A Chinese Physicist Resigns

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A Chinese physicist recently resigned from his job (pure research) at a Beijing research institute. His salary was too low. The base salary is something like $200/month, with something like $1200 for each paper you publish. He explained his decision in a letter to his bosses, which he posted on the Internet. From Google Translate:

Dear leaders:

Hello!

August 2006, I single-handedly carried the mat, one hand holding the quilt to the school to report to work. Slept on the floor in the office 3 nights later, Frank and others XX XXX Street, shares a house, 800 yuan per month. Themselves feel better. However, when my wife came to see me when to Shanghai, but a cry. She did not expect this to write beautiful prose, in English is superb, the monthly salary of ten years ago, men who have three thousand dollars so come down: the room to work without a decent table, there is no place to sit, could only sit bed; office also can take place without her. Yes, until now, my office is a chair, a common HP laser printer or the wife gave me a birthday present. His wife’s insistence, in March 2007, after six months sharing with others, I moved to Village X XX X, X round room (Reference: College on XXXX XXX), monthly rent of 1,600 yuan.

I come to school only task is to do research. Not in class, not with the students. I do specialty is theoretical physics. In my opinion, the current basic problems of theoretical physics can be divided into three areas, but also three levels: the top and most shallow, which is the quality of particle physics, neutrino problem, particle state mixing problem ; Secondly, the harder is self-consistent description of the gravitational field and unify quantum field; final, most difficult, is the true cosmology, the concept of the universe all things are included, the true cosmological should a TOE (Theory of Everything). Cosmology is now called, should be called observational cosmology, from a theoretical point of view, can only be called up to fit the observational cosmology. Three aspects of the course, or interrelated, each is at stake.

Second half of 2006, I understand the unified description of the main energy to the gravitational field and quantum field theory and mathematical tools needed which, in an arbitrary manifold reflects the quantum characteristics of the mathematical tools may be harmonic analysis. But I do not master any of harmonic analysis on manifolds.

Time to flash the first half of 2007, the annual meeting of gravity, I consider the possible use of Finsler geometry to try to do quantum gravity, began to self-Finsler geometry, the same year by the end of September, I made use of Finsler geometry re-expressed in general relativity. However, re-expressed with the Finsler geometry of general relativity does not make me to the direction of quantum gravity there is any progress, Finsler geometry is very strict rigid mathematical structure, the introduction of any features of the quantum structure itself will be incompatible with the geometry. Of course, you can put Finsler space-time structure of dark energy as an inevitable result, however, computability theory, the ability to compare theory and observations are not good.

July 2007, I bought a house in Shanghai, the total price of 96 million, 30-year loans to 66 million. After that, our economic pressure to the limit: my wife rented a house in Beijing, XXX XX Garden Park Unit X X X Building, Room (Reference: Beijing XXX Company XX), monthly rent of 2,500 yuan; my house in Shanghai, monthly rent of 1,600 yuan; also close to 6,000 yuan per month mortgage. All of my salary: two accounts, one CCB, more than 2,000 points (up once already, I am now in January 2669.27 yuan (March 2010)); another investment line, 1,800 yuan per month. Do not say that I run in Beijing and Shanghai both transport costs, my salary to feed my already running out. So we got married in 2005 had never to children.

Under the pressure of the huge costs climb in 2007, first half of 2008, I intend to do some simple problems, the observation of neutrino cosmology application, or vice versa, according to some astronomical observations to discuss the micro- Mass of sub-limits. However, read the literature, in-depth period of time to do that: this work is not a person with a PC machine can be done, at least a group of some value to make it possible to do the work. So, do I still have to go back I am a person with a PC, will be able to do mathematical physics. At this time, there have been two things: First, my wife is pregnant, should be joyous, married 4 years, she has XX years of age. Second, in June 2008, my body feels discomfort, severe cough began after the end of August, the end of September to do CT, in the chest, heart on top, between the lungs lymphatic tumor, a copy of the specific report, see CT.

08 expiration of the contract work my wife returned to Shanghai from Beijing. August 30, we arrived in Shanghai, after living for a month in a hotel (of course, is my wife’s company out of accommodation), I X, X, Room XXX Village renters (references, XXX), 3,300 yuan monthly rent. Our own new home in the June 30 submitted to, because my physical problems, and his wife was pregnant, there is no way to decoration. Only in November 2008 leased to our new home workers rough (references XXXX), monthly rent of 1,800 yuan.

My CT report came out, there are three doctors that the disease: sarcoidosis best results, followed by lymphoma or lung cancer. Six City Hospital, Zhongshan Hospital and the City Chest Hospital’s doctors agree that: To do mediastinal thoracic endoscopy to confirm the diagnosis. However, my child is born in November 2, and before that in October, I can not do chest examination. October 21, 2008, in my guarantee, Chest Hospital, XXXX decided in accordance with sarcoidosis, I began to hormone (prednisone) therapy. In fact, I know, if it is worse than the result of sarcoidosis, I have only the choice of suicide: I can not let my white mother in the cold begging to others: “Save my son… “; or my wife holding an infant child:” save my husband… ”

Thank bliss, I am still alive and well. But, my friends were not so lucky: Mao XXXX, 2005 in High Energy suicide; von XXX, one of my best friends, in January 2007 committed suicide at Tokyo University. Their death, and they chose Theoretical Physics, chose to do research are closely related. Von XXX, 28 years old when he died less, 8 years old his father died, take pains to support his mother and younger siblings. In the Babaoshan, watching Von XXX’s mother, that Ganchangcunduan, piercing woman, I was deeply sad but misery. To von XXX, I think I should continue to do theoretical physics.

2009, I went back to quality issues, problems and mixed particle state mixing matrix. An elegant theory that all the observed phenomena should be explained with the natural, but the existing weak unified theory, have failed. After several months of effort, I think, rest mass operator should be introduced to the rest mass of the quantum field operator as is the rest mass of the intrinsic value, so that uniform interpretation of quantum states can be mixed and mixed matrix. Done in July, found the problem difficult to overcome, and because of physical reasons, was closed. After the October, and XXX, XXX discussions and continue to do for some time. I found a little forward, but there are fundamental problems from a distance, need to be more profound thoughts.

In 2009, my body slowly getting better. Done 4 CT, 4 after March, the condition improved slowly. And then to Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital treatment is the same method. September 2, to Nantong XXXX hospital medicine treatment, medication in January, costs over 3,500 yuan (can not be reimbursed, easy to find the invoice.) To October 2009, my medical insurance card, no money already. At this time, CT showed that half of the tumor has disappeared, the results see the copy. Since then I have to give up treatment, on the one hand do not want to spend more money on the one hand I believe I can beat the rest of the half.

2008 year-end assessment, I did not write. Do write to me to do research, but failed; or I was sick; or I just add a small baby at home? Write my difficulties, I do not want to let others sympathetic to buckle my money? For a limb still, physical and mental health of man, which is a shame.

Thus, starting from March 2009, my investment line of Cary, 900 yuan less per month, only 900 yuan.

Finally, I deeply know that I am the circle around me, most people are not doing scientific research. Doing scientific research is false, is an issue, published an article to change some money, to live. (Above paragraph, is not directed against any person or thing, I seriously do research and those who pay tribute to the depths of his heart. Even if someone is writing papers for money, as long as there is no plagiarism, is beyond reproach, and now the rule is like that. I can not do, but my poor ability to adapt.) von XXX, XXXX Mao may also, like me, are the idealists, does not fit in this circle there to do, so they died.

Yes, I suddenly realized: I do not fit inside the circle to do the research now. Otherwise, I will and Feng XX, XXX Mao same fate. In the November 25, 2009 made a report terms of rest mass operator, I decided to leave. November 30, in the center of the meeting, I proposed to my research was no longer suitable.

All see, I know, the year-end 2009, has not filled out the necessary assessment: whether what I was made or not made anything, I knew.

So, I Merchants Bank of Cary, from the beginning in January 2010, a month is 0. I can start another kind of living law.

Determined from the high school to study physics to me, from the self to the Thermodynamics of Newtonian mechanics, to quantum mechanics; from the self-study calculus to linear algebra; learn from differential geometry, group theory, and then learn topology. Into his own youth, twenty years into his effort, and now had to give up, is a frustration.

Dreamed last night: spring, towards the sea, I lingered under the weeping willow, think about the physics, think of the beauty of the universe!

I know, only to leave, I can live. When people have forgotten that the earth is the soul of the physical sacrifice, I still worried about soul.

Must live with dignity, I can only leave. In the vast universe, the short life of individuals, such as fireworks, energy and all the leaders met, life is fate. Besides, I also get more help and the central leadership to take care, keep in mind when I hope to have the opportunity to return.

Why Small Change = Big Deal

Seth Roberts14 Comments

Eating a half-stick of butter (60 g) every day apparently improved how fast I can do simple arithmetic problems (e.g., 7-5, 3+1). I improved about 5% — from 630 to 600 msec per problem. My scores had been at 630 msec for months. They suddenly dropped.

A reporter said to me that a 5% improvement isn’t much. You couldn’t notice it. Why did this matter?

I did not reply “ what good is a newborn baby?” I said it mattered for three reasons:

1. You cannot easily produce such an improvement. I was already doing very well. For example, I had already lowered my scores a lot via omega-3. Imagine the world record for the 100 meter dash suddenly dropping 5% due to eating something you can find in a supermarket.

2. A 5% improvement is just the beginning. There is room for optimization — better dosage, better timing of taking the butter, and so on.

3. The brain is a mirror of the rest of the body. Learning the best diet for the brain, at least in terms of fat, will help us learn the best diet for the rest of the body, just as learning what house current is best for one electrical appliance is a guide to what other electrical appliances are designed for. They’re all designed to work with the same house current.

Alas, this is not just a poor answer, it’s what I actually said. I give myself a C+. Reason 1 is almost gibberish. Reason 2 is technocratic. A good answer is more emotional. Reason 3 is okay, if not very clear.

At Berkeley I knew a student who had transferred from a junior college. He is/was black. He had probably gotten into Berkeley because Berkeley administrators wanted to admit more black students. He complained one day that he got C’s on his essays even though “all the words were spelled correctly.” It was frustrating, he said. I am in a similar situation here. My answer is poor but I cannot easily do better.

30 Rock: East versus West Live Shows

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I suppose I’m one of the few people who know there are many differences between the audiobook version of On Beauty and the printed version. Maybe two per page. The audiobook version was prepared before the printed version was finalized. The printed version is better, of course. Long before that comparison, I was fond of comparing books drawn from New Yorker articles with the articles themselves. The New Yorker versions were better-written (= better-edited). It was a painless way to learn how to write.

Last week the TV show 30 Rock did two live shows: one for the East Coast, one for the West. I noticed many differences. The writing was better in the West version (jokes were improved) but the acting was better in the East version (the comic timing was better, for example). New York magazine has listed the biggest differences. For example:

East Coast: In a flashback, Julia Louis-Dreyfus calls to Jonathan, “Yeah, Chai Boy, get in here. You’ll never be a millionaire … Slumdog Millionaire ref. Blammo!”
West Coast: Instead, Louis-Dreyfus says, “Hurry up, Aladdin, before Jasmine is forced to marry Jafar! Similarities … Lemon out.” It gets way more applause.

East Coast: In the final scene, Liz is happy with how her birthday went. After all, she even “got to eat the cake off the floor.”
West Coast: This time, she “ate the Fonz’s face.”

I wish there was a whole website about this: Differences between Things that are Supposed to Be The Same. I wrote a Spy article about Similarities Between Things that are Supposed to Be Different. I noticed similar jokes in Jay Leno’s and David Letterman’s monologues.

Learning Chinese Characters

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I have 80 Chinese characters (flashcards for children) taped to a wall of my Beijing apartment. I add about five per day. I wrote about this earlier, before starting. So far it’s working. With almost no effort, no discipline, I know what almost all of them mean. I test myself a little whenever I’m in that room. This is a vast improvement over several previous attempts to learn the characters, such as studying flashcards the usual way or using Anki, a flashcard program.

I ruefully realize this is an application of something I thought of many years ago: the forces we can turn on and off are much weaker than pre-existing forces we can only take advantage of. Burning coal is a force we can turn on and off. Solar power is a pre-existing force we can take advantage of (and which almost everyone in Beijing uses to dry clothes). The sun shines no matter what we do. Deliberate studying we can turn on and off. We can study or not. In contrast, I am inevitably going to be in that room. Taping characters to the wall takes advantage of that.

Health Care As Seen by a Psychiatrist

Seth Roberts10 Comments

A reader of this blog named Laura Fisher left a comment about “doctors as bureaucrats” — meaning they care more what their employer thinks of them than what their patients do. A scary and plausible idea. I asked for details. She replied:

I live [and practice psychiatry] in a small [Utah] college town that is 80% Mormon. Almost all the docs in town are employed by an outfit called Intermountain Healthcare which owns most of the hospital beds in this and a few surrounding states. Once you get the doctors on the payroll, they really must take instruction from the employer–and they sure as hell do. The doctors who refuse to take instruction that is ethically or morally conflicted or repugnant are typically subjected to “peer review” as a means of punishment, either by hospital medical staffs or by state licensing boards. If you want  details on the abuses of “peer review”, you should find plenty of information on the website of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

The typical patient I see has been jollied along for years [by IHC doctors], sometimes decades, without any of his physicians taking the time to review his/her medications effectively. There isn’t a billing code for actually taking the time required to deliver good care, so the patients do not get good care. Some of them get good surgeries. Some get bad surgeries. Often a patient has had a surgery or procedure that he or she did not need. Often the surgery creates new needs for expensive pharmaceuticals. Most often he or she is on a pharmaceutical which is causing psychiatric effects. Either no one has thought of this, including psychiatrists, or no one other than the patient has thought of this and the patient is afraid to discontinue medications for fear of alienating the doctors he needs to stay on good terms with and for fear of unanticipated withdrawal syndromes. The docs who are seeing these salt of the earth working-class patients are young physicians who are not familiar with the old-fashioned notion of the doctor-patient alliance as being somewhat sacred, private and full to the brim of ethical obligations on the part of the physician. These docs check out at quitting time. I have seen them fail to save a sick person at risk of death when one of their colleagues is responsible for putting the patient in that predicament. They refuse to answer questions from patients about whether or not a given treatment change would help that patient, apparently because that doctors employers’ treatment guidelines don’t include answering such questions or choosing different treatment and because that doctor’s professional society leaders are reading from the same page where treatment is conveniently canned such that even nurses can dole it out pretty successfully.

I have seen depressed patients whose depression completely resolved when he or she stopped taking the statin they were on. I have also been interested in the statin users apparently having a higher risk for infections and therefore cancers. Duayne Graveline wrote a very short book (Lipitor, Thief of Memory) on his personal experience with transient global amnesia. This short book is great introduction into the statin subject. The best book I have found on the statins is Fat and Cholesterol are Good For You by Uffe Ravnskov. There is an International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics and their website is marvelous. If you look at this material you are going to learn that it is a poor idea to interfere with cholesterol because we have to have it for brain function.

Don’t forget to read The Trouble With Medical Journals by Richard Smith and The Emperor’s New Drugs by Irving Kirsch.

Statins and memory loss. Thanks to JR Minkel.

Breakfast Not All Bad

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I stopped eating breakfast when I discovered it made me wake up too early. My Tsinghua students are reading the paper in which I describe my breakfast research. One of them, a freshman, wrote:

When we [entered] Tsinghua University, the first task we should finish was the military training. [New students have a few weeks of military training.] We were asked to be gathered at 8 o’clock, and then we would do a lot of trainings. As the training was hard and tiring, we all had to eat breakfast in the morning. And I remembered in those days, we all slept well and were early-awakening. When the trainings were over, we began our classes. The time was also 8 o’clock, but many times we didn’t have breakfast in order to save time. Gradually, our awakening time become later and later. Even we set an alarm clock, we felt really reluctant to get up. For a long time, we wondered about that but no idea appeared. Now I got the answer, it has something to do with the breakfast. When I told my roommates, they were indeed surprise. Everyone was curious about why, and I was also interested in that. Maybe if the last day you had breakfast, the next morning your body will still have the motivation to call you up to eat breakfast.

Yes, if you eat at a certain time of day, you will tend to be awake that time of day. The effect has been heavily studied in animals, where it is called anticipatory activity.

Fermentation Not Sexy

Seth Roberts6 Comments

From an NY Times article about the high price of kimchi (in Korea):

Michel Troisgros, the renowned French chef from Roanne, listened to a Korean official hold forth on the wonders of fermentation and an ambitious project to export Korean foods like kimchi.

“I think you have to stop talking about fermentation,” Mr. Troisgros told the man. “It’s not sexy.”

Via Marginal Revolution. I love that remark (“not sexy”). Good epigraph for book or article about fermented foods.

I considered making kimchi until I was in a Korean market buying some. The Korean woman next to me thought it was too hard.

Will Eating Half a Stick of Butter a Day Make You Smarter?

Seth Roberts20 Comments

To my pleasant surprise, Mark Frauenfelder posted this call for volunteers. Will eating half a stick of butter per day or a similar amount of coconut fat improve your performance on arithmetic problems? Eri Gentry is organizing a simple trial to find out. The trial is inspired by my recent Quantified Self talk. Study details.

During the question period of my talk, I responded to a question about a trial with 100 volunteers by saying I would suggest starting with 2 volunteers. A reader has written to ask why.

What’s your reasoning behind suggesting only 2 volunteers to test the eating more butter results? You seem highly convinced earlier in the video, but if you were so convinced why not have a larger trial?

Because the trial will be harder than the people running it expect. If you’re going to make mistakes, make small ones.

This is my first rule of science: Do less. A grad student in English once told me that a little Derrida goes a long way and a lot of Derrida goes a little way. Same with data collection. A little goes a long way and a lot goes a little way. A tiny amount of data collection will teach you more than you expect. A large amount will teach you less.

My entire history of self-experimentation started with a small amount of data collection: An experiment about the effectiveness of an acne medicine. It was far more informative than I expected. My doctor was wrong, I was wrong — and it had been so easy to find out.

This may sound like I am criticizing Eri’s study. I’m not. What’s important is to do something, however flawed, that can tell you something you didn’t know. Maybe that should be the first rule, or the zeroth rule. It has the pleasant and unusual property of being easier than you might think.

Thanks to Carl Willat.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments
  • meaning-based computing
  • academic plagiarism. “One of my own students turned in a paper on “Great Expectations” which was an exact copy of Dorothy Van Ghent’s essay – an essay so celebrated that I recognized it right off and, at the first opportunity, raised the issue with my student. “Shit!” she said. “I paid seventy-five dollars for that.” “
  • The dark side of fermentation. I am very pleased to see that Edward Jay Epstein is writing a book about the 9-11 Commission.