I asked Bryan Caplan what effect his blogging had had. It made his first book a success, he said. Or helped make it a success. He had started blogging about two years before it appeared. Other bloggers wrote about his book as if they knew him. They knew him from his blog.
Category: blogs
Yay, EW Popwatch!
A recent EW Popwatch post compared several YouTube versions of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, much like I did here. It’s like Leno and Letterman telling the same joke. We have an Instinct of Connoisseurship, Veblen would say.
Useless Data and Me
Odd Numbers, an excellent blog by Jubin Zelveh at Portfolio.com, recently listed a few findings from the American Time Use Survey, which is in danger of being ended. They included:
– First-born children receive 20 to 30 minutes more quality time each day from parents than second-born children.
– Married couples have very little influence over each other when it comes to how much time each spends on leisure, child care, and chores.
A comment was:
Valuable information?
You can’t be serious. What can possibly be done by anybody about these “observations”?
This seems like a welfare program for economists.
Time use data — from 13 countries, including America — had a huge effect on my research and I suppose my life, since I applied my research to my life. The time use data I’m referring to showed that Americans were awake an hour later than people in the 12 other countries. They also watched TV an hour later. In other words, America was an outlier in two distributions: time of going to sleep, and time of stopping TV watching. I knew about research that showed that exposure to other people controls when we sleep. The time use data suggested that watching TV can substitute for ordinary human contact in the control of when we sleep. I wondered if seeing faces in the morning would improve my sleep; so I tried watching late-night TV early in the morning (via tape). I did that on a Monday morning. On Tuesday morning, I felt exceptionally good. Thus began the self-experimentation behind my pretty-face post. My best work. (The self-experimentation, not the post.)
Thanks to Marginal Revolution.
The Greatness of Behind The Approval Matrix
What I like most about magazines is their ability to open new worlds to me. Books — unless by Jane Jacobs — rarely do this. Music, TV, and movies almost never do this. Paintings and other visual arts never do this (to me). Magazines do this regularly. Entertainment Weekly — the best magazine with a dull name — tries to do this (and succeeds). I am now reading The Golden Compass because of EW. An issue of Colors made me visit Iceland. Spy made New York fascinating. (E.g., an NYC map of smells.) It’s the best kind of teaching: you open a door and make what’s inside seem so interesting and wonderful that the student voluntarily decides to enter and explore.
Which is why it isn’t completely surprising that Abu Ayyub Ibrahim, who writes Behind the Approval Matrix, is a teacher. New York magazine’s Approval Matrix has a wonderful way of introducing new things: with humor, poetry (if well-written short captions = poetry), a dash of outrage (calling stuff “despicable”), and an attractive layout. When it calls something Brilliant, I’m instantly curious — thus fulfilling the best function of magazines with remarkable ease. The problem for me, and I assume many others, is that the captions are often obscure. Behind the Approval Matrix — which might have been called The Annotated Approval Matrix — explains each item.
The creators of The Approval Matrix had a great idea and didn’t quite pull it off. It’s often too hard to figure out what they’re talking about. Ibrahim has supplied what is missing.
It’s a bit like my self-experimentation. Previous (conventional) research, for various reasons, couldn’t quite reach practical applications (e.g., omega-3 research couldn’t figure out the best dose); my self-experimentation, building on that research, was able to cover the final mile.
Blog Power (continued)
What Jonathan Schwarz calls “the Lost Kristol Tapes” is a taped debate between William Kristol (the new NY Times columnist) and Daniel Ellsberg about the invasion of Iraq. The debate was on C-Span’s Washington Journal, of which I have fond memories; I watched it for years to get morning faces for my self-experimentation. Schwarz called Kristol’s comments “a double album of smarm, horrifying ignorance, and bald-faced deceit.”
The debate has been watched about 5000 times. Three days ago, just before Schwarz’s piece, it had been watched four times, three by Schwarz himself. My long self-experimentation article would have been read by almost no one had not Andrew Gelman blogged about it. Now it’s been downloaded thousands of times.
More blog power: here and here.
Addendum. Funny coincidence: The day after I posted this, the formerly-obscure Wikileaks hit the news for a super-charged version of the same thing. Wikileaks exposed Cayman Island tax shelters.
More Blog Power
From the London Telegraph a few days ago:
Peter Hain has made history: his is the first British ministerial scalp to have been claimed by a blogger. Kudos, as the Americans say, to Guido Fawkes [a blogger], who first sighted his tomahawk at the Hain campaign 12 months ago when he posted Hain’s campaign strategy.
Hain’s crime was failure to declare campaign donations. A downfall timeline. “Guido sees himself as a journalist, a campaigning journalist who publishes via a blog. He campaigns against political sleaze and hypocrisy,” says Guido. His comparison of food allowances.
Blog Power
It’s not just that the Times is spot-on about Giuliani’s character. It’s great to see a big newspaper take the gloves off and really let someone have it and not worry about sinking the guy’s campaign. The editorial wasn’t fair or balanced, but it for-damn-sure knew what it was talking about. I feel that the Times was influenced by the blogosphere in those rhetorical liberties, and I hope the trend continues. Can you imagine someone saying what they really think about the Israel lobby on the Op-Ed page, instead of saying what they’re supposed to be saying? Now that would be progress.
On September 8th, two million people in two hundred and twenty cities across Italy celebrated V-Day, an unofficial new national holiday, the “V” signifying victory, vendetta, and, especially, “Vaffanculo” (“Fuck off”). The event had been organized by Beppe Grillo, Italy’s most popular comedian, to protest endemic corruption in the national government. . . . Grillo has galvanized Italians by talking about corruption with irreverence and humor”indeed, by talking about it at all. The country’s mainstream press is controlled, or owned outright, by political parties and corporations. Since 2005, Grillo has addressed the public primarily through his blog. . . .V-Day grew out of Clean Parliament, which Grillo launched in 2005, when he posted on his blog the names of the convicted criminals serving in parliament.
My Omega-3 Talk at Psychonomics
At the November meeting of the Psychonomic Society, a group of experimental psychologists, I gave a 15-minute talk (PowerPoint) about my omega-3 research. (Anyone know how to add audio to a PowerPoint file?) Almost all the data in the talk I’ve posted here, but it had one not-blogged idea, which I summarize like this:
optimize brain –> optimize body
The intake level of a nutrient that optimizes brain function should be close to the level that optimizes the function of everything else. In particular, the omega-3 intake that makes the brain work best should be close to the level that makes the rest of the body work best. This is because the brain and the rest of the body are bathed in the same blood.
It is easy to see why this is so. I have many electrical appliances: clock, telephone, TV, microwave, refrigerator, laser printer. In spite of vastly different innards and functions, all of them run best when their electrical supply is very close to house current. The electric current that makes my laser printer work best is very close to the electric current that makes my refrigerator work best. Of course, this is by design. LIkewise, the different parts of our body, although doing vastly different things, have all been adjusted by evolution to work best with the nutritional equivalent of house current. Just as we might study laser printers to learn what current to use with our refrigerator, we can study the brain to learn what nutrients optimize immune function.
This is a new idea in nutrition (at least, new to me). It is supported by and explains some of the most interesting data I’ve posted. It explains why Tyler Cowen’s gums got so much better so quickly — because he was taking almost exactly the best amount of flaxseed oil for his gums. Tyler chose his intake of flaxseed oil based on my behavioral data, which suggested the best amount was between 2 and 3 tablespoons/day. The gums and the brain could hardly be more different, but the best level for the brain turned out to do a wonderful job of healing his gums. Same thing with Anonymous and sports injuries.
By the way, this shows the scientific value of blogging. My gums got better, too, but not as impressively as Tyler’s. I didn’t have a lot of injuries to heal. The big improvements noticed by Tyler and Anonymous were “accidents” (unintended consequences). Science thrives on accidents; blogging, it turns out, is a new way to generate them.
The Softer Side of Blogs
Michelle Nguyen told me that in Palo Alto, professional contacts expect you to have a blog. If you don’t have a blog, you’re not a serious person.
At a recent wine tasting, I encountered the other, nicer side of the coin. I met Colleen and Vanessa, two of the three women behind Wishbone Clover, a blog without a theme. “We just blog about what we care about,” Vanessa said (as I have guessed). It’s a way of talking to each other and, oh yeah, other people can read it.
I said I had a blog, too.
“Have you ever been stalked on your blog?” Colleen asked. This might be the friendliest question I’ve ever been asked at a party.
“Stalked?” I said.
She meant that someone had repeatedly left very nasty comments on her blog, such as “you draw like a 4-year-old” (she is a graphic designer and often posts drawings).
I said no, most comments are favorable. No one has ever left nasty comments.
She explained that she had been at a museum party in Boston and a woman at the party thought that she (Colleen) had been hitting on her (the stalker’s) girlfriend. that’s what caused the stalking. It really upset her.
The women behind Wishbone Clover met when they worked at Wells Fargo. All three were told working at Wells was an “awesome opportunity”; all three left. Colleen now works at another bank. Vanessa is a writer; she has a writing job at UCSF and writes fiction. I forget what the third one does.
Wishbone Clover has a great list of categories, including aggrieved, I am so mad right now, glimpses, special guest star, exchanged (conversations), and the mysterious hlp. I especially liked an entry called “ My Mother’s Royal We.” It begins:
One recent morning I chatted, via IM, with my BFF, EB. I noticed a quirk in our conversation: when I describe some difficulty, especially related to poorly behaved gentlemen, she tends to respond in the third person, for example:
We don’t have time for that bullshit. Let’s drug his drink, leave him in Nebraska, and see how he fares.
However, she doesn’t like it when her mom uses the royal we. “We don’t like raw fish,” her mom once said.
The Value, Not So Hidden, of Blogging
The evolutionary sequence is:
1. Facial expressions and vocalizations.
2. Language (speech and writing).
3. Blogging.
Each makes clearer to everyone else what is inside us. Human nature being what it is — closely tied to occupational specialization — it should be no surprise that blogging is very useful in getting a job, as Penelope Trunk says. To get a job you need a skill. Your skill is inside you; blogging makes it much more apparent. Blogging shows not only that you have a skill but that you have an emotional attachment, too: Bloggers write about what they care about. Not only does blogging help you get a job, it helps you get a job you want.
There should be software that creates networks of blogs based on similarity. I wish I knew which blogs were most like mine, for example.