Chinese students say GRE stands for God Read English. The reading passages in GRE prep books are so difficult only God could read them.
More Maybe God will comment on your blog, said a Chinese friend. “I haven’t passed the GRE.”
Month: November 2010
Assorted Links
- Fermented salsa
- Vitamin D and schizophrenia
- Gut bacteria control fruit fly sex. “Imagine taking a course of antibiotics and finding your sexual preferences have changed.”
- The New York Times misdescribes Japan. Eamonn Fingleton is an excellent writer.
Thanks to Paul Sas, Anne Weiss, and JR Minkel.
Art Majors & UC Berkeley
In a fascinating bit of intellectual history, Andrew Gelman says he started off in math but came to doubt he was good enough at pure math. This reminds me of something one of my Tsinghua students told me a few days ago. An art major at his high school (the top high school in Beijing) was accepted at UC Berkeley with a big scholarship on the condition that the art student compete for Berkeley in a college math competition.
Dangers of Supplements
Via Robin Hanson I found this study of the effects of antioxidant supplements. It studied five (e.g., Vitamins A and C). Overall they were slightly harmful, except selenium.
This isn’t intuitive — why should they differ? — but fits well with previous work:
1. Evidence for benefits of selenium is overwhelming. You can look at a county-by-county map of US cancer rates and see a sharp drop along a certain line in the northeast. The line separates different geology. There is much more selenium in the soil on the low-cancer side of the line. Yet another case where correlation is powerful evidence for causation. An experiment with selenium supplementation found a reduction in cancer.
2. Several years ago, two experiments found Vitamin A supplements increased lung cancer. (Another study.) Later experiments cast doubt on Vitamins C and E. As one of Robin’s readers put it: “two of which were previously well known to be bad for you.”
Given this previous research, which is far more persuasive than the current study, the interesting contribution of the new study is methodological: will a meta-analysis of epidemiological studies reach the right conclusions? Will the signal outweigh the many sources of bias and error? In fact, it did. Again suggesting that severe critics of epidemiology, such as John Ioannidis, go too far.
Shallows Net
When I told my Chinese friend I read The New Yorker, she said she knew it was a very good magazine. A famous writer she knew of had written for it for 50 years. He was dead now. She didn’t remember his name. One of his books was Shallows Net.
She meant Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White.
A well-read and influential writer, she said.
Well-read, yes, influential, no, I said.
The Elements of Style might have been influential had its advice been good. Alas, it wasn’t. “Omit needless words.” “Be clear.” How to form the possessive. Please. I once took a short-story-writing class. When typing your story, the teacher said, put two spaces after a period.
In-Flight Fermented Foods?
I’ve tried taking fermented foods on airplane flights. Here’s what I’ve learned:
1. The rules speak of “medicinal” exceptions to the no-liquid policy. In practice, this means: (a) You need a doctor’s note and (b) you must need the medicine during the flight.
2. The rules say no gels. It turns out that yogurt is a gel.
3. What about Japanese pickles in sake dregs? When they were in a glass jar, with a lot of dregs (50% dregs, 50% pickle), the answer was no: Dregs are like gels. When they were in a plastic package (98% pickle, 2% dregs), they were okay.