Seth's Blog

From the Washington Post:

At the open house, a STEP [Stanford Teacher Education Program] instructor asked [Michelle Kerr] if she planned to accept the offer of admission [to Stanford's School of Education]. Anyone else would have said yes. But Kerr, who calls herself “fatally truthful,” said the tuition would be difficult to afford and admitted she was philosophically out of sync with the program. . . .

[Professor of Education Rachel Lotan, the director of STEP,] called Kerr in for a 45-minute session on her doubts about the STEP policy orientation. Wouldn’t she be more comfortable elsewhere? Even when university ombudsman David Arnot Rasch assured Kerr the offer of admission was binding, Lotan couldn’t let it go. According to Kerr, Lotan looked for legal grounds to keep Kerr out, something Kerr said she discovered when another official mistakenly sent her an email that was meant just for Lotan.

“I really can’t believe this response,” the official said of Kerr’s decision to accept admission and decline another meeting with Lotan. “Are you forwarding her response to the lawyer?”

Kerr called Lotan “a ruthless political animal who believes she was protecting her program from enemy infiltration.” During a second meeting with Kerr, Lotan said that she asked a lawyer about the possibility of rescinding Kerr’s admission. The lawyer had told her that was untenable. “Unfortunately,” said Lotan.

After Kerr became a student at Stanford, Lotan tried to get her in trouble at her internship school. In an official letter to Kerr, Lotan complained “you raised your voice.”

More about this.

From the Shangri-La Diet forums:

I’ve begun taking turmeric and it’s been a miracle. I used to be really into rock climbing and this really messed up the big toe in my right foot.  (Wearing shoes 2.5 sizes too small and bearing all my body weight on my toe joints will do that, apparently.)  The podiatrist said it was arthritic in nature and that the only thing that would stop it was to stop climbing.  So I did.  One year later, the pain had lessened, but it still hurt, and I couldn’t start running again.

Last week, on a humbug, I tried turmeric.  I made some vile anti-inflammatory spice concoction and managed to get a few tablespoons of it down.  It probably would have ended there because it was so freaking disgusting, but I noticed later that day that my toe pain had diminished to a dim sensation that was barely uncomfortable.  Desperate to come up with a non-disgusting means of taking my new “medicine,” I settled on mixing turmeric, cayenne, and yellow mustard into a paste.  It tastes like grainy, spicy mustard and I take about a tablespoon in the morning and a tablespoon at night.  I’m also trying to take some fenugreek, cinnamon, and cardamom.  I mix the fenugreek with my green tea,  allow it to steep and expand between brewings, and then eat the seeds once they get soft.  The cinnamon and cardamom are pleasant enough, so I just chew on them.  (I use mexican cinnamon, probably 1/3 to 1/2 stick per day.

Vile Spice Mixture = VSM.  James Lind tried a VSM in his famous scurvy experiment; it had no effect.

The Wonders of Turmeric.

Thanks to Heidi.

Jennifer Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, has a nice post about dumplings, including this:

I once made 888 dumplings for a party, my personal record. . . . You might have crudites, warm cheese, stale hummus, left over at the end of the party. You will never have leftover dumplings — unless you burned them.

This reminds me how much I liked the dumplings a the Tsinghua student cafeterias. I think they were served at every meal but I associate them with breakfast, maybe because there was less choice at breakfast. Fresh and homemade and chewy and well-spiced and incredibly cheap (like all the cafeteria food). Maybe 6 for 25 cents. There was an optional vinegar-like sauce (speaking of fermented foods). There were two types (pork & ??) but I didn’t understand the Chinese names.

I tried to avoid them. They were too easy and familiar. But it takes a certain amount of stamina to eat strange food so if I was tired, I’d have dumplings.

A friend of mine had acid reflux. When he ate certain foods — tea, chocolate, foods high in sugar or fat — and when he ate too much, he got a pain in his stomach. “Maybe I’ve got an ulcer,” he thought. He first noticed it after eating brussels sprouts, about a year or so ago. At the time it was only uncomfortable. He was taking Alleve for back pain around that time — that might have messed up his stomach. He was also worrying a lot at the time.

It got worse. Periodically he would have pain in his stomach in the middle of the night and during the day. In particular, after eating Oreo cookies. Mint tea, which he thought would help, made it worse. Friends suggested he try Prilosec OTC. A 14-day course seemed to clear it up. A month after the Prilosec ended, however, he went to a big party. He ate a lot of food, a lot of different things. He woke up in the middle of the night with the worst pain yet. So then he went to a doctor. The doctor said it was probably acid reflux; try Asiphex ($60 for two weeks), he said. It was less effective than the Prilosec. Then I suggested that some sort of fermented product might help. So he bought Activa yogurt. It wasn’t clear if it had any effect; maybe a small one.

Recently he was in Rainbow Grocery, in San Francisco. They sell kombucha. He bought some because I had spoken particularly highly of it. After four days of drinking it, he felt much better even though he’d only finished 3/4s of the bottle. His stomach doesn’t hurt any more. That improves his mood. His back feels a lot better — but that comes and goes. That might be a placebo effect, he says — “even though I don’t believe in kombucha, I think it’s bunk, but I have to admit that it works,” he says.

He’d heard of kombucha from his colleagues about three years ago. They raved about it but it seemed faddish to him. He’d tried it, but just to taste it. He doesn’t eat any fermented foods besides vinegar; he doesn’t drink wine or beer. Hadn’t been eating yogurt. He had gone on a vegan diet for a few months before the Prilosec. He’d thought the vegan diet would protect him from stomach problems, but he was wrong.

He has continued to drink small amounts of kombucha and the improvement has persisted, although recently something mint at a party caused a problem.

In an earlier post I called a certain JAMA editorial “the most self-righteous editorial I have ever read.” Perhaps the authors reluctantly agreed; the editorial, which used to be here, is gone. Since I quoted from it, you can still see what I was talking about. The BMJ has an article about the disappearance, which includes this:

The BMJ sent emails to JAMA’s editor, Catherine DeAngelis, and the journal’s media relations office asking about the disappearance of the March editorial. The BMJ also asked whether Dr DeAngelis could explain why the new July editorial had toned down the policy outlined in the March editorial.

The response from a JAMA spokeswoman was “no comment.”

Correct: It is indefensible. What I said earlier still holds: The whole incident — self-righteous editorial, trash-talking by DeAngelis to a WSJ blogger, deletion of the editorial, failure to explain the deletion — “sheds a hugely unflattering light on the very powerful doctors who run JAMA — and thus an hugely unflattering light on a culture in which such people, like Nemeroff, gain great power.”