Food & Entropy
Some people say that they can’t bake, even if they’re good cooks. Other people (fewer in my experience) say that they’re really good bakers, but can’t really cook. There’s a big difference between the two activities.
First, entropy. Entropy is a physics concept that is essentially a measure of disorder. A neat stack of bricks is highly ordered: low entropy. Knocking over that stack of bricks results in something less ordered: high entropy. The less structure, the more smeared together and uniformly distributed, the higher the entropy.
Cooking increases entropy. Take a steak and put it on the grill: the highly ordered muscle tissue and marbled fat begins to break down so that we can better digest it. Burn that steak and you increase its entropy even more. Take a pile of vegetables and chop them up with your new laser knife into little cubes and you have greater disorder; higher entropy. Sauté those vegetables and you increase the entropy a bit more. Soup is very high entropy: all of those highly-ordered ingredients you started with are now swirling around in a pot all together, breaking down into delicious disorder.
This makes a certain amount of sense: plants and animals are highly ordered when they’re alive; less so after they die. In order for us to digest anything and use the nutrients, we have to break down food into smaller and simpler compounds: that’s cooking in a nutshell.
Contrast this with baking. Baking also involves mixing a bunch of separate ingredients together, but in very specific sequences. Dry ingredients can get mixed together, sure, but some recipes require you to fold in the egg whites separately from the yolks, or letting the yeast work with the sugar before adding the salt and flour. The precise amount of water used is a significant factor.
Baking ultimately creates structure and order where there wasn’t any before. Cookies, cakes, pies (especially crust!), a Mille-feuille or a Dobos torte are all highly ordered: they might have distinct layers or boundaries, they have a specific texture borne of the heat during baking, they may have intricate decorations or flourishes. This is what makes baking a careful and patient enterprise: to create something with an intricate structure requires that we push back against Nature’s tendency toward disorder.
I think it’s telling that baking is a relatively recent invention, long preceded by roasting and fermentation. Baking is almost an extravagance: building something up so that we can enjoy breaking it down.
Technology vs. Technique
Technology facilitates the erosion of technique in many cases. Golfers are acutely aware of this phenomenon: why work to improve your swing when you can just get new clubs made with a bit more carbon fiber or magnesium? That’s sort of the point of technology: make things easier, faster, more robust and efficient. Skill and technique take the scenic route to the destination of high-quality, consistent results.
Why learn to chop vegetables when you can get a food processor that will reduce anything into whatever shapes and sizes you need? I suppose that in the near future we’ll have laser knives to raster across piles of vegetables and any discussion of technique will be reduced to when the best time is to check for firmware updates. Granton-edge knives—the ones with the little dimples on the sides of the blade—are supposed to keep food like potatoes from sticking to it while you’re slicing them. But you know what works better? Using a different technique: drawing the knife toward you, dragging the tip all the way through the potato to cut off each slice instead of a mostly downward chopping technique.
This is perhaps to say that it’s a two-way street: while technology relieves us of a certain amount of technique and effort most of the time, when technology fails to live up to the hype (or it just plain breaks), technique saves the day. From knowing just how to jiggle the handle on the toilet to turning the sheet pan 180-degrees halfway through your bake, to turning your smart device “all the way off” and then back on: having knowledge and skill above and beyond how technology is “supposed to work” can be invaluable. The internet abounds with tips about how to work around almost any software bug or “hack” a variety of tools.
Technology is often limited by whatever the interface is designed to let you do and the amount of charge that its battery will hold. Technique, when properly understood, gives you the ability to get results under a wider range of conditions. It might even help give you insight into principles.
And an understanding of principles gives you a hundred fold more options than a slightly fancier technology, if for no other reason than you can grab a different tool or even make one, and bend it to your purpose.
Text/Texture
I love books. I am excited by new discoveries, ideas, knowledge. I like learning.
I love the feel of books, too: their weight, the flexing and yielding of paperbacks and the stately solidity of a hardcover. The heft of a stack of books feels like treasure. I was cleaning up broken glass very early one morning and was struck with wonder at how it is that we can feel with our fingertips a single shard of glass—really just a grain of sand—so small that we can scarcely see it. And our sensitive fingertips and alert brains, as Kurt Vonnegut remarked, tell us that books are good for us. I love the feel of the pages of a book: not the glossy, plasticky kind, but the slightly rough, porous kind. The kind that inspires awe when you look closely and consider the typographical outposts imposed on that fibrous terrain.
And you can see on the page and in your mind the weaving of a good story, description or explanation. And in seeing it so clearly, you can almost feel the warp and woof of good writing like the texture of a warm blanket.
It Bears Repeating
To remember a thing, to become more skillful at a task requires practice. Specifically: trying to remember that thing, performing the task and noting your performance.
A review can help you plan, but the plan is to practice the thing, again and again.
Every Technology Since Fire
Before fire was mastered things were, in fact, simpler. By definition, there was no gathering of firewood, making the fire, stoking the fire, yelling at the kids to stay away from the fire, cleaning up around the fire pit, etc.
After fire, there was a lot more to do and there was a lot more to think about: who’s going to keep the fire going, when are they going to be back with more firewood, where should we build tomorrow’s fire ‘cause this spot sucks and don’t even get me started about how bad the smoke is from this crappy wood.
And more serious considerations: getting badly burned, accidentally burning down your house or having to flee the area because now the meadow is on fire. But fire meant warmth, protection and the almost immeasurable benefits of cooking.
Every technology developed since then has had complications: maintenance, second-order effects, misuse and abuse—and just plain difficulties when trying to use it. Just getting a new technology to work at all is hard, but I think it’s much harder to see clearly in advance what kind of complications might arise when the adoption and use of it scales up.
Because we’re far more clever at using things that already exist than we are at making brand new ones.
Disguises
Exercise is play disguised as work.
Philosophy is highly-ordered curiosity disguised as a trifling distraction.
Writing is thinking disguised as mere recording.
Cooking is loving-kindness disguised as housework.
Reading is adventure and exploration disguised as idleness. (So is meditation!)
A Small Set of Sharp Tools
This summer I’ve been trying to repair several windows of my 125 year-old house. They are double-hung, wooden windows. When I got started I thought that a few of them would need to be re-glazed, but as it turns out almost all of them need to be re-glazed. And joints repaired. And rotten wood consolidated. And glass replaced because, you know, fragile… And lots of painting.
Good tools are necessary for any endeavor like this, and so I gathered up scrapers and clamps and sandpaper and special window tools and putty knives. And what I’ve found is that among all of those tools, I need two of them the most: a claw-type paint scraper for getting the 3+ layers of paint off the exterior and a razor blade scraper. And of those two, the razor blade scraper is by far the most important.
I use the razor to remove the tenacious bits of glazing by slicing underneath it or making cuts into it, because I can do it surgically and without breaking the glass. I use it to help free old glazing points embedded in the sash like Excalibur. It works wonderfully on some of the heavily painted areas because I can get underneath all the layers instead of having to work my way down through them with the claw scraper. It’s indispensable for cleaning up the glass after I’ve taken it out of the sash or re-glazed it. Even when it’s dull it’s still useful to carefully pick at or wear away stubborn paint.
It’s great to have sophisticated tools for highly-specialized tasks, and multi-function tools certainly have their place, as well. But there’s a certain quiet, almost unremarkable wisdom in having a small set of “sharp” tools: simple, powerful tools that can be applied in flexible ways.
Old School
Apparently, world-class mathematicians prefer to work on blackboards more than any other medium. (And some have quite a taste for high-quality chalk.) One might think that blackboards would be considered too restrictive, too slow, too imprecise for high-powered math—clearly a job for high-speed, hi-res, high-tech computers.
But I can see their point: chalkboards are an enormous expanse of real estate to work out both abstract theories and concrete expressions, and you can look at your work up close or at a distance with a field of view that computer screens have yet to match.
And chalk: a substance that allows for quick erasure, deliberate smudging and modification; variation in line weight and shading. My high-school physics teacher had a favorite technique for drawing dotted lines: holding it at a steep angle to the board while “pushing” it would make it skip along the surface. With a little practice, you could produce a long arc of beautifully spaced dashes. Imagine another writing tool that gives you such immediate access to such a wide variety of techniques! (Charcoal, perhaps?)
Working at a blackboard is inherently kinesthetic: standing (sometimes crouching!), moving side to side, toward and away, hand and arm applying a variety of forces depending on the technique used to write or draw. It’s a level of engagement on par with sculpting or painting—the effort is physical, concentrated and the feedback is immediate.
Whiteboards don’t really allow for the same interaction. The scale is similar, but they are too slick and glossy to provide satisfying resistance—unless you count the resistance provided by a dried-out dry erase marker. The range of techniques is limited: just try to smudge a line on a whiteboard! It’s too fragile; it simply vanishes. And even photographing a whiteboard to capture the final result can be problematic because of glare and contrast.
We need more blackboards and lots of chalk—we can do better thinking with them.
Do the math.
Sounds Good
Speech is a stream of sound, just like music. And like music, we somehow know when it sounds right and when it doesn’t. Instantly. Automatically.
It seems almost inconceivable because language is so damn complicated when you tease it apart to find out how it works. There are the things that we think of as “words”, strung together into sentences, or at least utterances. The order of the words makes a big difference that reflects whether you’re stating a fact, asking a question or telling someone to do something. It makes a surprising difference when you use several adjectives in a row to describe something. The exact form of the words change—sometimes a little, sometimes a lot—depending on exactly what you’re talking about or why. Extra little words or word parts get sprinkled in, too, for effect or to ensure clarity.
And language isn’t just a pile of words and an enormously complicated set of rules: it’s also melody, rhythm, tempo, timbre and sometimes a percussion section—the nuance and emotion that gets layered into and on top of whatever is being said: tenderness, sarcasm, urgency, humor. All of it is carefully spun together into a single, thin stream of sound. And we know when it’s not quite right, because it sounds that way.
Language wasn’t created by grammarians or linguists: it was created by people who recognized what sounded good. The sheet music came later.
Tired of Thinking?
Maybe it’s because you’re trying to do all of it with your brain, instead of letting your body do some of the work.
Tigers in Cages
Our oldest cat is 19 years old, yet with some regularity she will tear through the house for a couple of minutes like a much younger cat: up the back stairs, down the hall, down the front stairs, through the dining room… I never know why, exactly, but one theory is that cats get bored and do this to amuse themselves. I think that might be right. Domestic cats are, from what I’ve experienced, still very much wild animals. A house cat is a small tiger in a large cage.
Just the other night our other cat caught a mouse in our bedroom. We turned the lights on to assess the situation and he was headed for the door with it in his mouth—no doubt to dispose of his quarry somewhere more private. Of course, there’s always a chance that the mouse will escape, because our cats aren’t necessarily hungry enough to eat a mouse immediately; it’s an evening of entertainment as well. We quickly closed the door to prevent his (the cats) escape and he immediately assumed a posture that asserted he wasn’t interested in sharing: a steady and slight downward gaze as he stood motionless, splitting his attention between managing the mouse and carefully observing our movements to take it from him: a wild thing, possessive of its prey.
Tigers in cages. Ours enjoy long hours of sleep on sunlit couches, specially-purchased pet beds or, preferably, fresh laundry. But there is restlessness as well: refusing to sit still in my lap while I work, pleas for attention, for stimulation, for a simulacrum of hunting and stalking. Pleas for a release of the animal energy that builds like water behind a dam.
We are tigers in cages* and when we dream, we dream of freedom.
* I know we’re not “tigers”, we’re “monkeys”. But “monkeys in cages” just isn’t as evocative, and keeping monkeys and tigers in the same cage seems like a questionable zoological practice.
The Usability of Everything
A book is a tool, a pen is a tool, Wordpress is a tool: for entertainment, for remembering, for communicating with words.
A knife is a tool, an oven is a tool, a sous vide machine is a tool: for cutting, for baking, for precisely heating food.
A yoga mat is a tool, a dumbbell is a tool, running shoes are a tool: for exercising and stress relief.
A job is a tool: for earning money to pay rent, for structuring your time and helping you feel useful. Maybe even for improving the lives of other people.
The usability of tools can be observed and evaluated. (Feel free to substitute the word “system” or “organization” for the word “tool” if it helps.) Can you get the tool set up and ready to use? Can you perform some simple tasks with the tool that it was designed for? How many mistakes do you make with the tool the first time you use it? After reading the instructions? After using it the second time? Can you achieve your goals with the tool? Can you clean and maintain the tool? Do you sometimes inadvertently hurt yourself or others with the tool?
The skillful use of tools can be improved over time with attention and practice–even bad ones. But that doesn’t excuse bad design.
We’ve advanced far enough that we shouldn’t need to tolerate bad tools anymore. There are a lot of Point of Sale systems, but some work really well and others suck to use. There are somehow still bad websites. We’ve had examples of good websites for 20 years now. We know what they look like, how they work and who makes them—there’s no Earthly reason to put up with having a bad website any more.
A bad website, a bad pair of running shoes, a bad knife, a bad organization: the existence of these things mean that the responsible parties simply don’t care enough to even just copy something that’s already good. It means that actually using the tool wasn’t important; simply selling or having the tool was more important.
If you regularly find yourself, while engaged in earnest effort, thinking, “Why is this so mind-bendingly stupid?” it’s time to: a) get a different tool, or b) modify it for your use. And if you don’t know what a good one—a useable one—looks like then get curious and look around. Maybe you’ll even be in a position to make one that’s already good even better.
Falling All Over Ourselves
We humans tend to walk on two legs, which works out well most of the time. Walking is great: it’s efficient and pleasant and we can chew gum, talk on our phones (stop it) or point at birds and snap our fingers while we’re doing it because we only need 2 legs to walk, not 4. But we give up some stability by only using 2 legs, and since we’re “walking upright” like a bunch of showoffs, most of our body is at a significantly higher altitude than our legs.
Sometimes we fall over, or trip. Or are tripped by mischievous... well, never mind. We sometimes lose our balance and fall. This isn’t that dangerous most of the time, except when you see something like this:
(Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times)
See Aaron Rodgers? (The guy with the yellow helmet) He’s being tackled at high speed. He’s lost his balance and he’s going to fall all the way to the ground—no doubt about it. He has also instinctively put out his left hand to stop his body plus the considerable mass of the other human body on top of him. It’s pretty stressful for Aaron’s wrist, elbow and shoulder joint and all the bones in between.
Sometimes when people do this (without even being tackled) break some of the bones in their arm. It might be a strength-to-weight ratio thing, or it might be because our arms were really developed for hanging from tree branches, but it doesn’t matter—our arms suck for stopping our bodies from falling when we stick them straight out.
However, there is a set of remarkable techniques for addressing this very problem.
The woman in blue is going to impact the ground very soon and very forcefully. Notice she is paying attention to how far away the ground is and NOT trying to stick her left hand out to stop this from happening. The arts of Jujutsu and Judo teach ukemi-waza or break falls: how to be tripped, thrown, swept off your feet—and survive. The thing that these techniques all have in common is that 1) you DON’T put your hand down to try to stop yourself from getting closer to the ground and 2) you DO tilt your head away from the ground. They also teach you to try to land on a large part of your body to absorb the impact better and to slap the ground with your hand and arm. (Curiously, slapping may be taught simply to occupy your arm with a harmless activity that prevents you from doing something stupid with it, like sticking it straight out toward an appointment with an ambulance or Emergency Room.)
Overcoming the instinctive urge to reach for the ground requires considerable practice, but I think it would be interesting if more people did. There are a fair number of emergency room visits for people with broken collarbones that might be avoided, like my mom who stumbled and “caught” herself a while back, or another friend who damaged tendons and ligaments in her shoulder while trying to catch herself from falling backwards. (“Fall On Outstretched Hand” or FOOSH is a common emergency room term.)
I had a close call quite a few years ago myself when, on a crisp Winter morning I stepped down off of a cement step onto a sidewalk, not realizing that it was glare ice. My feet shot straight out across the ice and the rest of me followed quickly in a downward arc after a moment of weightlessness that seemed both very long and all too brief. That cement step stayed in place. I don’t know exactly how close my head came to the step or the icy sidewalk, but the break falls I had been practicing for the previous 10 years paid handsome dividends: I tucked my head toward my chest and slapped the ground with my arms instead of sticking my arms back behind me toward the ice that had just tried to assassinate me.
The practice of break falls definitely might not work at scale, because we’re really not comfortable rolling around on the ground as we get older, much less deliberately doing something we avoid at all costs: suddenly meeting the Earth on gravity’s terms. But what if we started as children and then... just didn’t stop?
Sorry, Sting…
As much as I hate to disagree, we are not spirits in a material world.
We are animals—sophisticated, spiritual animals—but animals nonetheless who happen to be just clever enough to occasionally fool ourselves into thinking that we’re not.
Feedback
Make the bed—done.
Put all the dishes away—done.
Write a page—done.
Mow the lawn—done.
I haven’t been out for a run in far too long, and I’ve been beating myself up about it lately. But I’ve also noticed that as stress-relief goes, having some physical evidence that follows the effort, some clear visual feedback that I’ve accomplished something, is sometimes just as good. Seeing is believing.
Replay
A few years back my wife mentioned she wanted our big terra cotta planter moved from the kitchen out to the garage. It was about 2.5 feet in diameter, 2 feet tall and full of dirt. Lots and lots of dirt. One evening, I thought I’d move it by myself.
Anyway, the only way I could really move it was to grab the rim of the planter between my thumbs and fingers with a pinch grip, (the same way you might grab a really big piece of cardboard) lift it and unceremoniously waddle toward my destination. I made it through one doorway and then ever so slightly bumped into doorjamb #2. It wasn’t much contact at all, but just enough for me to lose the tenuous purchase I had on the rim. It fell all of 6 inches and broke under its own weight. Somehow I was able to replay the event in my mind mind 2-3 times in less than a second before I fully realized I wasn’t going to be able to catch it in time. Gravity can be a harsh mistress.
The same thing happened to me again today: I didn’t break a planter, but I had the “replay” experience immediately after I broke a pane of glass I was moving. Again, I had the surge of surprise, then anger and the sinking feeling of having broken something, and the instant review of the sound of the glass breaking and the feel of suddenly holding two pieces of glass instead of one. Again with the gravity!
The replay creates a feeling of helplessness. There is nothing I can do to fix either situation and in both cases I recognized the risk beforehand, anyway. I suppose that if I hadn’t been so integral in both events, the replay might help me make sense of what happened—maybe that why our brains do it. If a tree branch falls on us, the replay might help us see or hear something that we hadn’t noticed before. Or maybe it gives our brains a chance to fabricate some additional sign or signal that could help us next time.
But it’s probably most important to realize that if the replay isn’t helping you understand something better, it’s probably not worth watching.
Handle
I’ve been playing around with an idea the last couple of months—something to hopefully try to avoid hand and wrist problems that plague a lot of us who spend an inordinate amount of time at a computer. And it’s a little more fun and less onerous than a purposefully uncomfortable chair.
“Stress balls” are a generally accepted tool for relieving hand and arm tension and also billed as a way to take a break from computer work to prevent repetitive stress injuries. But I feel like they’re limited: they’re typically super-squishy and small enough to be unobtrusive on your desk, which means that they’re one-handed devices. (And sometimes they have annoyingly cheerful messages on them: “Life’s a journey, not a race!” Ugh...)
One of the interesting capabilities of humans is brachiation: the ability to support one’s body by hanging from the hands. We don’t do it much spontaneously, as a species, because we don’t live in trees anymore. (Kids do, and they’re to be encouraged!) Some of us do pull-ups or gymnastics, but most of us simply don’t have a reason to hang from a branch or a bar anymore. Which is too bad, because hand strength is something that’s very useful in everyday life, and hanging from a bar is a great way to develop it.
So, how about a stick? Nothing fancy, just a stick that’s maybe an inch or so in diameter. It could be part of an old broom or mop handle; it could be a hammer handle or a piece of sturdy PVC pipe. It could be a broken branch. Just something small enough that you can get your hand around it, stout enough that you can’t break it and long enough that you can grip it with both hands.
(This one just happens to be oak. “How about you, Jimmie? You an oak man?”) Here’s the cool part: take it in both hands.
Squeeze it. Hard.
Try to bend it. Now bend it in another direction. Hard.
Try to wring it out like a wet towel.
Try to pull it apart. Try to push the ends together.
Now grip it so that your thumbs are pointing the same way and try #1-4 again.
Now grip it with both palms up (thumbs pointing away from each other) and run through #1-4 again...
There are a lot of ways to use this very simple tool while sitting at your desk.
There are times when I want to take my computer mouse in my hand and crush it into a fine powder. (I’m not sure I really could, but it’s a recurring fantasy.) This gives me something else to squeeze so that I don’t have to have awkward conversations with our IT guy. It can sit on my desk, almost completely unnoticed. And I can fidget with it and squeeze/bend/twist/pull it while I’m thinking about how to re-word that email or figure out what order those slides should be in.
Best of all, it doesn’t need any optimistic aphorisms on it. It’s just a goddamn stick. If you make one yourself and it just has to have a label, I would suggest it simply say, “handle”: both in the noun and the verb sense. That’ll get it done.
Shifty by Design
Sitting still or standing still all day, every day isn’t great for us—it’s nearly as bad (maybe worse) as only performing one kind of movement all day, every day. So I’ll propose an idea that’s sure to be unpopular: getting rid of desk chairs.
Before you run to the garage to get your pitchforks and torches, let’s talk about this a little. We need to be able to sit down; I did say just a couple sentences ago that standing still is bad, too. But comfy chairs aren’t the answer. (Uncomfortable chairs might be the answer, but that’s not quite what I was thinking of.)
One of the smartest things I’ve read in a long time granted permission to watch as much TV as you like, as long as you don’t sit on any of your furniture. If you’re on the floor, you’ll be changing your position, shifting around and constantly trying to get comfortable: frequent movement and posture changes.
For most Western computer operators like myself working at fairly traditional companies, sitting on the floor probably isn’t going to go over well. (Maybe at Google—maybe they’ve got this already?) But a raised platform with a footprint that’s a bit bigger than a desk chair could create the same effect and have a much more acceptable appearance. One could sit on it using any number of positions found in different countries and cultures, as well as the Western tradition.
There could be several heights or an adjustable height mechanism, naturally, and it could be used with normal height and standing desks. It would have a simple, cushioned surface on top: not too austere, but not too plush. Just enough to keep you shifting in your seat and prompting you to stand up once in a while and move around a little.
And it could have storage underneath the seat! Storage! Nothing more American than that.
It’s Just Not That Exciting
My wife and I embarked on a journey 3 years ago when we did the Whole 30 program. I lost a bunch of weight that I didn’t even know I had, temporarily reset my taste for sugar and gained a really strange craving for kale salads. I’m not kidding: if I don’t have a kale salad every few days I feel like something’s missing. Anyway... I tried to be mindful during this time and there were a couple of things that I observed:
I did not really have hunger pangs, I had habit pangs. I wanted to have a snack because I was used to having a snack.
There is an absurd amount of sugar in nearly everything. Seriously, reading labels carefully will change your view of food forever.
At some point, I simply got bored with eating. It was just a thing I needed to do.
The last one is curious. I had gotten used to food as entertainment or recreation. Why eat just for nutrition when it can be an extravaganza? Why shouldn’t it be amusing and delightful? Every. Single. Meal.
And, of course, food is delightful. And it is delicious even if it’s not loaded with sugar AND dextrose AND corn syrup. (That’s not a joke: I’ve seen all three on the same label.) But sometimes you just need to have lunch and it doesn’t have to be a big deal. It’s some chicken and vegetables. It’s some fish and vegetables. It’s some vegetables and some other different vegetables. Or some fruit. And it’s healthy and satisfying in every way except that it’s not French fries dipped in BBQ sauce.
There are traditional foods that are only prepared for special occasions: celebrations, holidays, religious observances. The thing is, we’ve gotten used to being able to have anything we want almost any time we want it and subsequently erased nearly every association it may have had with a special occasion. That may not be quite as true these last few months as it used to be, but my last trip to the grocery store suggests that it’s still mostly in effect.
There are people struggling with being bored because they’ve got too much time on their hands (envy...), but I wonder if they’ve gotten bored with their food choices. I wonder what this time would be like if we ate pretty much the same thing each day and got used to not being surprised and delighted the way we’re used to?
The Gentle Pull of Reality
Research on space missions that require astronauts to endure weightlessness for extended periods of time is giving us an interesting picture of how our bodies cope (or don’t) with low or no gravity. The bones of astronauts tend to become less dense because they don’t need to support nearly as much weight/force as they do on Earth. The muscles lose mass for the same reason. And not just the muscles that get us out of our chairs, but heart muscle mass, too: the blood in our body is easier to pump when there’s no downward pull to fight. Humans just seem to deteriorate in a weightless, effortless, floaty environment. The research is important for helping us develop ways of keeping the astronauts healthy during these long missions in Earth orbit, or for another Moon mission or maybe even to Mars.
The effects of weightlessness can be mitigated somewhat by using some special exercise devices, but for really long trips a constant, gentle pull of artificial gravity is probably needed to keep the body functioning properly. Don’t want our brave men and women to come back from Mars looking and moving like rubber chickens...
And if you look at the research from a slightly different angle, it gives us clues about how to stay healthy during our everyday, normal mission of living on Earth. Gravity and effort don’t hold me down or hold me back—they quite literally hold me together.