Seth's Blog

Time Out magazine was started in 1968 in London by Tony Elliot, who was 22 at the time. The original title was Where It’s At. There were all sorts of new cultural stuff, such as a concert by the Who, that the mainstream media didn’t notice. The fringe-y alternative media weren’t interested in the attention to detail required to put out a list of events. That was the gap Time Out filled. Elliot borrowed a small amount of money (70 pounds) to start it. He and his co-workers worked without pay for the first three or four months. It was hard to get distribution, so they went around to parks passing it out. At a Beijing talk, Elliot said he didn’t remember the first paid advertiser (maybe a music store) but he did remember when he got an unsolicited advertising order from the prestigious London Film Museum. They understand what we’re trying to do, he thought.

I asked what some of his biggest mistakes had been. Both involved not saying no when he should have said no.

The President of Yale, Richard C. Levin, spoke in support of a Singapore branch of Yale College like this:

There has never been a greater need for undergraduate education that cultivates critical inquiry. In a world that is increasingly interconnected, the qualities of mind developed through liberal education are perhaps more indispensable than ever in preparing students to understand and appreciate differences across cultures and boundaries, and to address problems for which there are no easy solutions.

I suppose President Levin uses a speechwriter but still . . . It reads like something a college student would write in answer to an essay question when they hadn’t done the reading. What does “critical inquiry” have to do with understanding cultural differences? The first and second sentences could have been written by two different people. What possessed Levin to imply that people without a liberal education — such as MIT and Caltech graduates — can only solve problems for which there are easy answers? Or did he fail to understand what he was reading?

Couldn’t he, like, hire a better speechwriter? Or is “liberal education” so hard to defend that no one can coherently defend it?

• Toads predict an earthquake. The clueless comments are amusing.
• The prize for lifetime achievement in public relations goes to . . . the Bank of Sweden
• Plagiarism Today (a website)
• “There are indeed significant regional variations in expenditures on medical services, unexplained by differences in medical need or health outcomes, but correlated with the numbers of specialist physicians and the availability of hospital beds in each area.” Skip Part 1 of this review.

Duke University officials have known since 2009 that there were serious problems with Anil Potti’s research — serious enough to believe it is fraudulent. Here is how one researcher put it:

The Duke investigators said their data showed that expression of a particular gene, ERCC1, correlated with response to some agents. However, the commercial microarray chip the Duke investigators said they used in their experiments does not include that gene. “I admit this is one for which I do not have a simple, charitable explanation,” [said] Dr. Baggerly.

Potti, you may remember, lied about having a Rhodes Fellowship. Duke’s first investigation found him innocent.

Later events caused Duke officials to reconsider. They are still making up their minds. This is a horror story because a clinical trial based on Potti’s research is in progress. A hundred cancer patients are getting treated according to Potti’s research — that is, according to research that is probably fraudulent. Duke has done nothing to warn the patients or stop the trial.

The whole thing reminds me of UC Berkeley researchers taking weeks to tell a woman she had a large lump in her brain. As if their legal liability were more important than her life.

Kim Øyhus, who has a proof that correlation is evidence of causation, told me this story of medical overtreatment:

At 16 I got glass splinters and sand inside my hand when a test tube broke because it was handled too hard. The small local clinic sewed the wound shut without close examination, so a glass splinter and sand remained deep inside. About 5 years later the glass splinter cut itself loose because of bowling, and for about 10 years made the hand problematic to use. It became swollen and partly numb each time I used it with force.

So, 5 years into this I decided to do something about it. My mother contacted the local clinic again. “Come back tomorrow, and we will look at it.” the doctor said to me at the first examination.
The next day I arrived to a ready operation table of the simplest kind, and just the doctor.

“I thought we should look at it today, not operate it,” I said.

“You know perfectly well that that means operating,” he said.

I took that answer as a hint that he might not be an honest person.

In addition he had nervous tics in his shoulders and arms, as well as big thick sausage fingers, as if he plowed hard soil every day.

So, there I lay on the hard mattress, arm outstretched while he plunged the local anesthetic needle hither and dither inside my hand, while my unease continued to grow. So when he took the scalpel and pointed it at my hand, I said “No. There is not going to be an operation today.” and rose from the guerney.

“You can’t just leave like that!” he said.

“It is my hand, so I decide what is to be done with it,” I answered, and left the room with my mother.

Having seen the entire ordeal silently, which is very atypical of her, she was visibly relived, and agreed entirely with my decision. She thought he was extremely nervous.

As we drove away, I saw the doctor sitting smoking on some wooden stacks outside, looking somewhat forlorn. I waved, and he waved back.

Fortunately, the needle had moved the glass splinter to a better place, so the hand was useful again for a few years after that.

When it started getting really bad again, I asked other doctors how stuff like that could be fixed, and they told me that hand operations are exceedingly difficult due to the delicate nature and lots of nerves, tendons, muscles, and so on everywhere tight together, so it requires a surgical team with a very good and experienced surgeon, long operating time, and often unconscious anesthesia. And so it was. They found sand inside nerves. I can tell you that is uncomfortable to have. The glass splinter I knew was there because I could feel it by poking hard with my fingers before the hand got swollen, was nowhere to be found.

The recovery took many years. It’s OK now. And eating omega-3s and dropping carbohydrates this last year significantly improved it. It became softer, more bendable, and more sensitive, less numb, even though it is decades old now.