Month: September 2008

Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State

Seth Roberts3 Comments

To explain why Andrew Gelman et al.’s Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State is such an important book I have to tell two stories.

A few years ago a student did a senior thesis with me that consisted of measuring PMS symptoms day by day in several women. After she collected her data she went to the Psychology Department’s statistics consultant (a psychology grad student) to get help with the analysis. The most important thing to do with your data is graph it, I told the student. The statistics consultant didn’t know how to do this! There was little demand for it. Almost all the data analyses done in the Psychology Department were standard ANOVAs and t tests. If you look at statistics textbooks aimed at psychologists, you’ll see why: They say little or nothing about the importance of graphing your data. Gelman et al.’s book is full of informative graphs and will encourage any reader to plot their data. There are few examples of this sort of thing. That’s the obvious contribution. Because graphing data is so important and neglected, that’s a big contribution right there.

The other contribution is even more important, but more subtle. Recently I was chatting with a statistics professor whose applied area is finance. What do you think of behavioral economics? she asked. I said I didn’t like it. “It’s too obvious.” (More precisely, it’s too confirmatory.) For example, the conclusion that people are loss-averse — fine, I’m sure they are, but it’s too clear to be a great discovery. She mentioned prospect theory. Tversky and Kahneman’s work has had a big effect on economists — which certainly indicates it wasn’t obvious. Yes, it has been very influential, I said. I’m not saying their conclusions were completely obvious — just too obvious. Tversky and Kahneman were/are very smart men who had certain ideas about how the world worked. They did experiments that showed they were right. There’s value in such stuff, of course, but I prefer research that shows what I or the researcher never thought of.

Red State Blue State is an example. Andrew and his colleagues didn’t begin the research behind the book intending to show what turned out to be the main point (that the red state/blue state difference is due to an interaction — the effect of wealth on tendency to vote Republican varies from state to state). I suspect they got the idea simply by making good graphs, which is an important way to get new ideas. (Neglect of graphics and neglect of idea generation go together.) Red State Blue State could be used in any class on scientific method to illustrate the incredibly important point that you can get new ideas from your data. There aren’t many possible examples.

If I were teaching scientific method, I’d assign a few chapters of Red State Blue State and then have a class discussion about how to explain the results. Not just the state-by-wealth interaction but also the fact (revealed by a scatterplot) that the United States is far more religious than other rich countries — an outlier. Then I’d say: The graphs in the book made you think new thoughts. Your own graphs can do that.

New Way to Lose Weight: Don’t Eat Till Your Blood Sugar is Low Enough

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Tim Lundeen‘s sister Miriam wrote this:

Tim and I have been having conversations about health, diet and blood sugars for several years and I figured I was insulin-resistant with mild blood sugar dysregulation, but never was more than interested. About two months ago after a move cross-country with the accompanying stresses, I became more acutely concerned about my metabolic damage and was in a place where I could pay attention and do something about it. At Tim’s recommendation, I read Dr.Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution and Jenny Ruhl’s Blood Sugar 101 and started monitoring my blood sugar with a glucometer. Initially, my morning readings were usually 91-94. Not too bad but not the 83-85 that is “normal” [i.e., optimal]. I started waiting till I was hungry or when I would normally eat and then take my blood sugar again. If it was 85 or below I would eat a normal meal with an awareness of the carb content and eat smaller portions of these foods. Then I would monitor my postprandial (post-meal) blood sugars about every hour and see when and how high my spike was. If it was too high (over 140 for sure, and in the 130′s probably) I would adjust the amount of carbs downward. If my blood sugar was over 86 and I wasn’t famished I would distract myself with some engaging activity and check my sugar again when I noticed I was hungry. If I became really famished but my sugar was still not under 86, I would have a no-to-low carb snack like almonds, walnuts, left-over meat or a salad. Then I’d wait till I was hungry again. After a few weeks of doing this my morning sugar was consistently 81-85. If I ate off-plan and had an occasional 94, that was fine by me. I was happy about my blood sugars, but the pleasant surprise came when I had a physical exam at my doctor’s. I had lost 20 pounds without even noticing! [She is 5 feet 5 inches tall. After losing 20 pounds her weight was 155.] I was amazed since I had tried to diet a number of times over the last 10 years and my weight just kept creeping up. This has been the most fun and healthy weight loss program I could imagine. I am hoping my carbohydrate metaboliism will eventually recover and I will again be able to eat more carbs without weight gain and metabolic damage.

I am doing something similar for a few days, too soon to tell the results. About six months ago, to help write a chapter in my self-experimentation book about diabetes, I got a glucometer and started testing myself regularly. I was displeased to find that my morning readings were about 91, like Muriel’s, and further displeased to find that eating less carbs didn’t help.

Blood sugar testing isn’t cheap, but it’s easy and painless. The glucometer I use is Abbott’s Freestyle Lite (which is free). It’s painless if you get the blood from your arm. The test strips cost about 60 cents each.

The Case of the Missing Evidence

Seth Roberts38 Comments

The most telling detail in Robin Hanson’s lecture about doctors was about a nurse assigned to measure hand-washing rates among surgeons at her hospital. After she measured the hand-washing rates, she — as ordered — correlated them with death rates. It turned out that the surgeon who washed his hands the least had the highest death rate. For reporting this — as she was ordered to — the nurse was fired. Robin learned this story from his wife, who was a friend of the ex-nurse.

I was very impressed by Robin’s lecture, which was both accessible and profound, and it was one reason that during my next encounter with a doctor I was more skeptical than most patients. As I blogged earlier:

I have a tiny hernia that I cannot detect but one day my primary-care doctor did. He referred me to Dr. [Eileen] Consorti, a general surgeon [in Berkeley]. She said I should have surgery for it. Why? I asked. Because it could get worse, she said. Eventually I asked: Why do you think it’s better to have surgery than not? Surgery is dangerous. (Not to mention expensive and time-consuming.) She said there were clinical trials that showed this. Just use google, you’ll find them, she said. I tried to find them. I looked and looked but failed to find any relevant evidence. My mom, who does medical searching for a living, was unable to find any completed clinical trials. One was in progress (which implied the answer to my question wasn’t known). I spoke to Dr. Consorti again. I can’t find any studies, I said, nor can my mom. Okay, we’ll find some and copy them for you, she said, you can come by the office and pick them up. She sounded completely sure the studies existed. I waited. Nothing from Dr. Consorti’s office. After a few weeks, I phoned her office and left a message. No reply. I waited a month, phoned again, and left another message. No reply.

Yesterday Dr. Consorti finally got back to me, by posting a comment:

Seth, While I am in the process of finding papers in the literature to satisfy your scientific curiosity on why this hernia should or should not be fixed I am additionally trying to care for around 30 new patients referred to me for their new cancer diagnosis in the last 3 months. This may or may not explain why I have not been motivated to answer your call regarding your ambivalence about fixing your hernia. Yes, it is small and runs the risk of incarceration at some time. I will call you once I clear my desk and do my own literature search. Thanks for the update. Eileen Consorti

Fair enough. She’s busy. And I am glad to have her reply and her view of the situation. On the other hand, I am pretty sure the studies she was so sure existed — that justified the surgery — don’t exist. To call my curiosity about whether the proposed surgery would do more good than harm “scientific” has a bit of truth: No doubt scientists understand better than others that you can test claims such as “you need this surgery”. But it isn’t “scientific” in the least to worry that a medical procedure will do more harm than good. Everyone, not just scientists, worries about that. Surgery is scary. Let’s set aside the death rate, which is low but non-zero. How many brain cells are killed by general anesthesia? Dr. Consorti doesn’t know, nor do I. The number is plausibly more than zero. I suspect a power-law distribution: Most instances of general anesthesia kill a small number, a small fraction kill a large number.

I pointed Robin to Dr. Consorti’s response. He replied:

I wonder if she even realizes that she in fact doesn’t know why you should get surgery.

What I know and Dr. Consorti, very reasonably, doesn’t know, is that my mom was a librarian at the UCSF medical library and has done a vast amount of medical-literature searching. If she can’t find any relevant studies, it is very likely they don’t exist. And my mom did find a study in progress, which, to repeat myself, shows that my question about cost versus benefit is a good one. Others had the same question and launched a study to answer it. Robin’s lecture helped me ask it. Thanks, Robin.

More. Robin’s version of the fired-nurse story is here. Thanks to Charles Williams.

I Love This

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

In late July, JemSparkles posted this to the SLD forums:

Ok so I have tried many diets. Here’s the list Jenny Craig (10 lbs lost but gained back), Atkins (3 months of phase 1 and nothing lost), Curves (1 year and 10 lbs lost), Herbal Magic, a multitude of diet pills, the Zone, and then simply working out non stop. The weight doesn’t want to come off. So here I am with the last attempt that sounds crazy enough to work! I bought the book and this is day two. I am going to start tracking my data and see if I get any results.

Here’s to hoping!!!

Ok so I weighed myself for the first time this morning and my starting weight will be 260lbs.

Two weeks later she posted this:

Ok so I haven’t seen the fast results that some have seen but I am seeing results which is what matters. And compared to any diet this has been super easy to keep up with.

Today she posted this:

254!!! Yes I am finally down a total of 6 pounds and starting to feel much better. I have been working really hard on this and am not giving up. This diet has been the most effective I have been on to date.

We now return to our regularly-scheduled blogging.

If Your Comment Doesn’t Appear

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I just found two perfectly good comments in the spam pile, which contains thousands of items. If you post a comment on this blog and it doesn’t appear right away it means either

–it’s being held for approval by me;

or

–it’s been classified as spam, in which case I don’t see it. Comments classified as spam usually have one or more links. If your comment has two or more links, it has a good chance of being considered spam.

If you have commented successfully before your comment should appear right away. If it doesn’t, please let me know. You can send your comment to me and I will post it or de-spam it.

If you haven’t commented before and your comment doesn’t appear within a day, please let me know and I will post it or de-spam it.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 13)

Seth Roberts15 Comments

When I talk about how standing on one leg has helped me sleep better, the inevitable question is how much standing? After I became sure the standing was making a difference, I started to record the durations. I always stood on one leg until it became a little hard to continue. As my legs have become stronger, this has taken more time, as this graph shows:

During the early days on this graph, I didn’t include time-of-day information. I usually stood on one leg three or four times per day. More recently, I have included time-of-day info and now stand on one leg only twice most days. In all of the cases shown on the graph, I was pulling my other leg back behind me at the same time, stretching the muscles. (If I don’t stretch the other leg, I can stand one-legged much longer.) In the very beginning, I only stood one-legged 2-3 minutes.

I’m sleeping better than any other period in my adult life. My sleep was pretty good before this period but the difference is still huge. Not only am I sleeping better, I suspect I’m also sleeping less (as happened when I improved my sleep by standing a lot).

I suppose one-legged standing counts as “exercise” — that source of so many claimed benefits (longevity, weight loss, less heart disease, etc.). I read today that exercise is supposed to improve your brain. But the differences between what I am doing and what is usually recommended are as large as the difference between the Shangri-La Diet and other diets:

1. Conventional exercise: Requires expanse (for walking) or, usually, special equipment (e.g., gym). Takes one hour or more, when you count changing clothes and showering, not to mention the drive to and from the gym. One-legged standing: Can do almost anywhere. Takes less than 30 minutes, so far.

2. Conventional exercise: Requires discipline if you want a decent workout in a reasonable amount of time. One-legged standing: Almost no pain involved. I can watch TV or read something at the same time.

3. Conventional exercise: Supposed to be aerobic if you want the main benefits. One-legged standing: The opposite of aerobic.

3. Conventional exercise: Some benefits accrue slowly, such as weight loss. Others are hard or impossible to detect, such as longer life. Runners’ high goes away, in my experience. One-legged standing: Benefit clear the next morning. Because I am strengthening muscles I use all the time (when I walk or stand) I notice my vastly increased leg strength all the time.

4. Conventional exercise: You want to get stronger. One-legged standing: You don’t want to get too strong or else it may take too long to get the effect.

5. Conventional exercise: Often difficult to measure increased strength. Hard to measure improvement in swimming, racquetball, or aerobics classes, for example. One-legged standing: Easy to measure increased strength.

6. Conventional exercise: Helped me fall asleep faster, but didn’t solve the problem of too-light sleep. One-legged standing: Utterly solves the problem of too-light sleep.

Could the benefits of conventional exercise have anything to do with the fact that it vaguely resembles one-legged standing?

Directory.

First Meeting of The Quantified Self Meetup Group

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Last night the first meeting of The Quantified Self Meetup Group took place at Kevin Kelly’s house in Pacifica. Here are my notes:

Five-Word Introductions
Kevin Kelly (KK) Magazine junkie science groupie host
Melanie Swan
Lisa Betts-LaCroix home schooling
Joe Betts-LaCroix now future earth people children
Nathan Myers software wind minerals
Lee Corbin software hobbies math chess history
David Kirby machine learning applications
Tim Ferriss athletic performance language acquisition cognition
Hor machine learning life extension
Graham Bullock product health effects
Dan Brown sleep monitoring for better rest
Paul Lindow film binaural language
Jerry Legert ontology unix physics
Peter Mortonsen design irrationality
David Duncan writer radio experimental man
Alex Bangs personal health
Alexandra Carmichael open-source health research
Daniel Reda open-source health research
Gary Wolf (GW) reporter utopian
Vivian Dissler new conceptions of health
Moor unwilling rebel leader
Rajiv Mehta tools for living
Seth Roberts sleep mood self-experimentation flaxseed
Ka-Ping Yee visualization democracy lambda graphics usability
Stephanie life-streaming ubiquitous ambient
Chris social constitution of self online
Steve complex systems accumulating evidence reflexively
Neal futurism python family jazz piano
Emil Gilliam

Kevin Kelly introduction
Like to keep broadening it, before we get to the idea of saying we’re not interested in this. Using data & measurement for self-knowledge. Revolving around numbers and measurement. And measuring ourselves. Here we’re interested in science upon yourself.

Stuff people are interested in
Actionable measurements
Mood
Self-measurements of health
Gadgets
Service providers
Using geocoding for self-analysis
How have you incorporated measurements into your life?
Where do you do your research? Where do you get your ideas?
When you have a lot of data, how do you extract something you can see from it?
What data people would be willing to share with others? What private?
Measuring the effects of measuring
Resources, other groups
Spheres beyond health – such as time use, learning, how quickly you acquire new items
How to measure learning
Aesthetics of self-documentation
What do to with the data that we gather
Can you learn too much about yourself?
Environmental data, brain scans
How quantified health can be used to collaborate w/ traditional medicine
The greater good of all this – what potential for doing good?

Stuff people are willing to talk about
I’ve tracked my time for 3 years – how to analyze
Things I’ve measured
What professional athletes do in this domain
Learning, how quickly you learn
Design principles for measuring oneself
Genes, brains, & body – the Experimental Man
Geocoding

Ka-Ping Yee: Time Tracking
Tracked use of his time. Felt like problem not making good use of time. By collecting data, would help. How much sleep. Where is my time disappearing? Wrote script that keeps little window open in screen. Types in whatever he’s doing. E.g., “at QS meeting”. Logged with time. [Question from audience: what have you learned?] not a lot. Hope to learn. Can measure how much sleep I’ve been getting. Turns out to be getting more sleep than I thought.

Roberts: this data useful if you change something. You can notice unexpected changes.
Ferriss: MeTimer: tracks web browser use
RescueTime: indicates active focus, & local applications. Fascinating. Making me more effective. Doing the right things.
Xobni: identifying email hotspots. Top 10 contacts.
???: made pie graph of where we’re spending our time & is it compatible with what we say we’re about? Do we spend our time on our kids, business, health?

Clickable menu to help track time.
Yahoo widget stopwatch. Tracking work hours.
Surprises: so much unstructured time, more time spent with kid bigger than expected. Agast to realize one project was taking so much time. I’m really doing a lot of things. Decided to focus my life more. Ultimately the most satisfying thing to me. Now I’m working on that company. Me figuring out where I’m putting my creative energy.

The challenge of assigning tags to things. Too much or too little detail. Just write in your own words.

David Kirby: time tracking mood, sent message at random times to cell phone, got a lot more honesty about activity. Extremely difficult to do in social environment. What are you doing, do you feel productive? What is the sampling period? And what is the associated honesty of the data? I became very afraid of wasting time when each message would come it.

Tracking leads to optimization. As soon as she gets people to track their diet, it massively improves. Helps with eating disorders. Nigerian lawmakers tracked by journalist. Just the fact of publishing it greatly improved voting records.

Tim Ferriss: Athletes
Recorded every resistance training workout since age 15. Now 31. Diet & so forth. Go back to notebooks to see how I looked in this or that photo. Related to performance enhancement. Athletes are v. interested in relative vs absolute measurements. Body fat percentage – many different methods. All have problems. Real benefit is in measuring progress – difference up or down. I measure VO2 max. BMI is waste of time. VO2max tends not to change much. Only tested twice. Very similar in spite of different regimens. Cyclists measure to see performance maximum – can I become professional? Lots of blood testing. Every 2 or 3 tests, plus saliva-basted testing. $500-$1000 per time. Complete metabolic panel. Cortisol, estradial. Done 1st thing in morning. [Someone else: 120 things I track.] Most athletes use a laundry list of drugs. They cycle off to compete. They look at ratios. E.g., free testosterone to epitestosterone. Steriods are like antibiotics. Many of them. Betablockers: used by Chinese archer, concert pianists, entire orchestras. Subject in expts related to body heat. When does your body shut down? How to best dissipate heat? Wanted the data, would have cost $100K. Found that my ability to dissipate heat is severey reduced. Surface areas of lungs compared to surface area of skin. Brain shut down at unusually low temperature. Heat stroke susceptible. Recovery time measure of fitness. Sets, Reps, rest periods. Within rest periods you can track several things. Return to basal body temperature, heart rate, muscle tonus (galvanic skin response). Don’t believe in general intelligence or general fitness. I measure sex hormones, metabolic panels, IGF-1, indirect measures of growth hormone, free testosterone, T3 T4 TSH insulin (wide diurnal variance). How much insulin is produced, how much remains after meal. Athletes only measure something if they can act on the data they gather. I don’t want 24/7 measurement – too much data. I take a lot of experimental supplements. I like watch the response of my autonomous nervous system. Ephedrine hydrochloride. Widely studied. Yohimbine HCL: proposed as safer alternative to ephedrine. Not a selective agonist. I wanted to measure my blood pressure very closely.

You can order blood tests online & go to local places that will draw your blood & send you the results. Don’t need doctor’s prescription. Look up symptoms for whatever would require that type of testing.

Any statistical tools that will help you calibrate measurements against each other?

Templates for analyzing small data sets: couldn’t find.

Statistics packages, such as R. Google Website Optimizer. Set up experiments for website visitors. Test different pictures on your page. Ramsey 2-color theory. The known Ramsey numbers. If you know there has to be a mutual group of 5 people that all know each other, you have to have at least 43 people in the room.

Suggests data tutorial for the self-experimenter. At future meeting.
If there were a easy to use tool set, if you wanted to run experiments, finding things that were harder to find or predictions. Good tool honeypot for data. Norbert Weiner talks about that.

RescueTime can take aggregate data of 30000 people, reducing data entry from 100 items to 2 items. Hope there will be communities that will follow protocol.

Gary Wolf: Learning/Knowing
Did long story for Wired about managing 5000-item dataset. Keeps track of what you’ve learned & haven’t learned. Makes prediction about what you need to practice something to remember forever. How deeply rooted it is. Street you’ve lived on when little kid. I’m measuring 2700 index cards. Spanish vocabulary. Modal sentences for grammar learning. Maintaining at 90% remembering. What 1000 words do you need to know? Super Memo. Pieter Wozniak, Polish computer scientist. When you do your tests every day, you get 85%-90% on every test. It shows you a set of cards. If you want to learn the most, maximum efficiency is 40% efficiency. Unpleasant. 5-point rating system. Implemented physically in the 1950s. Liter System. Pimsler implements spaced repetition in background way. Index cards a metaphor – all online. You want to learn constantly for short periods of time over long time spans. What’s the lifetime limit on what you can learn? Cabbies in London: larger hippocampus. There are some glitches: learning some things can interfere with knowing other things. Cards in Super Memo that often come up. You can figure out why you’re not learning them. Everyone knows that poor sleep impares learning. How much will your performance decrease? You need a lot of sleep data & lot of learning data. We’re on edge of being able to do that.

David Duncan: One of brain scan tests for my book has to do with memory. As we age, we don’t forget things, we have inability to filter out. Series of faces & landscapes. Then forget faces or landscapes. Can you filter out what you’re not supposed to remember? Compare young and old. Older people can remember as well as young people but can’t filter as well. I came out right in the middle.

I’ve been doing tai-chi for a number of years. Doing for 5 min/day better than 1 weekend/month.

How do you measure learning? Not just via standardized tests. Cognitive & batteries of tests that people take. Tell you what your brain age is. Column for Portfolio. Cognitive drug research. Did better than I expected, didn’t want to take again. On website. On wine, my timing was way off. Check comment stream, people who got younger thought it was a great test. Issues with speed of server.

Rajiv Mehta: Ways This Helps
Helping people take care of their health. Individual perspective. You have some regimen in mind: chicken soup or whatever. What gets in the way of people ttaking care of their health? We forget a lot, life gets busy. Keeping detailed records impossible for vast majority. Made prototype device. Gives reminders for thigns that are scheduled. Makes easy to record symptoms moods, etc. anything you think is important health. User tracking exercise. ZumeLife.com. Tracking her carbs, glucose, medications, symptoms, shortness of breath. Speak into it. Transcription service. Things that don’t lend themselves to charts get put into notebooks. USB connected to your PC. Every day or so. NY Time article about 42-year-old person w/ diabetes. Complicated case. Lots of drugs. [can you use any category?] Right now. 5 categories: meds, biometrics, exercise (name, duration), food (carbs, points), health-status questions (how much coughing, how did you feel). Most been using: 7 months. One person had sclera derma. Intense pain, cold hands. She started measuring her pain levels, realized she was having 3 or 4 intense episodes per week. With her printout, she & her doctor said: you have a problem. Over 6 week period she went from 3 or 4 intense to    1 mild episode/week. About $40-50/month. Can’t ask people to buy a special phone. I’m not waiting for United Health Care to say it’s interesting. Institutions don’t want to deal with smart phones, they want a special device. We’ve found everyone experiments. If anybody is going to figure out what works for her, it’s her. Doctors benefit from charts. The experimenter is her. Our doctors are at best good advisors. We cannot abdicate responsibility.

Peter Mortensen: Motivating Running
If you want to help people who are not enthusiasts. Need proud & constant presence. Nike Plus Sports Band. Wear all the time I’m awake. Not just a string around my finger. I can see how much running I’ve doine in last 3 months. Also have my last run. More successful than Nike Ipod. You should hide the change you want to make. Also USB key, syncs/ with NikePlus website. Graphs, etc. Even cooler it charges battery when plugged in. I only hear I’m interested I’m wearing a nice watch, never that I’m self-tracking. Chip on shoe, Bluetooth. Impact accelerometer. It’s an attractive watch, I’m proud to wear it. Aesthetic thing. An ugly watch would not have the same effect.

Raj: If you’re sick it means something bad. If there’s going to be a device they have to be proud of it. Before Ms. L got our device she was trying to use her Treo. It got in the way. It’s rude to answer your phone if you’re having a conversation. People would get upset. This device: It’s Ms. L taking care of herself.

Nice scales for tracking weight. Cable going off somewhere. Body composition Bluetooth scale. Tonita.

Seth Roberts: Sleep
Early self-experimentation about acne. Found out stuff doctor didn’t know: really useful. Maybe would help with sleep problem: Waking up too early in the morning. Tried many things for 10 years, everything failed. All ideas were wrong. Finally got a new idea due to analyzing data, noticing less sleep when lost weight, told class, student told him about another way to eat less, required changing breakfast. Change in breakfast caused early awakening to get worse. This was the first thing that had made a difference. Led to discovery that any breakfast hurts; supported by rat research. Later found that standing a lot improved sleep. Had to stand at least 8 hr to get effect; no effect of 6 hr of standing. Great sleep when stood 10 hr but really hard to do. More recently discovered that standing on one leg to exhaustion helps. Do twice in one day. Same effect, roughly, as many hours of standing but only takes a few minutes. Now working out the dose/response function.

KK: looking for people who want to blog on the blog itself. If you’d rather just share a comment or idea just mail it to us (GW & KK).

GW: lot of dry timber waiting for a spark here. Value of this meeting, can something bigger grow out of it?

Bodymedia.com making their gadget available to retail. Measures body temperature, galvanic skin response. $399 plus $20/month. 2. Body computing comfernece at UCSF Oct 25. internal 3. 23&me has dropped their price. Version 2. 1/3rd price.

Send stuff to KK & GW to post on blog.

More Gary Wolf’s account.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 12)

Seth Roberts11 Comments

Over the last week I’ve found that standing on one foot till it becomes difficult just twice during the day is enough to produce much better sleep that night. Maybe the effect is larger with three times but not enough to make much difference.

It now takes 8-10 minutes of one-leg standing (with the other leg stretched back behind me) before it gets difficult. When I started, it took 2-3 minutes.

Directory.

A Hidden Benefit of Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Today I met a Unix consultant named Jerry Lugert who has done a lot of self-experimentation. He made a point I hadn’t heard before: When you start to measure something carefully, you become a lot more motivated to improve it. In practice, this means when you start to measure something at home every day or often in contrast to having it measured every six months when you see a doctor. One of his examples was blood pressure. He became a lot more motivated to lower his blood pressure when he measured it himself. Another example involved using chemstrips to measure his urine. He used them to measure both his hydration and the amount of protein in his blood.

The usual idea is that knowledge is power. Sure, if you measure your blood pressure every day you can better control it than if you measure it once per six months. That’s obvious. This is different: knowledge is motivation. If you measure your blood pressure every day you’ll want to control it more than if you measure it every six months. That’s not obvious at all and way more important.

This idea is so close to my idea about connoisseurship (which Jerry of course hadn’t heard of) I wonder if the mechanism is the same. I believe connoisseurship arises from side-by-side comparisons of very similar items: close-in-time comparisons of two orange marmalades, for example. Or two vanilla ice creams. Or two cheddar cheeses. Or two merlots. Etc. It’s obvious that if you make these close comparisons you’ll become better at discrimination — e.g., better at discriminating varieties of vanilla ice cream. What interests me is the hedonic change: making these comparisons causes you to care more about the dimension. You get more pleasure from the good stuff and less pleasure from the bad stuff. Connoisseurs are basically people who will pay more for this or that than the rest of us. (When income or wealth is equated.) Not because they’re snobs or showing off — because they derive more pleasure from it. This is part of a theory of human evolution.

Rudy Guiliani, Sarah Palin and Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Sometimes I’m surprised how much there is to blog about. At the Republican National Convention, Rudy Guiliani bashed community organizers:

[Obama] worked as a community organizer. [Said with a disparaging emphasis on “community organizer”] . . . Barack Obama has never led anything, nothing, nada.

So did Palin:

In this world of threats and dangers, it’s not just a community and it doesn’t just need an organizer.

The interesting thing about community organizing is that (a) anybody can do it (no need to be elected) and (b) you can organize about anything. This wide net, this all-inclusiveness, makes it a way that new ideas can become powerful. Self-experimentation is very similar: (a) anyone can do it and (b) you can study anything. You don’t need anyone’s approval, the research can be very cheap, the ideas you test can be conventional or wacky. Only if you believe that the already-powerful know everything should you disparage activities that help new knowledge come to light.