Category: General

Walking and Learning Update

Seth Roberts16 Comments

I discovered a year ago that walking makes it pleasant to study boring stuff — as I put it then, boring + boring = pleasant. I am still a little amazed.

Like any scientific discovery, I suppose, I had to do serious engineering to make good use of it. In particular:

1. Make walking easier. I use a treadmill in my apartment, which eliminates travel time (to where I do it), eliminates distractions, provides climate control, and allows me to walk barefoot.

2. Steady stream of study materials. Now I am using an Anki deck of Chinese characters put together by someone else. This saves a lot of time. (Anki is an open-source version of SuperMemo, a flashcard program that tries to optimize repetition.)

3. Figure out how much new stuff to study each day. Without plenty of repetition, you are wasting your time — you will forget what you’ve learned. Most of a study session is repetition. This means it’s not obvious how much new material to introduce each day. I found that 10 new Chinese characters is about right.

4. Put laptop on treadmill. To use Anki while on my treadmill, I need to use my laptop on my treadmill. At the Beijing Wal-mart, I found a piece of Sunor metal shelving that works perfectly. I put the shelf (about 90 cm long) across the arms of the treadmill, put the laptop on the shelf.

5. Minimize complications. I first noticed the effect using Anki. But Anki had several features I disliked, so I switched to ordinary flashcards. But they were too complicated — hard to schedule appropriately (you need to slowly expand the time between tests), time-consuming to keep track of progress. I had to keep stopping to make marks on the cards. So I am back to using Anki. Anki lacks a graph of progress — a graph that shows amount of learning versus date. But it is better than flashcards.

Each improvement made things better. With all of them, I lose track of time. Study, study, study, walk, walk, walk. Then it’s over. Not just painless, pleasant — different than any pleasure I have felt before. It feels a little like a new energy source (I imagine it can be used to learn many things), a little like teleportation.

The science aspect of it also interests me. Learning is the core topic of experimental psychology. Thousands of experiments have been done about human learning, thousands more about animal learning. Experimental psychologists are good methodologists; the average experimental psychology experiment makes the average medical-school experiment look retarded. But the walking/learning effect (walking makes learning pleasant) is outside anything anyone has ever reported. Only Michel Cabanac (not an experimental psychologist) has studied how variation in pleasantness regulates action (e.g., eating). Experimental psychologists lack good ways to find new effects. By missing this effect, they are missing a bigger idea:Â learning is regulated, just as a thousand other things inside our bodies are regulated.

More Email From Egypt

Seth Roberts1 Comment

My former student writes:

A lot of people here now are calling for a return to normalcy and peace! A fair number of people are beginning to blame the protestors for all the chaos and the fact that we can’t go out and we can’t go to work and Egypt is burning and we can’t order food from restaurants anymore! I think they are the same people who didn’t really support the protestors in the first place though- so we’re still safe- they’re not growing. Unfortunately many of my family members are among those- they just want to go back to work and they’re worried about money and they think we have gained enough concessions. They think the sacrifice is too big.

At the same time, there are maybe a hundred thousand or more protestors in the square right now, peacefully standing and holding signs for the president to step down. And more keep pouring in. My cousin Akram is getting ready to go meet my cousin Khaled and about 20 of his friends to go to the square. Aunt Magda is angry with Akram and telling him that he won’t set foot out of the house but actually he is tying his shoelaces now….. The Friday prayer ended about an hour ago so now is the time when most people will be arriving there or on their way. My cousin Karim actually went back to work at Vodafone today after 4 or so days off because of the revolt.

I have promised everyone that I wouldn’t go out today because of all the anti-foreign sentiment. There have been steady streams of emails about foreigners being detained, politely, and spoken to and then released after some time. But there are people calling the news stations in angry about Obama’s order for the president to step down. One woman asked, “Can any country accept an order for their president to step down?” There is a lot of hostility towards America right now and I don’t think the US can win no matter what they do. People criticizing the states for not making a strong enough statement requiring Mubarak’s departure, others angry that America would order the president of another country to step down, some angry about all of the past support, and others angry that America would meddle at all…

We haven’t seen any violence in the square so far today as there was on Wednesday and Thursday, just a massive sea of anti-mubarak protestors. We haven’t seen much of the pro-mubarak supporters today- it seems that they have been hugely overtaken. I really hope it stays peaceful but a lot of people are going out angry today because of the attacks on the peaceful anti-mubarak supporters of the last two days. Many see it as an obligation to go out now and defend those who have been attacked. I am really proud of all those people brave enough to go out…

Email From Egypt

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One of my students is in Egypt. She writes:

I may be leaving here soon. Two of the foreigners here that I know that were in the protests have been arrested by the army and taken to a military academy- they were able to contact the German embassy as they are German and the embassy came to take them and keep them safe in a hostel until they are able to leave the country. People are beginning not to trust any foreigners here, not only journalists, and have begun to say that foreigners are spies stirring up trouble on behalf of foreign governments. The German girl that I went to the demonstrations with saw her own Egyptian neighbor talking to the army officers about her and her landlord and her roommates while she was being detained. Of course all journalists are being attacked right now. And the mood has just become very hostile towards foreigners. We are getting reports on a mailing list called Cairo Scholars (for foreigners living in Cairo) of all different types of incidents directed at foreigners here.

Two Gmail Features I Want

Seth Roberts8 Comments

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.

Strong Light and Cancer

Seth Roberts5 Comments

From an excellent article about light pollution (not online) by David Owen in the 20 Aug 2007 issue of The New Yorker:

Richard Stevens, a cancer epidemiologists at the University of Connecticut Health Center, in Farmington, has suggested a link between cancer and the “circadian disruption” of hormones caused by artificial lighting. Early in his career, Stevens was one of many researchers struck by the markedly high incidence of breast cancer among women in the industrial world, in comparison with those in developing countries, and he at first supported the most common early hypothesis, which was that the cause must be dietary. Yet repeated studies found no clear link to food. In the early eighties, Stevens told me recently, “I literally woke up in the middle of the night — there was a street lamp outside the window, and it was so bright that I could almost read in my bedroom — and I thought, Could it be that? A few years later, he persuaded the [directors] of the Nurses’ Health Study . . . to add questions about nighttime employment, and the study subsequently revealed a strong association between working the night shift and an increased risk of breast cancer. [The researchers] wrote, “We hypothesize that the potential primary culprit for this observed association is the lack of melatonin, a cancer-protective agent whose production is severely diminished in people exposed to light at night.”

Exposure to strong light at night reduces the amplitude of your circadian rhythms. That causes a thousand changes. To decide that one of them (“lack of melatonin”) is the one that matters is highly premature. If reducing circadian amplitude increases cancer, it follows that getting more light during the day — which surely increases circadian amplitude — will reduce cancer.

The article also says:

Growing numbers of us pass most of our waking hours “in a box, looking at a box,” as Dave Crawford put it . . . Fewer and fewer of us spend much time outside at all, except in automobiles.

I have measured the light inside cars (front seats) several times and found it is quite strong (you are close to a big window). If the article is arguing that night light is bad and causes cancer, I am unconvinced. Night light exposure and daylight exposure are confounded — people who work night shifts get more night light and less daylight.
The Nurses Study paper: E Schernhammer, K Schulmeister. Light at night and cancer risk. Photochemistry and Photobiology, 2004, Vol 79, Iss 4, pp 316-318.

More Fermentation, More Anti-Cancer Effect

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Doenjang is a fermented soybean paste often served in Korean restaurants — as a vegetable dip, for example. This study found that the longer it’s fermented, the more powerful its anti-cancer action:

Doenjang fermented for 24 mo exhibited a two- to three-fold increase in antitumor effects on sarcoma-180-injected mice and antimetastatic effects in colon 26-M 3.1 cells in mice compared with the 3- or 6-mo fermented doenjang. The 24-mo fermentation was the most effective in preventing cancer by decreasing tumor formation and increasing natural killer cell activity in spleens and glutathione S-transferase activity in livers of mice.

Many things about doenjang stay roughly the same during fermentation. This study shows that what’s increasing (bacteria, etc.) is responsible for the anti-cancer effect, which supports my umami hypothesis (that we need fermented foods or something similar to be healthy).

I make yogurt rather than buy it so that I can ferment it a long time (e.g., 24 hours in a yogurt machine). The yogurt I make is much sourer than commercial yogurt.

Four Transitions: Population, Forests, Obesity, and Fast Food

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Long ago Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford professor, wrote The Population Bomb. Yet you probably know about the demographic transition: A sharp decrease in family size when countries reach a certain level of wealth. Which implies a big problem with Ehrlich’s forecasts. You probably don’t know about three related transitions:

1. Forests. For a long time humans destroyed forests and forest area decreased. More recently, however, forests have been regrowing as people leave rural areas for cities.

2. Obesity. In poor countries, rich people are fatter than poor people. In rich countries, the opposite is true: the poor are fatter than the rich, presumably because the rich eat less factory food.

3. Fast food. On a recent visit to Tokyo, I was told that the number of fast food restaurants in Tokyo is declining.

One Million Chinese in Mexico

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Contradicting the notion that you can find anything on the Internet, I cannot find any info about what I was told in a Beijing Starbucks: A few years, a city was started in Mexico where a million Chinese workers will manufacture stuff. Because of NAFTA, the stuff they make will have tariff-free access to the American market. And shipping from Mexico will be cheaper than shipping from China. The Chinese workers will come over for a limited time, such as one year.