Seth's Blog

At a charity dinner in New York City to benefit the Food Allergy Institute, the president of the Institute told the guests that

Several promising treatments [were] in the works, including a Chinese herbal therapy being developed by the prominent allergist Dr. Hugh Sampson of Mt. Sinai (ready as soon as 2011) and a parasite “similar to those found in the stomachs of most citizens in developing countries,” which could someday be introduced into imperiled Upper East Side intestines, the theory being that “in the developed world, we live in too clean of an environment, so our immune system has nothing familiar to attack.”

Gatekeeper syndrome. How dare they not read this blog!

Here is a statement from Hal Lewis, a physics professor at UC Santa Barbara, in answer to a question from CBS News:

I know of nobody who denies that the Earth has been warming for thousands of years without our help (and specifically since the Little Ice Age a few hundred years ago), and is most likely to continue to do so in its own sweet time. The important question is how much warming does the future hold, is it good or bad, and if bad is it too much for normal adaptation to handle. The real answer to the first is that no one knows, the real answer to the second is more likely good than bad (people and plants die from cold, not warmth), and the answer to the third is almost certainly not. And nobody doubts that CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing for the better part of a century, but the disobedient temperature seems not to care very much. And nobody denies that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, along with other gases like water vapor, but despite the claims of those who are profiting by this craze, no one knows whether the temperature affects the CO2 or vice versa. The weight of the evidence [suggests] the former.

That’s reasonable. Here is a statement from another physicist, a friend of mine and Andrew Gelman’s:

Like a lot of scientists — I’m a physicist — I assumed the “Climategate” flap would cause a minor stir but would not prompt any doubt about the threat of global warming, at least among educated, intelligent people. The evidence for anthropogenic (that is, human-caused) global warming is strong, comes from many sources, and has been subject to much scientific scrutiny. Plenty of data are freely available. The basic principles can be understood by just about anyone, and first- and second-order calculations can be performed by any physics grad student. Given these facts, questioning the occurrence of anthropogenic global warming seems crazy. (Predicting the details is much, much more complicated). [He seems to miss the point here. The usual claim is that man-made warming is large relative to other global temperature changes. That's not predictable "by any physics grad student" and to call it a "detail" is misleading. -- Seth] And yet, I have seen discussions, articles, and blog posts from smart, educated people who seem to think that anthropogenic climate change is somehow called into question by the facts that (1) some scientists really, deeply believe that global warming skeptics are wrong in their analyses and should be shut out of the scientific discussion of global warming, and (2) one scientist may have fiddled with some of the numbers in making one of his plots. This is enough to make you skeptical of the whole scientific basis of global warming? Really?

At risk of sounding v smug, my views have changed only a little. I already thought the consensus was more fragile than it appeared. That’s just a general truth about modern science. I was already skeptical of climate models because I knew how easily modelers fool themselves. I began to believe the consensus was not just fragile but wrong when I heard the story of the Yamal tree ring data — the long refusal to supply the raw data and, when the researcher’s hand was forced and the data finally supplied, the way it contradicted the claims that had been made. Climategate didn’t vastly change what I thought; it provided more evidence for ideas I already had.

Another friend of mine used to be a math professor. He has views similar to the views of my physicist friend. “Look,” I said to him, “if you want to argue that humans are causing major global warming you should at least show it’s warmer now than in the past. Even that isn’t true. The Medieval Warm Period.” “That was only in Europe,” he replied. Actually, there is evidence of the same thing in the Gulf of Mexico.

This website is a scam. Search “scam” in this blog for lots and lots of evidence about why it is a scam. It used to have other names, such as gamesingate.com. Notice how new the website is — how recently it was registered.

I blogged earlier about how Paulo Zamboni, an Italian surgeon, discovered that almost all MS patients have impaired blood flow from the brain. Surgery to improve the blood flow usually reduced MS symptoms. A very important discovery.

At the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, in Denver, they are unconvinced. They want more studies. Yes, Zamboni’s single study shouldn’t be the final word but here is the astonishing part: They say patients shouldn’t get tested to see if they have impaired blood flow. Impaired blood flow is very rare. When an MS patient gets tested, this tests Zamboni’s theory. His theory predicts they are likely to have impaired blood flow. At the National MS Society, they are against gathering data that would help decide if Zamboni is right. And against individuals finding out if something is wrong with their blood flow. This isn’t conservative, it’s stupid. And harmful — if anyone listens to them.

I wrote them to ask about their astonishing recommendation. Here’s the answer (from Kris Graham):

Our greatest concern at this point is the risk involved with the possible treatment, and we would like to see more clinical testing done before making a recommendation to the general public.

I wrote again to say it was the recommendation against testing (not treatment) that I was asking about. I got this reply:

We are not recommending that people get tested because there is not yet a treatment that has undergone comprehensive clinical testing.  In other words, we do not encourage people to go through testing that can not – yet – lead to treatment.  If clinical trials show that treatments, such as Dr. Zamboni’s, are clinically safe and effective, we will of course change our recommendations.  Until we know from controlled trials that there is a treatment to offer, spending the money to get tested doesn’t seem very reasonable.

What nonsense. Dr. Zamboni did a clinical trial. Spending money to get tested is money spent in a way that helps every MS patient — not to mention yourself. It’s gatekeeper syndrome — they can’t fathom why a MS patient would want to gather useful health-care info without waiting for “controlled trials,” whatever those are. I wrote back to ask what “controlled trials” meant. No reply. Thank god for self-experimentation, PatientsLikeMe, and CureTogether.

Japanese packages are beautiful. One after another. Old-fashioned Japanese buildings, Japanese posters, and so on, are also gorgeous. Even the Japanese flag is better-looking than other flags. The look of the IBM Thinkpad came from bento boxes. Why is Japanese visual design so great?

The usual answer is that Japan is an island, with scarce resources, therefore the Japanese learned to do much with little. This might explain a certain minimalism but there are plenty of island countries with undistinguished visual aesthetics.

My answer is different. It starts with the fact that Japan has a very large coastline/area ratio. It isn’t just an island, it’s a skinny island. That’s why the Japanese eat so much seafood. Seafood has a mild flavor. To preserve variety, you cannot spice it much otherwise everything ends up tasting like the spice. The differences between different fish are lost. This is why Japanese cuisine is weakly-flavored.

This created a problem for cooks. If the main food is weakly-flavored, everything else must also be. You want to show you care but you cannot do it with time-consuming complex sauces (such as harisa or mole, which takes a whole afternoon to make) or complex spice mixtures (such as curries) or complex cooking methods (French, Chinese). You are basically serving raw or lightly-cooked food with almost no spices. The solution — the way to show you cared — was presentation. The emotional energy of Japanese cooks went into making their food beautiful. Japanese food isn’t just the least-flavored of all major cuisines, it is also by quite a bit the best-looking. That’s how it started. Japanese cooks figured out how to make food beautiful. The lessons they learned and taught (at every meal!) spread to other design. When you grow up surrounded by beautiful things, as Japanese designers do, it helps you make beautiful things.

A friend of mine is a Chinese design student. She has met Japanese design students. How do they explain it? I asked her. They didn’t talk about it, she said. “We communicated in English. Their English is even worse than mine.”