Seth’s blog

Long ago Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford professor, wrote The Population Bomb. Yet you probably know about the demographic transition: A sharp decrease in family size when countries reach a certain level of wealth. Which implies a big problem with Ehrlich’s forecasts. You probably don’t know about three related transitions:

1. Forests. For a long time humans destroyed forests and forest area decreased. More recently, however, forests have been regrowing as people leave rural areas for cities.

2. Obesity. In poor countries, rich people are fatter than poor people. In rich countries, the opposite is true: the poor are fatter than the rich, presumably because the rich eat less factory food.

3. Fast food. On a recent visit to Tokyo, I was told that the number of fast food restaurants in Tokyo is declining.

A girl sitting near me in this Beijing cafe is using a Sony Vaio Series X notebook. I’m blown away how thin and light it is. It cost about $1100 and has a 60G hard drive. Another girl near me is using an iPad, big and clunky by comparison.

Contradicting the notion that you can find anything on the Internet, I cannot find any info about what I was told in a Beijing Starbucks: A few years, a city was started in Mexico where a million Chinese workers will manufacture stuff. Because of NAFTA, the stuff they make will have tariff-free access to the American market. And shipping from Mexico will be cheaper than shipping from China. The Chinese workers will come over for a limited time, such as one year.

If you’re like me, you failed to grasp the importance of this recent report in the New York Times. Much like the prediction of new elements using the periodic table, in the 1970s an engineer named Leon Chua predicted the existence of a fourth circuit element (the first three are resistors, capacitors, and inductors) that he called memristors — resistors with a memory. Their resistance varies depending on their history.

A few years ago Hewlett-Packard researchers studying titanium oxide found puzzling results that turned out to be due to memristors. Only at very small sizes, they found, does memristance become large relative to other effects. How easily you can walk through a room depends on where the furniture is. Memristors involve moving the furniture (atoms). If these new devices can be made practical (e.g., fast enough), they will provide memory much smaller and more power-efficient than current devices. But it’s hard to predict the impact of this discovery — it’s like discovering a new dimension.

I asked Aaron Blaisdell what was most surprising about his experience with “ancestral health” — adopting a evolutionarily reasonable diet. “That my porphyria went away,” he said. Aaron’s porphyria is/was a form of sun sensitivity. “My mother has it. Her father had it,” he said. It was obviously genetic. Scientists had located the genes involved. Aaron assumed that someday, not soon, it might be possible to fix the genes involved. Until then, he didn’t think anything would change. It was a rare and not particularly damaging disease — it wouldn’t attract a lot of research.

How reasonable the gene-fix idea sounds, in spite of being wrong. I’ve heard dozens of scientists, including Bruce Ames and James Watson, say that we are entering a new age where we will figure out the causes of diseases (their genetic causes) and fix them. A new age of rational medicine. To fix a car or dishwasher, you figure out the part at fault and repair or replace it. The metaphor is so convincing that nobody points out another possible metaphor: Your washing machine isn’t working because you haven’t plugged it in. You need to read the owner’s manual. Most health-care researchers, especially at medical schools, are studying the parts diagram of the washing machine, trying to figure out what part is at fault, when the problem is elsewhere: Not plugged in. Much easier to fix.