I returned vol. 3 of Not Only the Best of the Larry Sanders Show to my public library but forgot to include the DVD. I got a phone call about it. I returned with the DVD, which I had put in a paper envelope.
Here it is, I said. As I was leaving, the librarian asked if I wanted my envelope back. “In case this happens again,” she said. Everyone laughed.
Type of joke: veiled not-serious deprecation.
Conversation on a Berkeley lawn:
Andrew Gelman: You’d think we prefer an upward spike in pleasure — we’re happier for a while, then return to normal — to a downward one, but the evidence isn’t clear.
Seth: I know someone who woke himself up so he could enjoy falling asleep.
Andrew: Really?
Seth: Yes, really.
Andrew: Was that you?
Seth: No, it wasn’t me.
Andrew: If I heard about someone doing that, I’d think it was you.
Phil Price: That’s brilliant, actually.
Leonard Mlodinow, author of Euclid’s Window (about geometry), Feynman’s Rainbow, and a forthcoming book on probability and chance, and co-author with Stephen Hawking of A Briefer History of Time, was the brilliant sleeper. (Not Montaigne.) He might have woken himself up while he was a grad student at Berkeley (in physics). After Berkeley, he became an assistant professor of physics at Caltech. He left Caltech to become a writer. As unorthodox in a big way as waking yourself up so that you can fall asleep is in a small way.
The Cleveland painter Michelle Muldrow was a musician for ten years before becoming a painter — although she got a BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) before that. From an unusual background, an unusual creative process:
Interviewer: Describe your working process when creating a new work.
MM: Usually I begin reading about environmental issues, urban development, really anything touching on the subjects of land use, as well American history and fiction. I guess I sort of consider myself a sponge at the beginning stages of work, then usually some travel helps and I take tons of source photos. From there I organize my photos into different obsessions, be it the artificial horticulture and landscaping in the modern developments, or the death of inner ring suburbs, subdivisions, etc, at that point I look for what I am most interested in painting. It’s sort of like all my intellectual obsessions still must go through a filter of how I feel, and that is an important element to my work- nostalgia. I suppose I attribute that to the rootlessness of my childhood, I am always trying to make sense of my landscape and home. Then I begin the body of my work. I tend to approach my work as a series or body rather than as individual images. I always prep, underpaint and paint at least 4-5 paintings all at once, never one at a time. I freehand draw, then do a monochromatic underpainting, and from there, I paint.
Painting, in other words, resembles blogging: You can blog about anything, you can paint anything — so long as you care about it.
One of her favorite writers is Jane Jacobs. She used to live in San Francisco, where there seemed to be no upper limit on the value of property. In Cleveland, with boarded-up homes everywhere, there seems to be no lower limit.
Since the beginning of time everyone has been eating and sleeping — a lot. If you thought this meant there couldn’t be any new and cool twists on these activities, you’d be wrong.
1. Eating. “Last night I tried to “race myself” because I knew I would get full fairly quickly but I really enjoyed what I was eating so I ate fast.” This is from the SLD forums. Outcome of race: Lost. “I still couldn’t get through the whole salad, just too full to eat another bite. That’s amazing to me.”
2. Sleeping. Someone I know used to wake himself up in the middle of the night because he enjoyed falling asleep.
The journal Experimental Mathematics, started in 1992, publishes “formal results inspired by experimentation, conjectures suggested by experiments, descriptions of algorithms and software for mathematical exploration, [and] surveys of areas of mathematics from the experimental point of view.” The founder wanted to make clearer and give more credit to an important way that mathematicians come up with new ideas. As the journal’s statement of philosophy puts it, “Experiment has always been, and increasingly is, an important method of mathematical discovery. (Gauss declared that his way of arriving at mathematical truths was “through systematic experimentation.”) Yet this tends to be concealed by the tradition of presenting only elegant, well-rounded, and rigorous results.”
When John Tukey wrote Exploratory Data Analysis (1977), he was doing something similar: shedding light on how to come up with new scientific ideas plausible enough to be worth testing. Tukey obviously believed this was a neglected area of statistics research. I was told that the publisher of EDA was uninterested in it; they only published it because it was part of a two-book deal. The other book, with Frederick Mosteller, was more conventional.
My paper titled “ Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas” made the same point as Tukey about an earlier step in the scientific process: data collection. How to collect data to generate new ideas worth testing was a neglected area of scientific method. Self-experimentation, derided as a way of testing ideas, might be an excellent way of generating ideas worth testing.
I think of it as crawling back into the water. In the beginning, all math was conjecture and experimentation. In the beginning, all data analysis was exploratory. In the beginning, all science was tiny and devoted to coming up with new ideas. From these came methods of proof, confirmatory data analysis, and methods of carefully testing ideas. Human nature being what it is, users and teachers of the new methods came to greatly disparage the earlier methods. Gary Taubes told me that he spoke to several obesity researchers who thought that the field essentially began with the discovery of leptin. Nothing before that mattered, they believed.
Thanks to Dev Rana.
David Marcus made the following comment on an earlier post:
It’s a myth that Eskimos have low rates of heart disease. Actually, recent studies have shown they have high rates of cardiovascular disease (50% higher than western populations) despite diets that are very high in fatty fish.
Mr. Marcus makes a very good point (and it is wonderful to get such informative feedback). Myth is wrong. A Greenland doctor’s casual observation — Eskimos almost never died of heart attacks — was confirmed by a detailed study, published in Acta Medica Scandinavica in 1980. A r ecent study, however, found this:
OBJECTIVES: The thirty-year-old hypothesis that omega-3 fatty acid (FA) may “reduce the development of thrombosis and atherosclerosis in the Western World” still needs to be tested. Dyerberg-Bang based their supposition on casual observations that coronary atherosclerosis in Greenlandic Inuit was ‘almost unknown’ and that they consumed large amounts of omega-3 FAs. However, no association was demonstrated with data. STUDY DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. METHODS: 454 Alaskan Eskimos were screened for coronary heart disease (CHD), using a protocol that included ECG, medical history, Rose questionnaire, blood chemistries, including plasma FA concentrations, and a 24-hour recall and a food frequency questionnaire assessment of omega-3 FA consumption. RESULTS: CHD was found in 6% of the cohort under 55 years of age and in 26% of those > or = 55 years of age. Eskimos with CHD consume as much omega-3 FAs as those without CHD, and the plasma concentrations confirm that dietary assessment. CONCLUSIONS: Average daily consumption of omega-3 FAs among Eskimos was high, with about 3-4 g/d reported, compared with 1-2 g/d used in intervention studies and the average consumption of 0.2 g/d by the American population. There was no association between current omega-3 FA consumption/blood concentrations and the presence of CHD.
A well-written abstract, by the way.
Science is like a game of telephone. It would be truly weird if the initial observation was wrong, given that it was later confirmed in detail and productively followed up — and no one doubts that omega-3 increases clotting time. But “replications” are never exact. This study, for example, measured “in vivo” CHD, whereas the initial observation was about causes of death. The group of Eskimos studied is probably different; and their lifestyle, especially their diet, may have changed substantially in the last 30 years. On the other hand, these new observations are consistent with the great difficulty there has been in confirming the idea that omega-3 fats reduce heart disease.
Can I use emoticons [with Google Chat]?
Yes. Emoticons make your chats funnier.
Source. Should I laugh or cry?
Herodotus on Babylon:
They have no physicians, but when a man is ill, they lay him in the public square, and the passers-by come up to him, and if they have ever had his disease themselves or have known any one who has suffered from it, they give him advice, recommending him to do whatever they found good in their own case, or in the case known to them; and no one is allowed to pass the sick man in silence without asking him what his ailment is.
Suroweicki’s book, like this example, was actually about the wisdom of passers-by (unconnected individuals) rather than crowds.
Thanks to David Cramer.
In this video Malcolm Kendrick, a Scottish doctor, points out the lack of cross-country correlation between cholesterol levels and heart disease rates.
In this video Kendrick explains why he believes that extreme stress — often caused by emigration — is a big reason for high rates of heart disease.
This view is supported by research by Michael Marmot and others on the social gradient: People higher in occupational level have better health than those below them. This seems to be because lower jobs are more stressful. The lower your job, the less control you have. Lack of control is the problem.
Kendrick’s view calls into question the usual interpretation of migrant studies. When persons emigrate across countries — from Japan to America, from India to England — they usually have higher heart disease rates in the new country This is often attributed to differences in diet — the old-country diet is presumed healthier than the new-country diet. Kendrick lays the blame elsewhere. He also makes an interesting point about Finland. Finland used to have a very high rate of heart disease. Kendrick points out that in the early 1950s, about 700,000 persons of Finnish descent were pushed by the Soviet government out of the Soviet Union and into Finland. Kendrick also mentions Roseto, Pennsylvania, a town created by emigration en masse from Roseto Italy. The old customs and social networks survived the move intact and the people of Roseto Pennsylvania were. for many years, remarkably healthy.
Previous posts on heart disease: Omega-3 and heart attacks (also here). The Framingham Study.
Thanks to Dave Lull.
Addendum: Kendrick on “ The Great Cholesterol Myth.”
Yesterday I heard Mitch “Lotus 1-2-3″ Kapor give the third of three talks at the UC Berkeley I-School on “ Disruptive Innovations I have Known and Loved” (podcast). This talk was about Second Life; the first two were about the PC and the Internet. It was a very nice talk I would have enjoyed more if I hadn’t had a cold. Even with a cold I was pleased by two things:
1. A graph of on-line Second Life activity. It was increasing at roughly the same rate as SLD-forums activity.
2. A comment that the short-term effect of similar technologies is less than expected; the long-term effect is far greater than expected. One long-term effect Kapor predicted is virtual meetings. I knew someone who was head of design for a very large powerful company — supposedly a dream job. But he had to travel all over the world to meet with his subordinates. Incredibly exhausting. So it wasn’t a dream job, and he gave it up.
I knew about the “disruptive technologies” idea from my work on variation in rat bar-pressing, which led me to read Clayton Christensen’s excellent The Innovator’s Dilemma. Disruptive technologies can be as simple as hydraulic power, which caused several steam-shovel companies to fold.
I had not thought of SLD as a technology; but I realized that’s what it is: A weight-loss technology. Disruptive, who knows, although Aaron Swartz was optimistic quite early. And today in the SLD forums I read this:
I’ve lost 85 lbs. and I have 25 lbs. to go and I just. Can’t. Quite. Process that idea. . . I’m at a new job where no one knows that I used to be incredibly heavy and there’s even a really cute fellow faculty member who seems to like me. He smiles at me. A lot. It’s nice. Everything is so . . . fantastic. I’m so happy I’m practically beside myself. . . . Almost every morning . . . I catch sight of myself in the full-length mirror out of the corner of my eye and the first thought is still “Is that me?”. And I have to stop. And look. And wrap my arms around my tummy – my much, much smaller tummy – and think “Oh that’s right. That IS me.” It always makes me laugh.
Podcasts of his earlier talks here (PC) and here (Internet).