Month: April 2010

Is English My Native Language?

Seth Roberts18 Comments

Here’s the last paragraph of a New York Times book review by Janet Maslin:

“The Publisher” [a biography of Henry Luce] has its parched passages, most notably when it ventures into the thickets of Luce’s “big” ideas. It works best when the man is well within sight. But Mr. Brinkley is dauntless in assessing Luce’s most important accomplishments, like his “American Century” essay and other efforts to tell Americans what American life was like. Life magazine had no temerity about devoting a major series in the 1950s to “Man’s New World: How He Lives in It.” Now that Man’s New World is so different from anything Henry Luce could imagine, his life and times are more poignant than they once seemed.

As I read this, I wondered if English was my native language. It was so hard to understand. Then I wondered if New York Times writers are paid by the big word. “Parched”? “Thickets? At least I know what that sentence means. I don’t know what she means by “Mr. Brinkley is dauntless in assessing…” — dauntless means fearless. Nor do I understand what “Life magazine had no temerity about” means. Temerity means recklessness or boldness. The logic of the last sentence (“Now that . . . “) with its big word poignant also escapes me.

Perhaps Maslin has found that if she writes like this her editors will edit her less, not being quite sure what those words mean. I attended many talks at UC Berkeley in which the speaker left out crucial information, such as the meaning of the y axis of a graph. And, virtually every time, no one asked about it – not even the four or five professors present. Gradually I realized why: They were insecure.

Assorted Links

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Thanks to Eric Meltzer and Ryan Holiday.

Why Are Volcano Jokes So Bad?

Seth Roberts6 Comments

You may remember What does NASA stand for? Need Additional Six Astronauts. This circulated after the Challenger blew up. In contrast, the volcano jokes I’ve heard are curiously bad:

6. Dear Iceland , We said send cash, not ash.

7. Woke this morning to find every surface in the house covered in a layer of dust and a foul stench of sulphur in the air…. Yes, I’ve been married to that bone-idle slob for 20 years.

8. It was the last wish of the Icelandic economy that its ashes were spread all over Europe .

9. There’s no pleasing the English. The last time they got the Ashes they were over the moon.

10. Went outside today and got hit by a bag of frozen sausages, a chocolate gateau and some fish fingers. Someone said it’s a fallout from Iceland .

Where to Find Umami

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Here is a list of umami-rich foods. As regular readers of this blog know, I believe we like umami flavor so that we will eat more bacteria-rich foods. In this list, notice that fresh foods tend to have much less umami than older foods. Cured ham (337 units) is much higher than pork (2.5). Cheese (182-1680) is much higher than milk (1-4). Soy sauce (412-1264) is aged; so is fish sauce (621-1383). Seaweed (kombu) is high (241-3190) but since seaweed is sold dried, I suspect the drying process is at least partly responsible for the high umami content. Marmite (1960) is not aged — but its main ingredient is yeast.

As far as I know, all meat sold commercially in America is aged: it doesn’t taste right until it’s aged. Umami is sometimes described as a “meaty” taste.

Two Months on the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Good results.

In 2 months I’ve lost 13 pounds . . . I have even skipped days due to a hectic work schedule. . . .

I was stopped outside church on Sunday by someone who had noticed the weight loss and wanted to know how I did it. I have still yet to convince my fiercest critic — my loving wife, but at least she’s stopped calling it a placebo!

Tsinghua Student Clubs

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Here is a list of Tsinghua student clubs. Some are puzzling or intriguing:

  • Student Anti-Cult Association
  • Student Collection Association
  • Student Du Xing Association
  • Student Edge Landscape Studies Association
  • Student Informatized Service and Consultation Enthusiasts Association
  • Student Insurance Association
  • Student Project Management Association
  • Student Web Surfing Enthusiasts Association
  • Student Xi Lu Association

No restaurant club. Neighboring Peking University has such a club. I wonder what the Student Social Interaction Development Association does. The Student Redology Association is devoted to study of the book Dream of a Red Chamber. I mentioned earlier a student club whose name means “sing your heart”. Here that club is called Student Education Aid-the-Poor Service Association.

The Silver Lining of a Cloud of Volcanic Ash

Seth Roberts3 Comments

A New York Times article on the volcanic ash preventing air travel ended like this:

Leo Liao, a Hong Kong businessman who was stranded at the Frankfurt airport, was cheerful and philosophical. “It’s a natural issue,” he said. “Never complain. You can’t change this.”

Not cheerful enough. I once heard Edward Teller, the physicist, give a talk. In the middle, he said if we managed to control the weather we would take away the last topic of civilized conversation. Several years ago Berkeley had the rainiest winter in memory. It was never so easy to talk to strangers — you could commiserate about the rain. The stranded travelers have an unparalleled opportunity to meet people different from themselves, people they would ordinarily never be able to meet.

How to Talk to Strangers. Paris Syndrome.

Oprah Meets Veblen

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An assistant manager at Marshall Fields, the Chicago department store, told Gawker the following story:

I was walking through the floor, and I hear a voice call my name. . . . Once she started speaking to me, I realized it was Oprah. Honestly, she is unrecognizable without the spackle/wig. Anyway, she was very nice, and asked me if I would offer my opinion on a china pattern she was looking at for her house. It was Villeroy and Boch (German, middle-range) “Petite Fleur.” Very cute, kind of French-country, with a small, scattered floral design. I said, “What’s not to like?” Oprah responded, “Well, it’s not that expensive, and I don’t want people who come to my house to think I’m cheap.”

Why UC Berkeley is Investigating Peter Duesberg

Seth Roberts14 Comments

In November, UC Berkeley launched an investigation of Professor Peter Duesberg for misconduct associated with a paper of his retracted from Medical Hypotheses. According to the letter sent Duesberg informing him of the investigation, there were two allegations. One was that his paper had been withdrawn by the publisher due to “issues of credibility and false claims.” The other was that “you failed to declare a relevant conflict of interest with regard to the commercial interests of your co-authors.” Duesberg tried to learn more about what he was accused of, without success. Finally the university sent him the letters of complaint that led to the investigation. Here they are.

  

The first letter is incredibly vague. The “issues of credibility and false claims” aren’t spelled out and it is unclear why the University of California should care that “Bruce Rasnick failed to declare his conflict of interest.” The idea that publishing a dissenting paper about AIDS is an “attempt to discredit the academic community” is worthy of Orwell.

The second letter has several strange features. First, it contradicts itself. It says:

[Statement 1] Until recently, he [Rasnick] worked as a researcher for a company, the Dr Rath Health Foundation Canada [owned by Mattias Rath] [Statement 2] [Rasnick’s] former (and possibly current) employer, Mattias Rath.

Statement 1 says Rasnick no longer works for Rath. Statement 2 says he might still work for Rath.

Second, its logic is outside the way conflict of interest is normally understood. Because you used to work for someone that might benefit from your paper, you now have a conflict of interest? This makes no sense.

Finally, there is the weird idea that because something is “possible” — Mattias Rath is “possibly” Rasnick’s current employer — it deserves a misconduct investigation. It’s possible that a flying saucer will land on the White House lawn tomorrow.

In spite of all this, UC Berkeley administrators allowed themselves to be used to punish dissent.

Assorted Links

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  • “Your body’s resistance to an activity isn’t an obstacle to be overcome, it’s a message that you’re being an idiot, just like when your hand hurts after you punch a wall. The right solution isn’t to start punching the wall harder, it’s to look around for a tool to help you do the job . . . With losing weight, the key is things like the Shangri-La Diet.” Aaron Swartz argues that if something needs a lot of will-power to do, it’s a mistake. I agree.
  • Reed Hundt on “Bandwidth, Jobs, and the Future of Internet Freedom”.
  • Art DeVany interviewed on Econtalk. Agrees with Aaron.
  • In China, “what censored actually means”. “One day last summer, an anonymous member posted something on a Baidu forum devoted to the online game World of Warcraft, and it became an Internet meme: Jia Junpeng, your mother wants you to go home to eat. The cheeky, mysterious sentence received seven million hits and 300,000 comments on the first day. . . . Around the time the post originally appeared, a famous blogger named Guo Baofeng was arrested [by the Mawei police] for posting allegations of an official cover-up in the brutal rape of a 25-year-old woman named Yan Xiaoling in Mawei, a district in the city of Fuzhou. She later died of her injuries. . . . Bloggers began calling on people to send postcards to the Mawei police: Guo Baofeng, your mother wants you to go home to eat. Similar messages sprouted on bulletin-board sites. A few days later, Guo was released.”

Thanks to Evelyn Mitchell.