearing “informing himself about the history of North America by human beings”. For Gödel, such an inquiry would never have been complete without a sufficiently thorough study of all matters of American history, including the history of Native Americans, their tribes, the early settlers, the Civil War, Princeton, New Jersey, where “the borderline was between borough and the township”, “how the Borough Council was elected, the Township Council, who the Mayor was, how the Township Council functioned” and so on.

“I tried, to explain that all of this was totally unnecessary, of course, but with no avail”, Morgenstern later recalled in a memorandum. Gradually, as the months wore on, Gödel “proceeded to study American history, concentrating in particular on matters of constitutional law”. Morgenstern (who himself was an immigrant and took the same examination in 1944) “tried to convince him that such questions never were asked, that most questions were truly formal and that he would easily answer them; that at most they might ask what sort of government we have in this country or what the highest court is called”. Gödel nonetheless persisted, immersing himself deeper and deeper in his study of the American Constitution.

Oskar Morgenstern (left) and Kurt Gödel (right) in Princeton, New Jersey. Photograph likely taken by Albert Einstein (Photos: Courtesy of the IAS Archive)

A scientist held in the highest possible esteem by colleagues, Gödel was in the 1930s and 40s part of a close-knit community of scholars in Princeton, the likes of which the world has likely never seen before or since. The most famous scientist in the world, Albert Einstein, had arrived in 1933. He was closely followed by a group of Hungarian geniuses lead by John von Neumann (1903–1957), sometimes referred to simply as ‘the smartest person who has ever lived’. The assembly of European emigres in Princeton in the 1930s and 40s was indeed so dense that the resultant mixture of accents spoken around Princeton University would be colloquially known as Fine Hall English, for the building the department of mathematics was housed in at the time. All of them looked up to Gödel, perhaps even more so than to anyone else. Before his death, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) himself told Morgenstern that even though “my own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely … to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel”. von Neumann, who had been in the audience when Gödel presented his breakthrough 1931 paper, called him “absolutely irreplaceable”, “in a class by himself”, asking later — upon von Neumann’s nomination to full professor — “How any of us can be called professor when Gödel is not?”

The Hearing

Still several months ahead of his citizenship examination in 1947, Gödel was conferring with his friend Morgenstern with increasing frequency, when “then came an interesting development”. As Morgenstern later recalled, “He rather excitedly told me that in looking at the Constitution, to his distress, he had found some inner contradictions, and that he could show how in a perfectly legal manner it would be possible for somebody to become a dictator and set up a Fascist regime, never intended by those who drew up the Constitution.”

The Clarkson S. Fisher Federal District Court Building in Trenton, New Jersey

With him to the citizenship hearing he asked his two closest friends, Einstein and Morgenstern. His examiner was Judge Phillip Forman. As Morgenstern later recalled in a draft of a Memorandum from Mathematica entitled History of the Naturalization of Kurt Gödel (dated September 13th 1971):

Examiner: "Now, Mr. Gödel, where do you come from?"
Gödel: "Where I come from? Austria."
Examiner: "What kind of government did you have in Austria?"
Gödel: "It was a republic, but the constitution was such that it finally was changed into a dictatorship."
Examiner: "Oh! This is very bad. This could not happen in this country."
Gödel: "Oh, yes. I can prove it."

As Morgenstern writes, “Einstein and I were horrified during this exchange; The examinor was intelligent enough to quickly quieten Gödel and say “Oh god, let’s not go into this” and broke off the examination at this point, greatly to our relief”. Morgenstern’s notes from the day appear in his Memorandum from Mathematica on the subject of the “History of the Naturalization of Kurt Gödel”, dated September 13th 1971, available below:

Oskar Morgenstern (1902–1977)’s Memorandum from Mathematica, written September 13th 1971

Gödel’s Loophole

“One of the great unsolved problems of constitutional law” — John Nowak

Could a technical loophole in the constitution ever allow a dictatorial regime to emerge in the United States? Legal scholar F.E. Guerra-Pujol argues that if so, Gödel’s objection was likely with the “amending power in Article V, and so the logical possibility of “self-amendment”. His conjecture appears in the paper

• Guerra-Pujol, F.E. (2012). Gödel’s Loophole. Capital University Law Review 41, pp. 637–673.

Article V

Guerra-Pujol (2012) argues that the “design defect” Gödel observed in the United States Constitution likely related to Article V, which describes the “process whereby the Constitution, the nation’s frame of government, may be altered.” The article in other words allows the people to change or amend the Constitution through a two-stage amendment process, which requires:

Article V Process of Amending the United States ConstitutionStage 1
A 2/3 majority approval by the House of Representatives
A 2/3 majority approval by the SenateStage 2
A 3/4 majority by the States

Crucially however, as Guerra-Pujol (2012) points out, although changes to the constitution through this process would be incredibly difficult to pass:

Article V does not prevent any change or amendment to Article V itself.

Was this Gödel’s observation which in theory might allow for a dictatorship to emerge in the future? If so, the weakness Gödel observed is the following:

If the procedural requirements of Article V may be amended, they may be amended "downward", that is, reduced or eliminated, making it easier to amend the Constitution in the future.- Excerpt, Gödel's Loophole by F.E. Guerra-Pujol (2012)

This, in turn, may over time increase the probability of a future amendment that allows for the emergences of a constitutional dictatorship.

After the Hearing

As Morgenstern writes in his memorandum, after the hearing: “We left, drove back to Princeton, and as we came to the corner of Mercer Street, I asked Einstein whether he wanted to go to the Institute or home. He said, “Take me home, my work is not worth anything anyway anymore”. […] Then off to Einstein’s home again”. As they reached Einstein’s home, the great man turned back toward Gödel and said:

Einstein: “Now Gödel, this was your one but last examination”

Gödel: “Goodness, is there still another one to come?”

Einstein: “The next examination is when you step into your grave.”

Gödel: “But Einstein, I don’t step into my grave”

Einstein: “That’s just the joke of it!”

A genius of relativity but perhaps not of comedy, that Einstein.

“With that he departed. I drove Gödel home. Everybody was relieved that this formidable affair was over: Gödel had his head free again to go about problems of philosophy and logic”. — Oskar Morgenstern

Written by

Jørgen Veisdal

Editor-in-Chief at Cantor’s Paradise. Research Fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Cantor’s Paradise

Make Contact With Parallel Universe

Researchers At Large Hadron Collider Are Confident To Make Contact With Parallel Universe In Days

October 10, 2020

 the astoundingly complex LHC “atom smasher” at the CERN center in Geneva, Switzerland, are fired up to its maximum energy levels ever in an endeavor to identify - or perhaps generate - tiny black holes.

 If successful a very new universe is going to be exposed – modifying completely not only the physics books but the philosophy books too. 

It is even probable that gravity from our own universe may “transfer” into this parallel universe, researchers at the LHC say. The experiment is assured to accentuate alarmist critics of the LHC, many of whom initially warned the high energy particle collider would start the top of our universe with the making a part of its own. But up to now Geneva stays intact and securely outside the event horizon.

No doubt the LHC has been outstandingly successful. First researchers proved the existence of the mysterious Higgs boson “God particle” - a key building block of the cosmos - and it's seemingly well on the thanks to revealing ‘dark matter’ - a previously untraceable theoretical prospect that's now believed to form up the foremost of matter within the universe. But next week’s experimentation is reflected to be a game-changer. Mir Faizal, one in every of the three-strong group of physicists behind this experiment, said: “Just as many parallel sheets of paper, which are two-dimensional objects [breadth and length] can exist during a dimension [height], parallel universes can even exist in higher dimensions.”

“We predict that gravity can leak into extra dimensions, and if it does, then miniature black holes are produced at the LHC. Normally, when people consider the multiverse, they think about the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, where every possibility is actualized. This can not be tested so it's a philosophy and not science. this is often not what we mean by parallel universes. What we mean is real universes in extra dimensions. “As gravity can effuse of our universe into the additional dimensions, such a model may be tested by the detection of mini black holes at the LHC.”

“We have calculated the energy at which we expect to detect these mini black holes in ‘gravity's rainbow’ [a new scientific theory].”

“If we do detect mini black holes at this energy, then we are going to know that both gravity's rainbow and additional dimensions are correct."

When the LHC is fired up the energy is calculated in Tera electron volts – a TeV is 1,000,000,000,000, or one trillion, electron Volts. Up to now, the LHC has sought for mini black holes at energy levels below 5.3 TeV. But the foremost recent study says this is often too low.

Instead, the model forecasts that black holes might form at energy levels of no but 9.5 TeV in six dimensions and 11.9 TeV in 10 dimensions.