Seth's Blog

• What’s the umami fad all about?
• Tests of new MS idea funded. “A sweeping new set of studies is aiming to determine whether there’s any merit to a controversial theory that blocked blood veins cause multiple sclerosis.”
• “The science around climate change is not as settled as it’s presented as being. . . There are top-level atmospheric physicists, oceanographers and solar scientists who do not agree that the case is proven for global warming.”

Thanks to Michael Bowerman.

A reader of this blog reported the following conversation with his doctor:

us: We want to put our autistic daughter on a gluten-free, casein-free diet. We have heard that some autistic kids have gotten some benefit from it.

Dr: It’s not something I know about, but there is no harm in it so feel free to give it a try. You know, I had a patient whose parents put her on a ketogenic diet to treat her seizures, and it seemed to help. That goes against everything I was taught in med school, but if it works, I think that’s great.

What’s telling here is the word everything. In medical school, the doctor seems to say, he was taught in a dozen ways that the sun revolves around the earth (or its health-science equivalent). If the alternative — the earth revolves around the sun — explains more of the data, well, “that’s great.” Again, it sounds like 1984: Part of the doctor’s brain has been turned off by repetition of something that supports the status quo.

In Beijing, sky-high housing prices have left many couples who want to get married without the traditional requirement: an apartment they own. There’s a term for those who get married anyway: naked marriage. They are literally unprotected against rent increases. More abstractly, they are less comfortable than a couple rich enough to buy housing.

Two Chinese Idioms.

There is a high school in Osaka called (in Japanese) Ocean Science High School. It specializes in training students for fish industry jobs. During my visits to Japan, what’s most impressed me hasn’t been high-end restaurant food, as great as it is, but the way everyone seems to take pride in their job and doing it well. At one point a friend’s car got a flat tire. We limped to a service station. The attendant fixed the flat in 3 minutes, running around as if we were in a race. Typical for Japan, but unlike anywhere else I’ve been. I hope someday I can learn how this attitude is taught. Surely it has something to do with schools like Ocean Science — not Fish Industry — High School.

Black market = illegal. Grey market = “the trade of a commodity through distribution channels . . . unofficial, unauthorized, or unintended.”

In the evening, near the Wudaokou subway station in Beijing (where lots of students live), dozens of street vendors sell paperbacks ($1 each), jewelry, dresses, socks, scarves, electronic accessories, fruit, toys, shoes, cooked food, stuffed animals, and many other things. No doubt it’s illegal. When a police car approaches, they pick up and leave. Once I saw a group of policemen confiscate a woman’s goods.

What’s curious is how far vendors move when police approach. Once I saw the vendors on a corner, all 12 of them, each with a cart, move to the middle of the intersection — the middle of traffic — where they clustered. At the time I thought the traffic somehow protected them. Now I think they wanted to move back fast when the police car went away. Tonight, like last night, there’s a police car at that corner, the northeast corner of the intersection. No vendors there. The vendors who’d usually be there were now at the northwest corner. In other words, if a policeman got out of his car and walked across the street, he’d encounter all the vendors that he’d displaced.