Seth's Blog

Darrin Thompson writes:

Thanks for the pointer awhile back to the GAPS diet. It caught my eye and my wife and I implemented it for us and our autism kids. After about a month we are experiencing marked reductions in psoriasis and allergy symptoms. Our 3 autism kids are [now] doing well with no huge barrages of expensive vitamin supplements. We’re keeping up only with Vitamin E, DHA and eventually selenium. We’re noticing improvements in their communication skills.

• scientific misconduct in China
• Pee-Wee Herman returns. “In seventh grade, I remember meeting these art kids who were, like, ‘Hey, you got a minute? Sit down! Have you ever heard of nonconformity? Listen, this is what it is!’ And, meanwhile, I’m, like, ‘You’re kidding. You mean there are people who want to be different?’”
• The Natto Project. “Eating natto became ordinary and sometimes enjoyable.”
• larger and larger Last Suppers
• subtle comments by Peter Hessler about Google and China. I think Hessler is right.

Thanks to Carl Hattery.

Dreamhost supplies a way to backup your website. You click a button, a few hours later you get an email telling you to go to a certain place to download a set of files. Those files are supposed to be the backup. That’s what I did. I got a message that said:

Ta da!  Your ENTIRE DreamHost account has been backed up now here: . . .

Note the emphasis: ENTIRE. Now it appears those files don’t work. They aren’t a complete backup of my website!!!

In spite of this astonishing fact, someone in Dreamhost Customer Support told me ” We havent had any users report issues with the backups that we create.” Amazing. No users ever!

I want to hire someone to fix the problem. If you have the technical skills to (a) repair the SMF forums (which will require upgrading) and (b) help me transfer to a new hosting service, please contact me. You can reach me at twoutopias ..[at]…. gmail.com.

More Someone kindly offered to help me and the problem has been fixed. I still hate Dreamhost. When I complained bitterly about their bad backup, in reply they sent me an email that implied it was my fault! If you send me your stories about bad experiences with Dreamhost, I would be happy to post them.

Don’t ever use Dreamhost to host your website. I’ve had trouble with them in the past but the current problem is way over the top.

The Shangri-La Diet forums were hacked. A file was replaced and caused the forums to malfunction. It was easy to figure out what happened. To fix it, I merely needed to replace the two bad files with the correct ones.

And I had a recent backup. No problem, right?

Yet I have now exchanged six emails with Dreamhost Customer Support and have yet to figure out how to use the backup they automatically made for me and which I downloaded. I suggested that I send them the backup so they could figure out how to use it and in response they said I should make another backup! They would work with that one! They’re willing to work with a backup I don’t want but not with one I do! Ridiculous.

More No wonder I couldn’t extract the file I wanted. It wasn’t there! And the tech support people had — judging from their emails to me — no idea this was possible!

I blogged earlier how I suddenly got better at an arithmetic task. The apparent causes of the improvement were butter and standing. I’m not sure this is right; I will do more tests.

While I was trying to figure out the cause something even more extreme happened:

Notice the last two points. The previous anomaly was slightly below 600 msec. The new one is close to 550 msec. After observing it, I repeated the test 20 minutes later and got essentially the same result.

I’m blown away. I’ve been doing tests like this — simple measures of mental function — for about two years. Nothing like this happened during those two years.

My scores on this particular test averaged about 640 msec. Sometimes they’d be lower (as low as 610) but I had no idea why. The average stayed around 640. Now, within days, the average goes down to about 600 (presumably because I was eating butter regularly) and then down to almost 550. In other words, that 640 could be improved almost 20%! The improvement has nothing to do with practice; I was extremely well-practiced on this task. (And practice doesn’t produce such a sudden improvement.)

This is something we care deeply about — how well our brains work. Unless I’m a lot worse at arithmetic than everyone else, this suggests that for many people great improvement is possible. In an astonishingly small way. (I didn’t make any big changes during this time.) In a week.