From this video:
Keith Wilkowski I’m holding the most important book ever written about cities.
Obama Is it Jane Jacobs?
Obama goes on to correctly state the main point of two of her later books, The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations.
1. Talk about self-experimentation by Lawrence Altman
2. A new book celebrates fat.
3. The Kitava Study. Cardiovascular risk factors on Kitava.
4. A scary Google Talk by Nena Baker, author of The Body Toxic, about food and plastic.
Thanks to Pietr Hitzig and Dave Lull.
A few days ago I spoke on the phone to someone who’d written me that one-legged standing improved his sleep. I mentioned this replication earlier but the new details are interesting.
He is a 35-year-old man with an office job. He now works in the Washington, D.C. area. Until about a year ago, his sleep was fine. He would sleep 7-7.5 hours no matter when he went to bed.
About a year ago he went through a tough time with a lot of stress and anxiety. After that he started waking up after only 6 hours of sleep. He’d wake up early in the morning, 3 or 4 am, still tired but unable to fall back asleep. This is exactly the problem I had when I started to self-experiment to try to sleep better.
He went to a doctor for help. (I considered seeing a doctor.)Â The doctor prescribed:
1. Ambien. It worked for 1 or 2 nights.
2. Lunesta. Like Ambien, it worked for only the first few nights.
After using these two drugs, the problem got worse. Now he awoke after only 4 hours of sleep. He tried non-prescription drugs:
3. Melatonin. It made him foggy during the day.
4. Tylenol PM. It worked okay, but he would still wake up after 6 hours.
Then he decided he didn’t want to take pills of any sort — even if they worked, he’d have to take them for the rest of his life. (This is why I didn’t go to a doctor and never tried pills.) He tried conventional alternative treatments:
5. Changed his attitude about the problem. Although he was waking up very early, he wasn’t tired during the day. He had four extra hours. After this change in attitude, he began to fall back asleep a few hours after waking up. Gradually the amount of time he was awake in the middle of the night got shorter.
6. He has cold feet. He can’t fall asleep when his feet are cold. He read somewhere that if you imagine your feet are warm, they will warm up. This gave him an idea. What if he imagined going into an MRI-like machine that induces sleep? He started doing this. When he’d wake up at 2 a.m., he’d imagine himself going into this machine. This enabled him to fall back asleep with a short latency.
In August he read my posts about this and started one-legged standing, often while watching TV. He does it without stretching the other foot: puts one foot on top of the other or behind the other. He might or might not balance. Usually stands on a pillow. He does it until it hurts, twice for each leg. In the beginning it took only 5-10 minutes but now it has gotten much longer and he has started doing other things, such as wearing a backpack with books, to shorten the time.
From my point of view the main points are these: 1. He had tried several other treatments. Some were awful, some were okay, but none sustainably solved the problem. Not only did one-legged standing help, it apparently helped more than six other plausible treatments, including two powerful and expensive drugs. 2. What he did differed from what I did — verbal descriptions are always inexact and omit a lot — but still worked well right away.
My friend Carl Willat has the following suggestion:
To make it easier to consume flaxseed oil, put it on toast. About one tablespoon of flaxseed oil per slice of bread. Eat nose-clipped.
I tried it. Flaxseed on toast, noseclipped, is delicious. It tastes just like toast with butter.
It’s here. Not much content yet.
Anyone can contribute, you just need to register first.
According to a new study,
Fewer than 20% of cancer trial results are published in peer-review journals. . . Industry-sponsored trials only achieve publication one time in 20.
A new website hopes to increase visibility of clinical trials. Publication bias is one reason a method that allows you to see for yourself — self-experimentation — has value.
I just googled “ morning banana diet” and got only a thousand hits. Surely that will change. It is the most popular diet in Japan right now, so popular, Mark Schrimsher of CalorieLab told me, that “You can’t buy bananas in Japan now. It’s crazy. We found some little green ones and some really expensive ones, but the rest are sold out.” Fytte, a woman’s health magazine, has covered it three months in a row. Three books have been written about it.
Like the Shangri-La Diet, it derives from (a) self-experimentation by (b) someone who was not a weight-control expert and (c) was spread by the Internet.
A cartoon.
You probably know that plastics were first used for toys. You probably don’t know that the first metals were used by artists, as far as archeologists can determine. That’s material science, what about non-material science? Here’s Tyler Cowen:
I’ve been thinking of all those old puzzles where a bunch of guys enter the room and only so many of them have smudges on their foreheads and you have to find the algorithm to reveal that information.
The problem is to separate good banks from bad banks, so that good banks can continue business. A big reason I started self-experimentation was Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. I could sometimes solve Gardner’s made-up puzzles, which gave me confidence when a non-made-up puzzle — waking up too early — came along.
More When I pointed this post out to Tyler, he replied, “Exactly what I was thinking in fact, when I wrote that…I even almost mentioned Martin Gardner.”
If you look up vegetarianism in Wikipedia, you’ll find references to several health “concerns”. You won’t find anything about trouble at high altitudes. However, a friend of mine went on a high-altitude camping trip and found himself feeling terrible, with symptoms of altitude sickness. He later learned, when everyone reconvened, that two others in the group of 30 had had similar troubles. All three were vegetarians. They’d done fine on hikes at lower altitudes. None of the other 27 were vegetarians. The correlation makes sense because vegetarians are often much lower in iron — a component of hemoglobin, which transports oxygen — than non-vegetarians.
The interesting question for me is: What can we do with such data? It’s obviously useful, but where does it go? Not in a scientific paper, obviously. In a letter to the editor? Of what journal?
I guess this is from a press release:
John M. Pawelek, Ph.D., a senior research scientist in the department of dermatology at the Yale School of Medicine, recently was awarded a U.S. patent entitled Cosmetic Melanins for producing and composing synthetic melanins that may be used in cosmetic products.
Through its Office of Cooperative Research, Yale licensed the Melasyn technology originating in a medical school laboratory to Vion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. of New Haven. This month, Vion announced an exclusive world-wide licensing agreement with San-Mar Laboratories of Elmsford, NY., to manufacture and market products containing Melasyn.
Throughout nature, melanin is used in such diverse areas as protection from ultraviolet radiation, camouflage and species recognition. It is insoluble and difficult to work with, making it impractical for inclusion in creams and lotions. “But we have invented simple methods for creating melanin substitutes that dissolve readily in water and, when incorporated into cosmetic creams, can be spread evenly on the skin to instantly produce a tan,” Dr. Pawelek states.
In inventing this unique product, Dr. Pawelek employed one of scientists’ historical approaches to research: self-experimentation. “For nearly four years, I have been applying the material daily to my own face, and it produces such a natural-looking tan that it even surprises my dermatologist colleagues at Yale,” he quips. “Scarcely a day goes by when someone on an elevator or in a hallway doesn’t ask me where I was on vacation.”. . .
The Yale laboratory work behind the patenting and licensing offers interesting insight into the process of research and development of potential new products. “It started several years ago with our basic research on skin enzymes that produce melanin,” Dr. Pawelek explains. “Melanin usually is insoluble in water and forms a gummy solid in test tubes. One day, however, we noticed that the melanin in one enzyme assay remained dissolved in water,” he recalls.
Dr. Pawelek credits his colleague, Jean Bolognia, M.D., who conducts her research in his laboratory, with the idea for cosmetic use of melanin. If the melanin were really soluble, she surmised, it should be useful as a cosmetic. “From that point on,” he says, “we began a search for the right combination of ingredients and methods to produce cosmetic melanin.
“We were motivated by the thought that melanin naturally protects our skin from cancer induced by ultraviolet light. Perhaps, we reasoned, synthetic melanin would do the same,” he says. “If we could design a melanin that produced a natural-appearing tan, we believed that people might be attracted to the product through its cosmetic qualities and simultaneously apply a sun-protectant, affording them added sun protection and potentially reducing the incidence of sun-induced skin cancer,” hopes Dr. Pawelek, a cancer biologist who studies melanoma.
I often do something similar: Use an activity I want to do to motivate something I don’t want to do. Drink wine to take vitamin pills, for example.