Seth's Blog

Last weekend I attended EG, a TED-like conference in Monterey. One of the speakers, a woman named Hong Yi, made representational art from cheap materials  – a portrait from coffee-stained napkins, for example. The most stirring talks were by Matt Harding (dancing video) and Jo Montgomery and Chuck Johnson (circus school) but she, more than anyone else, seemed to have done something with big implications. Her art was attractive, profitable, very cheap, and diverse (many materials, many representational styles). If anyone else has ever done this, I don’t know about it. She is an architect in Shanghai and her art began because she was in China. At a wholesale supply store, she came across very cheap candles. She realized she could buy enough of them to make a picture with one candle = one pixel. I imagine people will be watching Harding’s video a hundred years from now and the underlying point of Montgomery and Johnson’s circus school will be valid forever, but both were enormous expensive unique efforts. Hong’s work was much easier and cost almost nothing. The benefit/cost ratio was very high and millions of people could do something like what she did.

I realized that my work resembled hers. (more…)

• The new name-dropping. Not bad, New Republic.
• Funny profound Amazon reviews of Sim City 5. “It’s astonishing how the same company can take [a] game concept and work on it for 10 years, and have [the result] be so much worse than what came before.” Also: “$60 for a game you can’t play is brilliant.” Also: “You have to wait in line for your own single-player game. YOU HAVE TO WAIT TO PLAY BY YOURSELF!! This is absurd.”
• Obesity in Mexico (Wikipedia). “There was discussion on putting a 5 percent tax on soft drinks; it was voted against because it was thought to be unfair to the poor when it is more expensive to buy water.”
• Intermittent fasting diet partly based on self-experimentation

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

• An Epidemic of Absence (book about allergies and autism)
• Professor of medicine who studies medical error loses a leg due to medical error. “Despite calls to action by patient advocates and the adoption of safety programs, there is no sign that the numbers of errors, injuries and deaths [due to errors] have improved.” Nothing about consequences for the person who made the error that caused him to lose a leg.
• Doubts about spending a huge amount of research money on a single project (brain mapping). Which has yet to produce even one useful result.
• Cancer diagnosis innovation by somebody without a job (a 15-year-old)
• Someone named Rob Rhinehart has greatly reduced the time and money he spends on food by drinking something he thinks contains all essential nutrients. Someone pointed out to him that he needs bacteria, which he doesn’t have. (No doubt several types of bacteria are best.) He doesn’t realize that Vitamin K has several forms. I suspect he’s getting too little omega-3. This reminds me of a man who greatly reduced how much he slept by sleeping 15 minutes every 3 hours. It didn’t work out well for him (his creativity vanished and he became bored and unhappy). In Rhinehart’s case, I can’t predict what will happen so it’s fascinating. When something goes wrong, however, I’ll be surprised if he can figure out what caused the problem.

Thanks to Amish Mukharji.

A reader with an autistic son sent me a link to a story in the New York Times Magazine by Susannah Meadows about a boy with arthritis who was cured by dietary changes, including omega-3 and probiotics. Conventional doctors and the boy’s father had resisted trying the dietary solution; Meadows is the boy’s mother.  An expert in the boy’s problem, Dr. Lisa Imundo, director of pediatric rheumatology at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, told Meadows that “she [Imundo] had treated thousands of kids with arthritis . . .  and diet changes did not work.” It took only six weeks of the dietary change to discover it did work. Eventually the boy’s arthritis was completely gone. It may have been caused by antibiotics he’d been given for pneumonia. The antibiotics may have killed his gut flora making his intestines too permeable.

Had Meadows accepted what mainstream doctors told her, her son would have taken medicine for the rest of his life — medicine that wasn’t working well. Dr. Imundo wanted to double the dose.

The reader with an autistic son explained how it related to this blog:

It particularly supports the value of self-experimentation in these chronic conditions, especially when there is heterogeneity. The heterogeneity of autism was obvious to me from early on, although I’ve come to realize it’s not obvious to everyone else. Autisms of known genetic causes have different tracks (Fragile X is the best-studied). Broad studies of autism start with a huge disadvantage: they are studying different disorders of similar presentation, and what helps in one case may harm in another. After the steady drip drip of your talking about n=1 experiments, it dawned on me that this applied to our situation. You didn’t need to do a massive, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of acne medication any more than I needed to enroll a thousand families in a study of diet and autism. I could start with dinner.

The reader found dietary n=1 experimentation with her son to be very helpful.

Update. After I wrote this, Michelle Francl, a chemist who writes for for Slate’s Medical Examiner column, complained about the “alternative medicine” in Meadow’s piece. Francl fails to mention that dietary changes completely cured the problem, thus avoiding the need for dangerous drugs that weren’t working. Francl says that Meadows has “an irrational fear of chemicals”.

Stagnation of innovation is often illustrated with kitchens. In 1996, Paul Krugman wrote, “I live in a house with a late-50s-vintage kitchen, never remodeled. The non-self-defrosting refrigerator, and the gas range with its open pilot lights . . .  it is still a pretty functional kitchen.” (Illustrating, at least, his lack of change.) Tyler Cowen said “if he were to introduce his grandmother to a modern American kitchen, it wouldn’t be all that earth-shattering for her.” David Brooks mentioned lack of innovation in many things, including “appliances”. Last week, the Economist said:

Take kitchens. In 1900 kitchens in even the poshest of households were primitive things. . . . Fast forward to 1970 and middle-class kitchens in America and Europe feature gas and electric hobs [= burners] and ovens, fridges, food processors, microwaves and dishwashers. Move forward another 40 years, though, and things scarcely change.

For a long time I wanted to go to the giant kitchen and housewares trade show in Chicago every summer, until this article convinced it would be the same old stuff with tiny variations.

In contrast, my kitchen has changed greatly in the last ten years. Here’s how: (more…)

To do personal science well, what should you learn?

Professional scientists learn how to do science mostly in graduate school, mostly by imitation, although they might take a statistics class. Personal scientists rarely have anyone to imitate, so have more need to understand basic principles. There are five skills/dimensions that matter. Here are a few comments about each one: (more…)

I have recently encountered three examples that suggest low-carb diets don’t work well long-term:

1. Alex Chernavsky tried a low-carb diet in 2002. Starting at 270 pounds, he lost 70 pounds. A year later, he started to rapidly regain the lost weight. He stopped the diet.

2. A “medical professional” started at about 260 pounds (she’s 5’3″).  After reading Wheat Belly, she gave up wheat. “After several months of being wheat free I lost 10 lbs. But that’s where it stopped.” Then she did  full low-carb. “From May to July I did what basically was Atkins induction. I lost 20 lbs but then the weight loss stopped.”

3. Jimmy Moore lost a lot of weight eating low-carb. Starting in 2004 at 410 pounds, he lost 180 pounds. Then he gained half of it back, ending up near 300 pounds in early 2012. (more…)

In July, a Cambridge UK programmer named John Aspden wanted to lose weight. He had already lost weight via a low-carb (no potatoes, rice, bread, pasta, fruit juice) diet. That was no longer an option. He came across the Shangri-La Diet. It seemed crazy but people he respected took it seriously so he tried it.  It worked. His waist shrank by four belt notches in four months. With no deprivation at all. (more…)

• Trying to crowd-source a cure for brain cancer.
• Interview with Aaron Blaisdell about Ancestral Health Symposiums
• Plagiarism Today, a website.
• Plagiarism averted
• Better late than never. By having him do a Fiction Podcast, the editors of The New Yorker finally acknowledge that David Sedaris is a fabulist. Treating his stories as if they actually happened (putting them under Personal History, not Fiction) was a curious editorial decision for a magazine that fact-checks poetry. Step 2 toward more New Yorker editorial honesty:  Book excerpts are labelled as such.
• self-experimentation workshop in Silicon Valley

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Warned by relatives that knuckle cracking causes arthritis, Donald Unger decided to crack only the knuckles of his left hand. For 50 years he frequently cracked his left hand, never his right. Finally he wrote a letter to a scientific journal (in which he calls himself “the author”) pointing out that he did not have arthritis in either hand, supporting the conclusion of another study which studied a much smaller amount of knuckle cracking.

Thanks to Bryan Castañeda via Now I Know.