Seth’s blog

To get a light meter (to measure the intensity of morning sunlight) I went to Beijing Camera Equipment City (official website). On the ground floor were 50-odd small shops. They sold the stuff in any camera store, except far more various: cameras, lenses, cases, tripods, flashes, and so on. Some specialized by brand (e.g., Canon), some by product (e.g., tripods). About 10 stores sold the light meter I wanted (Sekonic L-308S). One didn’t have it in stock, but they could get it. How long would it take? Five minutes. That is, they would buy it from another vendor and resell it to me. The sequence of prices (in yuan) I was quoted was 1450 ($212), 1300 (same vendor as 1450), 980, 950, 940, 930, 920 ($135). One vendor wouldn’t sell it at 920, so perhaps that was a good price. Online I would have paid about $170.

One store had a discontinued model. The meter in the box (Gossen) didn’t match the box (Sekonic)! I would have gladly bought a Gossen but the manual in the box was for a Sekonic.

The second floor was . . . software. Fancy dresses (often wedding dresses), fancy dresses for children, costume jewelry, frames, colorful textiles, displays of the work of professional photographers. The smallest shop sold bags to carry home a fancy dress. All the photography-related stuff that ordinary photo shops don’t carry.

In a special section of Nature on personal genomics, Brendan Maher writes:

This year, three groups of researchers scoured the genomes of huge populations (the largest study looked at more than 30,000 people) for genetic variants associated with the height differences. More than 40 turned up.

But there was a problem: the variants had tiny effects. Altogether, they accounted for little more than 5% of height’s heritability — just 6 centimetres by the calculations above. Even though these genome-wide association studies (GWAS) turned up dozens of variants, they did “very little of the prediction that you [can] do just by asking people how tall their parents are”, says Joel Hirschhorn at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led one of the studies. . . .

There could be scarier and more intractable reasons for unaccounted-for heritability that are not even being discussed. “It’s a possibility that there’s something we just don’t fundamentally understand,” Kruglyak says. “That it’s so different from what we’re thinking about that we’re not thinking about it yet.”

Still the mystery continues to draw its sleuths, for Kruglyak as for many other basic-research scientists. “You have this clear, tangible phenomenon in which children resemble their parents,” he says. “Despite what students get told in elementary-school science, we just don’t know how that works.”

I don’t think it’s so mysterious. My self-experimentation led me again and again to find unsuspected environmental causes for various problems. I believe the answer is this: The heritability estimates were overestimates. As one researcher put it, “Heritability estimates are basically what clusters in families, and environment clusters in families.” Variations in environment make far more difference than variation in genes.

What the researchers “don’t fundamentally understand,” I believe, is their own tendency toward religious thinking — the tendency, shared by all of us, to believe what we’re told regardless of the (lack of) evidence for it. The notion that genes make a big difference in practice is one of those beliefs, repeated endlessly by genetics researchers (James Watson is fond of repeating it), that are supported by poor evidence at best. Obesity, it should be obvious, is an environmental disease if there ever was one. Yet Jeffrey Friedman, a researcher at Rockefeller University, is studying the genetic basis of obesity.
Thanks to Dave Lull.

I am developing tests to measure how well my brain is working. Brief tests I can use daily. My experiences with flaxseed oil make me suspect that sometimes our brains work better and/or worse than usual for many hours or days at a time and this goes unnoticed. If these instances of better or worse function could be detected, maybe we could figure out their causes — and thereby improve how well our brains work by getting less bad stuff and more good stuff. In the case of flaxseed oil, I noticed that one morning my balance was much better than usual. I noticed this only because I was doing something unusual: putting on my shoes standing on one foot. I verified that observation with a better test of balance and later found that flaxseed oil improved my performance on several mental tests, such as speeded arithmetic.

One test I am using is a typing test: On each trial I type a random sequence of six letters four times. For example, if the sequence is “rksocn” I would type rksocnrksocnrksocnrksocn”. At the moment the measure of performance is how fast I type the 24-letter sequence. Each session consists of ten trials.

Here are the results so far:

Each point is a mean over the ten trials; the error bars show standard errors. I was glad to see there was little sign of learning after the first few sessions. Having to correct for learning would make comparison of different days more difficult.

Because I am collecting a lot of data, I could look at these data more carefully. It took me a little while to do an analysis where I corrected for the difficulty of each string: Some will be easier to type than others. My first attempt at correction involved adding a factor for each letter: does the string contain an “a” (factor 1)? Does the string contain a “b” (factor 2)? And so on. This correction made a big difference: The residual mean square was almost cut in half (= sensitivity was doubled). After correcting for this, I got new estimates and standard errors for each test session:

Uh-oh! The new analysis revealed there had been something unusual about the second-to-last test session — my typing had been distinctly slower than usual. Something I ate? Unfortunately, by the time I did this analysis I could no longer remember what might have been different.

Several books about this have appeared recently and are reviewed by Marcia Angell here. It’s a good review, especially a good summary of the books, but I was really surprised by this:

Members of medical school faculties who conduct clinical trials should not accept any payments from drug companies except research support, and that support should have no strings attached, including control by drug companies over the design, interpretation, and publication of research results.

She expects a researcher who depends on drug companies for research support to be honest? Why? If you don’t get favorable results your grant won’t be renewed. Under this system it will be survival of the most corrupt. A reformer proposed this.

I think it’s a lot like too much humanitarian aid. Supply free milk to a needy area for too long and you wipe out the local dairy industry. Judging from this stunning proposal, the drug companies have wiped out whole medical schools. The doctors who work in them are no longer capable of doing independent research. This is worse than corruption, it’s enfeeblement.

As I noted earlier, Beijing has a museum devoted to tap water — apparently the only one in the world. Another translation of its name is the Beijing Water Supply Museum. It was incredibly hard to find. None of a dozen people in the neighborhood knew where it was. It is on the grounds of the government company that supplies tap water. While I was there, there was only one other visitor, an American. Like me, he’d noticed it on Google Maps.

I loved it. One of the exhibits was called “10-Day Imperial Approval”. Permission to start the water company (around 1910) was requested from the Emperor. Approval came in a lightning-fast ten days from the Emperor’s mother on yellow paper. Only the Emperor, his father, and his mother were allowed to use yellow in decorative ways. The penalty for breaking this rule was death. In the early days of the water company, slips of paper gave you permission to collect your water in a bucket. A photo of an early president of the company (thin, young, shaved head, high-collar traditional shirt) made him look more like a dashing criminal than a captain of industry.

For anti-terrorist reasons, there was nothing about how the water was processed.

Museums are usually devoted to the rare, beautiful, and intricate, which why a museum of tap water sounds like a joke. When Paul Goldberger, the New Yorker’s architecture critic, devotes his best-buildings-of-the-year list to nine show-off buildings and an art exhibit — none of them advancing the art of making the houses and workplaces where we spend most of our lives — I am glad to see agreement that something is missing.

The other visitor was in Beijing to visit his sister, a high school exchange student, living with a family that speaks no English, who had checked the wrong box on her visa application and was unable to come home for Christmas. She was having a great time and now wanted to apply to a college with a Flagship Program — you go to the American school for two years and then a Chinese school for the last two years. What a sea change! Americans treat another country as equal. Americans grasp that someone else might have something to teach us. At Berkeley a few years ago, the psychology department had a day-long meeting to discuss various issues. About one of them, I suggested that we look at how other deparments had handled it; maybe we could learn from them. Bad idea, I was told, they’re supposed to copy us.