Smart Drugs: Fenn Lipkowitz and his Amazing Lifelog

It's certainly not a controlled experiment, but at the same time, I can report apocryphal success with daily doses of 500 mg of Tyrosine, a teaspoon of flaxseed and fish oil, 200 mg of CoQ10, 240 mg of Gingko biloba, and 10 mg of vinpocetine along with several other innocuous supplements that may or may not have a role here.

The upshot: several weeks in I got hit with three gnarly race conditions in 30,000 lines of GPU code. 3 days later, the bugs were all fixed and overall performance was up several percent. I'm good at what I do, but the speed at which these bugs were vanquished floored me. These were nasty hard to isolate, seldom occurring problems and I picked them off one by one on seemingly gut instinct alone.

Which is to say I do think something's going on here, but it's hard to isolate exactly what. More data is needed but I'm reluctant to attempt to fix what is apparently not broken.

As for the raw diet. I love the raw diet. But unless you're Demi Moore, Alicia Silverstone, Woody Harrelson, or living in a cooperative situation with a bunch of fellow raw foodies, it's just way too much work. That said, upping the consumption of green leafy vegetables, and correspondingly reducing the consumption of sugar and animal products in this day and age is a no-brainer (i.e. Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead).

Amusingly, the picture of Mr. Lipkowitz on his blog site is taken at the Googleplex - a place that served some of the most healthy food I've ever eaten - to some of the fattest, out of shape and unhealthy nerds I've ever seen in 14 years in the tech industry.