Seth's Blog

I’ve blogged a zillion times about the value of fermented food. Animals seem to agree with me:

At least twice in the past ten years [1998-2008], [elephant] herds in India have stumbled upon barrels of rice beer, drained them with their trunks, and gone on drunken rampages. (The first time, they trampled four villagers; the second time they uprooted a pylon and electrocuted themselves.) Howler monkeys, too, have a taste for things fermented. In Panama, they’ve been seen consuming overripe palm fruit at the rate of ten stiff drinks in twenty minutes. Even flies have a nose for alcohol. They home in on its scent to lay their eggs in ripening fruit, insuring their larvae a pleasant buzz.

It’s possible that the elephants were thirsty, of course, but these stories support the idea that our liking for fermented foods goes back a long way and has a genetic basis. I heard a story about horses preferring rotting apples to fresh ones, which shows how to improve the evidence: give animals a choice between fresh and older food.

If you’re like me, you failed to grasp the importance of this recent report in the New York Times. Much like the prediction of new elements using the periodic table, in the 1970s an engineer named Leon Chua predicted the existence of a fourth circuit element (the first three are resistors, capacitors, and inductors) that he called memristors — resistors with a memory. Their resistance varies depending on their history.

A few years ago Hewlett-Packard researchers studying titanium oxide found puzzling results that turned out to be due to memristors. Only at very small sizes, they found, does memristance become large relative to other effects. How easily you can walk through a room depends on where the furniture is. Memristors involve moving the furniture (atoms). If these new devices can be made practical (e.g., fast enough), they will provide memory much smaller and more power-efficient than current devices. But it’s hard to predict the impact of this discovery — it’s like discovering a new dimension.

I’ve blogged several times about Paulo Zamboni’s discovery that his wife’s multiple sclerosis was due to poor blood drainage from the brain and the wonderful implications of this discovery for many persons with MS. Here’s an excellent website about the topic. It’s of great interest to me because it suggests the power of people with (a) the subject-matter knowledge of insiders, (b) the freedom of outsiders and (c) the motivation of someone with the problem. Medical researchers, who get the billions of dollars spent on health research, don’t have the freedom of outsiders nor (almost always) the motivation of someone with the problem. My self-experimentation had those characteristics: I had the subject-matter knowledge of an insider, the freedom of an outsider, and the motivation of someone with the problem. For example, I knew a lot about sleep, I didn’t care what sleep researchers thought of me, and I had a sleep problem.

• Acupuncture taken seriously. Via Shack Attack.
• “Could it be that what the movie industry fears most is not more manipulation, but less?” by Robin Hanson
• the miso business
• Robitussin-assisted fertility.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

“City air makes free” is a medieval saying quoted by Jane Jacobs. I thought of it a few months ago when I visited an experimental private school near Shanghai. The founder of the school wanted to encourage creativity among students, in contrast to the main Chinese educational system with its overwhelming emphasis on memorization. His school was itself an example of city air makes free. There are many factories around Shanghai, filled with migrants from rural areas. These workers moved without official permission, which made their children ineligible for public school. This created a market for private schools, such as the one I visited. The school’s founder was previously a school teacher. The rural-urban migration had made him free to start his own school.

By growing up in a city instead of a village, regardless of what school she attends, regardless of overall economic growth, a Chinese student will have more access to the Internet, much bigger libraries, better teachers, far more students of different backgrounds, far more occupations in action, and a much wider range of culture. Her parents’ increased income may allow her to have a computer. Her family will suffer less from corrupt government officials. The increase in freedom — in opportunity — is profound. Her creativity and productivity will increase because she will better match her talents and her job. This is why Chinese creativity will increase enormously in the coming years whether the education system changes or not.

That such thinkers as Bill McKibben (who doesn’t understand the importance of cities for saving energy) and Jeffrey Sachs (who doesn’t understand the importance of cities for economic development) fail to understand this point shows how non-obvious it is. One more reason Jane Jacobs was a great economist.

“She and other Chinese I met on my trip had a much broader sense of what was possible, or what they were missing out on, than previous generations.”