Seth's Blog

The Harvard Society of Fellows, I learned from this great post by Steve Levitt, drink expensive wine — like $60/bottle. Steve, who was a Fellow for 3 years, did a simple experiment that showed the other members couldn’t tell expensive wine from cheap wine. Although the other members had liked the idea of doing the experiment, they didn’t like the results:

There was a lot of anger when I revealed the results, especially the fact that I had included the same wine twice. One eminent scholar stormed out of the room stating that he had a cold — otherwise he would have detected my sleight of hand with certainty.

Stormed out of the room! Why were they so angry? I think they were embarrassed. And not just that. Steve doesn’t say it, but I think there had been lots of dinner table conversation about how great the wine was. Now all that conversation was revealed to be delusional. Noting the greatness of the wine was — to be crude about it — a way of noting the greatness of those assembled at the table. “We appreciate the finer things in life,” they were saying. “We deserve to be here.” Snobbery is reassuring. In a tiny voice, the results said, yes, you are here, congratulations, but the reason you are here is more complicated than “you deserved it”.

Part 1

Irena Briganti is a widely-feared Fox VP of media relations:

Though one of Briganti’s favorite pastimes is leaking to blogs, she’ll come to find that her detractors can do the same thing just as easily. Blogs are far less likely to cower in the face of a threat of “denied access.”

 Part 2

Before I became a blogger, I spent my entire 20′s trying to become an academic (English and critical theory was my focus). While I struggled to produce a handful of conference papers or publishable articles during that decade, in my four years as a blogger I have published about 4,400 articles that have received about 50,000,000 direct page views, 46,000 incoming links, and over 100 Lexis Nexus mentions. Had I stayed in academic, none of this would have been possible, and I would have continued to receive an endless series of rejections from the gatekeepers. The “experts” that Appell describes did not see the same value in my writing huge numbers of other people clearly have.

From Chris Bowers.

Part 3

Yoely made some compromises. He miscalculated, however, when he wired his home with Internet access. “He thought, If I give her this, then she’ll shut up and be satisfied,” Gitty says.

“Once I read blogs from people who had gotten out of places like KJ, there was no turning back. Yoely begged me to stay. It is humiliating for a Satmar man to have his wife leave him. But it was too late,” says Gitty, who would start her own blog, 1 Beautiful Stranger, where she wrote about her misplaced life in Kiryas Joel.

From New York.

In the last chapter of The Shangri-La Diet and this post, I said it was foolish for those who want to improve the world to denigrate those in industry. (“[Food] companies will put anything in their food if they think the extra marketing hype will help them sell more of it,” said Marian Nestle.) A recent article in the NY Times described in detail how a wash-your-hands campaign became more effective by studying industry tactics. The head of the campaign said pretty much what I’ve been saying:

“For a long time, the public health community was distrustful [not to mention scornful] of industry, because many felt these companies were trying to sell products that made people’s lives less healthy, by encouraging them to smoke, or to eat unhealthy foods, or by selling expensive products people didn’t really need,” Dr. Curtis said. “But those tactics also allow us to save lives. If we want to really help the world, we need every tool we can get.”

And every person.

Thanks to Marian Lizzi.

At dinner I asked my friend who he’d like to meet. “Good question,” he said. Let me try to answer it:

1. John Horton Conway. A Princeton math professor who’s combined math and human interest better than anyone since John Von Neumann. I especially like his work on numbers and games and The Book of Numbers, which he wrote with Richard Guy.

2. Lauren Collins. She and Mark Singer are the best writers at The New Yorker. As I recently blogged, I loved her profile of Pascal Dangin.

3. Chimamanda Adichie. I blogged about a recent short story of hers. Reading her reminds me how I used to read lots of fiction and how much I liked it.

The person I don’t know who I most wish would write another book is Renata Adler. If a book can be stillborn, Private Capacity, supposed to be published in 2002, was that. From Wikipedia: “Renata Adler’s investigation of the Bilderberg group reveals the true history of the organization, its membership and its nebulous function. With an astonishing cache of Bilderberg archives and secret files, Adler charts the history of the organization and the extent of its power.” Sounds like it exists, doesn’t it? It ranks 5 million on Amazon, maybe because I ordered a copy. Second most: Ben Cheever. I loved Selling Ben Cheever.

On Wednesday Stephen Marsh and I appeared on The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet to talk about the Shangri-La Diet. The clip, alas, is no longer available. There were two critics: a doctor and a dietician. A friend of mine was amused by the doctor’s belief that because someone from Berkeley had criticized the diet it couldn’t be any good. Discussion in the SLD forums. Before the segment, the producer said to me, “What happens determines the length. If it’s interesting, it will be longer. If it’s boring, it will be short. That’s just the reality.” It was really short. If she hadn’t told me that . . . I felt bad for a while but other people convinced me it was okay. I’m pleased by the publicity, of course. Overall, I like the show; I like its focus on everyday issues and problems.

Two other diets were covered in the previous segment: The Flat Tummy Diet and The Warrior Diet. The author of the latter wasn’t pleased.

Stephen Marsh answers the critics.

I met David Lawrence when I appeared on his radio show a year ago. Since then, he has lost more than 100 pounds. He started at 355 (BMI 50); now he’s at 246 (BMI 34). Very impressive. How did he do it?

I’m not really doing anything special other than portion control (very easy, just eat a little not everything), and being more active. Occasionally I’ll remember to drink a Mexican Coke [he lives in Los Angeles] an hour or so before a big meal, and that cuts it down to size, but I can’t really claim that I’m following the SLD regimen. More like, I park in the first spot I come to in the parking lot, and walk to the buildings. Feels great.

There seem to be three changes here: 1. Eating less. 2. More walking. 3. Mexican Coke before some meals. I am skeptical that trying to eat less can have massive long-term effects, so I discount that factor completely. More walking can certainly be potent if pre-walking you are very sedentary, as perhaps David was. I’ve never heard of anyone losing 100 pounds by walking more, however. And the additional walking doesn’t sound like much.

So perhaps the Mexican Coke before big meals is actually doing something. This is fascinating because in general soft drinks are fattening. (They are the perfect ditto food: strong constant flavor, quickly-digested calories.) Yet it is possible that with this particular timing the calories in the Coke don’t get associated with the flavor of either the Coke or the following meal. If so they would function as SLD calories and that could indeed cause substantial weight loss (or at least make it much easier to do portion control).

There isn’t any precedent in the study of learning for “associative strength” (generated by the calories) to get lost, as it were, but then no one would ever look for such a thing. Normally the flavor of the Coke would hang around in the brain waiting for the calorie signal generated by the sugar but when the meal comes along the flavor signal gets muddled. Perhaps combining the Coke flavor memory with a wide range of other flavor memories creates a jumbled mess that is so inconsistent that the Coke goes from ditto food to the opposite, completely-new-flavor food.

David will appear in two episodes of Heroes in October.

In response to the trouble at Fannie Mae — its stock plunged — we have this:

“There is a sort of a panic going on and that’s not what ought to be,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who heads the Senate banking committee. “The facts don’t warrant that reaction, in my view.”

Mr. Dodd said that he was persuaded by conversations with Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke that the two companies “are fundamentally sound and strong.”

Nassim Taleb begs to differ — a year ago:

The government-sponsored institution Fanny Mae, when I look at their risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events “unlikely.”

A footnote on p. 226 of The Black Swan, published April 2007. Asked to comment on the Fannie Mae situation, Taleb replied, “I discuss events before, not after. I despise postdicters.”

Jacob Nelik, the friend of a friend, is a businessman/engineer in Los Angeles whose business, ISS Corporation, makes  high-tech solutions from off-the-shelf components. Their projects include video camera systems for luxury yachts and retail stores, and technical and marketing support to Israel Aerospace Industries for their wiring design software. His mom, who is 85, lives in Israel in an old-age home. She has short-term memory problems. Jacob wrote me:

I try to visit her 3-4 times a year but at this age the feeling of loneliness and emptiness, compounded with the feeling (and fact) that because of distance, I can’t come and visit her whenever she (or I) would like to, brought her to a stage where she felt she didn’t have a reason to live (“living for what?” as she said). I felt that with my knowledge, experience and the internet, I can make it easier for her. So I utilized a TV set she already owned to create a live picture of me in my office. Whenever I am in the office, she can see me (live). It is on 24 hours a day just like a picture but with live image. I felt that this would bring her closer to me and she would feel (on a daily basis) that I am there with her.
I utilized video parts that my company uses. I took an old home camcorder and connected it to one of the parts we use for our video projects, called a video server or video encoder. It takes the Analog video/picture that the camcorder provides, digitizes it, compresses it, and converts it to IP (Internet Protocol). There are many like this in the market; the one I used allows me to control many parameters including picture compression algorithm, so I can maintain a large physical picture (to fill up the TV screen on my mom’s end without being grainy or fuzzy) with high quality, high frame rate, very short delay (under 2 seconds) and very low bandwidth so I can use the cheapest internet service available. On my mom’s end, I used the same type of circuit to perform the reverse function (Taking the IP video stream, decompress it and convert it back to an Analog video to be fed into the TV set to the same connector where a VCR is connected). I am skipping some technical details but the net result is high quality video from end to end (when each end can be located at different place in the world).

What happened?

From the moment the system started operating (about a year ago) I could see tremendous positive effects on my mom. She no longer says “why do I need to live, what for?” I can detect a smile in her face just by listening to her. Just yesterday she told me that she saw me eating ice cream at my desk. She mentioned a new shirt I was wearing. It gives her many new conversational topics. She tells me that she enters the room and starts talking to me as if I am there with her.  She became much more relaxed and as a result, even her blood pressure is better controlled. It fills a void in her life. It affected me positively as well, because I see how much better she is.

I put cocoa powder in my black tea. I like the complexity it adds and believe it’s good for you. More evidence of its health benefits has just been published:

Design: Randomized, placebo-controlled, single-blind crossover trial of 45 healthy adults [mean age: 53 y; mean body mass index (in kg/m²): 30]. In phase 1, subjects were randomly assigned to consume a solid dark chocolate bar (containing 22 g cocoa powder) or a cocoa-free placebo bar (containing 0 g cocoa powder). In phase 2, subjects were randomly assigned to consume sugar-free cocoa (containing 22 g cocoa powder), sugared cocoa (containing 22 g cocoa powder), or a placebo (containing 0 g cocoa powder).

Results: Solid dark chocolate and liquid cocoa ingestion improved endothelial function (measured as flow-mediated dilatation) compared with placebo (dark chocolate: 4.3 ± 3.4% compared with –1.8 ± 3.3%; p < 0.001; sugar-free and sugared cocoa: 5.7 ± 2.6% and 2.0 ± 1.8% compared with –1.5 ± 2.8%; p < 0.001). Blood pressure decreased after the ingestion of dark chocolate and sugar-free cocoa compared with placebo (dark chocolate: systolic, –3.2 ± 5.8 mm Hg compared with 2.7 ± 6.6 mm Hg; p < 0.001; and diastolic, –1.4 ± 3.9 mm Hg compared with 2.7 ± 6.4 mm Hg; p = 0.01; sugar-free cocoa: systolic, –2.1 ± 7.0 mm Hg compared with 3.2 ± 5.6 mm Hg; p < 0.001; and diastolic: –1.2 ± 8.7 mm Hg compared with 2.8 ± 5.6 mm Hg; p = 0.014). Endothelial function improved significantly more with sugar-free than with regular cocoa (5.7 ± 2.6% compared with 2.0 ± 1.8%; p < 0.001).

Conclusions: The acute ingestion of both solid dark chocolate and liquid cocoa improved endothelial function and lowered blood pressure in overweight adults.

22 g cocoa powder = 2.5 tablespoons. If you live near Berkeley, you might want to attend the Charles Chocolates annual open house, which is this Saturday (July 12) at 2 pm. They are located in Emeryville at 6259 Hollis.

Here is the new 10 yuan note (from Alex Tabarrok):

Here is the man standing in front of a tank during the Tiananmen Square protests: