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.