Seth's Blog

Sounds like we’re under attack. Bombs going off, gunfire. A few fireworks.

More At midnight I was awakened by the densest loudest fireworks I have ever seen. About two per second for ten minutes or even longer. One launch pad was on the street near my apartment; I could see two other sources further away — geysers of glittery light. This proves the Chinese invented fireworks, I kept thinking. They were so pretty and varied I didn’t mind being woken up. And it was so nice to be able to watch them from my warm apartment.

In downtown Berkeley I met a group of Chinese students from Beijing. They were entering freshmen at UC Berkeley.

They said there were 40 students like them — from Beijing, entering UC Berkeley. (At Tsinghua, there will be 400 entering freshmen from Beijing.) In all of China, 13 students were admitted to Harvard, about the same number to Yale and Princeton. One of them said she’d wanted to go to Northwestern but hadn’t gotten in. Had she gone to college in China, she might have gone to Renmin University, perhaps the #3 university in China.

Surely their parents were wealthy, yes. But they preferred an American college to a Chinese one for two main reasons: 1. They can choose whatever major they want. At Chinese universities students are often forced into a major they don’t want if their scores are high enough to get into a prestigious university but not high enough to get into the major they want at that university. 2. They believe that if they graduate from an American university they will have more opportunities. Where did they get the idea of coming to Berkeley? I asked. Online, they said. Their English was really good.

The “more opportunities” may not be as simple as they think. In Beijing I know a Chinese businesswoman who hired a recent college graduate. She’d gone to college in England, indicating that her parents were wealthy. The new worker turned out to be irresponsible and had to be fired. Perhaps her parents had spoiled her. In this businesswoman’s eyes, an overseas education may now be a negative.

• “ant tribes” near Beijing
• What exactly is umami?
• Is omega-3 an antidepressant?  “Initial analyses failed to clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of Omega-3 for all patients taking part in the study. Other analyses, however, revealed that Omega-3 improved depression symptoms in patients diagnosed with depression unaccompanied by an anxiety disorder.” Are they fooling themselves? Maybe not. My research suggests that morning faces can reduce only depression but also anxiety disorders. So if you have depression without an anxiety disorder it may indeed have a different cause.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

• Success is fickle: The case of Megan Fox. Is Big Pharma in the same situation? Lacking profound understanding of disease (just as Fox can’t act) . . .
• Excellent anonymous obituary of Norman Macrae, deputy editor of The Economist. “Give power to the state and you end up with self-serving interest groups [he believed].” Via The Browser.
• David Healy on Big & Little Pharma (100 words). “Posted parcels are tracked far more accurately than adverse treatment effects on patients.”
• Beijing Ikea. I shop there often. The cafeteria, with heavy silverware and live music, feels opulent. An industrial design student I know admired one of their chairs for three years and finally bought it as a prop for her final project. During exhibition of her work, unfortunately, visitors said, “What a beautiful chair.”

Thanks to Bruce Charlton and Paul Sas.

In Beijing, sky-high housing prices have left many couples who want to get married without the traditional requirement: an apartment they own. There’s a term for those who get married anyway: naked marriage. They are literally unprotected against rent increases. More abstractly, they are less comfortable than a couple rich enough to buy housing.

Two Chinese Idioms.