Your Backpack and Demanding School Curriculum Is Making You Shorter

I remember back when I was in elementary and middle school how the teachers would give us these really thick, heavy textbooks to learn from. It was often neccesary to carry all those books around for convenience reasons so that we don’t become late to a class due to going back to a locker to pick up the books.

The fear in the 4th grade for many people was that they would develop scoliosis and a hunched back from putting so many books in their backpacks. There was always the motherly concern that their son or daughter would have stunted growth from carrying such a heavy backpack in school. Of course those old “wive’s tales” could never be proven to be true.

Well I found evidence that apparently putting such a high load on a growing kids’s back does indeed stunt their growth. As an adult, the same type of load will also make them shorter.

Now I admit that the study showed the children putting a load that was upwards of 50% of their total body weight and the decrease was just 1-2 millimeters, but the effects was that the IVD in the L4-L5 region was consistently squeezed.

That may not be much, but the effects can result in lower back problems later in life which will manifest when the children grow up to their 40s and even as early as 30s. The L4-L5 IVD is the one which is the most commonly ruptured disc when we did research on herniated discs, and bulging discs.

Thank god that the younger kids are moving away from the crazy heavy backpacks and towards tablets and ultra-books which are much easier on the back.

Of course, there is always a net downside. With the increase in kids using more and more computers for learning and less need to use paper books, they may not be developing back problems and become shorter, but their eyes are becoming more and more strained with more problems with mental health due to computer addiction.

I Don’t Want To Date, Marry, Or Have Sex With You Because I Am Insecure About My Own Height and Short Stature and Secretly Am Afraid To Have Short Children

Update May 14,2014: In light of the recent news about the Dutch Serial Killer Joran Van Der Sloot getting married, we needed to update this post to validate the point of this post. This Dutch guy is tall. I suspect that he is probably around 6′ 7″, but most sources say that he is around 6′ 4″-6′ 3″. Comparing old pictures of his guy next to the Peruvian Police and Guards which surround him, he looks like a giant next to the Indigenous Peruvian people. If fact, if you look at the mug shot of his face to the right, you can see that he is clearly above the 1.90 meters mark! The news reports got his size completely wrong, by 10 cms/4 inches. Even removing the factor of shoes, he would still likely be around 6′ 6″, which apparently is only slightly taller than average for the average Dutch male today. (I suspect that the modern Dutch male is probably around 6′ 3″-6′ 4″ in average height, with the average values given in Wikipedia is due to the lowering of the national average from the tabulated height numerical values of immigrants from countries like the Middle East, and Asia)

Many people who read the news about Joran meeting a peruvian women in jail and getting her pregnant may be shocked and disgusted at this male who probably has multiple sociopathic qualities. However, I am not surprised at what has happened. When viewed from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, after reading the book The Red Queen by Matt Ridley, it makes perfect sense for the women to want to mate with Sloot and have his offspring. 

Sloot has many of the qualities which have evolutionarily been useful. 

• He has height/size. 
• He has sociopathic tendencies & violent. – Genghis Khan bloodline supposedly can be traced to 5-10% of the entire human population.
• He is caucasian/white. – This one is not evolutionary, but cultural. In most cultures I’ve seen, Indian, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Iranian, Saudi Arabian, Brazilian, etc. there is a huge preference for “white” or european looking people, for dating and other aspects of the culture.

If we combines it with the fact that the woman probably is most likely not that well educated (bias here?) it makes sense that she would not be using pure logic and reasoning and telling herself to avoid him since he is dangerous. Her behavior is based on a different set of motives. Even if she tries to rationalize and justify her reason to the media and others for marrying a very well known, public serial killer, her real reasons for doing what she has done is still quite apparent to us. 

The fact is that Van Der Sloot is no longer dangerous, as long as he stays in prison for the full 28 years he is supposed to. The worst he can do is sexually assault other men in the same prison, but that is unlikely. He is probably too tall and big to be sexually assaulted himself, especially since he is supposedly in a Peruvian Prison. There is a clear size difference between the two ethnicities. He may try to get on national television and more press to spew hateful messages, but we on the outside can shut him out. 

The women may in fact be a type of predator, who is taking something from Sloot that she wants, which is to make her future children taller, whiter, and look more european, which is so prized in so many 3rd world developing countries of the world. 

She is planning on marrying him primarily to take his genes, which is technically considered healthy by Nature’s standards. In Richard Dawkin’s seminal work The Selfish Gene, Dawkins argues the point that we can look at our lives not from a technological or cultural perspective but from a genetic perspective, his point is made. We are in fact carriers of genes, which have a sort of intelligence of their own, whose primary purpose is to continuously proliferate themselves. All of our mental activities and pursuits are worthless, and we are completely controlled by our biology, and biological limitations, which are programmed in by our genes and the way the RNA are built into proteins. What matters comes down to genes and evolutionary fitness. 

It is mostly likely Van Der Sloot’s size/height that attracted the girl, and she unconsciously just followed her biological cues. Some people think that she is acting on emotional cues in the belief that she can somehow save him, like he is some tortured soul, but I doubt that part. Females in general often have a much better sense of how to play the mating game than men, while men focus on trying to increase the chances of siring offspring, not caring over the future consequences of their actions. 

I do believe however that mental traits like psychopathic qualities and other “evil” qualities of humans may indeed be genetic. It could very well be that the child born will also have similar brain characteristics as the father, but in this world, you can hide your thoughts, not your body and size. The randomness of how the RNA assemble when we are going through embryogenesis could result in a offspring of Van Der Sloots which don’t have his psychopathic tendencies (is she just playing with russian roulette with her womb?) but will most likely have the genes of height. 

Like we have said multiple times before….

• Height is determined mostly by genetics (by 70-80&)
• Intelligence is also determined mostly by genetics (I’m guessing 50-60%), but that is malleable, since Nuture (not Nature) plays a huge role in our cognitive development and likelihood of success in life. 
• Psychopathic/criminal/violent tendencies are in around 10-15% of all men in the world. There is a correlation that shows that it is passed down lineages. 

I (Michael) at this point in my life try not to judge people too much, since human nature is almost fixed, extremely hard to change, and the stupid, horrible, bad judgements we make in our lives is only because we are just animals at the most basic level. To quote the title of Friedrich Nietzsche’s work, Human, All too Human. The girl in the video below would most likely be also the same type of girl who would accept the idea of meeting a genetically tall male in prison, and mate with him just for his supposedly “height increasing genes”.

Note: I realize now that it is actually not a good idea that anyone can read this website, with its most unique of way of looking at the world. It might not be healthy to read everything written on this website, especially the non-scientific posts. We may in the future actively try to discourage certain readers from reading posts like this one (what Ryan Holliday calls Quake Books) since it might result in them having altered perceptions on the mechanics of society and the world which might lead to non-healthy relationships, and the development of anxiety. 

Here is a message to give to only a certain demographic of people who read this website, to the young single heterosexual men out there who complain that certain types of women (or maybe even most attractive single women) they meet and wish to date refuse to date them and state bluntly and explicitly that their reason for not wanting to date is due to the man’s lack of height. When it comes down to it, I think many, MANY women will ultimately make a similar claim or justification like the reason the girl in the video makes.

The problem exists. It is real, and it is not just in your/our minds.

When that person ever tries to actually talk about this problem they are dealing with, their peers and family gives platitudes like “just be more confident” or “when you are older, and become rich and successful enough, that problem will resolve itself”. Of course, when you are going through that issue yourself, the pain and suffering is much more real. It is not bodily pain, but mental and emotional pain, which is mostly self-inflicted.

People like to give this type of behavior the term “heightism”. You make quick judgements on the value of another human being based on how tall they are relative to other people of the same social group.

The girl has some issues herself, since she was stupid enough to vocally broadcast the idea so publicaly. Height is a very sensitive subject, almost taboo to talk about. Many people have very strong opinions about it.

Is it a good idea to just brush that women’s opinions under the bed and call her ignorant?

No. I honestly believe that the opinions expressed by her is something a lot of women agree with and have internalized but have too much social intelligence to say out loud for other people to hear. Ironically, it turns out that often it is the taller females who don’t have an issue with dating shorter men, since they don’t have that specific insecurity.

I am interested to hear from the readers on what their reactions, opinions, and thought are from watching the video. Care to share some thoughts?

Why Biomedical Engineering Bone Growth Techniques Is The Wrong Path

After I wrote the post where I had said that there is almost nothing left to say, and nothing left to research, at least on the level of theory and reading more articles, someone sent a link to a technique being developed in some Bioengineering or Biomedical Engineering Lab in Rice University where either a Grad Student or Post Doc was working on their little project, creating a type of gel which can be applied to bone to grow bones.

The problem with this bone growing gel technique is that it will NOT work for what we are trying to do.

Here are the 4 main axioms on the science of height increase

Axiom #1: Bones, the actual one tissue, the extracellular bone matrix, consisting of both the organic and inorganic components of the ECM, do NOT grow.

Axiom #2: It is either the marrow inside the bones or the outer layer wrapped around the bone called the periosteum that makes the entire bone grow.

Axiom #3: Most bioengineering and biomedical engineering techniques which claim to “grow bone” are talking about increasing the bone mineral density (BMD), which is used for treating low bone density aka osteoporosis, which affects postmenopausal women, since their ovaries have no more eggs aka no more release of estrogen. Increasing bone density does not increase bone volume, which is what we want.

Axiom #4: We want to find techniques which can grow cartilage, and keep the cartilage sustained and healthy for as long as possible.

Cartilage tissue, but most especially hyaline cartilage, is extremely hard to generate or regenerate when they start to degrade.

Now, here is two other axioms I would like to add with that list…

Axiom #5: Finding ways to grow bone tissue is very easy. – All you need is any type of biodegradable scaffold with a little bit of growth factor (there are plenty to choose from) placed in a fracture and you would have grown bones. Any local state university lab with a bioengineering department would have at least one professor or post-doc which is doing research like this – The technique has been done to death in thousands of research university labs around the world.

Axiom #6: Finding ways to grow cartilage tissue is very hard – This is what we are searching for. Not only that, we are looking for ways to actually induce bone tissue to turn into cartilage tissue.

This process we are trying to learn, by reading all the literature and guessing at the protein pathways, is to maybe figure out a few external stimuli to trigger the right gene expression so that a dormant region inside either the microRNA, or the “left-over RNA” to turn back on. It might be that the “waste RNA” which was active during embryogenesis, creating all the cartilage in babies and young children, can NEVER be turned back on but actually are completely dead. If that is the case, then there would be no easy technique like pressing a “button” to induce cells to transdifferentiate.

We are trying to do the impossible, which is induce the process of transdifferentiation, in the opposite direction that nature has set forth.

Here is the last two axioms I will add…

Axiom #7: The way nature and the universe works as time progresses —> Cartilage Cells aka Chondrocytes transdifferentiation into Bone Cells aka Osteoblasts

Axiom #8: What we are looking for when we are combing through the entire human medical research database is to create a theoretical and feasible scientific technique to go in the exact opposite direction —> Bone Cells aka Osteoblasts transdifferentiation into Cartilage Cells aka Chondrocytes.

To put it in some type of physics analogy, it is like us trying to find a secret loophole to go against the 2nd law of entropy. As everyone realizes, the only law that one can never break based on all the laws that humans have come up with is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the disorder of the analyzed system will NEVER decrease over time. So using this physics analogy, and going back to our bioengineering endeavor, we are trying to go against the natural process.

I really do appreciate the effort some of the readers put in to help find articles like this one (about the new medical gel turning into bone), but we are actually looking for a different type of research, involving a different type of tissue.

So, If you guys ever find news or stories about researchers being successful in creating a new technique to develop “Cartilage Tissue” or “Chondrocytes” or “Chondroblasts”, then send them in our direction. Those are worth reading! 🙂