Author: Seth Roberts

The Dog-Food Diet (part 1)

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From craigslist:

I have 2 dogs & I was buying a large bag of Pal at Big W and standing inline at the check out.

A woman behind me asked if I had a dog.

On impulse, I told her that no, I was starting The Pal Diet again . . . I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your pants pockets with Pal nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry & that the food is nutritionally complete.

Not absurd. Sclafani and Springer (1976) compared two groups of rats: (a) rats given rat chow (which resembles Pal nuggets) and (b) rats given rat chow plus human food (e.g., salami, cheese). Both groups could eat as much as they wanted. The second group gained a lot more weight than the first. I suspect rat chow is less fattening than human food because it is more bland and digested more slowly. This is one of the experiments that led me to the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Epidemiology: A Semi-Insider’s View

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On BART I met a graduate student in epidemiology. “What are the strengths and weaknesses of epidemiology?” I asked. Strengths:

1. It asks important questions. What causes cancer? for example.

2. The results are useful. They can guide public policy. If you learn that smoking causes cancer, you can start an anti-smoking campaign. Epidemiological results can also lead to informative experiments: Epidemiology suggests that X causes cancer, you do an experiment to test that conclusion.

Weaknesses:

1. Health is complicated, controlled by many things. Presumably this is why studies often have conflicting conclusions.

2. There is enough flexibility in data analysis that your original hypothesis may influence the way that you analyze your data.

I use epidemiology all the time — here, for example. It often makes an interesting idea more plausible. My ideas about depression, derived from studying the effects of seeing faces, became more plausible to me because of the epidemiology of depression.

The Twilight of Expertise (part 5: psychotherapy)

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In The Starfish and the Spider (2006), a book about decentralized organizations, one of the examples is Alcoholics Anonymous, started in 1935, in which local chapters are almost entirely autonomous from headquarters. Of course AA led to many similar programs: Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, and so on. All of these twelve-step programs offer therapy without therapists — for free. A little like the Protestant Reformation, which I mentioned earlier.

At a recent party I met a woman who runs an outpatient program for persons with mental disorders, including major depression. She asked me what I would suggest. Based on my faces research, I suggested early morning face-to-face meetings, especially for persons with depression. Very interesting, she said, AA folk wisdom is that morning meetings have the best success rates.

If you want to attend an early morning meeting (non-twelve-step), and you live in San Francisco, you may have a communal breakfast ($5 plus tax, served 8:30-9:30 am) at OneTaste (1074 Folsom at 7th St.), an “Urban Retreat Center”. If you can do this, I’m jealous. OneTaste is a group of 50 people who live and work together. They appear to support themselves by teaching yoga and giving other classes. They have been at their SF location for two years; before that they were at many different locations. The receptionist told me it was a “sensual community.” What’s that? I asked. “We try to activate our sensuality” etc., she said. I didn’t know what she meant. Is this on the website? I asked. Yes, she said, so I didn’t bother to take careful notes. I wish I had. The website puts it more bluntly: “Our purpose at OneTaste is to return to connection by researching our relationship to orgasm.” A recruitment video, to prepare for breakfast.

A New and Useful Word

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The word is black-and-white-ism. For instance:

Berman’s chief problem as a thinker is black-and-white-ism, and this is a good example of his failure to make subtle distinctions.

Scientists are guilty of black-and-white-ism all the time: this statistic is wrong, that way of doing things is a mistake, and so on. John Tukey wrote about this tendency in a paper called “Analyzing data: Sanctification or detective work?” If you believe data analysis is sanctification, there are indeed right ways and wrong ways, as with any ritual. But if science is not a set of rituals, talking about right and wrong confuses graduate students — who begin to think science is a set of rituals — and restricts what you can do. After you say something is wrong, it is harder to do it.

Can Dish It Out But Can’t Take It

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The presidents of dozens of liberal arts colleges have decided to stop participating in the annual college rankings by U.S. News and World Report.

From the NY Times. I commented earlier on the contradiction between how college presidents think students should be judged — they believe it is fine to judge all students according to one standard that usually has little to do with their strengths and goals — and how they wish to be their colleges to be judged.

“Frankly, it had bubbled up to the point of, why should we do this work for them?” said Judith P. Shapiro, the president of Barnard College.

Yes, exactly: Why help prospective students? Lest there be any doubt for whom colleges exist.

SLD Musings

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On her MySpace page, Janice writes:

I have been on [the Shangri-La Diet] for a month and I have lost 12 pounds! It is the easiest way to lose weight.

During this month she started riding a recumbent bike. I am struck by how often this happens: After people start SLD they start improving their lives in other ways. (Didn’t happen to me, by the way.) Does cessation of struggle with food (which took “energy”) leave more “energy” for other forms of self-improvement? I wasn’t struggling with food when I started SLD so I would fit that theory.

This wouldn’t explain why SLD causes non-caloric cravings (such as for coffee and cigarettes) to go away. Maybe they go away because they are triggered by hunger. Speaking of cigarettes, Gary Skaleski, who invented SLD nose-clipping, suggests that maybe you can quit smoking if you clip your nose while you smoke. You get the nicotine needed to remove the craving but the lack of smell removes the possibility of addiction. No one becomes addicted to plain sugar water, which has no smell. Fascinating idea.

Science in Action: Sunlight and Sleep (progress report)

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I’ve collected even more observations supporting the idea that outdoor light improves my sleep, as discussed earlier. Now I’d like to get some idea of the dose-response function. To sleep really well do I need two hours of outside light? Four hours? Eight hours?

I’ve started to rate my sleep on a scale where 50 = average sleep (average for the months before I started spending more time outside) and 100 = best sleep imaginable (which I got after standing about 10 hours). And I’ve started to use a stopwatch to measure how long I spend outdoors. I’ve also been using a light meter to measure the strength of light in various places. When I’m outdoors it’s almost always in the shade. Today I discovered that sitting indoors next to a cafe window the incident light was just as bright as when I sit outside. Great to know because indoors I can plug in my laptop.

A 1994 book chapter from Daniel Kripke‘s lab reported a correlation (0.24) between low light exposure and “abnormal sleep.” So the connection I am now studying has been plausible for many years. The measurements I am now making are easy, but no one made them. Perhaps too many people believe that anything other than a double-blind trial with control and experimental groups is, as Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, believes, a “mistake.”

My Jaw Dropped When I Read This

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From a review in tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review:

His ardent defense of states’ rights would have required him to uphold Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, not to mention segregated education, yet he lives with a white wife in Virginia. He is said to dislike light-skinned blacks, yet he is the legal guardian of a biracial child, the son of one of his numerous poor relatives.

“He” is Clarence Thomas. “Yet”, huh? There should be a rhetorical term for this: self-destructive.

Shopping Notes

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1. At a Vietnamese take-out place near Berkeley I got a can of sugar-cane juice. Some flavor, but very close to sugar water. From Taiwan. Which makes sense: In a Hong Kong store I saw cans of pure sugar water.

2. At Trader Joe’s I bought a package of trail mix called “Omega Trek Mix with Omega Fortified Cranberries.” (A new use of omega, by the way.) It contained “500 mg Omega-3 Fatty Acids Per Serving.” Sold only by Trader Joe’s. Not saying which omega-3 fats is a problem; so is lack of refrigeration. I could do a bio-assay, I realized: using the tests I have blogged about, such as balance and arithmetic, I could determine how much of the mix I had to eat to have the same effect as 1 tablespoon of flaxseed oil.

3. At Trader Joe’s I asked the checkout clerk what parts of her job she liked the best. “If we card a secret shopper, we get $15 for lunch,” she said. Lunch here? I asked. Lunch anywhere, she said. Whereas Dell employees detest secret shoppers. A tiny glimpse of a better future.