Author: Seth Roberts

The McCarrison Society

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The McCarrison Society is named for Robert McCarrison, a British doctor who studied nutrition in India. Its website is full of important nutritional info, including this:

When I worked in East Africa from 1960 – 1965, there was not a single case of breast, colon or prostate cancer, no cardiovascular heart disease and any diabetes seemed relatively mild. Nor was this absence of such diseases due to poor diagnostic facilities.

It’s like a British version of the Weston Price Foundation.

Interesting lecture by Michael Crawford, its president.

More. It was founded in 1966 and has about 300 members.

How Much Play Will This Get?

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How will Al Gore respond to this, I wonder?

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade . . . All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930.

Thanks to Geoffrey Kidd.

More. A response to this article. Thanks to Kathy Wollard.

Better in Google Books

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I’ve heard that Samuel Beckett’s plays, written in French, are better in English. I have no idea if that’s true but I am sure that Television Without Pity: 752 Things We Hate to Love (and Love to Hate) About TV by Tara Ariano and Sarah Bunting is better in its more accessible, abridged Google Books version. I remember Sarah from when she was an especially visible fan of My So-Called Life. I got a much-enjoyed soundtrack cassette from her. Then she and Ariano started Television Without Pity, a brilliant entrepreneurial idea, which has helped me understand so many erudite HBO dramas.

My Theory of Human Evolution (micropygmies)

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In 2004, anthropologists discovered fossils of tiny human ancestors on an Indonesian island. Called micropygmies, they were about three feet tall. Their brains were smaller than chimpanzee brains. They appeared to be descended from Homo erectus rather than Homo sapiens.

They survived until about 20,000 years ago — which was impressive, since Homo sapiens reached nearby islands about 50,000 years ago. Why didn’t the Homo sapiens kill off the micropygmies? Jared Diamond was puzzled by this:

The discoverers of the Flores micropygmies conclude that they survived on Flores until at least 18,000 years ago (1, 2). To me, that is the most astonishing finding, even more astonishing than the micropygmies’ existence. We know that full-sized H. sapiens reached Australia and New Guinea through Indonesia by 46,000 years ago, that most of the large mammals of Australia then promptly went extinct (probably in part exterminated by H. sapiens), and that the first arrival of behaviorally modern H. sapiens on all other islands and continents in the world was accompanied by similar waves of extinction/extermination. We also know that humans have exterminated competing humans even more assiduously than they have exterminated large nonhuman mammals. How could the micropygmies have survived the onslaught of H. sapiens?

One could perhaps seek a parallel in the peaceful modern coexistence of full-sized sapiens and pygmy sapiens in the Congo and Philippines, based on complementary economies, with pygmy hunter-gatherers trading forest products to full-sized sapiens farmers. But full-sized sapiens hunter-gatherers 18,000 years ago would have been much too similar economically to micropygmy hunter-gatherers to permit coexistence based on complementary economies and trade. One could also invoke the continued coexistence of chimpanzees and humans in Africa, based on chimps being economically too different from us to compete (very doubtful for micropygmies), and on chimps being too dangerous to be worth hunting (probably true for micropygmies). Then, one could point to the reported survival of the pygmy stegodont elephants on Flores until 12,000 years ago (1, 2): If stegodonts survived so long in the presence of H. sapiens, why not micropygmies as well? Finally, one might suggest that all of the recent dates for stegodonts and micropygmies on Flores are in error [despite the evidence presented in (1) and (2)], and that both stegodonts and micropygmies became extinct 46,000 years ago within a century of H. sapiens‘ arrival on Flores. All of these analogies and suggestions strike me as implausible: I just can’t conceive of a long temporal overlap of sapiens and erectus, and I am reluctant to believe that all of the dates in (1) and (2) are wrong. Hence I don’t know what to make of the reported coexistence.

Yes, I know, when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. But I think Diamond is quite wrong about the nature of Homo sapiens economies 50,000 years ago. To Diamond, the big change was the invention of agriculture. Before that, hunter-gatherer; after that, farmer and occupational specialization. I believe there were vast economic changes long before agriculture — it took a long time to evolve language, and that didn’t start until there was already plenty of trading. By 50,000 years ago, I’m sure there was lots of specialization (Person A makes/knows X, Person B makes/knows Y), giving the Homo sapiens all sorts of tools and other useful expertise that the micropygmies didn’t have. They both hunted and gathered but much larger brains and a vast amount of expertise would have been for naught if they didn’t hunt and gather different foods. Homo erectus did not have anything like human language, as far as I can tell; therefore they didn’t have lots of trading or expertise. The two groups could co-exist because their foods were different. I suspect the H. sapiens, able to hunt really large animals, thought small animals, which supported the micropygmies, a waste of time.

More about Acne (continued)

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When I was a teenager, my dermatologist gave me a long list of foods that might cause acne. It wasn’t any help at the time but later, when my acne was better, it helped me realize that drinking Diet Pepsi caused me to get acne 2 or 3 days later because “cola drinks” was on the list.

Now I learn from Tucker Max that it was probably the caffeine that did it:

I had bad acne in high school. I cut all caffeine out of my diet–cola, chocolate, etc–and about 90% of the acne went away. I got the rest with Accutane.

Very useful information. The list my dermatologist gave me was too long and too homogenous. “The acne caffeine link is well-known to dermatologists,” Tucker added. Except those who claim acne has nothing to do with diet.

Brain-Enhancing Drugs

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A helpful collection of stories about the use of drugs that help you get things done. This amused me:

Individuals who experiment with these substances are on their own, testing drugs on themselves in a wild, crowdsourced, ad hoc brain-enhancement experiment. They join a scientific tradition of self-experimentation that stretches back to Santorio Santorio, a 16th-century physiologist.

If you experiment with mood-altering drugs, you join an older tradition.

More about Never Enough

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From Never Enough by Joe McGinniss, which I blogged about:

One day she noticed that Michael wasn’t wearing the [$7000] watch [she’d given him]. He was embarrassed to tell her why. Finally, he said he’d told his brother Lance about the affair but Lance had been born again and told Michael he was immoral. More to the point, he told Michael he was fired. They argued. Finally, Lance said that Michael could keep his job in return for the watch.

Shades of the indulgences that upset Martin Luther! You don’t find this sort of detail in other books.

How Things Begin (conference-call classes about Indian philosophy)

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Waiting for a BART train I met Krishna Kashyap, a San Diego businessman, who teaches classes on Indian philosophy by conference call. He was born in India and studied philosophy there before he came to America.

There are many such classes. About 15 years ago, a Berkeley student named Mani Varadarajan started a listserv called bhaktilist, which allowed people who were interested in Vaishnava Vedanta to contact each other and exchange ideas. This is how the conference-call classes began. Bhaktilist no longer exists, but many lists came from it, including srirangasri@yahoogroups.com and oppiliappan@yahoogroups.com. There are several thousand people on these lists.

Kashyap himself recently stopped teaching classes so that he would have more time to learn. He is now taking classes with a teacher named K. S. Varadachar. He dials his number in India at a particular time. Other people can dial in as well. They listen and ask questions. “I got isolated from my community when I came to this country 20 years ago,” Kashya said. “Reading books is not enough. There wasn’t any other way to communicate [besides the conference calls]. When I wanted to learn I had to get teachers from India.”

Now there are 4 or 5 classes simultaneously; they meet by phone once/week, using freeconferencecall.com. The Indian lecturers don’t get paid or at least such is the convention. They are given an end-of-term “gift,” called sambhavana, that is $200-$1000.

A vast amount about Indian philosophies is here.

How different from American higher education! People learn easily, without coercion, without threats, without punishments, without external rewards, if they see their teacher as a guru. The American term for guru, of course, is motivational speaker.

More about Acne

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The highlight of my recent trip to New York was a talk I gave at Landmark High School, a public high school near Columbus Circle. The students paid close attention. Afterwards, a student named John Cortez told me what he’d figured out about what causes his acne. His skin was clear so I had to believe he knew what he was talking about.

He has three rules: 1. Eat less greasy food. 2. Work out hard. 3. Wash face extremely well, especially after working out. The last rule is surprising because one of Allen Neuringer’s students found that acne got better when she stopped washing her face. John explained his reasoning like this:

When I was little I got something because of the lack of hand washing. Nothing serious — it went away — but it caused me to become sort of a neat freak. When i started to get pimples I thought it was because i didn’t wash my face well. When i started to wash my face better, my acne stopped getting worse. One day i got lazy and from there on I stopped washing. Then I noticed that I was almost covered with pimples. When I got in a gym I realized that when i sweat and as soon as possible, washed my face got less pimples and prevented those nasty huge acne.

Amount JC figured out about acne while in high school: A lot. Amount SR figured about acne while in high school: Zero.

Addendum. Another unexpected aftereffect of my talk was that Shangri-La Diet forum traffic went way up. That evening, at one point there were 307 people simultaneously reading the forums, a new record. The average daily maximum during the days just before was about 150. There were about 50 people at my talk. Go figure.

How Things Begin (Reading the OED)

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Maybe this post should be titled How Books Get Written. A curious feature of the book industry is that it gets almost all of its key ingredient — book manuscripts — from amateurs. No other big industry is like this. If our economy is a giant experiment, this point is an outlier. A huge outlier. What does it mean?

To find out, it would help to look at specific cases. I asked Ammon Shea, author of Reading the OED (forthcoming), how he managed to write it. He replied:

The advance was plenty for me to live on for a year, which is approximately how long the book took. However, I live cheap. I moved in with my girlfriend, who owns her own apartment, and so the rent, or maintenance costs, are low. We cook at home, tend to not buy things that we don’t need, and our idea of excitement is to go to a new library.

I had wanted to read the OED for quite some time, but knew that I didn’t have the leisure to spend ten hours a day doing so. I wrote the book proposal to see if I could convince some publisher to, in effect, subsidize my hobby.

I’ve worked as either a musician or a furniture mover for most of the past twenty years – both are occupations which allow a certain freedom; freedom from both responsibility and security. Taking off time was not so much of a problem. In terms of circulating the proposal I had my agent send it out. He’s the same one that I had when I wrote several other books, some eight or ten years ago.

Ammon’s editor is the same as mine (Marian Lizzi), which is why I knew about his book. Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21730 Pages (= 60 pages/day) will be published in August.