During a 2009 FBI/NYPD raid of a house in Queens
A hazmat team in full protective gear was brought in to investigate a jar of kombucha tea fermenting in the basement.
The police seized a Mao Zedong refrigerator magnet, among other things.
Thank to Dev Rana.
The QuietComfort 15 headphones ($300) are Bose’s newest noise-cancelling headphones. I had two of an earlier model, the QC 2, because when they broke I couldn’t bear to be without one for two weeks. I used them while walking on my treadmill and riding the subway. BART is noisy.
The model numbers went 1, 2, 3, 15. And, yeah, the QC 15 is much better than the QC 2 and QC 3, which were about the same. The first time I wore them on BART, when I got out of the subway I noticed I didn’t feel exhausted, the way I usually did after a subway ride. I felt normal. The noise had been exhausting.
Thanks to Vic Sarjoo, Anne Weiss, and Marian Lizzi.
Yesterday I blogged about a sudden improvement in how fast I could do arithmetic. The improvement was much larger than normal variation and happened after I did four things that I rarely did. In chronological order:
1. Ate about 30 g of butter.
2. Stood on a cobblestone mat (for 5 minutes, which was all I could bear).
3. Stood during the test.
4. Walked for 10 minutes just before the test.
To find out which mattered, I did them again in the same order and at the same times of day, but with tests before and after each one. If performance suddenly improved after one of them, then I’d know.
Here’s what actually happened.
The last six points are the relevant results. The first of the six points (627 msec) was before everything. The second (613 msec) was after butter but before the cobblestones. The third (630 msec) was after the cobblestones but before standing. The fourth (610 msec) and fifth (603 msec) were while standing but before walking. The final one (581 msec) was while standing after walking.
I was surprised and pleased how closely the first and last scores repeated the earlier difference. The first score was close to the previous baseline; the last score was close to the previous outlier. A big improvement seems to be under my control.
Before doing these tests, my best guess about what caused the improvement was the walking. But the scores were improving before the walking so that’s unlikely. Perhaps the walking was one of several factors that helped. The data suggest, if anything, a shocking conclusion: butter made my brain work better. An alternative, less consistent with Occam’s razor, is that butter, standing, and walking all produced smaller improvements, which together added up to the big improvement. The cobblestones produced a short-lived decrement.
That pork fat improved my sleep obviously supports the butter interpretation. I should be less surprised than anyone else, but still . . . Last week I noticed something else that supports the butter explanation. At a restaurant with a friend, the waiter brought bread and olive oil. I asked for butter. I spread all of it on a piece of bread, then asked for more butter, and spread all of that on another piece of bread. (About 30 g butter total.) It was the first time I’d eaten a large amount of butter at a meal. An hour or so later, I felt unusually good, some combination of calm and warmth. I never noticed this after eating pork fat, but butter may be to pork fat as hamburger is to steak: Easier to digest. The pork fat is within cell walls; the butter fat isn’t.
For a few years, I’ve been making daily measurements of how well my brain works. I got the idea after I found that omega-3 (from flaxseed oil) improves my balance. It improved other mental functions as well. Tim Lundeen, using an arithmetic test, found similar results. These results suggested to me there might be a lot we don’t know about how our environment affects our brain.
If so, tracking myself might turn up interesting anomalies — clues to big environmental effects. The first one I found involved flaxseed oil. There turned out to be a short burst of improvement after I took it. The second anomaly I found also involved flaxseed oil. When I switched from Chinese flaxseed oil to American flaxseed oil (Spectrum Organic), a few days later my arithmetic scores suddenly improved. Something was wrong with the Chinese flaxseed oil.
The third revealing anomaly — which doesn’t involve flaxseed oil — happened yesterday (see below). Each point on the graph is one testing session. Each session consists of 32 simple arithmetic problems (e.g., 3+5, 7-6) and takes about 3 minutes. I use R on my laptop to collect the data. I type the answer or the last digit of the answer (e.g., if the answer is 13 I type “3″) as fast as possible. Here are the results from almost a year of this task:
The Y axis is the time it took to do one problem. Yesterday, the graph shows, I suddenly got much faster. My score dropped about 50 msec — far more than normal variation.
What caused the drop? I can think of four possibilities:
1. The test was standing. Usually I test myself sitting.
2. The test happened after I’d been walking on my treadmill for 10 minutes. That too was very rare.
3. I’d had about 30 g of butter 2 hours earlier.
4. I’d stood on my cobblestone mat 2 hours earlier.
My guess is that it’s #2 (10 min walking). The previous record low score, in January, might have come after I did Dance Dance Revolution for 30 minutes or so.
