Seth's Blog

This post by Lisa Katayama told me a few things I didn’t know — especially that there is “good soy” and “bad soy”. Good soy is mainly fermented (soy sauce, miso, and natto). The book she mentions (The Jungle Effect by Daphne Miller), which I didn’t know about, sounds interesting.

Katayama’s series about food has the global title “Taste Test” so I was disappointed she didn’t compare different brands. I have done natto taste tests. The big difference between brands is the sauce packets! This is not how taste tests are supposed to turn out. Natto has a mild flavor that doesn’t matter if you add sauces. The texture is very similar across brands.

Thanks to Bryan Casteneda.

I’d never heard the phrase in your wheelhouse (= in your area of expertise) until a few days ago. Now I’ve heard it twice: once on Ugly Betty, once on Glee. Maybe someone used in the LA Times six months ago, when those scripts were being written.

Fourteen years ago I woke up one morning and felt really really good: cheerful, eager, and yet somehow serene. I was stunned: There was no obvious cause. I hadn’t slept particularly well. Nothing wonderful had happened the day before. But there was one thing . . . the previous day I’d watched a tape of Jay Leno right after waking up. I’d thought it might improve my sleep. Now — a day later — my mood was better. Could there be a connection? Two very rare events: A (TV early in the morning) and B (very good mood upon awakening). Did A cause B? Such causality would be far different than anything we’re familiar with. Yet it made some sense: From teaching introductory psychology, I knew that depression and insomnia are related. If you have one you are more likely to have the other. I had done something to improve my sleep; had it improved my mood? The already-known depression-insomnia linkage made the new  idea, the cause-effect relation, far more plausible. Subsequent experiments led me to a whole new theory of mood and depression.

CureTogether has found another example of the familiar depression-insomnia correlation.  Persons with depression are twice as likely to have insomnia as persons without depression. CureTogether gathered this data much more cheaply than previous studies. Unlike previous researchers, they were under no pressure to publish. (Professional researchers must publish regularly to keep their grants and their job.) Unlike previous researchers, they were under no pressure to follow a party line.

On the face of it depression makes you less active. Yet insomnia is a case of being too active. So the depression-insomnia link is far from obvious. Lots of other facts connect depression and circadian rhythms; they all suggest that the intellectual basis of anti-depressants, all that stuff about serotonin and neuro-transmitters and re-uptake, is wrong. If depression is due to messed-up circadian rhythms, taking a drug at random times of day is unlikely to fix the underlying problem.

In the 1950s — before the invention of BMI (Body Mass Index) — Jean Mayer and others did a study of obesity at a factory in India. They divided workers by how much exertion their job required. Almost everyone, even desk clerks, was thin, with the exception of the most sedentary. It appeared that walking one hour per day (to and from work) was enough to get almost all the weight loss possible with exercise. Doing more had greatly diminished returns. A study with rats suggested the same thing. Bottom line: If you’re sedentary, you can easily lose weight via exercise, which can be as simple as walking to work. If not, it’s hard.

This month GOOD has a kind of update of that ancient study — a scatterplot, each point a different country, that shows percentage of obesity and fraction of commutes that are active (bike or walk). It supports what Mayer and others found — that how you get to work makes a difference. If you fitted a line to the data it would have a negative slope (more obesity, less active commutes). America has the most obesity and relatively few active commutes; Switzerland has the most active commutes and relatively little obesity. The graph also suggests that other factors matter a lot. Although Australia has less active commutes than America, it also has less obesity.

Here are my favorites (better to worse):

1. Mad Men.
2. Glee.
3. Lie to Me.
4. The Good Wife.
5. Survivor.
6. Amazing Race.
7. Ugly Betty.

Most seasons I might like three shows as much or more than I like Ugly Betty this season. In most seasons Amazing Race would be in the top three. And 60 Minutes, Frontline, 30 Rock, and Modern Family are watchable. Lie to Me and The Good Wife have both managed to make a case-of-the-week show seem fresh, new, and complex.