- Three-dimensional TV. Via polarized light. Not for sale yet
- Pens with erasers. You can erase the ink.
Month: August 2009
Japanese Ice Ouca versus Bi-Rite Creamery
Bi-Rite Creamery in San Francisco has the best ice cream I’ve had. The ice cream at Japanese Ice Ouca in Tokyo is maybe 95% as good but the presentation is so much better than Bi-Rite I was stunned. The prices are about the same at the two places. At Ouca you get a choice of three flavors (versus two at Bi-Rite). The three flavors are mixed in an attractive pattern. You get a pretty round wafer to add crunch. And you get a little bit of salty chewy seaweed to eat after you’re finished. Ouca doesn’t stand out from other high-end Japanese food, which is full of these sorts of effective small touches. In Iceland I met a Japanese teacher of English who said, “I like everything about America except the food.” American food is like barbarian food — except worse.
When she was a teenager, Jane Jacobs visited a relative of hers in isolated rural Pennsylvania. Her aunt had moved there to oversee the building of a church. The inhabitants had forgotten that buildings could be made out of stone. American cooking reveals a similar vast forgetting.
Tourist Humor
I believe that books for tourists are filled with inside jokes. A booklet for tourists called Welcome to Tokyo published by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government says the following about a place called Nakamise:
Both sides of the 250 m street from [A] to [B] are lined with about 90 stores dating from the Edo Period.
The Edo Period ran from 1603 to 1868, which few readers will know. The street is actually lined with stores selling the usual tourist stuff.
PayPal, the [Empty Promise] Way to Pay
A few minutes after I sent gamesinwelt.com credit-card payment for a Wii via PayPal, I phoned PayPal asking them to cancel the transaction. Your payment did not go through, I was told. “Did not”. So there was no need to cancel it. I was safe. To warn others, I wrote my earlier post about this.
Well, I was misinformed. My payment was not unauthorized, i.e., dead — it was, rather, not-yet-authorized. When I phoned PayPal, it could have been canceled but it wasn’t. A few days later it went through. Maybe I am easily amazed but this is amazing. At PayPal customer service, the account history screen seen by employees does not distinguish between two meanings of unauthorized: “authorization failed” and “not yet authorized”. What is this, 1960?
I was pissed. I called PayPal and was told in part that this was somehow my fault. I should have known [something]. To file a dispute I must call another number. I called that number. I filed the dispute. You’re safe, I was told. Will I have to call again? I asked. No, I was told.
Well, I wasn’t safe. Although I won the dispute, there was no money in the seller’s account. A possibility that hadn’t been mentioned. Too bad for me.
So I phoned my credit card company. I was told I should get my money back from either PayPal or the credit-card company. Fearing more untrustworthiness from PayPal, I emptied my PayPal account.
Bonus PayPal helping scammers, from the comments:
Same story! $300 for a Wii and a Nintendo DS! The day after my husband ordered I tried to go back to the website and order some games. I got a message saying the company “could not accept PayPal at this time” I then emailed PayPal’s customer service and asked them if this meant that they were not a reputable company that I should not do business with. PayPal said, and I quote, “It does not mean that they are not reputable, they could be experiencing problems with their internet connection to PayPal.”
The Shangri-La Diet in Japan
A few months ago a popular Japanese TV show ran a long (30 minutes?) piece about the Shangri-La Diet, some of which you can see here. It is very odd to see my work talked about and not know what’s being said. It’s like being a fly on the wall, taking into account that flies don’t understand English. The show is long enough that some of what they’re saying must be new to me. One of the panelists (there is a panel of one man and two women) appears to be Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, whose book Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window I love, have read dozens of times, and mention in The Shangri-La Diet — at least the English version. I first came across Totto-Chan at the Mill Valley Public Library. Even though I was living in Berkeley, I checked it out. Driving home I was so entranced I read the book at stoplights while waiting for the light to change.
The Financial System and the Immune System
In this interview, Nassim Taleb says, as he has often said, that booms and busts are a fact of financial life, what we should do is make the financial system robust against them. He put it like this:
Capitalism will always produce shocks and crashes. I want a society that has a buffer against shocks.
Likewise, I say bacteria are a fact of life. To be healthy we need to make our bodies resistant to them — which means having a well-functioning immune system.
These are not subtle or difficult points. What interests me is the difficulty that experts have appreciating them. To repeat a story I’ve told before on this blog, a few years ago I noticed that the UC Berkeley School of Public Health had a wide-ranging epidemiology course taught by someone I knew. I phoned him. “Will the course cover what makes us more or less susceptible to infection?” I asked. “No,” he said. I wasn’t exactly surprised — I have never seen this topic covered in any epidemiology textbook or even any epidemiology research paper — but still it is an amazing omission. They know we have an immune system, they just don’t think it matters! There’s an elephant in the room, and they’re ignoring it.
The parallel point about the financial system is that there is no study of what makes a financial system robust against shocks. Somehow finance professors, like epidemiology professors, haven’t grasped that something is missing.
Here are two more vast areas of ignorance:
1. Scientists know a lot about how to test ideas. They know almost nothing about how to come up with ideas worth testing. When a good way to generate ideas comes along — such as self-experimentation — they are dismissive. This is truly crippling: In an experimental science, for example, interesting new experimental effects aren’t discovered. Experimental psychology suffers from this problem. Experimental psychologists could self-experiment, but they don’t.
2. Economists know very little about how to generate new businesses — what makes the rate of new-business generation high or low. I came across a 500-page introductory economics textbook that had three empty paragraphs on the topic. Without new businesses to solve the problems created by old businesses (such as pollution), your society is in real trouble. The problems will pile up unsolved. This is what Jane Jacobs saw so clearly in The Economy of Cities and Jared Diamond completely missed in Collapse.
Noseclipping Diary
On the Shangri-La Diet forums, David, who is 6′ 4″ and about 340 pounds, wrote about his recent experience with the diet. He wants to lose about 120 pounds. Sugar water and oil didn’t work very well. Low carb didn’t work. Then he tried nose-clipping:
Last Friday, August 14th, I tried nose clipping. The relief was immediate. The hunger subsided and I even lost a couple of pounds. On Saturday I decided to try clipping every time I ate anything. By evening I could not eat my entire dinner. When I tried, I got nauseous. I actually thought I was going to vomit for awhile.
I am very curious what happens next.
How to Avoid Infection: Something I Didn’t Know
A book called Survival of the Cleanest (2005) by Jacob I. T. Van Der Merwe is about how to avoid infection. As far as I could tell from Google Books, it says nothing about how to boost your immune function. It is all about avoiding public bathrooms, frequent handwashing, and pointing out the many ways in which we can get infected (e.g., touching shopping carts). It is heartfelt but I didn’t find it persuasive. There was almost no data about the efficacy of the book’s thousands of suggestions.
Here is something I couldn’t find in the book. A few months ago, I noticed that my eyes itched. Apparently I had some sort of infection. My eyes almost never itch and this happened to coincide with something else very rare: I hadn’t changed the pillowcases on my bed in a few weeks. So I started changing my pillowcases more often. The itching went away and hasn’t returned. My explanation: The pillowcases were acting as staging areas for the bacteria. Ordinarily my immune system would fight them off but on the pillowcases they were safe. The pillowcases shifted the balance of power.
Survival of the Cleanest does say “correctly laundering clothes kills germs and drastically reduces the risk of infection” but since this particular bit of vague advice (what’s “correctly”?) is mixed with a thousand other bits of advice, such as avoiding doorknobs, it doesn’t get the attention it deserves. For what it’s worth, when I do laundry I do a second cycle without soap, in order to get a really good rinse. I’m less interested in killing germs than I am in washing them off.
Fifteen-Thousand-Page Theorem
Did you know that a certain math proof runs 15,000 pages? It’s about the classification of finite simple groups. A shorter version should be about 5,000 pages. It began when someone proved that the number of simple groups was finite. Such a proof is more like a railroad network than a book. No one verfies the whole thing, just as no one rides the entire railroad network.
Dietary Self-Selection by Young Children
In the 1920s and 30s, a Chicago pediatrician named Clara Davis did a remarkable experiment/demonstration: Letting young children choose their own food. About eleven children chose from a list of 30 little-processed foods — including sour milk, the only bacteria-rich food on the list — and could eat as much of each one as they wished. The choices included peaches, beef, carrots, beets, barley, bone marrow, pineapple, cabbage, lettuce, potatoes, and sweet breads. Many of the foods were supplied both raw and cooked. The experiment lasted about 6 years.
The main result was that the children were very healthy:
There were no failures of infants to manage their own diets; all had hearty appetites; all thrived. Constipation was unknown among them and laxatives were never used or needed. Except in the presence of parenteral infection, there was no vomiting or diarrhea. Colds were usually of the mild three-day type without complications of any kind. There were a few case of tonsillitis but no serious illness among the children in the six years.
Some of them were malnourished at the start of the experiment; all recovered. One had rickets and was offered cod liver oil. He drank a little bit of it while sick but after he recovered never drank it again.
Davis’s observations support the idea that we have inborn desires that help us choose what to eat. Davis emphasized that there was great variation from one child to another in what they ate — as Weston Price noted a great variation from one healthy community to the next in what they ate. She didn’t give details, however. The notion that our desires, given Stone-Age surroundings, help us choose a healthy diet is what led me to the umami hypothesis. It started with the idea that in the Stone Age our liking for complex, sour, and umami flavors caused us to eat food with more bacteria than fresh food. High-bacteria food tasted better than low-bacteria food; it was more sour, more umami, and had a more complex flavor. Suggesting that we need to eat bacteria to be healthy.