Pistachio saffron milk. A just-released product from Ajmera Innovations. Sort of a step up from pomegranate soda and a dozen other high-end drinks, just as pomegranate soda was a step up from Coke and Sprite.
Month: January 2009
How I Will Judge the Inauguration Speech
By this: Did he tell good stories? Did he tell stories that actually supported his points? This is hard to fake. It was easy for Dr. Eileen Consorti to tell me that studies existed to support her surgery recommendation but — the hard part — she never supplied those studies, probably because they don’t exist. Pronouncements are easy, stories hard. It’s easy to say X and Y (“we will . . . this is a time of . . . “) but if X and Y are just wishful thinking it won’t be easy to come up with a decent story — or any story — that supports them. If Obama understands how the world works, he should be able to tell stories that support his views.
Lyndon Johnson was a great politician and an excellent storyteller. Presidents since Johnson have been worse politicians and worse storytellers. Obama’s current popularity may reflect something in us rather than something in him. Right after 9/11 George W. Bush enjoyed enormous popularity. His speeches at that time, at least those I heard, contained no stories, which I think revealed that he understood little or nothing about the situation. (I would have told stories about overreaction.) The dismal outcome was foreshadowed. His popularity at the time was due to something in us, not something in him.
More The speech contained about one-quarter of a story. My expectations are hereby lowered.
Beijing Shopping (stuff easy to get in Beijing but not Berkeley)
Jane Jacobs said that one measure of a healthy economy is the choice it provides. A healthy economy provides abundantly at affordable prices; an unhealthy economy does not. Another sign of economic health, she said, is innovation: A healthy economy includes a constant stream of new products — nothing lasts forever. People in Norway are far richer than people in China right now, but what will Norwegians do when the oil runs out?
In contrast, my Beijing shopping revealed that Chinese entrepreneurs have been able to develop products that the rest of the world will want to buy.
1. Electric bikes. They’re everywhere in Beijing. They cost $200-$400 and a few cents per mile, far cheaper than gas. I would have brought one back to Berkeley but inability to fix it stopped me.
2. Keyboard covers for laptops. Transparent silicone plastic. Easy to clean. How did I live without one? These are a new product in Beijing, actually, but they are very cheap, about $1. I can find them for sale on the internet for about $15.
3. Cordless floor sweepers. They use a rotating brush to clean the floor instead of a air pump, as a vacuum cleaner does. That they are cordless makes them very easy to use. In Beijing they are obvious and attractive; I bought two and brought one back to Berkeley. In America I’d never seen them for sale but after I knew they existed I managed to find an unattractive one in Berkeley hidden deep in a hardware store. The price (about $50) was roughly the same in Beijing and Berkeley, except the Beijing models are much nicer.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all three products are “environmental” broadly conceived. Beijing air is dirtier than Berkeley air; my keyboard cover and my floors get dirty a lot faster in Beijing than in Berkeley. I think they are a sign of hugely-important things to come — China inventing and selling the products we need for a cleaner world. It’s been called the next industrial revolution; a better name would be the second half of the industrial revolution in which we clean up the mess left by the first half. As Jane Jacobs often said, the problem is not too many people, the problem is the undone work.
How Things Begin (sparkling tea)
Today, at the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco, I learned about Golden Star White Jasmine Sparkling Tea, the most new interesting product at the show (out of thousands). I asked the CEO, Edward Carden, how it came to be. He said he was helping his parents move several years ago when he thought: Why isn’t there a sophisticated non-alcoholic beverage? Like wine, but non-alcoholic. Starting with the best ingredients, what could they come up with? They could make stuff that tasted great, but there was an arbitrariness to it. Making a tea allowed them to connect with that heritage. Wine has a heritage, beer has a heritage, cheese has a heritage. They start by infusing tea leaves, then add sugar and microorganisms and ferment for a short time to develop complexity of flavor. The fermentation produces a small alcohol content. Call it a microwine. It was delicious.
Assorted Links
Chinese Medicine and Sleep
An American friend told me about one of his experiences with Chinese medicine — what is called in America “Traditional Chinese Medicine.” He had some sort of infection that caused skin near his stomach to be damp. He tried many solutions. None worked. Then he went to a Chinese medicine doctor who prescribed certain herbs to be ingested. In a week he was better.
My take on this is that the herbs increased the sensitivity of his immune system, which then detected and got rid of the infection. Such infections are rare, of course, so rare I don’t know their name. The existence of such an infection was a sign his immune system was working very poorly. I asked my friend about his sleep. His sleep was terrible. Highly irregular. It is telling that the Chinese doctor didn’t tell him to improve his sleep, which would have vastly improved his health and reduced his future visits to the doctor.
It was a new idea to me that Chinese herbs — at least some of them — work by boosting the immune system. It makes sense: detection of some invaders should make you more sensitive to other invaders. One implication of this view is that it hardly matters which herb you take so long as it is new. My friend told another story in which his Chinese doctor changed the herbs every week or so, supporting this idea.
It was a new idea to my friend that bad sleep was causing his immune system to work poorly. My experience with colds, as mentioned last post (when my sleep improved they disappeared), means that the fact that colds are “common” implies we are a nation of poor sleepers. And, indeed, sleep problems are very common. A few years ago, I learned about a course about epidemics taught at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. I knew the professor. I asked him if the course would cover environmental factors that cause the immune system to work better or worse. No, he said. Half the subject, ignored. Just as economists rarely study innovation and statisticians rarely study how data generates ideas.
More Supporting the idea that ingesting strange but harmless substances can improve immune functioning, I found this in the latest issue of the Journal of Nutrition:
Caseins and whey proteins are the 2 major protein fractions of cow milk. Whey proteins are separated from casein curds during the cheese-making process. The major proteins present in bovine whey come from the mammary gland that secretes β-lactoglobulin (β-LG),7 {alpha}-lactalbumin ({alpha}-LA), and glycomacropeptide (GMP), and from serum, like IgG1 and IgG2, IgA, IgE, and IgM and albumin. Besides their use in functional foods, whey protein products, and more specifically whey protein-derived products, have been shown to be efficient in certain pathologies. For instance, whey proteins inhibited gastric ulcerative lesions induced by ethanol or indomethacin, inhibited chemical-induced malignancy in mice, improved bone loss of ovariectomized rats, and reduced hyperglycemia in type 2 diabetic patients (1—5). Moreover, in vitro and in vivo studies have demonstrated modulation of immune functions by several whey protein-derived products (6,7). As examples, β-LG, the most abundant protein in whey (55—65% of total whey proteins), stimulates the proliferation of murine spleen cells and lamina propia lymphocytes (8,9). It is also useful to stress that researchers have shown that probiotics expressing β-LG can be used to manage food allergy (10). The 2nd most abundant whey protein, {alpha}-LA (15—25% of total whey proteins), modulates macrophage and B- and T-lymphocyte functions (11). Moreover, the {alpha}-LA—derived peptide f51—53 directly affects neutrophils (12). The 3rd most abundant whey peptidic component, GMP, can affect immunity and attenuate inflammatory colitis in rats (6,13,14). At optimal concentrations, the other bioactive whey-derived proteins like Ig and lactoferrin present in whey protein extract (WPE) can also exert immune modulatory functions (6,7).
I didn’t know this–that ingesting milk products had good effects on immune function. That probiotics can be used to manage food allergies isn’t explained by the idea that foreign substances make the immune system more sensitive.
Better Sleep, Fewer Colds
In my long self-experimentation paper I described how I stopped getting colds when my sleep improved due to more standing and morning light. It was easy to notice: Everyone around me was getting sick and I wasn’t. In Beijing this winter the same thing happened: Lots of people around me got colds — a friend of mine was even hospitalized — but I didn’t. This winter I continued to get lots of morning light — I cared enormously that my apartment was on the sunny side of the building — but in place of standing for 8 hours or more every day I stood on one leg four times (left leg twice, right leg twice) until exhaustion.
Plenty of other evidence links better sleep with better immune function. The latest comes from the Archives of Internal Medicine. In a survey-like experiment, researchers measured the sleep of subjects with a questionnaire for two weeks and then brought them to an isolation unit, exposed them to a cold virus, and waited to see if they developed a cold. Subjects who slept better were less likely to get a cold. It was a big effect: “Participants with less than 7 hours of sleep [per night] were 2.9 times more likely to develop a cold than those with 8 hours or more of sleep [per night].” I rarely sleep 7 hours but wake up feeling plenty rested, which suggests that my sleep is deeper than average.
Overall, I’m happy for the support of my findings. Better sleep has a three-fold benefit: you feel more rested (short term), you get colds less often (medium term), and your risk of heart disease goes down (long term). The morning sunlight I get corresponds to sitting outside in the shade for about two hours; the standing takes a total of about 40 minutes/day (with your leg bent most of the time). I usually watch a movie or TV at the same time and always look forward to it.
Thanks to David Cramer.
The Power Law of Scientific Dismissiveness
In my experience, scientists are much too dismissive, in the sense that most of them have a hard time fully appreciating other people’s work. This dismissiveness follows a kind of power law: a few of them spend a large amount of time being dismissive (e.g., David Freedman); a large number spend a small amount of time being dismissive. The really common form of dismissiveness goes like this (from a JAMA abstract):
In this second article, we enumerate the major issues in judging the validity of these studies, framed as critical appraisal questions. Was the disease phenotype properly defined and accurately recorded by someone blind to the genetic information? Have any potential differences between disease and non-disease groups, particularly ethnicity, been properly addressed? . . . Was measurement of the genetic variants unbiased and accurate? [bold added]
This is the dismissiveness of dichotomization: division of studies into valid and invalid, proper and improper, unbiased and biased, accurate and inaccurate. As if it were that simple. Such dichotomization throws away a lot of information. It leads to such absurdities as a meta-analysis of 2000 studies that decided that only 16 were worth inclusion. As if the rest contained no information of value. In the case of the term accurate the problem is easy to see. To draw a sharp line between accurate and inaccurate makes little sense and ignores the harder and more valuable question how accurate?
The average scientist is religious in many ways, and this is one of them. It is part of what might be called religious method: the dichotomization of persons into good and bad. An example is saying you are either going to heaven or to hell — nothing between.
How to Learn English
Pearl Alexander teaches English in Japan. She blogged:
The typically unintelligible and extra-syllable-laden speaking tests delivered to me by the students had a lone girl who stood out with nearly perfect pronunciation, however quite imperfect grammar.
I was completely astonished. Was she taking extra classes outside of school? If so, why wasn’t she delivering the typically rhetorical machine-gun speech like most of the juku students?
We got to the last question on her test: “What do you like to do in your free time?” She answered: “I often listen to music. I like Avril.”
At Tsinghua University, I had a similar experience. One of a dozen art students giving presentations had much better English than the rest. Did you live in America? I asked him. No, he just watched a lot of English TV and movies. Tsinghua students watch a lot of Friends, not to mention Prison Break and Heroes.
I found a Chinese movie to watch (Together With You) but in one player there is no sound and in another the English subtitles don’t appear! I listen to a lot of Chinese on my mp3 player but it is pretty boring. I should try to find some Chinese songs I like and get translations.
Vaccine Safety: Is This the Best They Can Do?
In the debate over vaccine safety, I’m not on either side. I am quite unsure whether vaccines with mercury caused autism, for example. I would be happy to read a decent book on the subject, no matter what the author believed.
Instead we have a book by Dr. Paul Offit, who wrote, criticizing another book about vaccines, that it “never discusses the fact that mercury is present on the earth’s surface.”
Sentences like that make me think vaccines are less safe than claimed by Dr. Offit.