Language Isolate, Creatine Benefits, Man's Search For Meaning
Three Point Thursday
Happy Three Point Thursday.
This week’s edition features insights on a strange language, information about one of the best supplements for athletes, and a reflection on a great philosophy book.
Behold the mysterious language.
The Basque Country is a region in Northern Spain with a fierce, independent mindset, not least because they have a unique language that is among the oldest living tongues. Also known as Euskara, the Basque language still puzzles historians and linguists to this day. It is not related to the Romance languages of Western Europe, which descended from Latin. Rather, it seems to have evolved independently, and may be related to a different, unknown proto-language. Although the jury is still out on that theory. If you look up a video of how the language sounds, you’ll notice how alien it is compared to French and Spanish, its closest geographic neighbors. It’s fascinating.
The safe supplement that makes you jacked.
I’ll never forget when I first started taking creatine. It was like when Steve Rogers got put into that special machine, and emerged as a buff, soon-to-be Captain America. Okay, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but I do remember being shocked by how much bigger and stronger I became once I started taking it. Of course, supplementation is never a substitute for hard training. However, creatine supplementation with resistance training can lead to an average of 8% greater increase in muscle strength compared to training alone (source). And most importantly, it is a safe, well-researched supplement, one that is a naturally occurring compound in the human body. Pretty good deal, right?
Man’s Search For Meaning is so powerful.
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist, writer, and Holocaust survivor. In 1946 he published Man’s Search for Meaning, describing his experience as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps during World War Two. It details the horror of his camp experiences, the psychological principles he used to persevere, and his teaching of Logotherapy. It is a challenging book to read, not because of how it is written, but because of the fact that you stare into the terrible abyss of evil that the authoritarian monsters made during that era. Anyway, here is one of my favorite quotes from the book that has always stuck with me:
“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”