Category: self-experimentation

How Safe is Melamine? Is This Funny or Horrifying?

Seth Roberts4 Comments

From Natural News:

Up to 90 percent of the infant formula sold in the United States may be contaminated with trace amounts of melamine, the toxic chemical linked to kidney damage, according to recent tests. The FDA’s test results, which the agency hid from the public and only released after the Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request, showed that Nestle, Mead Johnson and Enfamil infant formula products were all contaminated with melamine. . . .

Prior to these test results being made public, the FDA had published a document on its website that explained there was no safe level of melamine contamination in infant formula. Specifically, the FDA stated, “FDA is currently unable to establish any level of melamine and melamine-related compounds in infant formula that does not raise public health concerns.”

Once tests found melamine in U.S.-made formula products, however, the FDA changed its story. As of today, the FDA has now officially declared melamine to be safe in infant formula as long as the contamination level is less than one part per million (1 ppm).

Astonishingly: The FDA has no new science to justify its abrupt decision declaring melamine to be safe!

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when that decision was made.

The Four Abundances

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Someday, if I am lucky, I would like to write a book called The Four Abundances. It would be about how four incredibly important things that were once impossibly scarce, became or will become, to everyone’s surprise, abundant:

  1. Water. Free and everywhere. So cheap my Berkeley landlady pays my water bill. This has been true for a long time.
  2. Knowledge. I mean general knowledge. Via the Web, reference book knowledge and news is instantly accessible for free. A recent development, although books and newspapers were a big step in this direction.
  3. Health. A future abundance. Health is far from abundant right now. On the other hand, health has improved dramatically during the last 200 years, as Robert Kugel has documented. It is clearly approaching abundance.
  4. Happiness. Another future abundance. I suppose it seems impossibly far off — but abundant water once seemed impossibly far off. Here it’s hard to find signs of improvement, much less approaching abundance. Depression has become more common, not less, during my lifetime.

My self-experimentation has convinced me that health and happiness depend on things that were common in Stone-Age life, just as there was enough water and knowledge during that time. (Now we have more than enough water and knowledge, which is fine.) We need to figure out what those elements are. Self-experimentation provides a way of doing so.

In my little corner of Beijing, transportation is becoming a fifth (or third) abundance. Mostly I ride a bike — my bike was free, costs pennies to maintain, doesn’t pollute, provides exercise, easy to park. For longer trips I take the subway (30 cents/ride) or a cab (a few dollars a ride). Many people take the bus (a few cents/ride). I might get an electric bike for a few hundred dollars. Doesn’t pollute, very cheap per mile, easy to park, little congestion.

I’ve thought about this for months; what made me finally decide to post this was noticing that two little tools I use every day — a penlight and a brush to clean my keyboard — were free, giveaways at trade shows.

Learning Chinese

Seth Roberts2 Comments

My cell phone has a service number that you call to get your account balance or to recharge your account. You press 1 for in Mandarin, 2 for English. Today for the first time I pressed 1. It reminded me of being 9 and going into the adult section of the library for the first time. I looked at a few books. They were full of words I didn’t know. Likewise, I didn’t understand a word of the Mandarin I heard. But I can listen to it again and again.

The Washing Machine Principle

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Suppose I want to improve performance of my washing machine. Ways I might do this fall into three categories:

1. Supply missing inputs. It needs water, soap, and electricity. If any one of them is missing, I can greatly improve performance by adding it — by plugging the machine in, for example. These changes are easy because water, soap, and electricity are easy to get.

2. Replace broken parts. This will also greatly improve performance. These changes are very difficult unless I am a washing machine repairman.

3. Everything else. To improve performance any other way will be difficult and any improvements will be small. These other methods of improvement — such as putting special disks into the wash — are also likely to be dangerous.

All complex machines are like this. What I call the Washing Machine Principle says that humans are also like this. This means that non-transplant attempts to improve human well-being fall into two clusters: 1. Easy, safe, and highly effective. 2. Difficult, dangerous, and only slightly effective.

Some simple examples:

  • Vitamins. If you have a deficiency disease, getting more of the right vitamin will cure you easily, safely, and rapidly. They supply a missing input.
  • Antidepressants. They are dangerous, difficult to make and obtain, and don’t work very well. In controlled studies, they do only slightly better than placebos. Patients typically must try several to find one that works. They don’t supply a missing input.
  • The mirror treatment for certain neurological conditions that Atul Gawande recently described:
    • [The patient’s] left hand felt cartoonishly large—at least twice its actual size. He developed a constant burning pain along an inch-wide ribbon extending from the left side of his neck all the way down his arm. And an itch crept up and down along the same band, which no amount of scratching would relieve. . . . [These symptoms had lasted 11 years. Gawande suggested trying the mirror treatment.] After a couple of weeks, his hand returned to feeling normal in size all day long. The mirror also provided the first effective treatment he has had for the flares of itch and pain.

    The mirror treatment is cheap, safe, and, in this case, highly effective. Clearly it supplies a missing input.

To be continued.

Interview with William Rubel, Food Historian (part 2)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

William Rubel is the author of The Magic of Fire, about hearth cooking.

RUBEL I started to think, once I finished that book, I thought, ’well, this bread that I’ve been interested in for so long, I wonder if they ever wrote down how they made bread when they were still doing stone-ground flour and working the bread by hand at home or in the bakeries.’ And the answer is, really, that they had not written down with much precision. So my goal–another primary goal–is to find the lost part of the techniques that were not written down and revive them in a way that will provide inspiration for modern bakers.

A third idea is that I’ve certainly noticed that our current bread culture is exceedingly narrow. In other words, the artisan culture–the slow food breads that we all like–tend to be French breads that trace their lineage to France and the primary ingredient is flour, water, and salt and either yeast or leaven, which is a sourdough starter. And in this bread culture, the leaven starter is preferred. There’s also a preference for an irregular crumb–big holes on the inside of the bread but not a regular shape; some of them are big, some are small. We like the color to be little bit off-white, to be cream. We tend to like a crusty crust. It’s very specific. We tend to badmouth other breads like Wonder Bread as a garbage bread and fast-risen yeast breads or breads with soft crusts and soft interiors, we tend to feel that those are bad breads, that there’s a good bread which is that French-inspired one and these other ones are bad. But as an historian, I say that bread is an invention of human culture. There is no bread–farmers don’t farm breads, they farm grain. You could say that this is a perfect apple, an apple at peak ripeness, and you can measure the sugar content in the apple to know that it is at peak ripeness. But there is no ideal bread because bread is just an expression of human culture; it’s simply an invention. So once you start saying that something is good and bad, really you’re saying that this culture that produces that bread that you don’t like is bad. You are demeaning the people who like that bread.

In one way I’m thinking of using history books to comment on the present, much the way that historians in totalitarian states–like in Stalin’s Soviet Union–would write about Medieval Period and they could talk about problems there (and political problems in the Medieval Period), whereas they could not directly address similar problems in the modern state. I’m also using this work to critique our own values and value system when it comes to bread and hopefully help readers to see themselves in the story of bread and in the historical continuum of bread culture.

ROBERTS That’s what fascinates me the most. I think that everything about your history of bread is fascinating, but the last thing that you said is what fascinates me the most. Why don’t we turn to that now? When I’ve talked with you about the book, when you’ve been talking about the book, one point you made that I especially liked was about white bread and how white bread was seen and how we came to have white bread. Can you say a little about that?

RUBEL White bread is the starchy part; the white flour is the starchy part of the grain called the endosperm. The way you got that historically, before the invention of modern roller mills (steel mills with steel rollers in the 19th century), was that you ground the grain between stones and then you sift it. Before agriculture was invented, the hunters and gatherers who had settled in the Fertile Crescent around the big fields of grain had stone scythes and they had grindstones. The archaeological sites are littered, when you look at drawings of archaeological sites of the hunter-gatherers–we’re talking 13,000-15,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent–these sites are just littered with grindstones. Metates: we think of Mexican women grinding the corn to make the tortillas, grinding the boiled corn they mixed _____ to make Tamasa.

It was certainly possible for people to have ground grain–we don’t know that they did–it was certainly possible that grain was being ground a very, very long time ago. Once you have ground grain, separating out the white part–the powdered part–is fairly easy. Whether people did it, we don’t know, but certainly if you can make a sieve and if they could make a basket, if they could make cloth, then they could make sieves. You can go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in their Egyptian room they have a storehouse of linen cloths–bolts and bolts of the finest linen cloths you can imagine. Anyone with fine linen cloth can make the very, very fine white flour.

ROBERTS Because you can use the linen as a filter?

RUBEL You’d sift it; that’s what they’d use. They would use linen or they would use silk. Until nylon bolting cloths were developed, silk was the highest grade bolting cloth. But anything you can weave–horsehair (they had horses in Mesopotamia), a horsehair sieve–you can sift. Remember, you’re talking about a high status product, so you’ve got lots of slaves. You also could just shake and blow; you don’t even need to sift. You can certainly make a whiter flour than a whole wheat flour just by shaking a bowl of it and the finer particles will fall and the courser particles will rise to the top. If you take fine sand and course sand and just shake, the fine will go one direction and the course sand will go another.

Part 1.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 17)

Seth Roberts12 Comments

The story so far. Standing on one foot till exhaustion twice during the day vastly improved my sleep that night. I slept longer and, especially, woke up much more rested.

Theory. I have a theory about what’s going on. When muscles are stressed — used until some of the muscle fibers break — two things happen: 1. More muscle fibers grow (= you become stronger). Everyone knows this. 2. A chemical is released by the muscle that travels to the brain and increases depth of sleep. This is a new idea. The big picture is that sleep is controlled by many things; this is one of them. Morning light is also important but that is pretty obvious, at least to sleep researchers. Morning light appears to control both the timing and depth of sleep. These muscle-produced hormones appear to mainly affect depth of sleep; I don’t notice any change in when I sleep. The evolutionary rationale is plain: We grow muscles better when we’re asleep. If we need to grow muscles more than usual, we need more sleep than usual.

New data. I want to understand what the effect depends on. What makes it weaker or stronger — especially stronger? As my legs grew stronger, the effect became slightly weaker, presumably because it was harder to produce new muscle growth in a practical amount of time. My main measure of the effect is how rested I feel when I awake. I assess that on a 0-100 scale where 0 = just as tired as when I fell asleep and 100 = completely free from tiredness. I reached scores of 100 years ago when I was on my feet for 9 or 10 hours during the day and once or twice on camping trips. Standing that much is impractical so 100 appeared impossible to reach regularly. In Berkeley, during the months before I discovered this effect, this score averaged about 95. After discovery of this effect, it was usually 99 — a big easy-to-notice improvement.

But 99 was impossible to maintain because as my legs got stronger it started to take a really long time to exhaust them. I shifted to standing on one bent leg. This obviously reduced how long I needed to stand to produce exhaustion but it was less effective (presumably because fewer muscles were involved). When I shifted from standing one-legged however I wanted (two bouts/day) to standing with the leg bent most or all of the time (four bouts/day), the scores went down to 98 or 97. After a week or so of bent-leg standing I started using the cycle 50 seconds bent, 10 seconds straight; I repeated this as long as I could.

Here is a graph showing how long I stood.

standing duration

The interesting point is that the strength increase finally levelled off at a bearable amount of time, yet the effect has persisted. If I spend about 8 minutes 4 times a day watching TV or a movie (and standing on one bent leg at the same time) I can substantially improve my sleep. This is practical. It’s the easiest exercise I’ve ever done. No special equipment. Watch TV at the same time. Big benefit. I’ve tried other muscle-building exercises, including push-ups done two different ways, jump-roping, and something vaguely resembling a biceps curl done with a thick rubber band. None has had a detectable effect. For example, after a day with jump-roping and two bouts of one-legged standing, I sleep about as well as after a day with just two bouts of one-legged standing.

Can I say again how wonderful it is to wake up totally rested? It seems almost within my grasp.

Previous posts about this.

Natural versus Unnatural Learning

Seth Roberts6 Comments

My criticisms of undergraduate education (e.g., here) have three bases:

  • my experiences at UC Berkeley. Both sides — faculty and students — disliked the situation. I accidentally found a way that worked much better.
  • my theory of human evolution. My theory explained what I saw at Berkeley, and a lot of other stuff. It says that learning specialized job skills is a basic part of being human. Our brains have been shaped by evolution to make this happen.
  • the everyday observation that people successfully learn specialized job skills all the time and did so long before colleges. Or any schools.

Set up by people who didn’t understand how learning works — the crucial ingredients — colleges teach poorly, just as malnutrition is common.

At Berkeley I was a teacher. In Beijing I’m on the other side — a student — in a different but similar learning situation: learning Chinese. We learn languages naturally, without any special structure, just as people learned job skills. There is the same broad dichotomy: between language learning via official channels, involving classes and textbooks, and natural language learning that happens without any classes and textbooks. So there should be a better way to learn Chinese than via a textbook or a class or even a tutor.

What that is, I’m trying to figure out. For reading, flash cards may work. I’m starting with food words — I see hundreds of them every time I eat a meal (in the student dining halls) — and sign words and the preset messages on my cell phone. Listening and speaking is harder. When I get better maybe I can watch TV but now I can’t understand any of it. I always enjoy my Chinese lessons but they happen without context. During the day I may want to say “Where is ______?” but my lesson happens much later, when the motivation has gone. Maybe I will get a tape recorder show I can record what people say to me and then play it for my teachers to translate.

Interview with William Rubel, Food Historian (part 1)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

My friend William Rubel is writing a history of bread. I’m sure it will be fascinating, so I interviewed him about it.

ROBERTS Can you give the background of your book, the book you’re writing now? What led you to write it? Why did you want to write about the history of bread?

RUBEL I’ve been interested in bread since I was a child. I started making bread when I was eleven from the American Heritage cookbook. I made Anadama bread.

ROBERTS What kind of bread?

RUBEL It’s called Anadama. In the headnote it uses the word ’damn,’ and that wasn’t a word used around my house so I was very excited to see it in print so I could show it to my mother, as I recall. It’s a molasses cornbread. And probably with an inaccurate culinary . . . the history in the headnote is probably not accurate. But that’s a different story.

I’ve always been interested in bread and I have for a long time been surprised at how difficult people seem to think making bread is. Long before I started this book, in conversations with people they’d say, ’Oh but making bread is very hard.’ And I’ve always found it to be rather easy. I’ve always found bread to be a natural process that is pretty difficult to fail at.

One of my primary interests in researching the history of bread is to find stories about bread that will inspire bakers but also to find older ways or different ways of writing bread recipes so that bakers will feel empowered. I think that the modern recipe format, and this might be not quite on topic, but you can cut it to someplace else, the modern, particularly American recipe format with its specificity of measurement and technique, I think actually undermines the baker’s confidence, the cook’s confidence, rather than builds it. Right now particularly with bread recipes, the recipes are becoming increasingly specific so that a brioche recipe might run for ten pages and does in one of the cookbooks on my shelf. I think that you are in a vicious circle where more specificity breeds more tension and undermines confidence and actually reduces the number of people who are willing to just sit down and put together a bread.

ROBERTS I think that’s a great point.

RUBEL With the exception of pastries, which are chemical recipes that require precise ratios for a very, very specific effect. You can’t make a puff pastry if the percentage of butter is wrong, and there is a right and wrong for making something like the puff pastry. But for most recipes, and certainly for bread, there isn’t really a right and wrong. One thing that I’m learning, but it was also something I was looking for in historic text, is that there really isn’t, there’s rarely a single definition or a single recipe for a bread. For example, if we take modern breads, like the baguette, modern cookbooks offer a recipe titled ’Baguette’ and then there is a recipe–a very specific recipe–for that bread. But if you go to Paris, which is indisputably the home of the baguette, and if you buy a baguette at every bakery you pass for a period of hours . . .

ROBERTS How many baguettes are we talking about?

RUBEL Well, it depends how fast you walk and it does depend what district you’re in, but you could certainly collect 20 or 30 baguettes in a couple of hours. You’re going to find that they are all long, skinny breads, and they all have diagonal slash marks along the top–that opens them up. But past that, it’s also clear that there isn’t one recipe. Some will be very fluffy inside with an even crumb and very white. Some are going to be cream-colored inside with large, irregular crumbs. Some are chewy, some are not. Some are made with whole wheat or certainly flours that are not all white. Some are made with yeast, some are made with leaven–with sourdough. There’s just every combination–many different recipes. I think you’re going to find that all wheat bread–and that’s really the definition of a baguette–something simple like a wheat bread that weighs approximately 450 grams and is long and skinny and has diagonal slash marks on the top.

By going back into history, I tried to find inspiration and confidence; stories for cooks that will help them understand that they can be more relaxed when they approach a bread and that there isn’t necessarily one answer.

But maybe more generally, and to answer that question more directly, I discovered in my book, The Magic of Fire, which is a book on hearth cooking, that cooks went from cooking in the fireplace, more or less in the blink of an eye–all at once–to cooking on iron stoves and then these gas and electric ranges. And nobody had written down, no cook wrote down, what it was like to cook in the fireplace. There was no manual. But all of our recipes are derived from hearth cooking.

When I took the recipes back to the hearth then I found that there was often potential for flavor and texture, in particular, that were implicit in the recipe once you got it to the fireplace. They were implicit in the recipe but unrealized until it was brought back to the fireplace.

ROBERTS By implicit in the recipe, you mean those ingredients could produce a much better result than they usually got?

RUBEL Take a lasagna. You layer the boiled big pieces of pasta down with some ingredients and maybe you put cheese on top. And then you put it in a pan in the over and you bake it. Originally it was not baked in the oven like that, it would have been originally baked in a Dutch oven, what we call a Dutch oven: a pot that you can put a lid on and you can put embers on the lid as well as embers underneath the put. Or it was baked in the bread oven.

Now if we take the hearth cooking situation, which would have been the most common, because most people did not have ovens at home, you have straight, independently controlled heat sources. You can heat the Dutch oven just from the sides closest to the fire, from the side heat. You can heat it from embers underneath and you can heat it by embers on the top. So you might have your lasagna well cooked–heated all the way through–but you want to brown the top. At that point you can throw embers onto the top and brown it. You can take away all the other heat sources and just focus on that top. You might like to have crust on the bottom and the sides, so you would also have control of the heat source just to do that, whereas in an oven, everything’s a steady 350 degrees, top and bottom.

ROBERTS I see. Now I understand.

Learning Chinese in Beijing

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Learning Chinese here — at least the first baby steps — has turned out be easier than expected. I’d expected to hire tutors. A Berkeley grad student I know who had lived near where I live now had done that. I found ads offering tutoring on a craigslist-like site. I started with the cheapest ($10/hour — which is a lot in Beijing). After an hour, I cut short the first lesson. It had been excruciating. “X means this. Y means that.” In my tutor’s defense, we didn’t yet have a textbook to work from but paying $10/hour for a textbook reader seemed pricey. By then, two people — a Tsinghua student I’d met in a dining hall and the girl who sold me my cell phone — had offered me free Chinese lessons.

“Why should I pay you if others will teach me for free?” I asked my tutor.

“Why did I spend four years in college learning how to teach Chinese to foreigners?” she replied. (That was her major.)

That wasn’t persuasive, I said.

She said she had a Mandarin accent but others might not.

“To speak with everyone I should learn from everyone,” I said. This is an attractive feature of Beijing: It’s much more a melting pot than other Chinese cities, such as Shanghai.

By now I’ve had several lessons from three different people who offered to teach me for free. It felt like fun, not work. They volunteered to teach me because they would learn English at the same time. Most Tsinghua students want to go graduate school in America, where they can expect to do very well — Dark Matter notwithstanding — so long as their English is adequate. I may be at the exact place on earth — the Tsinghua campus — where English-speaking ability is valued most highly. It might be a special time, too: As the Chinese educational system improves its teaching of English, I expect the value will go down. If I were in Sweden, no one would volunteer to teach me Swedish.

The difference between my paid and unpaid teachers reminds me of a famous psychology experiment on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation done by Mark Lepper and colleagues at Stanford and published in 1973. They took two groups of kids and put them in a room full of toys. One group was told they would be rewarded if they played with the toys. The other group wasn’t told this. Two weeks later, the kids were put back with the toys. Kids rewarded for playing with the toys played less with them than the other kids did. It’s such a profound effect it’s like there are two different motivational systems.