Seth's Blog

In this amusing article Emily Yoffe tells about her troubles with GPS. She fails, unfortunately, to look on the bright side — to say how flawed GPS is better than no GPS. After a talk by John Tukey, the statistician, at Berkeley, I told him that I had found the tools he wrote about in Exploratory Data Analysis to be really helpful. (For example, smoothing my data led me to discover that eating breakfast made me wake up too early.) Tukey replied that if the tools are helpful half the time, that’s good. It isn’t easy to make an interesting response to a compliment!

Something is better than nothing.

From the abstract of a 2006 study done in Japan:

An epidemiological study was carried out on [134] first-year junior high school students in Wakayama Prefecture. Analyses were performed to investigate the relationships among eating habits of fermented milk or fermented soybean foods and the presence of atopic diseases. Serum levels of total IgE values, specific IgE to house dust mite and Japanese cedar pollen in these subjects were evaluated to clarify atopic status. . . . RESULTS: Serum total IgE levels were found to be significantly lower in those subjects habitually eating yogurt and/or fermented milk drinking, in comparison with those who do not habitually eat such fermented milk foods. Subjects with habitual intake of these fermented milk foods were significantly lower in having various allergy diseases compared with those without such an eating habit. However, no difference was found on the total IgE titers and having allergy diseases between subjects with or without habitual intake of Natto, a fermented soybean food.

Note the small sample size. Contrary to some experts, it’s a good sign. It means the differences were strong enough to be significant in a relatively small sample. A review article about allergies and fermented foods.

Last January (2008) I got home from Japan and started eating miso soup so often I forgot what I used to eat. This January (2009) I went to the Fancy Food Show and became so interested in fermented foods I’m having trouble remembering what I used to blog about.

Thanks to Peter Spero.

I’m sure that what we want to eat is a good guide to what we should eat, so long as you ask what our preferences would have led us to eat 100,000 years ago — before we killed off the woolly mammoths. (Curiously, I’ve never seen this obvious idea in any nutrition text.) A vast amount of trial and error is embodied in those preferences. Because we learn to like foods, our best guide to unlearned preferences may be what children want to eat.

The great essayist George Trow doesn’t quite get it, I’m afraid:

In the New History, the preferences of a child carried as much weight as the preferences of an adult, so the refining of preferences was subtracted from what it was necessary for a man to learn to do.

The Wisdom of the One-Year-Old Picky Eater. The Wisdom of the Five-Year-Old Picky Eater.

From Season 3, Episode 6 of My Life on the D-List:

TV SHOW PRODUCER [preparing Kathy for the questions she'll be asked] What do you love about handbags?

KATHY GRIFFIN That they are a statement that I’m rich.

This reminds me of Albert Einstein saying his two favorite thinkers were Thorstein Veblen and Sigmund Freud. We really are smarter now, just as James Flynn says. Einstein, surely the best physicist of his generation, was unable to see that Freud was bogus, and, although he was right about Veblen, talented comedians now say exactly what Veblen said.

More Kathy Griffin in this week’s EW: “I have not read a book since last week’s Us Weekly.” That makes two of us, Kathy.

The only hard part of making kombucha is getting starter culture. Here’s an easy way to do that:

Get a bottle of K.T.’s [or any non-pasteurized brand] . . . remove the cap, cover with cotton [or paper towel] and rubber band, set in warm spot [room temperature is fine] for about 3 weeks [or less] and a nice baby culture will grow on the top! Simply pour the entire contents in your . . . tea and sugar mixture.

I noticed the same thing with Rejuvenation Company kombucha stored at room temperature for a few weeks. To speed up culture growth transfer the kombucha to a container with a wide mouth, so that it gets more oxygen. Adding sugar, a few teaspoons/cup of kombucha, might help.