Author: Seth Roberts

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 2)

Seth Roberts13 Comments

A few days ago (Tuesday night) I slept unusually well, presumably because Tuesday day had been unusual in some way. I made a list of nine possible reasons.

Today I realized I’d forgotten something: 10. Stood on one foot more than usual. To pass the time while looking at my face in the mirror I had stood on one foot while stretching the other leg, pulling my foot up behind me. I was curious how long I could do this so I did a few trials with each leg where I did it until it became too painful. I lasted about 2 minutes on one leg and 2.5 minutes on the other.

This might seem trivial — and I forgot about it. But standing on one foot continuously for a relatively long time surely stressed my leg muscles much more than usual. Previous research convinced me that standing many hours improves sleep. Maybe this “extreme standing” produces the same hormonal effects in a few minutes as normal standing does in ten hours. That would be wonderful!

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The Professor Has No Clothes

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In 1953 Harvard appointed an architect named Josep Sert to a powerful position. Sert had some amazing ideas. From a review of a new book about him:

With the help of Walter Gropius, [Sert] was appointed dean [of the architecture school] at Harvard in 1953, where he set up the world’s first course on urban design, a perfect platform from which to propagate the modernist Ciam agenda for shaping cities using new science, principles and forms. . . .

As propagandist for a type of urban thinking which would have disastrous consequences, Sert had a programmatic mind-set which could see the beauty of historic cities, but his totalitarian attitude insisted on extrapolating abstract systems out of their features. In 1953, for instance, he proposed that if repeated endlessly, the traditional patio house could make a whole city. . . Sert continued to insist that since the unplanned energy of cities is “chaotic” and “disorderly,” the planner must normalise and “overcome” it. He expressed these convictions in abstract terminologies about neighborhoods, scalar zones, urban functions, categories and so on, and in complacent assertions — “every city is composed of cells, and the role of planning is to put these cells into some kind of system or relationship.”

His 1952 plan for Havana is one shocking example. Commissioned by a group of speculators intent on carving up the city, Sert’s Pilot Plan “addressed the entire metropolitan area of Havana, applying Le Corbusier’s rules on classification of roads,” a totally abstract theory. Having destroyed the city’s historic streets and obliterated all memory of Old Havana, he proposed “clusters” of what he supposed would be “charming streets recalling the city’s origins,” but with dimensions that would use the completely abstract principles of Le Corbusier’s Modulor. This awful scenario was to be dominated by “tall towers for a new financial district” which would have wrecked Havana once and for all.

Thankfully, the 1959 Cuban revolution thwarted this insane plan.

I wonder what real-world events led Hans Christian Andersen to write “ The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well?

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Last night I slept extremely well. I slept about eight hours and woke up feeling really good. In the past I’ve slept this well only after being on my feet nine or ten hours. Yesterday I was on my feet maybe four hours. I usually sleep well but this was a distinct improvement.

What caused it? Yesterday had many unusual features (like most days), but I did deliberately vary one thing:

1. I looked at faces (actually, my face in a mirror) earlier than usual. Usually I start around 7:40 am; yesterday I started about 7:10 am. (Background: I discovered that seeing faces in the morning improves my mood the next day. For example, seeing faces Monday morning improves my mood on Tuesday. And makes my mood worse Monday night. Details here.) I’ve done this before — watched the faces earlier than usual — and hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Yesterday may have been different, however, because three days ago I changed something. I always listen to something (audiobook, a Google Talk, This American Life episode, etc.) while I look at my face in the mirror. Three days ago I moved the sound source directly behind the mirror.

This is my best guess why my sleep was better than usual. But yesterday was unusual in several other ways as well:

2. I went outside (in the shade) 30 minutes earlier than usual.

3. Usually wear contact lenses while sleeping but didn’t.

4. Usually wear a tooth guard while sleeping but didn’t.

5. Salmon for dinner, which isn’t unusual, but I had more than usual.

6. No aerobic exercise.

7. Did a lot of chores I’d put off. (Peace of mind?)

8. On the preceding days, the sound source was behind the mirror. In other words, it was the cumulative effect that produced better sleep.

9. The end of a cold.

Now I’ll do all sorts of things to test these possibilities.

There’s a saying No one believes a theory but the theorist; everyone believes an experiment but the experimenter. This illustrates why. The experimenter can see all sorts of confoundings and special circumstances that others cannot.

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The Undone Work: Electric Cars

Seth Roberts1 Comment

During Bill McKibben’s book tour for Maybe One (1998), an argument for having no more than one child, he gave a reading in Berkeley. I attended, and asked a question: Jane Jacobs says the problem isn’t too many people, the problem is the undone work. (Which I also said at the end of The Shangri-La Diet.) For example, air pollution. The solution won’t be fewer people, it will be cars that pollute less. I asked McKibben what he thought of this. He said he thought highly of Jacobs, but the EV1 was a failure. Terrible answer, I thought.

Yesterday I spoke to the owner of an electric car. It is entirely powered by electricity from solar panels on the roof of her house. It can’t go on the highway but is perfectly good for taking her and her two children around town. She’s had it about a year; she bought it after seeing someone else drive one. Leaving aside the cost of the solar panels, driving costs her almost nothing, is very quiet, and produces no pollution. The car was made in Vancouver. In America, it’s small; it wouldn’t be small in Japan. Looks like the future, I thought.

Green Motors, a Berkeley store specializing in electric cars, started by the man she bought it from. Lovely website, his enthusiasm shines through. Car-maker difficulties.

Weston Price and the Olympics

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I was surprised how much I liked the Olympics opening ceremonies on Friday. I hadn’t been so transfixed by an Olympic event since Joan Benoit won the first woman’s marathon, leading the whole way. At one point during the opening ceremonies a young girl in a red dress sang a Chinese song. Or so it seemed:

The girl in the red dress with the pigtails, called Lin Miaoke, 9, and from a Beijing primary school, has become a national sensation since Friday night, giving interviews to all the most popular newspapers.

But the show’s musical designer felt forced to set the record straight. He gave an interview to Beijing radio saying the real singer was a seven-year-old girl who had won a gruelling competition to perform the anthem, a patriotic song called “Hymn to the Motherland”.

At the last moment a member of the Chinese politburo who was watching a rehearsal pronounced that the winner, a girl called Yang Peiyi, might have a perfect voice but was unsuited to the lead role because of her buck teeth.

Weston Price’s research, described in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, implies that buck teeth are caused by too little of a dietary growth factor, which a commenter described as “the menaquinone-4 form of vitamin K2.”

What Do Organizers Do?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

At a cooking class, I met Ami DeAvilla, a professional organizer. It’s a profession so new — 15 years old? — that I was curious what sort of problems she works with. She told me some examples:

Example 1. A woman who was 4 years behind filing her taxes. She was collecting the letters from Franchise Tax Board and the IRS. There wasn’t that much money involved — she might even have had some money owed to her. Became overwhelming and daunting. As the years went on, doing her taxes became overwhelming. She had a “fear basket”: those letters went in it. I was able to come in & open the most recent of the letters. She did have all of the info. There was a lot of fear involved. Also she had gotten divorced. Emotion of having to handle financial stuff on her own. She contacted me because she knew she needed to file but couldn’t do it on her own. Her sister found me through the website of the National Association of Professional Organizers. We met twice/week for a few hours. We did 3 years together; she did the last one on her own. Total 15 hours [Ami’s current rate is $100/hour]. One 3-hour session was about her current relationship to money, which was as important as the taxes. Just as having a heart attack can lead you to improve your health habits because it indicates a greater problem.

Example 2. A woman who for 37 years had been in the same home. She needed to decide whether to stay there because her husband’s health was getting worse. It was a two- story house. Two sets of steps to climb because it was on a hill. Not possible for him to be mobile in and out of the house. He had severe back pain and had trouble getting up the stairs. It was her home. She didn’t want to leave. She was feeling overwhelmed with the decisions to be made. After she decided to move, there were decisions about their stuff. They were moving to a much smaller place. Moving from four-bedroom house to three-room apartment. Sorting through their entire life. Dividing belongings among all their children and grandchildren.

Example 3. A small business owner who had been in practice for over 20 years. His home-based office was a mess. People not billed. Papers all over the office. He works on site. He came to me because it was daunting to take care of tasks that needed to happen. He would hire someone to help in the office but they wouldn’t work there until it was cleaned up. They didn’t want to feel overwhelmed by the clutter. He wasn’t able to clean up his office. He was working a lot of hours, trying to balance personal life with business life. Now that he was taking some personal time, and not working all night, business things weren’t being taken care of.

Example 4. Published author, several books out. She was juggling four pressing projects and trying to start a website. Continuing on a book she was halfway into. Couldn’t make the writing work. I worked her with for 2 hrs to help her prioritize her time. Previously she was able to manage some of this better. When the website came along it became another project that kept the writing from happening. She’d been working on the book for a year or less; she was more than halfway through, and now falling behind the publisher’s deadline. She wanted a plan, plus physical organization of her workspace. We shifted the space a little bit to help her focus on writing. She was getting distracted too much.

Example 5. A woman called me because her house was not the way she wanted it. Three people had died and she had inherited their belongings. She felt overwhelmed in her own home. She’d lived there over 20 years. It was overwhelming to go through things and make decisions about what she wanted to keep. Stuff had gotten packed in quite a bit. We went through her house room by room and cleared stuff out. Started in the kitchen. Less emotional. Not much room left on the counters. We did 4 or 5 rooms, including office space. She had been a graphic designer.

You can reach Ami at amisolutions at mac dot com.

The Best Food Writing I’ve Read

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I subscribed to Saveur for several years but never finished any of the long articles — which weren’t that long. This should have puzzled me, but it didn’t. A month ago, however, I got the audiobook of Secret Ingredients, the New Yorker anthology about food. I was surprised how many of the articles I didn’t want to listen to. 90%? Usually I like New Yorker anthologies and read most of the articles. I’m a more tolerant listener than reader which made the comparision even worse.

Here’s my explanation. Food writing is like downtown Edinburgh. Its main street has shops on one side, on the other side a park. What should have been the economically most lively street in the city is rendered half as effective as it might be by the fact that half of it isn’t businesses. As something to write about, food is similar. Just as a park is economically inert, food is psychologically inert. Like a park, food can be pleasant (to read about) but it doesn’t act. It isn’t alive. This is why those Saveur feature articles were hard to read, I realized. They resembled flat lists: We cooked and ate X, Y, and Z. It’s incredibly hard to make that sort of thing fun to read. The best article in Secret Ingredients was John McPhee’s profile of Euell Gibbons. It’s a mini-adventure story, with an interesting guy at the center. The food is . . . a condiment.

This is why I’m so impressed by the chapter “Waizhou, USA” in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee. Waizhou means “out of state” — in this case, away from New York City. It’s the story of a family who left New York to run a Chinese restaurant in a small Georgia town. It took a shocking turn that Lee didn’t expect. Police took the children away. The father was arrested. “The offices pointed to the burn scars from cooking oil on the parents’ arms and said that was evidence that the couple had a history of fighting.” This had horrible and ramifying effects. “Oh, I can’t eat there anymore,” said a lawyer, “that’s the DV [domestic violence] case.” The teenage daughter starts using the court system to punish her mother. The parents are arrested again. “They had violated court rules by driving near their children’s foster home. Because they had sold their restaurant they were considered a flight risk.” Eventually they get their children back, and go back to New York. It’s a whole slice of life I’d never read about before. Enormously emotional and unpredictable. The father enjoyed jail. “When I was in jail for two days, it was really relaxing,” he told Lee.