Seth’s blog

The presidents of dozens of liberal arts colleges have decided to stop participating in the annual college rankings by U.S. News and World Report.

From the NY Times. I commented earlier on the contradiction between how college presidents think students should be judged — they believe it is fine to judge all students according to one standard that usually has little to do with their strengths and goals — and how they wish to be their colleges to be judged.

“Frankly, it had bubbled up to the point of, why should we do this work for them?” said Judith P. Shapiro, the president of Barnard College.

Yes, exactly: Why help prospective students? Lest there be any doubt for whom colleges exist.

On her MySpace page, Janice writes:

I have been on [the Shangri-La Diet] for a month and I have lost 12 pounds! It is the easiest way to lose weight.

During this month she started riding a recumbent bike. I am struck by how often this happens: After people start SLD they start improving their lives in other ways. (Didn’t happen to me, by the way.) Does cessation of struggle with food (which took “energy”) leave more “energy” for other forms of self-improvement? I wasn’t struggling with food when I started SLD so I would fit that theory.

This wouldn’t explain why SLD causes non-caloric cravings (such as for coffee and cigarettes) to go away. Maybe they go away because they are triggered by hunger. Speaking of cigarettes, Gary Skaleski, who invented SLD nose-clipping, suggests that maybe you can quit smoking if you clip your nose while you smoke. You get the nicotine needed to remove the craving but the lack of smell removes the possibility of addiction. No one becomes addicted to plain sugar water, which has no smell. Fascinating idea.

I’ve collected even more observations supporting the idea that outdoor light improves my sleep, as discussed earlier. Now I’d like to get some idea of the dose-response function. To sleep really well do I need two hours of outside light? Four hours? Eight hours?

I’ve started to rate my sleep on a scale where 50 = average sleep (average for the months before I started spending more time outside) and 100 = best sleep imaginable (which I got after standing about 10 hours). And I’ve started to use a stopwatch to measure how long I spend outdoors. I’ve also been using a light meter to measure the strength of light in various places. When I’m outdoors it’s almost always in the shade. Today I discovered that sitting indoors next to a cafe window the incident light was just as bright as when I sit outside. Great to know because indoors I can plug in my laptop.

A 1994 book chapter from Daniel Kripke’s lab reported a correlation (0.24) between low light exposure and “abnormal sleep.” So the connection I am now studying has been plausible for many years. The measurements I am now making are easy, but no one made them. Perhaps too many people believe that anything other than a double-blind trial with control and experimental groups is, as Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, believes, a “mistake.”

1. At a Vietnamese take-out place near Berkeley I got a can of sugar-cane juice. Some flavor, but very close to sugar water. From Taiwan. Which makes sense: In a Hong Kong store I saw cans of pure sugar water.

2. At Trader Joe’s I bought a package of trail mix called “Omega Trek Mix with Omega Fortified Cranberries.” (A new use of omega, by the way.) It contained “500 mg Omega-3 Fatty Acids Per Serving.” Sold only by Trader Joe’s. Not saying which omega-3 fats is a problem; so is lack of refrigeration. I could do a bio-assay, I realized: using the tests I have blogged about, such as balance and arithmetic, I could determine how much of the mix I had to eat to have the same effect as 1 tablespoon of flaxseed oil.

3. At Trader Joe’s I asked the checkout clerk what parts of her job she liked the best. “If we card a secret shopper, we get $15 for lunch,” she said. Lunch here? I asked. Lunch anywhere, she said. Whereas Dell employees detest secret shoppers. A tiny glimpse of a better future.

From a review in tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review:

His ardent defense of states’ rights would have required him to uphold Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, not to mention segregated education, yet he lives with a white wife in Virginia. He is said to dislike light-skinned blacks, yet he is the legal guardian of a biracial child, the son of one of his numerous poor relatives.

“He” is Clarence Thomas. “Yet”, huh? There should be a rhetorical term for this: self-destructive.