I went gluten-free and it worked

Late last year, I was having some gastrointestinal issues, and someone suggested I should go gluten-free, as an experiment. I tried it for a few weeks, and it seemed to help.

So I started speaking to a dietician, and we did a bunch of tests to see what was going on. I kept a food diary. I eliminated a lot of different foods, and reintroduced them one by one. I determined that I have a sensitivity to a class of carbohydrates called FODMAPs.

I had heard of FODMAP sensitivity before my dietician told me about it. In a rare case where blogging has materially benefited me, I had blogged about the very same subject almost a decade ago. I had heard of (then recent) research that many people who believe they have gluten sensitivity are actually sensitive to FODMAPs. FODMAPs and gluten both occur in the same food, and so going gluten-free tends to help even if it wasn’t gluten that was the source of the problem.

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That time I interviewed a fraud

Here’s a story about a job candidate I interviewed who seemed to be engaging in some sort of AI-assisted fraud.

Before the interview even occurred, there was already suspicion around the candidate. A couple other interviewers observed a lag between the voice and video, and they thought this might be a sign of an AI generated video. And the resume felt way too perfect, claiming extensive experience in basically everything that we do.

I don’t know about the video lag. To the extent there are AI tools out there, I don’t presume to know how exactly they work, nor do I presume that I am capable of distinguishing AI video from a bad internet latency. So I took an approach that was different from other interviewers: I looked at his LinkedIn page.

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Margaret, the hoarder

This is a true personal story, although not quite true, and not quite a story. I have mixed in some lies to give people some privacy, and to shave off some technical details.

Margaret is a hoarder. She maintains a household full of junk. Mountains of clothing, overflowing cabinets of food, bags full of bags, blocked closets full of nobody-knows-what. The top layer is a thin coating of decorative tchochkes. The bottom layer is a collection of packed cardboard boxes, untouched since the house repairs that occurred 15 years ago.

The kitchen has no counter space, and much work is done on a pull-out cutting board, which blocks the utensil shelf directly beneath it. The dining table is unusable, forcing people to set up a temporary table in the space that the front door would open into. There are not one but two expensive television sets, one in front of the other, and the second one partially obscured by other junk. The house is composed of a series of single-lane walkways; people must back up and step aside to let others pass by, and wear close-toed shoes to avoid injury.

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Experience with AI coding

In the past year, myself and many other people who program for a living started using AI coding assistance. I’m just going to plainly discuss my experience, and ramble about some related issues.

This explanation is primarily for the benefit of people who do not code professionally, and thus have little idea what’s going on. If you code professionally, then you already know, and have formed your own opinion about it, which you are welcome to keep. But it’s worth noting that lots of different kinds of people code for a living. It’s not just software engineers, you know. I code on a daily basis but I’m a data scientist. The reader should be cautious about generalizations because what’s true of one profession may not be true of another.

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Recent health developments

Another casual blogging event.  This one is about farts.  Wait, I’m being serious!

A few months ago, I had COVID for the first time.  I never got it before, because I work remotely, don’t go outside, and I’m also very religious about getting my boosters.  I finally caught it because my husband’s company’s RTO.

As I recall, I took a week off of work.  At the tail end, it was in that liminal state of “am I really sick enough to take off work?”  I could just give work 90%, and then I get to save my vacation day for when I actually feel better, you know?  The symptoms I had at the end were constant burping, and globus sensation.  “Globus sensation” is when you feel like something’s stuck at the back of your throat, I had to look that up.  Also, farting.

The stomach symptoms didn’t entirely go away.  And now, three months later, I’ve decided it’s because I’ve developed lactose intolerance.  I have tested this empirically.  Lactose intolerance can be treated with lactase enzyme, which you can buy over the counter.  Try ice cream with and without lactase, observe the difference.  Okay, so, I don’t get sick from lactose, not usually anyways.  I just get gas.

Could COVID induce lactose intolerance?  Maybe.  Some people on the internet seem to think so, although that’s not worth much.  I’m half Asian, various degrees of lactose intolerance runs in the family.  Some people just suddenly develop lactose intolerance as adults, and the timing may well be a coincidence.

I’m currently working out how much I need to change my diet vs just taking a bunch of lactase all the time.  It’s very nice that lactase is an option.

Deconversion Narrativization

It’s said that the world is made of stories. But, if that were true, why is translating a personal experience into a story so lossy? Invariably, you must choose where the story starts and ends, which pieces of context to include or exclude, which events to highlight as important. You must choose the “moral” of the story, or lack thereof. You must adjust the story based on who you tell it to (unless, you know, you’re a bad storyteller). If you want your story to be 100% objective and accurate, my advice is don’t tell a story at all; just live it, and then your life will be 100% accurate to itself.

In atheist circles, we occasionally circulate deconversion stories. They’re probably most common among people who recently left religion, and then after enough time people stop caring so much any more. I wrote a deconversion story back in 2009, so long ago that I don’t even remember it. It’s not a story I need to tell over and over, even if it would be new to most readers.  But I might still tell it occasionally, perhaps with different goals in mind than I had back then.

What sort of goals do we have when telling a deconversion story?

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Confession

I left Catholicism when I was 18, so I literally have a child’s understanding of the Catholic practice of confession. It was a ritual that did not make much sense to a child.

What is confession? It’s one of the seven sacred sacraments, the other six being eucharist, confirmation, marriage, holy orders, annointing the sick, and baptism, in some order. Catholic Wednesday school, known as CCD, is supposed to introduce kids to three of the sacraments, namely eucharist, confession, and confirmation.

Confession was essentially a scheduled annual obligation. One day, all the kids would quietly line up for a little private chat with one of the priests. And just to paint the picture, we always talked to priests face to face, we never used confessional boxes, ubiquitous though they are in fiction.

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