Seth's Blog

After I moved to China in September, I was surprised that my arithmetic speed went down. (That is, I got faster.) I had lowered it from about 630 msec/problem to 600 msec/problem by eating lots of butter. I had no idea how to lower it further. I didn’t deliberately change my diet in China but it was quite different. I kept some things the same: the amount and brand of butter/day, the amount and brand of flaxseed oil/day.

I failed to figure out why I had gotten faster. I reduced the amount of flaxseed oil from 3 T (tablespoons) per day to 2 T per day. It made no difference. (In the beginning of my interest in flaxseed oil, change from 2 T/day to 3 T/day had made a difference.) Perhaps because of the butter.

Surprised that the change from 3 T/day to 2 T/day hadn’t made a difference, I went down to 1 T/day for two weeks, then back to 2 T/day. Both changes made a difference:

Each point is a separate test. Each test had 32 arithmetic problems (e.g., 3+4, 11-3). In the beginning of the data shown in the figure I tested myself once per day. After 12 days I started doing two tests/day, one right after the other. I was curious about the repeatability of the numbers; it wasn’t hard; it was a way to get better measurements. Averaging over the tests for each day to get one value per day, combining the 19 2-T/day (before) days and the 11 2-T/day (after) days, and comparing the combination to the final 7 1-T/day days, t(38) = 6.5. If you’re not familiar with t values, t = 2 is a barely reliable difference, t = 4 is a very clear difference.

This is more evidence that flaxseed oil improves brain function. It interests me because it implies the optimum dose is close to 2 T/day. It cost about $20 and took 1 person-month. In contrast, the DHA-Alzheimer’s study I mentioned two days ago cost about $1 million and took about 7000 person-months. And used (a) a cruder something-versus-nothing comparison, b) a less-sensitive between-subjects comparison, and (c) a more ethically-problematic placebo-controlled design.

C-Span has nicely archived their shows since 1987. Jane Jacobs was on twice. Her appearances are listed here.

• Plagiarism by Dr. Shervert Frazier, a Harvard psychiatrist and at one point director of the National Institute of Mental Health
• David Shenk on talent & genius: why rely on homilies when we have data?
• Should practice tests have warning labels? Apparently. A University of Central Florida business professor creates a test using a test bank, tells students he wrote the test, and says students who studied questions from the test bank are cheaters!

A large just-published study found that giving people who already have Alzheimer’s 2 g/day of DHA (present in fish oil) did not reduce their cognitive decline compared to placebo (corn or soy oil). Fish consumption had been found many times to be associated with a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s.

Thanks to Saul Sternberg.

Which is it, New Yorker editors?

Page 66 of the food issue:

Pickled cabbage is not romantic or fashionable.

Page 107 of the food issue:

“This [interest in fermented foods] is a revolution of the everyday,” says [Sandor] Katz, “and it is already happening.”

After zero recipes for sauerkraut in all previous issues of the magazine, this issue of The New Yorker contains two.

Thanks to Tyler Cowen and Dave Lull.