Seth's Blog

• Probiotic cuts probability of pneumonia in half for high-risk patients. In related news, yogurt confiscated.
• Medical ghostwriting is research misconduct, argues this article. Think what this means: A common practice among medical school professors can reasonably be considered research misconduct. Via the Carlat Psychiatry Blog.
• Parking-space maximums by Tom Vanderbilt

Thanks to Anne Weiss and Mark Griffith.

Here it is. A 12-minute talk about what I’d learned recently from daily tests of mental function. Most of all, the value of butter.

Today I flew from Beijing to San Francisco, an 11-hour flight. For the first time ever on a long flight, I slept well even though I had to sleep in my seat. (When I’ve been able to stretch out on several seats or on the floor, I’ve slept okay.) I slept so much the flight felt short — like it was four hours long. When we landed in San Francisco, I felt great. As if I hadn’t traveled at all. This has never happened before. Instead of going straight home, I did some errands.

Why did I sleep so well? It surely helped that the flight started at 4 pm Beijing time, to which I was well-adjusted. But I’ve never before slept well sitting up, no matter what the flight time. I think this time was different because I did two things I’ve never done together before:

1. Lots of one-legged standing. Around 2 pm I stood on one leg to exhaustion 3 times (right leg, left leg, right leg).  Around 7 pm I did it again: left leg, right leg, left leg. Six times is a really large dose, too large to be used every day because my legs would get too strong. Usually I do two or four times. I think that the two bouts (in this case, 2 pm and 7 pm) need to be widely spaced so that signaling molecules released into the blood by the exertion can be replenished.

2. Lots of cheese. Around 7 pm, I ate about a quarter-pound of Stilton. With a milder cheese I might have eaten more. It isn’t just the animal fat, I think something in milk makes me sleepy.

Around 8 pm I started trying to fall asleep. It didn’t seem promising, I only felt a little tired and not completely comfortable, but after maybe 4 minutes with my eyes shut, I fell asleep for most of the rest of the flight.

• Success is fickle: The case of Megan Fox. Is Big Pharma in the same situation? Lacking profound understanding of disease (just as Fox can’t act) . . .
• Excellent anonymous obituary of Norman Macrae, deputy editor of The Economist. “Give power to the state and you end up with self-serving interest groups [he believed].” Via The Browser.
• David Healy on Big & Little Pharma (100 words). “Posted parcels are tracked far more accurately than adverse treatment effects on patients.”
• Beijing Ikea. I shop there often. The cafeteria, with heavy silverware and live music, feels opulent. An industrial design student I know admired one of their chairs for three years and finally bought it as a prop for her final project. During exhibition of her work, unfortunately, visitors said, “What a beautiful chair.”

Thanks to Bruce Charlton and Paul Sas.

In a museum about the history of Tokyo, I saw an exhibit that showed a typical Tokyo home from hundreds of years ago. It contained an elaborate good-luck charm next to the shrine. I realized that good-luck charms can be explained by my theory of human evolution as another example of behavior — along with art, ceremonies, and gift-giving norms – that long ago supported technical progress. This particular good-luck charm was hard to make. Because people wanted them, they bought them. This helped support skilled craftsmen, who were the ones who made technical progress. Along the same lines, ceremonies usually involve lots of high-end hard-to-make stuff, such as fine clothes.

Visiting distant big cities has taught me a lot about human nature. The big examples are the Shangri-La Diet (Paris) and the umami hypothesis (a earlier Tokyo visit led me to make a lot of miso soup, which had surprising effects). Trips to Antigua (single words make it easy to trade), Toronto (gifts support technical progress), and now Tokyo (again) helped me think about human evolution.