Seth’s blog

1. Why Word has an animated paperclip. For more on this, see the excellent Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Prestige, and Success by Art Kleiner.
2. Does sugar make it harder to fight off microbes?
3. Practical memory training.
4. Interview with Leonard Mlodinow, author of Feynman’s Rainbow and the soon-to-be-published The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.

Thanks to Dave Lull and Peter Spero.

The most popular TV show is American Idol. On Survivor, one of the most popular TV shows, an “immunity idol” has a big role. Next: a restaurant chain called Potlatch.

The Shangri-La Diet (the book) is two years old. What’s happened during the last year?

The nerd in me is enormously concerned with numerical measures of popularity. Is the diet spreading? If so, how fast? This can be measured dozens of ways; the number I trust most is number of visitors to the SLD forums. This number has been steadily increasing. Plotted on a log scale, the visitors-vs-time function is roughly linear ( = same percentage increase each month). The number has doubled in a year. It was about 7,000 a year ago; it is about 14,000 now. The increase has happened/is happening without much effort from me. During the first year, I posted on the forums several times per day; now I post less than once/day.

Which brings up Topic 2: Improvements by users — which the populist in me cares about. I like to think that allowing anyone to contribute ideas and experience, which they can do via the SLD forums, will be a good thing. (Not only here: the Weston Price Foundation website should have forums.) I also like to think the ideas behind SLD have a life of their own. More than other weight-loss methods, the Shangri-La Diet is based on a theory. Most weight-loss methods are based on good/bad classifications: Food A is good, Food B is bad. Not much room for improvement. A theory, on the other hand, can be used in many ways. Mixing a new theory with lots of user experimentation should be really powerful — especially when the user-experimenters can trade ideas and experience. It should produce a different kind of growth: growth of efficacy. Over the last year I was especially impressed with comments on the SLD forums about nose-clipping. This thread in particular. Heidi555 wrote:

I think it’s much easier to nose clip a higher percentage of food. The AS is noticeable and you don’t have to exert any will power. I don’t worry about a two hour window. . . . The weirdest thing is that I always feel like I’m eating a lot. Maybe eating as much as you want, of whatever you want, always feels like a lot.

By “much easier” she meant much easier than other ways of applying the theory (”taking oil, sugar water, or a smaller amount of nose clipped food). Wearing nose-clips in public isn’t easy, but that could change. Isn’t wearing nose-clips a lot like wearing glasses?

Another part of me likes a good story — e.g., American Idol. If I wanted to tell a story about SLD during the last year, I would stress the omega-3 storyline, especially 1. Tyler Cowen no longer needs gum surgery after he starts taking flaxseed oil (FSO). 2. Anonymous finds himself healing more quickly after martial arts practice when he starts taking FSO. Stops taking FSO, returns to baseline, restarts FSO, improves again. I like the unexpectedness of it: Why would a new diet lead to this? Speaking of fights, in New York, I met a woman who works on reality TV shows. “That’s what my job is about,” she said. “Getting people to fight.” Yes, fight = good TV. Over the last year, the SLD forums remained bad TV: exceptionally well-behaved and conflict-free. I’m not sure what this means, but I really like it.

Stephen Marsh’s 2.5 yrs on SLD.

In a science classroom at a middle school I saw a poster about “the scientific method.” There were seven steps; one was “analyze your data.” According to the poster, you use the data you’ve collected to say if your hypothesis was right or wrong. Nothing was said about using data to generate new hypotheses. Yet coming up with ideas worth testing is just as important as testing them.

It’s like teaching the alphabet and omitting half of the letters. Or teaching French and omitting half the common words. While no one actually teaches only half the alphabet or only half of common French words, this is how science is actually taught. Not just in middle school, everywhere. The poster correctly reflects the usual understanding. I have seen dozens of books about scientific method. They usually say almost nothing about how to come up with a new idea worth testing. An example is Statistics For Experimenters, a well-respected book by Box, Hunter, and Hunter. One of the authors (George Box) is a famous statistician.

The curious part of this omission is how unnecessary it is. Every scientific idea we now take for granted started somewhere. It would be no great effort to find where a bunch of them came from.

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.