Seth's Blog

This sidebar appeared in an article about self-tracking (only for subscribers) by James Kennedy, who works at The Future Laboratory in London. The top photo is at a market near my apartment. Below that are photos of my sleep records, my morning-faces setup, my butter, and my kombucha brewing jars. Back then I was comparing three amounts of sugar (each jar a different amount). Now I’m comparing green tea/black tea ratios.

• Benefits of fermented wheat germ extract
• Why Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is unlikely. A list of AGW-associated “miracles”. Some of my favorites: “Unique among all sciences, climatology develops yet finds no surprises whatsoever, apart from when it’s worse than we thought” and “AGW is a grave threat to humanity, yet it can take the backseat when AGWers have to score their petty points (such as not sharing their data with the “wrong” people)” and “Having won an Oscar, a Nobel Prize and innumerable awards, having occupied more or less every audio or video broadcast for years, having had the run of more or less every newspaper for the same length of time, suddenly AGW leaders declare they’re not “great communicators” and blame this for the generally high levels of skepticism.”
• Denmark has started to tax butter. “To discourage poor eating habits and raise revenue.”
• Life-saving personal science: Mom figures out cause of daughter’s problems. “One spring night in 2002, she stumbled upon an old photocopy of a 1991 Los Angeles Times article that described a young girl whose condition had uncanny parallels with [her daughter’s].”

Thanks to David Cramer.

• Lard chic. ““I might have a cold,” she says. “Eat this, then,” I say, proffering a piece of hot toast with a thin, transparent slice of cured pork fat.”
• Skeptical Science is a blog devoted to rebutting every argument offered by AGW skeptics like me. Bishop Hill points out that after two comments were critical of a post about Antarctic ice,  the post was rewritten. Rather than point out the rewriting, replies were added to the critical comments saying that the commenters hadn’t read the post (“read and reread the post above”).
• Nobel Laureates Behaving Badly. “In his Nobel Prize Lecture of December 12, 1946, Hermann J. Muller argued that the dose–response for radiation-induced germ cell mutations was linear and that there was ‘‘no escape from the conclusion that there is no  threshold [below which radiation is harmless]“. However, assessment of correspondence between Muller and Curt Stern 1 month prior to his Nobel Prize Lecture reveals that Muller knew the results and implications of a recently completed study at the University of Rochester under the direction of Stern, which directly contradicted his Nobel Prize Lecture.” This is related to radiation hormesis — the observation that low doses of radiation are beneficial. Airport screening may be making people healthier.
• Harvard’s “Healthy Eating Plate”. No fermented food, nothing about omega-3 (beyond the recommendation of fish). “Limit butter”.  “Stay active” but nothing about sleep.
• Dangers of compact fluorescent lighting.

Thanks to Steve Hansen and Anne Weiss.

A reader of this blog started taking flaxseed oil, half a stick of butter daily, and yogurt. “This works wonders,” he wrote me. “It feels like lubricant to the mind.”

Yesterday I was telling a relative about the Ancestral Health Symposium and I mentioned the emphasis on meat eating — for example, two vendors gave out samples of beef jerky. To most people, I think paleo means eating lots of meat. I told my relative I disagreed with this. I find nothing wonderful about meat protein; I would happily get my protein from plants.  I eat meat almost only for the associated fat. Which I can get from butter. A lot of meat I am served, such as in fancy restaurants, strikes me as too low in fat. Yesterday I requested butter at a sushi restaurant. The waitress was unsure if they had some.

Today I see Melissa McEwen said the same thing much better:

It was interesting to observe that [at the Ancestral Health Symposium] among the low-carbers, there seemed to be an epidemic of puffy red skin, particularly in older men. I’m sure the pictures, when they are posted, will make obvious who these people are.  The ones who had healthy complexions like the Eades and Nora are those espousing a high-fat diet. It goes very well with some of the anthropological stuff I’ve been working on showing that almost all cultures that eat meaty diets are doing so because they have access to high-fat game.