Month: July 2010

Two Faces Better Than One?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Here I describe my discovery that seeing faces on TV in the morning improved my mood the next day. The details of the effect suggested that the ideal stimulus is what you’d see during a conversation. For a long time I used the C-Span show Booknotes as the main source of the faces. I watched it on a 25-inch TV. More recently I used my own face in a mirror. It was readily available and perfectly life-size. I listened to a podcast or book at the same time.

A few months ago, Caleb Cooper commented saying that he’d found that looking at two faces every morning seemed to work better than looking at one face. He found that Bloggingheads.tv expanded to full screen on a 24-inch monitor (measured diagonally) produced close-to-life-size faces, which is what he wanted.

This interested me for several reasons: 1. It might make the effect stronger. 2. Bloggingheads.tv has a big selection, offering control over size. 3. I disliked looking at my face for long times. 4. It seems more naturalistic than looking at my own face.

I’ve been trying this with a 22-inch monitor (which I already had). Perhaps 24-inch would be better. The effect does seem stronger, as Caleb said.

I asked Caleb several questions about his experience.

How did you get started doing this?

I think it started when I read your posts about standing and sleeping. This led me to read your paper on self experimentation and sleep. Like you, I often suffered from early awakenings where I would wake up around 2-3 hours early, still feeling tired but having a hard time going back to sleep.

Based on what I learned from you and other sources, I tried out the following; got a pair of blue blocker clip-ons for my glasses which I put on about two hours before bed; ordered an Apollo goLite blue light emitter that I use for about an hour in the morning, I would sometimes take 1/3 mg of melatonin nine hours after waking up, and 3mg half hour before bed, and I started standing on a high difficulty Thera-Band balance pad on one leg while looking into a mirror for 30 minutes in the morning.

What made you think it was worth a try?

Well, why not:) Most self experimentation can be easily done for practically no cost, while the potential upside is significant. There’s also satisfying curiosity, expanding self knowledge, gaining mastery over your mind and body… You had a plausible theory, had collected suggestive data, and I’d already found the appetite suppression effect of the Shagnri-La was very real, so you had a track record of introducing ideas worth paying attention to.

What happened at first?

It felt to me like my sleep modestly improved, sleeping through the night longer and having the energy to get up and go much sooner after waking. This was awhile ago though, I didn’t keep any data, and I was adding and dropping different things, so my experience doesn’t have a high enough confidence interval for drawing any general inferences.

When did you make those changes?

I’d guess around sixteen months ago.

After you made those changes (“got a pair of BlueBlocker glasses…”) did your mood change?

It improved in as much as waking up feeling rested makes you feel a lot better than trying to get up while still tired.

Tell me something about yourself (job, age, etc.).

I got into medicine through Clinical Massage Therapy. Being a high school dropout I wanted something I could get into quickly, then sink or swim on my own. Massage is one of the few fields the university-accreditation complex hasn’t sunk its tentacles deeply into (a mixed blessing; for an autodidact it lets you quickly start a great career, but the field really needs a bifurcated certification track to separate medical massage from relaxational spa massage). I live in the Pacific Northwest, near the site where they developed the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Despite all the lingering nuclear waste, it’s a nice, mid sized metro area. I’m in my mid twenties.

More Flight From Data

Seth Roberts8 Comments

I’ve blogged many times about the desire of professors to show off and how it interferes with being useful. It doesn’t just make them bad teachers, it makes them bad scientists. Here’s an example from economics (via Marginal Revolution):

“The mainstream of academic research in macroeconomics puts theoretical coherence and elegance first, and investigating the data second,” says Mr. Rogoff. For that reason, he says, much of the profession’s celebrated work “was not terribly useful in either predicting the financial crisis, or in assessing how it would it play out once it happened.”

“[Academic economists] almost pride themselves on not paying attention to current events,” he says.

Pure Veblen, who in Theory of the Leisure Class provided many examples of people, including professors, priding themselves on being useless. Men wear ties, he said, to show they don’t do manual labor (which is clearly useful).

My research is closer to biology, where you can say the same thing: much of the profession’s celebrated work has not been terribly useful. Yesterday I gave an example (the oncogene theory of cancer).

Modern Veblen: Flight From Data.

TV Recommendations

Seth Roberts5 Comments

TV is getting better and better.

1. Temple Grandin (HBO). I’d read Oliver Sacks’s story about her and seen a BBC documentary about her. This was far more moving.

2. Work of Art: The Next Great Artist (Bravo). A competition. Each week the contestants are given a task (make a portrait, make art from junk). The person who does the worst job is eliminated. Bravo’s great The It Factor followed actors in New York and Los Angeles and made you feel the constant rejection. This has the same vibe in the sense that much of what the contestants make is heavily criticized (“a middle-school art project”).

3. Undercover Boss (CBS). A head of a big company works at a low-level job in his company. Week after week, it has some of the most touching moments I’ve ever seen. When this or that employee learns that someone noticed their hard work or talent, they start crying. Because it relied on deception (“we’re making a documentary about entry-level jobs”), I wonder if there will be another season.

The Oncogene Theory of Cancer

Seth Roberts8 Comments

I am looking forward to reading Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us — And How to Know When Not to Trust Them by David Freedman because of this sentence in an excerpt:

Cancer experts shake their heads today over the ways in which generations of predecessors wasted decades hunting down the mythical environmental or viral roots of most cancers, before pronouncing as a sure thing the more recent theory [that] cancer is caused by mutations in a small number of genes — a theory that, as we’ll see, has yielded almost no benefits to patients after two decades.

He’s referring to the oncogene theory of cancer, for which Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus won a Nobel Prize in 1989. I made a similar comment at a dinner:

Several years ago, at a big Thanksgiving dinner in an Oakland loft, I told the woman sitting next to me, a genetic counselor, what a travesty the Biology [Nobel] prizes were. The discovery that smoking causes lung cancer had improved the lives of millions of people, I said [yet the discoverers hadn’t gotten a Nobel Prize]; the discovery of so-called oncogenes hadn’t improved the life of even one person. She replied that she was the sister of [Harold Varmus]. The next day I learned she complained I had been rude!

I’m glad Freedman agrees with me. My low opinion of oncogene theory didn’t prevent Varmus from becoming head of the National Institutes of Health, whose recent budget was about $30 billion/year.

Thanks to Kathy Tucker.

Crazy Spicing Ice Cream

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Unfamiliar foods cause weight loss, says the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet. If you add enough spices to a food, it will become unfamiliar.An ice cream store in San Francisco called Humphrey Slocombe has some of the world’s strangest flavors, likely to be unfamiliar until you eat them many times.

Their flavors include Eight Ball Stout, Pink Grapefruit Tarragon, Carrot Mango, Russian Imperial Stout, White Chocolate Lavender. Here’s what happened when the owners ate a lot of them:

In the store’s first few months, Godby and his business partner, Sean Vahey, scooped from noon to 9 each night, ate nothing but ice cream, traded the leftover brownies for cocktails at a dive bar called Dirty Thieves and still lost weight. Since then they’ve hired eight employees and — hazard of the job — each gained back the 10 pounds they’d lost.

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

Homemade Yogurt Tip

Seth Roberts13 Comments

Mark Frauenfelder describes how he makes yogurt with a yogurt machine. Made by Hand, his new book, has a chapter about fermented foods.

Let me add my two cents. After several years of making yogurt, I finally figured out there are two crucial steps: 1. Denaturing (expanding) the milk proteins. 2. Growing the bacteria. They require different temperatures. The milk proteins, as far as I can tell, denature at temperatures starting around 130 degrees F. You want the milk to be in that range for an hour or so. Below that temperature, the milk proteins curl up again unless bacteria get in the way. The best temperature for growing the bacteria is said to be around 110 degrees F., although I’ve found that incubation at 92 degrees F. also works.

So the ideal process for making yogurt is something like this: 1. Keep the milk at 140 degrees for a few hours. 2. Add the starter bacteria. 3. Keep the milk at 110 degrees for a long time, say 12 hours. I have a yogurt maker that approximates the initial higher-temperature phase by having you add boiling water around the container. The first time I tried it I was surprised how well it worked (how creamy the yogurt was) because it was much simpler than the usual recipes where you boil the milk, let it cool, and so on — and which after all that produced mediocre results. It took me a long time to realize I’d get even better results with my yogurt maker if the milk was warmer when I started.