Seth's Blog

Eric Stroud, a web and marketing consultant, thought it would be nice to have a glass of wine an hour before bedtime. Wine is healthy, right?

But after seven or so nights of this, he began to have unpleasant dreams of a sort he’d never had before. They became more and more visceral, nightmarish, and anxiety-drenched. This continued four or five nights. Then he stopped drinking the wine. The bad dreams went away in one or two days. Something similar happened to one of his cousins.

He believes the bad dreams were due to the sulfites in wine. When he drank sulfite-free wine, he felt fine.

• suppression of innovation in ice cream by the State of Illinois
• Nassim Taleb: “We have wasted three years doing nothing but transferring money to the pockets of the bankers”
• Fish oil associated with larger brains

Thanks to Dave Lull and Tucker Max.

I recently heard Tucker Max speak about writing books. He said he had succeeded because he told the truth about himself — including the unpleasant stuff. Most people don’t. That, plus an ability to make it entertaining, was what he could do that other people couldn’t. He was saying that “being yourself” — more precisely, building on how you are different — was the only good place to start. Imitating other people is not a good place to start. Jane Jacobs said the same thing about how cities should develop. She said it was pointless to try to imitate other cities — to imitate them by building a stadium or convention center, for example. Each city should figure out what its unique strengths are — what makes Springfield Springfield — and build on them. Amplify them. (more…)

My post at Boing Boing about a woman who figured out the sources of her migraines attracted lots of comments, some of them preventive stupidity (e.g., “anecdotes are not evidence”). I asked the subject of the story what she thought of it. Here’s what she said: (more…)

A few days ago, Dominic Andriacchi, a 25-year-old law student living near Detroit, told me that he mentioned some of my self-experimentation (my discovery that postponing breakfast reduced insomnia) in an Amazon ebook (Law School Livin’) he’d just published. He added that something he read in this blog really helped him:

Thank you for introducing me to flaxseed oil.  Recently, I re-injured my back (a injury that occurred during college football).  While I’ve never seen a doctor for the injury, I did a little internet searching and figured that I had herniated a disk in my lower back.  I also had pain in my leg due to, I presume, pressure on the sciatic nerve from the herniated disk.

He re-injured his back pulling a small tree uphill.

Usually, it takes at least a week for the pain to go away.  I have trouble sitting, walking, and so forth.  That day, because I [had] read the post of Tucker Max’s ankle injury and flaxseed oil, I immediately upped my flaxseed oil to a total of 15 1000mg capsules.  The next day, there was nearly no pain at all.  I could bend over and touch my toes with only the slightest pain.  The day after that, I was back to normal.

Later he added some details:

I took 15 capsules of flaxseed oil [the day of the injury] to see what would happen. There was no immediate benefit that I felt that day, but the next day it was great. Even sitting or the slightest bending can cause a lot of pain, but I was able to bend over and nearly touch my toes. I took another 10 capsules that day as well. The day after that, I was completely pain free. I took more flaxseed oil capsules even though I was experiencing no pain at all. I expected the pain to come back, but it didn’t. From then on, I would just take my normal two flaxseed oil capsules [per day]. I was spacing them out, 5 at a time in between meals.