Month: July 2013

Was Sisyphus in Hell . . . or Heaven?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In third grade, I learned that Sisyphus was condemned to an eternity of pushing a rock up a hill, the rock rolls back down, he pushes it up again, and so on. Why the Greeks told this story I had no idea, and still don’t.

I am now moving — from an apartment in the basement of a house to an apartment on the top floor of the same house. I’ve discovered that in small amounts this is enjoyable. I enjoy carrying stuff up a bunch of stairs. I could do it an hour per day forever — like Sisyphus, except with time off.

Here is the downside of the occupational specialization that distinguishes humans from other species. I don’t need to haul stuff upstairs one hour per day. People move stuff for a living. Instead I walk uphill on my treadmill, a imitation activity that does nothing for my upper body. I could move heavy stuff around my apartment, but that’s boring. The situation reminds me of the way Japanese schoolchildren clean up their school every day. In small amounts, cleaning is fun. Whoever runs Japanese schools has figured this out and used this fact to everyone’s benefit. Blogging is another example. In small amounts, writing and being read is fun. The communication this enables helps everyone. When writing becomes a job, a lot is lost — much less diversity of points of view. Those who write for a living are afraid of losing their jobs, reducing even further what can be said.

This blog is all about the fact that science is still another example. In small amounts, doing science is fun, especially when it has practical benefit (e.g., sleep better). Professional scientists have their place, just as professional movers, janitors, and writers have their place. But people who do science purely for their own ends — just as I move stuff upstairs purely for myself — have their place too. I am not as strong as a professional mover but I make up for it in dozens of ways. Personal scientists don’t have the resources (e.g., expensive equipment) of professional scientists, but they make up for it in dozens of ways. Without them, the diversity of ideas that are taken seriously (e.g., tested) goes way down.

Assorted Links

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  • The power of the smell of chocolate. I add cacao shells (from Tisano Tea) to the tea when I brew black tea. This adds complexity. 2.5 g of black tea plus 0.9 g of cacao shells.
  • Madonna’s diet is rather hard. “I am basically dying on this diet. . . . It is so hard to give up all those foods.”
  • Sous vide basics. “Using extra virgin olive oil results in an off, metallic, blood taste.” DIY sous vide, I want to read it to learn how controllers work.
  • More about Steve Cooksey and the ADA. The North Carolina branch of the American Dietetics Association attacked Cooksey for making nutrition recommendations on his blog. For free. This post explains why they did such a strange thing. A friend of mine, a nutrition professor at UC Berkeley, gave a Freshman Seminar (unpaid classes with about 10 students) on how to fix a car. Later he got a letter from a dean in the engineering school at Berkeley saying that only engineering professors can teach such a course.

Thanks to Richard Sprague.

What I’m Reading

Seth Roberts3 Comments
  • Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers, and Rebels by Alissa Quart
  • Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein, Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists that Changed our Understanding of Life and the Universe by Mario Livio
  • Fate of the States: The New Geography of American Prosperity by Meredith Whitney
  • Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, might set the record for largest value of letters in author’s name (21) minus letters in title (10) = 11
  • proofreading part of a new book by Edward Jay Epstein, described as a “Kennedy assassination diary”

Benefits of Alternate Day Fasting

Seth Roberts17 Comments

A friend of mine named Dave saw the BBC program Eat, Fast and Live Longer ten months ago. The program promotes intermittent fasting for better health. It sounded good. Already he often went a day without food. Some Brahmins in South India had eaten this way for millennia – which suggested it made some sense. It wasn’t a fad. Alternate day fasting was simpler than the “fast 2 days per week” regimen the TV show ended with. He started alternate day fasting immediately.

It was easy to start. The first day was hard. He had painful stomach cramps, but hunger was not a problem. The second day of fasting was slightly difficult, again because of stomach cramps. By the third day of fasting, there was no problem. He tried eating a small meal (400-500 calories) on fasting days but it just made him hungry. It was easier to not eat at all.

Within two weeks, his head felt clearer, he had more energy, and he felt lighter. Lots of people say the same thing in YouTube videos about the diet. He had more mental energy. Before the diet, he easily became overwhelmed. In spite of a highly technical background (he was a math professor at an Ivy League school), something as simple as writing a computer program would exhaust him. When he tried to tackle a technical problem, he would get overwhelmed, exhausted, and would quickly give up. For example, he has written tens of thousands of lines of computer code. Writing in a language he knew very well, he’d be unable to get beyond 10-15 lines. Within three months of starting the diet, he took an online class (an introductory class about R) and was surprised he could do the work. (He had started the class to take his mind off of family issues he had to deal with. He wanted to do something for himself.) After that, he took two more online classes, about cryptography and about functional programming. He finished them and did well. He was elated.

Several other things started improving. He’d had GERD (“acid reflux”). He had poor digestion at night, would wake up with an “acidic stomach” and burning in the back of his throat and mouth. He’d had this all his life (he’s now in his fifties). In his twenties, several health experts told him he had digestive problems. When he started alternate day fasting, he didn’t change the time of day that he ate. After two or three months, his GERD entirely went away.

Another improvement was athlete’s foot. He’d had it since his mid-twenties. He had it all over his feet, not just the toes. He’d done many things to get rid of it. None of them worked, at least permanently. After two months of alternate day fasting, he noticed improvement. Over the following months his athlete’s foot continued to improve. However, three weeks ago he started drinking a half-gallon of yogurt per week. Within two weeks of starting that, his athlete’s foot got much worse. Eating much more yogurt was the only dietary change he’d made. The connection (yogurt increased athlete’s foot) is plausible because athlete’s foot is due to one or more fungi, fungi need sulfur to grow, and yogurt contains a lot of cysteine, which contains sulfur. (A natural therapy site gets it exactly wrong: “Continuing to consume yogurt . . . on a daily basis after the immediate problem has been solved may prevent future outbreaks”).

His food allergies started going away. Wheat was the worst. After eating wheat, he got brain fog, agitation (difficulty sitting still), and difficulty focusing. He would start having violent imagery; for example, his dreams will get quite violent. A laboratory test showed that he had astronomical levels of an immune response to gluten peptides. Another food allergy of his was dairy. It caused agitation, difficulty concentrating, and depression (in the sense that you feel like you want to kill yourself). Before he figured this out, there were times he consumed a quart of milk in a short period of time. Half an hour later, he got these three symptoms, including scary depression (“there’s no way out”). Now he can consume both wheat and dairy without trouble. His wheat allergy isn’t entirely gone but it is much better. He hasn’t noticed any allergic reaction to dairy, even large amounts.

He’d had blood sugar problems for a long time. He’d had hypoglycemia since his late twenties. After strenuous exercise, he could come close to passing out. He would eat fruit to keep this from happening. He’d be lying on the floor, drag himself to eat a piece of fruit, and instantly feel better. After a meal, he’d feel tired, then eat something sweet and feel a rush of energy. He had a regular need for sweet things, including dessert. Whenever he had dinner, he’d really want dessert. About eight months after he started alternate day fasting, he realized that his craving for something sweet went away. One day it was present, the next day gone. Instead of feeling tired after a big meal, he felt calm.

He thinks that he must have had a candida infection and his gut is healing. This would explain the allergies going away and the GERD improvement. He hadn’t expected these changes. He just started it because it fit his eating patterns and was more regular.

“I’ve experienced hunger for the first time,” he says. If he doesn’t eat the morning of a day he’s supposed to eat, he feels ravenously hungry – a new experience. A crystal-clear sense of hunger, which is pleasant. It’s pleasant to know what hunger is. He takes meals more seriously, because that’s the day he’s eating. He pays more attention to his food.

I found his experience far more convincing than anything else I’d heard about intermittent fasting. It was sustainable, it was easy, the benefits were unexpected, no ideology was involved, all sorts of things got better. It was as if this was the eating pattern our bodies were built for. My friend’s experience led me to try alternate day fasting, as I’ve said. After a few days my fasting blood sugar substantially improved (from the mid-90s to the mid-80s). Within weeks, my HbA1c went from 5.8 to 5.4. I haven’t noticed mental changes but my brain test scores have improved for reasons I cannot yet explain (there are several possible explanations).

Chinese Food: China vs America

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I skype-chatted with Clarissa Wei, a Chinese-American journalist in Los Angeles whose post about stinky tofu in Los Angeles impressed me.

SR What do you think of Chinese restaurants in America compared to Chinese restaurants in China?

CW It depends on where you’re talking about. In broad America, the Chinese food is pretty different from that of China. In places like Los Angeles and pockets of New York… it’s much more alike

SR I’m thinking of the best ones in Los Angeles.

CW It’s definitely cleaner here that’s for sure. In Los Angeles, the food quality is pretty similar. The major difference would be the price and variety. The selections are also pretty similar. The set-up in American Chinese restaurants is obviously different than the ones in China so that influences things a lot

SR I have never been to a Chinese restaurant in America that resembles a high-end Chinese restaurant in Beijing

CW In Los Angeles — there are a couple high-end Canto restaurants. They typically are your seafood + dim sum banquet types. Lunasia is a great example.

SR What do you mean by the set up?

CW Well in China, a lot of the restaurants are literally hole-in-the-walls. There isn’t that much of a standard in terms of being neat and sanitary.

SR There is vastly more range in China, both better and worse

CW In the rural countrysides, it’s out of people’s homes. But in America, everyone has to have at least some degree of sanitation.

SR Chinese restaurants in China are more playful. Like a toilet restaurant, for example.

CW Very true. Yeah they’re opening one of those in LA.

SR Or a restaurant where everyone says hello when you enter and goodbye when you leave

CW There’s also a Taiwanese “Hooters” in L.A. A lot of the Taiwanese breakfast eateries in L.A. have that “cutesy” vibe.

SR When you were in China were you in any way disappointed by the Chinese restaurants?

CW I was in China in 2011 for 4 months as part of a study abroad program. I was disappointed mostly because I always got sick.

SR What city?

CW Shanghai. But I travelled to Guilin, Dunhuang, Beijing. I got sick from just the regular restaurants on my street. Some were marketed as higher-end. I lost 10 pounds from throwing up. Mind you, I go to Taiwan yearly and that never happens.

SR The first time I went to China I was sick every 2 days, but after that I was fine.

CW I think my toleration for bacteria is pretty low.

SR I get sick no more often in Beijing than in Berkeley. [But in Beijing I eat Korean and Japanese food mostly.]

CW That’s surprising. I was at Donghuamen [a night market selling strange food] in Beijing. Did an article on that place. But I just felt like throwing up because the streets reeked of trash.

SR The cheap restaurants scare me. They use recycled cooking oil.

CW I think that’s changing now with the media coverage on the Chinese food scandals. But in places like Los Angeles..the food is pretty up to par in terms of “authenticity”.

SR How was the food in the various Chinese cities besides Shanghai?

CW It was alright. I get turned off when a restaurant is dirty to be honest. But that may just be because of my American upbringing. It really influences how I consume the food and how much I eat of it. When I was in Dunhuang, there was a vendor making daoxiaomian but he kept on coughing over and over. And we watched him make the dish and serve it to us. I felt disgusted but we were starving.

SR What did you think of the food expertise of the Chinese people you met in China?

CW I learned a lot about Chinese food in China from my Chinese teacher. That’s when I started to gain in interest in the regional differences. The oyster omelette for example in Xiamen is similar to the one in Taiwan, but crispier and thinner

SR It was very hard to buy a kitchen timer in Beijing because I was told no one uses them when they cook.

CW No one uses fancy gadgets or exact measurements there. It’s all passed down and family recipes which is the beauty of it.

SR My students at Tsinghua are more connoisseurs of food than my Berkeley students. A lot more.

CW Food is such a central theme of the Chinese culture. There’s a fascination with Western food too. In Shanghai, my first article for CNN was “Top Western Restaurants in Shanghai”. I brought my Shanghainese friends along to one of the places — a bagel places — and they were fascinated.

SR I went to the best Korean restaurant I’ve been to outside Korea in Shanghai.

CW Shanghai has a tradition of really embracing foreign cooking traditions. One of the best fine dining restaurants I’ve been to was in Shanghai, Mr. and Mrs. Bund.

SR Do people in Shanghai understand how good the food is in Japan?

CW I think so. But a lot of Chinese people really don’t have the opportunity to travel abroad. They don’t have a feel or the exposure to foreign tastes as much as Americans do. In Taiwan, there’s a fascination with the Japanese. Obviously because of the occupation of the Japanese but a lot of the high-end Taiwanese restos are Japanese influenced.

SR Controlling for age who did you think are the more adventurous eaters, Americans or Chinese — I mean the ones you know.

CW Chinese hands down.

SR That’s interesting, I always worry that my students won’t like this or that. [At least, they draw the line at eating insects.]

CW Just because Chinese cuisine has a variety of meats and offal and “bizarre” parts you know. So they’re much more open to try …. snails from France than your average American. Because snails are a Chinese dish too.
Also in Chinese culture, you’re taught to eat anything and everything that’s presented to you. It’s rude to refuse.

SR A friend of mine said that Chinese (in practice) is a language of verbs, English is a language of nouns. One of the verbs is “eat”. Parents tell children: “eat”.

CW Yes. Americans have the luxury of being more picky — look at the whole gluten free, vegan movement in these metropolitan places. If you go into a Chinese restaurant in China and say you’re vegetarian — they don’t really know how to work with you. Some places will just roll their eyes.

SR After you came back from Shanghai to Los Angeles, how did you view American Chinese restaurants differently? The authentic ones.

CW I appreciated it a lot more. The food here is good and it won’t give me food poisoning. Sanitation was like the biggest worry in China. An article recently came out that said the ice from the KFC in China had more bacteria than toilet water.

SR I never go to KFC in China. Now I have been vindicated in that decision

CW The egg tarts there are fantastic. Modeled after the original Macau egg tart recipe apparently.

SR There should be a category: best food in worst restaurant. Also worst food in best restaurant.

CW Chinese restaurants have such extensive menus, it’s always easy to find a bad item.

SR I was impressed that Chinese restaurants managed to make mashed potatoes slightly interesting. That’s baby food! They added raspberry sauce.

CW Again — fascination with Western food.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Researchers Fool Themselves: Water and Cognition

Seth Roberts7 Comments

A recent paper about the effect of water on cognition illustrates a common way that researchers overstate the strength of the evidence, apparently fooling themselves. Psychology researchers at the University of East London and the University of Westminster did an experiment in which subjects didn’t drink or eat anything starting at 9 pm and the next morning came to the testing room. All of them were given something to eat, but only half of them were given something to drink. They came in twice. On one week, subjects were given water to drink; on the other week, they weren’t given water. Half of the subjects were given water on the first week, half on the second. Then they gave subjects a battery of cognitive tests.

One result makes sense: subjects were faster on a simple reaction time test (press button when you see a light) after being given water, but only if they were thirsty. Apparently thirst slows people down. Maybe it’s distracting.

The other result emphasized by the authors doesn’t make sense: Water made subjects worse at a task called Intra-Extra Dimensional Set Shift. The task provided two measures (total trials and total errors) but the paper gives results only for total trials. The omission is not explained. (I asked the first author about this by email; she did not explain the omission.) On total trials, subjects given water did worse, p = 0.03. A surprising result: after persons go without water for quite a while, giving them water makes them worse.

This p value is not corrected for number of tests done. A table of results shows that 14 different measures were used. There was a main effect of water on two of them. One was the simple reaction time result; the other was the IED Stages Completed (IED = intra/extra dimensional) result. It is likely that the effect of water on simple reaction time was a “true positive” because the effect was influenced by thirst. In contrast, the IED Stages Completed effect wasn’t reliably influenced by thirst. Putting the simple reaction time result aside, there are 13 p values for the main effect of water; one is weakly reliable (p = 0.03). If you do 20 independent tests, purely by chance one is likely to have p < 0.05 at least once even when there are no true effects. Taken together, there is no good reason to believe that water had main effects aside from the simple reaction time test. The paper would be a good question for an elementary statistics class (“Question: If 13 tests are independent, and there are no true effects present, how likely will at least one be p = 0.03 or better by chance? Answer: 1 – (0.97^13) = 0.33″).

I wrote to the first author (Caroline Edmonds) about this several days ago. My email asked two questions. She replied but failed to answer the question about number of tests. Her answer was written in haste; maybe she will address this question later.

A better analysis would have started by assuming that the 14 measures are unlikely to be independent. It would have done (or used) a factor analysis that condensed the 14 measures into (say) three factors. Then the researchers could ask if water affected each of the three factors. Far fewer tests, far more independent tests, far harder to fool yourself or cherry-pick.

The problem here — many tests, failure to correct for this or do an analysis with far fewer tests — is common but the analysis I suggest is, in experimental psychology papers, very rare. (I’ve never seen it.) Factor analysis is taught as part of survey psychology (psychology research that uses surveys, such as personality research), not as part of experimental psychology. In the statistics textbooks I’ve seen, the problem of too many tests and correction for/reduction of number of tests isn’t emphasized. Perhaps it is a research methodology example of Gresham’s Law: methods that make it easier to find what you want (differences with p < 0.05) drive out better methods.

Thanks to Allan Jackson.

Are Drug Companies Becoming Less Law-Abiding?

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Alex Chernavsky drew my attention to a report of the giant fines assessed drug companies for fraudulent marketing. For example,

Merck agreed to pay a fine of $950 million related to the illegal promotion of the painkiller Vioxx, which was withdrawn from the market in 2004 after studies found the drug increased the risk of heart attacks. The company pled guilty to having promoted Vioxx as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis before it had been approved for that use. The settlement also resolved allegations that Merck made false or misleading statements about the drug’s heart safety to increase sales.

Fines, of course, are supposed to reduce bad behavior. Here are the fines by year:

  • 2009: 2 fines
  • 2010: 1 fine
  • 2011: 1 fine
  • 2012: 5 fines

This pattern does not suggest the fines are working. Drug companies, of course, are very big. I would like to see cross-industry comparisons: which industries pay the most in fines per dollar of revenue?

 

More Magic Dots

Seth Roberts3 Comments

A New Jersey patent attorney named Jim D writes:

I’ve been using the magic dots as you described, marking a dot or line every six minutes. I use an online timer with an audible tone every six minutes. A portion of my work requires focus, as I have to review, compare and contrast technical documents. I’ve historically had limited ability to focus for extended periods of time. I’ve used an online bar graph countdown timer, but even with the visual feedback of the bar graph counting down, the longest I could go without a short break was 20 minutes. I’ve also tried online Pomodoro timers, with alternating work and break periods, but again, the longest I could go without a break was 20 minutes.

In contrast, by using the magic dots method, I can easily focus for 60 minutes. I’ve been working for 60 minutes until the box is completed, and then taking a short break before starting another 60 minute box. After a few more weeks, I will see if I can extend the focus length for a longer period of time. (As an aside, I wonder if completing an entire “box” is psychologically important, and, if so, would a 90 minute “box” shape work better than continuing with consecutive 60 minute boxes?).

I don’t think finishing a box matters. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, it doesn’t seem to make a difference. A friend used a much different counting system; it also worked. After years of using six-minute intervals I have started to use five-minute intervals; they don’t interfere too much and shorter intervals are likely to be more powerful. I would like to compare different interval lengths but it is a difficult experiment to do.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts8 Comments
  • Open Source Malaria
  • Criticism of Malcolm Gladwell by The Korean, Gladwell’s persuasive rebuttal, more from The Korean, more from Gladwell. I thought the work under discussion (“ethnic theory of plane crashes”) was the best part of Outliers. Gladwell summarizes it: “That chapter in Outliers is about a series of extraordinary steps taken by Korean Air, in which an institution on the brink of collapse and disgrace turned themselves into one of the best airlines in the world. They did so by bravely confronting the fact that a legacy of their cultural heritage was frustrating open communication in the cockpit. That is not a slight on Korean culture, or any other high-power distance culture for that matter.”
  • More praise for the new TV show Naked and Afraid on the Discovery Channel. It really is riveting.
  • Ziploc omelette. Poor man’s sous vide.

Thanks to Nicole Harkin.