Seth’s blog

This excellent post by Alex Tabarrok about the effect of removing traffic lights — traffic improves — reminds me of how I discovered the work of Jane Jacobs. Browsing in the Transportation Library at UC Berkeley, I came across The Economy of Cities.

That order arising from below (from individual drivers and pedestrians) can be much better than order imposed from above (by traffic engineers) was a point Jacobs made often. The details in Alex’s post and the video he embeds don’t just suggest that traffic lights in thousands of places could be profitably removed, they also support more radical thinking:

• Traffic engineers were completely wrong in all these cases. Trying to improve something, they made it worse. How did we get to a world where this is possible? Surely it isn’t just traffic engineers.
• What would happen if students were given more power to control their own education? Perhaps we would need far few professors. I gave my students much more control and found (a) my job got easier and (b) my students learned much more.
• What would happen if all of us were given more power to control our own health, rather than rely on gatekeepers, such as doctors? Perhaps we would need far fewer doctors.

The essence of my self-experimentation is that I took control of my health. Rather than seeing a doctor about my early awakening, or waiting for sleep researchers to find a solution, I found a solution.

• Probiotic cuts probability of pneumonia in half for high-risk patients. In related news, yogurt confiscated.
• Medical ghostwriting is research misconduct, argues this article. Think what this means: A common practice among medical school professors can reasonably be considered research misconduct. Via the Carlat Psychiatry Blog.
• Parking-space maximums by Tom Vanderbilt

Thanks to Anne Weiss and Mark Griffith.

• Quotation bias in reviews of the diet-heart idea. “Criticism of the diet-heart idea is often met with the argument that consensus committees have settled the issue unanimously.” Uh, where have I heard that?
• Kefir for sale in Beijing. Eating plenty of fermented food for the first time, “for whatever reason this is first trip where I didn’t have any real bout with food poisoning or tourista.”
• Cheese and tooth decay
• Tim Harford on Jane Jacobs
• Fermented grain recipes from around the world
• Triumph over HMO. “His lack of action protected his status and his organization, but put [my daughter’s] safety and well-being at risk.”
• Never bet against New Yorker writer Susan Orlean

Thanks to Steve Hansen and Gary Wolf.

• submarine tunnel and giant terrain model, discovered via Google Earth. More here.
• Nassim Taleb interview podcast.
• Shades of Jane Jacobs: How the cure for scurvy was lost. “From the fifteenth century on, it was the rare doctor who acknowledged ignorance about the cause and treatment of the disease.”

Thanks to Dave Lull.

• Jane’s [Jacobs] Walks
• 9 years of sleep data
• overview of Jane Jacobs’s work
• God is in every leaf of every tree. A great summing up of what science is about — taking seriously little things (such as leaves) and drawing inferences from the very small (”leaf”) to the very large (”God”). Someday I am going to use this saying . . . I would have used it already, had I known of it.

Thanks to Anne Weiss, Tom George, and JR Minkel