Category: General

Who I’d Like to Meet

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At dinner I asked my friend who he’d like to meet. “Good question,” he said. Let me try to answer it:

1. John Horton Conway. A Princeton math professor who’s combined math and human interest better than anyone since John Von Neumann. I especially like his work on numbers and games and The Book of Numbers, which he wrote with Richard Guy.

2. Lauren Collins. She and Mark Singer are the best writers at The New Yorker. As I recently blogged, I loved her profile of Pascal Dangin.

3. Chimamanda Adichie. I blogged about a recent short story of hers. Reading her reminds me how I used to read lots of fiction and how much I liked it.

The person I don’t know who I most wish would write another book is Renata Adler. If a book can be stillborn, Private Capacity, supposed to be published in 2002, was that. From Wikipedia: “Renata Adler’s investigation of the Bilderberg group reveals the true history of the organization, its membership and its nebulous function. With an astonishing cache of Bilderberg archives and secret files, Adler charts the history of the organization and the extent of its power.” Sounds like it exists, doesn’t it? It ranks 5 million on Amazon, maybe because I ordered a copy. Second most: Ben Cheever. I loved Selling Ben Cheever.

GrownChildCam: New Treatment For Depression?

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Jacob Nelik, the friend of a friend, is a businessman/engineer in Los Angeles whose business, ISS Corporation, makes high-tech solutions from off-the-shelf components. Their projects include video camera systems for luxury yachts and retail stores, and technical and marketing support to Israel Aerospace Industries for their wiring design software. His mom, who is 85, lives in Israel in an old-age home. She has short-term memory problems. Jacob wrote me:

I try to visit her 3-4 times a year but at this age the feeling of loneliness and emptiness, compounded with the feeling (and fact) that because of distance, I can’t come and visit her whenever she (or I) would like to, brought her to a stage where she felt she didn’t have a reason to live (“living for what?” as she said). I felt that with my knowledge, experience and the internet, I can make it easier for her. So I utilized a TV set she already owned to create a live picture of me in my office. Whenever I am in the office, she can see me (live). It is on 24 hours a day just like a picture but with live image. I felt that this would bring her closer to me and she would feel (on a daily basis) that I am there with her.
I utilized video parts that my company uses. I took an old home camcorder and connected it to one of the parts we use for our video projects, called a video server or video encoder. It takes the Analog video/picture that the camcorder provides, digitizes it, compresses it, and converts it to IP (Internet Protocol). There are many like this in the market; the one I used allows me to control many parameters including picture compression algorithm, so I can maintain a large physical picture (to fill up the TV screen on my mom’s end without being grainy or fuzzy) with high quality, high frame rate, very short delay (under 2 seconds) and very low bandwidth so I can use the cheapest internet service available. On my mom’s end, I used the same type of circuit to perform the reverse function (Taking the IP video stream, decompress it and convert it back to an Analog video to be fed into the TV set to the same connector where a VCR is connected). I am skipping some technical details but the net result is high quality video from end to end (when each end can be located at different place in the world).

What happened?

From the moment the system started operating (about a year ago) I could see tremendous positive effects on my mom. She no longer says “why do I need to live, what for?” I can detect a smile in her face just by listening to her. Just yesterday she told me that she saw me eating ice cream at my desk. She mentioned a new shirt I was wearing. It gives her many new conversational topics. She tells me that she enters the room and starts talking to me as if I am there with her. She became much more relaxed and as a result, even her blood pressure is better controlled. It fills a void in her life. It affected me positively as well, because I see how much better she is.

My Theory of Human Evolution (autism )

Seth Roberts9 Comments

In the journal In Character, Simon Baron-Cohen, the autism expert, writes:

Clinicians describe the deep, narrow interests in autism as “obsessions,” but a more positive description might be “areas of expertise.” Sometimes the area of expertise a person with autism focuses on appears not to be very useful (e.g., geometric shapes, or the texture of different woods). Sometimes the area of expertise is slightly more useful, though of limited interest to others (e.g., train timetables, or flags of the world). But sometimes the area of expertise can make a real social contribution (such as fixing machines, or solving mathematical problems, or debugging computer software).

My guess is that in autism, something is turned off that should be turned on. This allows the rest — in particular, the rest of what motivates us — to be seen more clearly. Everyone has a tendency toward expertise, says my theory of human evolution. Why everyone? Because everyone suffers from procrastination and the tendency toward expertise is the tendency that causes procrastination: It’s harder to do something new than to do what you did yesterday. Back in the Stone Age, this tendency toward expertise caused different people to do different hobbies, and become good at them. This was the beginning of occupational specialization.

How Much Play Will This Get?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

How will Al Gore respond to this, I wonder?

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade . . . All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930.

Thanks to Geoffrey Kidd.

More. A response to this article. Thanks to Kathy Wollard.

What Do Jobs Need to Be Good?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I’ve always wondered what makes a job satisfying. Yeah, it varies from person to person. What about features that are true for everyone? What about this, for example?

For a while at Amazon, I was the Manager of Website Performance and Availability. . . . Whenever something went wrong, and some chunk of the site got slow, I tracked down why and got people to fix it. Each week I wrote a report summarizing everything that went wrong in excruciating detail, and presented it to a room of directors and VPs in a weekly metrics meeting. It was as sisyphean a task as any you can possibly imagine. In a software system as large, complex and constantly changing as amazon.com, something is always going wrong. . . . My job was to make a list of irritating things each week, and I was widely regarded as having done it as well as anyone ever had. . . .I found this job to be the most soul-crushing work I’ve ever done. I totally burned out in a year, as did the person who held the job before me.

I tell you this story as a cautionary tale. Try to find work that allows you to focus on positive things. Avoid like the plague any work that focuses on negative things.

Related research. The writing cure.

More from Holland

Seth Roberts1 Comment

My friend in Holland wrote again:

Last year, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that it was OK to have sex with animals, as long as the animals enjoyed it.

She attached a newspaper article in the Hague/Amsterdam Times dated 20 March 2008 that began:

Under a new law being debated by the government, sex with animals will be allowed as long as people don’t enjoy it.

It ended:

The Animal Party was mainly disappointed about the fact that the new bill does not refer to the animals’ dignity.

Is LDL Bad Cholesterol?

Seth Roberts15 Comments

You’ve heard a million times that there is “good” cholesterol (HDL) and “bad” cholesterol (LDL). Recently I got my cholesterol measured. My LDL was 151 mg/dl. The test results were written on a form that said your LDL should be “Below 100 mg/dl. Below 70 mg/dl if High Risk.” The person who handed the results to me said, “These are not the best results . . . ”

How concerned should I be? A 2005 study in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society surveyed several thousand “elderly people [who] were recruited from a general Italian population, and mortality was monitored from 1983 to 1995.” The emphasis of the study was on whether LDL was good or bad.

People with more LDL lived longer. You read that correctly. For women, mortality was lowest at the highest level of LDL. For men, mortality was higher at the highest level of LDL (60 deaths/1000 patient years) than at the next highest (50), but still lower than at the lowest level of HDL (90). Going from the lowest to the highest levels of LDL is associated with a one-third decrease in mortality, in other words.

What should I make of my 151 mg/dl? To convert to the units of the paper (mmol/L), I needed to divide by 39. 151/39 = 3.9. Looking at the graph relating mortality to LDL, an LDL concentration of 3.9 mmol/L is where the mortality vs LDL function reaches a minimum — the lowest mortality. According to this study, my LDL is optimal.

Thanks to Joel Kauffman.