Seth's Blog

A New York Times article all about kombucha! I didn’t know about Kombucha Exchange, where you may be able to find someone to give you a starter culture. Here’s a recipe that’s close to what I ended up with after trying several alternatives.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Previously on Seth’s Blog: A few weeks ago, during a brief test, I did simple arithmetic (e.g., 3+8, 4*0) substantially faster than usual. The next day, under the same conditions, it happened again. I thought of four possible reasons for the improvement:

• 30 g of butter I’d eaten a few hours earlier.
• A cobblestone mat I’d stood on earlier for 5 minutes.
• Walking for 10 minutes before the test.
• Standing (rather than sitting) during the test.

I guessed it was the walking.

Since then I’ve been gathering data to choose between these possibilities. I’ve been eating butter regularly to see if there’s a chronic speed-up. And I’ve been doing pairs of tests 20 minutes apart. The first test provides a baseline against which to judge the results of the second test. To measure the effects of the cobblestone mat I stood on the mat between the tests. To measure the effect of walking, I walked during the time between the tests. To measure the effect of standing, I stood during the second test but not the first.

The results so far suggest, to my surprise, that two of the four factors helped: butter and standing. How wrong I was!
At Berkeley, one of my students did a self-experiment that compared different ways of studying. She measured how long she stayed awake while studying foreign vocabulary. Worst turned out to be the conventional way: sitting at her desk in silence. Best was lying on her bed listening to hard rock. My new results are sort of a bigger version of the same thing: conventionally we avoid butter and sit while doing intellectual work.

Hoping to learn why Chairman Mao, like me, considered pork belly “brain food”, I found just this:

The local government in Hunan [where Mao was from] has sought to standardize the cooking of the dish [Mao's favorite pork belly dish], in order to stem the tide of imitations that crowd Chinese restaurants.

According to stringent instructions from the government’s food quality supervision and testing institute, true hong shao rou [red braised pork] can only be made with the meat of rare pigs from Ningxiang county. Officials have designated the pig, which has been bred for nearly 1,000 years, as an “agricultural treasure”.

I tried pork belly from different sorts of pigs (e.g., black pigs) but never noticed a difference.

Hunan Province is also the location of West Lake restaurant, one of the largest restaurants in the world. I’ve been watching “The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World,” a wonderful BBC documentary about it. The owner attributes her success to her first husband, who made her furious.

When I started college, I started reading harder books. I noticed something no one had told me about: Only some of them made sense. In some cases (e.g., Theory of the Leisure Class), there was a general statement I could understand and examples that clearly supported it. In other cases (e.g., Freud), I had difficulty understanding what was being said. I stopped reading the puzzling stuff.

I thought of this experience when, thanks to Marginal Revolution, I read Michael Clemens’s comments on how the Millennium Village project should be evaluated. This makes sense, I thought. His points are clear and he has evidence for them. (I wish he hadn’t used the words scientific and scientifically, which confuse me, but that’s minor.)  In contrast, when Jeffrey Sachs explains the absence of comparison villages like this:

he [Sachs] does not like the idea of going into a village, subjecting poor people to a battery of questions and then leaving them empty-handed.

I’m confused. In grad school I learned that a good way to test for causality in an experiment is to test different dosages of the treatment; if the treatment has an effect, different dosages should have different effects. (And the two groups will be more alike than a treated group and an untreated group.) Other villages could have been given small amounts of aid in return for cooperation.

The whole Millennium Village Project reminds me of a 7th-grade science-class demonstration I mentioned earlier. Our teacher, Mr. Tanguay, put a bunch of ingredients (water, sodium, calcium, etc.) mimicking the composition of the human body into a big graduated cylinder. This is what the human body is made of, he said. When we put them all together let’s see if we get life. The final ingredient he added caused the whole thing to swirl around for a little while but needless to say there was no life.

The easy way to create life is to connect new ingredients with existing life. (As I do when I make kombucha and kefir.) Likewise, the easy way to create new economic life is to connect dead economies with existing economic life. It can be as simple as people in poor villages moving to cities, as is happening in China. No one is paying them to move. To pump money into this or that poor Chinese village could easily delay the migration — which is why the long-term effects of the Millennium Village Project could easily be negative.

If you read Andrew Gelman’s blog, this will be old news:

The other day I was talking with someone and, out of nowhere, he mentioned that he’d lost 20 kilos [44 pounds] using Seth’s nose-clipping strategy.

From a travel guide to Hikone, a town near Osaka:

But natto is nothing. The real test of gastronomic mettle in [Japan] is funazushi.

A challenging plate of funazushi.

This forerunner of all sushi comprises fish that have first been salted and then had the salt soaked out before being packed into large crocks between layers of cooked rice and left to “mature” for two or three years. The resulting utterly ungodly stench from this finny fare is enough to make a grown man practically keel over.

But, reflecting that some fine-tasting cheeses have a rancidity not unlike that of diaper contents, I tried it. And of course the stuff tastes exactly like it stinks. The official guide to Hikone cheerfully observes that funazushi is often referred to as the “king of delicacies.”

• Julian Simon replies to his critics
• self-experimentation with pig saliva. “‘I was at first told that self-experimentation was not allowed any more,’ says Varki. . . . He slyly asked if any members of the committee wanted to be the volunteers.”
• omega-3 helps healthy boys. Background here.
• In Seoul, a week without Internet. “An unnerving sense of isolation.”

Thanks to Dave Lull.

This comment was made recently on an earlier post:

I am so glad I found this blog.

My daughter has had coughing fits for 24 months (she’s 5 1/2 yo).

Inhalers, several doctors, nothing helped. She routinely coughed until vomiting. After one 10 hour coughing fit I reached my limit and scoured the web.

After putting in her whole medical history as search qualifiers I found this [post]. The prior eczema and antibiotics were key indicators.

After 3 days of drinking 1 probiotic shake a day, she showed very marked improvement. After 1 week, no symptoms. This is a girl who’s been unable to run and play for 2 years. Who woke up coughing and gagging most nights.

After 6 weeks of the same regimen, she still shows no symptoms and is running and playing full blast.

The pulmonary specialist discounts the results we’ve seen as a fluke . . . we’ll see. Previously my daughter’s lung capacity was measured at 47% of expected.

“Unable to run and play for 2 years”! I’m impressed. Not only (a) the improvement is huge, but also (b) it resembles verification of a prediction, not just something a theory can explain, (c) it wasn’t obvious to “several doctors” or (d) the rest of the Internet, and (e) after it happened it was dismissed by an expert, even though the evidence for causality is excellent. The verification aspect reminds me of Pale Fire:

If on some nameless island Captain Schmidt
Sees a new animal and captures it,
And if, a little later, Captain Smith
Brings back a skin, that island is no myth.

Describing those who made money in the subprime mortgage market, Michael Lewis said this:

They were outsiders to the market that they were betting on. And in addition, they were, in many cases, personally curious people, not clubbable members of the group. And I think that was a key to the success. I think that the fact that they didn’t feel compelled in any way, on any level, to think like other people gave them an advantage.

This is what Thorstein Veblen said about Jews in a 1917 essay titled “The intellectual pre-eminence of Jews in modern Europe.” Being outsiders gave them freedom of thought. Lewis may have read that essay. A few years ago, he compiled an anthology of economic classics, one of which was Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. I mentioned this essay earlier.

:> :~) — I’m bad at emoticons. But I appreciate other people’s work. From an article about the Lehman report:

“So it’s legally doable but doesn’t look good when we actually do it? Does the rest of the street do it?” one Lehman employee asks another in emails included in the report. The answers, respectively, are yes and no, followed by a smiley face.