Abram Katz

Ticked off for no good reason

2012-02-15T12:22:00.000-08:00

As it turns out, Lyme disease was not created as a biological weapon on Plum Island and did not accidentally escape into an unsuspecting population.

Who said it did? For one, Jesse "The Body" Ventura, former Navy underwater demolitions expert, governor of Wisconsin and professional wrestler, real name, James George Janos.

He's quoted on the Web as contending that Lyme disease resulted from biological warfare research on Plum Island, a mysterious little island off the coast of Connecticut. The actual institution there is the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. During the Cold War the site was allegedly used to create bio-weapons against domestic animals, like sheep and cattle.

The bacterium that causes Lyme disease

Yes, it's a bit creepy, and having to change out of your clothes and into a special disposable suit, and being required to shower before exiting, adds to the spooky atmosphere.

But, getting back to Lyme disease.

DNA from the bacterium that causes Lyme disease was recently identified in a sample taken from "Otzi," the remarkably preserved frozen fellow found in the Otzi Valley, in the Alps, a few years ago.

Otzi is about 4,000 years old. That is, way, way before Europeans landed on this continent and thousands of years before the construction of the lab on Plum Island.

However, even if Otzi had never been found, the idea of Lyme disease as a biological weapon is ludicrous. It typically causes flu-like symptoms, a rash, painful joints, and is almost always cured by a week of antibiotics. There is no record of any otherwise healthy person ever dying from Lyme disease.

This is not what you want in a weapon. It's too mild and too easily treated. Treatment calls for nothing more exotic than amoxicillin, a standard, cheap antibiotic. Smallpox, plague, and anthrax are the kinds of terrifying pathogens that some countries have weaponized.

The Lyme disease pathogen, Borrelia burgdorferi, just wants to live in ticks. The ticks are not affected. The parasite just uses mice, deer, shrews, voles and us, as way stations.

Nothing personal. Just passing through, like they've been doing for a long, long time.

Higgs boson, anyone?

2011-12-16T17:02:00.000-08:00

what a Higgs boson might "look like"

The Higgs field works like this

Granted, I don't know anything about anything, but the Higgs field seems fishy to me.

The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland may have detected a Higgs boson, the theoretical particle that transmits the "force" of the Higgs field to all matter. You are probably familiar with the boson for electromagnetism, the photon.

The Higgs idea, over-simplified, is that the universe is occupied by the Higgs field. Some things can pass through the field easily, hardly bothering with Higgs bosons.

Other things are like Higgs boson magnets. They have to wade through clouds of Higgs bosons. In this way the Higgs field confers mass. That is, we perceive more interaction with the Higgs field as mass.

Or, an elegant way to account for mass.

But a universal field smacks of the aether, a Medieval invention that in centuries hence was employed to explain how light waves could travel through a vacuum. Physicists reasoned that water and air are necessary for sound waves, so the same mechanism must hold for light.

Michelson and Morley, two American physicists, set out in 1887 to measure the aether, or ether. To make a long story short, they did not find any evidence of ether. The theory of special relativity did not depend on ether either. Today the idea of luminferous ether seems naive.

Mathematically, we are told, the Higgs field and boson solve the "where does mass come from?" question economically and convincingly.

But it does sound a lot like ether, which turned out to be unnecessary and nonexistent, doesn't it?

cold, wind, and temperature

2011-11-04T00:51:00.000-07:00

Since it seems as if winter temperatures will finally arrive, a word about wind chill.

Wind chill was developed to describe how wind velocity changes the way temperature feels to exposed skin.

We hear about wind chill so often that many people have become confused. Only warm blooded animals with bare skin, humans basically, are affected. If the temperature is 35 but the wind chill is 16, a container of water placed outside will not freeze.

Wind might make the water freeze more rapidly at an ambient temperature of 32 degrees by carrying away heat. Entropy always increases, after all.

So fear not. Your car will die equally well at 16 degrees or minus 10 with the wind chill.

Is Everybody Happy?

2011-11-04T00:49:00.000-07:00

Speaking of ridiculous nonsense -- and why not? -- we have Harvard scientists concluding that happiness depends on the contentment of friends of friends, or neighbors you may not even know.

This may apply to some people, but it is demonstrably false for the vast majority. If it were true, after all, as long as one person on Earth is happy, so should everybody. The happy fellow is friends with another, who is friends with another, and so on, ad absurdum.

Besides, how can you possibly characterize someone as happy or unhappy? Some people are unhappy most of the time, and others are in as good mood most of the time, but no one is joyful at all times.

Part of adulthood is learning how to keep these emotions private. If you found a $100 dollar bill, would you walk around with a broad smile and tell everyone you pass on the sidewalk? Would you call up your friends?

Perhaps $100 isn't sufficient to cause elation. Suppose instead that you won $50 million in a lottery. You're ecstatic. Is this going to make all of your friends jolly?

Some of them, sure. Most of the others will curse their luck, feel sorry for themselves, and/or ask you for money, since you now have an endless supply. Decline any of these requests and you've made an enemy for a long time.

Moreover, most people don't appear to be happy. At best they're able to maintain a guarded equilibrium. Next time you're at a store look around. See many smiling faces? No.

And finally, what kind of society aspires to be happy all of the time?

Only one in which people are losing their jobs left and right, banks are collapsing, businesses are failing, auto companies are on the brink of bankruptcy, newspaper chains are going under, and people are afraid to spend money.

Good times. Happy people.

dog bites man again and again

2011-10-12T17:45:00.000-07:00

Either the dog or the leg are artificial. Maybe both.

Are aggressive pit bulls and other breeds of dogs inherently violent, or are they made so by their owners?

It is both nature and nurture, of course.

However, let's consider different species. How many people are bitten by rabbits? By goats? By guinea pigs? Probably not too many, nor too seriously. Could you provoke a rabbit to bite you? Yes, but it would take persistence.

The point is that animals exist on a continuum, from shy to scary. Sharks, rattlesnakes, and alligators are considered dangerous. Some sharks are more mellow than others, but all in all, they're at the dangerous end of the spectrum.

Clearly, so are dogs. Humans started out with wolves and domesticated them into dogs. In fact, the modern canine is largely a human invention. Dogs were bred to guard, attack, hunt, and bite. Certain species were intentionally bred to have strong jaws and the capacity to maul.

There are many types of dogs now, but as a group they're closer to the shark end of the line than the bunny end. Face it. Snails, turtles, bats, woodchucks, beavers, or otters are highly unlikely to bite you.

Most dogs will not bite you. A lot of them will.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "about 4.5 million people are bitten by dogs each year. Almost one in five of those who are bitten; (and) a total of 885,000: require medical attention for dog bite-related injuries. In 2006, more than 31,000 people underwent reconstructive surgery as a result of being bitten by dogs."

The "dog bite denial" folks point out that there is no way to determine which breeds are more likely to bite you. True. But obviously, pit bulls put more people in the hospital than beagles. There is a reason that German shepherds are the dogs of choice for protection and paramilitary work.

For mysterious reasons, people these days tend to be more concerned about animal, rather than human, welfare. (It's possible to care about both). This society sends people who hurt dogs to prison.

What we don't do is hold hold owners accountable for their dogs. Only in the most serious mauling cases are the dogs themselves killed, or are people charged with a crime.

Dogs can be a gentle, loyal, lovable part of a family. They can provide nonjudgmental companionship. But owners need to control their dogs as if each pet is a potential killer.

Especially people who insist on owning pit bulls.

I made a mistake because I made a mistake

2011-09-27T13:52:00.000-07:00

We all make mistakes, that is, those of us who are human.

But have you ever been asked to explain a mistake? Ultimately, the only way to explain a mistake is to circularly say "I made a mistake," which is not really an explanation.

Can you explain why you accidentally knocked over a glass of milk? Clumsy? Clumsy is just another word for "prone to making mistakes."

Forget an appointment? "I got mixed up." In other words, I got mixed up because I got mixed up.

So, what is a mistake? Something you did that you did not mean to do? That suggests that the left side of the brain doesn't know what the right side is doing. A circuitry problem.

And there are those who contend that there are no mistakes; that actions are a response to unconscious urges. Calling Dr. Freud.

Mistakes are a key aspect of atonement, as in the day of atonement, or Yom Kippur, which is observed by Jews next month. In this context anything done in violation of God's law must be atoned for.

Life would be easier without mistakes.

But, a large majority of us are human.

Brother can you spare a cylinder of acetylene

2011-09-02T13:48:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama does not confer with me about jobs programs, but there is something I'd like to say to him.

Say there are about 14 million people in the U.S. who are unemployed. Construction workers constitute about 1.7 million of that number. That's 12 percent.

Yet when the President talks about creating jobs, he almost always refers to "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects such as bridges and highways.

Since the bridges and highways in the U.S. are not adequately maintained, they are crumbling and rusting into oblivion, so rebuilding all of those decaying pieces of infrastructure makes sense.

But where does that leave the other 12.3 million unemployed Americans? The experienced and older white-color unemployed? Those cast off by corporations so that young, inexperienced people can take their places for much less money?

The newspaper business comes to mind. As the New York Times recently reported, many news organizations are using people with no professional experience to cover the ongoing presidential election cycle.

If you can replace someone working for $50,000, who has 30 years of experience, with someone working for $30,000, who has no experience, that saves a lot of money. Or, so it seems. The public is less informed, but who cares?

This dynamic is apparently happening across the board.

White collar jobs at hospitals, software companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, consulting firms, etc. are going to young people. If you are 50ish, good luck.

I wouldn't mind learning how to weld, or lay concrete, or drive rivets, or whatever. But who is going to hire a 60ish welder with no experience?

As everyone who knows anything knows, the country needs New Deal-type boost, so that people who are otherwise unemployable can get jobs and spend money. No one I know wants to get hand outs.

"Over my dead body," quoth the Republican majority in the House, a la Eric Cantor.

Not exactly. Over my dead body.

Hurricane hype and the rule of threes

2011-08-29T13:43:00.000-07:00

It's better to plan for a disaster that does not happen, than not plan for a disaster that does.

But does that mean it's good for cable news channels to spend 24 hours a day talking up a level 1 hurricane as a monster killer storm that could wipe out major cities on the East Coast?

No one wants to repeat the horrendous mistakes that turned Katrina into an historic mess.

And, if you're the owner of a house that got swept away, or the relative or spouse of a person who was killed or injured, then Irene was a killer monster storm. However, it was nowhere near as nasty as the National Hurricane Center or the Weather Channel led viewers to believe.

Coverage splits into three phases: First, evacuate, prepare, stock supplies, board your windows, and make ready for a disaster. Television is good at that. The next phase is reporting was actually happened -- or in the case of Irene -- what did not happen. The third stage is either "Armageddon" or "We missed the bullet."

New York city was not inundated. Storm surges, created by low pressure and strong winds, were not as high as predicted. The number of storm deaths was relatively low (except if you are the lost one's brother, sister, or spouse, in which case Irene was as a bad as it could be).

Hundreds of thousands along the eastern seaboard lost electricity. In Connecticut alone, about 700,000 spent hours or days without electricity, which is no treat, to be sure.

Could Morris Cove in New Haven been flooded? Absolutely. By tropical storm Irene? Not likely.

But police driving around and using public address systems warning people to leave or face potential catastrophe was enough to convince my family to impose on a brother-in-law in East Hartford overnight.

His power went out. At our vacant home, electricity was off for about an hour and then restored. Trees did not topple on our street, although one cracked and fell on a lawn.

So, it turned out we would have been fine if we'd ignored the unenforced "mandatory"

evacuation.

Other people along the coast were not as lucky. Beach houses were damaged and washed away. However, if you want to see major damage, Google the hurricanes of 1954 and 1955.

Which brings us to coverage phase three: Back-pedaling, or "We missed the bullet." WMB is a handy journalistic device because you get a story either way. Either a groan or a "Phew!"

What would have been helpful was a balanced, level-headed explanation of the storm. We know that hurricanes lose force in cooler northern waters. We know that hurricanes get tapped out when they travel over land.

None of the news people or meteorologists seemed to wonder about what that might mean for Connecticut. New York City was the big story, and not much happened there. Phew.

The next time hurricane warnings are issued, will people around here pay attention? Probably not as much as they should. That's the downside of the hype.

I'm not a meteorologist, but I doubted that Irene's predicted level of destruction was likely. If we have the misfortune of a category 4 or 5 hurricane heading straight for Connecticut I will expect major damage, regardless of what the televised people say. I will be getting away from Long Island Sound long before the police arrive.

Next time a hurricane approaches, how about a realistic discussion of the worst, best and most likely possibilities of damage.

That's doable.

Fewer reporters standing in the rain, and more independent meteorologists in the studios.

Cue the lumbago

2011-08-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

Television ads for anti-depressants are getting more depressing.

The advertisement for airipiprazole (Abilify) is a case in point. Not only is there a patient and a doctor in the animated creation, there is also a stand-in for depression. Depression is a ovoid black, animated thing that can resemble a blob, or turn into a hole.

The "patient" is a woman and depression is by her side throughout the commercial. She is taking notes as the "physician" describes possible side effects and counter-indications. Depression has its own clipboard and is also taking notes.

What does this mean?

Depression is a character and as real as the patient. Is depression taking notes so that it can defeat Abilify?

The cartoon woman and her family then go for a picnic and depression tags along like the family dog. In fact, depression never leaves. What does this say about your expectations? Aim low. Don't count on your depression actually lifting.

Same with a gout medication called Uloric (febuxostat). A guy is walking around a city carrying a huge beaker of green liquid that is supposed to represent uric acid. Gout is caused by the formation of uric acid crystals in joints. Our patient gets Uloric and the size of the beaker shrinks.

But at the end of the ad, he still has to carry a small beaker of green liquid. In other words, this medication may improve the condition, but it will not cure it.

Along the same lines is a medication for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. The opening scene is of a man with COPD with an elephant sitting on his chest. A good metaphor, perhaps for chronic bronchitis or emphysema. Presumably the elephant is a computerized drop in.

The actor playing the patient actually says that there is no cure for COPD. He proceeds to play pool (why pool?) and the elephant remains in the same room. Spiriva (tiotropium bromide inhalation powder) may improve your symptoms, but you're stuck with the elephant, who at least is letting you stand up and walk around.

In ads for heartburn medicines, the heartburn is neither a character nor does it linger. Does this mean that heartburn is "curable?" Sort of. It can be controlled. Same with ads for mucus dissolver, blood thinners, and anti-cholesterol drugs.

Mucus, unwanted blood clots and artery-clogging cholesterol are all potentially chronic diseases, but they have no cartoon characters. A blood clot could be like a strawberry, cholesterol lends itself to an amorphous blob shape, and mucus suggests a green critter.

Some of these cartoon diseases may spin off their own animated features. A woman pursued by a black blob, a coughing guy and his elephant sidekick. Cholesterol as a cat burglar.

Weirder movies have been made.

Twist and shout

2011-07-06T17:30:00.000-07:00

I twisted Rubik's World to an inclusive standstill, but I had the last laugh.

Sort of.

For those unfamiliar with things Rubik, the "world" is a sphere composed of 8 pieces. It's like a 2 by 2 cube, but spherical.

I insouciantly tore the wrapper off and started to fiddle around. It didn't look that complicated.

What followed was hour upon hour of spinning the pieces, matching South America to North America, trying to get Australia in the right place, and so on. With Africa and South America in the correct spots, half of Asia was somewhere in the Pacific.

Then I managed to get most of it right, realizing that either the eastern or western hemisphere was upside down. If I keep moving things around, I reasoned, sooner or latter I will blunder into a solution. Then I realized that that strategy is useless.

Yes, there is an algorithm that sorts everything out, but the knowledgeable people on You Tube either covered the puzzle with their hands, or were vague. Among the more confusing aspects of the explanations is that regardless of how the puzzle is held, the top is called the top, the left called the left, and so on.

Consequently, one second you're looking at the top, and the next you're looking at the top, which is now a side. Some day the Khan Academy will post understandable instructions on Rubik puzzles. Meanwhile, more clockwise, up, clockwise down, left, left. etc.

Eventually I'd had enough and proceeded to take the thing apart so I could reconfigure it in the correct position and put it away. This is the real puzzle, I thought, as a bunch of black plastic pieces fell out. I must admit shamefully that after I got all but two of the pieces back inside, I glued the whole thing together.

Now it is forever (relatively speaking) solved.

Are there people who enjoy puzzles? Who actually like the bewilderment and repeated false steps? Doesn't seem likely. Trying to fit the World back together was far more enjoyable than the puzzle itself.

Part of the problem with Rubik puzzles is that they are abstract. The sole purpose is to figure out how to manipulate the thing. Everyday puzzles are more rewarding. You may think about how to fabricate a bird house, or a shelf, or some other minor wooden project.

Consider doing this, or that. Maybe Plexiglas is the best bet. Perhaps cut this piece at an angle, or put the frame on the outside, or build the thing out of cardboard boxes.

At the end, you have something to show for your trouble. If it's junk you can rip it apart and do over.

Rubik-wise, the reward seems to be the knowledge of how to solve the puzzle. People compete to see who can rearrange the cubes fastest. No one in his right mind fiddles with a Rubik's cube or world for 20 minutes a day, before taking a walk, or after breakfast.

Having an unsolved Rubik sitting around is practically intolerable. Chess puzzles are similar. They are made to solve, not ponder.

One conclusion has become clear: I am not a Rubik's kind of person: too many screwdrivers and types of glue.

The measure of a bridge

2011-07-01T12:41:00.000-07:00

Measure twice, cut once, woodworkers say.

Accurate and precise measurement are the keys to 90-degree square corners, even legs, and generally, pieces fitting together properly. On a small project it's usually possible to correct errors by cutting, planing, sanding, gluing, or using wood putty.

Now imagine you are building an enormous bridge, highways, and on and off ramps over New Haven Harbor to replace the old bridge.

The materials are way too big to measure with a tape. Can a steel fabricator guarantee that a 50-foot girder will be within 0.001 inch of the blueprint girder? When construction workers pour concrete into stories-high wooden molds, how are they able to make the finished product exactly the right size? Also, all of the angles have to be correct, because the bridge and associated sky ways are curved.

Who is out there with a yard stick making sure the project is built according to specifications? A cursory inspection does not reveal anyone with prospecting tools, and you do not see the workers looking at plans. Maybe this all takes place in a trailer somewhere.

Still, who determines the correct height of the mold and how is this applied in practice? How do they make the towers plumb?

Sure, there are project engineers, bridge engineers, and all of those people. You ever see them measuring anything?

Maybe they are doing the equivalent of drawing out a tape measure and marking a spot, but using unrecognizable equipment. Infrared or laser beams? Global positioning systems?

But even if an engineer can determine that a particular support needs to be 35 feet, six and half inches tall, how do the workers possibly fabricate something that big and with such precision?

It's not easy to make six two-by-fours all exactly eight feet long, for example. However, in theory, the job is straight forward. What theory do builders use when six pieces of concrete have to be exactly 50 feet long?

Maybe all highway support columns and other construction elements are a standard size, and so all of the fabrication equipment is automatically gauged properly. That does not seem plausible.

Or maybe the crews just eyeball the whole thing and modify as they go. That doesn't seem plausible either.

Same holds true for skyscrapers, dams, stadiums, oil tankers, and all enormous man-made things.

Suppose 100 men and women are working at a site, and each one is accurate down to a hundredth of an inch. At the end, won't whatever they're building be off by at least an inch?

Murder most foul...Yawn

2011-04-02T14:24:00.000-07:00

Why are so many television shows and books devoted to murder?

Collecting forensic evidence, looking for fibers, and unravelling complex subplots and meta-plots. Some homicides are fascinating. Serial killers are morbidly interesting, and occasionally someone does something really bizarre like puts his wife through a wood chipper.

But all of those twisting and turning plots and big surprises and shoot-outs? Life's not like that at all. You mean what we see on television is not perfectly accurate? Afraid not.

If a spouse turns up dead, the prime suspect is always the husband or wife. That's about as complicated as it gets.

Most murders are solved through confessions, or by people who overhear other people talking about how they killed someone, or by people with information seeking to lessen their own prison time.

Also, the ranks of police departments are not filled with beautiful women who wear low-cut plain clothes. Female detectives look like regular women.

Moreover, there are so many more interesting topics than murder. But finding them is not as easy. Materials physics, quantum mechanics, robotics, fishing for crabs, logging, gun smithing, and history are all available on cable. Way more entertaining to see Bear Grylls eat insects or make himself a seal-skin vest, than one of the proliferating Murder She Wrote shows.

How common objects are made, bridges are designed, ore mined, the Panama Canal widened, all more interesting than "murder."

Despite Agatha Christie and her ilk, murder is tawdry, mundane, messy, miserable, and kind of boring -- unless you're the murderer or the murdered.

Snow fools the eyes

2011-04-02T13:53:00.000-07:00

Time to clear up some misconceptions.

We may not get any more snow now that April is here, but remember the big drifts of this past winter? The snow started out white and then after a few days, snow plowed to the side of the road turned gray and was dotted with pieces of dirt.

The typical explanation for the gray color is either "dirt" or "pollution" or dirt resulting from pollution. However, if pollution were falling so fast that it could discolor snow in two or three days, we would notice it everywhere -- on cars, sides of houses, clothes, shoes, statues, and so on.

Besides, the air pollution around here is tiny particulates (too small to see), and ozone smog. Acid rain would not color snow, would it?

The drifts' gray appearance is optical. True, there are motes of dirt and assorted garbage in the snow, but the gray is the result of melting. Take a look at the ice cubes in your freezer. They are not snow white, they're gray. Snow that melts and refreezes is the same.

Snowflakes, incidentally, are clear, but very reflective. Catch a flake in your hand. It's not white.

Ponder the color differences between rain clouds and fair weather clouds. The water-filled rain clouds are gray and the cumulus clouds are composed of zillions of clear droplets and appear white.

Yale research has also found that some bird feathers and insect wings are colored not by pigments, but by refracted light. Same thing with snow.

Now you know.

The electric toothbrush jive

2011-03-04T16:32:00.000-08:00

Just for fun, and to see how social networks function, start this rumor: Urinating while simultaneously using an electric toothbrush can cause electrocution.

This seems almost plausible if you don't think about it very hard, and is just weird enough to be true, if you don't think about it too hard.

Spreading rumors, or hoaxes, is hard work. You'll need to repeat the rumor to everyone you know, and have them repeat it ad nauseum.

What would all of this prove? That there's a reason the United States' ranking in science education is 48th out of 50.

I see jail and tidal waves in your future

2011-02-09T16:17:00.000-08:00

Romania is considering punishing witches and fortune tellers if their prognostications do not come true.

Why bother fortune tellers, you might ask. For one thing, the proposed law is aimed at Roma, or the people who used to be called "gypsies."

Romania must have more pressing problems than cracking down on something so trivial, but apparently Romanians are superstitious. Extremely superstitious.

But the parliament apparently did not figure out that the anti-fortune telling law is a logical riddle.

Suppose a man goes to a fortune teller, who predicts he will get hit by a falling piano. The man, who lives near a piano factory, goes home by a circuitous route to avoid the factory and any falling pianos. In this case, the man relied on the fortune teller, and took evasive action.

If a piano did actually fall, he would have escaped harm thanks to the fortune teller -- but then the fortune would be incorrect and she would face criminal charges. Seems like a paradox.

Or suppose she predicts vaguely that a client's relative is going to experience health problems. The client could then take the relative to the doctor for a check-up and thus double-cross fate. The logical fallacy actually works in favor of the people he or she cons.

Unless the fortune teller specifies a certain date, she can always claim that the event is in the client's future. Eventually, decades down the road, the client will develop a disease and will die. "Health problems" inevitably happen at some point in a person's life.

It might take decades or centuries for a piano to fall on someone's head. Would the fortune teller be released from prison if, 20 years later, a piano happens to fall on someone? Or would that just confirm that she is a witch?

Witches have their own angle. They can defend themselves by blaming the fortune-telling cards. This puts the card manufacturer in a fix. The card maker could then blame the company that made the stock on which the cards were printed, who could then blame the rags that the recycler delivered to make the stock. This road extends to infinity, or at least, to the beginning of the universe.

This is sort of a "you can't prove a negative" argument.

Now ponder Earth's changing climate. Skeptical politicians who refuse to recognize the problem are in the place of the Romanian parliament, and the fortune tellers are scientists.

As the Romanian example shows, the scientists cannot lose. And this is assuming that climate experts are simply guessing. Either the climate does change (it's in the process right now) or it may change in the future.

Maybe the Romanian parliament is just the body to deliver global climate change laws.

Forget the economy. Let me tell you about a bake sale!

2010-12-16T12:54:00.000-08:00

The Torrington Register Citizen, the New York Times tells us, is encouraging the public to visit its newsroom and attend afternoon news meetings.

Why? No one there has a clear explanation, according to the Times' story. It's possible to sell newspapers. No newspaper has yet figured out a successful or robust way to charge for Internet content. That's why the few thriving Web newspapers depend on grants from non-profit organizations.

Or, a company can distribute a paper for free to get advertisements into people's homes.

From all appearances, the reason to invite the public to help produce a newspaper is because the newspaper does not want a long payroll of reporters.

Think of it in this abstract way: Consider a circle including all events, big and small. Newsworthy events are small circles. Other goings on are squares. Events are newsworthy if they provide information about how tax dollars are spent, information the electorate needs to know in order to make rational voting decisions, or if the event is entertaining.

For example, a power plant exploding ultimately raises questions about whether the government was maintaining its responsibility to protect citizens. Tragedies also often provide grisly entertainment. Crime tells you how well your police force is working.

Sports, movie reviews, advice columns, local columns, letters, comics, and horoscopes may be informative, but are usually either thought-provoking or otherwise entertaining.

The reporter's job is to travel inside the circle and find the circles among the squares. This requires the skill to recognize a circle and/or the ability to convince officials to help pinpoint the circles. A higher number of reporters makes the task of gathering circles easier. You can collect more circles over a given amount of time, too.

Not all circles are simple. Often, circles are within circles, within squares, within circles. It may take time to find the circle in the middle. If you don't have the staff, those circles remain hidden and unknown.

Bringing "the public" (whatever that means) into the newsroom is casting a huge net and hoping that the people who appear will bring some circles with them. Or, more likely, the public, which is not monolithic, is likely to differ with editors about what constitutes a circle.

Citizen A, for example, might question the necessity of reporting a murder, or identifying the victims of a car crash. Citizen B could question why the newspaper publishes or posts so much bad news. Why not some good news? Citizen C might complain that the publication is simple-minded, and Citizen D may protest that the writing is too complicated to understand.

The jobs of the reporters and editors is to slog through all of the collected circles and squares, separate the two, and decide on the most important circles.

How will the public contribute to that process? That depends on who shows up on any given day. Will the editors follow the public's news judgment? If not, what benefits do the individuals accrue?

Another question is, who would be motivated to attend news meetings? Would suspects or crooked cops appear and demand that their stories be told? No. Do you want the mayor helping decide what you read? No. Will business owners reveal plans to lay off workers? No.

Will anyone newsworthy show up? Only for self promotion.

More likely, editors will hear about bake sales, scholastic sports, homeowner disputes, and public works complaints. And they may also be treated to the rantings of a few lunatics.

So, what does inviting "the public" into the newsroom accomplish? As far as I can tell, nothing, other than prior restraint.

Will "the public" compensate for a skeleton staff? Unfortunately, no.

Jesus wept

2010-12-16T11:54:00.000-08:00

The creepy thing about John Boehner weeping so readily on a variety of subjects, is that the tears seem prompted by self-pity.

Boehner's labile behavior is troubling when you consider other historic wallowers in self-pity. Richard Nixon, who resigned the presidency after his plot to undermine the Constitution was uncovered; Adolf Hitler, inventor of industrial mass murder to effect genocide; and Jimmy Swaggart, evangelist who sinned. You can think of many more.

Self-pity is not pleasant to watch.

There are plenty of reasons to weep. Being wrapped up in yourself is not a good one to put on public display.

Only a few of us remember cars

2010-08-03T14:47:00.000-07:00

A few generations ago there were people who remembered transportation exclusively on foot or by horse.

Some of them witnessed the transition from horse to automobile.

And right now lives a sub-population who will be able to tell their children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, about a time when the U.S. had an interstate highway system modeled after the German autobahn.

That was back in the age of automobiles.

Their kids will listen incredulously as parents tell them that everyone drove cars, machines run on internal combustion engines and fueled by gasoline. "What's gasoline?" a young one may ask.

You see, big companies that had a lot of influence over governments, pumped stuff called petroleum out of the ground. Petroleum is the fossilized remnants of ancient plants, and other stuff. The problem was that when you burn such fossil fuels to release the stored-up energy, one resulting exhaust gas is carbon dioxide.

Yeah, everyone knew that carbon dioxide was transparent to sunlight but opaque to re-radiated heat. Yes, that was discovered way before us old folk were born. Sure, people knew that fossil fuel emissions would change the climate, but the oil companies convinced the government to transport food and all manner of goods in big trucks on our version of the Autobahn, which Germany built before World War II to rapidly move military assets around the country.

Other countries developed advanced rail systems.

You know, Henry Ford built the first mass produced car. Well, yeah, he and Hitler got a long fine. But that's another story.

Driving cars was a ball! No, everyone was on the highway at the same time, staying between painted lines. Yeah, that was it. Yes, of course cars crashed into each other and people got horribly maimed or killed.

Hundreds of thousands of people every year. It wasn't just Volkswagens, there were many brands of cars made all over the planet.

We didn't know any better.

No, wait. We did. We just needed our space and independence. Yeah, that's all. The spirit of young individualist pioneers. Yeoman farmers. That kinda thing. I don't really remember.

Yes! One person to a car, usually. Using a steering wheel. No computerized radio control cables in the road, no.

People would drive around drunk and crash into other cars, and people would talk on cell phones and even try to text each other. It was insane.

After cities were redesigned into places people wanted to live in, not escape from, and work was only a few blocks away, that all changed. That's why we live in Bridgeport, and it's so nice. Old Bridgeport was pretty horrible. You wouldn't have liked it.

It took a while, but people got used to buses, and computer controlled vehicles programmed not to collide. And trains. And bicycles! You wouldn't believe how fat people used to be.

Yeah, I think it's much better now. There were a few decades where people were using fuel cells, wind mills, and other things to generate electricity, before the answer became so obvious. It's been like through out history. Once someone does it, it doesn't seem obvious anymore.

Okay. Time for bed.

You know, I may have to get a new pair of legs. These are beginning to kill me.

What has this country come to? I mean, really?

2010-08-03T14:01:00.000-07:00

Creating and building your own private business is good experience for lowering the horrendous unemployment rate in Connecticut, right?

That's what candidates who have started their own businesses say. But it's not true.

One caveat that few seem to have checked, is what businesses are the candidates referring to? What does Ned Lamont do? What did Linda McMahon do? She is married to Vince McMahon, the steroid tycoon who converted regional "wresting" into a national company.

Her campaign contends that she created "500 jobs" in Connecticut. Doing what? Writing scripts? Wrestling as independent contractors? Five hundred jobs, whatever they are, does not seem to have revived Connecticut.

McMahon et al, who are running on their supposed business acumen, do not understand one simple matter. Operating a state is not like being the executive of a company.

For openers, entrepreneurs seek to fill a consumer niche. Turns out a lot of adolescent types wanted to watch bulked up men gymnastically throw, hit, and jump on each other. That's why the WWE is successful.

A show about, oh, rebinding old books, or rock collecting, would not be a ratings smash.

Neither would feeding and sheltering the poor, providing them with medical care, or negotiating budgets. That is why government exists -- because it is the agency of last resort. Government does not need to make a profit. It gets its money from taxes.

Solving these kinds of problems is extremely difficult and requires a politician (from the Latin word for "government"). Here are some good politicians: Thomas Jefferson, Lyndon Johnson, FDR, and Winston Churchill.

Ronald Reagan and cronies made "politician" and "politics" into dirty words. This was part of the whole "starve the beast" decade of wealth distribution to the wealthiest, and the devil take the hindmost. If you're poor or unemployed, in this laissez-faire system, it is because you are inferior, unmotivated, and a malingerer. Or your ancestors were slaves kidnapped from Africa, and we all know, or we thought we did, that some "races" are superior to others.

At any rate, being able to sell ice cream in the desert is not the same as being able to sell a budget in Hartford. Or to negotiate. Or to convince people that paying taxes is morally superior to letting your neighbor starve, or sicken and die, in country full of food and doctors.

Ability to turn a profit does not make one a good governor or senator. Of course, it is possible to do both.

What does Ned Lamont do? He inherited a fortune, had a go at Cablevision and is founder and president of Lamont Digital Systems, which apparently wires up colleges with high-tech communications gizmos. He supposedly makes at least $500,000 a year.

What does Linda McMahon do?

Who cares?

Windmills of Doom?

2010-03-29T11:39:00.000-07:00

Windmill generators seem clean and environmentally benign, aside from the toxic insulation and other little pieces here and there.

But before we create forests of windmills, consider what they do. The sun's heat is distributed unevenly on Earth's surface, because the planet is more-or-less spherical, and continents handle heat differently than oceans.

As Earth tries to regain homogeneity, hot air moves north and cool polar air moves south, creating wind. Wind mills derive their power from wind. The wind turns the huge propeller blades, which turn a generator. Since the wind has given up a little energy, its velocity drops slightly. This is what's know as conservation of energy.

Now imagine that instead of one windmill, the countryside is covered with them, hundreds of thousands of them. Enough windmills, perhaps, to make the wind come to a complete halt? Just for fun, let's assume that this is possible.

Ultimately, the polar and equatorial temperatures cannot achieve equilibrium, so the tropics become blazing hot and he higher latitudes become freezing. As noted, this would take an incredible number of windmills, probably one standing on every square foot of land and sea.

So the effects, in the real world, might be more subtle. Maybe temperatures modify by a fraction of a degree. Then consider the windmill itself. It cannot be 100 percent efficient. Some of the rotational energy escapes as heat. The same applies to electric cars.

None can be totally efficient, meaning they emit some energy as heat. How much warm air would the windmills and electrical devices powered by them, produce? Enough to compensate, or maybe over compensate reductions in green house gases?

These may seem like silly questions, and perhaps they are. But if someone has asked 150 years ago what effect coal burning would have on the climate, that would have seemed silly, too.

Today's silly is tomorrow's scorch.

One day of snow does not a climate change

2010-02-12T01:28:00.000-08:00

Who knew that James M. Inhofe, Republican senator from Oklahoma, was a climatologist?

Oh. That's right. He's not.

Anyone who selects a particular storm to prove or disprove climate change just does not understand weather or climate, or what the difference is between the two. So, just because it snows way more than average in the usually milder parts of the U.S., does not mean the climate is changing or getting cooler.

Inhofe, the same guy who openly disdains the theory of evolution, was delighted with this week's mid-Atlantic blizzard because "snow" is the opposite of "warming." Or something like that. No one knows how his mind works.

Why argue that the atmosphere's average temperature is not increasing, when careful measurements show that it has over the past century? Heaven forbid that the federal government has to do something to slow the rate of carbon dioxide emissions. That's bad for business.

Oh. Wait a second. That's right. Developing and building alternative energy sources is good for business. That might mean most of the cars in the U.S. would have to be replaced, which would benefit the auto industry.

Some people might have to be put to work building and erecting windmill power turbines, or building nuclear power plants.

That's why China is is becoming the world's supplier of wind turbine blades.

And, incidentally, the horrible explosion at the under-construction power plant in Middletown this week created more casualties than any nuclear power plant accident in the U.S., ever. Three Mile Island? No one injured, no one dead.

As for the climate, consider this: warmer oceans put more water vapor in the air. If that extra water vapor happens to collide with cold air, you get lots of snow. If it gets wound into a hurricane, the result is a stronger hurricane. This is a gross over simplification, but the point is that virtually all climatologists predict that global warming would create exactly this kind of weather extreme.

A warmer planet, incidentally, does not mean that every place on Earth is like Miami. The global temperature is an average. Climate change could leave some parts of the world parched and hot, while other areas become cold and snowy.

Places like Oklahoma might experience more frequent and stronger tornadoes.

Does Inhofe believe in tornadoes?

Do-it-yourself nuke

2010-01-09T14:41:00.000-08:00

John McPhee is such a tease.

He wrote "The Curve of Binding Energy" in 1973, and rogues have yet to build a workable atomic bomb, as far as we know. If so, it is not because McPhee offers too little information.

We learn that a sphere of plutonium the size of a billiard ball would suffice. We're taught how to convert plutonium nitrate and plutonium oxide into more or less pure plutonium -- at home. And then the reader is basically taught how to fabricate a uranium weapon, by a former nuclear weapons designer, Theodore Taylor.

Taylor specialized in miniaturing nuclear weapons, giving us the W-54 warhead employed in the Davy Crockett 155 mm recoilless rifle. The W-54 had a puny yield compared to other nuclear weapons, but just right for a terrorist. The smallest atomic weapon in the U.S. arsenal, as far as the public is concerned, is the spacial atomic demolition munition, which also uses the W-54 device and weighs about 160 pounds.

Small fission devices are also necessary as the triggers for larger hydrogen bombs. Taylor made many "small" designs, but he refuses to disclose them explicitly to McPhee.

The question, if you are pretty much insane, is where to get your hands on the enriched uranium or the purified plutonium?

McPhee wrote in 1973 that the nation's large stockpile of plutonium, which is generated by civilian reactors, is stored casually in poorly guarded structures that could be breached in a few minutes.

What the intruder would have found 30 years ago were heavy casks each containing about 2 pounds of plutonium nitrate. Thieves take a few of them home. Then what?

(Caution: don't even think of trying any part of this, even minus the radioactive stuff. No kidding. )

Here's all they have to to: Add oxalic acid to the plutonium nitrate. Plutonium oxide crystals will precipitate out. Roast these crystals to dry them. Then you buy some hydrofluoric acid and heat it in a quartz crucible. Direct the hydrogen fluoride gas into the crucible and bake at 500 degrees centigrade. What you get is plutonium fluoride. Now take another crucible and line it with magnesium oxide. Add water to make a paste. Add 170 grams of calcium and 50 grams of iodine. Put 500 grams of plutonium fluoride in the crucible, top with argon gas, and close the container.

Heat to 750 degrees C. in an induction furnace. The mixture will react and heat itself up to 1,600 degrees. During the next 10 minutes, the crucible cools down to 800 degrees. Now take the crucible out of the furnace and let it cool to room temperature.

Then, if you've managed to do all of this without setting your basement on fire, blowing yourself up, or otherwise avoiding serious injury or poisoning, pour some nitric acid into the crucible to wash away the iodine flakes and calcium fluoride salt.

What you have left is a small lump of plutonium. Repeat several times, and then figure out how large a sphere you need to construct, and how thick a layer of explosives you must use to wrap around the sphere, and figure out a way to make all of the explosives detonate simultaneously to the plutonium sphere will be compressed to a supercritical mass.

One would require a fairly large, sophisticated laboratory equipped with the right, and not easily obtained chemicals, to carry this out. Configuring the plutonium is also not a trivial problem. The amount you need depends on what you use as a reflector.

You'd pretty much need to be a weapons designer like Taylor to carry this off. Making the plutonium is not the only problem, either. Plutonium metal exposed to humid air rapidly forms oxides and hydrides that crack off and burn spontaneously.

McPhee does not mention this part, perhaps purposely.

Well, wouldn't it be easier to hijack a truck carrying enriched uranium oxide powder on its way to fashioned into reactor fuel pellets?

Sure. Put four and half kilograms (about nine pounds) on a vibrating tray in a laboratory furnace, while heating up hydrofluoric acid in a stoppered flask. Guide the hydrofluoric acid gas through a tube to the furnace and heat up to 500 degrees C. What you end up with is uranium tetrafluoride, which you dump into a crucible with powdered magnesium and potassium chlorate.

Sounds like we're making fireworks.

Put the crucible into a strong steel container and then use something like a toaster coil to heat the mixture to 600 degrees. The uranium tetrafluoride and magnesium ignite, creating uranium metal and magnesium fluoride. Repeat.

McPhee's point seems to be that reckless, motivated lunatics unafraid of death, could conceivably synthesize materials necessary for making an atomic bomb. Many experts consider these scenarios farfetched.

They point out that stealing a bomb would be much simpler. The U.S. military is aware of this, and configures most bombs and other nuclear munitions with protective devices that render the devices unexplodable if tampered with.

McPhee's point about more closely managing and guarding nuclear materials is still valid. The U.S. is spending $250 billion to improve security at nuclear power plants, nuclear waste sites, weapons fabrication plants and munitions storage facilities.

Russia is also attempting to gather and protect fission and fusion weapons scattered across the former Soviet Union. International efforts to curtail proliferation must also be strengthened.

None of this is simple, but if we are frightened by a man who sets his underwear on fire in a passenger plane, we should be terrified at the thought of suicidal maniacs getting their hands on atomic bombs.

Decoding the Surrealistic Landscape of Health Reform

2009-11-20T23:10:00.000-08:00

By this time anyone reads this the arguments in Congress may be over.

Joseph Lieberman et al may have even prevented a vote. My prediction: Leiberman's next incarnation will be as Shining Path Maoist. Based on principle, you know.

Regardless, this whole "health care reform" plan is a travesty. It's a giveaway to private insurance companies, a sop for big pharma, and makes care more complicated for the average person to obtain.

Anyone who thinks about this issue, and does not work or lobby for, the insurance industry, can see that using private insurance and linking it to employment is a recipe for wasteful and inefficient spending.

The solution has been staring us in the face for decades, but particularly in the last few months.

Ready?

What we need is a single payer system.

This does not mean the end of private practice. In fact, it very closely resembles Medicare, which is, pardon the expression, a single payer system that is known to work.

The Veterans Affairs medical programs (some of which are a substandard disgrace) are also single payer, and if Republicans stopped obstructing and obfuscating everything that crosses their desks, Congress would allow an increase in spending for the VA health care system.

Somehow, I am chosen to participate in telephonic town hall meetings. Always happens at dinner time. The phone rings, I answer with typical trepidation, and am informed that I have been selected for this cyber town hall thing.

The first one was for U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who took many calls, a high percentage tearful, from people begging to know how health reform will help them. Small business owners were also wary.

When my turn finally came to talk, I asked, since most of the previous callers were complaining about medical insurers, why was the single payer option eliminated without serious consideration? Why are we catering to the insurance industry, I asked, and was then placed on "listen only."

I cannot recall was Rep. DeLauro said, but a male aid of hers told me that a single payer system would make workers who receive benefits through their jobs unduly "anxious" about the system.

Right. Workers have no anxieties in Connecticut, do they?

The answer was silly. When 64-year-old Americans become 65, they are eligible for Medicare, and he sky does not fall. The heavens do not darken. The federal government does not grind to a halt.

The 65-year-old receives a Medicare card, and gives the information to his doctor. His doctor probably takes Medicare cases. If not, he finds a doctor who does.

Covering everyone in the country with an expanded Medicare plan would cut billions of dollars in waste by insurance companies whose sole motive is to collect money, and keep money by refusing claims.

Given a choice between arguing with a disinterested government official and an unidentified professional confounder at an insurance company, I know what I would rather choose.

Instead of the simple Medicare for all plan, if health reform pans out, we will be able to keep the plans we're on, or shop for insurance from an exchange, including an anemic public option.

If you remember the complexity of Medicare Part D, the prescription plan with the famous doughnut hole, the coming plethora of plans will seem familiar. Figuring out the best, or least bad, Part D plan was the equivalent of breaking the German enigma enciphering machine.

The insurance companies would not release their formularies, and could change them without notice. There was a substantial penalty for not signing up quickly.

Well, you can imagine what "shopping on the exchange" will be like. You'll get a list of covered items, premiums and deductibles, along with a list of exceptions. Everything will require pre-authorization, I suspect.

One plan I recently saw for mental health requires prior authorization, and does not cover marriage counseling, pervasive developmental disorder, or a bunch of other conditions. You call the company for authorization and talk to someone, clearly not a doctor, with a Mumbai accent, I'm imagining.

If health care is a right, as some people claim, the system we are likely to end up with is a mockery.

Which also points out that regardless of what our elected officials say, our domestic and foreign policy is determined by ExxonMobil, Well Point, Humana, SmithKlineGlaxo, General Dynamics, Boeing Lockheed, and Wall Street.

Each woman is an individual and her breast care is her business

2009-11-20T22:02:00.000-08:00

The federal Preventive Service recommendations on mammograms is not about rationing health care, although it does involve economic considerations.

Repeat, the "fewer mammograms" suggestion is not about parsing care, it relates to breast cancer as a public health issue, not a personal one.

Here it is in a nutshell: Do the anxiety, biopsies, surgeries, and expenses of mammograms justify their current use by women, not at any special risk, starting at age 40.

Studies show that one case of breast cancer is discovered by mammogram per 1,904 women tested. The problem is that the other 1,903 women may receive false positive results, meaning that they then undergo a biopsy, and possible surgery.

complications in biopsy and surgery are rare, but not unknown. Depending on the skill of the doctor "reading" the mammogram, the x-ray may show benign lesions, cysts, or "artifacts" such as shadows that aren't really there.

Suppose there were an extremely rare fatal disease curable if caught before the age of 5. Say this disease struck 1 person in 1 million. Even if the test were cheap, easy and accurate, a million people would need to take and pay for the test to reveal that single case, on average.

Clearly, for the diseased individuals, these kinds of screening tests can be lifesaving. But what if your doctor recommended the test, even though the chances of it occurring in your child were minuscule?

You might ask your pediatrician if it made sense to test everyone, because the risk is only 1 in 1 million, getting time off from work is a hassle, a doctor bill is a hassle, and putting a toddler through a medical test is emotionally and physically draining.

On the other hand, diseases like measles, mumps and rubella were so common and the vaccines so inexpensive and effective that virtually all children in the U.S. receive them before they are allowed to attend school.

Currently, about 1 in 8 women will develop breast cancer in her lifetime. Breast cancer is not a single disease; there are aggressive, invasive types, and slow growing types. Women with certain genetic mutations are more likely to develop breast cancer.

So undergoing mammograms at age 40 seems reasonable.

The five-year survival rate for breast cancer in women in the U.S. is about 89 percent, which is encouraging.

Here's what puzzles and confounds many men and women. Canadians followed 40,000 women ages 50 to 59 in the 13-year study that concluded in 2000. The women were split into one group who received physical exams and another that were given mammograms.

The Canadians found that though more cancers were detected by mammograms, their death rates were no lower than the physical exam group. The inescapable conclusion is that yearly mammograms did not increase survival rates after cancers were detected.

Can this be true? It makes little sense. The methodology of the test was criticized, including the quality of the mammograms. The age of the participants is another issue. All of the women probably faced an elevated risk, skewing the results.

This is why it is so important to read and understand medical reports and journal articles. Why it is important to study biology and physiology. You don't need to agree with evolution to be a good doctor, though genetics is part of an educated person's knowledge.

Even if the study had been conducted perfectly, epidemiology has to do with large numbers of people. Medicine pertains to the individual.

So when all is said and done, here's what you should do: Consult your own doctor or doctors about whether they think you should get or delay mammograms. Because you're the person at risk for breast cancer.

This is your life, and you should not allow an obscure public health meta-study to dictate what medical tests you choose, and when you choose them.

Leave it the way you found it

2009-10-16T21:59:00.000-07:00

For mysterious reasons, many people seem concerned about the moon.

Recently NASA hit a crater on the moon with a bus-sized vehicle to see if there was frozen water under the dust. There was general alarm. Is it ethical to bombard another object in the solar system? Did we have the right? Are we in danger of messing up space?

Some of the people worrying about the moon do not have the same level of concern for global climate change on our own planet. But that's another story.

As anyone with binoculars or a telescope can tell, the moon has been hit hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of times by leftover solar system debris. The only places without craters on top of craters are the "seas" and "lakes" covered with relatively smooth melted and solidified rock. In a few billion years these areas will be just as pocked as the rest of the surface.

Humans have hit the moon repeatedly since the 1960s with jettisoned lunar landers, and probes of various kinds. Humans have left stuff there either because the instruments are impossible to retrieve, or the cars, tools, and all of that other moon landing material were too heavy, cumbersome or useless.

Should we dispose of garbage by sending it to the moon? No, of course not. Even if it were possible. it's just not right to trash a pristine world.

The idea of messing up space is different. Because, if you haven't noticed, most of the sky is space. Or it appears to be. There is a lot of invisible dark matter unaccounted for, not to mention dark energy.

If we ever want to get to another galaxy, scientists will have to figure out a non-destructive, practical way to bend or twist space.

That could make the trip short enough to tolerate. Unfortunately, whatever we beam up to warp space can only travel at the speed of light, so to reach a star 100 light years away, the beam would have to travel 100 years.

The irony is that once humans get to wherever they are going, it would turn out to be just like it is here, because Earth is a non-exceptional planet orbiting a non-exceptional star, in a non-exceptional galaxy in a non-exceptional universe, among million, billions, or an infinity of other universes.

So, the short answer is, don't worry about the moon.

Fate is full of fat

2009-10-07T15:39:00.000-07:00

A recent study found that posting the caloric content of fast food does not make any difference in what people order.

Come on. If you go to a place that fries or deep-fat fries everything on the menu, it's safe to conclude that the food contains a lot of -- yes -- fat.

Double maximize the order with a gallon of sugary soft drink, three or four patties of beef, or whatever that stuff is, top it all off with mayonnaise, or some other equally fattening, oily, condiment, and in one meal you exceed the number of calories you require for a day and a half, you get a month's worth of fat, and more sodium than you can shake a salt shaker at.

The problem with this study, at least as it was explained in a newspaper, is that by "posting," fast food places mean that the numbers are available if you search long enough and with a magnifying glass.

Some franchises list nutritional details in handy take-home folders, that the staff never places in your bag. Others have them on the wall, but the letters and numbers are only visible if you have a step ladder.

What we need is something that is chewy, like meat, that tastes like meat, and that contains something that feels like fat, and something else that tastes salty but isn't. Or foods like french fries could be cooked in highly pressurized and superheated helium.

McDonald's had a non-meat hamburger a few years ago. It wasn't bad, basically because it was slathered with mayo and ketchup, and loaded with pickles, lettuce, and so on. But it disappeared quietly. No one noticed.

Is there not some method to render tofu into an ersatz hamburger, a convincing one? There's got to be a way. Soybeans are certainly less expensive than beef. Do it right and no one would know the difference.

Because, as we now know, no one looks at the ingredients or the calories.

Watson, come here -- look out for that car! -- I need you.

2009-09-30T01:59:00.000-07:00

Some of today's teens are "texting" on their cell phones while driving.

This obviously is distracting. But the real question is, physically, how do they do it? Using the microscopic keyboards is difficult for palsied middle aged parents with paws, who are sitting at sitting at a desk, concentrating.

Are the drivers doing the texting with one hand, and steering with the other? Are they holding the electronics in both hands on top of the wheel? Can they touch-type, or touch-thumb, or however they manipulate the keys?

Changing the music on an iPod running through the car's radio is simpler, but still requires averting eyes from the road for about a minute or two, or roughly a mile or two at Interstate speeds. It's terrifying, but if you've been listening to Public Enemy for two hours and want to counterbalance your brain by switching to Schubert (or Schumann) for a while, you have no choice.

That is, unless you pull into a rest area, but who has time for that? And really, if you can keep the vehicle in your lane, what can happen in a mile and a half? Those of you who have experienced automobile collisions know that it's not the mile, the problem is the last 50 or 100 feet. Anyway.

A loony teenager, who was seriously injured texting and driving, was on television recently. She had been writing to a friend when she collided with a truck. After she recovered from a broken leg, broken pelvis, and a few other injuries, she went right back to text-driving, and had another crash. And she's still doing it!

The amount of multi-tasking, coordination, and fearlessness, is fascinating.

Never mind the irony of using a telephone to correspond when you could just talk. That was originally what was so liberating about telephones: Instead of laboriously writing, addressing, and posting letters, , you could just dial a few numbers and talk.

We need people like these driving texters to fly drones over Pakistan and Afghanistan. They might even be able to pilot a drone, fires missiles at the Taliban and drive, simultaneously.

If you're going to risk your life like that, and you can drive, read, write and think about something else, all at the same time, why not "give something back" to your country?

I'm the guy with the apple over his face

2009-08-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

Preparing for a recent flight out of Bradley, in Windsor Locks, I was treated to the updated homeland security scan.

Obviously we are not terrorists, nor did we want any on board. So we followed orders.

My family was first directed through a "sniffer," a machine that puffs air at you to detect traces of explosives. No big deal.

Then we had to stand with our arms extended, palms up, while personnel went over us with sensitive metal detectors. It detected the wire embedded in my sternum during heart valve repair surgery, and, of course, the zipper on my pants.

The security guy declined an offer to view my sternum scar, which I would have happily shown him. I did have to turn my belt buckle and pants over, to make sure, I'm not sure what for.

Again, no problem. Seemed like standard stuff.

Then, I was in front of a counter, behind which stood a woman, who had all of my personal items: my key ring and pill case, my wallet, my cell phone, pens, change, and a few other odds and ends.

The woman started to chat with me, as if to pass the time pleasantly. That's a pill case. What kind of pills? she asked. Prescription pills from home that I use to quell my claustrophobia inside airliners, I said. Alprazolam. Xanax.

In a hushed voice she said she knew someone who got hooked on Ambien. "So sad," she said. I declined to explain to her that Ambien and Xanax are not similar or similarly used. What was going on?

It began to dawn on me that she was interviewing me, looking for signs of something. Maybe I seemed nervous, or not nervous enough.

Then we came to my wallet, which she opened without concern. She leafed through some family photos, my insurance card, and an ancient press card I'd never bothered to remove. "Oh, you work at a newspaper," she said. How nice!

Used to, I replied.

Then she pulled out a pack of assorted do-it-yourself business cards, including a version containing a Magritte painting of a man's face obscured by an apple. "Is this you?" she asked, laughing.

No.

Then she pulled out a battery powered, credit card-sized magnifying glass that I had stuck in there and never used. This was what they suspected was a calculator. What's wrong with a calculator? Not sure.

Having answered that question, she gave my possessions back to me and we flew to Chicago on an Embraer jet.

No one I've spoken to has ever had his or her wallet opened and explored. Maybe she was new and extra zealous? I don't think so. Maybe she wanted to see my reaction to her pawing through my most personnel papers, doctor's numbers, bank statements from ATMs, a card of assorted passwords.

She crammed the looking glass thing back in the wallet and we were on our way, but the whole business left me with an uneasy feeling that would not lift. We were told that our family had been chosen at random for special attention.

Which is the dumbest, least effective way to catch would-be terrorists. Perhaps the random checks are intended to be a deterrent. That doesn't seem to make sense either.

The trip back to Bradley was uneventful.

But I still can't shake that feeling.

A Few Simple Steps to Happiness

2009-08-14T14:51:00.000-07:00

Scan the "health" magazines at Wal-Mart and you will recognize that versions of the same articles are published over and over.

There is always a story on how to quickly obtain a flat abdomen; the best way to lose weight; and the keys to higher quality sex. Freud famously wondered what women want, and apparently to this day no one knows.

Not even women. Especially not women.

The same holds for men, whom the magazines always portray as sleek, competitive business types obsessed with sports, sex with women, alcohol and adventure. But most men are not like that, just as few women achieve the weird look that marks the American female ideal.

Lists on the cover sell magazines, so you see "10 ways to trim fat," "12 days to six-pack abs," "26 ways to drive him wild in bed," "100 ways to get any woman you want," and so on. Have your cake and eat it too, in five easy steps.

All of the articles repeat the same advice, which everyone already knows: eat less, exercise more, and improve communications with your partner.

These adolescent issues coagulate in a new HBO series called "Hung," which features an impoverished man with a large penis who becomes a male prostitute for straight women. His pimp, a sensitive woman, has to keep reminding him not to behave like a Neanderthal.

The series is very amusing, and is sure to increase orders for cockeyed "penis enlarging" pills. These pills are sold in spam that you probably automatically discard. Yet these products are out there and even advertised on television.

This whole industry is an exercise in the placebo effect, because biologically speaking, there is no nostrum that will enlarge a specific part of the anatomy. Usually, things that make body parts bigger are bad.

Steroids increase muscle mass while destroying the liver and causing other unpleasant effects.

A steady diet of alcohol will enlarge one's liver to the point that it is a mass of fatty cells that no longer function. And, of course, no one wants to bulk up with cancerous cells. Bigger lymph nodes, larger eyeballs, enlarged gallbladders, swollen appendixes, growing prostates, thickened airways -- all bad, very bad.

Add it all up and neither men nor women take any prizes for brains, health or emotional well-being.

Maybe Freud was asking the wrong question.

Your quivering Voice Supposedly Gives You Away

2009-08-14T14:05:00.000-07:00

Emotions are so complex that there really is no way to physically detect liars.

Yet people keep trying to devise instruments to judge stress levels, breathing patterns, perspiration, blood pressure, increased activity in the frontal lobes, and other types of functional brain scanning to distinguish between truth and falsehood.

The polygraph was once considered to be a scientifically dependable method of detecting lies, except that the act of being "polygraphed" creates an enormous amount of stress, and everyone feels guilty about something.

Except for sociopaths lacking a conscience, empathy, or remorse. Consequently, the polygraph is usually used as a prop on the unwary, to squeeze confessions out of suspects. The results themselves are not allowed as evidence in a trial.

Now a voice analyzer has been patented and the inventor, Charles Humble, of the National Institute For Truth Verification, (whatever that is), contends that vocal cords can give you away.

To paraphrase a bit of his lengthy press release:

Humble, the founder of the NIFTV, created the CVSA II (Computer Voice Stress Analyzer). US Patent # 7,571,101, for “Quantifying Psychological Stress Levels Using Voice Patterns."

It should be obvious to all that we speak differently when sad, angry, guilty, depressed, anxious, sleepy, bored, insulted, humiliated, praised, rebuffed, and on and on. Since there is no one location for "lying" in the brain, a lie must be gathered from an array of mysterious places in the brain.

This is why voice stress is no different than polygraph. Same idea, different technology.

There are less expensive ways of obtaining confessions, according to research conducted in China during the Korean War. Under duress, sleep deprivation, disorientation, and continual questioning, most people will ultimately confess to anything, just to end the torture.

People also make notoriously bad eye witnesses.

Scientists currently have to real idea of how the brain works. They understand the functions of nerves, and can detect activity in brains, but how do we think? No one has a clue.

Not even, thank goodness, people like Charles Humble.

To hell with the bill of rights

2009-08-03T16:17:00.001-07:00

This may come as a shock, but victims of crime in this country do not have any special rights.

They have the same civil rights as anyone else. No more, no less.

That includes the right to a trial, to face accusers in court and to be considered innocent unless proven guilty. Defendants have these kinds of rights because they need protection from the state or federal governments, which in certain cases are trying to kill them, or lock them up for life.

The states and federal government enjoy a tremendous advantage over the average individual. As George W. Bush showed, the government can pluck people from literally anywhere and stick them in a prison indefinitely, without requiring that they be charged, or informed why they are imprisoned, and without any recourse.

That's why our Constitution guarantees criminal suspects certain rights. Like the presumption of innocence, even if "everyone knows" that the suspects are guilty. In a case like this, "victims rights" comes across as "No need to wait for a trial, let's string 'em up right now."

That's why upholding the Constitution is so important, even when dealing with people who allegedly murdered a doctor's wife and killed the couple's two daughters by tying them to beds and setting them on fire.

It is unsightly and even a bit frightening when the surviving doctor complains that the suspects have not been executed quickly enough.

Let's just string 'em up right now.

Lying about health care

2009-08-03T15:59:00.000-07:00

Many of the opponents to health care reform seem to require some health care themselves -- mental health.

Members of the "Tea Party," (whatever that really is) contend that Hitler and Stalin both instituted government-controlled health care, with disastrous results. Yes, the two dictators killed millions of their own, but not through health care.

Nazi Germany relied on an out of pocket system, unless the patient was born with certain "defects," in which case he might be euthanized to keep the gene pool clean. In the Soviet Union, everything was government run, at least officially.

Most Russian doctors were women, and were not well paid. The authorities dealt with subversives by putting them in "mental hospitals" where they were drugged into oblivion and otherwise rendered mad.

But Hitler and Stalin are not the point here. No politician is suggesting that the government should take over health care. This is unfortunate because a majority of Americans seem to prefer a single-payer government system, like Medicare or the Veterans Administration system.

Meanwhile, emergency departments are increasingly becoming primary care givers, which does no one any good, insurance companies only issue policies to young healthy people, which does most people no good, or they charge outrageous and unaffordable premiums.

What is true, is that the United States is the only industrialized country in the world without a national health care system.

That's what history will record.

Oh, those sludgy squdgy valves.

2009-06-13T21:40:00.000-07:00

Shell says in its recent batch of television commercials, that the petroleum titan is adding nitrogen to its gasoline to clean gunk off of valves and other moving parts.

Those who understand how an automobile engine works should immediately recognize the colossal blunder in the ad.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere is already almost 80 percent nitrogen by volume, so there's already loads of the inert gas entering the cylinder. After the gasoline burns, the catalytic converter quickly breaks the nitrogen oxides created at high temperatures, into nitrogen gas and water.

So, what is it Shell is adding? Nitrogen is present in protein, and countless other compounds. But it is most often associated with explosives, (the nitro in nitroglycerin), ammonia, hydrazine rocket fuel, ammonium nitrate, and all sorts of nasty stuff. Of course, so is oxygen, carbon, and every other element, other than xenon, helium, and stuff like that.

Did you figure out the blockhead mistake in the ad yet? The ad shows gasoline showering down on a cylinder valve, cleaning away accumulated sludge. That would mean gasoline in the rocker panels and on the cam shafts. Gasoline never gets into cam shaft territory and certainly does not stream onto the tops of cylinder valves.

The only gasoline that hits the top of a valve would be a gas-air mixture, vapor really, from an ancient device called a carburetor, which cars don't use these days.

That makes the add doubly mysterious. Companies put all sorts of compounds into gasoline to maintain the engine, such as nitrogen-containing detergents, petroleum distillates, and who knows what else. But nitrogen?

And someone should have pointed out that if gasoline reaches the external tops of the valves, something is seriously wrong with the engine, like it's in the middle of a horrendous crash and is disintegrating.

To clean the tops of the valves, put some cleaning goop in the oil. Gasoline goes into the cylinders via the valves, and the valves are lubricated and cleaned, or not, by oil that circulates through the engine.

T0 clean the underside of the valves, where the high temperature gas-burning takes place, add something to the gasoline.

Don't expect that nitrogen-laced gasoline is going to make your engine last 500,000 miles.

Mommy, can I please get this toy bull pup assault rifle?

2009-06-04T13:39:00.000-07:00

Why are children, especially boys, drawn to guns?

Many parents avoid buying toy guns, do not expose their babies to violent TV shows or games, and yet, the youngsters want squirt guns, Nerf guns, or will fashion substitutes.

More than one baby has bitten a piece of toast into the shape of a pistol, horrifying and puzzling his parents.

While babies seem to be born with an innate fear of heights, darkness, snakes, and a few other things, gun lust is unlikely to be genetic. Aggression may be in our genes, but not the preference for a particular weapon.

Children must acquire a knowledge of guns from their environment. Television shows have greatly reduced explicit gun violence. Twenty or thirty years ago the Lone Ranger, Eliot Ness, Ben Cartwright and other characters routinely shot and killed people. The victims, not displaying any injury or blood, instantly dropped dead.

How does a child shielded from CSI, Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear Solid, Mortal Kombat, and restricted to family-friendly Disney movies, learn about guns?

Possibly because of what's happening in the world.

Most children won't go near a newspaper, but the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan leak in through discussion, and television news. Columbine and other notorious school shootings are over-covered by 24-hour news channels, and are apt to be overheard.

Perhaps the knowledge comes through their friends: "I'll be Osama bin Laden and you be the 10th Mountain Division. I'll take the AK-47 and you get the M-16."

Maybe a gun, even a toy one, gives children a feeling of safety in a post 9/11 world with a scary former vice-president predicting Armageddon, flag-draped coffins being unloaded from Air Force cargo planes, neighbors being shot, and stray rounds crashing through bedroom walls.

Can you really blame a kid for wanting to protect him or herself, even symbolically?

People, pellets and public health

2009-06-04T12:00:00.000-07:00

Almost everyone is mixed up about air guns.

Let's briefly put aside the issue of taking an air gun to school and shooting a fellow student.

That obviously is wrong and requires disciplinary action. The 9-year-old Celentano School student who shot an airsoft gun at a another boy on a bus probably now appreciates that carrying a weapon of any sort, even something as innocuous as an airsoft gun, poses more risk than safety.

"Air gun" encompasses many different types of weapons, ranging from toys to rifles capable of killing small game.

Airsoft guns were introduced in Japan in the 1980s for teens fascinated with real guns, which are illegal and difficult to find there. Participants played a "combat" game like paintball with these plastic guns, which were considered toys.

Air soft guns employ bright orange barrels to indicate that they only fire plastic pellets, but it is a simple matter to paint the barrel or cut it off.

They were considered toys because they fire small (6 mm) plastic pellets at a slow velocity. Since kinetic energy equals the mass of the pellet times the velocity multiplied by itself, and all of that divided by two, it is clear that the only way to seriously injure someone with an airsoft gun is to use it like a club.

The one exception is that eyes are delicate and unprotected, so goggles had to be worn, along with plastic "armor."

Then there is the BB gun. BB guns were devised to fire BB-sized bird shot. Most BBs are made of steel or copper. The .177 caliber spheres can travel at 300 to 400 feet a second, and could conceivably cause serious injury. These are not toys.

The next step up the air gun line is air rifles. Some use a built-in pump to compress air. More powerful air guns compress air using a large, powerful spring. The highest quality air rifles are made in Germany and cost more than conventional firearms.

Spring loaded air rifles can fire a .177-cal. pellet at up to about 1,000 feet a second. The speed of sound is about 1,100 feet a second, and supersonic pellets make a loud "crack," which is self-defeating. Europeans (mostly) use these weapons to eliminate rats, and keep rabbits, starlings and other unwelcome small animals away from farm lands.

The most powerful air rifles propel .22-cal pellets at 800 to 900 feet per second.

Many of these rifles are used for target shooting in lieu of conventional rifles, because air rifles are the same size, but are relatively quiet, use inexpensive ammunition, and do not require a permit.

All air rifles should be treated as "real" guns, should be equipped with trigger locks, locked in a cabinet, and pellets should be locked in another container. As with firearms, you always act as if the rifle is cocked and loaded, never point it at anything you do not intend to shoot, and consider what is behind the target, because it is in the line of fire.

Hardly any robber uses an air rifle because the arms are large (45 inches long), heavy and unwieldy. Moreover, a conventional pistol has a higher muzzle velocity and much heavier projectiles, and can readily inflict lethal wounds.

Consequently, many criminals use use real-looking airsoft guns, or pellet-firing pistols to commit crimes. Perhaps they think that using an air weapon will aide their legal defense when caught, but it doesn't.

But air soft gunfs are cheap and easy to acquire and are sufficiently gun-like to scare potential victims. The least we can do is make realistic toy guns illegal.

If kids want to play games -- and they seem to be genetically programmed to fight mock battles -- they can use Nerf guns that are fancifully shaped and shoot light foam cylinders at low velocity. No one could confuse a Nerf gun with the real thing.

Ultimately, here's what needs to happen: toy manufacturers must stop producing realistic-looking weapons; air rifle ownership should be regulated, and only people with a demonstrable need should be allowed to own real firearms.

Unfortunately the Second Amendment is ambiguous and grammatically obscure, so gun fanciers and the firearms lobby will continue to ensure that gun ownership if widespread.

The question is, would the National Rifle Association consider a ban on air soft guns to be an assault on our Constitutional rights?

How about a bit of common sense

2009-05-14T19:53:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of reasons that people in other countries are not cozy with the United States.

Here is one minor example of why.

The problem here is drill bits, or rather, describing the diameter of drill bits. The rest of the world uses the metric system, which is simpler than whatever it is that we're using.

Here's the assortment of bits: 1/16th of an inch; 5/64ths; 3/32nds; 7/64ths; 5/32nds; and 3/16ths. Using this method requires thinking about common denominators, admittedly not a tough mathematical problem, for the most part.

Seven 64ths of an inch is one 64th from being 1/8th of an inch. Three 32nds is one 32nd from 4/32s, or 1/4th of an inch. What's the difference between 5/32nds and 3/16ths? One 32nd of an inch. Why not make all of the bits in 32nds? Too simple.

In the metric system, the same set is 1.59 millimeters; 2 millimeters, 2.38 mm; 2.8 mm; 3.18 mm, 3.97 mm and 4.8 mm. There are 25.4 mms in 1 inch. So 2.38 mm is a little less than 1/10th of an inch, which we call 3/32 of an inch. Which is a little less than 1/10th of an inch.

Can't we at least use 10ths of inches? Instead of using odd little increments like 5/32s?

Or, you can ignore the whole thing and just eyeball which bit you want. Then a few weeks later your shelves fall off the wall.

Phone home if you dare

2009-04-07T01:55:00.000-07:00

Chances are that once in a while your cell phone cannot project its tiny radio signal to the nearest relay tower.

So, it's not like you're holding a 50,000-watt transmitter against your head. You're holding a thing the size of a pack of gum.

Yet researchers in Australia have concluded that using a cell phone (against the ear) for 10 years doubles the risk of brain cancer (for you, not them). Aside from the fact that dozens of studies of the same hypothesis have found absolutely no link, 60 Minutes, the Australian version, apparently, decided that a man with brain cancer must have developed it because he used a cell phone.

This guy is a farmer. Who was he talking to? Anyway, the report, by a hyperventilating Aussie, would be enough to make you throw away your LG unless you think about it for a fraction of a second.

First off, we are constantly bombarded through and through with FM, AM, shortwave, emergency band, and other sources of radio waves. If you could see radio waves, your room's walls would be glowing furiously. Not to mention television, computers, and everything else that creates electromagnetic radiation.

Remember: 20 years before cell phones there were cordless phones. Now almost everyone has a cordless phone, even though it seems to old fashioned. Cordless phones work by -- you guessed it -- radio waves, from your phone to your base station.

So we should have seen the doubling of brain cancer by now. And yet we haven't. Just to get to the heart of this, some electromagnetic radiation is sufficiently energetic that it can knock apart atoms and molecules. This is called ionizing radiation, x-rays for example, and they are not good for you.

Radio waves, on the other hand, have far longer wavelengths, and consequently, they are way less powerful. Radio waves do not ionize. Microwave ovens do not ionize. Gamma rays ionize. Cells phones, no.

This business with cell phones is worse than Paul Brodeur and his fantasy about carcinogenic electromagnetic fields around power cables. There may actually be something to that. Probably not, and if there is, it is so rare that it is impossible to pick out from the epidemiological noise.

The opposite of, say, working in a coal mine and developing black lung disease.

Just to be on the safe side, hold the cell phone at arm's length and yell into it. Especially while on public transportation.

A billion is way bigger than a million.

2009-03-21T15:10:00.001-07:00

Okay. Here's a little math for people who are livid about $165 million in "bonuses" to employees of the corporate carcass once known as American International Group.

AIG received $30 billion from the Federal Reserve to somehow rid itself of insane insurance policies on a sliced and diced mixture of below-prime-rate mortgages. Or, what we now call "toxic assets."

How galling is it for a Greenwich millionaire cum-crook to get a million or two or three dollars for sabotaging the company while becoming filthy rich, causing untold misery to everyone else?

Pretty high on the Gall Scale. Right up there near the top.

But people want the money back as recompense for the $30 billion. Let's consider the numbers 165 million and 30 billion.

One million is 1 followed by 6 zeroes One billion is 1 followed by 9 zeroes. Three additional zeroes, or you might say, three orders of magnitude. Now, think about it.

Since Earth's population is about 6 billion, then 30 billion would be the number of people on five Earths. By contrast, 165 million is about the populations of the 10 largest cities on Earth.

Or, to put it another way, 1 million seconds is 13 days. One billion seconds is 31 years. A million hours ago it was 1855. A billion hours ago humans did not exist.

One more. There are about 10,000 grains of rice in a cup. Sixteen cups equals 1 gallon of rice. So, 1 million grains of rice would be 6.5 gallons. One billion grains of rice would be 6,500 gallons.

Consequently, $165 million is about half of one percent of $30 billion. It's chump change.

Of course, $165 million would make us chumps pretty rich -- but paupers compared to a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffet.

By the way, 1 trillion seconds ago Neanderthals were hunting mammoths and trying to stay warm.

Earmarks for dummies

2009-03-21T14:06:00.000-07:00

Many trivial-sounding "earmarks" are criticized as a waste of money, usually by people who don't understand the value of basic research.

Earmarks have faded from the news, pushed into the background by enormous bail-outs that are orders of magnitude larger than the supposed pet projects in the proposed federal budget.

Here are a few projects revealed earlier this month by New York Time columnist Maureen Dowd:

+$2.1 million for the Center for Grape Genetics in New York. There's nothing funny about this to the growing U.S. wine industry. There are roughly 600 varieties of grapes, 54 of which comprise the main ingredients in most wines around the world.

Genetics are very important to wine.

Phyllorexa, a plant louse that loves grape leaves, appeared in the 18th century, first in America and then in Europe. Ultimately, after some back and forth, America began to provide phyllorexa-proof roots to Europeans, who graft on local grape varieties.

The point is, resistance to rot, insects, fungus, nematodes, etc. lies in genes, and the more we understand about grape genes, the safer the wine industry. California's wine industry alone is worth about $20 billion a year. So $2 million to assure its safety seems like a n0-brainer.

+ $1.7 million for a honey bee factory in Texas. Bees are essential to pollinating many crops, and bees are mysteriously disappearing. If the factory helps figure out what's going on the money will be well-spent.

+ $1.7 million for pig odor research in Iowa. Big joke, except that pig poop could be a source of biofuel, either by collecting the methane it gives off as it rots, or through some other biomass process. Do you want to live next to a pig fuel plant? No, because of the odor. So this grant has a serious purpose.

+ $2 million to develop and promote astronomy in Hawaii. Part of the reason that astronomy is conducted in Hawaii is because the mainland is wasting prodigious amounts of light, lighting up the night sky and obscuring stars, galaxies, and possibly even some planets. The skies over Kitt Peak (near Tuscon, Arizona) are way clearer than the skies over the East Coast. But Arizona cities are spreading like phyllorexa.

What's important about astronomy? Are you curious about the origin and future of the universe and the solar system; life on other planets; or the possibility of colonizing Mars or predicting asteroid collisons? That's astronomy.

There's more, but you get the idea.

A couple of centuries ago, how ridiculous it would have seemed to study why apples fall to the ground. That story about Isaac Newton may be apoccryphal, but you never know where a simple question will lead.

House Rules

2009-02-12T18:39:00.001-08:00

This is an obvious question, but why does no one really know how to put the economy back together?

If an airliner crashes, experts can find the faulty part or parts and correct them. If a bridge collapses, building a new, safer, bridge is not a mystery. Should a new bacterial or viral pathogen emerge, researchers have some idea how to cope with it.

But the U.S., economy, is different. Iceland went under. They're no less intelligent than we are. How could they not stop that from happening? People are being cast out of their homes, jettisoned from their jobs, and left living in cars, and fixing the whole mess is an inexplicable mystery.

Incompetent executives are rewarded with truckloads of money. The people who seem to have created this disaster are now collecting billions or trillions of dollars. Those two problems are clear, but somehow impossible to fix.

Sure, securities, and credit markets and the fed, mortgages and loans are complicated. But are they really so complicated that no one knows how to wrestle them back into order? Is our economy like a nuclear power plant that's so complicated that its operators will be faced with crises they do not recognize?

Everyone knows: write off the useless securities cobbled together with sliced and diced mortgage loans to people who could not afford to pay them. Who pays? The cobblers, slicers and dicers, with money borrowed from the treasury.

How could there be more than one opinion on how to proceed? Is righting the economy like choosing between a suspension bridge and a truss bridge? That does not seem to be the case, because such an issue could be solved relatively easily by comparing cost, durability, capacity and longevity.

Why should we suppose that economics is rational? Because there is a Nobel prize in economics. People study economics. Is it a branch of mathematics, philosophy, or psychology?

Or is economics a spongy discipline like sociology?

It's hard to tell because economics is both abstract and immaterial. There seems to be no applied economics. It's all just bits of symbolic data flowing through computers, and apparently, no one really understands it.

Or, some people understand economics but they keep everyone else in the dark so that they can make fortunes, at others' expense.

Trilobites redux mea culpa, ipso facto

2009-02-10T18:50:00.000-08:00

As readers -- if there are any -- of this thing know, I am very partial to trilobite fossils.

The first ones I acquired were at the Peabody Museum. An Elrathia Kingii, I believe, a few Ptychagnostuses, (they're small), and a bunch of Diacalymenes, many of which are found in Morocco.

Then I had to have more. A giant Phacops, from I don't remember which store. These shops are around if you look for them. Many of the fossils were scratched as only Moroccans can scratch them. I bought them anyway.

As I became more serious, I acquired "Trilobites," by Riccardo Levi-Setti, who just found a new species. This book contains photos of some of the best finds, including a few whose soft limbs were preserved in iron pyrite. These fossils are locked up in the Peabody, along with many other fantastic specimens.

I collected and collected, and spent and spent, like a lunatic, until I accepted the fact that I could never collect "one of everything" unless I had billions or trillions of dollars, and that my collection would never be as magnificent as Levi-Setti's.

Almost all of my little buddies (some call them "bugs") are now resting in the attic. I keep four out for show. One has eye stalks (broken off and glued back on), another has small spines, and the third is curled up so that his cephalic spines, cheek bones, if you will, are sticking up like a "U."

The fourth is a very nice mortality plate of a species I have not identified. Either their molted shells were collected by currents, or a living bunch of them were buried under silt. This one is a Moroccan fossil, purchased by me at the Peabody, and has scratches all over it, and fissures where the plate broke and was glued together (not uncommon). It is a very good piece, and probably could have sold for $500 to $800 on the Web.

It's wonderfully three-dimensional, with trilobite atop trilobite. All together there are about 15 trilobites. I am slowly grinding away at some of the worst scratches.

I'm only going into this much detail, because I know from Google analytics that perhaps 7 people read this mish-mosh once in a while.

Anyway, the point is that I belatedly heard that some of the Peabody staff were made uncomfortable by the last entry I wrote about Moroccan trilobites made out of Bondo.

I feel bad about this. I never meant to imply that they were trying to foist fakes off on the public, or were acting in any but the most honorable way.

My feeling is that this country is trilobite-illiterate, and someone, somewhere, has to make a stand.

I think everyone ought to know about trilobite fossils. The sad truth is that some of them are half Bondo, (the fossils, I mean), but this is not the museum's doing. It goes on all over the place. Maybe all sellers of fossils should post little cautionary signs.

Nothing bigger than an Elrathia. That's all.

And besides, the gift shop is one of my favorite places, and, really, when you get down to it, I don't know anything about anything.

Oh, What a Tangled Web

2009-02-02T14:02:00.000-08:00

The jungle under the desk is puzzling.

All of the cables, lines, transformer boxes, hubs and the rest of the connections that keep the computer and all of the peripherals functioning together inevitably turn into a tangle.

And not a trivial tangle -- this morass of copper wire is practically impossible to straighten out. The reasons are not clear. There must be an applicable branch of mathematics, topology, knot theory, that could explain how and why the tangle happens, and more importantly, how to resolve it. The Koenigsberg bridge problem, that kind of thing.

Why bother? The tangle makes diagnosis of hardware issues extremely difficult. If a drive disappears from the desktop, is it because it is unplugged, or did the USB cable detach, or is it a more serious problem?

The other issue is fire prevention. Somehow a knot of electrical cords seems hazardous, although circuit breakers would presumably trip before the whole house is engulfed.

One issue seems to be that the power lines and the cables want to go in different directions. All of the plugs want to go to the power strip, while the cables seek a firewire hub, a usb hub, the back of the computer, speakers, or the desk top. (The real desk top, the piece of wood holding up the computer).

The other problem is that the cords are too long. This would not be a drawback unless you're working in an room the size of a broom closet and all of the component are on top of each other. A six-foot cable connecting components that are 18-inches apart leaves a lot of extra cord available for a tangle.

The collected wires seem to want to tangle. A straightened out set of wires can turn into a jumble if you look away for a second.

Consequently, the non-tangle strategies involve bundling and shortening. "Bundling" here means wrapping wires into loops and then either putting a rubber band around them, or sticking them inside a plastic cable tube.

We all remember from physics that moving a wire through a magnetic field generates a current, and that sending an alternating current through a wire creates a magnetic field. This is how electric motors, transformers, and many other devices work. It's called induction.

The question, then, is, are all of those knots of cable under the desk radiating magnetic fields, and if so, what potential effect could that have on how the hard drives, and all the rest, function. Perhaps the wires are supposed to be in a tangle to prevent this from happening.

One of these bundles will make a cheap compass deflect a little bit. So the confined wires are creating magnetic fields of some intensity. Is the person sitting at the desk unknowingly bathing in several electromagnetic fields? What if Paul Brodeur was right?

We know that it is possible to make a fluorescent tube glow if you hold one on the ground under high voltage wires. Is the field from the wires creating a current in the tube? Let's put all of these questions aside for a moment.

Shouldn't there be a formal way of laying out a configuration of wires in such a manner that you're not inadvertently creating transformers under your desk? Algebraic geometry anyone? Matrices? Functions?

So, you can see that trial and error is the least complicated way forward. Or so it would seem.

See all of those diagrams? Or attempted diagrams?

How can you find a solution when you can't even figure out the problem. Let's hope the house doesn't burn down.

There's no fossil in that fossil

2009-01-27T10:28:00.000-08:00

With a heavy heart, someone must reveal the secret about the trilobites for sale at the Peabody Museum gift shop.

Otherwise, a visitor may pay hundreds of dollars for a lump of mostly epoxy formed to look like a trilobite fossil. Or, a few real fossils epoxied onto a piece of Devonian rock.

All of this confusion could be avoided if the merchandise was correctly labelled. For example, "model fossil for educational purposes or display."

For those who don't appreciate a good trilobite, they are long-extinct marine creatures with antennae, lots of legs, shells, and other arthropod features. They also possessed compound eyes.

Trilobites, as the name suggests, are composed of three segments, a central "spine" with rows of "legs" or "gills" on both sides. They lived between 550 million and 250 million years ago. There were hundreds of species, from the tiny to foot-long.

They are found in sedimentary rock that is 250 to 550 million years old. Such outcroppings occur in the Western United States, New York state, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Basically, everywhere except New England.

Some of the most spectacular specimens are found embedded in rock that comprises the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Many of these fossils are laboriously removed from the rock using tiny sand blasting tools and picks. These fossils tend to be expensive because separating one kind of rock from another complex shape of different composition, is time consuming.

Enterprising Moroccans also dislodge fossils from the same areas. They do not have expensive tools or the inclination to spend days slowly removing the matrix rock. Instead, they use screw drivers, nails, and and whatever else is handy to scratch away the matrix.

Thus, it's possible to instantly recognize most inexpensive Moroccan fossils. They are crudely scratched. Others are unscathed, but sometimes assembled from fragments of different fossils. They tend to be either tan or black, in gray or rust-colored rock.

The fossil producers discovered a long time ago that most souvenir collectors cannot distinguish between a real fossil and one made mostly out of the type of epoxy used to repair automobile bodies.

Epoxy is hard, like rock, malleable before it sets, and easily scratched.

The trilobites at the Peabody are from Morocco and some show obvious signs of modification or assembly. Hints: If many fossils are on a quilt-like surface of different shades, chances are that these real fossils were cemented together to form a more expensive plate. The other typical Moroccan fake is the large Paradoxides of the Redllichiida order.

The fossils appear to be tooled and outlined and the rock (or whatever that stuff is) is carved with attractive radiating lines.

A few years ago a lunatic such as myself brought this to the attention of the museum. This guy washed off the Paradoxides he had purchased there. The underlying "fossil" was suspiciously colored, and the border between colors was a straight line. Our sleuth disassembled more of the fossil and found that there wasn't any fossil in the fossil.

He brought his findings to the museum's attention, but was brushed off. So today, you can go to the gift shop and still see modified, doctored trilobite fossils.

This is ironic, because the Peabody has one of the best and most significant collections of real trilobite fossils in the world.

These specimens are beautiful and priceless. Unlike the crude recreations in the gift shop.

Coffee does a lot, but can it keep you sane?

2009-01-27T10:02:00.000-08:00

The idea that coffee reduces the risk of dementia is kind of silly, if you think about it.

First of all, coffee has many effects. Too many to narrow down. For example, coffee could reduce the hours spent sleeping, or might increase exercise. We also know that it is a diuretic, and that it makes the heart beat faster and increases blood pressure. And it's a stimulant.

All of that aside, consider the history of coffee consumption and the incidence of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. Per capita coffee consumption was about 20 gallons in 1910. It was also about 20 gallons in 2005. Coffee drinking peaked just after World War II, to just under 50 gallons per person per year. Then soft drink consumption rises, and coffee declines back to early 20th century levels.

So, since most dementia has a decades-long latency period, many of the people who are slipping away now were born at a time when coffee drinking was highest. Consequently, their parents drank a lot of coffee. They were still drinking more coffee growing up than people drink today.

So, one might ask, why is dementia and Alzheimer's increasing as the rate of coffee consumption drops, if coffee protects against dementia?

One obvious factor is that people are living longer now than ever before. Many people probably used to die from other causes before they had a chance to develop dementia.

In other words, the coffee hypothesis makes no epidemiological sense. The crude data seems to suggest that coffee drinking is linked to higher rates of dementia. But, as we all should know, linkage doesn't necessarily reveal any causal connection.

The only positive side to this research is that it encourages behavior that's already taking place. People do not have to give up coffee, the same way they're supposed to quit smoking and cut back on fatty foods.

Keep the java coming.

What's that analemma for, anyway?

2008-12-28T22:56:00.000-08:00

If you're lucky, you live in a house with an analemma.

It's not a pet, but an interesting feature printed on certain globes. It looks like a stretched out figure eight, and is where the sun would be in the sky if you took a photo of it at the same time every day for a year.

Those who live on the equator would see the sun move east and west, while someone at the North Pole...What would he see?

Believe it or not, the sun does trace this stretched out 8.

The sun is at its lowest point in the 8 on or around the winter solstice and at the top of the 8 on the summer solstice. (In the Southern hemisphere the analemma is upside down.)

Two factors produce this oddity. The first is that Earth is tilted at about 25.4 degrees to the plane of its orbit. That accounts for the east to west to east to west movement. The north to south apparent motion is a consequence of the Earth's orbit.

This should not come as a surprise, but the orbit it an ellipse. Consequently, the planet speeds up when it is nearest the sun, in January, and slows down when it's farthest away, in July. The difference in speeds is confounding, because our clocks are designed as if the orbit were a circle.

Practically, this means that your watch is ahead for six months and then behind for six months,

compared to where the sun should be in the sky. This difference is called the Equation of Time. We never hear about this for some mysterious reason. We just keep following our watches and clocks, and let the sun do its own thing.

What if you want to construct your own analemma? You could do it with a stationary camera, but it gets complicated. Either all of the exposures must be on one piece of film, or all of the frames must be assembled and superimposed at the end.

Or, make one of those contraptions for viewing solar eclipses: a box with a pinhole at one end and a piece of paper at the opposite end. Now, all you have to to is keep the box in the exact same spot for a year, and at the same time every day, look inside, see where the sun is projected on the paper, and put a dot there.

After a year, you should have an elongated figure eight shape. This still leaves some questions. For starters, the sun is obscured by clouds on many days in New England. More puzzling, is what does "the exact same time" mean?

Given the Equation of Time business, should we use the actual "sun time" or our oscillating piece of quartz time? Perhaps you could make two sets of dots, one for solar time, the other for man-made time.

Also, since the box is going to be outside for a year, use something durable. Do not use cardboard.

Finally, you may have to explain to a neighbor or two what you're doing. If he or she asks why you're outside with your head in a box, just say, "I'm looking for my analemma."

Pretty soon everyone will leave you alone.

There's this new stuff called papyrus...

2008-12-18T20:26:00.000-08:00

Perhaps 10 or 20 years from now, someone similar to Steve Jobs will have a breathtaking idea.

Paper! It's cheap (compared to a computer or a Kindle), it is preservable forever, you can cut it apart and stick some in your pocket, make copies, fold it, and then do all sorts of other things with it before it's recycled. Oh, yes, it's recyclable, too.

Moreover, you no longer have to plow through the Internet looking for relevant news, it's all printed there, selected, edited, and lovingly laid out, just for you.

But you can't surf the net with a bunch of printed paper, can you?

No, but that's what computers are for. The two are not mutually exclusive. Some egghead-types, or just people who want to know what's going on, could read words printed on paper and

look at the net.

Yes, it's possible. A lot of people used to do that. Doesn't require great skill or a large amount of time.

And now that wood pulp trees can be grown in a day (this is in the future, remember), paper is made by robots in a clean factory using solar energy. It goes for, like, a penny a ton.

Yes! Those things in the rare book bunker at Yale? You can have modern versions of them!

But, hey, keep reading the digital kind. Moby Dick and Infinite Jest will always be the same. News is always different (in a all-the-same kind of a way).

Instead of everyone buying a computer for $100 to read the news, one company could buy a printing press, a computerized one, for $5,000, and then serve everyone for a nickel. Or a Yen.

This could happen, right after people realize that nuclear power is actually safe, cheap, and less polluting than any other technology.

But that's another story.

One more thing...

2008-12-18T20:21:00.000-08:00

This is self-serving, sort of like soft ice cream, but if any of the two or three people who read this know of any jobs out there, please let me know.

Otherwise it'll be me and my wife living in a refrigerator box. (minus the refrigerator).

Finis

The End. Je Suis Fini.

2008-12-18T20:11:00.000-08:00

The previous post was written a few days before I was laid off from the New Haven Register.

In a city whose businesses and industry revolve around health and science, the Register deemed my job, unfortunately called "Science Editor," to be superfluous. An unaffordable luxury.

But apparently, through some strange cuber quirk or Google-glitch, I can still post here. I have another blog, Abram Katz, created out of a sense of deranged egotism and passive aggressive pain.

Anyway, that's why I'm not writing the Health/Science page, or any other stories for the Register, anymore. I wish I were.

But that's the way the asbestos crumbles.

cheers.

Is Everybody Happy?

2008-12-09T18:06:00.001-08:00

Speaking of ridiculous nonsense -- and why not? -- we have Harvard scientists concluding that happiness depends on the contentment of friends of friends, or neighbors you may not even know.

Besides, how can you possibly characterize someone as happy or unhappy? Some people are unhappy most of the time, and others are in as good mood most of the time, but no one is joyful at all times.

Perhaps $100 isn't sufficient to cause elation. Suppose instead that you won $50 million in a lottery. You're ecstatic. Is this going to make all of your friends jolly?

Moreover, most people don't appear to be happy. At best they're able to maintain a guarded equilibrium. Next time you're at a store look around. See many smiling faces? No.

And finally, what kind of society aspires to be happy all of the time?

Good times. Happy people.

Hey! Spread Out!

2008-12-04T12:29:00.000-08:00

An oil company recently took out a full-page ad in the New York Times pointing out that the sunlight hitting Earth in one second could provide humans with enough energy to last many years.

And that, in a nutshell, is the whole problem.

There's no efficient way to capture the energy of the sunlight, or to convert the energy into work. Instead what the sunlight does is increase entropy. That is, it turns liquid water into water vapor, or ice into water.

Entropy is a complicated concept with a technical meaning. To simplify, entropy is the amount of energy "lost" in a system doing work. For example, gasoline is burned in a cylinder to make a car move. Some of the energy is translated into motion (work) while much is released as heat.

The heat is absorbed by air, and other objects, and cannot be recaptured. Almost everything humans do increases entropy: generating and transmitting energy, extracting and burning fossil fuels, cooking, blowing things up, heating our homes, going shopping.

Another way of thinking about entropy is the tendency of system to evolve from order into disorder. Which brings us back to sunshine.

Some things on Earth progress from disorder to order. That list includes giving birth, making chocolate, growing watermelons, and evolution. All of these activities that seem to be making order from disorder, are doing so at the expense of the sun.

The sun, and other stars, ultimately provide the energy that drives everything, either directly or through creation of heavy elements like uranium, which are cast off in supernovae and incorporated into planets.

The furiously turns order into chaos as it converts hydrogen into helium, sending radiation in every direction. No matter how we harness sunlight, the disorder of the sun increases. In fact, the disorder of this entire universe is also decreasing, as new stars are born and burn out.

Burning fossil fuels, fissioning uranium, or finding alternate energy sources are our relatively puny way of interrupting the grand flow of entropy.

Current cosmology suggests that the universe will ultimately turn into a cold, dark empty place. But that won't happen for a long, long time.

Still, it's something to look forward to.

My Ransome

2008-11-23T22:54:00.000-08:00

This resume looks a lot like a ransom note. More like a "ransome."

It would have been easier to write this with a jar of ink and a quill.

The question is, why do prefabricated "projects" inevitably turn into disasters? I especially like the small 'b' in bACHELOR'S degree.

Anyone have any answers?

My Resume: Fonts gone insane

2008-11-23T22:48:00.000-08:00

Abram Katz

Experience

New Haven Register

· Science Editor 1986-2008

Wrote weekly Health/Science page consisting of feature story and column, Gray Matters. Selected and edited wire copy for page, and assigned art. Supervised two reporters, assigned and edited their stories. Covered Yale University, Yale School of Medicine, University of Connecticut, Wesleyan University and other local colleges and universities. Also wrote daily and Sunday stories.

· Environment Reporter

Covered state and federal departments of environmental protection. Issues included solid waste, hazardous waste, and Superfund sites. Followed enforcement of federal and state laws.

· Transportation reporter

Beat included state and federal transportation departments, condition of bridges, highways, mass transit, Mianus River Bridge collapse, state DOT policy.

· West Haven Reporter 1979

Responsibilities included city government. Series of stories on municipal corruption led to resignation of police chief, and city treasurer pleading guilty to felony involving illegal loans.

Fitchburg – Leominster Sentinel and Enterprise 1976-1978

· Covered police and fire departments, community development block grants, wrote features, took photos.

Education

Boston University 1975-1976

Received Master of Science degree in print journalism. Wrote master’s thesis on life and career of Upton Sinclair. Wrote additional thesis on Social Darwinism and development of American newspaper design. Courses included news and feature reporting and writing, communications law, survey of foreign press. Covered Middlesex Superior Court and wrote for school publication Boston Courier.

Washington University in St. Louis 1971-1975

Bachelor’s degree with honors in English Literature. Wrote honors thesis on Andrew Marvell political symbolism. Also took courses in biology, mathematics, astronomy, linguistics, vertebrate paleontology, philosophy, European history and art history.

University of Chicago Laboratory High School.

Skills

Able to explain complicated subjects clearly and on deadline in clear concise writing.

References and awards on request

Gotta do something about that water

2008-11-20T15:57:00.000-08:00

Goodness, there's uranium in Madison's drinking water!

Something must be afoul. Who dumped it there? Is it tailings from a uranium mine?

None of the above. The fact is that uranium is a natural element found in sedimentary rock all over the world.

Fortunately, all but a minute percent has a nucleus with 238 protons and neutrons. This renders the material incapable of sustaining a nuclear reaction.

No need to worry about mushroom shaped clouds.

Occasionally a uranium atom will emit an alpha particle, which is two protons and two neutrons. This turns the atom into thorium. Alpha particles are big, but weak. They cannot penetrate a piece of tissue paper.

The problem with drinking uranium-containing water is that uranium is a metal, and metals are often toxic, like lead or mercury, although we require iron, copper and a few others.

Uranium deposits naturally break down into lighter radioactive elements, and in the process, release radiation. Uranium is ultimately reduced to lead. Along the way, a bunch of other elements are formed.

This is where radon comes from. If there weren't uranium underground in these parts, radon wouldn't seep into basements or out-gas from bath water. Wherever there's radon, somewhere relatively nearby there's a uranium compound.

If you're not terrified of radon, no need to get excited about a little uranium.

If the water in Madison is absolutely loaded with uranium, by all means, stop drinking it or bathing in it. Perhaps the town could install a water supply system and draw from reservoirs.

Meanwhile, the Madison uranium has been there for at least a few million years. But water-borne uranium is not a freakish curse.

There are plenty of other water sources that we avoid because of chemical "contamination." People avoid drinking water with too much fluoride, we don't consumer water from sulfur springs, and no one can consume ocean water very long without dire consequences.

We shouldn't assume that any water is safe and potable unless a few basic tests are done. Since we've known about radon for decades, perhaps it should have occurred to someone to check for uranium.

While we're at it, check the bottled water, too. After all, it comes from the same subterranean geology as the water in Madison.

But, why?

2008-11-17T21:06:00.000-08:00

There are billions of blogs, more than anyone could look at in a lifetime.

So, why clutter the impossibly complex thicket of electrons with another one? Not solely because I think my thoughts are somehow more interesting or thought provoking than anyone else's. (They are. We'll get back to that.)

Consequently, this blog will not be another unexceptional exercise in solipsistic complaints or existential dread. At least not all of the time.

The goal here is to display some of my writing, perhaps a resume, and so on. Kind of dull, true, but it may -- just may -- allow me to find a job not at Wal-Mart.

Or it might be my first step on the way to Wal-Mart.

We shall see.

The sun is the same in a relative way...

2008-09-30T15:52:00.000-07:00

The sun is going through its "blankest" year in a long time.

There have been no sunspots out of 200 of the past 274 days. The sun goes through 11 years cycles of activity, and is at the nadir of the current cycle. Our star hasn't been this placid in 50 years.

Astronomers have also noticed that the sun is dimmer than ever. Its luminosity is only declined a fraction of a percent, but in solar terms, that's a lot of energy.

No one knows why sunspots erupt on the solar surface. The sun has a strong magnetic field, probably caused by its rotation. Since the enormous thermonuclear reaction is a ball of plasma, it does not spin like a solid object.

Different latitudes and depths move at different speeds. A spot on the equator makes a complete rotation every 25 days. All of these different layers produce a powerful magnetic field, that also rotates, until the field gets all tangled up and reaches a breaking point.

When the field breaks through the surface we see sunspots, which are up swellings of cooler material from the sun's interior. All of this wrapping and snapping is what is believed to lie behind the sunspot cycle.

Why so quiet? No one knows. It's not as if the sun is running out of fuel. The sun still has about 5 billion years of hydrogen left.

What effect, if any, the dimming is having on Earth's climate is also not known. Maybe in a few decades we'll be burning any organic material we can get our hands on to generate enough greenhouse gas to melt a little of the global ice sheet.

The truth, the whole truth, and way too much truth

2008-09-18T17:05:00.000-07:00

India has the answer to water-boarding and other forms of torture.

The country is considering using magnetic resonance imaging to determine whether a suspect is lying. Presumably, certain parts of the brain go to work at the thought of mendacity.

So, you take the suspect, strap him between huge magnetics, zap him with radio waves, and bingo! He's either innocent or guilty.

The problem, as increasingly anxious Indians are pointing out, is that the system is extremely fallible.

How could it not be?

Making up a story, not telling all you know, or modifying the truth, are all forms of lying. All require memory. The basic issue here is that no one — no one — knows how the brain creates memory.

Somehow, a enormous collection of intertwined neurons supplies another enormous collection of intertwined neurons (your consciousness) with memories. However, memories could not exist in specific, easily identifiable parts of the brain.

Remember something. The last time you ate apple pie, let's say. You remember what the pie looked like, what it smelled like, how it tasted, who you ate it with, if you ate it alone and felt lonely, if your stomach hurt, how does this pie compare to other pies, and perhaps even less coherent thoughts.

Someone might start to think about cutting up the pie, and trying to remember high school geometry or trigonometry, and then the person who sat behind you in trig class and drew on your neck with a ballpoint pen, and how difficult it was to remove the marks.

Likewise, asking "Did you do it?" could trigger childhood memories of being punished, previous minor infractions, fear at the thought of incarceration, a memory of the last time you were this scared, how it felt when your father whipped you with a belt, and on and on.

Where do all of these memories lie? And how do you know if the MRI is picking up fresh guilt, or childhood shame?

Using brain scans to determine guilt makes the polygraph seem downright scientific.

You know you're killing yourself, right?

2008-09-08T17:58:00.000-07:00

Telling acquaintances who smoked that it was bad for their health stopped being cool about 20 or 30 years ago.

So most people, or at least non-smokers, keep their thoughts to themselves. You know the lungs of that woman who smokes are probably the color of charcoal.

Her lungs are in the process of getting saggy and unable to provide oxygen and remove carbon dioxide.

In a few decades she'll be breathing oxygen through nasal tubes, shuffling around, and coughing.

Not lung cancer, but still a horrible way to die. Like drowning in your own lungs.

But it's not socially acceptable to tell smokers that. First of all, they know. Or they should know. The warnings on cigarette packs are obtuse. However, they're smart enough to read between the lines. Smoking can kill you in a dozen different ways.

Is it a moral duty to remind smokers of that? Someone should. Perhaps a spouse or significant other. It probably seems intrusive coming from a casual friend.

If you saw someone standing on the ramparts of a bridge, thinking about jumping off, would you do anything, or just walk away so he can kill himself?

My scars are better than yours. I could cut you open, but I'd have to charge

2008-09-08T17:37:00.000-07:00

No new posts here since May, but there's a good reason other than lethargy, torpor, and sluggishness.

The person who writes this nonsense had to have open heart surgery to repair an extremely leaky mitral valve. For all of you cardiac fans, it was Barlow's disease.

The person (me), started having trouble breathing and walking at the same time. What was happening internally, was that the mitral valve, between the left atrium and left ventricle, was flapping in the blood like a ripped standard.

As a consequence, half the blood that was supposed to be going forward was going backward on each heart beat. This is called regurgitation.

One thing led to another, and the operation was scheduled for mid-May. Everything was fine until I awakened. To make an excruciatingly long story short, my chest and shoulders hurt very much. Some of this pain was caused by two drainage tubes, which were removed the day after the surgery.

My sternum also hurt because it had been split with a medical jigsaw and then wired together. After two or three narcotic filled days in the cardiac intensive care unit, I was transferred to a regular hospital floor.

Narcotics continued to flow, which was essential. Then I had to stay home for two or three months recuperating. Now I go to cardiac rehab three days a week. That won't continue forever.

Now, except for some brain damage, the person who generally writes this mess is back. Doesn't that leave a gap of two or three or four months unaccounted for? Yes.

That was the lethargy and sluggishness part.

Now I notice surgical scars on the beach. Mine are by far the most symmetrical.

Please Stop Chewing My Leg

2008-05-07T14:45:00.000-07:00

Pandas. You've gotta love them.

They looke cute, they're harmless, and for goodness sakes, they're not even real bears! They're cuddly! They're the apotheosis of innocence and all that is good.

Well, for the taxonomically challenged, yes, Panda bears are bears.

Specifically, they are Ailuropoda melanoleuca, "black-and-white cat-foot." That's a genus within the family Ursidae, which includes grizzly bears, black bears, polar bears, and the spectacled bear.

Pandas are generally herbivorous, although they will eat fish, rodents, honey, eggs, and other non-plant goodies when available. See if you can find a photo of panda teeth. Major canine action.

But if you were out in the forest, you'd be better off running into a panda than a grizzly. However, keep in mind that pandas are as non-domesticated as their brothers and sisters in the zoo.

That doesn't mean, however, that pandas are docile do-gooders. Gu gu, a panda at the Beijing zoo, reportedly gnawed the legs of a 15-year-old boy that entered the bear's cage last year. The Beijing News reported that Li Xitao "had both legs gnawed to the bone."

Yogi and Booboo never did that.

Check You Tube and you can find videos of a panda trying to pull a man into the 300-pound bear's cage. Bad panda!

There reason there aren't more run-ins between humans and pandas is that people are basically driving pandas to extinction so that they can grow rice or build factories.

Pandas should be protected, not because they're adorable, but for the same reasons that any species should be rescued from oblivion. Nature is a continuum, and taking out pieces could have unexpected effects.

Moreover, they have the innate value of all life, and it's not up to us to decide what lives and what dies.

Are you controlling the computer or is it controlling you?

2008-03-18T14:00:00.000-07:00

Microsoft XP isn't a barrel of laughs — except for one feature.

Microsoft engineers put some games into the operating system. Not games like "find the missing DLL" or "Where's the error in the registry," although those can give you hours of enjoyment. Not enjoyment, really, more like barely controllable rage.

No, these games are called games and they're actually games. Solitaire, battleship, a few other ones, and pinball.

Pinball games for computers are generally crummy. The ones for Mac OS X are worse than that; they seem to have been designed by apes with low self-esteem.

The Windows pinball game is pretty good. The physics and speed are good, meaning that the ball moves and bounces like a real ball. The other element is how fast the ball rolls down the playing field. Here too, Windows pinball is fine.

Consequently, it is possible to waste incredible amounts of time tapping the z and / keys to operate the flippers, aiming at targets, and generally keeping the ball in play.

But, what's going on here (other than putting your job or marriage in jeopardy)?

Are you really playing pinball? No. You are using a simulation of pinball. The simulation and the real thing are pretty similar. They involve moving your index fingers. On a real pinball machine you would be compelled to stand.

Most other computer or video games are also simulations. Most of the simulations are of activities you could not or would not engage in, like killing, crashing cars, flying fighter planes, and performing various sports.

These non-pinball games depend on manipulating symbols. "O" fires a missle, "X" is a kick to the head, and so on. All actions are mapped onto a controller with about a dozen controls. What are our brains actually doing?

Once the controls are memorized and become second nature, we translate an action into a push button, which changes values in the program and makes an action happen on the screen.

So we think the game is the simulation, while really, the simulation is happening in the brain.

Will humans eventually shun the real world and manipulate symbols, instead?

Or are we almost there?

Free drugs! Just drink a trillion glasses of water.

2008-03-18T13:02:00.000-07:00

The Associated Press conducted an intensive study, discovering that the water supplies of many cities contain traces of pharmaceuticals.

This should click your skepticism meter up a few notches. The cities reviewed seem to get their water from different sources, which is problematic.

Take the drinking water in Southern Connecticut. For the most part is comes from reservoirs and is treated.

But let's back up.

Drugs end up in drinking water because people (and animals) take them and tiny amounts are eliminated in waste. This waste is then filtered, treated with chlorine, and pumped out. Now, if the effluent goes into the source of the water, as it might in Chicago, it seems plausible that drugs could be identified in drinking water.

We, on the other hand, get out water from reservoirs. This means our drug-containing waste is treated, sent to Long Island Sound, evaporates, and falls as rain. Some of the rain lands in the reservoirs, but a larger proportion seeps in after being filtered through organic materials in the forrest floor.

Reservoir water is then filtered through sand and activated carbon, chlorinated, and its acidity adjusted. Then it goes to your tap, picking up a little of whatever there is in the intervening pipes.

After going through this process, how many molecules of drugs, or drug metabolites could remain? By the way, there are plenty of other chemicals to ponder. Chlorine reacts with organic material to form trihalomethanes.

Then there's sodium, barium, strontium 90, lead, copper, and even a smidgen of uranium. The water is also tested for bacteria. All of these chemicals, and more, are regulated and cannot exceeed federal standards.

The water also may contain dozens of unregulated compounds, such as radon, chloroform, and a bunch of additional organic chemicals that result from reactions with chlorine.

At any rate, it seems unlikely that minute amounts of anti-anxiety drugs, anti-depressants, hormones, antibiotics, proton pump inhibitors, and the rest, end up in treated reservoir water.

And if undigested drugs end up in drinking water, they cannot be in copious amounts. Modern instruments can find parts per trillion or even less. It's probably possible to find almost anything in water if you look closely enough.

It is said that in every glass of water, there are a few molecules that passed through Napoleon. And also, presumably, from every other person. This claim has to do with the enormous number of molecules in a glass of water.

Turns out the number is something like 10 multiplied by itself 24 times. This is orders of magnitude larger than the number of sand grains on the world's beaches.

What does all of this mean?

If you want to worry about water, worry about bacteria, protozoans, and other microorganisms that have struck water systems in the past.

Black as the driven snow

2008-02-12T17:18:00.000-08:00

Let's make one thing clear.

Ice is clear.

It's not black. "Black ice" refers to ice that is difficult to see because it is in a thin layer over asphalt, which is more or less black.

Not that black ice wouldn't be interestingl. Imagine black snow. When you awoke after a storm, it would still be quiet, noise muffled by the snow. But it wouldn't look bright outside. It would look darker than usual.

Then, when you peered out of the window, everything would be covered with black. Tree branches would be coated in black. It would look like soot, or the sand on a volcanic beach. Or dirt.

Black snow would also change the world. Rather than reflecting heat, black snow would absorb it. The snow would melt more rapidly. There might not be glaciers, or polar ice caps. (There might not be any of those in a few years, anyway, but that's a different story.)

The climate would certainly be a little different with black snow. Also, black snow would have to be produced from black water. The oceans would be much warmer. The color of clouds? Black? Gray?

All because of black ice.

So let's cool it on that.

A Death

2008-02-05T10:17:00.000-08:00

If an elderly relative has an advance directive, or living will, you may think his death will be a smooth passage.
Don’t count on it.
Certainly, it will be smoother for you than for him. You’re watching. He’s watching, too, from inside, through an undefinable mental haze.
You can leave his room after a few minutes when watching becomes too uncomfortable.
He can’t. He lies with the pain, perhaps one of the only feelings or emotions that he still possesses.
Being with him is slightly terrifying because you’re never sure when he may awaken. He groans, cries, tries to rip off bandages and throws punches at nurse’s aides. That’s not easy to watch.
His once brilliant mind helped determine the best ways to isolate plutonium in 1944. He then spent decades studying photosynthesis and chlorophyll. Now his brain is somewhere else.
It started a few years ago. As Alzheimer’s disease progressed and choked and tangled his neurons, he started to lose himself and his encyclopedic knowledge, his sense of humor, his irritability, his warmth, his fearfully bad temper.
At first, he could tell that something ominous was happening. But there’s no way to stop it. Every time you see him, his decline is appalling. He stops recognizing his offspring.
He thinks strangers are in his apartment. Who are those strange people? No matter how often he is reminded that they’re his children, he feels threatened.
For a while, you’re convinced that you can somehow jog his memory. Maybe a photo.
Some incontrovertible proof that you are his, and that he will understand in a burst of rationality. Then, you finally realize that he’s disappearing, going somewhere solitary and strange. After 95 years, he’s leaving and never coming back — but, he doesn’t know that. Does he?
Eventually, you avoid catching his eyes, fearful of how he may react. Or maybe you do not want to see the vacancy behind his gaze. Or the fear.
He is relocated to the floor with the demented people. He has two broken hips made of tenuous bone too thin to repair. Two broken ribs. They’ll never heal.
"Dr. Browner," whom you never see, is convinced against all evidence that he is improving. He’ll be fine in no time! Of course, he can recognize food!
No, he won’t. No, he can’t.
You want to find Dr. Browner to ask him what he’s thinking and perhaps grab and shake him by the collar. What’s his plan? He gives nurses orders and vanishes.
Meanwhile, the patient is weaker, weaker and increasingly unhappy. He moans. Can he please be made more comfortable? Just ease the pain. That’s all the family wants. They plead. They cry.
The head nurse and the floor nurses, who dispense morphine, are following contradictory orders from the invisible doctor and the hospice nurse.
In books, the person with power of attorney handles the Browners and nurses with a firm hand. No one has a firm hand now. But you help to straighten out the heartbreaking mess.
Soon, much sooner than you expect, he’s gone. Dead.
No, this was not smooth.
Did you relieve his suffering or help kill him?
His clothes still hang in the closet. He still has aftershave in the medicine cabinet. His ornate letter opener is on his desk, where he left it. The books he wrote and read wait, leaning on the shelf.
Did you allow him to die in peace, or just hasten his death?
You’ll have the rest of your life to think about it.

The smallest, shortest, and lightest

2008-01-04T17:08:00.000-08:00

You may not have noticed this, but there are basic units of time, distance, and mass.

What this means exactly is best left to physicists, but for the rest of us: If you had a very (insanely accurate) watch, and you wanted to set it to exactly noon, not a nanosecond less or a femtosecond more, down the scale, there comes a point at which time is indivisible.

Same with length. The smallest unit of length is about 20 orders of magnitude smaller than a proton, which is already pretty small. This means, among other things, that there is no way to divide this smallest length.

It would be like dividing a photon, which you simply cannot do.

The smallest time is called the Planck time, and the smallest distance, the Planck distance. They were both named after Max Planck the famous physicist. The Planck time is how long it would take light to travel the Plank distance. This is an unimaginably short interval equal to a decimal fraction of 1 second, with 43 zeroes followed by a 1.

Since this is the shortest amount of time, that's where the big bang starts.

Books describe the Planck length and Planck time as the limits of what makes sense. Anything smaller than the Planck cannot be defined.

Then there's the Planck mass, which is about equal to a black hole with a radius of the Planck length.

Now, if there are smallest units of time, distance and mass, shouldn't there be corresponding maximum limits of the same things? There might be, but the values are of no value.

Physicists use Planck time, distance and mass, in quantum mechanics.

You might say they walk the Planck.

Sticky Fingers

2007-12-24T13:22:00.000-08:00

Before Chinese factories began putting antifreeze in cold medicine and toothpaste, coating toys with lead paint, and producing counterfeit prescription drugs, China produced generally reliable yet inexpensive goods.

Many "American" brands are actually manufactured in China. You don't even need to look very carefully. For example, Black & Decker produces sealed lead batteries intended to start cars and provide electricity during emergencies.

The actual battery is manufactured by the Vector company in China, and the consumer product is apparently assembled in Mexico.

But let's not pick on Black & Decker, whose power tools are dependable. Although model lines change so rapidly that last year's rechargeable battery is unlikely to fit on this year's driver, or drill.

Some tools are still made in the U.S., and they generally work the best. American hand tools from the 1950s are magnificent.

Which brings us to Bushnell, maker of optics of all sorts, from telescopes, to binoculars to rifle scopes. Virtually all of it's products are made in China, including an inexpensive pair of zoom binoculars with rubber grips.

After a few years in its case, under normal environmental conditions, the rubber grips underwent a chemical reaction of some kind. They're no longer rubbery, they're sticky. Like tacky paint. And since they got sticky just sitting in a case, it seems unlikely that the grips will "dry."

What were the grips made out of? Plastic mixed with industrial waste? Plastic with insufficient plasticizing chemicals? Recycled rubber with leftover epoxy or cyanoacrylate thrown in? Modeling clay mixed with black paint?

We have a heightened suspicion of Chinese goods these days, but it's possible that the American importer insisted that the Chinese contractor make binocular grips out of bubble gum mixed with powdered coal.

Whatever the reasons behind the stickiness problem, the binoculars are useless as binoculars.

When the weather gets warmer, they could be suspended from a ceiling to catch flies.

Nice Doggy! Now, let go... of my throat...

2007-12-21T17:04:00.000-08:00

If it's any consolation, the individuals who maimed a dog last week in Milford for no discernible reason are probably going to end up in prison.

Torturing animals is usually a warm-up for other, more severe, anti-social acts. Like killing people.

But meanwhile, the amount of public outrage at the dog slashers is way over the top. Greg, from Guilford, says he would execute them. Ken, of North Branford, thinks they should get a taste of their own medicine.

And Bruno, of Milford, is threatening their lives.

It goes without saying that people should not harm animals. But animals are, well, animals.

Why do so many people care more about dogs than about fellow humans? Because dogs are innocent and have done nothing to deserve this kind of vicious act?

Because pets are pure and people are corrupt? Sure. What about dogs that attack and maim people? There are currently about 75 million dogs in the U.S. and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculate that these dogs bite about 2 percent of the population - more than 4.7 million people - a year.

Do we hear any outcry over dog bites? Getting bitten by a dog is the fifth most frequent cause for visiting an emergency room. About 1,000 people end up in ERs every day because of dog bites.

It is not a shock to find that pit bulls and rottweilers are responsible for 74 percent of the attacks; 68 percent of the attacks on children, and 65 percent of the deaths.

Owners never think their dogs are dangerous until the dog mauls someone. Then the owners say, "He must have provoked the dog."

So, basically, the number of people who attack dogs is minuscule, while dogs take chunks out of people all over the place.

It would be interesting to hear what people who've been bitten and scarred by dogs have to say about the Milford case.

Why Is This Woman So Happy?

2007-12-17T15:27:00.000-08:00

We've all seen Rachel Ray and we've all seen Rachel Ray grinning like a maniac.

Why is not clear, except that she's either really happy, someone told her to smile, or has had some transcendent religious experience to which we are not privy.

Her grin is so ubiquitous that there are hardly any photos of her with a straight face. Go ahead, search Google for one.

This means that she could go pretty much anywhere incognito, as long as she does not smile. She could knock over convenience stores and banks and mug elderly people. She must be wealthy, so these activities would have to be purely for fun.

But she must already be having more fun than she can handle, judging from her insane cheek to cheek smile.

Cancer? No thanks!

2007-12-11T16:39:00.000-08:00

Plants have cells, chromosomes, hormones, and most of the cellular organelles as animals, yet plants apparently do not get cancer, which is kind of strange.

Plants cannot survive without the sunlight that gives humans skin cancer. So, how come we have cells that proliferate out of control and plants don't?

Plants have a complicated collection of pigments that handle excess energy in solar radiation. That may protect underlying cells from having their DNA blasted and ionized.

Radiation will kill plants. But not give them tumors.

Plants do get things called "galls" but galls are caused by viruses, insects, nematodes and other kinds of parasites. The gall is a way for the plant to hold its enemies at bay.

If humans behaved more like plants physiologically, we would grow a tough container of cells around tumors. Of course, part of what makes cancer perplexing is that it is our own cells out of control. Normal cells would recognize the abnormal ones, but as we know, will not kill them all, all of the time.

Why doesn't yeast develop cancer? Suppose one yeast grew a duplicate, and the "daughter" had damaged genes and would not separate? And then the daughter starts to make messed up yeast cells like crazy. They grow into a relatively big clump.

There is no "central yeast" so the mutated yeast could multiply until it ran out of food. No yeast cancer.

Do we even know if insects get cancer? Generally they are not around long enough to accumulate a cancerous number of mutations.

No, only big animals with a lot of cells get cancer.

Maybe that's the evolutionary price we pay for having trillions of cells. Sometimes one of them goes berserk and makes billions of crazy copies.

In return we get eyeballs, brains, bones, and the rest of the stuff. Respiration, metabolism, the Krebs cycle, and so on.

Would you rather be a plant?

Water, Water, Everywhere...

2007-12-05T14:29:00.000-08:00

Earning a platinum designation from the U.S. Green Building Council is tough and only the most determined institutions make the attempt.

Essentially, the building has to produce about as much energy as it consumes and should have no carbon footprint.

Yale's under-construction Kroon Hall is aiming for platinum, which is laudable.

How a building of laboratories and classrooms can produce as much energy as it consumes is a puzzle. Either the building has to use a minimal amount of energy, or must come up with ingenious ways to generate electricity.

It would be easy to reduce energy consumption to zero. Just eliminate lights, heating, and electrical sockets. True, the interior would be freezing and dark for several months a year, and then hot, stuffy and dim.

That doesn't seem practical. Solar power in New England is not a great idea because about one out of three days is cloudy. Likewise, New England does not have large plains that naturally generate wind.

Here are a few suggestions: Internal fans, connected to generators, spun by the wakes of walking students. Have students wear thermocouples. Line the halls with copper coils and have students wear magnets as they walk from one room to another.

The Kroon plan does include an intricate water system that will supposedly save 500,000 gallons annually. How in the world could Kroon Hall even consume that much water, unless they are converting bauxite into aluminum?

The water system is intended to treat storm water run-off. Not anything as gross as sewage. Just relatively pure rain that has flowed through turf and soil. The first rain water is dirtiest and it's diverted into a large tank. So is gutter water.

This water is then directed into a pond containing aquatic plants that serve as biofilters. Clean water then flows into a harvesting tank. There it will be used for toilets and irrigation.

So basically, the storm run off still ends up in the sewage treatment plant and/or Long Island Sound, but first it runs through some pipes and a pond. Why bother to clean water that will be used in toilets?

Unless the slope of the pipes is carefully designed and adjusted, moving the water will require pumps, or students turning a big wooden wheel connected to a pump.

The expense of the pipes, pond, and tanks hardly seems worth it. How long will the storm water project take to pay for itself?

By then we'll all be using fusion power.

More applications, more rejections, more money

2007-12-03T14:53:00.000-08:00

Johns Hopkins University, the Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore, the real Johns Hopkins University, sends pleas to high school seniors.

Johns Hopkins wants you to apply for "the most amazing four years of your life."

The six-page, full color brochure must have cost a fortune. And the university is sending them out indiscriminately. Why?

Johns Hopkins isn't the only university to engage in this practice. Most of the ones that self advertise are either schools you've never heard of, schools you'd never consider, or both.

After the first few letters, high school students start throwing out the solicitations unopened.

By now, after undergoing SATs, SAT IIs, ACTs, "How to succeed at SAT" classes, private tutors, and several weeks or months of anxiety, most of those applying to college have already settled on their favorites. Or at least, the favorites to which they think they can gain admission.

So here's Johns Hopkins, one of the most selective of the selective, begging the poor student to spend another $60 or $70 to apply to a university that costs around $50,000 a year.

Out of about 14,000 applicants, fewer than 4,000 are admitted, and 1,207 end up attending.

Here are some universities that don't send out unrequested promotional materials: Yale, Harvard, the rest of the Ivy League, Reed, Williams, Oberlin, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and on and on and on.

Their attitude is "If you don't know who we are, then you're unfit to go to school here." Unfit to take Western Civ, room with an ominous eccentric, play "residence hall" hockey, seal someone in his room with a pile of beer cans, and the rest of the college experience.

The National Guard has a well thought out mailing. Many pretty young women apparently enroll in the Guard, despite what you may think. The Guard brims with possibilities for betterment: education, experience, discipline, service. And, oh yes, (you may have to try to kill people who are trying to kill you). That last part escapes mention.

It's easy to see why the National Guard needs to promote itself. But Johns Hopkins?

The accepted theory of college solicitations is that enlarging the applicant pool while accepting the same number increases the appearance of selectivity. The higher the selectivity, the higher the tuition can be.

But Johns Hopkins? What's up with that? Huh?

Just another one of the strange, inexplicable, and mystifying parts of the college application process.

The Emperor of Ice Cream

2007-11-19T15:49:00.000-08:00

Is is possible to live on bread and water only?

For a while, yes.

We're assuming a good brand of unenriched white bread.

But then you would develop scurvey (lack of vitamin c), beriberi (lack of vitamin B), rickets (lack of vitamine D), kakke disease (see beriberi), and you would eventually be deprived of essential amino acids, that is, ones you cannot synthesize. That would lead to a loss of protein and breakdown of muscles.

There are also essential fatty acids, such as arachidonic acid.

So even if your diet were restricted to bread, water and a vitamin pill, you eventually would waste away.

Your teeth would fall out, your connective tissue disintegrate, and you would develop pressure sores.

But on the brighter side, you would definitely lose weight.

Stick it in Your Ear

2007-11-01T15:02:00.000-07:00

If you surf cable TV channels late at night you're sure to see a new low in smoking cessation ads.

This is the "auricular" treatment that allegedly eliminates the desire to smoke in two weeks.

A crazed blonde claims the device is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (it's not) and so easy to use. The system is two small magnets, perhaps strong rare earth magnets.

The smoker puts magnets on both sides of the left ear. Here's a chance to brush up on the external anatomy of the human ear. The magnets are to be placed on the Scapha, the outermost C-shaped plane next to the outer fold.

That's it. Why would sticking magnets to your ear ease the desire to smoke? A "pressure point" in the ear stimulates the same parts of the brain as nicotine. This is signified in the ad by fireworks going off in the smoker's head.

This suggests that a smoker could give up tobacco and get hooked instead on little magnets in the ear. If any of this contained a grain of truth, that would be good.

However, stimulating the smoking parts of the brain does not seem as if it would quell the desire to smoke.

Or maybe you end up wanting to smoke magnets.

Too Much of A Good Thing

2007-11-01T14:20:00.000-07:00

One sentence in the ads for erectile dysfunction prescription medications never fails to get a laugh. If you have an erection lasting more than four hours seek immediate medical help, the warning goes, more or less.

Predictably, men watching this often snicker and say "If I had an erection for four hours I would..." Fill in the lubricious blank. Well, what would you do? It's not as if many middle-aged men have dozens of eager partners waiting to service them.

At any rate, the caution seems silly. What harm could there be in a 240-minute erection?

To understand the problem, consider what causes an erection. Blood rushes in and one-way valves keep it from leaving until the blood is no longer needed.

An erection that won't end is called "priapism," after the king of Troy, Priam, who legend says fathered 50 offspring.

Priapism is usually painful, and usually affects males between 5 to 10 and 20 to 50 years. If not treated promptly, priapism can cause scarring and permanent erectile dysfunction.

Yes, that's right. Permanent.

Priapism cen be caused by sickle cell disease, leukemia, black widow spider bites, carbon monoxide poisoning, and of course, certain medications. The condition is treated with ice packs, injections, and shunts to let the blood drain.

That doesn't seem like a barrel of laughs.

Priapism is one kind of ED you definitely don't want.

Red Moon at Night, Motorists Take Fright

2007-10-01T13:38:00.000-07:00

The moon was like our own private lunar eclipse.
the disk was full, and a dark febrile red-maroon.

The riddle was that no lunar clipse was expected that night. There had been one a few days earlier, as the moon swept through the very narrow shadow cast by Earth.

Refracted light passing through Earth's atmosphere paints the moon red. Bluish light is scattered and longer wave-length red light penetrates our atmosphere and hits the moon.

But we were driving though Pennsylvania perhaps 10 or 11 p.m. and the moon was rising. It was about 20 degrees above the horizon and as weird-looking as it ever gets.

The moon hung like a blood blister. Out satellite even seemed ominous, though we knew that lunar signs do portent disaster. (Do they?)

A cell phone check confirmed that no one else was seeing a lunar eclipse.

What was going on?

The only good explanation was that we were looking at the moon through an extremely thick layer of atmosphere, which was exerting its own optical effects. Specifically, the atmosphere was scattering blue, as it always does, and letting red through.

The red was dimmed by tons of soot, dust, water vapor, volcanic ash, fly ash, meteorite dust, smog,and smoke.

And that's the stuff we can see. Even if we got rid of carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect, it looks like we'd still be in trouble.

I Love You. Now Get Out of My Sight.

2007-09-11T17:46:00.000-07:00

Do you remember your first kiss?

How about the first time you kissed someone and decided that he or she wasn't what you were looking for?

Possibly if you're a woman you have done this.

No men in this country these days would dismiss a potential girlfriend based on one kiss. Yes, this is a goofy subject, but not so goofy that researchers at the University of Albany didn't study it.

They found that many college students have been attracted to someone only to realize after kiss number one that they were no longer interested. Kind of schizoid. Presumably, one reason people kiss is that they like each other.

If one ill-executed kiss can erase affection, we're dealing with some pretty superficial students.

"While many forces lead two people to connect romantically, the kiss, particularly the first kiss, can be a deal breaker," the researchers wrote.

In a sample of 1,041 college students, researchers found only five who had never experienced romantic kissing and more than 200 who estimated having kissed more than 20 partners, the scientists report.

They also discovered that when it comes to kissing, women value it more than men. This would come as no surprise to any man who's ever been married or even gone steady for a couple of weeks.

To avoid friction both of you should skip stuff like garlic, onions, anchovies, haggis, blood sausage, and chocolate covered grasshoppers.

An interesting follow-up study would be to measure the number of applicants the university received before and after the kissing study was published.

Why Are Some People Evil?

2007-07-25T16:28:00.000-07:00

Yes, of course the men who destroyed the Petit family in Cheshire are evil.

But what does that mean, exactly?

"Evil" is a pejorative, subjective term that carries little formal meaning. Sociologists blanch at the word. They prefer a more clinical "abnormal behavior" or even insist that abnormality depends on context.

How then do we characterize the two men who allegedly beat a well-known Cheshire doctor and killed his wife and children?

Do we describe the perpetrator's actions as the result of the environments in which they were raised? If so, we do not know the specifics of how these hypothetical criminals were reared. They sure weren't brought up by Ozzie and Harriet.

Besides, plenty of people survive poverty, abuse and neglect to become law-abiding citizens. They may be depressed, ill-tempered, or unpleasant, but they do not wantonly rape and kill.

Perhaps the brains of these murders have physiological abnormalities. That's almost a given: horrendously abnormal behavior must reflect an underlying abnormal mind.

Perhaps the pair had complementary psychopathologies.

One may have influenced the other, convincing him that breaking and entering, kidnapping, bank robbery, sexual assault, attempted murder, and murder, and arson was a sensible idea. In that case, the killer who went along must have an extremely weak sense of self or of reality.

Both men arrested in the case have long criminal records, so it's fair to say that whatever was awry in their minds has been that way for quite a while. Could they have controlled these impulses? How many people have the same pressure to act, but hold their homicidal fantasies in check?

Incarceration apparently did not help. They were aware of the death penalty, but the ultimate punishment did not deter them. We cannot put to death or maim convicts to ensure that they will not commit a future crime.

That would mean that the penalty for any infraction is death. Do we want to live in a country like that?

In 18h century London, pockets were picked as crowds watched pick-pockets being hanged. Some societies cut off the hands of thieves, and stone adulterers, but these savage punishments have not brought forth a crime-free paradise.

Since most of us no longer believe in "evil spirits," at least not literally, we are left with only two two avenues of explanation: genetic and environmental.

There is no easy answer, other than that imprecise, loaded word, "evil."

In this case, pure evil.

I'm Rubber, You're Glue...Burning Glue

2007-07-25T15:42:00.000-07:00

E-mail may just be a new alternative to writing letters, but increasing anecdotal evidence suggests that on-line communication serves very different purposes.

E-mail allows users to criticize, insult and bait virtual strangers who've done nothing more than write an opinion piece or some other innocuous article on the Web, or in a newspaper or magazine.

Take, for instance, this response to a recent article about the difficulty some long-time pot smokers have in quitting.

Robb McCune,address unknown, emailed:

"Nice read on Pot. if the logic in your story was correct when people who are depressed go to a doc and tell them they would tell them better ways to cope and think about why they are depressed rather then prescribe something like Prozac etc. Nice straw man argument. What is that like reporting 101? Did you just regurgitate what the Good DR said rather then report?"

There does seem to be substance hiding in this tangle of mangled English. Hard to tell. Why the obvious tone of acrimony?

Or Doug Moquet, senior at Lehigh University, who writes, "...For your edification, Mr. Katz, I suggest you do some of the research that should've originally been included in your article. Start with some of these published studies. While it's still obvious that marijuana usage, especially among adults should still be casted in a negative light, I think you do a serious injustice as Register Science Editor, to not at the least mention in your article emerging evidence suggests the drug could indeed have some beneficial effects. I think if you took the time to at least interview some of the users themselves, they'd have told you that.

http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/news/20030701/heavy-marijuana-use-doesnt-damage-brain

http://www.aphroditewomenshealth.com/news/20050913230228_health_news.shtml

http://www.webmd.com/news/20000508/marijuana-unlikely-to-cause-cancer

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729.html

http://www.doctordeluca.com/Library/WOD/WPS3-MedMj/DecreasedDepressionInMjUsers05.pdf

Again, the author seems under the control of an angry muse.

Paste these URLs into your browser and you'll see that none pertains to the question of how to help marijuana-dependent adults quit.

One hopes McCune finds a program of some kind. An anger management program, that is.

Moquet sent further comments indicating that he is actually a personable fellow rather than a weaselly snark.

These are merely two examples of the e-mails that we are all subject to, fair and unfair. Writing takes time and reflection, which would allow flamers time to reconsider. E-mail is strangely uninhibiting, although we know that it is far less private than "snail mail" and as easy to store.

E-mail inaccurately gives people the idea that what they write is ephemeral. But it is not. It all becomes part of your permanent record.

And we all thought the "permanent record" business was a middle school teacher's ploy.

Look into the past with a big piece of glass

2007-07-15T14:39:00.000-07:00

The ho-hum telescope is a lot more mysterious than we give it credit for.

How is it that a few pieces of curved glass allow us to look backward in time? Is this a property of light, the telescope or time?

We know time does not require telescopes, because the first known telescope was invented in 1608. But can there be time without light?

These are the kinds of questions that are likely to pop up when the curious non-physicist reads books about general and special relativity. Understanding Albert Einstein's work requires difficult mathematics.

Lacking a readership conversant in Minkowski space, Lorentz transformations, tensor fields, and even plain old integral calculus, writers attempt to explain Einstein's theories by analogy.

For example, space is like a trampoline, Earth causes a dip in the surface, and this curved space bends light. Light is deflected differently depending on the mass of the object it encounters and its distance from the object.

Since light travels at a constant speed, then time must elapse at different speeds depending on distance from the mass. Therefore, an object approaching the mass must shed energy, because it is experiencing slower and slower time.

So in some strange way, what we perceive as gravity is a consequence of mass bending light.

The speed of light also changes depending on what it travels through. This is why a lens is able to focus light and what enabled Hans Lippershey, an eyeglasses maker in the Netherlands, to invent the telescope in 1608.

Using advanced versions of this light-bending instrument we can see galaxies millions and billions of light years away. Or in other words, we can see light that they emitted billions of years ago.

We can look backwards in time. It's just impossible for us to change anything in less than the time it takes for light to travel from the past to the present. If we somehow wanted to change something in a galaxy 100 light years away, which seems unlikely, it would take much longer than a century to get there, because matter cannot travel at the speed of light.

Still, it's amazing that a few pounds of highly polished glass let us view the distant past.

Whadda you mean this violence is fake?

2007-07-15T13:30:00.000-07:00

World Wrestling Entertainment is immensely popular, though if you ask anyone if he watches Smackdown, or whatever it's called these days, he'll probably scoff and say, "It's all fake!"

Of course it's not authentic wrestling and sure, the routines and outcomes are planned in advance. But fake?

No one discourages people from going to Harry Potter movies because they're fake. But they are. There is no Harry Potter, just fiction, an actor, and millions of dollars of special effects.

Likewise, those who go to a theater to see "Hamlet" are not confronted by sneers that "it's all fake." No, Hamlet does not see his father's ghost, he doesn't kill Polonius, Gertrude doesn't drink poison, and a dying Hamlet does not skewer Claudius.

Again, it's fiction. Just like the WWE, and Vince McMahon's exploding limo. The fact is, the WWE has more real violence than anything you're likely to see on the stage or screen.

Necks break, wrestlers fall to their deaths, and widely practiced misuse of anabolic steroids has caused numerous premature deaths. Most recently, steroids may have contribited to Chris Benoit's strangling of his wife and son and subsequent suicide by hanging.

The question is, why do we find violence entertaining? Crowds at the Coliseum cheered bloody death, folks flocked to public hangings, fans pay to see men hit each other in the head as hard as they can, and now teenagers play games that realistically simulate killing.

Sony expects parents to shell out $600 for a PlayStation 3 so that junior can play Metal Gear Solid 4 (or 5?) and the latest update of Grand Theft Auto.

Is this just a way to blow off steam? Cope with stress? Channel violent impulses into something harmless? Maybe all three.

The people who complain about wrestling being fake -- they're really disappointed, not disapproving -- aren't they?

Let's build an on-ramp over there!

2007-07-09T11:36:00.000-07:00

As all of those purported "improvements" on Interstate 95 enter their 238th month, one begins to wonder whether the construction company has any plan.

The whole venture has an improvisatory quality. One week they're paving these, the next week they're paving that. Lanes come and go. Cones migrate from one side of the highway to the other.

There are formal methods to analyze a complex project and determine the order of construction. That way, different parts of the whole can be worked on spontaneously.

The other question, is, what's taking so long? The only plausible reason for such glacially slow progress is that the workers are being paid by the hour. They apparently are not supervised.

Or the company could be following the Aztec calendar.

This is why the project may never end. Those guys will continue to build, pave, rebuild, re-pave, excavate, fill in, pile up and level, until it's time for their children to take over.

Get into med school without taking chemistry

2007-07-09T11:12:00.000-07:00

The fortunately fumbled bombings in London and Glasgow are frightening evidence that medical training has hit rock bottom in the United Kingdom.

Otherwise, how could the cabal of incompetent doctors have tried to make bombs without any explosives? Thank goodness they didn't, of course.

But what did they think would happen to a car packed with containers of gasoline and propane? Liquid gasoline will burn. Vaporize it, ignite with a spark, and the result is a massive thermobaric blast.

Doing that yourself is not simple, by any means. Don't try it, either, unless you want to end up in a burn unit without any skin.

A Department of Defense lab worked on the problem for several months before they produced a thermobaric weapon with which to incinerate caves.

Same deal with propane. Of course, if you place a propane tank in a fire, once it reaches a certain temperature it will explode, and probably streak off in an unpredictable direction like a canon ball.

This is all very basic chemistry. An explosive, high or low, requires unstable bonds that break exothermically. It also requires it's own source of oxygen and large number of molecules of gas that are released and expand rapidly.

Any med student at Yale could easilly make a workable bomb.

That runs counter to Hippocratic oath. But so does filling vehicles with flammable liquids and trying to set them off in a crowded urban area.

Saturn's Hexagonal Crown

2007-03-27T15:14:00.000-07:00

Something funny's happening on Saturn.

NASA's Cassini mission has photographed a hexagonal shape on the enormous planet's north pole.

The hexagon is about 15,000 miles across, or big enough to contain four Earth-size spheres.

Why a hexagon with almost equal length lines? Not because there are intelligent aliens there. Saturn is a very interesting — but cold — place with no surface. Just different densities of raining gases, with metallic hydrogen at the very center.

Bees make honeycombs composed of hexagonal cells. Hexagons fit together seamlessly with no wasted space. So shape is most efficient for, say, tiling a floor.

Saturn has just one hexagon. Why not a circular polar vortex like Earth's? It's not coincidental. The chemistry, winds, gravity and other factor favor formation of a hexagon.

Either that or the planet is home to enormous bees.

Don't Worry. Be Happy. And Update Your Resume.

2007-03-27T14:59:00.000-07:00

A suspiciously New Age sounding company, Balance Integration, wants to help your boss alleviate the anxiety he creates by firing people willy-nilly.

"Balance Integration believes the sum of any corporation is greater when its parts are whole and they’re functioning harmoniously (and no one’s worrying about losing their job!," B.I. says.

B.I. needs a little grammar training, but nothing to get too worried about. On the other hand, maybe someone should be laid off.

Balance Integration claims to "incorporate simple, stress-relieving tactics into the workday by providing in-office seminars and sessions on how to combat stress and fatigue in the workplace through meditation and even desk-side yoga."

B.I.'s main client is Dunder-Mifflen, from the sound of it.

Wait! Here's an idea: Don't fire people indiscriminately! Treat then with a certain amount of dignity. Act (you don't need to believe this) as if you appreciate their work.

If the company you work for starts training you in desk-side yoga, breathe into a bag until the anxiety attack subsides.

Sixteen Tons and What Do You Get? Good Abs.

2007-03-27T14:38:00.000-07:00

How would you like it if your boss gave you an exercise plan and told you to hit a gym?

Probably not overjoyed. Of course, you do need to hit, or do whatever you do, to the gym or swimming pool or bike path.

It's the idea of your personal Mr. Burns telling you to get off your fat rear end that rankles.

He's not helping you get in shape because he likes you. He cares about your health because the less sick you are the more money he makes. Not that many companies offer real health insurance anymore, but that's a much bigger problem.

We have self-proclaimed "corporate wellness expert" Tom Gilliam trying to sell your employer a book of suggestions for molding a thinner, stronger, workforce.

Incidentally, the secret to getting in shape does not require a book-length exposition. Exercise aerobically and don't gorge. That's it.

We should do this despite the Tom Gilliams of the world, because we want a higher quality of life. And if your chief executive gives you gym privileges, as unlikely as that seems, so much the better.

A Lot of Hot Air

2007-03-19T12:27:00.000-07:00

Who would you believe on the topic of global climate change: The Competitive Enterprise Institute or Al Gore?

Trick question. Those aren't your only two choices. You could do some research, read some journals, scan some less formal periodicals, and make up your own mind.

Or you could find out who really is an expert on climate change. Again, there's more than one. Some consider it a critical problem. Others believe the change in temperature measured so far is largely the result of natural cycles. Yet more think that the causes are both artificial and natural.

Al Gore, former vice president and presidential candidate, apparently is convinced that corrective action must be taken immediately.

Then there's the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Al Gore and his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," drives them up a wall. Who is in the CEI? Check it out. No one you've ever heard of, and certainly no scientific experts on climate.

Yet the CEI has prepared point-by-point rebuttals for claims made in the movie.

So here's the decision: Cut greenhouse gases (no down side) and see if the temperature drops, or refuse to do anything and wait to see if the sea level starts to rise (all down side).

Al Gore may not be an expert, but at least you know who he is and where he's coming from. You don't have to accept his movie. Read some books and decide for yourself.

Or don't let facts get in the way and let the CEI make up your mind for you.

Your Child Has A Wolf-Like Muzzle

2007-03-19T11:57:00.000-07:00

It is, indeed, a dog's world.

The American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is praising BJ's Wholesale Club Inc. for refraining from selling potentially contaminated"pig ear chew treats."

The pig ears may be tained with Salmonella bacteria. Animals are not as sensitive to Salmonella as humans are (So all of you people who secretly chew on pig ear treats, stop doing it.)

This makes sense because until their relatively recent domestication, dogs and cats ate rodents of various sizes — not the cleanest of victuals.

Anyway, the ASPCA prevailed on BJ's to "voluntarily" take the "pig ear chew treats" off its shelves. The ASPCA goes on to advise "pet parents" to discard any suspicious pig ears.

Pet Parents? Huh?

They used to be called "pet owners." At most they might be considered pet step-parents. But pet parents? The anthropomorphism of dogs has gone too far. Dogs' "parents" are other dogs, you know.

If you consider your pet as much your child as your actual child, you need your head examined.

Do not, of course, feed your pet poisonous food.

That goes for the other members of your family as well.

Does This Water Taste Like Crestor?

2007-01-22T14:40:00.000-08:00

Americans are throwing away so many medication that traces of common prescription drugs have been found in 80 percent of the nation's streams.

This is different than the beef problem. Steers and cows are given antibiotics and hormones, we eat and drink, and the drugs end up in the effluent water. Since we're loaded with systems to digest and detoxify everything we eat, and what's left over goes through a tertiary treatment plant and chlorination, it's hard to believe many drugs get into the water this way.

The way prescriptions end up in streams and rivers is by flushing them down the toilet.

AARP recommends that instead of dumping meds into the bowl, render them unusable and put them in the trash.

But why are Americans discarding so much medicine, and particularly, prescription drugs?

People who still pay taxes are giving pharmaceutical and insurance companies money to give them the opportunity to join incomprehensible prescription drug plans. And then they dump the drugs in the toilet?

By this time all of us should know that unless the doctor says otherwise, we are supposed to finish all prescriptions. No one should have a stockpile of outdated capsules and pills.

Perhaps we stock up on aspirin, ibuprofen and cold medicines and then discover that some of the drugs expired before they were used. That's wasteful, but OTC drugs are comparatively cheap.
Not so the prescriptions. Some cost hundreds of dollars.

Not to sound paranoid, but if consumers aren't throwing away perfectly good drugs, who would be? The only beneficiaries of reducing supplies of drugs would be the manufacturers.

But that's goofy. Isn't it?

Confused By Cold

2007-01-15T15:26:00.000-08:00

Since it seems as if winter temperatures will finally arrive, a word about wind chill.

Wind chill was developed to describe how wind velocity changes the way temperature feels to exposed skin.

We hear about wind chill so often that many people have become confused. Only warm blooded animals with bare skin, humans basically, are affected. If the temperature is 35 but the wind chill is 16, a container of water placed outside will not freeze.

Wind might make the water freeze more rapidly at an ambient temperature of 32 degrees by carrying away heat.

So fear not. Your car will die equally well at 16 degrees or minus 10 with the wind chill.

How Many Lunar Hectares in a Square Kilometer?

2007-01-09T14:58:00.000-08:00

NASA, for reasons known only to NASA, had decided to use the metric system for its future lunar explorations and settlements.
The rest of the world uses the metric system, but not the United States. We've just never seen the point.
Instead, we use miles, feet, yards, inches, pounds and a bunch of other arbitrary units.
The meter, on the other hand, was invented by the French in 18th century.
Christian Huygens suggested that a meter be defined as the length of a pendulum with a period of one second, but that didn't happen.
It was instead defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator along a line running between Dunkirk in France and Barcelona in Spain.
So the meter was a removed reflection of Earth, as were the units for volume, and weight. The original meter was a platinum bar kept in Paris. (The bar was 0.2 millimeters short, but what the heck.)
Scientists have since redefined the meter as 1/299,792,458 the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in one second.
Either way, using meters on the moon makes no more sense than miles, yards, and feet. Isn't NASA the agency that confused metric and British units on the $125 million Mars Orbiter, causing it to crash?
Maybe NASA should just use what we're used to.

Time Flies, So Stop Pushing

2006-12-21T16:51:00.000-08:00

Steve Miller had it wrong: Time isn't slipping, slipping, slipping into the future.

The future is time and time cannot slip into itself, can it?

Actually, we're the ones who are traveling through time. We all go in the same direction, like a school of fish. No one, as far as we know, can curve around and go backward.

So, here's the question. Space and time are so closely linked that Albert Einstein called them "space time." To move from standing still requires work, that is, force acting over time.

Ignoring planetary and galactic movement, if you want to stay in one spot on Earth, you simply don't stir. Movement in space seems to be under our control.

We're also traveling through time, but what force is doing the work to push us? You can stop movement by sitting at your desk, but there's no equivalent way to stop our motion through time.

Whatever propels us through seconds, minutes, and years, is relentless. What is it? If we could figure that out we could probably stop it. Then we'd be outside time, in eternity.

We would probably be able to see other things moving, but how would we appear? Or would we disappear because we're steadily receding into the past? No, because we wouldn't be moving in relation to time.

Consider packing into Times Square on New Year's Eve. You can't move, but nothing stops the date from changing.

Happy New Year, as you hurtle, unhindered, into the future.

SM, non-smoker, inso female, uninhibited, not afaird of cavemen.For walks on tundra and possible gene swap. No weirdos please.

2006-11-13T15:47:00.000-08:00

Humans may be the way they are because 37,000 years ago our species mated with Neanderthals.

This is what Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators at the University of Chicago propose based on a genetic analysis of a brain-size gene in modern humans.

Most humans these days have a certain version of the mircocephalin gene. If this gene spontaneously mutates the bearer has a much smaller head and brain. Homo sapiens has a good version of the gene.

They apparently acquired the D allelle of the microcephalin gene about 37,000 years ago. Since then D has become predominant, because humans animals with normal heads reproduce better than humans with small brains and heads.

Where the D allelle came from has been an open question. The Iniversity of Chicago scientists say it's possible -- even likely -- that modern humans picked it up by breeding with Neanderthals.

Neanderthals and humans diverged from each other about 1.1 million years ago, though both apparently remained sufficiently similar anatomically.

But these were different species. Did modern humans take advantage of Neanderthals routinely? If so, why? Because they were there?

The experience had to be eerie. Imagine if another member of the Homo family was extant and perhaps even attractive. Would there be laws against humans and Neanderthals fooling around?

They inevitably would interbreed. Then what?

We may owe our reign on at least one act of what we might now consider beastiality.

The idea makes the controversy over homosexual marriage seem like a colossal nothing.

Let Someone Else Worry For You, Sourpuss

2006-11-13T15:13:00.000-08:00

The holiday season is stressful, so much so, that it's beginning to seem odd that we call it the holiday season.

Maybe another name would be better. Something like, "The Season of Obligations and Unhappy Relatives," or SOUR.

"I'm dreaming of a sour Christmas..."

A group in Arizona has formed to keep a lid on annual angst. It's called "The Worry Club."

Instead of battling to cheer up, go ahead and wallow in despair. Let your mood sink. Perhaps if you worry enough, whatever frightens you will dissipate. Like if you want to stop eating butter pecan ice cream, buy a half gallon and force yourself to eat it all in one sitting.

Unfortunately, anxiety does not tend to work like that. Let it run wild and it just gets worse. The brain has an inexhaustable supply of anxiety-inducing chemicals. Fret all you want, your neurons will make more.

Actually, The Worry Club helps people by listening and counseling. Don't plan to do too much, establish time for yourself, set realistic goals, let others help with cooking and decorating, and do not drink in excess. Do not expect to repair 30 years of discord.

And so forth.

So have a happy sweet and sour holiday.

Ka-Boom

2006-11-07T17:09:00.000-08:00

Many physicists suspect that North Korea's recent nuclear test was what weapons designers used to call a fizzle.

There was a nuclear chain reaction and enough energy was released to send seismic waves from one end of the planet to the other. Even more would have been generated, but the device probably blew itself apart too fast.

This is not totally surprising, because making a workable atomic bomb is not easy. Thank goodness.

The idea is to take a sphere of pure plutonium-239 and compress it into a solid, super-critical ball. Then neutrons split nuclei, which emit more neutrons, which split more nuclei, and the chain reaction proceeds exponentially.

The smaller nuclei have extra binding energy, which they shed as gamma rays, x-rays, and a tremendous explosion.

However, the sphere must be compressed precisely and rapidly. Generally, the sphere is surrounded by carefully shaped conventional explosives. All of these charges have to be detonated at essentially the same instant. Not easy.

Circuitry originally depended on ultra-high speed switches called klystrons. Until a few days ago people interested in the details could find them online in old Iraqi military papers posted by the U.S. government for some strange reason.

When the Web existence of the atomic secrets became known they were quickly taken down.

The whole episode is bizarre.

The principles of atomic weapons are well known and the subject of many books. The difficulties lie in the details, like, how do you rig the explosives.

Once that gets out, assuming it hasn't already courtesy of the U.S., the world will be in a heap of trouble.

Death Takes A Job In A Hospital

2006-11-07T16:17:00.000-08:00

U.S. medicine is increasingly expensive, filtered through unqualified insurance-o-crats and becoming less and less accessible.

But at least it's better than the medical system in Britain, where the chance of death by medical error is a breath taking 1 in 300.

Britain's senior doctor made the estimate recently. Presumably that's a lifetime risk.

That's about the lifetime risk in the U.S. of dying from gunfire, overdosing on narcotics, or falling down. According to the National Safety Council, the least likely accidental cause of death in the U.S. is by a snake or lizard bite.

The most common include car crash, self-inflicted gunshot (not really an accident, assault with a firearm, or the ever popular falling down.

In Britain, the average chap is 33,000 times more likely to die from a medical error in a hospital than in an air crash, according to the chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson. "In an airline industry, the evidence ... from scheduled airlines is the risk of death is one in 10 million. If you go into a hospital in the developed world, the risk of death from a medical error is one in 300," he said.

Perhaps Donaldson is counting the number of people who die in hospitals, which these days, includes most of us. Otherwise, he's defining medical error in a ridiculously broad way.

The message seems to be that if you want to avoid dying in a hospital, spend as much time as possible flying in an airliner.

Mean Comments Don't Help the Overweight

2006-10-25T16:19:00.000-07:00

Yale diet scientists have discovered that nagging people about being overweight is not helpful.

In fact, stigmatizing those on diets makes them abandon the diets and seek more food. Many people would respond to this study with an obtuse "Duh."

Of course overweight people don't want to be teased and made to feel like self-saboteurs. Though this seems obvious now, that response comes after decades of treating the overweight as social and physical pariahs.

So, "Duh" really marks an advance in thinking. It seems as if people are finally realizing that obesity is not an abject absence of self-control and a failure of free will.

This is not to say that obesity is healthy. It isn't. But clearly, shame does more harm than good.

Bore Not, Blog Not

2006-10-24T17:13:00.000-07:00

Good grief.

Is this as boring as all of the other blogs? You bet! Even the notable ones. Are any blogs interesting or are we all deluding ourselves?

Or boring ourselves on purpose as an escape from the devised, depraved existence in which we find ourselves.

Boredom is a saving grace. We spend four years in college learning how to be politely bored. Boredom is what sets humans apart from other animals. They learn, anticipate, plan. But do they get bored?

No. That's our one true human traint. Boredom is not mindless. It's too much mind.

Are you bored yet?

Blah, blah, blah. Of course you are.

Here we have graphic proof that only the thoughts of a very few people are interesting, valuable, or revelatory. Fernando Pessoa had original perceptions. The rest of us? Blah.

Denis Johnson? Yes. You? No.

But don't fool yourself. Boredom is valuable. It gives you something to do. Otherwise you'd be wasting your time. Boredom is truly yours and yours alone. That's one thing no one can take away from you.

It's reliable and effortless. And people envy the truly bored.

So, go ahead. Be bored.

Just do it the right way.

Clang! Coumadin Time!

2006-10-24T16:17:00.000-07:00

An astounding 700,000 people in U.S. poison themselves every year by taking the wrong medicine, too much of the right medicine, or because of an adverse reaction to a medicine.
Adverse drug effects accounted for 2.5 percent of emergency department visits in the years studied by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The main problem seems to be confusion. Patients take an over-the-counter or prescription pill, forget, and then take another too soon.
Some drugs, such as blood thinners and medications for diabetes, were especially prone to accidental misuse.
But can that number possibly be true? That's almost 1 million Americans. Or about 0.3 percent of the population. So, yes, it does make sense.
Imagine you take six drugs a day; one three times a day, another when you wake up and go to sleep; another every four hours, a second drug three times a day and as needed, another taken as needed or every two hours, and another than can only be taken with food.
How could you not be confused? Here's where a robot could really be useful. Load all of the drugs into the machine. After each load, enter the information about when the drug should be taken. The machine would also have an "as needed" button, but the robot would keep track of how many times it's pushed.
The robot would have a sound alarm and flashing light. The pills would emerge from a shoot, like a gum ball machine. The machine could only be opened with a key that's in the possession of the person in charge of keeping the robot supplied. It would run on electricity and also contain emergency batteries.
This shouldn't be too hard to design.
In fact, you could simply take the machine to the pharmacy. Simple.
Or, you could not smoke, stay slim, exercise, not drink in excess, have good genes and no family history of heart disease or cancer.
That's the ticket.

Political Lunacy

2006-10-24T15:25:00.000-07:00

A social worker at Southern Connecticut State University has completed a study showing that support for President George W. Bush is especially high among the mentally ill.
In fact, the more severe the mental illness the greater of support. Christopher M. Lohse, the researcher, also discovered that Bush supporters showed a lower understanding of current issues, politics and government than non-supporters.
The study involved 69 psychiatric outpatients in the 2004 presidential election. The subjects completed various tests to measure their impairment.
"The funding that political preference for George Bush was associated with poor mental health is consistent with previous research on voting preference and mental illness," Lohse wrote, based on a paper published in 1977 by Frumkin and Ibrahim in "Perceptual and Motor Skills."
This appears to be a serious study, but releasing it two weeks before the election betrays a certain partisan bent.
How the mentally ill perceive the world is interesting, however. Unfortunately Lohse does not reveal the diagnoses of the 69 outpatients.
Maybe psychiatric patients have some political predictive value.
As the schizoids go, so goes the nation!

If I Were A Hyena I'd Eat Your Head

2006-09-18T14:54:00.000-07:00

Snoring is definitely not an evolutionary advantage.
A few hundred thousand years ago emitting a sound like a lawn mower every few seconds would draw every predator within ear shot.
And the snorer is as his most vulnerable. He'd wake up with sabre tooth tiger fangs sticking out of the back of his head.
Snoring is apparently another one of those unexpected results of civilization. We can now safely snore, in the sense that we need not worry about hyenas with sharp ears.
However, loud snoring is associated with obstructive sleep apnea. This is a condition in which your floppy soft palate seals off your windpipe, almost waking you up, over and over and over.
It increases the risk of heart problems, high blood pressure, and falling asleep at any opportunity, sort of like the actors in the mattress ads.
There are non-surgical ways to effectively treat sleep apnea. Basically, you strap a mask over your face connected to a pump that blows air down your throat all night.
What does not work are devices designed to pull your nostrils open. Of course open nostrils are good, but snoring has zippo to do with the nose, and everything to do with the floppy tissue at the back of your throat.
For cripe's sake, get a mask.

Mad Dog or Thunderbird, Sir?

2006-09-12T16:46:00.000-07:00

Either a wonderfully dry group of satirists has been born - or a bunch of crackpots with a harmful agenda is at work.
They call themselves the Reason Foundation, which is already kind of funny.
The foundation's latest e-mail report purports to demonstrate that people who drink heavily earn more money than social drinkers and those who abstain.
This contradicts common sense, but common sense isn't always correct. The foundation clowns instead use a nonsensical equation and impossible to interpret data sets to "prove" its hypothesis.
This is a real-life example of what you should learn math. Someone, somwhere will read and believe the report and start bringing a bottle to work and keeping a short dog in his jacket.
That's what all of the successful people do. You can see them lounging outside on the curb at night or sleeping in cardboard boxes.
There's nothing wrong with sensible drinking and it may even be OK to overindulge occasionally if someone sober can drive you home and dump you on your front lawn.
Reason Foundation, meet "the aristocrats."