- Interview with Royce White, the basketball player. I agree with him that addictions should be considered mental disorders. I think they are usually self-medication for a mood disorder, such as depression. His view that more than half of Americans have a mental disorder is consistent with my view that you need to see faces in the morning to have your mood control system work properly. Hardly anyone sees enough faces in the morning.
- Racial quotas at Harvard by Ron Unz. “Top officials at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton today strenuously deny the existence of Asian-American quotas, but their predecessors had similarly denied the existence of Jewish quotas in the 1920s, now universally acknowledged to have existed.”
- Traditional Filipino fermented foods (scientific paper)
- Omega-6 supplementation (with concurrent decrease in saturated fat) increases heart disease
- How not to globalize Korean food. For one thing, don’t assume all foreigners are alike.
Thanks to dearime.
Golly!
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/science/testing-of-some-deadly-diseases-on-mice-mislead-report-says.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
Seth: Thanks. I have already written a post about it, which will appear in a week or so (backlog).
On seeing faces, I get up every morning and my wife and I get our pile of kids off to school. I forget, but, doesn’t that count as seeing faces? Isn’t that very common?
Seth: If you have 30 minutes of face-to-face conversation, that should have an effect.
Apparently the Unz article is based on some uneven statistical sources which makes the Jewish over-representation a bit of an exaggeration.
https://andrewgelman.com/2013/02/that-claim-that-harvard-admissions-discriminate-in-favor-of-jews-after-checking-the-statistics-maybe-not/
Oh, oops, wrong Unz article. That one could be fine.
Speaking of mice being different from people:
https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_weller_could_the_sun_be_good_for_your_heart.html
People who live in places with more sunlight seem to be much less likely
to have heart attacks. (Studies mentioned are within Great Britain and
Britain vs. Australia.)
Subjects were exposed to UVA, which doesn’t produce Vitamin D.
Nonetheless, they produce more nitric oxide, and their blood pressure went
down a little.
It turns out that people (mice don’t, which made studying the phenomenon more difficult) have stores of precursors of nitric oxide
precursors in their skin, and sunlight activates them. A moderate amount
of UVA exposure is enough to lower blood pressure enough to affect heart
attack rates. (Note number of other factors which might be left out!) The
effect is stronger in older people.
The NO precusors may come from diet– specifically vegetables.
He finishes by saying that as a dermatologist, he tells people to stay out
of the sun, but he actually thinks there should be more work on a
risk/benefit analysis for sunlight considering that heart attacks are a
hundred times more common than skin cancer.
Anyway, the reason I found this especially interesting is that it seems to
me that depression corelates with grayish-looking skin, and depression is
considered an independent risk factor for heart attacks. So there might be
something in there about how much blood gets to the skin. (I’ve also seen
people stably lose that greyishness, I think there’s an emotional
component.)