Seth's Blog

Chinese students say GRE stands for God Read English. The reading passages in GRE prep books are so difficult only God could read them.

More Maybe God will comment on your blog, said a Chinese friend. “I haven’t passed the GRE.”

Last week a journalist asked me why the 5% improvement in arithmetic speed produced by butter was important. In an earlier post I said I’d given a poor answer.A few days later I figured out what I should have said. The article was delayed, it turned out, so there was time to use my new strategy. I answered the question like this:

I was excited by this discovery because it was so big and unexpected. Someone once found a correlation between IQ and reaction time. The higher your IQ, the faster your reaction time. I don’t know what the exact function was but a decrease of 30 milliseconds might correspond to 10 more IQ points. I felt a little bit smarter. It was so unexpected because hardly anyone was going around saying butter is good for you — and thousands of people were saying it is bad for you. The only ones saying butter is good for you were the followers of Weston Price, and they had almost no evidence for what they were saying. Compared to their evidence, my evidence was crystal clear. Among mainstream nutritionists, butter is universally scorned. Yet my data suggested exactly the opposite — that it had a large amount of an important nutrient I wasn’t getting enough of. If mainstream nutrition advice could be so wrong, it would have big implications for what we eat. Maybe other things we are constantly told about what to eat are also wrong.

I discovered this big effect of butter by substituting butter for pork fat. So the reason butter was so helpful wasn’t anything as simple as animal fat is food for us. I ate plenty of animal fat before I started eating lots of butter. The reason was something more specific.

In a fascinating bit of intellectual history, Andrew Gelman says he started off in math but came to doubt he was good enough at pure math. This reminds me of something one of my Tsinghua students told me a few days ago. An art major at his high school (the top high school in Beijing) was accepted at UC Berkeley with a big scholarship on the condition that the art student compete for Berkeley in a college math competition.

I’ve tried taking fermented foods on airplane flights. Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. The rules speak of “medicinal” exceptions to the no-liquid policy. In practice, this means: (a) You need a doctor’s note and (b) you must need the medicine during the flight.

2. The rules say no gels. It turns out that yogurt is a gel.

3. What about Japanese pickles in sake dregs? When they were in a glass jar, with a lot of dregs (50% dregs, 50% pickle), the answer was no: Dregs are like gels. When they were in a plastic package (98% pickle, 2% dregs), they were okay.

When I told my Chinese friend I read The New Yorker, she said she knew it was a very good magazine. A famous writer she knew of had written for it for 50 years. He was dead now. She didn’t remember his name. One of his books was Shallows Net. (more…)