Seth’s blog

My friend Carl Willat has the following suggestion:

To make it easier to consume flaxseed oil, put it on toast. About one tablespoon of flaxseed oil per slice of bread. Eat nose-clipped.

I tried it. Flaxseed on toast, noseclipped, is delicious. It tastes just like toast with butter.

If you look up vegetarianism in Wikipedia, you’ll find references to several health “concerns”. You won’t find anything about trouble at high altitudes. However, a friend of mine went on a high-altitude camping trip and found himself feeling terrible, with symptoms of altitude sickness. He later learned, when everyone reconvened, that two others in the group of 30 had had similar troubles. All three were vegetarians. They’d done fine on hikes at lower altitudes. None of the other 27 were vegetarians. The correlation makes sense because vegetarians are often much lower in iron — a component of hemoglobin, which transports oxygen — than non-vegetarians.

The interesting question for me is: What can we do with such data? It’s obviously useful, but where does it go? Not in a scientific paper, obviously. In a letter to the editor? Of what journal?

You probably know that plastics were first used for toys. You probably don’t know that the first metals were used by artists, as far as archeologists can determine. That’s material science, what about non-material science? Here’s Tyler Cowen:

I’ve been thinking of all those old puzzles where a bunch of guys enter the room and only so many of them have smudges on their foreheads and you have to find the algorithm to reveal that information.

The problem is to separate good banks from bad banks, so that good banks can continue business. A big reason I started self-experimentation was Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. I could sometimes solve Gardner’s made-up puzzles, which gave me confidence when a non-made-up puzzle — waking up too early — came along.

More When I pointed this post out to Tyler, he replied, “Exactly what I was thinking in fact, when I wrote that…I even almost mentioned Martin Gardner.”

I just googled “morning banana diet” and got only a thousand hits. Surely that will change. It is the most popular diet in Japan right now, so popular, Mark Schrimsher of CalorieLab told me, that “You can’t buy bananas in Japan now. It’s crazy. We found some little green ones and some really expensive ones, but the rest are sold out.” Fytte, a woman’s health magazine, has covered it three months in a row. Three books have been written about it.

Like the Shangri-La Diet, it derives from (a) self-experimentation by (b) someone who was not a weight-control expert and (c) was spread by the Internet.

A cartoon.

Yesterday I went to San Francisco early in the morning.  Because of my discovery about standing and sleep, I had slept very well. In Berkeley, it looked like morning: empty streets, angle of light. I felt jet-lagged: I should have been tired but I wasn’t. On BART, the same mismatch: Everyone looked tired but I was wide awake.

It is taking longer and longer to get enough one-legged standing to generate  great sleep. Here’s a graph of how long I’ve been standing: Each point is a different bout of one-legged standing. Most of the points are from bouts where the standing leg was straight or bent (usually straight) but a few of them (”bent leg”) are from bouts where the standing leg was bent the whole time. Most days have two bouts: 1. On the left leg until I get tired. 2. On the right leg until i get tired. I’m pretty sure there’s no effect until it becomes difficult — until the muscles are so stressed that they send out a grow signal. The whole thing is pleasant because I watch TV or a movie at the same time but, as the graph shows, it has become seriously time-consuming.

So I have tested keeping the standing leg always bent. I get tired much sooner (2 minutes versus 20 minutes) but the effect is not quite as strong. Probably because fewer muscles are involved — you use more muscles when you stand on one leg in any possible way than if you stand on one leg in only one way.

I assume there’s a steady-state solution. The more muscle you have the more you lose each day. (Just as the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet assumes that the higher your set point, the fast it falls.) Eventually I should have enough muscle and will lose enough in one day so the exercise needed to merely replenish it will be enough to produce great sleep.