Seth’s blog

ROBERTS I like to think that because you cover so many hundreds of years when you discuss geometry or probability that–and there’s so many interesting characters and they have to be so brilliant to make a lasting contribution to those fields–that you’re able to draw from a richer material than most writers. You have to be a very unusual person to make a lasting contribution to probability theory. [That came out wrong. You have to be a very unusual person to make a lasting contribution to any field.]

MLODINOW Right, well certainly mathematicians tend to be very unusual and colorful, odd sorts. That helps when you’re writing a book about them. The physicist are maybe not quite as odd. My book Feynman’s Rainbow was really about just one physicist and he was very colorful, so I got away with that. The work I do with Stephen Hawking is different in that sense–there’s not that much history in those books. In our new book that we’re doing, he doesn’t want us to much history at all, so we’re going to focus on the concepts.

ROBERTS . . . Let’s start with your writing career. You seem to have been a good writer by the time you got your PhD because as I understand it, you were able to actually get a writing job after leaving Cal Tech. You must have been at a very high level by that time; you wrote a spec script for, what, Star Trek? Or some other show?

MLODINOW Well, my rise in Hollywood is a long and involved story, but yes, I did rise pretty quickly. After Cal Tech I went to the Max Planck Institute in Munich and then I came to Hollywood to make my way and in six months I was working at my first TV job, which was a really crappy show on cable, which was pretty new then–cable, I mean. And from there I worked by way up to network shows–I did comedies such as Night Court, the original Gary Shandling show and I wrote for dramas as well including MacGuyver and as you said, Star Trek: The Next Generation. That was a crazy period of life.

ROBERTS I got the impression that you already knew how to write really well by then.

MLODINOW I think that in a way . . . I guess there’s two components to being able to write. One is your natural proclivity, I try not to say talent, but it’s your voice or the way you express yourself. And the other is the craft part of it that you learn by doing. I think I always had a good sense of humor and maybe a way to say things colorfully or think in terms of dramatic or powerful situations and I guess that’s the first part and served well. The other part is the things you learn as you go, such as what puts people to sleep or how to abandon what you think are good ideas but really aren’t. That’s a hard lesson to learn because it’s difficult to let go of things you might like and to realize that it just doesn’t belong or goes on too far or the idea that sometimes it’s hard to recognize things that may be good but just don’t belong there–that are tangents and they take away the dramatic thrust of where you’re going and they really have to be cut even though they’re good and you like them. You know, lessons like that, lessons about pacing–you learn by doing, by failing. You learn more about pacing, all sorts of technical aspects of writing, whether its fiction or nonfiction or TV or books; there are certain principles that you just learn by repeatedly doing and doing wrong and realizing, absorbing what went wrong and fixing it and you grow that way. In book writing you’re able to do that a lot with rough drafts so a lot of your mistakes don’t end up getting published–you know? TV writing can be so fast that often you don’t see the problems with the script until you actually watch it on the air and then you go, ‘Next time I think I won’t have that guy climbing the stairs for four minutes in the middle of the scene; I think five seconds is enough to get the idea across.’

Interview directory.

Somebody anonymous with an amusingly-named blog became a vegan while working in a Thai restaurant:

Now here’s something surprising: my bosses were interested in helping me be a vegan. “Oh, that silly white boy and his eating experiments,” they’d say. Vang, the chef, learned to create delicious curry without fish sauce–learning how to dump plenty of salt and sugar into the coconut milk to compensate for the rotten fish. Plus, they introduced me the power of hot sauce, namely Sriracha Sauce–a love affair that continues to this very day. . . .

One of my uncles, who is possibly a little retarded and probably a little mentally ill, says that hot sauce kills all the germs in your body (yes, he claims all of them), thus making it impossible to get sick.

No, it’s the rotten fish that does that.

An SLDer has created a Facebook page for SLD. Sophie Lorenne vividly writes:

My own personal story I will post here. I have lost 7 lbs in 3 days. I am amazed that with so little effort on my part that it’s actually working! The best part is that I’m no longer hungry. And trust me I was hungry all the time, by the time others have just started their first meal. I was on my 3rd meal.

I created this page to share with others my journey and to also create a support system for others.

Thanks, Sophie.

And thanks, Marian Lizzi, for telling me about this.

More Nassim Taleb has started a Facebook group called Make Bankers Accountable — a “J’accuse” by Roubini and Taleb. Great idea. Thanks to Dave Lull.

I was 15 or so when I first read a John Updike novel. To my amazement, it was fun to read. The novels I’d read in English class, such as Oliver Twist, had never been fun to read. I read a lot more Updike and figured out he liked Nabokov. So I picked up Pnin. I loved Nabokov, it turned out. You could say Updike was an easy-listening version of Nabokov. He was the first person who taught me to enjoy literature. He was the bridge.

For a long time I read almost everything he wrote (except The Poorhouse Fair) but around S. I stopped. Maybe because I was watching more TV. I continued to read all his stuff in The New Yorker, but maybe it is fitting that, in his entire career, the thing he said that I like best occurred on TV. In a National Book Award acceptance speech (1998) he said, “A book is beautiful in its relation to the human hand, to the human eye, to the human brain, and to the human spirit.”

Beijing’s dirty air is easily the worst thing about living there. You might think what to do about it is obvious. Many people do, including this man who wants to sell the expensive air filter he bought:

I remember the day IQair Sales Rep Justin Shuttleworth came to my place [in Beijing] to give me a demo. This guy has the easiest job in the world. All he does is come with his little air quality measuring device, show you how bad the air you are breathing is in your apartment (indoor air is sometimes worse than outdoor air for those who don`t know), and as the minutes go by, you literally see the amount of particles in the air go down, until it’s basically nil. This was the first time that I could actually smell the difference.

This is from an email list I’m on.

I got the same demo.  But it had the opposite effect: It made me not want to buy the IQair filter.

The air coming out of the IQair filter was very clean, yes. But there was only so much it could do. More dirty air was always coming into my apartment and no matter how high (= noisy) they ran the machine the overall level of dirt was no more than cut by 2/3rds. I already had an air filter. The air it produced wasn’t quite as clean as air from the IQair filter but it was still much much cleaner than the intake air. The IQair machine cost about 11,000 RMB. My filter had cost about 1,000 RMB. For 1,500 RMB I could buy a bigger version of what I already had, an air filter that cleaned twice as much air per minute as the IQair machine while producing roughly the same amount of noise. Its output was slightly dirtier than the output of the IQair machine but the overall cleaning effect — the reduction in dirt — was much greater. I ended up getting two of the 1,500 RMB filters.

I think of this demo when I hear someone talk about how this or that traditional diets is better than our modern diet. They make a simple point: People who eat the traditional diet are healthy, people who eat the modern diet are unhealthy. Just as the IQair demo guy has “the easiest job in the world.” They inevitably conclude: Eat the traditional diet or at least closer to it. Just as the conclusion of the demo is supposed to be: Buy an IQair filter. It seems so simple.

But it isn’t so simple. Eating the traditional diet isn’t easy, just as the IQair filter isn’t cheap. Maybe their abstraction — their description — of the traditional diet leaves out something important. Just as the IQair people do not measure cleaning power per decibel, which turns out to be what matters. (I traded air pollution for noise pollution. I wanted the best deal possible.)

If you read Good Calories Bad Calories you may remember the Canadian anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson who spent many months with Eskimos eating what they ate. He came back and told the world “you can eat only meat.” In his conclusions and subsequent field experiment, he ignored the fact that the Eskimos ate a lot of fermented meat.