Seth's Blog

I am at a hotel. Yesterday I decided to take a walk. A short distance from the hotel I started to walk uphill. It was surprisingly hard. I realized I was sick.

I think this is what happens when your immune system is working properly: Sickness stops being obvious. I think my immune system is working well because I sleep well and eat plenty of fermented foods.

I have never heard sickness described like this by anyone else. I have heard it described in terms of obvious suffering thousands of times. Which suggests a lot of room for improvement.

A new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine asked how often placebo-controlled medical studies made clear what the placebo was. The abstract says:

Most studies did not disclose the composition of the study placebo.

Which may give the wrong impression. About 90% of the studies they looked at did not say what the placebo was.

The paper illustrates the problem with an example:

In one of these studies [where the placebo was not described], the authors commented that “The lack of any overall effect in patients with myocardial infarction might be related to the unexpectedly low mortality rate in the placebo group.” The possibility that the placebo composition may have influenced this “unexpectedly low mortality” was apparently not considered.

Thanks to Gunnar Schröder.

Someone asked Lydia Davis: Why another translation of Madame Bovary? She replied:

In the case of a book that appeared more than 150 years ago, like Madame Bovary, and that is an important landmark in the history of the novel, there is room for plenty of different English versions. For example, 1) the first editions of the original text may have been faulty, and over the years one or more corrected editions have been published, so that the earliest English translations no longer match the most accurate original; 2) the earliest translators (as was the case with the Muirs rendering Kafka) may have felt they needed to inflict subtle or not so subtle alterations on the style and even the content of the original so as to make it more acceptable to the Anglophone audience; with the passing of time, we come to deem this something of a betrayal and ask for a more faithful version. 3) Earlier versions may simply not be as good in other respects as they could be—let another translator have a try.

This reminds me of my three-part answer to the question a journalist asked me: why it mattered that butter improved my arithmetic speed by 5%.

Just as I disliked my answer, I disliked Davis’s answer. It’s hypothetical (“may have been faulty”, “may have felt”, “may not be as good as they could be”). It’s flat and obvious (earlier versions may have room for improvement). It’s irrelevant (bad translation of Kafka does not justify new translation of Flaubert).

I had trouble figuring out a better answer to what I was asked, but I could instantly say what Davis should have written: The story of how she decided to do a new translation. (“I began to think about doing a new translation when . . . “) That would have been a lot more emotion-laden and not hypothetical, obvious, or irrelevant.

As soon as I thought what Davis should have said, I could see what I should have said. I should have answered the journalist’s question like this: Why does 5% matter? Let me tell you why I was so excited by this. . . . 

Via Marginal Revolution.

I learned of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture by Ishmael Jones (a pseudonym) from an interview on the New Yorker website. This comment by the author interested me:

Once the C.I.A. became a place to get rich, effective operations ended. Today, more than ninety per cent of C.I.A. employees live and work entirely within the United States, in violation of the C.I.A.’s founding charter [to supply only foreign intelligence].

I could say much the same about science: Once it became a place to get rich (or at least get large grants), effective science became a lot less common. A great deal of science is done by drug companies. They pay a lot. Some of their scientists are surely brilliant but their talents are wasted by the need to find solutions that will be highly profitable. My self-experimentation found solutions that cost nothing and make far more intellectual sense. I was able to do something that didn’t produce a lot of publications because it wasn’t my job.

Many skills make good full-time jobs. Science doesn’t. There is too much pressure for short-term results. Without short-term results, you may lose your job or your grant. (Or, in China, most of your income.) Nor is science a good source of status. If you want your science to provide your status, you will be under great pressure to conform. Yet for practically all scientists, it’s their full-time job and their main source of status. This may not make it impossible for them to do good work but I suspect it comes close to doing so. My self-experimentation was effective not only because it was fast and cheap (per experiment) but also because I could be slow (per publication) and do something low-status.

A few years ago, after I started taking about 3 tablespoons/day of flaxseed oil, my dentist told me my gums were much healthier. They were less red, more pink. Friends and blog readers who took flaxseed oil in similar amounts noticed the same thing. Tyler Cowen’s gums improved so much he no longer needed gum surgery.

An epidemiological study in the November Journal of the American Dietetic Association reports correlations between omega-3 intake and periodontitis (an extreme form of inflamed gums). The more omega-3, the less periodontitis. I’m sure that sufficient omega-3 intake cures periodontitis so this study has methodological interest for me. One interesting point is that the study reached a correct conclusion — contrary to the nihilism of John Ioannidis. Another is that the correlations were weak. The risk of periodontitis was only 20% lower in the group (quintile?) with the highest omega-3 intake. Although there were 9000 subjects, there was no significant correlation with linolenic acid, the form of omega-3 found in flaxseed oil.

Thanks to Sean Curley.

• talk by Harold McGee about science and cooking. Starts at Minute 20.
• Doreen Kimura’s life in science. Kimura is an excellent neuropsychologist.
• Folly in British government re climate change.
• The Hockey Stick in a nutshell

Thanks to Paul Sas.

At a Mr. Lee’s restaurant (a Chinese chain), I started chatting with a girl sitting near me. I told her I was a psychology professor. “You know what people are thinking,” she said. I lamely said, no, I study what foods make the brain work best.

“I don’t know the English word for it,” she said. She drew a walnut.  Good for your brain, her parents had told her. I was astonished. When I got to China, my arithmetic scores mysteriously improved. I had expected them to get worse, if anything. I tried to duplicate my American diet in Beijing but it is hard to duplicate the flaxseed oil. (Chinese flaxseed oil is worthless. I can bring it from America but not easily, and it’s impossible to keep it cold the whole way.) I had tested various explanations of the improvement but none held up.

I was starting to believe the reason for the improvement was walnuts. I have two servings/day of yogurt, each time with walnuts. I ate a lot of yogurt with walnuts in Berkeley, too; this was not a dramatic change. But maybe I eat more walnuts in China, and maybe the walnuts have more omega-3.  Maybe the walnuts are fresher. In Berkeley I put ground flaxseed in my yogurt (in addition to walnuts), without obvious improvement. Walnuts are lower in omega-3 than flaxseeds.

A Chinese friend of mine had told me the same thing — that her parents had said that walnuts are good for the brain. This is a common Chinese belief, mingled with the curious idea that they are good for the brain because they look like a brain. The Wikipedia entry for walnut, which includes its use in Chinese medicine, says nothing about improving brain function. This long article about the benefits of walnuts doesn’t connect them directly with better brain function. It does say they are considered “brain food” because of high omega-3 content and links to a page that says 1/4 cup of walnuts (25 g) has 2.3 g of omega-3. I am now consuming 2 tablespoons/day of flaxseed oil, which contains 14 g of omega-3. I have sometimes consumed 3 or 4 tablespoons/day (with 21 or 28 g omega-3). You can see why 2 g doesn’t impress me, especially when added to 14 g. I thought I was getting the optimal amount of omega-3 from flaxseed oil. Adding a small amount to the optimal amount shouldn’t have a noticeable effect. This article says walnuts are brain food because of their lecithin content. Lecithin is used to make acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter.

Miraculously I can gather better evidence by myself, in a month, than all the evidence I’ve found. I simply vary how much walnuts I eat and see what happens to my arithmetic score. The experiment is worth doing because of the common Chinese belief and my puzzlingly good scores. Maybe walnuts help a brain that is already getting plenty of omega-3. Maybe not.

A Chinese physicist recently resigned from his job (pure research) at a Beijing research institute. His salary was too low. The base salary is something like $200/month, with something like $1200 for each paper you publish. He explained his decision in a letter to his bosses, which he posted on the Internet. From Google Translate:

Dear leaders:

Hello!

August 2006, I single-handedly carried the mat, one hand holding the quilt to the school to report to work. Slept on the floor in the office 3 nights later, Frank and others XX XXX Street, shares a house, 800 yuan per month. Themselves feel better. However, when my wife came to see me when to Shanghai, but a cry. She did not expect this to write beautiful prose, in English is superb, the monthly salary of ten years ago, men who have three thousand dollars so come down: the room to work without a decent table, there is no place to sit, could only sit bed; office also can take place without her. Yes, until now, my office is a chair, a common HP laser printer or the wife gave me a birthday present. His wife’s insistence, in March 2007, after six months sharing with others, I moved to Village X XX X, X round room (Reference: College on XXXX XXX), monthly rent of 1,600 yuan.

(more…)

• New York City hospitals in crisis. What happens when health problems pile up unsolved.
• Frederic Mishkin (economist) versus Charles Ferguson (filmmaker)
• computer-generated music comes of age. “Many were angry.”
• What lies beneath sweetness
• Nassim Taleb on Benoit Mandelbrot

Thanks to Peter Spero, Dave Lull, and David Kramer.

I suppose I’m one of the few people who know there are many differences between the audiobook version of On Beauty and the printed version. Maybe two per page. The audiobook version was prepared before the printed version was finalized. The printed version is better, of course. Long before that comparison, I was fond of comparing books drawn from New Yorker articles with the articles themselves. The New Yorker versions were better-written (= better-edited). It was a painless way to learn how to write.

Last week the TV show 30 Rock did two live shows: one for the East Coast, one for the West. I noticed many differences. The writing was better in the West version (jokes were improved) but the acting was better in the East version (the comic timing was better, for example). New York magazine has listed the biggest differences. For example:

East Coast: In a flashback, Julia Louis-Dreyfus calls to Jonathan, “Yeah, Chai Boy, get in here. You’ll never be a millionaire … Slumdog Millionaire ref. Blammo!”
West Coast: Instead, Louis-Dreyfus says, “Hurry up, Aladdin, before Jasmine is forced to marry Jafar! Similarities … Lemon out.” It gets way more applause.

East Coast: In the final scene, Liz is happy with how her birthday went. After all, she even “got to eat the cake off the floor.”
West Coast: This time, she “ate the Fonz’s face.”

I wish there was a whole website about this: Differences between Things that are Supposed to Be The Same. I wrote a Spy article about Similarities Between Things that are Supposed to Be Different. I noticed similar jokes in Jay Leno’s and David Letterman’s monologues.