completeconfusion

Why We Are Occupying Wall Street

2011-10-16T16:27:00.000-07:00

The facts that justify us, in a few pages
by Russell Johnston,
(please feel free to redistribute)

We fight because, to quote Will Rogers in the 1930s: “We got it, but we don’t know how to split it up.” “During the first 70 years of the 20th century, inequality declined and Americans prospered together. Over the last 30 years, by contrast, the United States developed the most unequal distribution of income and wages of any high-income country.” [1]

Because we are not swayed by “the intellectual project of modern conservatism, which Galbraith once called 'one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.'” [2]

Because those Theodore Roosevelt called the “malefactors of great wealth” are waging a very successful class warfare against 90% or more of their own society, creating a black hole of wealth and power which may now be irreversible. [3]

Because “In 2007, the top 1 percent controlled 34.6 percent of the wealth—significantly more than the bottom 90 percent, who controlled just 26.9 percent.” and “Between 2002 and 2007, 65 percent of all income growth in the U.S. went to the richest 1 percent of the population. That lopsided distribution means that today, half of the national income goes to the richest 10 percent.” [4]

Because “The real numbers—like that the wealthiest 300,000 Americans received as much income as the bottom 150 million—sound too crazy to be true.” [5]

Because it wasn't always this way: “During the Second World War, and in the four decades that followed, the top 10 percent took home just a third of the national income.” [4]

Because: “From 1979 to 2007, for the middle class, average household income (after taxes) nudged upward from $44,100 to $55,300; by contrast, for the top 1 percent, average household income soared from $346,600 in 1979 to nearly $1.3 million in 2007. That is, super-rich families saw their earnings increase 11 times faster than middle-class families.” [6]

Because it's getting worse everywhere: “The rise of today’s super-rich is a global phenomenon. It is particularly marked in the United States, but it is also happening in other developed economies like the United Kingdom and Canada. ... and is now as high in Communist China as it is in the U.S.” [4]

Because four men: Mukesh Ambani. Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Carlos Slim Helú are worth more than the world's poorest 57 countries put together. [7]

Because corporate profits have grown much faster than personal income or personal consumption for 20 years now. [8]

Because “the wealthy won’t pay for public goods or collective welfare, and the declining middle class can’t” [18] The severe underfunding of basic education is one example. Due to tax cuts which business has campaigned relentlessly for, housing prices have greatly increased as families compete for those few houses which are still near good schools. [9]

Because elections, and elected officials are corrupt. Money and advertising elect them, and guess who has the money now to donate to the lobbyists and politicians? This has become a more vicious cycle with each election, since those with money can, and have, slanted the laws ever more in their favor; against not just regulation, but in favor of the sort of outright robbery we saw the results of in 2008, and live with today. “Politicial scientists Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page have found that the preferences of foreign policymakers correspond more to the preferences of executives of multinational companies than to the general public. Page and Jeffrey Winters estimate that the top 10 percent of income earners hold about 90 percent of materially based political power, and that 'each member of the top 1 percent averaged more than 100 times the power of a member of the bottom 90 percent; about 200 times if the index is calculated in terms of the more politically relevant non-home wealth.'” Maybe that's not so surprising given that “the median net worth of members of Congress is just under a million dollars.” ... “we’re getting caught in a negative feedback cycle: as the rich get richer and more powerful, policies are increasingly aligned with their interests” … “as political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson write, 'America's public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefited the few at the expense of the many.'” [5]

Because deliberate and systematic gerrymandering, (creating weirdly shaped electoral districts that will re-elect the present member) has destroyed democracy in most electoral districts in the United States by creating solid red or solid blue districts. This means that most elections are now not competitive, and that only the most extreme positions on the political spectrum are well represented. (If you've wondered why politics seems so much more polarized than decades ago, this is why.) Both parties cooperated in this. The unrepresented middle of the road voter can only look on astonished as Congress is stalemated, unable (and in the case of the Republicans, unwilling) to act to reduce the economic crisis. Or take to the streets.

Because we don't wish to continue to have to violate our own values in order to find work in this society. Think how many low level employes knew about mortgage-based debenture frauds, but kept quiet in order to keep their jobs. They did this because violating personal ethics (and the law) has not only become the norm in the workplace – it's a very real and absolute condition of employment.

Because employers are forcing us to work longer and harder and faster, instead of hiring anyone. [10]

Because this has caused corporate profits to shoot up 22% since 2007; as output increases and employment lags. And because our share of those profits is to work harder for less. [10]

Because corporate advertising is a massive, fast-growing kudzu-vine swallowing the world, (after first buying naming rights to it). Advertising allows the top 1% to drown out every other message, and all other human values, with relentless product-spam. So how else can we now be heard by most people during their day, save by Occupying Wall Street, and so many other streets?

Because we now live in a “Feudal Capitalist” society in which innumerable mergers and acquisitions have largely destroyed the free and competitive market - with the connivance of the Right, who swore they wanted to protect the competitive marketplace. Instead, more and more monopolies and oligopolies divide up markets at their pleasure: “just 147 entities” ... “control nearly 40 percent of all of monetary value of transnational corporations” [11][12] Feudalism didn't work out very well the first time. We don't want to see the repeat.

#law

Because the worldwide patent rights for a single invention now cost more than $100,000, ensuring that very few individuals can effectively patent anything. Consequently the inventions of the bottom 90% fall into the hands of the top 1%, without any payment. By far the most valuable property is now intellectual property, which constitutes the bulk of what businesses own - not factories, land or buildings - but it's perfectly legal to simply take it from the 90% of us too poor to protect our ideas, whether we got there first, or not. No wonder that in the U.S., the number of patents issued per capita declined during the majority of the 20th century. The laws have steeply eroded the chance that the average person can protect their ideas. [8]

Because copyright protection has now, unconstitutionally, been extended for ridiculous periods (70 years after an author's death, if you can determine that) that only benefit corporations, and enforced in ways that eliminate fair use and make it strictly illegal to transfer a movie we've bought to the device we want to watch it on. Corporations win, the law and the public lose out, just when information can be very cheaply distributed.

Because there are so many laws that there is no law - it then becomes the free choice of authorities who is jailed and who isn't. “the laws are so broad the police and prosecutors get to decide whom to go after and find guilty. Those decisions are about power. In the 'rule of too much law,' Stuntz advises, 'too much law amounts to no law at all.'” [13]

Because “For most of the twentieth century in the Northeast and Midwest, the ratio of police officers to prison inmates was two to one. Today, it is less than one to two.” In other words, the public gets far less protection from criminals, while more people spend more time in jail, increasingly arbitrarily (according to Stuntz). [13]

Because the spread of unpaid internships (illegally expanded beyond genuinely educational placements) demonstrates very well just how abusive the labor market in general has become. [14]

Because we feel poor - and we feel poor because we were robbed, in 2008, of unbelievable sums by a gargantuan and very deliberate real estate fraud; while our public officials and many accounting firms were being paid in one way or another to look the other way, and did, and still do. If your house has been robbed, it stands to reason that you're going to feel poorer for some time. Where are the arrests? Where are the executions, for the right that adores the death penalty?

Because according to Time magazine, “After Three Years and Trillions of Dollars, Our Banks Still Don't Work”. “73% of small business owners say they are still affected by the credit crunch.” “During the TARP bailouts, instead of buying bad loans directly, the government decided to inject cash into the banks, hoping executives would use the capital to fix their finances or boost lending. Neither of those happened.” The banks are now accumulating cash, not lending it, which was the purpose of the bailouts. [15]

Because banking reform hasn't happened. “Robert Johnson, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and an expert on financial regulation says the Dodd-Frank banking-reform bill, which Congress passed last year, has done little to make banking accounting statements more transparent.” Even the most suspect, derivative bonds are “still not fully quantified on bank's financial statements.” [15]

Because “Those foolish enough to raise objections are punished. The result is a system that selects for criminality, excluding and marginalizing the very men and women of probity most needed to build a sustainable state.” now describes not just Afghanistan and so many other countries around the world, but our own country as well. [16]

Because blue collar workers have been hard hit since 1973, and white collar workers are now getting the same treatment. [17]

Because Unions and collective bargaining rights are now all but destroyed. States with the best educational results have the strongest teachers unions, and vice versa, but society, under the strong influence of the top 1%, is heading the other way: eliminating unions and their bargaining rights, simply because this highly benefits the top 1%. [8]

Because under the prodding of the richest 1% we have abandoned past wisdom for a cruel economic state of nature, or free-for-all. “The classic discussion of this movement is Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). Speaking of the Industrial Revolution and the consequent rise of “the free market” in England. Polanyi wrote that 'human society would have been annihilated but for protective countermoves which blunted the action of this self-destructive mechanism. . . . Society protected itself against the perils inherent in a self-regulating market system. . .'; and 'the principle of social protection (aimed) at the conservation of man and nature as well as productive organization. . .' (pp. 76, 132).” [18]

Because our foreign aid has been so miserly, under the influence of the top 1% who only want to avoid taxes, that some countries in the world are poorer than Medieval economies were! [19]

Because while the rich get far richer, “More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World”, “if every mother took iodine capsules [costing 25 cents per year], there would be a 7.5 percent increase in the total educational attainment of children in Central and Southern Africa. This, in turn, could measurably affect lifetime productivity.”, “in Indonesia, ... A year's supply of iron-fortified fish sauce cost the equivalent of $6, and for a self-employed male, the yearly gain in earnings [due to reduced anemia] was nearly $40 -- an excellent investment.” [20]

Because the top 1% - through the agency of the billionaire-funded Tea Party - pounds away with the fear of inflation in order to prevent any political or financial measures to promote economic recovery – this despite the fact that economists (including Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve) are now saying that previous recessions in 1973-75, 1980-82, and 1990-91 were DUE to monetary policies driven by excessive fears of inflation and not increases in oil prices that sparked that fear of inflation. [21] And in bad times, it is deflation that is to be (greatly) feared, not inflation. Thankfully, President Obama has been able to push through at least some “qualitative easing” expanding the money supply and making a deflationary spiral and thorough economic crash much less likely.

Because there is “An Agreement of the People”, (cf that 1647 Leveller document) that our society is now headed toward ever more profound abuses of the rights, freedoms, and livelihoods the vast majority of citizens.

Because the ordinary person has no recourse to the civil law in most cases; that has been made so expensive that only corporations and very rich individuals can afford to stand up for their rights. For the rest of us, those rights are almost entirely theoretical.

Because we tell our children not to bully each other, but live in a society now profoundly BASED on economic bullying. Why wouldn't our children bully if they can easily see that that's how people rise and maintain their positions in this society?

Because our higher education system has become a behemoth feeding only itself, while providing ever less genuine value to us: “According to The College Board, average annual in-state tuition and fees at four-year public universities increased by 72% over the past decade. Four-year private college tuition is up by more than 34% over the same time period, during which inflation rose only around 25%.” … “After all, U.S. News & World Report doesn't reward affordability.” [33]

Because “Universities in general redistribute money from average tax payers to rich ones and are anti-egalitarian. Their staff do not teach in sink schools or give literacy classes in prison or wrestle with Haringey social services.” [22]

Because even President George W. Bush has said that "The fact is that income inequality is real, It's been rising for more than 25 years." [23]

Because eduction will not remove this inequality: instead, today higher education is being used as a largely unproductive class barrier. To quote Bryan Caplan, "Going to college is a lot like standing up at a concert to see better. Selfishly speaking, it works, but from a social point of view, we shouldn't encourage it." Yet we now live in a world where “the starting salary for someone with a degree in English ($37,800) is higher than the average income of all those, including older and experienced workers, with only a high-school degree ($32,000).” [23] Education doesn't, and can't by itself, create equality. “The top 10 or 20 percent by income have education levels roughly equivalent to those in the top 1 percent, but the latter account for much of the boom in inequality. This appears to be related to the way taxes have been cut, and to the ballooning of the financial industry’s share of corporate profits.” [1]

Because as Winstanley argued in his seventeenth-century pamphlet “The New Law of Righteousness”: “Not one word was spoken at the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another, but selfish imaginations did set up one man to teach and rule over another.” [24]

Because 500 ships lie largely unremarked in the world's largest ship graveyard in Nouadhibou Bay, Mauritania: a staggering testimony to modern insurance fraud that has enriched those already rich. [25]

#taxation

Because in the U.S., federal revenues will only make up 14.4% of the gross domestic product this year - the lowest percentage since 1950. [7] Government is doing less because the top 1% don't want to contribute anything remotely like a fair share taxes, and have FOX news to tell everybody that's how things must be.

Because the rich have successfully shifted the burden of taxation onto the poor: the California Budget Project stated that "measured as a share of family income, California's lowest-income families pay the most in taxes." … “The bottom 20% of families pay 11% of their earnings in state and local taxes, executive director Jean Ross calculated. The top 1% pay about 8%.” [26] “In Alabama, for example, the burden on the poor is more than twice that of the top 1 percent. The one-fifth of Alabama families making less than $13,000 pay almost 11 percent of their income in state and local taxes, compared with less than 4 percent for those who make $229,000 or more.” [27] No wonder “Growth in median family income was around 2.6% per year from 1947-1973 and only 0.37% from 1974 to 2007.” [8]

Because “people forget that the income tax is less than half of federal taxes and only one-fifth of taxes at all levels of government.” … “Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance taxes (known as payroll taxes) are paid mostly by the bottom 90 percent of wage earners.” [27]

Because “Despite skyrocketing incomes, the federal tax burden on the richest 400 has been slashed, thanks to a variety of loopholes, allowable deductions and other tools. The actual share of their income paid in taxes, according to the IRS, is 16.6 percent.” That doesn't say they pay 16% of all taxes, it says they paid just 16% of their income in taxes. Without Obama overturning a secrecy rule put in place by Bush, we wouldn't know this. [27]

Because the McCourt's (Los Angeles Dodgers) divorce case showed they paid no taxes since 2004, but spent $45 million during one of those years. They did this by “borrowing” against Dodger team revenues. “To the IRS, they look like paupers.” They were Dodgers, alright! [27]

Because in all the time after Reagan was elected, “only the wealthy have gained significant income.” The bottom 90% of us have only gained $303 in all that time. That's not $303 per year, that's $303 total during all that time. That's what we have to show for our efforts. The top federal income tax rate in the United States was 70% back then. It is now 35%. [27] And just look at the fix that's put us in. No one can pretend that the most wealthy did anything extra wonderful with all that extra income.

Because the top 1 percent gained not just $303, no, their income per year has doubled to more than a million per year. The top one-tenth of that 1 percent saw their income per year increase four times, says a study by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. [27]

Because “The bottom 20% of families pay 11% of their earnings in state and local taxes, executive director Jean Ross calculated. The top 1% pay about 8%.” [26]

#religion #church

Because the Church's teachings on equality, charity and humainty - no matter what church you belong to - are being ignored in a post-Christian society of the elite. To cite but one example: “The Church’s influence on ideas about labor can be traced to the late nineteenth century. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued the Church’s first “social encyclical,” Rerum Novarum, which … gave moral sanction to trade unions, social assistance for the poor, and critical concepts such as the just wage, the dangers of concentrated wealth, the social obligations of ownership, and even worker ownership.” [28]

Because for 90% of the population, often unconsciously, “diminished expectations” have begun to replace hope. [29] To quote George Orwell from another time of oppression, “Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by reducing their standards.” [20] Many of us have lowered our standards so much that we largely agree with the rich that everything's fine, just as it is.

Because: Our toys are better, but our lives, worse. Sorry, Mr. Jobs, but it's just the truth.

Because our children will inherit an increase in oppression, and a decrease in their freedoms.

#health

Because the U.S. and Syria have “an almost identical prevalence of disease.” [30]

Because chronic illnesses are becoming far more prevalent, but research into the causes of those illnesses is not being ramped up. For example, the majority of people in North America now have an autoimmune disease, something that was once rare; but research is not a priority because low taxes for business and the very rich are the only priority, and because the answers might not make the rich richer.

Because the spread of tuberculosis and many other communicable diseases will eventually find their way to the rich too, if enough of the rest of us become destitute, and receive less and less help. Meanwhile, the rich live many years longer than the poor: it's believed this is because they can't afford the same quality of food, but add in stress and longer hours of work to the equation.

#families

Because families are suffering: “Today, 85 percent of the $400 billion that the government spends to encourage things like home ownership, college attendance, investment and small business ends up in the pockets of the top 20 percent of earners (and half goes to the top 5 percent). Very little ends up helping the working poor. On the other hand, many social benefits cut off when a family’s income rises roughly 30 percent above the poverty line - which is still a far cry from being out of poverty.” [31]

Because “Today, a full two years into the 'recovery', more than 9% of Americans are still out of work.” (actually an underestimation based on those most actively looking work.) [32]

Because “More than 15% of Americans live below the poverty line. The total rose for the fourth consecutive year.” And add to that an extra three million adults just above the poverty line because they are now living with mom and dad, due to current conditions. Before the Occupy Wall Street movement began, Time magazine said: “While Americans historically haven't been as inclined to riot as Europeans to riot over inequality... it's hard to rule that out in a world in which the American Dream is increasingly becoming a myth.” [32]

Because we have become a downwardly mobile society. “'Poverty is in many ways about a lack of social mobility,' says Erin Currier, who studies these topics at the Pew Charitable Trusts. And research shows that even before the current crisis, Americans had much less mobility than people in many European Nations.” [32]

Because "We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both." - Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice from 1916--1939

In sum:
“We fight because severe economic abuse has become the norm, and our politicians ever more helpless and corrupt, have been captured by the richest 1% of society.”

[1] “Minding the Inequality Gap”, Stephen Kotkin
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/business/05shelf.html

[2] “Countervailing Powers: On John Kenneth Galbraith”, Kim Phillips-Fein
http://www.thenation.com/article/160602/countervailing-powers-john-kenneth-galbraith?page=full

[3] “Whatever Happened to the American Left?”, Michael Kazin, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/whatever-happened-to-the-american-left.html?pagewanted=2

[4] “The Rich Are Different From You and Me”, Chrystia Freeland, The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-14-biggest-ideas-of-the-year/8556/12/

[5] “The Public Overwhelmingly Wants It: Why Is Taxing the Rich So Hard?”, Alyssa Battistoni
http://www.alternet.org/story/150715/the_public_overwhelmingly_wants_it:_why_is_taxing_the_rich_so_hard/

[6] “McDonald's is killing the middle class”, Andy Kroll
http://www.salon.com/news/us_economy/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/05/09/mcdonalds_killed_the_middle_class

[7] Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
http://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/mr-smarty-pants-knows/

[8] “Don't Worry, Be Unhappy”, By Timothy Noah, plus comments
http://www.slate.com/id/2285927/

[9] “What’s Hurting the Middle Class” The myth of overspending obscures the real problem
Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, Boston Review
http://bostonreview.net/BR30.5/warrentyagi.php

[10] “U.S. workers are the victims of a speedup” By Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery
August 14, 2011, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-jeffery-bauerlein-speedup-20110814,0,5795904.story

[11] “Study shows powerful corporations really do control the world's finances”, Bob Yirka
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-powerful-corporations-world.html

[12] “The network of global corporate control”, Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, Stefano Battiston,
http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5728

[13] “The Crime of Punishment”, Lincoln Caplan, a review of The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, William Stuntz, America’s leading thinker on criminal justice
http://www.democracyjournal.org/22/the-crime-of-punishment.php?page=all

[14] “Less than Zero; The value of intern labor in an age of economic inequality”, Roger D. Hodge, Book Forum
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/018_02/7802

[15] “After Three Years and Trillions of Dollars, Our Banks Still Don't Work”, Stephen Gandel, Time
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2093317,00.html

[16] “Government by crime syndicate”, Sarah Chayes
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-chayes-corruption-20110925,0,517490.story

[17] “Race To The Bottom?”, Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest Blogs
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/02/22/race-to-the-bottom/

[18] “Farewell to Democracy?”, Philip Green, Logos Journal
http://logosjournal.com/2011/farewell-to-democracy/

[19] The Not So Dark Ages, By Joshua E. Keating
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/22/the_not_so_dark_ages

[20] “More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World”, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/more_than_1_billion_people_are_hungry_in_the_world?page=full

[21] “Crude reality; Will a Middle Eastern oil disruption crush the economy? New research suggests the answer is no -- and that a major tenet of American foreign policy may be fundamentally wrong.”, Jeremy Kahn
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/02/13/crude_reality/?page=full

[22] “AC Grayling has caricatured British universities. No wonder they're fuming”, Simon Jenkins
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/09/ac-grayling-caricatured-british-university-fuming

[23] “Why Education Is Not an Economic Panacea”, By John Marsh, Chronicle Review
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Education-Is-Not-an/128790/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

[24] “A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 9]: MARTIN LUTHER’S ACCIDENTAL REVOLUTION”, Kenan Malik
http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/a-book-in-progress-part-9-martin-luthers-accidental-revolution/

[25] “Picture Show: 500 Wrecks in the World's Largest Ship Cemetery”
http://www.good.is/post/picture-show-500-wrecks-in-the-world-s-largest-ship-cemetery

[26] “'Buffett Rule' a bust in California”, George Skelton, Capitol Journal (this article contains some very poor logic, but a good couple of good facts)
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cap-buffet-20110922,0,3852704.column?page=2&track=rss

[27] “9 Things The Rich Don't Want You To Know About Taxes”, David Cay Johnston
http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-17350-9_things_the_rich_dont_want_you_to_know_about_taxes.html

[28] “The Church of Labor”, Lew Daly, Democracy Journal
http://www.democracyjournal.org/22/the-church-of-labor.php?page=3

[29] “How to make an intelligent blockbuster and not alienate people”, Mark Kermode
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/28/mark-kermode-multiplex-blockbuster

[30] “Genes, germs and the origins of politics”, Jim Giles
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028133.300-genes-germs-and-the-origins-of-politics.html?page=2

[31] “Out of Poverty, Family-Style”, David Bornstein
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/out-of-poverty-family-style/?ref=opinion

[32] “The Truth About the Poverty Crisis; It isn't just a reflection of job loss. It's a sign of downward mobility.”, Rana Foroohar
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2093321,00.html

[33] “Occupation: From Wall Street to the university”, Dan Primack, Fortune/CNN
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/10/05/occupation-from-wall-street-to-the-university/

Self-anchoring, insertable plugs for pipes (helping BP)

2010-06-05T17:44:00.000-07:00

I had a good time laughing at the thousands of seemingly uniformly inane suggestions pouring into BP about how to plug the leak. Then last night I came up with a few myself, which I've sent in. Here they are:

Plugging a heavily leaking undersea pipe by insertion is extremely difficult due to the high flow rate, which will strongly tend to push out any plug.

I am proposing three relatively simple and I believe novel devices, all of which are insertable plugs that redirect the flow pressure to anchor the plug against the inner wall of the pipe (as does, for example, a ventricular valve in the heart, when it is sealed against backflow.) In other words these plugs are designed to be “self anchoring” within the pipe, “using the pressure of the wellhead to seal the wellhead.” As with a ventricular valve in the heart, the greater the pressure, the firmer the seal (and anchoring) against the inner surface of the pipe, the reverse of what is the case with most plug designs that can be imagined. The length of these plugs can be varied - also graduated elasticity of the material employed - in order to distribute the flow pressure at the plug over a large enough area to maintain the structural integrity of the pipe.

Here the “top” or “top rim” of a plug is always the portion that is furthest up into the pipe, and the “bottom” of a plug is that part closest to the operator, and to the ocean water.

The first “can and cone plug” design is a quite simple hollow steel (or plastic), somewhat cup-shaped plug with a concave conical bottom. Imagine a simple hollow conical shape joined at its base to a hollow cylindrical sleeve of equal radius and more or less equal height. The cone tip points up toward the top (open) rim of the cup, away from the operator and toward the source of the current. (As is the case for a closed ventricular valve resisting backflow.) The radius of the plug is slightly smaller than that of the inside wall of the pipe.

This plug is inserted into the pipe open (top) rim first, with the base of the cone at the “bottom” of the plug (closest to the operator.) However: this may be most difficult design to insert, against pressure.

So long as the materials used in the manufacture of the plug allow some elasticity, and some compression (as well as significant tensile and compressive strength) the great force of flow/fluid pressure in the pipe will constantly force the plug to widen somewhat and thus be a more effective plug, which is even more tightly self-anchored to the walls of the pipe. It is, likely, important to distribute that force against to pipe to more than just a narrow ring however, to ensure the pipe does not burst – the length of the cylinder/outer sleeve helps accomplish this.

The cylindrical sleeve could go at either the top or bottom of the cylinder. If the top of the cylinder is joined to the bottom of the cone, insertion is eased but the pressure, principally transferred to the pipe around a narrow rim at the cones base, may breach the pipe, the initial anchoring may be more difficult to achieve, and variations in wellhead pressure may more likely to dislodge it.

Therefore, it is likely better to join the bottom of the cone to the bottom of the sleeve, so that they overlap forming a shorter device. The idea here is not to make the plug more compact, necessarily but to allow elasticity in the sleeve to distribute the pressure along a larger area of the inner surface of the pipe so that the pipe remains strucurally intact. This plug should be braced at its outer bottom rim only against the flow pressure within the pipe to deploy it – while inserting it, the center of force could be applied to the center/tip of the cone to prevent it from expanding prematurely.

A small area of concave flange (a small inverted cone section) at the top rim of the plug, farthest from the cone may help to anchor the top rim of this plug by using the flow pressure to force the top rim of the cylinder against the inner wall of the pipe. However, some means of obscuring the top flange during insertion would then be necessary to prevent its premature expansion.

Varying the plug's cylindrical wall thickness so that the area nearest the cone is less elastic may also help secure the seal along the “top” part of the plug so that the pressure against the pipe wall is well distributed. An abrasive or ridged (with slanted ridges) outer cylindrical surface of the plug may help prevent it from sliding, particularly if variations in pressure are likely.

This “can and cone plug” design can be a partial plug, or if you prefer, porous plug – with mesh or holes in the cone only slowing the flow. In this way a series of such plugs could be inserted (if flow pressure made insertion very difficult) to first slow that flow. Or, a series of such partial plugs could make up one long device in order to distribute the pressure over a larger length and area of the pipe to avoid overloading it.

The second “ring and torroidal bag” design is more easily inserted and deployed. Once the ring has been inserted, with the doughnut-shaped bag trailing, the bag is inflated with water or heavier fluid, to at least substantially reduce flow and at the same time anchor this plug against the wall of the pipe by leveraging the pressure of the flow within the pipe to force it's now triangular cross-section against the pipe wall. A second, longer, but similar device may then be able to seal it off.

The third “top-rim-anchored parachute” design would be least likely to breach the pipe, but requires a little more sophisticated design. It inserts a long “tube sock” into the pipe, but needs a rigid top rim that is a section of cone, or instead, a “ring and torroidal bag” partial plug could anchor it at the top, particularly until the cloth parachute plug is deployed.

The principle idea here is that it is necessary to insert a mechanical device that will redirect (exploit rather than merely attempt to directly oppose) the force of the flow along the pipe and transferring this force against the inner surface of the pipe, but at an angle to the force of flow that actually opposes the direction of the force of flow (or if you prefer, fluid pressure.) This is what the (conically shaped when shut) triangular ventricular valves within our heart and veins already accomplish – more blood pressure, as backflow, against these valves simply seals them tighter. This design of nature redirects the pressure of the fluid flow (in this case unwanted backflow) outward to the walls of the vein or artery and at an angle (vector) somewhat opposing the original force/backflow of blood which was “trying to go the wrong way”; this pressure is thus exploited or leveraged to both close the valve and seal it the more tightly against that very flow.

If you know a better idea, you can send it in to:
http://www.horizonedocs.com/artform.php

Where British stoicism came from

2009-04-25T09:46:00.000-07:00

A century ago, early children's literature wasn't enthusiastic about boosting kids' self esteem just for it's own sake. Child rearing had a grittier, more realistic feel to it, back then, and children's feelings weren't always spared. Here's a passage - and yes it's real - from the the ninetheeth century English children's book, "Lessons for Children Three to Four Years Old", by Anna Laetitia Aiken Barbould. n.p., as cited by cited by Susan Tyler Hitchcock in "Mad Mary Lamb", p135:

"Do you know why you are better than puss? Puss can play as well as you; and Puss can drink milk; and lie upon the carpet; and she can run as fast as you, and faster, too; a great deal; and she can climb trees better; and she can catch mice, which you cannot do. But can Puss talk? No. Can Puss Read? No. Then that is the reason that you are better than Puss - because you can talk and read . . . If you do not learn, Charles, you are not good for half as much as puss. You had better be drowned."

And mind you, back then children knew that unwanted kittens were commonly drowned, and may have seen the practice, too. No wonder narcissism and feelings of entitlement were less common then than now!

Uppity appliances advocated

2009-04-17T17:12:00.000-07:00

re:
Attention-seeking objects will be hard to part with
17 April 2009

James Pierce at Indiana University in Bloomington is designing ways for objects to periodically make their presence felt, forcing us to "reflect" on them more often. He believes that this will increase our sense of attachment to our possessions, helping to end our unsustainable habit of constantly buying new things and dumping the old.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227045.700-attentionseeking-objects-will-be-hard-to-part-with.html

I'm very glad intelligent, creative people are taking a chance or two and trying to come up with new ways to put a few speed bumps in front of consumerism.

But I'm not sure misbehavior is the way. My father didn't keep his beaters around longer if they were especially temperamental - we all buy badly behaved or too hard to understand electronics and software, and then return it or shelve it, or garbage it.

Variable reinforcement seems like a better bet to me, appealing to the gambler in all of us - how about engraving a lottery ticket good for a hundred years into every consumer item. The ticket would be more likely to win the longer the "ticket" was still out there, a bit more likely every year. Then we could cling to our old toasters "just a little while longer" waiting for them to pay off. Of course, there could be unintended consequences, you might increase hoarding, or fuel consumerism. Learning theory says that variable reinforcement is astonishingly powerful.

The only other thought that occurs to me is, once technology allows, have every consumer item make friends with our kids, who would then be heartbroken if we got rid of them...

PS - The ancient greeks actually used to hold trials for tools that had injured or killed their owners, and condemn them to death. Sort of a "closure" thing, I guess.

Death to Tax Cuts, Long Live Tax Cuts

2009-02-23T10:55:00.000-08:00

There's something infuriating about Obama and the Democratic Senate having to accept unproductive tax cuts in order to create any sort of stimulus. After all, previous ill-advised tax cuts are already hamstringing the government's ability to respond effectively to the crisis; and irresponsible tax-cuts were very much part of the weaselly mind-set that created the present crisis.

Again and again the right has been able to use the mantra of "tax-cuts" to hornswoggle the average voter and taxpayer into voting, not for genuine conservatism: but mere corporate rapacity.

So here's the long-term answer. I think it's inevitably where we'll end up, so let's get there while there's still something of our economy and culture to save: The Democratic party, and Canada's Liberals, should commit themselves to moving the tax system, over about a decade, over to one in which the average voter will not pay one dollar in income tax (and perhaps other taxes.)

Elections are won when 51% of the electorate agree with you, and very few people have a long-winded intellectual or ideational commitment to low taxes, for good reasons or bad. They just like the way money jingles in their pocket, that's all. If that same money is in the government's pocket, they don't hear that nice jingle any more; so that's not as much fun.

Fine. Done. Egalitarianism is not a bad thing, overall. No more taxes for you! You're obviously not responsible enough to know what they're for, anyway! At least this way, the most vicious ideologues on the right can't buy your vote for a song, ever again!

So the whole burden of taxation goes onto the top half of the population; and 50% of the voters won't think about taxes, again, ever, because they don't have to, and can't profit by it.

This tax shift means sharply punishing very high salaries, but why not? If a salary cap and high salary tax is acceptable in the big sports league, something like it won't exactly cause a peasant's revolt if government tries it. This one policy action can forever change the mathematics of every election to come. I believe it would initiate a swing away from the intensely corrupt government and legislation that we've seen over the last couple of decades, which ended in a great crash - because the average victim of that excess, the average taxpayer, can't be fooled into thinking that they're getting a part of the action. They're out of that game.

Note that starting on this road may mean, over time, not taxing the less rich half of those who actually vote - and not merely the less rich half of those who could vote or are registered to vote; but this doesn't change the math radically.

What "legal" means

2008-11-29T13:43:00.000-08:00

There seems to be a lot of confusion here in Victoria, and at city council, about what the word "legal" means.

It is the duty of the police to enforce the law, and others to conform to it. BUT:

The law consists of the Constitution, Charter of Rights, previous legal decisions (precedent), common law, Tort (civil) law, and - according to the Nuremberg tribunal - supervening international legal and moral norms as well. TOGETHER these constitute the law. (Albeit the last is contradicted by the Notwithstanding Clause of the Canadian Constitution, which clause could be invoked for anything at all including the mass murder of people with red hair, elimination of free speech, or a new holocaust - all these would be superficially "legally" in Canada if the Notwithstanding Clause were invoked.)

A statute or bylaw may declare night day and day night, but that doesn't make it so. Policework is not merely a game of "Simon Says" where we substitute "City Council" for "Simon." That game isn't legal in Canada. The latest whim of council isn't law unless it conforms to the Charter of Rights, Constitution, etc. Not for the police, nor anyone else. Neither is it enough to say that whatever the courts have not specifically ruled out in previous decisions is therefore legal should a brand-new bylaw declare it so. There's no principle in law that everything is legal "until it is specifically ruled against by a judge." (This is the equivalent of "let's just do it until we get caught" or "it's legal until we get caught." But, no it ain't.)

In summary: "I was just obeying orders" doesn't remove culpability from authorities, post-WWII, or according to Canadian law.

Where the police have every reason to suspect that law and bylaw might conflict, the legal course is instead to set up a test case, with the cooperation of those affected where possible (a "collusive action"); and to otherwise suspend any enforcement until the courts have ruled on that test case.

The police, who are in an increasingly difficult position, have been very ill-used by Council and by their own management as tools to break the laws. This taints the reputation and effectiveness of the police generally, diverts them from the duties they were trained for, and make any future cooperation between the homeless community and law enforcement officials extremely difficult - yet that cooperation must eventually come about, for everyone's sake. Nevermind what you see on the TV show CSI, police have always relied on the community to do the bulk of the work in discovering, reporting and providing the evidence to enforce the law. This will have to be true for the homeless community as well in the future, but nothing could create a larger obstacle to this than years of directed, systematic law-breaking by the people entrusted and paid to maintain the law.

The question is, why have the police decided to be such thorough (and culpable) codependents? It may be that both they and the City Council believe that intimidation and some degree of cruelty and lawlessness by the police will discourage homelessness here, or at least, discourage the homeless from moving to Victoria. Where law isn't sufficient, skirting the law or simply breaking it, is the next resource. Anyone can understand the temptation to grasp at simple solutions for growing, and frightening, problems, if not the contempt for the law. Extra homeless people in Victoria are an inconvenience for everyone including the homeless people already here, but...

Given the compulsory nature of most homelessness and, for that matter, the uniquely kind weather of Victoria within Canada and B.C. (although most homeless are not newcomers), this experiment in twisting the arms of the victims again and again is absolutely futile. Sooner or later, council must come to understand this, however distressing it may to them to give up on the dream of violently pushing away homelessness must be to the more comfortable. If this was going to happen, it would have happened - the police were freer in previous years to act illegally (and did) than they can possibly be in the years to come now that the scrutiny of the courts has been aroused.

I would not wish to be a police officer in Victoria, or nearly anywhere else in North America, today. I am grateful that many are willing to serve as peace officers. But I earnestly appeal, with emotion that cannot enter into this text, that the police, and in particular their management, look to their own interests, and their own future interests with regard to the questions pertaining to homelessness. The council has thoroughly betrayed those interests, and the police cannot act too quickly to ensure that their officers now strictly obey the whole of the law, and begin to rebuild the reputation that they must have to do their job (and to do it more easily and in less peril) within and without the homeless community.

I might humbly submit that in order to commence this new approach, the police should immediately cease some techniques they now employ to evade accountability: Primarily, stop using volunteers merely dressed as police at the front desk who don't actually know the law. This current practice allows citizens to believe they have made a report to the police by talking to the front desk, or that they have advice from authority, when neither is true. Moreover no record of any kind is made of their report unless the volunteer on their own sole authority decides to tell them how to make an actual report, in writing, on the correct form. This is a great way to keep crime stats down, but thoroughly mischievous, as well, and calculated to bring the police into disrepute. Everyone showing up at the desk can be given a number and one sentence description of their report (anonymous or not) which is reported and retained by the police for future reference. Similarly re phone reports, everyone phoning in has to be given a report number and the call be databased, even if with a one-sentence description, and even if the report was anonymous. Now, my experience has been that phone operators seem to be trained to do everything they can, including balding lying about what the law is, in order to avoid any report being recorded if at all possible. I don't doubt that the police are underfunded, but this isn't the way to deal with that. It might even be that actually recording all crime reports would result in more funding.

by Russell Johnston

http://confusioncomplete.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-legal-means.html

The Swan of Avon Explained?

2008-11-29T10:58:00.001-08:00

Is what follows too obvious to say, or has it been too obviously overlooked?

I've been looking at Sir Francis Bacon's writings on the beginning of Science, and the Royal Society - spurred on by a CBC radio "Ideas" program that I had to look up quotes for online next day, since I was listening in healthy, true darkness.

Related Google enquiries led to links to the question of whether Bacon wrote Shakespeare. I love such thoroughly eccentric explorations of history, true or false, credible or laughable, for the same reason that anyone who's read a huge pile of history books (and doesn't have their head stuck up their ass) ought to love 'em - they take me far from the well-worn facts of history I've read about, often literally hundreds of times, into genuinely new territory (whether my guide is inept or not.) That's refreshing if you love history but sometimes find it hard to obtain genuinely new grist for the mill.

In the process of encountering many delicious tidbits of otherwise hopelessly obscure history that's refreshingly new to me, it could be I've stumbled on an overlooked clue to the mystery of authorship, just maybe, maybe (if there is any mystery, of course.)

Should you want to know why Ben Jonson called Shakespeare "Sweet Swan of Avon", as Bertram Theobald did:

"Now one word about the 'Sweet Swan of Avon.' Has it ever struck anyone that if this phrase is to be taken at its face value, it is singularly inept as a simile? The verses of a poet are melodious,or should be."

http://www.sirbacon.org/bertrambj1623folio.htm

It may be instructive to look at a line very early on in Robert Green's "Groats-Worth of Wit, bought with a million of Repentance" (1592), incidentally our first published mention of Shakespeare, which line is retailed as if it were a common enough saying of the time:

The Swan sings melodiously before death, that in all his life vseth but a iarring sound.

http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/greene1.html

That is: "The Swan sings beautifully at death, who all his life used (issued) only a jarring sound."

In the context of that popular saying (as it seems from the context in Green's pamphet), Jonson's calling Shakespeare "a sweet swan of Avon" has new meaning. It's quite a funny line (and still packs a punch today) if the the rude Shakespeare from Avon were not much of a poet, but the Shakespeare about to become part of history with the posthumous publication of the Folio, was a very fine poet indeed.

But note that how melodious a swan is depends very much on the species of the swan.

Which leads us to another explanation: that Green's contemporary version of the saying isn't relevant, but the Phaedo is, where Plato has Socrates say that swans "having sung all their life long, do then sing more, and more sweetly than ever, rejoicing in the thought that they are about to go away to Apollo, whose ministers they are." Or even Shakespeare himself, who in Othello has Emilia say "I will play the swan, and die in music."

If so, Jonson only meant to say that Folio was the Bard's beautiful final song, as it was.

Or, we could give the final word to Wikipedia, "Swan Song":
The phrase "swan song" is a reference to an ancient belief that the Mute Swan (Cygnus olor) is completely mute during its lifetime until the moment just before it dies, when it sings one beautiful song.

Cygnus olor was originally native to the British Isles, and that restores the Baconian jest to Jonson's words.

Jonson and Green were both playwrights and contemporaries in London and might be supposed to have used the allusion similarly, or likely so. On the other hand, Johnson was self-educated but would have known Plato. Still Green went to Cambridge and Oxford and could hardly have escaped knowledge of the Phaedo, himself. We report, you decide.

How we got here - according to the Governor of the Bank of Canada

2008-11-24T11:21:00.000-08:00

Wonder why we have a depression or recession thanks to the subprime lending crisis? Here's an insider's view:

Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney interviewed by Carrie Gracie
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/the_interview.shtml
Last Updated: Saturday, 22 November 2008, 23:32 GMT

Excerpts:

"A: The fear had become self-fulfilling."
....
"Q: What exactly, in your view, went wrong? These banks just borrowed too much, was it?
A: "They borrowed too much: they did two things, they borrowed too much, they had too much debt, relative to their amount of capital without question, but they felt they could do that because they felt they weren't taking any risk. And they short-circuited some of the very basic aspects of banking. Which is that, banking is about, in some respects it's about relationships, you should know your customer, you should know the business or person you're lending to, um, and you should, ah, do analysis in terms of their ability to repay. And what became, they did two elements of shorthand for that, instead of having that type of relationship credit-based, you know, hard-nosed the [garbled] advisor type of banking, what they did was, they relied on other people to make judgements, these were the famous credit agencies that were rating them at triple A or, they felt that they were taking on a loan, but it only mattered - they weren't going to hold onto the loan, it only mattered how quickly they could sell it to somebody else. In the terminology, they had 'warehouse risk'. So as long as they could get rid of the hot potato, quickly, it didn't matter. Well, you know, the music stopped eventually, they still had it, and because they had it in such size, it's been a very painful process to work that out.
....
Q: And why wasn't that spotted...
A: We had some faith in this as well...
[A: The mistake that was made was that when the subprime market was small, you had to be a good risk to get in but as they expanded the likelyhood of default increased] "But people were seduced, or only remembered the old assumption, they didn't realize that the expansion of this [subprime lending market from 2% of US lending to 15%] would change the equation."

The End of Night: Why We Need Darkness

2008-10-30T11:17:00.000-07:00

Go National Geographic!

I've been (quite futilely) trying online to get people with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome to consider turning off the light switch a bit more. (Ok a lot.) You might suppose that desperately ill, suffering people would be eager to try a fairly easy, natural way that someone else swears has worked wonders for them. If so, you couldn't possibly be more wrong! This is my second try, I got absolutely no-where two years ago - so I resolved to be much more forceful and jump straight down the throat of anyone who wanted to merely gainsay the research, but supplied no bibliography - just their prejudices. There have been very few takers willing to reach up to that switch and turn it off more often! But the good news is, there have been a couple. As Bruyner (Lance Armstrong's team manager) says in his book, if you want the prize, you have to be willing to bend a few fenders (he is notorious for his driving as he follows Lance on the tour along narrow mountain roads.)

Wholly by coincidence, at the local newsstand I see that the new November National Geographic has emblazoned on its cover: “The End of Night: Why We Need Darkness" which includes discussion of health effects for humans, and so many other animals. I've included below the relevant quotes:

Light Pollution
Our Vanishing Night
Most city skies have become virtually empty of stars.
Published: November 2008
By Verlyn Klinkenborg

Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feeding—is affected.
For most of human history, the phrase "light pollution" would have made no sense. Imagine walking toward London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was Earth's most populous city. Nearly a million people lived there, making do, as they always had, with candles and rushlights and torches and lanterns. Only a few houses were lit by gas, and there would be no public gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years. From a few miles away, you would have been as likely to smell London as to see its dim collective glow.
....
Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet, a process being studied by researchers such as Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich, co-founders of the Los Angeles-based Urban Wildlands Group. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being "captured" by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms, circling and circling in the thousands until they drop. Migrating at night, birds are apt to collide with brightly lit tall buildings; immature birds on their first journey suffer disproportionately.
....
Frogs and toads living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses.
....
Unlike astronomers, most of us may not need an undiminished view of the night sky for our work, but like most other creatures we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself. The regular oscillation of waking and sleep in our lives—one of our circadian rhythms—is nothing less than a biological expression of the regular oscillation of light on Earth. So fundamental are these rhythms to our being that altering them is like altering gravity.
For the past century or so, we've been performing an open-ended experiment on ourselves, extending the day, shortening the night, and short-circuiting the human body's sensitive response to light. The consequences of our bright new world are more readily perceptible in less adaptable creatures living in the peripheral glow of our prosperity. But for humans, too, light pollution may take a biological toll. At least one new study has suggested a direct correlation between higher rates of breast cancer in women and the nighttime brightness of their neighborhoods.
In the end, humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs in a pond near a brightly lit highway. Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural patrimony—the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way—the edge of our galaxy—arching overhead.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/11/light-pollution/klinkenborg-text/

False Left-brain Right-brain Test

2008-10-30T09:12:00.000-07:00

"Left Brain v Right Brain Test"

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0%2C023739%2C22556678-23272%2C00.html

Someone else pointed out to me that if you put your attention on the shadow of the foot she turns anticlockwise. This attention to the shadow unravels the mystery it seems to me, and shows the test false:

The shadow of the lifted foot is, since it's only visible in part of its arc, is unambiguously going anti-clockwise so the dancer is too - only if your brain is so selective that it never really sees or takes in that shadow can anyone interpret the movement as clockwise.

Therefore, I think this is a decent test of Alzheimer's (sorry bro), or maybe typical male laser-like focus on naked female bodies. (Male brains during orgasm have intense activity in a small area unlike female for example.)

IMHO, a well-functioning brain will unconsciously take into account the foot-shadow and can then only give one interpretation. But we know from other studies that male brains don't function that well well viewing naked nubile females.

Today's excitement: trying to figure out today whether I'm smelling dead neighbor out in the hallway (wouldn't be the first time in the last month or so.)

Interesting new study shows genetic illnesses aren't caused by new mutations but the opposite - very old genes going back to single-cell life. If that holds up, this tells me these illnesses are 99% environmental, triggered by our dazzlingly unnatural modern lives. Light being suspect number one for me, but not the only suspect.

Genetic-based Human Diseases Are An Ancient Evolutionary Legacy, Research Suggests

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081016124043.htm

Russ

So many String Theories, so Little Time

2008-10-25T14:22:00.000-07:00

Why 10 to the 500th power is a small number.

NOTE - what follows is a very restricted argument about one aspect of one point made versus String Theory, the size of the possibilities it admits: 10 to the 500th power. I'm not competent to wander from that restricted topic here; although I include references to statements from those who are. My point may be so minor that everyone in effect assumes it, never bothering to state it, but the frequency and vigor with which the number 10500 pops up appears to belie this.

Suppose you are a prosecuting attorney. You believe you have the criminal. Unfortunately you need evidence, and so far the admissible evidence, including a blood type only restricts the perpetrator to one of 10 to the 500th power DNA combinations, isn't anything like sufficient. 10 to the 500th people is obviously greater than the earth's population, for starts. Even if only a few hundred million people are actually walking around with the right blood type, it would seem that you haven't made much progress on your case. If you need to go to court tomorrow, of course you ought to dismiss the case.

But let's say you can count on more than a year before this case shows up on the calendar. That's lots of time to get new evidence, and if even a little DNA shows up, then that will narrow the possibilities instantly, and at least logarithmically. There are so many DNA combinations that almost any substantive DNA result will be more unlikely than "merely" 10 to the 500th power. So, sure, right now, your evidence is consistent with too many possibilities. But one DNA discovery will blow nearly all, or all, of those possibilities away. Additionally, suppose you find 10 pieces of more ordinary evidence that are compatible with only one in a thousand of the suspects that haven't yet been ruled out by blood type. Barring codependent variables, that's 10,000 of your 500 zeros gone into the ether... in other words, this sort of evidence will eliminate possibilities logarithmically, also. In other words, for investigators contemplating possibilities, 10 to the 500th just isn't as large a number as it is for, say, the average price-sensitive shopper.

Just then your assistant says, "Hey, our LHC - the Large Heuristic Collator is supposed to start up this year! It data mines way more than our current databases. Just one or two discoveries there, could knock out nearly all of those other supposed suspects - or all of them, if we've got the wrong guy." Now things don't look so hopeless.

The Large Hadron Collider might do something similar to, or for, String Theorists; knocking out all but one of their models, or all of their models. According to Woit, just one unexpected new particle within the energy range of the LHC and String Theorists will be mighty short of zeros in that exponent, very quickly, since none of their possible theories will be compatible with such a particle. Still, it's not logically impossible (actually some sever critics say the theory is already inconsistent, I believe) that other LHC results, will narrow the window and do so in a way that remains consistent with M-theory and 10 to the 500th will be history, replaced by 1000, 100, or 1 (or zero). Woit demurs, at least in part, saying that in the case of the search for superpartners that they've already hedged their bets with the anthropic principle, and have an explanation at hand for every result.

Woit's claim of hedging brings up the real worry, it seems to me: which is whether 10 to the 500th in fact represents the last kludge, or the last epicycle. Is 10 to the 500th in truth just the tiniest tip of the iceberg of what malleable multi-dimensional math can be patched up to provide (pardon the aglomeration of alliteration, there), once string theorists are more motivated to expand their horizons?

If the latter, then what string theorists have been developing is "merely" a language in which some future theory could be expressed. Woit would then be correct to say that it's no more a theory than calculus, by itself, is a physical theory. Now, such research is not necessarily useless, by any means (although its application might turn out to be far removed from particle physics.) Developing a language in advance of need is, however, surely no reason to crimp anybody else's funding, much less everybody else's funding - particularly anybody trying to develop an actual theory, you know, with predictions and stuff. If Woit is right about the irrelevance of the LHC for string theorists (so long as the standard theory isn't equally embarrassed, I take it), then given the expense involved in creating collisions that are orders of power more energetic, perhaps a moratorium on spending in "language development" for at least a few decades is in order.

From my uninformed viewpoint, string theory might still be a winner. Someone knowing calculus before Liebnitz or Newton might have a hunch that it could describe planetary orbits and reasonably start groping around for a relationship or constant to plug in that might pop out some elliptical orbits. This may even be roughly what Newton and Hooke did, in fact. (According to Hooke) when a particular possibility for the attraction between masses (inverse square of distance) was mentioned to Newton by Hooke (who may have already proved the consistency of an inverse square law with circular orbits), Newton had in hand the mathematical language to prove that that specific relationship fit the elliptical evidence Kepler and Tycho had previously provided. Newton also claimed at the time that he had already previously proved this result for ellipses and an inverse square law: but his papers did not contain such a work or any notes concerning it, whereas a discussion between Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley about whether the inverse square law would produce elliptical orbits took place in 1684, two years before Newton published the Principia. The interesting possibility is that, whether or not he had anticipated Hooke, Newton's preeminence today may be a direct result of his spending considerable time researching the language with which future theories might be expressed, rather than trying to charge ahead to next discovery with the mathematical tools already developed, or pressing ahead with experiments not much different than those already published. If string theorists have done the same, that may not be all bad. Given the cost of each new generation of cyclotron, it may even be inevitable. During the nineteen twenties, Russian filmakers had no film. Year after year, they could only sit around and discuss what future films might be like, and the techniques they could employ - in other words, all that they could do was to invent the next language of film. As "Battleship Potemkin" showed, they succeeded wonderfully in this, and turned out not to be "useless eaters" [if the reader will pardon that Nazi-era phrase] after all.

Other places to peruse re this topic:

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2006/08/lee-smolins-trouble-with-physics.html

'Theory of everything' tying researchers up in knots
Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
Monday, March 14, 2005
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/14/MNGRMBOURE1.DTL

Woit's blog:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

Mold. I've been nailed by mold.

2008-10-01T11:57:00.000-07:00

A word to the wise, from the unwise!

I've suffered from a year of terrible health - and in particular terrible sleep - since moving into my present apartment. Turns out the place was flooded and the previous resident probably turfed out for that reason.

I should have known before I moved in. The rug was wrinkled (and still is) as if it was just a bit too big for the floor. Sure sign of a flood, but I'm from semiarid country originally and I wasn't familiar with such things. Plus a specifically asked about the musty smell and the (non-profit!) landlord insisted that that was just the rug cleaner. It wasn't. The rug is very old, but it wasn't removed, much less a proper remediation done. I even asked about whether formaldehyde might be causing my symptoms, but the building manager denied that and kept firmly clammed up. There was no problem and they weren't going to do anything. A letter from my doctor asking them to move me left them utterly cold. No way no way no how were they going to do anything - including mention that they knew perfectly well what the real problem was, and it's impossible to believe they didn't know. Why do non-profits uniformly, given enough time, become somewhat more evil than other sorts of institutions (look up the history of HIV and the Red Cross, or that of any communist state) - "because they can", that's why. (Clinton's reason.) That is to say, there's no mechanism for removing nasty non-profits, no equivalent of bankruptcy (moral bankruptcy laws for non-profits, anyone?)

As for my being naive: because I'm more used to living in near-desert conditions, I had no idea how many steps needed to be taken to keep humidity low in a rain-forest-like climate. I like to soak beans overnight and then boil them for hours, to reduce the lectins, for example. But it never occurred to me to put the smoke-hood fan on, then. Hey, nothing was on fire.

The result of a little extra humidity triggering a huge preexisting mold condition? Horrible sinusitis causing asthma causing apnea causing a whole lot of seizures and boatloads muscle pain. Large doses of creatine controlled the seizures, but I still wasn't sleeping more than an hour at a time, with many hours awake in between, most nights. (Plus the productive cough, watery eyes, headaches, etc that mold typically produces.)

The good news is that mold isn't that scary - it triggers one's immune system (an allergic effect) and therefore the sinusitis etc; but there are no literally toxic effects. Keep the humidity way down so that mold growth is all but stopped and you may be okay in the same place. (If it's caused by condensation in the outside walls that's beyond your control and you can only move or remodel however.)

So here's hoping a new chapter of life begins... soon, I'm sure hoping...

Some good mold links:

http://www.epa.gov/mold/moldguide.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mold_growth,_assessment,_and_remediation

http://www.mouldfacts.ca/blog/2007/04/mold-symptoms.html

Graft and War, the Eternal Couple

2008-09-19T11:11:00.000-07:00

"The 101st had seldom been in a rest area. What the men saw there made them wonder how any supplies ever reached the front line. Twice in Haguenau they had received a beer ration of three bottles each. The cigarettes they got were Chelseas or Raleighs, much despised. No soap, an occasional package of gum, once some toothpaste - except for C and K rations and ammunition, that was all that reached the front lines. Being near a supply depot in the rear, the men learned why. The port battalions unloading the ships coming from America got their cut, the railroad battalions helped themselves to Milky Way candy bars and cases of Schlitz beer, chalking it up to "breakage," the truck drivers took the cartons of Lucky Strikes (by far the favorite brand), and by the time division quartermaster and regimental and battalion S-4 skimmed off the best of what was left, the riflemen on the front line were fortunate to get C rations and Raleigh cigarettes."

p321 Band of Brothers; E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest
by Stephen Ambrose

Dynamic Story Sorting

2008-09-04T09:54:00.000-07:00

Seems there's nothing that can't be patented these days including "page up"... but just in case somebody later on tries to make this minor suggestion their own private property (like so many other things)...

(email to news organization/publisher Sept 4, 2008)

"I didn't remember this queue notice or I wouldn't have asked re the delay in publishing my recent articles. The delay does mean that I will tend to publish somewhat time-sensitive articles (ie anything based on recent studies) elsewhere, however.

But I do have a suggestion - I apologize, since it's a bit rude to suggest work others might do, particularly programming, still...

Someday, maybe go to a dynamic two-tier system, as is found on other news sites, where people can click for more articles from a given day, and make it so that articles are tracked so that the most popular "hidden" articles are swapped with less-clicked articles on the front page, as the day goes on and stats accumulate. Come to think of it, for all I know, this last might be a patentable suggestion. I'll publish it on my blog.

Thanks for listening to what might be an impertinence....

Travel Web Sites and Tips

2008-08-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

A list of web Travel Resources:

(cut and paste the URLs, I'm too lazy to code them all.)

www.thebathroomdiaries.com find a washroom

www.doctor-travel.com advice on making travel easier

www.roadnews.com how to cope with computer issues when travelling
www.laptoptravel.com gizmos etc

www.localsintheknow.com

www.kropla.com guide to phones, plugs, TV standards etc

www.web-travel-secrets.com use the web to help you travel
has great links
www.web-travel-secrets.com/links/links.html

www.longtriptips.com esp re airtravel

the Center of Travelology
www.angelfire.com/ct/travelology/index.html

Mastercard ATM locator:
www.matercard.com/atm
VISA ATM locator:
www.visa.com/pd/atm/main.htm

www.booksites.com travelers stories

Re travelling light:
www.verber.com/mark/travel/packing.html
www.travelite.org see the FAQ
www.henricson.se/mats/upl Universal Packing List

Lava Lamp principle harnessed for ocean-going “perpetual-motion” vehicle.

2008-02-11T18:40:00.000-08:00

Will military applications be next? See the BBC story:

BBC NEWS
Robot glider harvests ocean heat
By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

A sea-going robotic glider that harvests heat energy from the ocean has been tested by US scientists.

The yellow, torpedo-shaped machine has been combing the depths of seas around the Caribbean since December 2007.
....
It generates its energy for propulsion from the differences in temperature between warm surface waters and colder, deeper layers of the ocean.

Wax-filled tubes inside the craft expand when it is gliding through warmer water. This heat is used to push oil from a bladder inside the hull to one outside, changing its buoyancy.

Cooling of the wax at depth reverses the cycle.

Full news story at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/7234544.stm

Published: 2008/02/08

Parmenides Pooh-poohed

2007-12-26T14:21:00.000-08:00

Below is a short comment on an interesting recent article on Parmenides,

Parmenides—father of modern thought
Published by
Tom Nuttall
December 19, 2007 in Science and technology and Philosophy.

Read more Greek history, and less Greek philosophy, and I think you’ll have a very different understanding of the rise of the ancient importance of reason than the one given by this article however.

Internal to cities: wealth, intermarriage and force held far more importance than reason. But the ancient Greek historians recount again and again how critical reason and rhetoric were as a military force multiplier amongst diverse city states without permanent alliances. Conflicts in such multiplayer games were won by those who could persuade others to join temporary alliances of interest, faith, heritage, or anything else that seemed appealing.

Reason was a desperately important survival skill, and a competitive blood sport as well - emissaries from both camps would often be simultaneously appealing for help from prospective allies, and if memory serves: not infrequently, debating each other in front of them.

(I can't help sneakily thinking, though, that Parmenides could very well have been trying to discourage or satirize the use (or merely misuse) of reason in human life, with a poem that was simply hilarious to contemporary farmers - and farmers today for that matter.)

More Steroids and Baseball

2007-12-13T13:08:00.000-08:00

When I wrote and Steroids and Moneyball, I was told I was greatly exaggerating a situation that affected only a tiny handful of players, not an industry.

http://confusioncomplete.blogspot.com/2005/07/steroids-and-moneyball.html

Uniformly, my correspondents flatly stated that the problem couldn't be that so extensive that it was changing the very management of the game. Mitchell's report now says the problem is and has been larger, in fact... and then wishes to change the subject. Moreover it relies on two or three sources only, and unmasks only the most highly indiscreet players. Anyone who took any precautions at all to hide their use, Mitchell doesn't know about.

Every time the subject of steroids has been mentioned, for years now, baseball management and players have been saying "It's all out. Let's move on." Implying (and lying) that the whole story was known. The latest Mitchell report tying the biggest names to illicit drug use puts the lie to previous denials, and then repeats the same nauseous mantra: "No blame. Move on. No penalties."

But that neglects an essential fact about steroid use: much of the positive effects on athletic performance, such as muscle bulk and strength are PERMANENT not temporary. The cheaters will retain the advantage, those who didn't cheat will continue to be deprived of careers if Mitchell's advice is taken. Nice.

We've become a society that believes neither in retribution NOR deterrence: that doesn't believe in punishment or penalties or even occasional time-outs it seems. In this New Age, everyone, starting with upper management it seems, is an anarchist!

All very charming, but the idea that rule of law is superfluous has been tried before and it didn't work well. Some example we're now setting for our kids. In effect we're saying: "Forget Christianity (or any other major religion). Forgiveness is a human right; all that Christian stuff about repentance and heartfelt change being necessary first? Screw that. Do what you like, however shocking. Forgiveness is your birthright and if someone tries to deny that to you for any reason whatsoever, you have every reason to be outraged! How dare they!"

So now we have a society that isn't merely post-Christian, is post-morality, period. We could survive the former, but not the later.

Keynes on Capitalism

2007-08-21T12:06:00.000-07:00

Since it's not up on the net, according to Google, here's a terrific quote from the famous economist Keynes:

“Modern capitalism”, [Keynes] wrote a few years before the Great Slump, “is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers. Such a system has to be immensely, not merely moderately, successful to survive.”

- John Maynard Keynes quoted in Harper's Magazine, November 2001, p 82, in a review of Robert Skidelsky's biography: reviewer Nicholas Fraser.

A suitable epitaph for hippiedom I suppose, though it was written decades before.

Back for a bit

2007-07-25T12:24:00.001-07:00

I'm feeling better, after a rough time much exacerbated by copious amounts of second-hand smoke served up by subsidized housing (your tax dollars at work.) Now I need to get caught up in a lot of ways (and find new digs without the smoke if that's possible in my price range.) Maybe with room for an electric wheelchair this time, that might be nice.

So I may or may not be back to update this blog for a bit, but it's nice to be able to spend some time at the computer indulging myself writing small bits, working my way up to tackling larger projects that have been fallow.

Fraudulent subprime mortgages

2007-07-25T11:22:00.000-07:00

This was originally a reply to: “Fraudulent subprime mortgages” (click the title of this post to go there.)

On that (rather famous economist) blog, there is a lively discussion about who was defrauded whom. My take:

The ultimate purchasers of the loans didn't stop to analyse how the legal changes in the resale market had suddenly removed any incentive for the initial "lenders" (now really more like scouts than investors) to vet homebuyers. Largely, although not exclusively, the large investment institutions who were hurt when the music stop "fooled themselves." Or rather their hirelings profited (in the short term at least) from self-deception or a lack of "fiduciary curiosity", to coin a term - while the firms who paid these bozos their bonuses lost an far bigger pile of money.

What's most interesting is the parallel between the functionaries who ultimately stuck their investment firms with these loans and the similar functionaries in accounting and stock-sales firms who fully cooperated with Enron frauds with similarly disastrous results (See the film "The Smartest Guys in the Room.") Again and again, decade after decade, now; the big money seems to be in making "Dutch Book" between the interests of large financial institutions, and that of their higher-level managerial staff, who turn out to be very willing to betray the long-term interests of their employers. Bonus structures focused on the short-term obviously exacerbate those differences (conflicts of interest!), which are already extremely problematic for ordinary stockholders.

In support of this view, many of the biggest losers were hedge funds, and note this quote retailed in the same blog:

"...the top 25 hedge fund managers combined appear to have earned more than all 500 S&P 500 CEOs combined (both realized and estimated)."

(originally from Steve Kaplan and Joshua Rauh, http://www.nber.org/papers/w13270)

I don't doubt that bonuses for short-term "performance" were a big part of those "earnings."

It may be that enough evidence is in now in to suggest that with few exceptions, bonuses for management that exceed a small fraction of their wage are an irresistible encouragement to fraud, particularly if the crimes first originate outside that company and give the illusion of allowing theft without ultimate responsibility. It isn't possible to plug every mousehole, to remove every possible fraudulent scheme, so dangling huge carrots in front of executives that most will only be able to reach if they tell themselves and their bosses a few convenient (but eventually very costly) lies is a very bad idea - unless you've just gotten your management degree and want to improve your lifestyle, of course.

CompleteConfusion.com

PS - what does it say about our society that neither Marginal Revolution's website spell checker nor that of Open Office has ever heard of the word "analyse"? No wonder there's a problem with subprime mortgages (amongst other things.)

Simpsonized Russ

2007-07-24T16:42:00.000-07:00

This is my Simpsonized portrait. As a promotion for the movie, you too can have a photo transformed into a .png image, at http://www.simpsonizeme.com

I didn't say it was going to be pretty, but it is rather accurate, I'm afraid.

Surplus Value

2007-07-24T16:19:00.000-07:00

Every now and then I can't resist commenting on a blog, and I often reproduce those comments here. This was in reply to a criticism on a comment by Adam Smith on the contribution to price, of labor. Note that the labor that goes into creating machinery and finding, extracting and refining the fuel to run machinery counts here too, not just direct manual labor per se:

And what adjusts supply and demand? Usually labor. If a meteorite lands in your backyard and you decide to sell it, your labor hasn't determined its price.

But there is a market in meteorites, and its prices are determined by the efforts of those who scour their favorite windblown desert sites in dune buggies (with half their finds going to universities if they are searching on Federal Lands.)Markets not determined by labor at one moment usually become so.

Of course, Smith uttered an overgeneralization. But over time where labor is applied is the factor that can be most easily changed, so it ends up determining prices rather closely, even with commodities - but of course it is the marginal labor, of getting the most labor-intensive last part of the supply to market that determines price, often leaving much "economic profit."

It's not impossible that Marx was groping for this last concept, ineptly, with his lamentable theory of "surplus value" (which Bertrand Russell excuses as an emotional outburst due to reading to much about child labor)although this interpretation of mine may be much too kind. In transitional (or subtly corrupt) economies such profits can be very wide spread amongst the rich.

submitted to
http://adamsmithslostlegacy.com/ASLLBlog.htm

Remote control assassination takes a giant step forward

2007-02-27T08:35:00.000-08:00

Long ago one of the Sci-Fi ideas I considered writing up as a story was the use of remote control birds, ideally pigeons as a tool for assassination. They could carry more than enough plastic explosive in their digestive track to decapitate a target. Imagine a pigeon, or an innocent dove flying over a well-guarded Presidential Candidate's outdoor rally... then landing on his shoulder... and exploding.

The Chinese have now developed just this technology, the remote control pigeon, according to today's news. The Robot Engineering Technology Research Center at Shandong University of Science and Technology use brain implants to control the birds flight.

Welcome to the ever braver new world.

The register finds this new tech hilarious and obviously useless: "Sadly, the report 'did not specify what practical uses the scientists saw for the remote-controlled pigeons', Reuters notes."

I'm less amused, or convinced this technology will never be employed by anyone.

Virgin Earth Challenge

2007-02-17T17:22:00.000-08:00

My quite possibly half-baked answer for the Virgin Earth Challenge for solutions to CO2 buildup/removal:

This suggestion might be either naive or old hat, but: Why not sequester carbon where the wells are, filtering it from the general atmosphere and then pumping it underground,?

We do something like this already to filter out oxygen from airliners' fuel tanks to prevent explosions:

"Called a fuel tank inerting system... Before it enters the tank, air is forced through bundles of fibers that filter out the oxygen.

Steve Zimmerman: These fibers are really in the structure of very small straws the size of a human hair. So there's millions of these fibers laid axially down the length of the air separation module. So, air that's 24% oxygen enters these fibers and starts traveling down their length. Now because of the nature of the fiber and the structure of the molecules, oxygen's allowed to be absorbed into the walls of the fiber, and then exits the fiber and is collected and dumped overboard. Whereas the balance of the air that continues traveling down these fibers, becomes more and more nitrogen enriched as it flows down the length."
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/innovation/transcript_episode5.html

Now if you have two filters, and first take out everything bigger than CO2 and then use a second filter to take out the CO2, you can use wind power or other erratic but renewal sources of power to pump air through fiber filters and take CO2 out of the atmosphere at the sites of old oil wells, and put it underground.

Granted, it would be still better to suck it from your auto tailpipe and shove the dirty CO2 underground, but it's not possible to do that economically, on an industrial scale.

When Gaming Threatened to Wreck Society... in Tudor England

2007-02-01T09:15:00.000-08:00

We aren't the first people to think maybe games are getting out of hand. Back in the Tudor Age, in England, the situation became serious enough that a series of laws were passed to get people back to what they were “supposed to be doing.” It wasn't video games that were sucking up peoples time then, of course, but tennis, bowling, and skittles. What men and boys were supposed to be doing in their free time was playing at archery - so that in time of war (think Agincourt) there would be plenty of experienced, skilled archers to send out with the mounted troops and pikemen.

Even so by 1512 the English Parliament thought that the illegal games were drawing so many people away from archery as a leisure sport that the nation was in peril: “archery and shooting in longbows is right little used but daily mininsheth, decayeth and abateth more and more.” Possibly your boss or teacher can sympathize. Again in 1542 Parliament passed even stricter measures, angered that sly gamers had evaded the previous laws by inventing new games, such as shuffleboard - or shove ha'penny as it was at first - and were now playing at these. The situation was bad enough that bowmakers, unable to make a decent living in England, were beginning to move to her traditional enemy: Scotland. So games other than archery became legal only when licensed, and most people were forbidden to play any games except at Christmas. Now, there's an argument to use when your parents wants you to drop the Wii and socialize during the holidays: “Aww, Mom, have a heart: even during the middle ages they let people play games during Christmas - unless they needed help burn a witch or something!”

In case you're wondering, yes there were plenty of guns on every battlefield in the sixteenth century; but they weren't yet cheap and effective enough to entirely displace archers, and in any case the English were more conservative than other armies, preferring to what had worked well for them before. (Your boss or teacher might agree with that sentiment too.)

It's worth mentioning that these “games” weren't exactly the same then as they are now. For instance football (soccer), which had been outlawed in 1314, had a field that was often miles long. Both men and women could play, and there was no restriction on the size of each team. Rules were scarce: so long as you didn't draw a weapon or actually kill an opponent; you could stop whoever had the ball in any way you possibly could, and however violently - without penalty. One reason given for suppressing football at the time was that seriously wounded players tended to nurse their resentments for some time afterward.

There's more about life in those “good old days” between the pages of such books as “A Brief History of the Tudor Age” by Jasper Ridley, Robinson, Constable & Robinson, London, 2002 which was originally published as “The Tudor Age” in 1998, which I've drawn from liberally for this comparison to modern mores - if, of course, you can stopping playing games for long enough to read.

There's a lot we don't know and can't read about those times however.For instance we don't know when paper airplanes were invented, or whether anyone played with them then - although paper may have been too expensive to give to children. No doubt the designs up at BestPaperAirplanes.com were unknown, but Leonardo Da Vinci does mention some kind of glider that involved paper in his notes, and origami was common.

Better Buoyancy for Ballons, Blimps and Dirigibles

2007-01-29T13:08:00.000-08:00

This may be old hat but it might be relevant to the geostationarybananaovertexas.com project. If I have money for patents anytime soon, it'll go to other patents, but if someone else wants to invest, let me know.

Self-Contained system to replace ballast or gas-release - or other means of changing buoyancy and altitude in lighter-than-air balloons or dirigibles

Russell Johnston, PhotoperiodEffect.com
August 10, 2001 version - last revised January 29 2007
Proposed Provisional Patent Application

Examples of applications:
Dirigibles and other shaped inflatable lighter-than-air (or partially lighter-than-air) devices are being reintroduced as lifting devices (SkyCat of Cardington, England, CargoLifter), tour vehicles (Zeppelin-NT, in service), and proposed as more ideal "cell-phone towers" hovering high over cities (Sky Station International of Washington, DC). As well, NASA plans a balloon expedition to Mars.

Advantages:
A self-contained system which did not involve the taking on or discarding of ballast, or the releasing of gases in order to reduce buoyancy would be more convenient and practical, particular for frequent use. For example, the proposed CargoLifter CL 160 Airship heavy lifting system would have the craft taking on large amounts of water ballast whenever it released a large load. This might well make releasing such loads in remote areas or to mountain tops inconvenient. Repeatedly picking up and releasing loads by such means might be extremely inconvenient. The alternative of gas release, particularly of Helium, is very expensive. In sum, ballast or gas-release systems are highly inconvenient, particularly for repeated use. In the case of the NASA probe, they would not be practical for any lengthy exploration of Mars without a means of adding ballast or gas in situ, yet to do without any means of changing altitude in order to descend to examine the surface closely would obviously limit the mission's usefulness.

The Proposed Device:
In this system buoyant gas is converted from having lift to becoming weight, and therefore ballast, without loss, by compressing it in a container within the craft. It is re-converted to lift again by releasing it from that container into the general bladder or gas envelope it came from. This would necessitate pumps/compressors and the use of some energy. However, it would offer very fine control of the craft's lift and therefore altitude, without any loss of ballast or gas, and the process could be repeated as needed. In previous times, the canister to contain the compressed gas, and perhaps the pumps needed, might have been prohibitively expensive. Modern materials have changed this equation, probably enough to make this a weight-economical secondary system or primary system for altitude control (or to vary the weight-lifting capability) of such lighter-than-air craft. In the case of the NASA probe, such a device could be designed to be discarded at some point to allow higher-altitude surveys, if desired.

It might be necessary or convenient, for non-rigid airships or otherwise, to provide secondary bladders which would operate on these principles so that at least one portion of the structure remained rigidly inflated, even when such buoyancy bladders are deflated.

A better system than the above might be to provide a second "ballast air" bladder inside the main (buoyancy) bladder with a connection to the outside air. (During a descent, for example) air could be pumped into this bladder to replace any buoyant gas that was being compressed, adding a minor amount of weight and more importantly, maintaining the main bladder's pressure at a constant amount. When more buoyancy was wanted, and buoyant gas released into the main chamber again, air would be pumped out/released from the secondary or "air ballast" bladder. Such a system might be considered a bit more closely analogous to the way submarines work, and might be especially useful for shaped balloons or airships without a rigid frame.

Note, in any case, that only a portion of the buoyant gas needs to be compressed in order to alter the buoyancy of the craft overall. In order to vary altitude for a craft whose weight is being held constant, perhaps only quite a small portion - reducing the weight of such a system.

Prior Art:
(This is not intended to be exhaustive, and health and other work have prevented a proper search.) Fish have air bladders that are not wholly unlike such a device, and of course, submarines also vary their buoyancy, and by similar means. Air is used to displace water from the surrounding ocean in buoyancy tanks in order to make the machine more buoyant; and air is released or removed from buoyancy tanks, being replaced by outside water, in order to allow the machine to sink. So far as I know, a way of applying such principles to airships has not been introduced, however. Nor do I know with certainty whether submarines re-compress air from their buoyancy tanks instead of releasing it. If not, that advance would fall under this idea as well.

The Photoperiod Effect and ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis)

2007-01-21T14:58:00.000-08:00

The Photoperiod Effect study of the day is: Serotonergic mechanisms in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

It explores the hypothesis that, in effect, ALS is a serotonin deficiency disease, extending "the glutamate excitotoxicity theory". It concludes that "progressive degeneration of 5-HT neurons affecting motoneuron activity constitutes the prime mover of the disease and its progression and treatment of ALS needs to be focused primarily on boosting 5-HT functions..." 5-HT is serotonin, and we make it in the dark, only.

This is consistent with other studies I'd come across in the last couple of years that suggest a link between the Photoperiod Effect and ALS - more than a hint and less than proof. If you know anybody with ALS, tell them to come in out of the light, as it were.

Warning! Reflux drugs thin bones and may cause... reflux!

2007-01-15T16:30:00.000-08:00

First published January 15, 2007 - last revised January 21, 2007

A recent, well-publicized study found that all common reflux drugs, including Nexium, Prevacid and Prilosec make hip fractures far more likely. Nearly 50% more hip fractures occurred after just one year of taking the most effective "proton pump inhibitor" drugs! 17190895 This is shocking news, because one in five people dies after a hip fracture, according to Dr. David Forcione; and it can be presumed that the risk becomes greater with every year that reflux drugs are taken. It now seems that reflux drugs, which act by limiting the acid we produce, thereby limit the amount of calcium we absorb (calcium reacts with acids), imperiling our bones to a startling degree.

Note that both the new and old drugs don't stop reflux, heartburn, or GERD since reflux is "primarily a motor disorder"; 15729198 they only reduce the amount of acid within the fluids that come up. Also, older drugs were found to thin bones less only insofar as they were less effective in reducing acid in the first place – so switching back to such drugs as Zantac doesn't help any more than does reducing the dosage of the more recent drugs.

But there may be worse news hidden in this new study. It may even be that the most profound and common long-term side-effect of reflux drugs is... worse reflux over time! This is because calcium is essential in controlling reflux, not just neutralizing the acids in it – possibly for reasons we do not yet fully understand including better gut mobility 15628717 and anti-inflammatory action 17201221 as well. So if modern reflux medications are indeed reducing our calcium intake, more and worse reflux may be an all-too predicable consequence of taking those drugs for long periods. These drugs may actually be helping to cause the problem they are being prescribed to cure.

Calcium is a common treatment for reflux, and not just because the calcium we've just eaten combines with acid to neutralize it in the stomach. The calcium available in our body also helps us to deal with stomach acid in reflux by being released and neutralizing it, as well as improving gut mobility. Therefore, taking calcium well before an episode of reflux happens helps - but only if it's absorbed, of course, and our reflux medications are helping to prevent that. If over time we have less calcium in our body thanks to reflux drugs such as proton pump inhibitors or older drugs such as Zantac, still worse reflux months or years later may be a likely result. Sadly, the new finding about hip fractures may also explain why so many people who start taking reflux drugs end up staying on them year after year, and even decade after decade.

Other conditions can also be strongly affected by calcium deficiency, including epilepsy, anxiety, and muscle spasms. Combining reflux medication with these conditions may not be advised. It is also known that low acid interferes with B-12 absorption.

So what to do if you have reflux? The first thing - take all the calcium and B-12 you should (which for almost everyone means taking calcium/magnesium supplements). Note, however, that if you are still taking reflux drugs, these may prevent you from absorbing any calcium from these supplements, as well. At a minimum, it's worth finding out, in consultation with your doctor, whether taking substantial calcium supplements will allow you reduce your dosage of reflux drugs such as PPIs. If these drugs are indeed addicting, only being off them for some time, during which calcium can be replaced, will tell you if they are either necessary or truly helping you, over time. You should expect a transition period during which reflux is more noticeable because it's more acidic, before things get better.

Consider the possibility that your reflux is being caused by other medications you are taking. Asthma medication, anti-depressants and aspirin-class NSAID painkillers can all cause reflux, and taking female hormones may do so. Any drug which is a sedative or tranquillizer may slow the peristaltic waves within the esophagus that clear food. Lose weight if you can, since extra pounds worsen reflux.

Other things to try: make sure you're getting enough fiber, since this also helps motility. Raise the head of your bed a few inches, and make sure you drink a glass of water after taking any medication, to limit damage to the esophagus. Also limit smoking, alcohol, chocolate, coffee and tobacco and if you do take them, try to do so only in the morning, since these stimulants may possibly cause reflux by altering the stomach and intestine's daily cycles. (PhotoperiodEffect.com describes some of our daily rhythms and new knowledge about how to optimize them.) The good news is that if you've improved these habits since you started taking reflux drugs, the only thing now causing your reflux, might be the drugs themselves!

End Spam

2006-12-30T12:22:00.000-08:00

Here's a suggestion – appropriately enough from completeconfusion.com - to solve the problem of email spam and let charity raise money at the same time, with a voluntary donation.

It would be a little like the old North American Easter Seals and Lung Society "Stamps" fund-raisers, but usefully updated.

Let the United Way or Cancer Fund (but just one such charity, or one umbrella organization) sell 50 online "stamps" for $5. Email companies such as Google could then allow their users to opt in to allow new contacts only from those who used up such a United Way electronic stamp to do so (or who had been given prior permission or a password perhaps, as well.) Anyone you're already corresponding with gets through free - and if a spammer pays, one click identifying that message as spam removes future messages or imposes a new stamp fee.

Those who send new messages without a stamp get an automatic reply directing them to the charity's web page, and when they've paid the stamp fee, their message can go through.

Individuals who want to control their inbox a little more closely could impose a higher number of stamps as a fee at their discretion.

If new messages were marked as stamped (even if not blocked when unstamped) by cooperative email companies that alone would help all of us, including those recipients who hadn't opted in, considerably.

The economics of the free market suggest that as long as spam is free, it's unstoppable, because the perpetrators can amortize almost any investment in getting around filtering programs.

If you need convincing that there's really a problem, here a couple of recent articles to convince you:

. . .

"Net Watchdog: Seemingly Unstoppable Spam
Spam volumes are rising, and this new breed of junk mail is taking on an entirely new form.
Tom Spring, PC World
Tuesday, December 26, 2006 12:00 AM PST

If you're like me, each morning you greet an e-mail inbox stuffed with a new breed of fiendishly clever spam that somehow manages to elude your spam filters.

Earlier this year we thought the good guys were winning the war against spam. Back in January, I talked to spam fighters who were claiming victory in the spam wars. One company told me that the volume of spam had stopped growing at double-digit rates for the first time.

But that may have changed. Researchers and IT managers are now complaining that spam levels have risen significantly in recent months--some organizations have reported increases as high as 80 percent. Overall spam volume has increased 67 percent since August 2006, according to Barracuda Networks, an enterprise security appliance vendor." .... - PCWorld.com

. . .

"The menace in your inbox
Jonathan Weber used to face spam with equanimity. Now he wants to take a harder line:

Unlike many of my friends and colleagues, I've generally had a fairly relaxed attitude about Internet spam. Unwanted e-mails in your inbox? Just delete them – it takes a lot less energy than being an anti-spam vigilante.

But I sure don't think that way anymore.

The spam in the inbox has reached a level that annoys even me – sometimes 40 or 50 a day despite the spam filters..." - TimesOnline

United 93 - Divided 2006

2006-12-29T07:16:00.000-08:00

Finally saw United 93, on DVD, the controversial movie that raised the question "Is it too soon to begin 911 Denial... or too late?" Judging by the initial reaction of public horror that a movie acknowledged the disaster had been made, some of us just can't get those rose-colored glasses wedged back onto our faces fast enough. The "special feature" is a nauseating apologia for making a film that includes any part of the reality we've lived in for half a decade - which "special feature" was hopelessly dated by the time the DVD came out, and thoroughly exploits the families to make its now deadeningly obvious point.

The flick is very well made, but I could have skipped it this lifetime. Anything that brings back the tension and abject fear from my childhood is generally a bad entertainment choice for me, so I should have guessed that much, I suppose.

The overall impression I took from the film is the overwhelming intricacy and complexity, intelligence and cooperation within Western Civilization, accumulated over thousands of years; starkly contrasted with a staggeringly profound religious bigotry and indifference to violence also accumulated over thousands of years.

But as infuriating watching the pig-headed hijackers was, it was worse witnessing the countless instances of human herding on the American side, as the infinite weight of habit, again and again, turned nearly everyone involved from an intelligent human being into a billboard screaming "Incompetence!"

There are far too many instances to name, but a few quick examples will give you the thick flavor of human idiocy that permeates the film. Because no-one has hijacked an airliner within the U.S. in forty years, no-one believes it can happen now. (Whatever happened to the Gambler's Fallacy?) The fighter planes scrambled to intercept the airliners were given the correct headings, but turned in the opposite direction and flew far out to sea... because they were in the habit of turning in that direction during previous interception exercises. The fighters were still one hundred miles away when the last plane hit the ground. The FAA endlessly delayed flight clearance for the fighters because they weren't in the habit of doing anything so unusual... and on and on and on and on...

It's so lucky that, like, the planet isn't at risk, say from environmental problems caused by human habit... Oh, no, wait...

Free the average person and immediately they are slaves once again... to habit. "Let's just stay on the plantation."

The Ketogenic Diet and The Glutamate Diet for Epilepsy - are they really the same?

2006-11-15T12:47:00.000-08:00

The Ketogenic Diet for epilepsy restricts carbohydrates in order to reduce seizures. The glutamate diet combats seizures by restricting glutamate in the diet - a common protein that's also a neurotransmitter, which humans really have a taste for. Agricultural foods have been selected for very high amounts of glutamate, over centuries, and of course, we have quite a taste for monosodium glutamate.

Add in one more fact... not only do we burn protein when carbohydrates aren't available, but glutamate is even used as a food for cultured bacteria - it's easy energy.

So it occurs to me... maybe the Ketogenic diet is merely an indirect way of restricting glutamate, by causing the body to burn off more of it. Maybe that's why it works.

No More Jericho...

2006-11-15T12:19:00.000-08:00

First, the best headlines of the week, from the satirical site The Onion:

Casual NASCAR Fan Fails To Appreciate Subtleties Of Eight-Car Crash

Over-Competitive Lance Armstrong Challenges Cancer To Rematch

I'm not recommending the stories, there's not much to say after the headlines, but I laughed at the headlines.

Now on to the TV series Jericho, my first best hope for this TV season, for which I have little time. I won't be watching it anymore - I've concluded it's a Zeno series, which I'll explain in a moment. But I will tell you the end, to save you some time, dear reader...

The nukes were all from a right wing conspiracy to cleanse and remake America, a la Timothy McVeigh. I don't have any inside sources but the misdirection has been as clumsy as in Survivor, so it's more than a guess. Plus, Hollywood doesn't have an enormously complex political agenda. Trust me, that's the big ending, the big explanation: to quote someone else, "It's a slam dunk." The political right and or Lunatic Christian Right (LCR?) did it.

What's a Zeno TV Series? It's when the plot advances only half as much each episode as it did in the last episode... progressing toward a limit that it will never reach. In other words, Jericho's writers are deliberately wasting my time doling out astonishingly little real information, and no catharsis in the backstory.

LOST is an innovation in TV... (I lost track of it so I'm not watching that either.) The backstories provide catharsis while the real plot moves slowly forward, sans catharsis. It's a way to compensate for the greatest weakness of standard TV series, that the writers must restore the status quo at the end of every episode, cycling endlessly.

Neil Simon's brother (a venerable TV writer, worked with Woody Allen etc) explained this cycle to me, to my disgust, at a TV writing seminar long ago. It put me off writing for TV. But LOST has begun to innovate around that problem. Unfortunately Jericho doesn't really understand the new formula, and doesn't provide catharsis in the backstories, while deliberatly pissing away the lives of its dwindling number of viewers each week while not advancing the central story. Much as I love end of the world stories, I'm out.

The last Zeno series I briefly watched was that marine Invasion of the body snatchers thing a year or two ago. I'm giving up sooner this time 'round.

Atopy, Arthritis and Darkness

2006-10-30T09:13:00.000-08:00

As I continue to revise PhotoperiodEffect.com I am folding in breaking science news that's consistent with the Photoperiod Hypothesis (here.)
I won't post every such news story here, there are too many, but I will probably do so from time to time.

The studies I've read suggest that atopy (asthma etc) and autoimmunity result when we cut short the period of darkness when much of the clean-up and maintenance of our cells, as well as self-identification takes place.

Specifically, very recent research (October, 2006) suggests that rheumatoid arthritis may result from one particular clean-up task not being properly performed by the immune system. The DNase II enzyme in macrophages (a garbage-collecting white cell) snips apart and thus digests waste DNA in the bloodstream from dead cells. Mice that are prevented from producing this enzyme, by deleting that gene “develop a chronic polyarthritis resembling human rheumatoid arthritis.” [17066036] [http://www.newscientist.com/]

The obvious conclusion (at least to me, to paraphrase Copernicus) is that those who already have arthritis ought to be smart enough to come in from the light.

If you're already in pain from an autoimmune disease, and you still want to burn the candle at both ends (of the day) preventing your normal daily immune cycles from operating, good luck to you.

Surely the sensible thing to do is to adopt a more normal night. (Instructions here).

Giant Aluminum Paper Airplanes

2006-10-15T13:59:00.000-07:00

Pity I'm too busy with rather adult, sober matters such as fixing up logictutorial.com my latest health related writing, summing up the Photoperiod Effect in a Nutshell.

Because there are more whimsical things that I'd like to have time for. Such as one I mentioned to a student of UCLA who wrote to ask about paper airplane events near him, to write about...

"I've sometimes thought of folding a huge paper airplane out of thin aluminum sheeting (say 6 or 8 feet long) and then launching it by inner-tube-rubber-band far out to sea, though. You could do that and make your own story...

Russell Johnston
bestpaperairplanes.com"

Nearly as much fun might be to fold up a bunch of these giant aluminum "paper airplanes" and then hang them up in an outsize mobile to hang in Malls. That ought to amuse some youngsters.

All wistful thinking though, as I won't have free time like that for some long while I expect.

"Ban antibiotic growth promoters!"

2006-10-13T13:27:00.000-07:00

The untold story behind the emergence of deadly food poisoning of spinach, salad, sprouts and more, is the agribusiness use of antibiotics solely to fatten animals.

Today, the spinach fatalities join the list:

E. coli strain traced to ranch near spinach fields

The real story can be found at EurekaAlert, (or two studies in the Nov. 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases):

Studies identify food sources of disease and drug resistance

The industrial use of antibiotics in animals for meat production has created unprecedentedly deadly, highly drug resistant strains of bacteria which can kill in small amounts. The quote that's the title of this post comes from Niels Frimodt-Møller, MD, DMSc, and Annette M. Hammerum, PhD, MSc, of the Danish National Center for Antimicrobials and Infection Control, in an editorial in the same issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases

URL of this post:
http://confusioncomplete.blogspot.com/2006/10/ban-antibiotic-growth-promoters.html

Additions to PhotoperiodEffect.com

2006-10-07T12:55:00.000-07:00

Finally I've managed to get up more than a one-page site at PhotoPeriod Effect dotcom.

Namely, a maybe thirty page article Photoperiod effect, Diabetes, Hypertension and more, in a Nutshell. which outlines the connections. It doesn't have anything like as many citations inserted into the text as it will, that will take more time. If you want an overview of how to escape obesity and chronic illnesses by adopting a more natural day (and night) that's where to start.

I've also put up
Easy Ways to Get More Natural Darkness; switching to a natural day, and night: A guide to shifting your hours back to something more like a natural day...

And the first article I wrote and sent around a little on the topic. more than a year ago now;
Darkness Therapy for Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome

The next addition to the site will be a "Frequently Raised Objections (and answers)" document, which has already been written, and has accumulated to the lenght of about 60 text pages, but which needs some editing before it can be posted.

Dragging eyes to these sites is the next task.

Forking Wikipedia

2006-09-25T11:54:00.000-07:00

Forking Wikipedia – this was a message to a Citizendium list (Citizendium is a proposed fork of Wikipedia by Larry Sanger et al) but applies to other competitors to Wikipedia – and I hope there are many that flourish.

Re: On Transversality -- Communication Between Different
Levels Of Experience on Citizendium

I've long advocated a "Simpleopedia" in addition to Wikipedia (which could link to the latter, or Cit http://citizendium.org/.) Not merely for the less educated, informed, or younger students, but as a quick overview which could also serve as an introduction in case that's all that's needed. It's another question, however, as to Whether Cit [http://citizendium.org/] should start by undertaking this task, too. If it would be an effective initial marketing tool for Cit, then sure. Otherwise, maybe one thing at a time makes more sense.

Re: Fork Viability, and establishing beachheads.
I wanted to retail my experience with three different similar (non Wikipedia) projects that I won't name, one of which was in fact a fork of Wikipedia. None worked out. (Forgive me if this has been discussed elsewhere - I'll be quick.)

Cause of the other failures (imho): It's difficult to fork all articles all at once as soon as anyone wants to add a single sentence, at least until the new project gains enormous momentum. The danger is that the small changes in your fork will be swamped soon enough by the as yet larger project with a larger community; and that many of your forked articles will for this reason gradually become inferior, dragging down the project as a whole.

Deliberately focusing your volunteers efforts on only some articles for a while so that your forked articles will both supercede and continue to supercede the originals is, experience tells me, necessary. Not for ever, but for some while.

Meanwhile, Cit could accumulate proposed additions to future forks, and notes on what could be added. When these accumulate to a very substantial change in the article, and it's clear that volunteer interest will sustain and update the forked article ever after, then it can be safely forked.

Premature forking that results, eventually, in many inferior articles within Cit that will drag down the search engine reputation of all articles, including the dazzling ones, is the easiest way to sink Cit (imho, and experience.)

The bonus is that concentrating efforts where possible, for a while, will ensure at least some search engine attention comes to CIt early on.

This is analogous to establishing a new species - which doesn't tend to happen everywhere at once, but in small relatively isolated "island populations" at first, and only then spreads throughout a geographical range.

Do humans have some Neanderthal genes?

2006-09-21T20:06:00.000-07:00

There are suggestions now that maybe, after all, we do have some Neanderthal genes, now. Not proof. PMID: 16895447 but there may be better sources.

My interest relates to the established link between artificial light and breast cancer, etc, etc. I'm curious to know how long our genes have had to adapt to more extreme seasons and the varying lengths of daylight that come with them. I wonder if some of the (genetic) differences between ethnic groups re breast cancer and other chronic disease including diabetes might relate to how close to the equator ones' ancestors were.

Maybe Northern Europeans have some built in protection from the chronic illnesses that photoperiodeffect.com discusses, because we at least had some time to adapt to more extreme light variation with the seasons - and since Neanderthals went North first, just maybe we have kept some genes that help one adapt to variable photoperiods. This would account for some genetic variation affecting vulnerability to these illnesses, perhaps.

The Relativity Drive

2006-09-21T10:50:00.000-07:00

I'm a sucker for impossible stories. If we aren't willing to believe anything that turns out to be impossible, then we'll never allow ourselves to imagine what really is possible - such as that too much artificial light can cause breast cancer.

But, just when I thought my own site that discusses that and more, photoperiodeffect.com might be the strangest news story of the year, or maybe the decade (since I'm saying that most chronic illnesses, and its a long list, are caused by prolonged use of artificial light); I read what really must surely be the strangest news story of the decade, and it comes from the highly respected New Scientist magazine which reports that the drive has been prototyped, tested, and supposedly, it works!?

The drive described below doesn't conserve momentum, in any way that I can discern. That's not right. Is the Universe a larger system than we think? I hope it works (I was cheering for telegraphy, too) but seriously, if you can't bet on Newton's Laws, just what sort of bar bet can't a person lose?

Relativity drive: The end of wings and wheels?

- New Scientist, 8 September 2006, by Justin Mullins, issue 2568

"Traditional forms of transport are just so last century. New Scientist meets the man who would replace them with pure radiation
....
Roger Shawyer has developed an engine with no moving parts that he believes can replace rockets and make trains, planes and automobiles obsolete. "The end of wings and wheels" is how he puts it. It's a bold claim. Read Shawyer’s theory paper here (pdf format)." http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/av/shawyertheory.pdf

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19125681.400-relativity-drive-the-end-of-wings-and-wheels.html

That last link is just a stub article, but there's more at Wikipedia, under the title of EmDrive. Typical of Wikipedia, because it's exciting, it's recommended for deletion, of course. Another article is at Eureka. The inventor's rather spare site is emdrive.com and I'm guessing he might not be thrilled that I bought relativitydrive.com and .org today.

Quoting from Shawyer's Paper: "The technique described in this paper uses radiation pressure, at microwave frequencies, in an engine which provides direct conversion from microwave energy to thrust, without the need for propellant.
The concept of the microwave engine is illustrated in fig 1. Microwave energy is fed from a magnetron, via a tuned feed to a closed, tapered waveguide, whose overall electrical length gives resonance at the operating frequency of the magnetron."

But I can't help thinking that it might be made more efficient, by using baffles in the interior of the chamber (I may be wrong about this, my Relativity is rusty at best, and it isn't easy to test in your own garage, since the forces involved are small.) The diagram below is meant to be a cross-section showing a baffle arrangement that might (or might not) help. Below is another diagram of a different arrangement that might be a better bet. Anybody want to be the first on their block to have a share in a Relativity Drive Improvement patent? Oh, come on...

Or better:

Of course, because resonance is key, the size of the baffles might have to be exactly half the proportions of the chamber, and you might then have to halve the wavelength to get thrust from both baffles and chamber. This is vaguely similar to using overtones when singing, perhaps, and other resonance phenomena. Or maybe baffles just can't work.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm vastly surprised even that such a thing as an EmDrive (or Relativity Drive) MIGHT work, if that's so. But it ain't April and it's in New Scientist. They aren't easy to hoax. The British government is funding it, based on an independent evaluation of the effect.

So how does anyone judge the truth of news stories as bizarre as the Photoperiod Effect or a Relativity Drive? I suppose, the same way we evaluated the telephone, telegraph, airplane, nuclear bombs, etc. If it works it works. Likewise if more darkness helps your diabetes, why then it does. Still, Newton's Laws predate even Newton...

Who wants to live in a world without surprises, anyway? Even if the story's false, it's good mental exercise to take Lewis Carol's advice and try to believe four or five impossible things before breakfast.

Steroids and Money Ball - updated

2006-09-20T13:16:00.000-07:00

This was published elsewhere a while back, I'm reposting it here, together with an update at the end:

N.B.! THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS SPECULATION AND NO LEGAL CLAIM OF CRIMINAL ACTIVITY BY MANAGEMENT OF ANY LEAGUE , TEAM, OR SPORT IS MADE IN THIS ARTICLE. NO DEFINITE CLAIM AS TO THE STATE OF MIND, KNOWLEDGE, OR INTENTIONS OF ANY PRESENT OR PAST MEMBER OF MANAGEMENT OF ANY LEAGUE OR TEAM WITHIN OR WITHOUT THE MLB IS MADE HEREIN.

I'm beginning to think that while there's something to "moneyball", it's not the real story. Sure, stats help you select players and always have, but all the hype may (also) have largely have been a useful cover story for the real bargain hunting: namely consciously going out and finding young players with merely good stats who weren't taking steroids, but were likely to do so, or who had just begun to - who therefore were going to be a whole lot better than their stats would make you think.

Seems to me, speculating, that Billy Beane was in an excellent position to watch that economic process take place, understand it exactly, and exploit it thoroughly. It would be hard to argue that he has uniformly avoided hiring or retaining all players who might use steroids.

So what did Billy Beane know and when did he know it? He's said what he lacked as a player was (paraphrasing badly, from memory) "that he had real skills that excited the scouts but lacked the will to do whatever it took to be a really good baseball player." We now know (as he presumably knew way back when - unless my timeline is way off, and maybe it is) exactly what "whatever it took" cashes out to - performance enhancing drugs that were known to carry real risks by then. Certainly, unlike a certain Californian governor, Beane wasn't willing to do whatever it took to his body pharmaceutically to have a truly spectacular career at any price - that much seems clear in any case - but in struggling with this question, or once he was in management, Beane may have realized that he had some very valuable economic information about just which undervalued players were in fact likely to become stars. With regard to that timeline, Billy Beane's debut in the majors was in 1984 and his last game in 1989.

Perhaps his consolation prize for knowingly watching less highly talented cheaters pass him by and get the biggest headlines and longest careers as players, was to proceed directly to management and cash in this knowledge. ("Assuming any major league player has ever used steroids during this, earlier or subsequent periods.") As the old saying goes, the fox knows many things, but the porcupine knows one big thing. Steroids, and just whose stats were about to climb skyward thanks to them, were a big thing to know about back then "if anyone in baseball has used steroids to enhance their performance." Very big, if you were building a ball club on a relatively small (but still multi-million dollar) budget.

The key realization in this, would be that players who hadn't taken steroids but were now started, or were about to, were the greatest bargains in the marketplace, with the greatest hidden upside possible, unreflected in their known stats. Maybe Billy Beane was the first person to both figure that out, if he ever did, and then to discern the extreme economic value that seemingly small bit of knowledge represented. Maybe he still hasn't, or hasn't consciously figured this out to this day. But if I were a betting man....

That doesn't mean that there's nothing to sabremetrics. Not at all. But on base percentage (under whatever terminology) isn't a new concern, and the new stats and studies may actually have been very much the smaller part of the moneyball story. Or, the renewed value of novel statistical studies may have come about precisely because steroid use had altered so many trends and made traditional expectations, once better founded statistically, had become somewhat obsolete. (See initial legal claim.)

Maybe congress should have called one more witness. But then again, pardon my cynicism, but perhaps that's precisely why they didn't call on a bunch of prominent management figures to testify.

A REPLY TO UNPUBLISHED OBJECTIONS/QUESTIONS FROM DAN AGONISTES (danagonistes.com):

With it's concentration on OBP, pitching accuracy, and so much more, I agree that there's much to moneyball - but I do wonder whether it's a full and adequate explanation of Billy Beane's success. However we have to keep in mind that what was privately known by some or many experts but kept private as a business advantage can't be directly known. We don't know this sort of thing except by, say, looking at prices paid for various types of pitchers to see what knowledge has been discounted, or not, as in any other market. No doubt much proprietary knowledge about baseball development was neither very uncommon nor widely broadcast. I do begin to suspect that a flurry of publicity over moneyball may in part at least have been a good cover for the real bargain hunting, which was looking for players whose performances were just about to get pumped up. Also, as I'll argue shortly, statistical study of baseball skills development can hardly help but incorporate knowledge of what are in fact the consequences of steroid use "if indeed statistically significant numbers of developing baseball players have ever taken steroids" - last clause applies to whole paragraph.

I don't think Billy Beane or anybody else had to push steroids - the carrot of multi-million dollar contracts and fame was surely more than sufficient for many players “if indeed any have taken steroids”, and these humongous incentives were already in place. Not to mention that the legal implications from civil suits spurred by later medical problems by anyone pressured to take steroids could obviously have been massive, too. Plus, and this is very important to note, I'm not saying he or anyone else in management isn't ethical (as ethical as other non-whistle blowers at least, and there are hordes of those) much less a criminal, or performed any act that would now be criminal. I'm only saying that he or they may have realized just how important that key data point, steroid use, was in changing all the other data points; and figured out that this meant that the real, spectacular bargains in the marketplace were those players whose known stats reflected no steroid use and who were middle-of-the-pack or a bit better - but who had recently started to take steroids seriously, or whose known attitude or associates suggested they would or might soon "assuming any steroid use at all" - quoted fragment applies to paragraph as a whole.

In fact, to exploit this for economic advantage, it might only have been necessary to invest broadly in players from places where steroid use was known to be relatively low, such as colleges without a high priority on athletics in general or baseball in particular. The purpose of such a strategy being to scoop up players who hadn't yet been exposed to a lot of steroid use, or seriously considered it. Conversely, a related strategy would have been, or might still be, to investigate carefully and avoid all players who were longer-term steroid users since their stats and market price had already "discounted" that steroid use, giving them a much lower upside under modern conditions (as well as a possible health and injury downside.) That is, there would be no further large "bounce" from steroid use available to such long term users. Thus, paradoxically, one could economically exploit the trend toward steroid use efficiently by actively avoiding some steroid users – namely the long term users - or even all steroid users, in effect counting on the fact that at least some of there still pure players might start using on their own. Economic profit lies in the upside, after all.(Literally so, since "economic profit" is a technical term within the field of economics to designate above-market profits, and that's how I'm using it here). To summarize this "steroid avoidance" strategy, players who have been taking steroids for some while and don't have a further upside possibility from now deciding to live "better" through chemistry are, relatively speaking, worse investments in the long term.

Of course, sabremetrics, etc could have discovered and exploited such trends, partially at the very least, with or without having explicitly discovered the underlying variable of drug use - but too many people in the industry knew precisely what was going on for that to be an entirely credible claim, I suspect. And who better to explicitly notice the economic and career consequences of drug use than a talented player who was deprived of the shining career it looked like he was going to have, in no small part because of widespread steroid abuse by so many others who didn't care as much about their future health? That's a description that may well fit Billy Beane, a first round draft pick in 1980, to a T. One has to imagine that watching that happen to one's career hopes would have stung deeply, "if indeed anyone in baseball Billy Beane knew or knew of ever took steroids during this period." Billy's a very bright guy by all accounts, I suspect he knew just what had happened to his career "whatever that was", and I also suspect his being bone lazy or ill-omened despite his talents wasn't the backstory to his unspectacular career. Maybe I'm wrong - it's very difficult to vouchsafe what other people thought or knew and kept largely to themselves, but I do believe a good argument can be made that he was in a position to know these things and that if he did, the consequences over the last decade or so would have been similar to what we've seen. See beginning legal claim.

Whatever anyone knew, it's no doubt true that a certain amount, maybe even a very large amount, of the hidden upside that moneyball-type statistical investigations have uncovered and exploited has in fact been made up of diverse markers of steroid use (such as, say, paradoxical increases in stats when players move up to a higher class of league), together with novel trend changes caused by steroid use "if steroids have been in use." Whether or not anyone ever discerned that as an underlying cause wouldn't have prevented the economic exploitation of such secondary trends once they were unearthed. An obvious possible example of a novel change in trends - is increased injury. This could perhaps be a factor explaining why it's now true that early pitching talent is heavily discounted because injury is pretty likely to erase that early promise, or injury-related changes in trends might only affect hitters to a large degree "if steroids have ever been used."

In horseracing, drug use leads to a sharply increased risk of injury (harness racing being one historic response to that risk, one may speculate, but see the initial legal claim again.) This risk comes about not so much because of direct damage to the body as indirect injury, since performances are pushed over the redline with erratic consequences. Nature likes to work within what structural engineers would call "margins" and drugs work in good part simply by overriding these safety margins, enforced by fatigue and otherwise. If you push your fighter aircraft over the redlines on the dashboard dials and outside its secure "performance envelope" more mechanical breakdowns occur, not just to moving components of the engine, but also to passive restraint mechanisms that are the avionic equivalent of hamstrings. The same sort of injuries have likely been happening in baseball "if indeed steroids have been used in major league baseball at any time." I think it would be difficult indeed to argue that today's players are markedly more robust, and less susceptible to injury than previous generations. (Lawyers are a leading cause of double negatives.) It would be somewhat confounding to medical science if steroids have nothing at all to do with recent injury trends "if indeed steroids have ever been used by major league baseball players." (Lawyers are a contributing cause of quotation mark usage.)

A large economic/investment change from widespread steroid use in earlier career stages "if any players have taken steroids early in their career or otherwise" would be a trend toward more drop outs from injury of talented players who don't reach the majors at all, shorter careers for first draft picks than in earlier times, and a consequent advantage for those teams making broader investments in many cheaper players rather than making very heavy investments in a very few highly performing young players who are now more likely not to have a career at all (or to be passed by egregious drug abusers.) A strategy of broader investment sounds somehow familiar, to me, and might to the reader. (Quoted fragment applies to the paragraph as a whole and by implication, to each sentence of same.)

In case this article disappears from everything2.com, I might mention, with the greatest respect to Everything2, that I will be posting articles of mine censored from everything2 (about twenty percent of the articles I've written for them so far) at my blog at completeconfusion.com. Revisions and fuller versions of articles and late additions to bibliography will also be posted there for similar reasons - censorship always has a degree of predictability, so I do self-censor some of what appears under my rubric at everything2 in advance of publication there; needless to say. I don't mention this self-censorship as a slight to everything2 in any way at all, since this is of course an all but inevitable consequence of any external restraint on speech.

I'm very grateful to Everthing2. Everything2 is a private concern with every legal right to censor what appears there by elimination as a whole, for any reason whatsoever, which I recognize and respect fully. I'm grateful for the opportunity to publish many things at everything2.com, as well as being glad that the internet is large.

Initial message similar to first part sent July 12, 2005. First published here and on the web July 14, 2005. Last revised July 14, 2005.
Russell Johnston
This article may be found at:
http://confusioncomplete.blogspot.com/2005/07/steroids-and-moneyball.html
Note that this address is confusioncomplete, etc not completeconfusion, etc. Suitably confusing, eh?
completeconfusion.com however does redirect to the above site at blogspot.

* * * * * * * * * *

The Update is some support from a recent article (excerpt):

Drugs: Sports' Prisoner's Dilemma
By Bruce Schneier (WIRED)
02:00 AM Aug, 10, 2006

The doping arms race will continue because of the incentives. It's a classic prisoner's dilemma. Consider two competing athletes: Alice and Bob. Both Alice and Bob have to individually decide if they are going to take drugs or not.

Unfortunately, Bob goes through exactly the same analysis. As a result, they both take performance-enhancing drugs and neither has the advantage over the other. If they could just trust each other, they could refrain from taking the drugs and maintain the same non-advantage status -- without any legal or physical danger. But competing athletes can't trust each other, and everyone feels he has to dope -- and continues to search out newer and more undetectable drugs -- in order to compete. And the arms race continues.

Some sports are more vigilant about drug detection than others. European bicycle racing is particularly vigilant; so are the Olympics. American professional sports are far more lenient, often trying to give the appearance of vigilance while still allowing athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs. They know that their fans want to see beefy linebackers, powerful sluggers and lightning-fast sprinters. So, with a wink and a nod, they only test for the easy stuff.
For example, look at baseball's current debate on human growth hormone: HGH. They have serious tests, and penalties, for steroid use, but everyone knows that players are now taking HGH because there is no urine test for it. There's a blood test in development, but it's still some time away from working. The way to stop HGH use is to take blood tests now and store them for future testing, but the players' union has refused to allow it and the baseball commissioner isn't pushing it.
In the end, doping is all about economics. Athletes will continue to dope because the prisoner's dilemma forces them to do so. Sports authorities will either improve their detection capabilities or continue to pretend to do so -- depending on their fans and their revenues. And as technology continues to improve, professional athletes will become more like deliberately designed racing cars.

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71566-0.html?tw=wn_technology_medtech_11

Re more Bolts in Space...

2006-09-15T15:45:00.000-07:00

Remember those old plastic "pearls on a string" necklaces that just snapped together? Put nuts or bolts on plastic strings with a socket glued to the bolt and the male end to the string. You can still rotate the nut or bolt before "unplugging". Even if you unplugged only the moment before installing the nut or bolt, that would help with the following situation:

Spacewalkers Add to Orbiting Space Junk

This week the Atlantis astronauts made their own contributions to the space debris in low orbit: a couple of bolts that escaped from the addition they were connecting to the international space station.

To engineers, this isn't funny. Many of those pieces of space junk can kill astronauts, puncture satellites or at the very least scratch up expensive space shuttle windows.

"It's one of these problems that is growing in seriousness," said William Ailor, director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at the Aerospace Corp. in Los Angeles. "It's really the small things that will get you."
http://www.physorg.com/news77471460.html

Admittedly, the problem is limited, as far as the present space station is concerned. It's in a low orbit, and because smaller objects dropped from it have greater surface area by weight (mass) they will slow as they collide with atoms and plasma, and drop into lower orbits and then into the earth's atmosphere.

Construction elsewhere in space, not just in higher, polar or more elleptical orbits, but at Lagrange points, etc, might have to be cleaner, however; else more substantial hazards might result in time.

The Philosophy of Torture

2006-09-11T13:49:00.000-07:00

Five years since 9/11, and my contribution is to post an article about torture in the U.S., and the philosophical and legal underpinnings thereof, at http://logictutorial.com/torture entitled: “A Modest Contribution to the Philosophy of Torture”. I regret the necessity, it would be better if we had decided either to be honest or not to torture; perhaps then I would have published today an essay concerning only the horrors of extreme Wahabism.

A couple of other notes on the five-year anniversity:

1) The woman who checked the terrorists through security in Boston has committed suicide according to the Oprah Winfrey show, today. A pity, since security was a deliberated joke everywhere at that time. Like the aimless Ack-Ack the Brits threw up at German bombers at night during the Blitz in 1940, it was only ever intended to reassure passengers, for business reasons.

2)Apparently some torture techniques have now been dropped by the U.S., mostly as unhelpful, such as waterboarding: “Death threats, waterboarding, profound deprivation issues, heat, cold, denial of medical attention -- those are now abandoned. ....One of the dark moments in the so-called war on terror, as I disclosed in the book, along with all the other stuff, is that we threatened Khalid Sheik Mohammed's children to get him to talk. According to those involved in that incident, he pretty much looked them straight in the eye and said, "Fine, they'll be in a better place with Allah." Once you threaten someone's children there's pretty much nowhere else to go in terms of building the kind of relationship where they at some point tell you things that you really need to hear.” - Salon, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/09/07/suskind/

Tips for the real world

2006-09-01T15:35:00.000-07:00

Decent, the above, esp on voicemail tips. My 2 cents: The way to point out freeloaders is by praising them fulsomely for utterly trivial contributions, contextually making the point that they did nothing. If they're stupid, they'll actually be pleased. But be careful - smart, truly twisted individuals may just be smart enough to put you at the top of their shit list. Then again, if they're that smart, they already know you're on to them and you're already on top of their shit list, for that reason alone.

But if you really want to know how the real world works (rather badly, really), here's a very funny
tojan horse video

Leadership speak: Unpacking Harvard

2006-09-01T14:53:00.000-07:00

Joel said: at (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/24.html)
“The annoying thing about everything that comes out of Harvard Business School is that the conclusion is so infuriatingly wishy-washy. “Expanding your self-awareness, situational awareness, and ability to adapt your leadership style increases your overall range of effectiveness as a leader,” they say. What a bold thought.”
quoting:
Sean Silverthorne: “Is it better to be loved or feared?”
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5464.html

My 2 cents:
I not only think this paragraph says specific, important things, but that each of them is unintuitive:

1. "expanding your self-awareness" = always blame yourself first, think three times before even suggesting anyone under you might be wrong. If you are the one who's wrong and you go after a subordinate just once, even mildly, your leadership of that person may well be compromised for as long as both of you work for the same organization.

2. "situational awareness" = DON'T focus (you're the leader, you simply can't – go ask someone else to focus on what you've decided was important, or critical.) "SA" was originally fighter pilot talk for keeping an eye out for missiles while fighting and talking and dropping bombs, etc.

3. "ability to adapt your leadership style" = there's no one way to lead, and there's no such thing as a leader with just one way of behaving, so be ready to behave differently on a dime, always. This really means not having “a” leadership style. Sure, be predictable when that works best, but be unpredictable when necessary, to break the mood, or just to ease troop boredom. It's so hard to learn one way to lead that almost all of us stop there. DON'T. Keep learning different ways to skin the cat, no matter how good your results have been.

The Harvard author doesn't like to "write dirty" by ever referring to the real world, but his message isn't vague, merely encrusted in academic jargon. That's how you get to Harvard (I've only visited.)

Marketing by beach head

2006-09-01T13:44:00.000-07:00

The link above points to a perfectly correct article telling you not to market "in general". Instead "focus on a smaller group."

I'm visually oriented though, so I've always thought of this marketing principle in military terms: “establishing a beach-head.” (Think D-Day, in WWII.) You must have a small territory that you've conquered. Once you have that, expanding that territory enormously is actually far easier than taking the (relatively) tiny beach-head in the first place. Think of it this way: dropping one hundred thousand soldiers by parachute scattered all across France, Belgium, and Germany on June 6, 1944 wouldn't have resulted in a German surrender within a year, it would just have wasted lives.

So find a need that's genuinely unmet, then make sure your product really meets it, as the article I've cited above says.

I'm facing this problem with an out-there health site called photoperiod.com that I'm constructing (it's hardly there as yet). I want to persuade a lot of people that humans didn't evolve under electric lights, and that extending our daylight hours with artificial lights can, decades later, lead to just the chronic health problems we are now seeing in industrialized countries (including weight gain.)

More than one group makes a tempting to target, but I'll likely start with a truly tiny one: sufferers of the obscure genetic illness Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), and work my way up to diabetes and hypertension. The need is greatest for EDS. There is no treatment of any kind for it now except joint splints and an electric wheelchair when that becomes necessary.

But be warned: you may find the best small group is unreachable, or unconquerable for reasons that were unforseeable, or at least, unforseen. In the case of EDS, the general ignorance of the fact that genetic illnesses usually are determined by environmental variables (such as the most prevalent genetic illness, celiac disease) may well prevent easy acceptance. As well, it usually takes sufferers of this illness many years to simply get a diagnosis. They may feel that accepting the idea that an environmental variable could strongly influence the course of the disease is tantamount to saying they aren't truly ill, or that they don't actually have a serious genetic illness – a diagnosis they probably fought hard to obtain; and which in many cases their families resist. I don't know yet either way, therefore, I'm looking hard for my next prospective beach-head location, too.

In other words, there is no guarantee that your first planned location for a marketing beach-head won't turn into a Dieppe disaster (a WWII reference again.) So have a couple more possible beach-head locations in mind. When you start to succeed, reinforce that success with everything you've got. Testing a few small beach-heads at once can yield success; but it's better to make a list and and then focus on one at a time until you get a success. What's all but certain is that broad, unfocused marketing won't work very well at all.

If EDS is a non-starter for photoperiod.com, then I think obesity will be my next target. There are lots of treatments, but none that aren't very difficult for patients to follow, or extreme – such as surgery.

back ache, back problems

2006-09-01T11:56:00.000-07:00

Originally written to a friend with back spasms:
No doubt everyone you've talked to has their own treatments for back problems, but you can add my two cents to the pile, no reply necessary:

I used to have recurrent back problems, but haven't since I've been observing a natural night (real darkness and lots of it, at consistent times - a la Carlos Castaneda, actually, and a lot of new science too (chronobiology).) The reason may be that the collagen (intercellular glue as you'll know) we make at night in darkness seems to be different, and stronger than the stuff we make during light. So consistent hours, and more darkness when you sleep (red light is okay) might help, strange as that might seem. But the science is new, one's improved metabolism with more darkness might also be the cause, not differences in collagen formation, if darkness is helping my back as I think it is. And of course, it's new science, so I could be wrong about all this and report back problems tomorrow.

I'm starting what may seem to be a fairly crank medical site at photoperiod.com on this, but one citing lots and lots of studies (eventually.) (Warning: very much under construction, most links won't work.)

Also, I might mention that I have found that in the past when I had any sort of leg problem, I got in the habit of using my back too much and that's when problems with the back became likely. Reminding myself to use my leg muscles whenever possible helped quite a bit. But of course, your problems, and their causes, may vary - again, no reply necessary.

Today I'm experimenting with Writely and finding that with litecable, Web 2.0 is really Molasses 2.0 Back to Open Office which removes those extra line breaks from text files very easily, it turns out.

Russ

Can your pillow make you go blind?

2006-08-29T15:37:00.000-07:00

That title is not a joke, although it's certainly anecdotal, not the result of any scientific study. Still, if you liked the story of the guy who decided to get infected by African hookworms to treat his asthma, you might like this medical oddity story as well.

"Neck Support" pillows didn't exist when I was young, and they may not be a good idea, entirely, or for everyone - they may affect your carotid arteries, perhaps enough to affect the blood supply to your brain! Yikes.

Other sites of note:

http://www.podzinger.com/

It gives as text those podcasts you don't want to listen to. Of course, if you're
in the dark a lot because photoperiodeffect.com has convinced you to try a more natural night, you'll probably want the audio.

Also http://www.worldcat.org/ which is in beta but allows you to search for book information through book catalogs around the world.

The Photoperiod Effect - website

2006-08-25T08:49:00.000-07:00

I've finally started to put up a health website that has been in the works for well more than a year: photoperiodeffect.com

It's a surprising thesis about what lies behind the modern epidemics of obesity, asthma, heart disease, diabetes and chronic illnesses affecting industrialized (and now industrializing) countries. Maybe the answer is nearly as simple as turning off the light switch. I didn't believe it possible, either, until I'd really dug into the evidence. This is no longer an answer we can dismiss. This understanding has made a real difference to my health over the last year and some.

The site is going to be crude and under construction for a while, i expect, but continually expanding: so please do bear with me - even so, I expect it will that there will be the equivalent of more than 60 (printed) pages up within a few weeks, as I edit and upload what I've already written. It will take longer to put in all the citations from notes on thousands of studies and address individual chronic illnesses such as hypertension or Alzheimer's, but that will happen.

Unimaginable idiocy about terrorism

2006-08-10T08:05:00.000-07:00

"The plot was "intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale."
- Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson

Are we really as blinkered as this? The terrorists intended to bring down 9 - 12 airliners, up from 4 on 9/11. Is three times the scale of attack "unimaginable"? Actually, the 9/11 plot was originally intended to be that large but was scaled back.

More than a thousand airliners at once might be unimaginable... although I'm not at all certain that's impossible; it's very unlikely (because it's hard to keep a secret with over 1,000 operatives, but not impossible - it wouldn't be beyond Al Queda's spending limits, necessarily, and they certainly have had more than a thousand active members at a time.)

Not to mention nuclear weapons and dirty bombs, which are becoming easier and more economical to build all the time. Red mercury, and all that.

If our imagination is really this shabby, we are going to be attacked successfully as soon as the bad guys think up a slightly new trick. As the New York Times points out, this was a recycled twelve-year old plan that was well known to authorities. Hardly "unimaginable".

The fundamental finding of the 9/11 commission was that there was a failure of imagination. Admittedly, this may have been a far too casual comment by Mr. Stephenson, but it seems that our imaginations are still dangerously inactive.

The Organ Glut

2006-08-02T20:04:00.000-07:00

My comment on a Freakonomics article, I'll start with a short quote summarizing the difficulty:

http://www.freakonomics.com/times070906.html

Freakonomics
Flesh Trade
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT
Published: July 9, 2006
Weighing the Repugnance Factor
In the space of just a few decades, transplant surgery has become safe and reliable (to say nothing of miraculous). But success breeds demand: as more patients get new organs, more patients want them. In 2005, more than 16,000 kidney transplants were performed in the U.S., an increase of 45 percent over 10 years. But during that time, the number of people on a kidney waiting list rose by 119 percent. More than 3,500 people now die each year waiting for a kidney transplant.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/magazine/09wwln_freak.html?ex=1154664000&en=1d4e5c14bdffcc6f&ei=5070

Surely, nothing could be more ironic than a relatively well-off American dying for lack of a kidney transplant. Nature, thanks to it’s love of redundancy, has created a kidney glut, not a shortage – there are nearly twice as many kidneys as anybody really needs.
I think the repugnance has been overstated, it’s more a product of fear. The largest benefit anyone could obtain from giving an organ (with or without payment) would be a general guarantee that any donor (paid or no) instantly takes precedence over anyone else for an organ if they need one later; plus an insurance policy that yields more than enough money to pay someone else for an organ later.
It’s habit more than real irrationality that keeps the kidney glut going, while patients die. Money overcomes irrationality quickly, and even habit – but not reasonable fears. So very strong legally binding insurance (not bland assurance) has to be given of the organ provider.

Causes of the Great Depression

2006-07-20T13:08:00.000-07:00

I had a lousy night, and I'm not up to tackling writing projects today, so here's a quick write-up on the cause of the Great Depression. I don't know whether this idea has been mentioned before or not (perhaps it has a long bibliography) so I thought I'd write it up:

As I was reading a compilation of history essays about the nineteen-twenties, “Ain't We Got Fun?” edited by Barbara H. Solomon, I was struck by a large change in consumer behavior in the Roaring Twenties... the spread of product advertising, and the installment plan; fueled by (and fueling) increases in prosperity for ordinary people the like of which we've never seen in our lifetimes: “By 1923 factory workers were averaging twice the cash income they they had earned in 1914.” (page one) Apparently, this widespread acceptance of consumer credit represented an ethical sea change at the time. On page three of the introduction, the editor states that: “Prior to the 1920s the public had held generally negative attitudes toward credit purchasing. Young people were warned against burdening themselves with a lifetime of debt... In the Twenties all that was turned around... Millions of ready buyers were convinced that there was no need to deprive themselves of the magnificent new appliances...” She goes on to say that 15 percent of goods were sold on installment plans, which doesn't count other sources of loans for merchanise.

I wonder if this didn't contribute heavily to the Depression to come – two effects would have helped precipitate it. First, in a one-time shift, a huge number of purchases were moved forward by years, creating the illusion of enormous economic growth; but only an illusion because people weren't necessarily spending more over their lifetimes, it was only that a mass of people chose to spend sooner, creating a burst of growth that couldn't be sustained and didn't represent a growth in productivity or production. That acceleration of spending forward in time may have been trailing to an end by the time the decade was out. Secondly, this change in spending habits also represented a massive drop in savings. In previous decades, when hard times hit, nearly everybody had a substantial cash reserve. Even if they weren't consciously saving for bad times, the ethic passed down to everyone by their parents insisted that this was how one saved up for fairly large household purchases. Therefore, previously, during bad times consumer spending didn't instantly dry up – there was money for at least some goods, although larger purchases would be hit hard. That previous pattern was one which businesses and banks had great experience with, and could well plan for. But the new economy was just different. In a downturn, demand could now become very elastic indeed, plummeting earthward with astounding speed as large blocks of consumers found themselves without any ability to spend, period, since they now had no savings. Now, nearly the whole economy was on the roller-coaster.

Of course, this wasn't the first “Depression”. The very word “Depression” was introduced because it didn't sound quite so bad as the term “Recession”, since that had been used during the last memorable downturn around 1870. But those economic reversals were shorter, and not the same order of catastrophe. The Great Depression turned out to be a whole different sort of beast.

In time, arguably, other factors have ameliorated the greater elasticity of the consumer economy caused by consumer credit – Roosevelt introduced an equal and opposite countervailing force, the forward collection of taxes through payroll deductions during World War II as a cash grab; and increased (relatively inelastic) government spending has smoothed out some bumps as well. Now and then the Federal Reserve changes interest rates in the correct direction, too. In the Thirties, responsible officials understood before the crash that they “should” increase interest rates to curb enthusiasm, but by the time this was clear to them, it was also quite clear that there would likely be a very sharp downturn if they did increase interest rates, and that it was they who would be blamed for the resulting recession, and no-one else. They declined that honor, and let the problem build.

Calling a thing by its name

2006-07-08T12:33:00.000-07:00

"Penne Rigate will spontaneously insert itself into Rigatoni (order pasta) under liquid to gas transition conditions of H2O to create the previously unobserved species Noodleous doubleous. The estimated probability of this spontaneous generation event is too low to be explained by thermodynamics and therefore apparently represents intelligent design."

Intelligent Design is hilariously lampooned in the above link which details an experiment in the random self-organization of kitchen noodles. But ignorance of what is meant by the "theory of Natural Selection", has much more serious consequences.

ID and its ilk always trade on the use of the word "theory". (As in "theory of evolution" or "theory of gravity".)

Most of the time, scientists use the word "theory" to mean "General or Overarching Truth". NOT "something dubious", which is what it means in common english.

Of course, such scientific "General Truths" begin as "tentatively proposed general truths" - which is still the only translation laypeople can make of the word "theory." To quote Caltech Professor David L. Goodstein:

"There are theories in science, which are so well verified by experience that they become promoted to the status of fact. One example is the Special Theory of Relativity-it's still called a theory for historical reasons, but it is in reality a simple, engineering fact, routinely used in the design of giant machines, like nuclear particle accelerators, which always work perfectly. Another example of that sort of thing is the theory of evolution. These are called theories, but they are in reality among the best established facts in all of human knowledge."
- David L. Goodstein, 1985, Atoms to Quarks, video lecture 51 of "The Mechanical Universe ... and beyond"; California Institute of Technology/Intelecom

So it's time for scientists to change, so as not to mislead the public further. Use "the 'General Truth' about Gravity (as discovered by Newton)" and "the 'General Truth' of Evolution", etc, and leave the word theory for tentatively proposed General Truths such as String Theory (until some evidence piles up.) What can be simply fixed should be simply fixed.

Of course, all human truths might possibly be overturned - we know that Newton's General Truth about Gravity isn't quite true, post-Einstein, for example. But these scientific claims to truth have as much gravity as any others we know of.

Shockley unmourned...

2006-07-04T15:55:00.000-07:00

The New Statesmen loathes everything about him. Can't blame them, however that's not the whole story...

I saw Shockley in person arguing for his position at Harvard, and he was repellent at first glance, just striding onto the stage. My first impression was of a demented marine officer who just liked to bully. But his arguments and evidence, stripped of the intimidating body english, were pedestrian and correct. He wildly exaggerated the broad implications of his results, and the other side even more wildly exaggerated the implications of what they had found. Both sides simply spoke past each other, imagining that they were contradicting one another. What a pity that political correctness had so taken hold by then that almost no competent researcher then dared to do a better job, and it was left to Shockley, who was far more competent at the job than this article suggests, but not exactly a good mascot.

The real story is the cowardice of his contemporaries, which helped obscure (prevent the discovery of) fetal alcohol syndrome for many, many years, allowing the political correctness of the day to do untold damage.

I also saw Vernon at work, at the University of Calgary, talking about his studies, revealing what was really an epidemic of FAS amongst native populations in Alberta. Vernon, I'm sorry to say, did strike me as a racist, which was a tag I couldn't pin on Shockley's comments during his talk. But his results were not imaginary – just sorrowfully ignored as “unacceptable”. The consensus of those I went with was that Vernon shouldn't have been allowed to publish or to perform the studies at all – FAS was undreamt of then, and would remain "undicovered" for long years afterward. Venron's prejudice kept him from making the discovery, his audiences prejudices kept them from taking in the facts they were presented with at all. Many suffered terribly as a result.

Someday, maybe scientists will start to consider more than one opinion acceptable at a time before the evidence is in. Maybe – but don't bet your tenure on it.

Worms for asthma

2006-07-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

One way to deal with your asthma seems to be to deliberately get yourself infested with hookworms. That story is at asthmahookworm.com

I'm trying a slightly different path - here's a reply I've sent to the guy behind asthmahookworm.com with a new hypothesis about why worms work to keep asthma under control:

I've also put this note to you up at completeconfusion.com:

Before anything else I should mention a truly excellent recent review article, that's up on the web (freely available to all):

Clinical & Experimental Allergy

Volume 36 Page 402 - April 2006

doi:10.1111/j.1365-2222.2006.02463.x

Volume 36 Issue 4

Review

Too clean, or not too clean: the Hygiene Hypothesis and home hygiene

S. F. Bloomfield, R. Stanwell-Smith, R. W. R. Crevel and J. Pickup

Use of the term 'hygiene hypothesis' has led to several interpretations, some of which are not supported by a broader survey of the evidence. The increase in allergic disorders does not correlate with the decrease in infection with pathogenic organisms, nor can it be explained by changes in domestic hygiene. A consensus is beginning to develop round the view that more fundamental changes in lifestyle have led to decreased exposure to certain microbial or other species, such as helminths, that are important for the development of immunoregulatory mechanisms.

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1365-2222.2006.02463.x

Fascinating, with lots that's new to me, such as:

"The reunification of Germany provided some new insights into the influence of lifestyle on atopic disease within relatively homogeneous populations. Von Mutius et al. [9] showed that hayfever and atopic sensitization among children in the former East Germany both significantly increased between 1991–1992 and 1995–1996, raising the issue of 'Western living' influences on children, as previous studies had shown lower rates in East Germany compared with West Germany."

It's a mixed review at best - helminths seem to be a rather lonely success for the hygiene hypothesis, so just maybe there's another reason why helminths work... for instance, maybe they're eating selectively, perhaps reducing the otherwise surprisingly large amount of neurotransmitters that are in modern, cultured foods. (If so, a glutamate restricted diet should work as well as worms do against asthma.)

(This is only part of what I'm trying, so even though I'm having real success against asthma, this diet may not be why. But I am free of asthma, just now.)

The amino acid Glutamate/glutamine is the main neurotransmitter for humans - while lower creatures cheerfully use it as a food and energy source. It is extremely abundant in many modern, cultured foods such as wheat, soy, peanut butter and beans - up to 3% by weight in modern foods! Since it passes easily into the brain. supply and transport of glutamate are obvious targets in order to control seizures/epilepsy (however most current epilepsy drugs boost the inihibitory neurotransmitter GABA to counter glutamate et al and so reduce hyperexcitability.)

So I'm following the lead of http://dogtorj.tripod.com/id2.html, a veterinarian who first found that glutamate restricted diets helped pets with seizures. (He's not your regular scientist, but he also may be onto something.) The result, within days of my adopting the diet - no more seizures, but also, a bit later, no more hyperexcitable airways either, so no more asthma.

Even so, I don't think glutamate is the whole story behind modern asthma (but the rest of the story I'm still trying to write up.)

I think helminths can pretty much be counted on to eat a whole lot of glutamate, it's a great energy source for them. Because glutamate (think monosodium glutamate) makes foods taste better, foods we've shaped through agriculture have undoubtedly been selected to have more and more of it over the years - maybe too much of it for some of us, now, particularly with modern agricultural breeding techniques.

Russell Johnston

Socrates: the epileptic dialectic

2006-06-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

“So much of Platonic scholarship is brilliant hallucination of sufficient textual basis for secure inferences about the whole Socrates/Plato thing, to console us for the sheer bummer that is losing all that stuff.” - John Holbo
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/philosophy_were_people_helping_people_refute_people/

Professional philosophers don't miss the rest, in my experience. They should, but they won't even read Xenophon, very sadly. First because the social context that Socrates had to adapt his teaching to crystal clear there - Xenophon never writes a word that isn't intended to directly contradict one charge or other raised against Socrates. Second, because some bad arguments by Socrates, probably not badly mangled by Xenophon, slip through and tell us a great deal about how Socrates, as opposed to Plato, viewed the world.

But, to be somewhat acerbic about it, pro philosophers nowadays prefer to believe that Socrates was wearing a lab coat not a toga, and reading Xenophon gets in the way of that, rather.

Interesting recent biographical highlight:

We found textual evidence that his daimonion was probably a simple partial seizure (SPS) of temporal lobe origin. It was a brief voice that usually prohibited Socrates from initiating certain actions. It started when he was a child, and it visited Socrates unpredictably. Moreover, we found at least two descriptions of Socrates' unique behavior that are consistent with complex partial seizures (CPSs). The fact that Socrates had been experiencing both SPSs and CPSs periodically since childhood makes the diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) likely.

Epilepsia. 2006 Mar;47(3):652-4.
Socrates and temporal lobe epilepsy: a pathographic diagnosis 2,400 years later.
Muramoto O, Englert WG.
Department of Neurology, Kaiser Permanente Northwest Division, Portland, Oregon

PMID: (pubmed.com ID) 16529635

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=16529635

Google Adsense API - good news for trees

2006-06-12T20:38:00.000-07:00

The Adsense API is out in Beta. Few know about it yet, fewer understand its potential at all (maybe not even Google, but then, them guys ain't all dumb.) I'm betting everyone will understand it very well in only a year or two. To put things in a nutshell (pardon the pun), it's very good news for trees.

I think lots of people are entirely missing the point with this API, and I had to bang my head against the idea for a few hours before it started to become clear to me, although I've been thinking along a very similar line. It's not a replacement for the usual Adsense interface for site owners. Far from it. It's aimed at changing the behavior of hundreds of thousands, or even millions who are literate, but who are not computer literate programmers and don't want to be. These people want to write, fiction and non-fiction, and do. They just don't want to wait tables or keep their old jobs forever to do it. They don't want to give away their work forever, or become a site-owner. Just write, and put food on the table.

The goal Google has is simple: Google wants to get more and better quality content onto the web (and whyever not, it certainly helps them in the long run.)

Money can do that. I can't tell you how many talented and knowledgable people (including myself a few months ago) are still thinking about writing books, or trying to find publishers now. Putting anything up on the web doesn't cross their mind. Some are good and talented friends of mine, and I can't persuade them to publish online because they equate that with giving their hard work away and not earning a cent even if it eventually gets noticed. I can't persuade them to become a webmaster either, since they haven't read their DVD manuals yet and are still watching movies with subtitles on, or with distorted screens half the time 'cause they haven't found the right button yet by chance.

They don't know that text ads and a growing internet ad market have changed the economic equation entirely for writers and perhaps other artists, because there's no practical path available to get them that advertising money without them first learning HTML, and the web business, and how search engines work, etc, which they won't.

But, ceteris paribus, those friends of mine and countless others should be thinking web. No publisher can or will pay me what bestpaperairplanes.com now earns from Adsense ads, for example, although periodically writers and publishers gently ask if they can rip my original content off and pay me nothing. Right now however, most writers I know aren't programmers or even business people, so they won't set up their own sites, they'll send out a manuscript to a dozen tree-based publishers first, light candles, and pray.

As of this day, Google now offers, at second-hand, an alternative to non-techie writers. Put up your novel, book or article on someone's publishing site on the net that uses Adsense API, and get fully 85% of the ad revenue your pages generate. Let the publishing site and Google handle everything but the writing, and you the writer can take away most of the ad revenue! That's not chickfeed anymore, and if you squint a little, it looks like a royalty fee of 85%, my friends. For MOST writers (not all) the net will now probably pay them better than any traditional way of getting into print! The net won't be a stepping stone, it can now be the endpoint for writers. Money changes all things, and I think you're about to see a revolution in the quality and quantity of what's available online. Bet that's what Sergey thinks, too.

So this changes EVERYTHING* for writers, and therefore, for everyone else who uses the web. Sell your tree-based publisher stocks, and any amazon stock, these companies are going to be under at least as much pressure as newspapers from this day on. (Remember what the printing press did to the scribe labor market?) The internet is a vastly more economical way of distributing information than squashing trees is even on an industrial scale, if the internet's earning potential can be harnessed to benefit writers who just want to write, not program. That's just what Google hopes it has done with the new API.

The API has already been around for a while, by the way, all but unnoticed - Google owns blogger, and blogger allows you to put in Adsense ads via this API, and has for a while. That's a very small taste of what's possible.

Believe me, this really does have the potential to change everything. It also will probably kill off or stalemate Everything2.com, just as one example. However, it will take at least a few years before most writers understand how websites and web articles gradually and logarithmically grow in popularity and begin to truly appreciate how much ongoing income they can generate over time.

On the other hand I have two large reservations or complaints (can't have the cup getting too much more than half-full, now, can we?)

One personal bleat: ironically you're reading this for free because I can't have adsense ads here, since I already have an adsense account. Weird, but true. That's why they call it Beta.

Much more critically, a fixed 15% take for the publisher simply won't do. A range of values is needed. We need web-based ad-model publishers who are willing to provide editing services, do some of the publicity legwork, add necessary links, provide ranking within their sites, etc., etc. Fifteen percent won't do this. 50% certainly could, and I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to have my work on a great site where it's quality would be recognized, a good editor would be available, and many times as many surfers would find it - even if it meant a smaller slice of the bigger pie for me.

Fifty-fifty after all, is the best tested model in other media, historically. For example, television broadcasting - traditionally the affiliate paid nothing for network shows, and got half the ad time to place their own ads. Maybe that's a bad example, since regulation governed that, but if Google is going to be the de facto government regulator here, and that's effectively where we're starting, it might consider a different percentage or several possible percentages.

Better, let the market decide. Google should insist that content providers always know clearly what percent the publishing site is taking vs what they get, but then let a thousand flowers bloom. Allow a variety of kinds of web publishers to evolve according to need and effectiveness. Writers can then gravitate to the kind of help they need to make their efforts profitable, and freely available to the world. Let's get as much great information and writing onto the web as we can.

Roger Bacon's Health Advice

2006-06-06T11:59:00.000-07:00

Roger Bacon (1200s) really was ahead of his time. Since this quote now appears nowhere on the net (not in this translation anyway), I thought I should add it. Here's his health advice, complete with reference to genetics (or rather, inherited charactistics):

“A real remedy against the specific corruption [of the body] might be found if a man from his youth would exercise a complete regulation of his health in all matters pertaining to food and drink, sleep and waking, movement and rest, retention, air, and passions of the soul. For if anyone will observe this regimen from his birth, he will live to the utmost that is permitted by the nature which he has inherited from his parents.”

From Bacon's letter “On Art and Nature”, De Mirabile postestate artis et naturae, c. 1250 quoted on page 148-9 of Clegg

Now that's up to date advice - sleep hygiene is now getting much more attention in the headlines as a way of preventing or limiting diabetes and heart problems, for instance.

And if you survived infancy, longevity wasn't nearly as rare then, as we often suppose - although Bacon must be overestimating it in another quote:

“Many of us are well aware in our own times that farmers living without the advice of medical men frequently attain the age of a hundred and sixty or thereabouts.”
From Bacon's letter “On Art and Nature”, De Mirabile postestate artis et naturae, c. 1250 quoted on p 148 of Clegg

I'm using as a reference (and recommend),

The First Scientist; A Life of Roger Bacon
by Brian Clegg
Constable & Robinson Ltd., London, 2003

Could atmospheric nuclear testing have roasted us in the Nineteen-Sixties?

2006-03-22T13:12:00.000-08:00

This is an excerpt from a much longer article on Occam's Razor, whether it's still useful, and it's frequent failures during the history of science, at http://logictutorial.com/occam.html. In that article I discuss how Occam's Razor helped us to overlook Global Warming for so long, and then for completeness, go on to discuss a very recent new theory of Global Warming, what I'm dubbing the “Silver Cloud Theory”:

Excerpt:
It is not impossible that even in this last case that Occam's Razor will change the direction it's pointing in at least one more time. Surprising changes to the available data on temperature are certainly very unlikely, and a new hypothesis that fits the data better may seem unimaginable. However Vladimir Shaidurov has had sufficient imagination to throw one more hypothesis into the mix just recently. His interesting new paper relies only on accepted temperature data. A good jounalistic description of the theory can be found at [http://news.mongabay.com/2006/0313-vapor.html] and the more daunting original paper is at [http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0510/0510042.pdf]. This data shows average temperatures around the earth trending sharply upward only after the first decade of last century. Atmospheric water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas (not CO2) [1], but Shaidurov also points to the cooling effect of repeatedly crystallizing water vapor in the middle part of the mesosphere forming what are known as “silver clouds” more than 50km above the earth. These clouds reflect some sunlight back into space before it can reach earth. He hypothesizes that a large amount of water vapor was removed from this part of the upper atmosphere by the spectacular, 15 megaton explosion of the Tungus meteorite 10 above Siberia in 1908 “stirring the atmosphere” and heating it, and that this “restructuring” initiated the current process of global warming by thinning the layer of “silver clouds”. [2]

While the Tungus meteorite itself doesn't constitute a novel entity, of course; any large and self-sustaining effect on world temperature from such an event would be new to science. So that counts as a novel entity. The “silver clouds” are not new entities, but he may credit them with a stronger cooling effect than previous estimates, and his hypothesis does posit that they were more extensive before 1908 than today. For good measure Shaidurov also introduces another entity into his explanation (which in fairness may actually be necessary for any explanation that fits the available data [http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/slides/large/05.16.jpg]) – namely a strong cooling countertrend from the end of World War II through the late Nineteen Seventies from dust and water vapor kicked up into the high atmosphere by above-ground nuclear testing. [3] The strength of that cooling trend would be at least partly due to his posited strong cooling effect from silver clouds: therefore, although it may seem confusing to say so, it would also be a bit of downstream complexity that actually confirms his theory, if this effect of nuclear testing were shown to be true.

In exchange for these two or three new entities however, he has given us an hypothesis fits the temperature data remarkably well and in so doing explains why the earth actually cooled for nearly a century after the Industrialization Revolution (continued a long-standing trend), according to the accepted data. As a bonus, (this is my addition and Shaidurov is not responsible for any error here) his hypothesis then also explains the obvious earlier, and much longer downward trend to boot. Connecting the dots, such gradual cooling would then be the general case historically, in between random collisions with large light meteorites. In other words, the earth was still cooling from the effects of a previous such collision when the Tungus meteorite hit. (It's estimated that similar explosions may happen as often as every couple of centuries - generally over water, unobserved.[http://www.psi.edu/projects/siberia/siberia.html])

Fairness insists I also list other evidence that's downstream of his theory, if it's true – but these points don't necessarily go unexplained by the industrial theory of global warming either.

The “silver cloud” hypothesis is also consistent with data that show that the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of the earth is actually gradually declining recently. This would be consistent with the very gradual restoration of “normal” water vapor levels in the mesosphere after a collision.
Latest versions of the standard theory show that the temperature rise before 1940 cannot be attributed to the smaller amount of CO2 emitted up to that time. The “silver cloud” or meteorite hypothesis explains this earlier rise, and the fact that the slope of that earlier rise (1910 to 1945) is pretty much the same as the current rise, despite the fact that emissions of CO2, methane, etc., have become far greater.
It may explain why the current rise is seemingly steady, not clearly accelerating, from the late 1970s to the present, although industrial emissions have increased. (Estimates of the rate of increase have risen recently as it has become clearer that warming wasn't evident from 1945 to 1980, there is no obvious curve or parabolic rise in recent decades. However, expected yearly variations in temperature within this short period obscure the matter.
It explains why ice cores show that in the distant past, periods of warming began before carbon dioxide levels rose, despite the fact that the standard theory supposes that CO2 is what drives significant climate change, in pre-history, and today.

In contrast, while the rise in global temperature over the last century has three stages: an early rise from 1910-1945, a plateau from 1945 to the late 1970s, and a rise since. All three components are quite unlike what we see in the several previous centuries, namely a steady fall in average temperatures. The standard theory can only explain the latest stage, since 1980. For it, the earlier rise, and the plateau, are extra, unexplained entities, as is the earlier gentle downward slope in temperature. Not exactly ideal.

Of course, that his new hypothesis fits the most obvious chunk of data we have very well doesn't make Shaidurov right, and that it also has explanations for other phenomenon doesn't prove it correct, either. I have no expertise in the area with which to render a any judgement with the net result that I'm still scared of industrialization but am also more frightened of meteorites than I was before. The precautionary principle suggest to me that we should be very careful of abandoning the standard theory prematurely.

He does suggest an experiment that would also be a cure for global warming if his hypothesis is true: rocketing payloads of hydrogen up to the mesosphere to replace the missing water vapor that will then form more “silver clouds”. If part of such a test is conducted and shows a sufficiently strong effect, or if other tests can be devised that would be decisive, then perhaps with the help of that additional data, Occam's Razor will swing 'round once again and declare that the effects of industrialization aren't causing global warming. Perhaps.

I hope, given the previously cited arguments and examples, that it goes without saying that we shouldn't allow self-satisfaction, or any conviction that Occam's Razor still most clearly supports the Industrialization Theory of Global Warming, to forestall us from gathering more data relevant to Shaidurov's Hypothesis. At worst we would learn more about a part of the atmosphere now sometimes referred to as the ignorosphere, since we know so little about it. But in the meanwhile I also hope that mere prudence, as well as the separate peril of ocean acidification by excess CO2, will motivate us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as quickly and energetically as is possible.

Before we leave the topic of the earth's environment, one more imaginable consequence of Shaidurov's Hypothesis (the “Silver Cloud Theory of Global Warming”?) deserves to be raised. It suggests the distressing possibility that a too=quick resort to Occam's Razor might all too easily have produced vastly accelerating global warming by now. (Again this is another addition by myself, and Shaidurov is not responsible for any errors here, either.) For Occam's Razor then suggested that the mesosphere would not be dramatically more vulnerable to a nuclear explosion than any other part of the atmosphere. No-one then had any reason to suppose such a complexity or extra entity/vulnerability. Yet had that assumption, directly attributable to Occam's Razor, ever been used to help justify the test of a large nuclear bomb at very high altitude, we might be in the midst of a population crash now, if the “silver cloud” theory is right.

Such a test wasn't entirely unlikely, either. A live test of the Soviet Antiballistic Missle system, which employed nuclear bombs to detonate incoming nuclear warheads high up in the atmosphere, might have sufficed to for a doomsday scenario. The largest bomb ever tested, Tsar Bomba, in 1961; was several times as large as the Tungus event. It was dropped at low altitude but the mushroom cloud reached 18km. Typical nuclear bombs are more like 1.5 megatons, but had such a bomb ever been given a very high altitude test directly in the mesospheric layer of the atmosphere, 50 or 80km up, whether as a demonstration of strength or for any other reason; one can guess that it might have damaged the “silver cloud” layer far more severely than the Tungus event (only 10km up), causing a much steeper self-sustaining rise in global temperatures if the “silver cloud” theory of global warming is right.

Perhaps we may all have to start thinking far more kindly of President Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev; who signed the ABM treaty in 1972 severely limiting the development of such weapons, as well as President Johnson, who initially proposed such a treaty in 1967.

It is sobering enough to count up the number of times the American scientists who built the first atomic bomb employed, amongst many other shortcuts, Occam's Razor to help predict the effects of the bomb, in particular, whether it might be astronomically more powerful than they imagined. In one very important respect they are known to have erred on the side of simplicity and Occam's Razor – judging that lingering radiation and the effects of radiation from nuclear explosions on the health of survivors would be minimal.

[1] CO2 is believed to drive the changes in climate, but water vapor does most of the work of reflecting heat radiated from earth, back to earth

[2] Contrary to most people's intuition, meteorites above a certain size are actually much more likely to explode in the atmosphere and not reach the ground. Most meteorites that reach the ground relatively intact do so because the atmosphere slowed them down fairly quickly, before they were heated to the point of vaporizing. So one shouldn't conclude from the fact that the Tungus meteor exploded that it was small or not very dense. The opposite is true – even though truly huge meteors will also penetrate the atmosphere largely intact.

[3] Granted these were also large bombs, often measured in megatons, but these explosions occurred much lower in the atmosphere than 10 km, where the meterorite is thought to have exploded, so nuclear tests didn't affect the high atmosphere significantly.

The Hot Way to Germinate Seeds

2006-03-21T15:04:00.000-08:00

The Hot Way to Germinate Seeds

By: Russell Johnston, March 21, 2006 – revised Sept 20, 2006

-- exclusive to Handales.com – may not be reproduced --

When I was a younger man I had the good luck to see some mimosa seeds for sale in a small town grocery store, of all things. I had heard of the famous mimosa, that rapidly folds its leaves at the slightest touch, and I really wanted to grow one myself.

When I got them home I faithfully carried out the instructions to get the plants started and... nothing came up. Germination rate zero. I tried a couple of over methods to germinate them, soaking, soaking in paper towels, and still didn't get even one seed started. About the time I had only a few of twenty seeds left, I gave up.

Some years later I came across the few old seeds that were left over and had a flash of inspiration. A bit of an unusual idea, but I just figured, hey, I've got nothing to lose here, theses seeds are probably dead anyway, I might as well make the experiment. I'll tell you what I did in just a second, but here's the result: every single seed sprouted! Since then, if I have any problems getting seeds to start growing, I use the same trick to germinate them, and it's always worked well.

Here's what you do:
Get two cups. Put half a cup of room temperature water in one. Put the seeds in the empty cup. Boil water and then pour a half cup of the boiling water into the empty cup with the seeds in it. Wait thirty seconds or a minute and then pour the cooler water into the hot cup with the seeds to cool fill the cup and cool the water somewhat. Now leave the seeds to soak overnight, then plant them.
There's more than one reason that might explain why this works so very well. Boiling water penetrates seeds quickly. Fire is actually necessary for some seeds to germinate, and warm temperatures can help with germination too.

A recent BBC news story tells of two hundred year old seeds being tempted into life, helped perhaps by mimicking other effects of fire: “The Cape region is regularly visited by fire, which is a signal to germinate. So scientists mimicked the effects of fire by chipping off the hard coats of some seeds, and bubbling smoke over others. ...Even with this detailed preparation, 29 of the 32 species represented declined to germinate.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5361396.stm

I'm tempted to suggest that they should have tried heat or very warm water, as well on some of those species. I don't know precisely this quick-parboiling technique works, but I sure know it does work. I've always had very high rates of germination with this technique, so if you have some seeds that are very reluctant to sprout, try this unusual technique to force them to start. You might be surprised at just how effective it is.

-- exclusive to Handales.com – may not be reproduced --

About the author:
Article copyright © Russell Johnston

Russell Johnston writes for Handales.com, which offers a large variety of articles on gardening. His web sites are photoperiodeffect.com, funnypoetry.com and BestPaperAirplanes.com

An Easy Way to Avoid Overwatering, and Keep Roots Healthy

2006-03-21T08:12:00.000-08:00

By: Russell Johnston

-- exclusive – may not be reproduced --

Overwatering is the largest menace your houseplants face, but there's a simple way that you can help prevent damage to their roots from rootrot. A solution that can make it at least somewhat safer to water your plants frequently – so it can reduce the risk of damage from underwatering, as well.

When we water plants we naturally try to distribute the water around the pot, so that all its roots are fed at least some moisture, in imitation of nature, without thinking much about that habit. But largely by accident, I've found there's another way, and one that helps protect those precious roots.

If you water on one side of the pot only each time you water a plant, but alternate which side you soak this helps protect the roots. In other words, if you're watering once a week, then on even numbered weeks you could deliver the water to the right side, and on odd numbered weeks, to the right. Whichever side got the water last time, gets none this time.

How does this help the roots? Well, roots don't drown the way people drown. Roots are designed to stay under water for a while, without having to breathe in oxygen. But if they stay under too long, then that water is also very friendly to bacteria, mold, and all sorts of other organisms that are even better adapted to an aquatic environment, and the invaders will begin to attack and rot the roots. As long as they spend a fair bit of time with air around them, roots are quite safe from rot, since it cuts off the attacks. As for the plant itself, it wants water, but it doesn't much care which side of the pot that water comes from, as long as it gets enough. Likewise, the roots on the dryer side of the pot will benefit from whatever water the plant absorbs on the other side of the pot, even if they aren't absorbing any themselves.

Obviously, always watering only one side of the pot, the same side every time, is a bad idea. The roots on both sides may perish for different reasons. So you do want to keep alternating sides, very regularly.

It also goes without saying that if you're really enthusiastic about watering your plants, you can still put in so much water that below the surface, the roots on both sides are getting drowned, and die. By alternating the sides you water it's much more difficult to drown the roots, but it's not impossible.

Introducing a slightly random element by switching off which side the roots are being watered on, gives all the roots a chance to rest in partly dry soil quite regularly. That's really all they need to stay healthy, because dramatically changing moisture levels are very much a part of nature. What's not natural is for roots to remain in even a little too much water week after week. This bit of randomness greatly reduces the risk of overwatering because you are no longer trying to strike a very delicate balance within a relatively small amount of soil which simultaneously offers both air and water to all the roots, and to maintain that balance nearly all the time. Something that's very difficult to do. Instead, by switching which part of the soil is wet very regularly, all your plants' roots will get enough air and enough water to stay healthy over the long run; without your having to struggle to maintain such a precise balance. Your plant friends will thank you for it, and you'll be less anxious for their health.

-- exclusive – may not be reproduced --

About the author:

Russell Johnston writes for Handales.com, which offers a large variety of articles on gardening.

2006-02-04T09:52:00.000-08:00

You think the most amazing thing about Bush's illegal wiretapping program was that he did it, or that he says he still thinks it's legal, because Presidents can do that sort of thing (hey, Nixon actually proved that, didn't he?).

NOPE - the most amazing thing is that the New York Times, no less, covered up the illegal practice for an entire year, themselves (and would have continued to do so):

"The Bush administration asked The Times not to print some of Risen's reporting, especially about the wiretapping program, and the paper honored that request for a year. But when Risen was about to publish this book, which included the revelations that The Times had withheld, the newspaper decided to end its self-restraint."

'State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,' by James Risen

Spies and Spymasters

Review by WALTER ISAACSON

Published: February 5, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/books/review/05isaac.html?pagewanted=2

Doesn't that just do it to you on toast?

The Times now believes the program was illegal. It's reporter always did:

"...as Risen shows, the program went on for more than a year with indifference to the requirement that there be some court authorization or Congressional approval of domestic wiretapping."

So what the hell happened? The Times isn't saying, for now. (It doesn't find the book as a whole rock solid, but it doesn't question the sections on the wiretapping.) The Washington Post once had a hell of a time trying to get other papers to report a story, as I remember...

Penguin terrorists strike again!

2006-01-08T08:26:00.000-08:00

"Oh, for God's sake Harold, I can't take you anywhere!"

Free Automatic Weapons for the Homeless!

2006-01-07T12:29:00.000-08:00

I had a good time at http://rtmark.com/projects/ today, a satirical happenings website. Here's the project I submitted:

FREE AUTOMATIC WEAPONS FOR THE POOR!

Code: fawp

Description:

Do the NRA one better! Get some cash together and create a gun-happy front organization to take the National Rifle Association's position to its logical extreme. Try to make the letters for this front organization say "RAA" (short for Reducto Ad Absurdum, and rhymes with NRA) if possible. (Let's say the "Rifles Automatically for Americans.")

Hand out lots of pamphlets and place newspaper advertisements from the "RAA" that offer free automatic weapons with boxes of amunition to every bonafide homeless person, together with time at a firing range free of charge, and of course shrewd advice such as: "Always aim low, since recoil will place your next shots higher than where you were initially aiming" and "Always fire at live targets which are lined up one behind the other if at all possible" and of course the classic: "Cross fields of fire; shoot not directly at, but along the lines of any large number of peop..., er, anything you happen to be shooting at, so you can drop the most targets with a single burst."

Actually give out at least a few guns (makes great TV even if the firing pins are welded.)

While you're doing all this, don't just keep a straight face, keep a stone face!

Idea courtesy of completeconfusion.com

But there's more! I also helped out others' projects with comments, helpful fellow that I am:

First I commented on a project to make neocolonial board games...

“Did this long ago sort of...”

I wrote up a two-page satirical spoof of traditional paper and board "wargames" with a science fiction colonial theme, complete with map and counters. In the game the colonial Tralmalfadorians (apologies to Kurt Vonnegut) fought the spear-carrying natives of a planet desired by the Tralfs. As in any war game there were "combat tables" and you threw a die to see the results of any combat. A result of 1-5 meant "Native troop unit completely destroyed". A roll of six meant "Native troop unit completely destroyed, however, Tralmalfadorian gunner slightly bruises his trigger finger." It was published in some very minor wargaming zine of the day, maybe thirty years ago. Thanks for the memories.

Then I commented helpfully on a petition to send the Statue of Liberty back to France...

Better, start a high-profile campaign to alter the Statue of Liberty "to better reflect the patriotic mood of Americans" by replacing the flame with an M-16 (or whatever they're firing these days.)

Now that ought to get a substantial reaction from the French than the “Freedom Fries” movement did! All in all, a good Saturday's work helping to create world unity.

911 Denial

2005-11-22T09:14:00.000-08:00

I have relatives and friends who, it turns out much to my shock, are 911 deniers. So I won't have to have this argument again, here's a typical message from a friend of mine and my pretty much standard reply about 911:

On 11/21/05, a friend wrote me, following up after a phone conversation:

“as far as 9/11 is concerned why didnt the military scramble fighter jet s from andrews afb (10 mins from pentagon) to avoid pentagon getting hit. why did wtc 7 (third building ) come down. if you see the video it looks exactly like a controlled demo. goebbels said tell the big lie.!! cheers Xxxxxx.”

And here's my reply:

I've read a lot of history and studpidity (make that "stupidity") is a recurring theme - why did Pearl Harbor not scramble fighters after radar saw incoming planes in 1941? 'Cause humans are dumb as bricks, and twice as complacent is why, methinks.

I knew an Islamic militant or two in University - their hatred for any ideas that weren't identical to their own was endless and terrifying. Absolute Holocaust deniers, just for starts. Yes, they really are that motivated. It may be a stretch but I sometimes think that maybe some of the 911 denial comes from people who unconsciously want to hold on to the comforting but racist thought that people who's skin is a different color just aren't smart enough to fly planes, etc, so we're actually pretty safe - or that we really don't have bitter enemies, so we're actually pretty safe. I've met one or two of these sort of guys, twenty years ago and yeah, we do have implacable enemies. That's how the world is. Not everybody is reasonable.

Why were all the staircases in the same corner in each tower? Why were building standards in New York lowered dramatically citywide so that the towers could be built without fireproofing the beams properly (cheaper), having better emergency exits, etc, etc? 'Cause the world is one long meeting of Morons Anonymous, I'm afraid. "Hi I'm Bob, and I'm a Moron who loves to save money for big business by scrapping safety standards for skyscrapers." "Hi, Bob!!"

More than just three buildings were destroyed actually - the impact of the two towers falling was staggering - other nearby buildings, beyond the third, had to be demolished because they were no longer structurally sound, as well. As for the third building falling straight down, big buildings can't fall sideways, that much weight falls pretty much down, it's a function of scale. The compressive strength of the materials, by weight, becomes relatively smaller as the building size increases, etc.

Torture by the US was (and is) deliberate, and the way their last two Presidential Elections were stolen, was deliberate. I don't think we have to dig very far to uncover conspiracies, the Right Wing in the U.S. has done enough that's pretty obvious and astonishing, surely.

As for the other version of 911 denial, that Bush knew and let it happen, we all knew from the previous, very serious attack on the World Trade Center that it was target number one. We all knew, not just the U.S. government.

I'll admit, History often takes a different look however (although not always more accurate): I'd love to open a text from the year 3000 to see what it has to say. I wouldn't be surprised if it says Bin Laden was really fighting for gay rights. If some of Bush's supporters and successors get to write up the history books, they might well decide that's by far the most helpful and instructive way to tell the story.

My kingdom for a writer...

2005-10-27T13:28:00.000-07:00

There are two ways to portray a historical figure as an actor - imitate, or resonate, as one might say. That is, you can try to make the audience recognize mannerisms, accent, and idiosyncrasies, or you can try to recreate the forces within that moved that individual. One can't commit fully to both approaches at the same time and it's laughable to flip from one to the other.

Both approaches have their advantages, but critics overwhelming prefer the latter: alas, audiences not always. And real-life figures who are exceptional actors are often exceptionally good at never revealing precisely what motivates them even to those closest to them (trust me on this one). Audrey Hepburn strikes me as having been masterly at precisely this mannered presentation of self that tells future writers and actors almost nothing of what they most want to know, no matter how good their "actor's mind" is. Whereas Nixon, for example, a profound, if highly skilled ham, revealed all his insecurities to the professional eye instantly. Such skills as Hepburn had may simply close off the possibility of creating an "inner portrayal" of her that would ring true without the precise manners.

Ms. Hewitt does a remarkable job of the first approach - which can never be as consistent as a more Stanislavskian go at it. At some moments, she captures Audrey with impossible accuracy in every respect. With a larger budget and longer shooting schedule those moments might have been so frequent as to be mindbending. But this was a TV movie, so unsurprisingly. more often a slightly wandering accent or only nearly correct posture makes identification impossible. Yet I can't think of a better portrayal of the look and mannerisms of an historical character on film offhand, so for professionals the time spent is worthwhile for this alone: to know what's possible and what's not in playing out other's lives on film.

The writing is less interesting I'm sorry to say. Stanislavski, as a director, was very insistent that key decisions always be made onstage, not between scenes, if at all possible. This rarely seems to happen in this script, which makes the straightforward error of portraying events more often than decisions. However, real stories, mesmerizing stories, are about decisions, and even when Audrey accepts her first marriage proposal - making a decision in front of us for once - we don't know why, because we know nothing about him that couldn't be found in Who's Who, and she hasn't done a lot of confiding, previously, to fill us in. In sum, it's not a terrible script, just pedestrian (almost literally.)

That having been said, in some indefinable way, it does manage to capture what's best about that period of deliberate fantasy and denial that followed the Second World War, in the fifties and early sixties. Full disclosure: it's a period I remember with some bitterness in truth, but this movie shows the best side of that vanished era, and made me fonder of it.

October 27, 2005

A postscript - some might wonder why I saw this movie, much less bothered to review it. Part of the answer is that I've become interested in movies set in or made circa 1960, when I was five, such as Vertigo. Another part of the reason is that the portrayal of historical characters cuts to the heart of many questions and dilemmas for actors. But mostly, I've had a less than stellar day, and nothing settles me down quite so much as writing fairly well about something not quite so important as say, the survival of our environment or the accelerating epidemic of chronic illness throughout the industrialized world.

Novel asteroid deflection vehicle

2005-10-17T14:37:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write this up as an article for more than a year, so this quick note will have to do. It seems to me the best craft to deflect asteroids (particularly delicate or spinning ones) would be simple, if apparently a bit wasteful: glue two ion engines with equal thrust back to back so that they produce no relative motion of the craft, bring this device near the asteroid and point the emissions of one engine at the asteroid. If this can be done precisely enough that some ice boils there, so much the better.

A craft with one engine would do, if the engine were flipped (rotating against a counterweight) repeatedly, to "pogo" it first toward and then away from the asteroid, so that half of the time it was modifying the asteroid's orbit. Such a craft is within present technology, and could be built and deployed quickly.

Russell Johnston

Guaranteed safely online

2005-08-27T02:33:00.000-07:00

First, here's how to compute safely in the internet age, without ever being unable to do your days work on your computer:

Backup, but don't just backup.

I have more than one hard-drive, as everyone should, and swappable hard drives, as everyone should. No-one can be certain a virus won't take out your system if you are connected to the internet or a network. If nothing else, buffer overflow errors can make any system vulnerable to a complete takeover - yes, even Linux systems, even with hardware firewalls.

The answer is to keep a virgin hard drive that's never on your computer when it's connected to the net and which drive boots itself. This virgin drive, which you put in the swappable drive door (and which is jumper-toggled as a master drive) becomes a hard drive onto which you can copy all your data from your, um, let's say more promiscuous hard drive as a backup, and on which you can work offline. Or if nothing else a second OS so that the latest virus will only take out one of the OSes you could use on a given day on that machine.

Nothing else is safe. NOTHING. This way you have two computers for the price of one - likely only one of which is attached to the internet, ever, in any way, but both of which can swap data via a sort of super-fast sneaker-net, for backups, synchronization, etc; and either of which will let you do your days work, with all your data intact, if something happens to the other OS - like a worm or virus. No matter what hits the internet, period, ever, you have a guarantee you'll still get your day's work done on the virgin disk.

The central idea here is to make the permanent (non-swappable) hard drive in your computer a slave - but a slave with it's own operating system, so that when no swappable HD is inserted, it boots as if it were a master and lets you charge out into the internet or do your business, but will also step back when a swappable HD, toggled to master, is inserted (with the net connection unplugged, in my case) and the computer rebooted. Then it's just a slave from which data can be easily copied - or used.

This is the only gold standard for safety for any networked computer in this remarkable evil age online.

One wee trouble in paradise, however... and a warning.

This system worked wonderfully for me right up until this week. I decided to install Linux on this system.

I never install Linux without it destroying something.

Once upon a time, simply trying to alter your screen resolution could result in a full reinstall wiping out your entire hard drive and every scrap of data. I think they might have fixed that. This time Linux just refused to abandon the installation and spit out the hard disk, scared the hell out of me, then destroyed an entire XP operating system and some Firefox bookmarks... but left the rest of my data intact.

But apparently, the idea of a hard drive that's sometimes dominant and sometimes submissive is new to Linux Fedora 2. Maybe their programmers don't get out to clubs much... So Linux, without any warning, simply destroyed my access to the swappable master's OS entirely and went to the slave on the other drive and appointed it God and master of all things - managing to override the hardware toggles, in effect. #@^$@!! And this AFTER I had told it (the Linux installation on the F: drive) NEVER to boot from the C: drive. NEVER. Apparently never means always to Linux in this special case. *$%^!!! Goodbye to all my safety precautions, my vigin disk, the firefox books there (which aren't stored where they say they are) and of course there's no safe way back - there never is with Linux - there's no such thing as truly uninstalling Linux on a double boot system so you're back where you started and anyway I'm far too frightened to risk any such procedure - this data's vital.

*(#$#*@! Linux is still a little puppy that just goes where it wants (three guesses as to how easy it is to house-train a penguin) - whereas Microsoft is an aging thug who gets into barfights and brings home curious infections on a weekly basis... so there's no hope for us!

Both operating systems have God complexes. Linux won't let you go back, or even abort the install or open the drive door so you can hard boot out of harm's way.... oy veh!

Firefox, of course, compounds the problem. Firefox communicates bookmarks well with Explorer, but doesn't recognize the existence of Firefox. You can't synchronize Firefoxes on two HDs on the same machine, you can't import Firefox bookmarks from one HD into Firefox on another... you can kludge up HTML pages, with some effort and editing in a separate program, and send a bookmark to those pages on your machine, but that's it.

Surely I'm not the only person on earth who has figured out that by far the best option is to make your swappable hard drives masters, and the fixed HD a bootable slave. Surely not. This isn't rocket science. There are only two fundamental arrangements here - drawer masters being the useful arrangement if safety is a concern. Then again, they say it took three hundred years after someone invented a single stirrup on one side of a horse, to help in mounting, before someone else figured out that two stirrups would be a good idea. And we are cheerfully killing off the earth.

It's like I'm back in the bad old days when merely having two hard disks on one machine meant that nearly every software program you purchased would malfunction in bizarre ways, usually on install, because that possibility - two hard drives! - had somehow never entered the designers' wildest dreams, so the programs just couldn't cope.

Now, having a drive that's sometimes master and sometimes slave is somehow utterly beyond even the most drug-crazed dreams of software designers. Caffiene doesn't stimulate the imagination, after all, relaxation does.

So there it is. If you're stupid - you get infected. If you're smart - you'll step one inch out of the standard way of doing things and the designers behind Windows or Linux will trash your OS for you. (Even so your data, bookmarks aside, perhaps, will be intact) You can't win - just limit your losses, in this old world.

Pardon the rant.

DO use the above described method to make sure your life on the computer is a safe one (and backup to CDs or DVDs too - but also to a HD, as I've described, because hard drives are much less volatile. Data on writable CDs disappears - that's not an if , it's only a question of when, and don't count on such written data lasting a decade.)

If you install Linux however, maybe just put it on the central slave - while nothing is in the swappable hard drive door - until Linux catches up with the times.

Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved

2005-08-13T11:10:00.000-07:00

Guess what happens a lot around Bermuda? Hurricanes. And it turns out that monster waves aren't a freak during hurricanes, but common, and much larger than we thought. Half again taller then tsumami waves.

The air turbulence might take out a low flying plane down near wave height (trying to take advantage of ground effect and save fuel, for example) and can certainly sink ships instantly. Other explanations, such as methane gas bubbling up from the sea floor may now have to retire in favor of a more mundane explanation. Of course if you're a scientist, you can't let the words "Bermuda triangle" pass your lips, so the obvious possibility of a connection isn't mentioned.

Hurricane caused 'tallest wave' (BBC story)

Hurricane Ivan west of Cuba

Hurricane Ivan generated a wave more than 90 feet (27 metres) high...
"Our results suggest that waves in excess of 90 ft are not rogue waves but actually are fairly common during hurricanes," lead author Dr David Wang, told the BBC News website.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4739741.stm

A possible new kind of vaccination?

2005-07-30T15:29:00.000-07:00

The CDC, back in 2001, published a very interesting paper that might change your mind about how and why you get the flu - amongst other things.

Seasonal Variation in Host Susceptibility and Cycles of Certain Infectious Diseases by Scott F. Dowell
is available at
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol7no3/dowell.htm

It strongly suggests that viruses don't arrive in winter - they were already there, it's just that we get weaker, until a kindling effect can get an epidemic going. He thinks that the photoperiod, and changes in melatonin, are the likely trigger.

He quotes a fascinating observation from 1826, well before jet travel: "...this epidemic affects a whole region in the space of a week, nay, a whole continent as large as North America, together with all the West Indies, in the course of a few weeks, while the inhabitants could not within so short a time have had any communication or intercourse whatever across such a vast extent of country."

But it gets me thinking about an old idea I've kicked around without being able to interest anyone in it.

I wonder if a factor in disease seasonality isn't that the probability of infection vs resistance may depend in part, as well, on the actual number of infectious units initially encountered.

Do we even know whether the gradual exposure to one then 8 then 64 copies of a virus, etc, over days, or weeks might make resistance more likely? That repeated slight exposure might or might not be an effective means of protection generally against infection? (Wouldn't that be nice.)

I mention this because such a mechanism might be expected to logarithmically exaggerate any seasonal effects such as he hypothesizes, mediated by melatonin. Once the snowball got rolling, and exposure came in bunches, it might, to thoroughly mix a metaphor, go like wildfire if the sheer size of the initial exposure is really important. Whereas, during months when everyone's immune system is strong, mild infections of others would expose us only to mild doses of the infectious agent, making the chances of our gaining resistance that much greater as well - if this idea of mine holds at least.

And of course, if repeated or gradually increasing very slight exposures were very likely to produce immunity, this might be quite useful, obviously. We could do that deliberately, as a different sort of vaccination, and one that might be generally applicable as soon as viruses (etc) emerged, without a lot of research and development. Just maybe.

There may well be no such effect of course - but have we ever bothered to find out such a fundamental fact concerning disease transmission? Granted, most in the field would accept that illness-or-resistance is more likely given a large exposure, but the question is, would repeated tiny exposures make developing specific resistance to that disease more likely? Is that part of what's happening during the seasons when viruses or flus aren't virulent?

One interpretation of Dowell's findings might be that he has provided evidence, or at least a hint, that large exposures to infectious agents make resistance more difficult, and less likely.

Even if that's true it doesn't mean that graduated exposure to just any pathogen would be an effective (or wise) countermeasure, but it does get me thinking.

In any case, he's written an impressive and necessary paper, that's very interesting, and might amuse you during flu season.

First published July 30, 2005
Last revised July 30, 2005

Russell Johnston

Poor Man's Air Conditioning

2005-07-23T12:08:00.001-07:00

Free air conditioning (or the equivalent) with nothing to buy – a way to beat the worst of the heat waves with little or no expense. Sound good? A year or two ago I figured out how to create a make-shift cooling system for the hottest days of summer that doesn't cost much of anything. The poor man's air conditioning system, you might say.

As it happens I live in a part of the world that's [temperate] in summer, where [air conditioning] in the [summer] is optional. Most people don't bother purchasing it. But there are always periods [in the heat of the summer] when one isn't going to be very comfortable without it.Not to mention that in a heat wave, staying a bit cooler can be life-saving, especially in areas where air conditioning isn't common. For example, University of Delaware climate researcher Laurence Kalkstein has said that a 1992 heat wave in Seattle contributed to around 60 deaths. As I write (July 21, 2005) a headline states that 18 people, mostly homeless, have died of the heat in Phoenix (consider giving a homeless person a frozen water bottle or yogurt container of frozen water on exceptionally hot days.) And the 2003 heat wave in Italy is now credited with causing 8,000 deaths, as well as widespread blackouts due to extra demand by air conditioners. (http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=RGJMFQU50JYCOCRBAEOCFFA?type=worldNews&storyID=8914252)

Certainly the extremes of summer heat isn't to be trifled with: “Severe heat causes more weather-related deaths in the USA than all other weather phenomena combined.” – the Centers for Disease Control (USA Today, May 26, 2005 http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-05-26-heat_x.htm).

Which is where a simple system of improvised cooling or air conditioning comes in handy, keeping you cool on the hottest summer days, since it's generally the poor who don't have air conditioning in place. If you have a [refrigerator], some empty yogurt containers or something similar, and a solid surface or plate that's metal or stone to put under your feet, then you too have free air conditioning or if you prefer, "temperature regulation" available to you, right now. (Well, it's free if you aren't paying the electricity costs directly and already eat something that comes in plastic tubs.)

The trick is to use the freezer to time-shift the cold, as it were. In the evening, fill up a half-dozen or so of those plastic yogurt container with water - about three-quarters to seven-eighths full, no more, because [water] expands and can split the container. You'll probably find that thin-walled containers work better than sturdier plastic because they're more flexible and more likely to expand than split. It may also help to squeeze the containers as you snap the lids tight on them so that the sides of the containers are pushed in somewhat.

Now in the night, when the [heat] is not so insufferable, your freezer will go to work slightly raising the room [temperature] of your kitchen - but you'll be glad tomorrow.

When the day begins to heat up, go get a frozen yogurt container, by now frozen solid. If you have a concrete floor, as I do, take off your shoes, put the yogurt container between your sock feet, and carry on typing or whatever it is you're doing.

The [ice] will cool the floor, and the floor will cool your feet. True, the air around you will also be a bit cooler, but what will really keep you comfortable are your big feet. They're terrific [heat exchange|heat exchangers], by design - it's part of what they're supposed to do, in [nature] – after all, we didn't evolve wearing shoes.

In an hour or two, switch to the next block of ice, putting the now liquid water in the used container into the fridge or down the drain. Don't put it in the freezer during the day unless you're really lazy. It's best to wait until night to start the freezing part of the cycle again because your freezer is a [heat pump], and the more you make it work during the day, the hotter your place is going to get.

Now, you may not have a concrete floor, of course. You might be cursed with unhygienic carpeting. In which case you need a slate of marble or ceramic tile or stone or metal (aluminum's a great [heat conduction|heat conductor] so you could use a fairly thin piece of aluminum) to put the ice block (still inside its small plastic tub) and your sock feet on.

For more cooling

It's best not to put your feet or ankles against the ice. That's a bit extreme, not quite what bodies are designed for, and you shouldn't find it necessary. On very hot days, I do use a couple of containers at a time, however. It's also very useful to start getting a container or two out and down on the floor at least an hour or two ahead of the time when you'll really start feeling the heat. That way, the concrete floor is already cool when you need it to be - and you may be able to slightly delay the time when the heat is oppressive, as well. Another technique I sometimes use on very hot days is to use a couple of containers at my feet and to shift them back and forth about twenty centimeters from time to time so that I can put my feet down on the concrete where the containers have been sitting for some minutes, for an extra blast of cooling.

For less cooling

For less extreme cooling, wrap a towel around the yogurt container. If you're going through a lot of ice containers, you may wish to cool the surrounding air less. So in order to cool just the floor, not the air generally, wrap a towel around but not under the container.

If you can't find anything like a marble slab to put under your feet, you can wrap the container in a towel and put it beside you - but I don't recommend this as, aside from the bottom of our feet, our bodies aren't built to be extreme heat exchangers. So if you do this, shift the container around a lot so as not to cool one part of your body too much - that sort of differential cooling just ain't that natural. Better: just go find a slab of something.

For only a little bit of trouble, you can enjoy a significantly cooler body and a maybe even a slightly cooler [environment] during the hottest parts of the day. You might even want to use this instead of your present air conditioning on some days, if you only need to cool yourself and not the whole house and you want to be a little more [green party|green].

As a bit of an aside, I must admit it would be nice to have a nifty solution to the problem of the yogurt containers cracking sometimes from ice expansion. Using thinner containers helps a lot, but I keep thinking that something like a stick of styrofoam long enough to go to the bottom of the container slipped into the center of the container while the water's liquid, or even better, a sealed plastic tube filled with air that's not quite as tall as the container, might absorb most of the expansion by allowing itself to be crushed slightly in the center. The only thing common and cheap that would do the trick that I can think of would be strips of bubble-wrapping rolled up and tied with string or wire to make a cylinder a bit longer than the tub is high, or a column of styrofoam if you have some of that packing material handy.

Some other tips commonly given for hot times: eat small meals more frequently, since digestion is a large task that creates considerable heat itself, stay hydrated and keep your electrolyte levels up with some form of salt.

The first signs of heat exhaustion are being very thirsty and a dry mouth. Less urination may mean the body is growing short of liquid. Dizziness and fatigue and also signs. Hot and dry skin is a red flag – heat stroke is setting in and death may follow.

For more information, see the CDC site: http://www.bt.cdc.gov/disasters/extremeheat/index.asp

Russell Johnston, completeconfusion.com

first posted on the net June 6 2004

last revised July30, 2005

Steroids and Moneyball

2005-07-14T12:06:00.000-07:00

Steroids and Moneyball

N.B.! THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS SPECULATION AND NO LEGAL CLAIM OF CRIMINAL ACTIVITY BY MANAGEMENT OF ANY LEAGUE , TEAM, OR SPORT IS MADE IN THIS ARTICLE. NO DEFINITE CLAIM AS TO THE STATE OF MIND, KNOWLEDGE, OR INTENTIONS OF ANY PRESENT OR PAST MEMBER OF MANAGEMENT OF ANY LEAGUE OR TEAM WITHIN OR WITHOUT THE MLB IS MADE HEREIN.

I'm beginning to think that while there's something to "moneyball", it's not the real story. Sure, stats help you select players and always have, but all the hype may (also) have largely have been a useful cover story for the real bargain hunting: namely consciously going out and finding young players with merely good stats who weren't taking steroids, but were likely to do so, or who had just begun to - who therefore were going to be a whole lot better than their stats would make you think.

Seems to me, speculating, that Billy Beane was in an excellent position to watch that economic process take place, understand it exactly, and exploit it thoroughly. It would be hard to argue that he has uniformly avoided hiring or retaining all players who might use steroids.

So what did Billy Beane know and when did he know it? He's said what he lacked as a player was (paraphrasing badly, from memory) "that he had real skills that excited the scouts but lacked the will to do whatever it took to be a really good baseball player." We now know (as he presumably knew way back when - unless my timeline is way off, and maybe it is) exactly what "whatever it took" cashes out to - performance enhancing drugs that were known to carry real risks by then. Certainly, unlike a certain Californian governor, Beane wasn't willing to do whatever it took to his body pharmaceutically to have a truly spectacular career at any price - that much seems clear in any case - but in struggling with this question, or once he was in management, Beane may have realized that he had some very valuable economic information about just which undervalued players were in fact likely to become stars. With regard to that timeline, Billy Beane's debut in the majors was in 1984 and his last game in 1989.

Perhaps his consolation prize for knowingly watching less highly talented cheaters pass him by and get the biggest headlines and longest careers as players, was to proceed directly to management and cash in this knowledge. ("Assuming any major league player has ever used steroids during this, earlier or subsequent periods.") As the old saying goes, the fox knows many things, but the porcupine knows one big thing. Steroids, and just whose stats were about to climb skyward thanks to them, were a big thing to know about back then "if anyone in baseball has used steroids to enhance their performance." Very big, if you were building a ball club on a relatively small (but still multi-million dollar) budget.

The key realization in this, would be that players who hadn't taken steroids but were now started, or were about to, were the greatest bargains in the marketplace, with the greatest hidden upside possible, unreflected in their known stats. Maybe Billy Beane was the first person to both figure that out, if he ever did, and then to discern the extreme economic value that seemingly small bit of knowledge represented. Maybe he still hasn't, or hasn't consciously figured this out to this day. But if I were a betting man....

That doesn't mean that there's nothing to sabremetrics. Not at all. But on base percentage (under whatever terminology) isn't a new concern, and the new stats and studies may actually have been very much the smaller part of the moneyball story. Or, the renewed value of novel statistical studies may have come about precisely because steroid use had altered so many trends and made traditional expectations, once better founded statistically, had become somewhat obsolete. (See initial legal claim.)

Maybe congress should have called one more witness. But then again, pardon my cynicism, but perhaps that's precisely why they didn't call on a bunch of prominent management figures to testify.

A REPLY TO UNPUBLISHED OBJECTIONS/QUESTIONS FROM DAN AGONISTES (to a previous version of the above specualtion) (danagonistes.com):

With it's concentration on OBP, pitching accuracy, and so much more, I agree that there's much to moneyball - but I do wonder whether it's a full and adequate explanation of Billy Beane's success. However we have to keep in mind that what was privately known by some or many experts but kept private as a business advantage can't be directly known. We don't know this sort of thing except by, say, looking at prices paid for various types of pitchers to see what knowledge has been discounted, or not, as in any other market. No doubt much proprietary knowledge about baseball development was neither very uncommon nor widely broadcast. I do begin to suspect that a flurry of publicity over moneyball may in part at least have been a good cover for the real bargain hunting, which was looking for players whose performances were just about to get pumped up. Also, as I'll argue shortly, statistical study of baseball skills development can hardly help but incorporate knowledge of what are in fact the consequences of steroid use "if indeed statistically significant numbers of developing baseball players have ever taken steroids" - last clause applies to whole paragraph.

I don't think Billy Beane or anybody else had to push steroids - the carrot of multi-million dollar contracts and fame was surely more than sufficient for many players “if indeed any have taken steroids”, and these humongous incentives were already in place. Not to mention that the legal implications from civil suits spurred by later medical problems by anyone pressured to take steroids could obviously have been massive, too. Plus, and this is very important to note, I'm not saying he or anyone else in management isn't ethical (as ethical as other non-whistle blowers at least, and there are hordes of those) much less a criminal, or performed any act that would now be criminal. I'm only saying that he or they may have realized just how important that key data point, steroid use, was in changing all the other data points; and figured out that this meant that the real, spectacular bargains in the marketplace were those players whose known stats reflected no steroid use and who were middle-of-the-pack or a bit better - but who had recently started to take steroids seriously, or whose known attitude or associates suggested they would or might soon "assuming any steroid use at all" - quoted fragment applies to paragraph as a whole.

In fact, to exploit this for economic advantage, it might only have been necessary to invest broadly in players from places where steroid use was known to be relatively low, such as colleges without a high priority on athletics in general or baseball in particular. The purpose of such a strategy being to scoop up players who hadn't yet been exposed to a lot of steroid use, or seriously considered it. Conversely, a related strategy would have been, or might still be, to investigate carefully and avoid all players who were longer-term steroid users since their stats and market price had already "discounted" that steroid use, giving them a much lower upside under modern conditions (as well as a possible health and injury downside.) That is, there would be no further large "bounce" from steroid use available to such long term users. Thus, paradoxically, one could economically exploit the trend toward steroid use efficiently by actively avoiding some steroid users – namely the long term users - or even all steroid users, in effect counting on the fact that at least some of there still pure players might start using on their own. Economic profit lies in the upside, after all.(Literally so, since "economic profit" is a technical term within the field of economics to designate above-market profits, and that's how I'm using it here). To summarize this "steroid avoidance" strategy, players who have been taking steroids for some while and don't have a further upside possibility from now deciding to live "better" through chemistry are, relatively speaking, worse investments in the long term.

Of course, sabremetrics, etc could have discovered and exploited such trends, partially at the very least, with or without having explicitly discovered the underlying variable of drug use - but too many people in the industry knew precisely what was going on for that to be an entirely credible claim, I suspect. And who better to explicitly notice the economic and career consequences of drug use than a talented player who was deprived of the shining career it looked like he was going to have, in no small part because of widespread steroid abuse by so many others who didn't care as much about their future health? That's a description that may well fit Billy Beane, a first round draft pick in 1980, to a T. One has to imagine that watching that happen to one's career hopes would have stung deeply, "if indeed anyone in baseball Billy Beane knew or knew of ever took steroids during this period." Billy's a very bright guy by all accounts, I suspect he knew just what had happened to his career "whatever that was", and I also suspect his being bone lazy or ill-omened despite his talents wasn't the backstory to his unspectacular career. Maybe I'm wrong - it's very difficult to vouchsafe what other people thought or knew and kept largely to themselves, but I do believe a good argument can be made that he was in a position to know these things and that if he did, the consequences over the last decade or so would have been similar to what we've seen. See beginning legal claim.

Whatever anyone knew, it's no doubt true that a certain amount, maybe even a very large amount, of the hidden upside that moneyball-type statistical investigations have uncovered and exploited has in fact been made up of diverse markers of steroid use (such as, say, paradoxical increases in stats when players move up to a higher class of league), together with novel trend changes caused by steroid use "if steroids have been in use." Whether or not anyone ever discerned that as an underlying cause wouldn't have prevented the economic exploitation of such secondary trends once they were unearthed. An obvious possible example of a novel change in trends - is increased injury. This could perhaps be a factor explaining why it's now true that early pitching talent is heavily discounted because injury is pretty likely to erase that early promise, or injury-related changes in trends might only affect hitters to a large degree "if steroids have ever been used."

In horseracing, drug use leads to a sharply increased risk of injury (harness racing being one historic response to that risk, one may speculate, but see the initial legal claim again.) This risk comes about not so much because of direct damage to the body as indirect injury, since performances are pushed over the redline with erratic consequences. Nature likes to work within what structural engineers would call "margins" and drugs work in good part simply by overriding these safety margins, enforced by fatigue and otherwise. If you push your fighter aircraft over the redlines on the dashboard dials and outside its secure "performance envelope" more mechanical breakdowns occur, not just to moving components of the engine, but also to passive restraint mechanisms that are the avionic equivalent of hamstrings. The same sort of injuries have likely been happening in baseball "if indeed steroids have been used in major league baseball at any time." I think it would be difficult indeed to argue that today's players are markedly more robust, and less susceptible to injury than previous generations. (Lawyers are a leading cause of double negatives.) It would be somewhat confounding to medical science if steroids have nothing at all to do with recent injury trends "if indeed steroids have ever been used by major league baseball players." (Lawyers are a contributing cause of quotation mark usage.)

A large economic/investment change from widespread steroid use in earlier career stages "if any players have taken steroids early in their career or otherwise" would be a trend toward more drop outs from injury of talented players who don't reach the majors at all, shorter careers for first draft picks than in earlier times, and a consequent advantage for those teams making broader investments in many cheaper players rather than making very heavy investments in a very few highly performing young players who are now more likely not to have a career at all (or to be passed by egregious drug abusers.) A strategy of broader investment sounds somehow familiar, to me, and might to the reader. (Quoted fragment applies to the paragraph as a whole and by implication, to each sentence of same.)

Also published at everything2.com with the following addendum:

In case this article disappears from everything2.com, I might mention, with the greatest respect to Everything2, that I will be posting articles of mine censored from everything2 (about twenty percent of the articles I've written for them so far) at my blog at completeconfusion.com. Revisions and fuller versions of articles and late additions to bibliography will also be posted there for similar reasons - censorship always has a degree of predictability, so I do self-censor some of what appears under my rubric at everything2 in advance of publication there; needless to say. I don't mention this self-censorship as a slight to everything2 in any way at all, since this is of course an all but inevitable consequence of any external restraint on speech.

I'm very grateful to Everthing2. Everything2 is a private concern with every legal right to censor what appears there, for any reason whatsoever, which I recognize and respect fully. I'm grateful for the opportunity to publish many things at everything2.com, as well as being glad that the internet is large.

Initial message similar to first part sent July 12, 2005. First published here and on the web July 14, 2005. Last revised July 14, 2005.

Russell Johnston

This article may be found at:
http://confusioncomplete.blogspot.com/2005/07/steroids-and-moneyball.html
Note that this address is confusioncomplete, etc not completeconfusion, etc. Suitably confusing, eh?
completeconfusion.com however does redirect to the above site at blogspot.