Which is it, New Yorker editors?
Page 66 of the food issue:
Pickled cabbage is not romantic or fashionable.
Page 107 of the food issue:
“This [interest in fermented foods] is a revolution of the everyday,” says [Sandor] Katz, “and it is already happening.”
After zero recipes for sauerkraut in all previous issues of the magazine, this issue of The New Yorker contains two.
Thanks to Tyler Cowen and Dave Lull.
A large just-published study found that giving people who already have Alzheimer’s 2 g/day of DHA (present in fish oil) did not reduce their cognitive decline compared to placebo (corn or soy oil). Fish consumption had been found many times to be associated with a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s.
Thanks to Saul Sternberg.
In Chinese supermarkets now and then you see a large and a small version of something taped together — for the price of the large version! For example, a quart of milk and a pint of milk taped together, sold at the price of one quart. Wow, you think, for the same price I get 50% more.
Today I looked closely at one of these deals. The milk was several days older than the rest of the milk for sale. I realized it was the Chinese equivalent of putting a day-old sticker on something and selling it at half-price. Day-old stickers have negative connotations (“stale”) but the taped packages have positive ones (“your lucky day”).
A few years ago the Chinese people invented a new noun: guan er dai (官二代), meaning the children of government officials. There was already fu er dai, meaning the children of rich people.
The reason for the new term is that guan er dai act badly. A few weeks ago at Hebei University, a guan er dai, driving a car on campus, hit and killed a girl. Angry bystanders gathered around the car. “My father is Li Gang!” shouted the guan er dai. Li Gang is a mid-level police official. Not especially powerful, but powerful enough. Hubei University covered up the incident.
Government officials have always been very powerful, said the friend who told me this. But only recently have people become aware of this. This is why guan er dai is a new term.
A few years ago a Tsinghua sociology professor and a graduate student wrote a book about the hierarchy within Chinese society. Government officials on top, below them business people, and so on. Perhaps farmers at the bottom. The government did not allow this book to be published — “we are not on top of society, we are the servants!” said a government official. All that work, down the drain.
More The reckless driver was sentenced to three years in prison. The New York Times has a long article about this.
According to my theory of human evolution, a liking for ceremonies evolved because ceremonies increased innovation. Ceremonies increase demand for hard-to-make stuff, which helps the most skilled artisans make a living.
Stephanie Laursen, a letterpress printer, is an example. Letterpress printing is difficult. Larsen is a skilled artisan. She makes a living from wedding invitations. Without wedding ceremonies, she would probably be doing something else.
In an account of ghostwriting for students (i.e., term-paper factory) the following story stood out:
Although my university experience did not live up to its vaunted reputation, it did lead me to where I am today. . . . I was determined to write for a living, and, moreover, to spend these extremely expensive years learning how to do so. When I completed my first novel, in the summer between sophomore and junior years, I contacted the English department about creating an independent study around editing and publishing it. I was received like a mental patient. I was told, “There’s nothing like that here.” I was told that I could go back to my classes, sit in my lectures, and fill out Scantron tests until I graduated.
Inconvenient human nature. He wanted to learn something the school didn’t formally teach. The school controlled something precious that he needed — time. The rest of his life was at stake, but it wouldn’t give it to him.
His college was like a diet without necessary nutrients. It stunted growth.
A 1997 epidemiological study, which I just learned about, found that increases in saturated fat intake were associated with a lower risk of stroke. Sampling from among the papers that cited it, this study found a non-significant change in the same direction. This study found a significant change in the same direction in Japanese, who eat a low amount of saturated fat. This is especially interesting because many people assumed that the high rate of stroke among Japanese was due to high salt intake. This finding suggests it is due to low saturated fat intake.
As I said in a recent post, this sort of consistency across studies on a question of enormous interest argues against the severest critics of epidemiology, such as John Ioannidis.
Thanks to Vic Sarjoo.
Now that Gmail is out of beta, here are two suggestions for improvement:
1. Oldest first. I want to be able to sort my email so that the oldest is first on the list. That will make it harder to ignore or forget about. I can use the reward of seeing my latest email as inducement to deal with the oldest email. (I often bundle unpleasant and pleasant tasks: taking vitamins and drinking kombucha, doing pushups and listening to music, standing on one foot and watching Survivor.)
2. Delayed send (also called second thoughts). I want to be able to send email after a delay — say, one day. This has two advantages: it slows down the correspondence, and it gives me a chance to reconsider. An earlier email program I used had something like this and I was often glad I could revise what I’d written before it was sent.
More The Gmail Undo Send feature (available in Labs) gives you about 20 seconds to change your mind. Better than nothing but not nearly long enough.
Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School, is best-known for a study she did in graduate school. When shoppers in a Menlo Park food store were offered much more choice of jams (24 rather than 6), they were less likely to buy one. In The Art of Choosing (2010), Iyengar wrote (p. 190):
Since publication of the jam study, I and other researchers have conducted more experiments on the effect of assortment size. These studies, many of which were designed to replicate real-world choosing contexts, have found fairly consistently that when people are given a moderate number of options (4 to 6) rather than a large number (20 to 30), they are more likely to make a choice, are more confident in their decisions, and are happier in what they choose.
In contrast, Benjamin Scheibehenne, a research scientist at the University of Basel, and two co-authors, who surveyed the literature, found the effect was hard to replicate:
The choice overload hypothesis states that an increase in the number of options to choose from may lead to adverse consequences such as a decrease in the motivation to choose or the satisfaction with the finally chosen option. A number of studies found strong instances of choice overload in the lab and in the field, but others found no such effects or found that more choices may instead facilitate choice and increase satisfaction. In a meta-analysis of 63 conditions from 50 published and unpublished experiments (N = 5,036), we found a mean effect size of virtually zero but considerable variance between studies
This reminds me of the learned-helplessness effect. When Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at Penn and recent president of the American Psychological Association, was a graduate student, he and his advisor reported that when you give dogs inescapable shock, they stop trying to escape or avoid the shock: learned helplessness. The effect turned out to be extremely hard to replicate, but this did not stop Seligman from having a brilliant career.