Yes. Just imagine the Binary stars being very close compared to the distance to the habitable world. E.g. two sun-like stars in sun-mercury distance, and an earth-like planet somewhere between mars and jupiter.
Three-body problems can be chaotic and can be ugly. But in the simplest case you can make them look like two-body problems and things will be just fine.
We do mostly have a problem with ultra-unspecific, ultra-unsubstantiated, ultra-agenda-driven and ultra-useless nutritional advice.
The lacking proper definition of ultra-processed foods is just one part of it. How much is "much"? How often is "occasionally"? What is the confidence level and effect size of that advice? What are the alternatives?
Apart from ethical or environmental concerns, one of the best decisions you can make nutrition wise is to vary your intake a lot and one of the worst is to try and subsist on a limited range of foodstuffs.
The paradox is that by restricting my diet, with an ethically, morally, environmentally and health conscious move to ~veganism, it expanded the variety of food I eat.
When you are unable to rely on old faithfuls, especially meat and dairy, you have to explore other possibilities and really dip into the weird.
I have zero intention to comment on vegetarianism or veganism with this observation, I am solely talking about seeking variation in whatever dietary spectrum you may choose to follow...
That is good advice, but I'd like to clarify that I meant variation over diversity. Eating the same 15 things every week is better than eating the same 5 things, no doubt. But changing it up over the week, month, is even better because is diminishes the chances you're getting too much of something that might be bad in great quantities and works with the adaptability of the body.
Fasting seems to be good for you, for example, because it stimulates the body to consume malformed proteins. Changing intake up from one day to the next also should help the diversity of the gut biome and the activation of several metabolic pathways without 'overheating' any of them.
Real world phenomena can never be cut by clean lines. This isn't math definitions. That said, there are fairly comprehensive definitions of these things. The UN's FAO defines ultra processed food as:
> Formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive
industrial use, made by a series of industrial
processes, many requiring sophisticated equipment
and technology (hence ‘ultra-processed’). Processes
used to make ultra-processed foods include the
fractioning of whole foods into substances, chemical
modifications of these substances, assembly of
unmodified and modified food substances using
industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding
and pre-frying; use of additives at various stages of
manufacture whose functions include making the
final product palatable or hyper-palatable; and
sophisticated packaging, usually with plastic and
other synthetic materials. Ingredients include sugar,
oils or fats, or salt, generally in combination, and
substances that are sources of energy and nutrients
that are of no or rare culinary use such as high
fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated or interesterified
oils, and protein isolates; classes of additives whose
function is to make the final product palatable or
more appealing such as flavours, flavour enhancers,
colours, emulsifiers, and sweeteners, thickeners,
and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming,
gelling, and glazing agents; and additives that
prolong product duration, protect original
properties or prevent proliferation of
microorganisms.
This definition makes most sense when compared with the definitions of the other three categories [1]. I am pretty sure, that any two people trained on these definitions will only disagree less than 5% of the time.
You’re missing the point. It’s not defining what constitutes ultra processed — it’s that no one really knows if it’s bad for you.
Because when you study people who eat a certain thing, they also all tend to eat another thing.
I religiously read nutrition labels and a lot of vegan ultra-processed foods are not particularly healthy, but not necessarily because they are ultra processed but because they mimic non-vegan foods which themselves are unhealthy.
Even if you cook all your meals, it doesn’t mean that you are eating healthy because it still depends on your ingredients.
And as the article hinted to, a lot of people who initially start eating vegan foods tend to buy non-vegan analogues which are not healthy. The better analogues tend to be ultra processed. Are these people at higher risk of certain diseases because they are eating ultra processed foods or because they’ve limited themselves to unhealthy vegan substitutes? Hard to say.
The world is complex. There are thousands of basic foods that are combined, processed and cooked in countless ways. You can't figure out which of these are good or bad individually. You have to make categories to simplify the problem.
There are dozens of categorizations that are studied in literature. Vegan/Veg/Carnivore is one. Each diet becomes its own category to be studied, such as keto.
Level of processing is another such categorization. It won't give you the final answer on what is good or bad, only a partial answer, that will indeed have to be combined with results of other categorizations to get a final answer.
Please understand that nutritional science is a few decades old at this point. Demanding physics (a 500 year+ academic discipline) level of clarity from a discipline which is many times more complex is not going to happen in our lifetimes. The only thing we are going to get are bad partial answers; just like you point out. Everyone knows they are partial answers, but they are partial answers because of complexity, not because of malice.
My problem with picking ultra-processed as a food category is that it has very little to do with the nutritional value. And where we decide the starting line is for that processing is also arbitrary, as far as the result goes.
I mean we could say that beef is ultra-processed grass. And lettuce, ultra-processed sunlight.
Our biological ancestors evolved over 10s-100s of millions of years to consume raw plant matter and raw meat. Only in the last 100k years or so did we start consuming cooked food, which gives some time for evolution to adjust our genes. Our bodies are wet chemical machines that we are confident can consume such food.
These are the unprocessed and moderately unprocessed foods in the NOVA categorization. Processed foods is something that began to be consumed a few thousand years ago (eg. Tofu is 2k+ years old in China), and ultra-processed foods, as defined above, became largely consumed a few decades ago. So there are very good reasons to define these categories as they are. The lines dividing them are fuzzy but that is how all non-physics sciences work.
> ultra-processed as a food category is that it has very little to do with the nutritional value.
Now, if you have a complex system like the human body, it's reasonable to say that the more you drive it outside the domain that it was designed and tested in, the more risk you are taking on the something bad will happen. So a priori you would be mindful of consuming ultra-processed foods. It is a testament to biological evolution that nothing radically bad happens when we consume ultra-processed foods. But it seems very reasonable to investigate such foods more carefully for smaller but long term impacts on health.
> little to do with the nutritional value.
The digestive system doesn't just care about raw nutrition - the number of proteins/fats/carbs - of the incoming food. There are a number of physical and chemical processes occur during digestion, and these processes can be sensitive to what combination of things go in and in what physical form, etc.
It's based on fear of change -- that something bad might be in newer foods. Taking this advice to heart would mean limiting what we eat to just a few well-known, well-tested foods.
And yet the common best-practice nutritional advice is to eat a wide variety of foods. At the same time we know of plenty of natural raw foods, and even some simple cooking processes, that are harmful.
I'd actually advocate for both practices. It's how animals survive best: some members of a species are risk takers and others are cautious, so that one or the other is likely to survive any change in environment.
> It’s not defining what constitutes ultra processed — it’s that no one really knows if it’s bad for you.
If I remember correctly, the book on the subject[1] makes a compelling case for the source of that classification, Monteireo[2], to have pretty solid data on just that
>Subjects were instructed to consume as much or as little as desired. Energy intake was greater during the ultra-processed diet (508 ± 106 kcal/day; p = 0.0001), with increased consumption of carbohydrate (280 ± 54 kcal/day; p < 0.0001) and fat (230 ± 53 kcal/day; p = 0.0004), but not protein (-2 ± 12 kcal/day; p = 0.85).
>Weight changes were highly correlated with energy intake (r = 0.8, p < 0.0001), with participants gaining 0.9 ± 0.3 kg (p = 0.009) during the ultra-processed diet and losing 0.9 ± 0.3 kg (p = 0.007) during the unprocessed diet.
Maybe the issue isn't the 'ultra processing' but protein amount? Less protein = people eat more = weight gain = health issues.
At the end of the day, it's CICO. But why do people eat more calories than replacement? I think it's pretty obvious some of the blame is hyperpalatability, which overlaps greatly with the category people call ultra-processed. The issue is that it tastes good, though, not how many times it has been transmuted.
The UN FAO definition cited above still at the very least sounds like a slightly dressed up version of "industrialized food production bad" (nevermind that it is responsible for all of the wins against malnutrition in the world). "a series of industrial processes, many requiring sophisticated equipment and technology" - like literally any industry? "fractioning of whole foods into substances" - like milling flour or extracting corn or potato starch from said plants? "assembly of unmodified and modified food substances using industrial techniques such as extrusion" - like extruding pasta? "use of additives at various stages of manufacture whose functions include making the final product palatable" adding stuff to make taste more godder describes literally any kind of food preparation? "sophisticated packaging, usually with plastic and other synthetic materials"?
Hello, are you describing oreos or dried pasta from 1950 here?
Because the definition given is useless. Additives I wouldn't use as a home-cook, thickener or emulsifier make it ultra-processed.
So anything with a thickener or emulsifier is ultra-processed? So now my potato-soup is ultra-processed because potato-starch acts as both (same with any kind of beans/lentils/starchy things)? What about that sauce where I intentionally add starch or flour? That pasta, where the cooking water emulsifies the sauce? That mayonaise where mustard and egg yolk act as an emulsifier? Risotto, where the rice starch thickens? What about roux? Reductions? Blood? Thickening with paprika powder?
By definition practically everything home-cooked is also ultra-processed. Anything containing any kind of starch is ultra-processed. This is either a completely useless definition, or the actual message is "don't cook food, ever".
You do list things that are not that good. As someone pointed out when you limit yourself to one thing it is usually not good. Potato starch is great but not if you only use that, and there is a problem of eating processed potatoes instead of unpeeled.
More greens and more fibers is a good thing, but also takes more work to cook well. The definition is not useless if you just use it as one part of understanding your ingredients, not the only way.
The definition given there is pretty useless, imo:
> In the Nova system, a food product is considered ultra-processed if at least one of its ingredients is a substance that home cooks generally don't use (such as high-fructose corn syrup or hydrolysed protein), or is an additive designed to increase the product's appeal (such as a thickener or emulsifier).
Whether or not home cooks use an ingredient has little to do with the health of that ingredient. And, at least from the abstract of the linked article, the additional details don’t inspire confidence that this is a meaningful category.
“Processed foods” is yet another example of the trend of giving something vague a name, attaching an emotional valence to the name and then using that anti-scientific emotional valence to influence public policy. (See also the politics of nuclear power)
The scientific thing to do would be to only use novel food additives when they have been proven to be safe, when they've been tested for toxicity, effects on the microbiome and the digestive tract specifically.
Such a dogshit definition makes it impossible to target any specific chemical or process. With that definition and a meal, I can't tell you whether that meal is "ultra-processed" or not. Just tell me the processes, and show me the studies on them. If there aren't studies on them, do studies on them. But talking about "processed" foods actually seems to use generalization as a smokescreen that somehow still allows deceptive labeling, an enormous number of chemicals, and no specific criticism of the industry.
Food preservation is important, Fortifying foods with vitamins can be awesome. It's good when foods are cheap, food "preparation" and food "processing" are the exact same thing in English. There's always going to be processing. Finding out which processes can cause disease or ill-health is reasonably straightforward, if you want to do it rather than throw around political and marketing rhetoric.
I know of some remote¹ forest in Germany that used to be a training area. It is so bullet- and bomb-riddled that they just decided clearing it wasn't worth it, put a fence around it and declared it off-limits.
¹ in Germany, "remote" means something like "2km from the next settlement".
fail2ban is dangerous imho. First, it will only block high-frequency maliciousness. If an attacker knows to stay below the default ban frequencies, or change endpoints often enough, they will have free reign. Second, fail2ban is a DoS risk, attackers can spoof connections from an IP they want to switch off. Third, fail2ban relies on parsing of textual logs. This is vulnerable to all kinds of injection attacks (there have been some CVEs to that end) where an attacker injects patterns that the fail2ban heuristics will latch on to, and wildly ban stuff.
So you should not rely on fail2ban to keep you safe from anything, and you are introducing DoS risks. Very bad tradeoff imho, making it only good as a last resort.
Like all these problems, the answer is it depends...
In general, fail2ban is often setup to indirectly whisper to a firewall API. The firewall is smart enough to enforce white lists, and custom rate-limiting traffic rules.
i.e. to survive a DoS, the server enforces the traffic profile that chokes off users violating normal rules (ratio of TCP packet types, UDP volume %, and TTL count variance per IP.)
In general, for DDoS you just drop the traffic to a fixed cost CDN with a CAPTCHA to issue real users session tokens, or issue a 302 to 127.0.0.1 for everyone else hammering the site.
Even if all passengers were alive at the time of a water landing, getting out of a plane is tricky in the best of conditions. Getting out of a damaged, rapidly sinking plane is very hard or maybe impossible.
Also, if you would get out of the plane, you are then in the middle of the indian ocean with just your life vest and the sharks. You get maybe 3 days, because the water is warm.
And nobody will find you if they don't know where they should be looking. An airplane life vest doesn't have an AIS transponder, only the life rafts/emergency slides do. If those weren't properly deployed, no chance of a vessel finding you. There are reports of shipwreck survivors about ships passing within a few hundred meters of them in calm seas, and failing to see them.
When you get a sailing license, you learn that if a man goes overboard, it's best to be (at east) three. One goes overboard, one orders the other never to let the overboard man out of sight and to point with his arm outstretched in his direction, and the boatman uses the outstretched arm to the man overboard. It is impressive how quickly you lose sight of someone even in light waves.
This is absolutely correct, but is in part due to the complicated nature of getting a sailing vessel to a fixed location in the sea behind the current location of the boat and in such a manner that allows for the boat to be put directly into the wind at the right time to kill forward motion.
Only very small motor boats are agile enough that you can turn on a dime and not loose sight of a man-over-board. And even then, it strongly depends on wind, current and boat speed. Also, orientation on the seas, sense of direction and getting to a remembered position again is very very hard to impossible. Especially when agitated. You might try using compass and GPS, but those are imprecise, overwhelming and useless when there is any kind of waves or current.
It is absolutely vital to keep the man-over-board in sight. Practically no exceptions.
Also: the originals are mostly only relevant for their collectible value. Researchers can more easily work off digital scans. No need to buy anything or keep anything together physically, just scan it if you are really that interested.
I don't know if there are digital scans. But that there aren't proves the OPs point that researchers can't be THAT interested after all, if they didn't even take scans of the documents.
We shouldn't let the value of something be determined by the budgets and personal tastes of researchers from a random period in history.
Look at the kind of historical artifacts that provide untold insight into ancient societies. Many of these artifacts only exist today because they were accidentally buried or boarded up in a wall and forgotten about while all others were wiped from the world for whatever reason, be it simply recycling or a more malevolent and systematic purge by motivated individuals.
We don't know what is valuable so we should assume that it is all valuable.
Three-body problems can be chaotic and can be ugly. But in the simplest case you can make them look like two-body problems and things will be just fine.
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