Seth's Blog

A professor in the Berkeley nutrition department recently told a friend of mine he knew about the Shangri-La Diet. He advised:

Don’t try it. He’s a psychologist, not a nutritionist.

As if weight control didn’t involve the brain. Perhaps my friend was talking to Marc Hellerstein, who told a student reporter that the theory behind the diet makes “no sense.”  The theory says we stock up on energy when it’s cheap.

How weak it is:

By any measure A/H1N1 is a benign flu virus. According to official statements, New Zealand, for example, usually has 400 deaths from flu each year. This year there were 17, so it could be argued that the pandemic has resulted in 383 lives being saved, which makes it more effective than any flu vaccine.

It is always good politics to scare people. Create a danger from which you protect them. It’s such an old and common ploy it’s curious how well it still works. Maybe the gullibility is hard-wired.

In a good article about what caused the financial crisis, John Cassidy quotes an economist:

During the past few decades, much economic research has “tended to be motivated by the internal logic, intellectual sunk capital and esthetic puzzles of established research programmes rather than by a powerful desire to understand how the economy works—let alone how the economy works during times of stress and financial instability,” notes Willem Buiter, a professor at the London School of Economics who has also served on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee.

It isn’t just “the past few decades” and it isn’t just “much economic research,” it’s all academia. Thorstein Veblen made this point a hundred years ago in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Academics show their high status by doing useless research. Useful research is low status. When, as a professor, you see this in your own department — the uselessness of what people do — you think surely other departments are different. They aren’t. As a Berkeley grad student in engineering said to me, “95% of what goes on in Cory [Hall -- where her department is] will never be used.”

A curious comment was left on a previous post of mine about an internet shopping scam:

Hi Guys I really thank you for this blog

I am going to buy from the Web-Site name www.myshoppingsun.com
But I am not convince about it so I went to PayPal Verified and this is all they said, I just copy from the window they put a domain name but they used all paypal scammers account,

By the way I was scammer with some phone from UK, I Hate to said these but I am affright to do business with chinese people they always try to scamme me

And Please read what paypal said about these myshoppingsun.com website

Light in the box Limited. is PayPal Verified

PayPal’s Verification System allows you to learn more about users before you pay them through PayPal. Verify that the information below is consistent with the business, organization or person you wish to pay.

Email: order@litb-inc.com
Status: Verified
Account Creation Date: Aug. 18, 2006

To ensure that this is a legitimate PayPal Verified user, make sure that the URL of this page begins with https://www.paypal.com/.

What it Means to be Verified

To become Verified, a PayPal member in the United States must enroll in our Expanded Use Program. When a member completes Expanded Use enrollment, he undergoes additional checks that increase security for all PayPal users. Please note that PayPal’s verification system does not constitute an endorsement of a member, nor a guarantee of a member’s business practices. You should always consider other indicators when evaluating members, including length of PayPal membership and reputation scores (on eBay or other auction sites, if applicable)

The commenter’s URI: www.myshoppingsun.com. Their IP: 98.203.87.228.

In the latest episode of Mad Men, one of Betty Draper’s friends wants to know who someone is. She consults a book. Oh, he’s a bigshot, she says.

Was this deliberate? A not-very-in-joke? In the 1960s — even in the 1980s! — there was no Google-like book that said who living people are. You had to go to the library. It used to be fun to read the New Yorker Christmas poem (“Greetings, friends!”) and try to learn about the people you couldn’t identify. It was hard.

More In light of the first seven comments below I reviewed the scene. The mystery man, an advisor to Governor Rockefeller (not in advertising), is listed in a thin spiral-bound notebook. Who’s Who was much thicker and never spiral-bound. Here is the 1962 New York Social Register — much thicker and not spiral-bound. A later comment suggested the notebook contained “a copy” of the Register. No way — there were no Xerox machines back then. The woman who looks the mystery man up in the notebook tears his page out of the notebook and hands it to Betty — just like sending someone a link.