Seth's Blog

An assistant manager at Marshall Fields, the Chicago department store, told Gawker the following story:

I was walking through the floor, and I hear a voice call my name. . . . Once she started speaking to me, I realized it was Oprah. Honestly, she is unrecognizable without the spackle/wig. Anyway, she was very nice, and asked me if I would offer my opinion on a china pattern she was looking at for her house. It was Villeroy and Boch (German, middle-range) “Petite Fleur.” Very cute, kind of French-country, with a small, scattered floral design. I said, “What’s not to like?” Oprah responded, “Well, it’s not that expensive, and I don’t want people who come to my house to think I’m cheap.”

A New York Times article on the volcanic ash preventing air travel ended like this:

Leo Liao, a Hong Kong businessman who was stranded at the Frankfurt airport, was cheerful and philosophical. “It’s a natural issue,” he said. “Never complain. You can’t change this.”

Not cheerful enough. I once heard Edward Teller, the physicist, give a talk. In the middle, he said if we managed to control the weather we would take away the last topic of civilized conversation. Several years ago Berkeley had the rainiest winter in memory. It was never so easy to talk to strangers — you could commiserate about the rain. The stranded travelers have an unparalleled opportunity to meet people different from themselves, people they would ordinarily never be able to meet.

How to Talk to Strangers. Paris Syndrome.

Here is a list of Tsinghua student clubs. Some are puzzling or intriguing:

• Student Anti-Cult Association
• Student Collection Association
• Student Du Xing Association
• Student Edge Landscape Studies Association
• Student Informatized Service and Consultation Enthusiasts Association
• Student Insurance Association
• Student Project Management Association
• Student Web Surfing Enthusiasts Association
• Student Xi Lu Association

No restaurant club. Neighboring Peking University has such a club. I wonder what the Student Social Interaction Development Association does. The Student Redology Association is devoted to study of the book Dream of a Red Chamber. I mentioned earlier a student club whose name means “sing your heart”. Here that club is called Student Education Aid-the-Poor Service Association.

• “Your body’s resistance to an activity isn’t an obstacle to be overcome, it’s a message that you’re being an idiot, just like when your hand hurts after you punch a wall. The right solution isn’t to start punching the wall harder, it’s to look around for a tool to help you do the job . . . With losing weight, the key is things like the Shangri-La Diet.” Aaron Swartz argues that if something needs a lot of will-power to do, it’s a mistake. I agree.
• Reed Hundt on “Bandwidth, Jobs, and the Future of Internet Freedom”.
• Art DeVany interviewed on Econtalk. Agrees with Aaron.
• In China, “what censored actually means”. “One day last summer, an anonymous member posted something on a Baidu forum devoted to the online game World of Warcraft, and it became an Internet meme: Jia Junpeng, your mother wants you to go home to eat. The cheeky, mysterious sentence received seven million hits and 300,000 comments on the first day. . . . Around the time the post originally appeared, a famous blogger named Guo Baofeng was arrested [by the Mawei police] for posting allegations of an official cover-up in the brutal rape of a 25-year-old woman named Yan Xiaoling in Mawei, a district in the city of Fuzhou. She later died of her injuries. . . . Bloggers began calling on people to send postcards to the Mawei police: Guo Baofeng, your mother wants you to go home to eat. Similar messages sprouted on bulletin-board sites. A few days later, Guo was released.”

Thanks to Evelyn Mitchell.

In November, UC Berkeley launched an investigation of Professor Peter Duesberg for misconduct associated with a paper of his retracted from Medical Hypotheses. According to the letter sent Duesberg informing him of the investigation, there were two allegations. One was that his paper had been withdrawn by the publisher due to “issues of credibility and false claims.” The other was that “you failed to declare a relevant conflict of interest with regard to the commercial interests of your co-authors.” Duesberg tried to learn more about what he was accused of, without success. Finally the university sent him the letters of complaint that led to the investigation. Here they are.

The first letter is incredibly vague. The “issues of credibility and false claims” aren’t spelled out and it is unclear why the University of California should care that “Bruce Rasnick failed to declare his conflict of interest.” The idea that publishing a dissenting paper about AIDS is an “attempt to discredit the academic community” is worthy of Orwell.

The second letter has several strange features. First, it contradicts itself. It says:

[Statement 1] Until recently, he [Rasnick] worked as a researcher for a company, the Dr Rath Health Foundation Canada [owned by Mattias Rath]

[Statement 2] [Rasnick's] former (and possibly current) employer, Mattias Rath.

Statement 1 says Rasnick no longer works for Rath. Statement 2 says he might still work for Rath.

Second, its logic is outside the way conflict of interest is normally understood. Because you used to work for someone that might benefit from your paper, you now have a conflict of interest? This makes no sense.

Finally, there is the weird idea that because something is “possible” — Mattias Rath is “possibly” Rasnick’s current employer — it deserves a misconduct investigation. It’s possible that a flying saucer will land on the White House lawn tomorrow.

In spite of all this, UC Berkeley administrators allowed themselves to be used to punish dissent.