Seth’s blog

These are the supplies I used in my calorie-learning experiments:

1. Wonder bread. I wanted bread with as little flavor as possible

2. Unsalted butter. Unsalted because the spice blends have salt.

3. Eleven Penzeys Spices spice blends. In particular, Baking Spice, Cake Spice, Chicken Taco Seasoning, Jerk Pork Seasoning, Poultry Seasoning, Mural of Flavor, Sate Seasoning, Southwest Seasoning, Sweet Curry (regular), Tuscan Sunset, Venison Sausage Seasoning. Each has 5-15 different spices. For example, Jerk Pork Seasoning contains paprika, allspice, ginger, cayenne pepper, sugar, nutmeg, black pepper, garlic, thyme, lemon grass, cinnamon, star anise, cloves, and mace. Baking Spice is a mixture of two kinds of cinnamon, anise seed, allspice, mace, and cardamom. Combining a few of them should produce a flavor unlikely to resemble any familiar flavor.

The Sharper Image has gone bankrupt and will no longer honor gift cards. In the comments section of the Consumerist post about this, several people apparently fail to understand why gift cards exist:

Another reason why cash is a better gift than gift cards.

This is just a good example why you should never buy a gift card.

Did anyone ever NOT know that gift cards are stupid?

The real lesson here, as Consumerists know, is don’t buy gift cards. They are a bad deal even if the issuer doesn’t go bankrupt.

This is the low-rent version of the deadweight cost of Christmas idea, which I discussed earlier. At the risk of stating the obvious, the perfect gift shows you know a lot about the recipient; cash shows you know nothing. A gift card shows you know a little — where the person likes to shop. They are less wasteful but less gift-like than ordinary gifts, more wasteful and more gift-like than cash. Gifts are supposed to be wasteful. This is why they are nicely wrapped. (Curiously no commenter called gifts stupid, a scam, etc.) In evolutionary terms, gift-giving traditions evolved because they increased demand for seemingly “useless” stuff. Gifts that went unused and expensive wrappings weren’t actually useless; they helped artists and artisans make a living. They were research grants for material science.

From an article in Rolling Stone about mercury and autism:

The CDC “wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe,” Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the [Institute of Medicine’s] Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001. “We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect” of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee’s chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was “inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation” between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result “Walt wants” — a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.

From Chapter 12 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

`No, no!’ said the Queen. `Sentence first–verdict afterwards.’

`Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. `The idea of having the sentence first!’

`Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple.

Eerily prophetic, no?

Thanks to Dev Rana.

The discovery of flavor-calorie learning (in rats) was no surprise. It was another example of flavor-consequence learning, which was well established. In the 1950s, John Garcia had found that if you make a rat sick after exposing it to a new flavor, it will avoid that flavor. Flavor-consequence learning belongs to the larger category of Pavlovian learning (also called classical conditioning), the sort of learning where an animal learns that an unimportant event (such as a bell) predicts an important event (such as food). Pavlovian learning belongs to the larger category of associative learning, which also includes action-event learning, such as a rat learning that bar presses produce food pellets. The action is pressing the bar; the event is getting a food pellet.

My Ph.D. was in the field of animal learning. Almost all animal learning research is about associative learning. When I taught introductory psychology, however, I found it hard to take advantage of my expertise because most of the research had little real-world relevance. The big exception was Shepard Siegel’s work on drug tolerance and craving. Tolerance and craving are due to Pavlovian learning, Siegel argued. Flavor-calorie learning, happening at every meal, might have been another exception had anything interesting been known about it — but nothing was.

The usual terminology is to say that in a Pavlovian-learning experiment, the animal learns to associate the CS (conditioned stimulus, such as a bell) with the US (unconditioned stimulus, such as food). In flavor-calorie learning experiments, the flavor source is the CS, the calorie source the US.

When I buy flaxseed oil, I have a choice: with or without lignans. I almost always choose without. Apparently that’s the right choice, witness this from the SLD forums:

I’ve been trying to figure out what besides overeating might cause these flare ups with my gallbladder. It seems clear from the last few days that one of the things that can set it off is Flax Seed Oil with lignans. When I consume 2-3 tablespoons a day of FSO without lignans, I don’t notice any problems. The FSO goes down easy and I don’t feel nausea or pain. But with the lignans I often do. To be sure, I decided to switch from FSO to ground up flax seeds mixed into my oatmeal. And today, the first time I tried that, an hour later the familiar nausea is back.