peristaltor

I'll first make an up-front declaration of bias: I hate the anti-vaccination crowd.

For those of you unfamiliar with actress, comedianne and centerfold model Jenny McCarthy's hobbies, she has been probably the most visible and outspoken celebrity to endorse the vile lies that childhood vaccines, especially those containing mercury-based preservatives like Thimerisol, cause autism.

I call her positions on vaccine "vile lies" for good reason: At least four peer-reviewed studies have failed to show a connection. That doesn't stop folks -- including celebs like McCarthy and her boyfriend Jim Carrey, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Bill Mahr and a raft of others -- from flogging the Thimerisol horse corpse.

Ms. McCarthy, of course, has reason to be angry at autism; her son suffers from the condition. In this case, though, she has gone completely off the deep end attacking vaccines, even going so far as to suggest that the inevitable preventable deaths that follow people refusing to immunize their own children are a price worth paying to avoid an autism connection that (once again) has been debunked.

Let's really add to evidence of her dissonance. Though she has on more than one occasion likened vaccines to "poison," take a gander at what she had to say about one of the most deadly poisons known to man:

“I love Botox, I absolutely love it. I get it minimally so I can still move my face. But I really do think it’s a savior.”

Anyhoo, I'm not posting this just to rant. I was responding to alobar the other day. I think the Hygienic Hypothesis might be a more likely culprit, and said so. He asked a good question: Why now? ( Why are we facing an explosion of autism? )


Edit: Link and floppy verbiage corrected October 8, 2009.

I have an iPod. Not the fancy, wheel-controlled or touch-screen equipped money pits, but a simple iPod Nano (without the proprietary DRM earbuds). It does what I want of it. It provides audio content while costing less than my $60 limit, the amount of cash I am willing to spend on any gadget I bring to work.

When new, this little gadget did all that was promised and more. Funny thing though: Its functionality ( stopped right at the threshold of 'more.' )

Addendum, the next morning: Oh, and I completely forgot the strangest part, the part that leads me to believe there is a programing error in the pod's OS. There are only two slider switches on the Nano, Power On/Off and Shuffle On/Off. Shuffle off plays items roughly in the order you select on the sync page (see entry for infuriating limitations) -- but plays MP3s, then MP4s, Apple's proprietary format. Switch to Shuffle On -- you're going to love this -- and the unit only plays MP4s, ignoring any MP3s currently loaded.

What's more, this is the second Nano I've owned. I mentioned the shuffle switch weirdness (and some other strangeness) at the Mac store to a floor guy, prompting him to take my old one to the back and declare it FUBAR in ways no one in the back claimed to understand. He gave me a new unit . . . which does exactly the same thing.

Once I can write off as a unit malfunction. Twice and we have a design flaw.

Major Addendum, August 17, 2009: It looks like the latest iTunes upgrade (to 8.2.1(6) ) has corrected the ordering problem! By gum, the darned thing is now playing the order I want!

Now to get them to fix that podcast Autofill and we're on the verge of normalcy!

Michael Shermer gives the 12-point rundown on questions everyone should be asking all the time. BTW, his books Why People Believe Weird Things and Why Darwin Matters should be required high school reading.

Found a follow-up to something interesting I heard last year about how people cannot be told the truth if the truth disagrees with their preconceptions.

The same sort of issue — the persistence of misperceptions in the face of evidence — has also been intriguing Brendan Nyhan, of Duke University, North Carolina, and Jason Reifler, of Georgia State University. And they have published two fascinating papers providing the results of experiments that they conducted into whether it is possible to correct such errors of fact.

Their conclusions are not a cause for optimism.

I had heard about their study when I was writing my Deist Miasma series, but they were still working on questions I found too fundamental to include before the answers had been found. This new study found what I had suspected all along:

First, correcting a misperception doesn’t really work when the original misperception fits snugly with the subject’s ideology. Second, and worse still, attempting to correct errors often produces a backlash, with the error becoming more firmly believed. (Emphasis mine.)

Lesson: It really doesn't matter that you are right on the facts; people who don't like the facts simply won't listen.

Forgive me, readers, for I have omitted. When I first started The Deist Miasma, I fully expected to answer that last question asked in Part I, Why do many creationists feel so threatened by the scientific explanations for life's diversity? After all, the "Fundamentally" in the post's title refers to the fundamental, underpinning assumptions Behe, Schlafly and Walker all hold that forces their science attacking actions. I wrapped up the third and last installment, though, and forgot to answer that question. Why? I am a forgetful idiot. That's why.

I've added the following to the original Part I. If you'd like to read the entire thing, be my guest. If you remember the original, continue after the cut to the original entry. ( Onward. )

Not familiar with the James Randi Educational Foundation? James has worked tirelessly over the decades to debunk the bunko artists, the crap salespeople that peddle cheap gimmicks as gold, that prey upon the desperate with empty hopes. He does this by demonstrating what cheats these people are, and by offering a simple challenge: If you think you are psychic in any way, come to us and let us prove it. If you can demonstrate your psychic or paranormal powers in a double-blind test, The Randi Foundation give you a million dollars. It's that simple.

So far, no one has accepted the challenge and collected the money. Go figure.

The problem might be, though, that these flim-flam artists don't really need Randi's cash. They make pretty good money peddling lies and deceit to their generally pretty strong followings. If they tell their legion of minions to complain about Randi, they probably will.


Via Pharyngula.

Addendum, April 12, 2009: It looks like Randi is back on the air! Woo-hoo!

I really want one of these cameras. And not for kinky stuff, either. Well, not just.

One of the latest podcasts from The Economist had a fascinating interview with Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham. He maintains that the leap from the big chest cavities of H. habilis to the big brain pans of H. erectus may have been facilitated or even made possible by cooking:

Richard Wrangham has tasted chimp food, and he doesn’t like it. “The typical fruit is very unpleasant. . . . Fibrous, quite bitter. Not a tremendous amount of sugar. Some make your stomach heave.” After a few tastings in western Uganda, where he works part of the year on his 20-year-old project studying wild chimpanzees, Wrangham came to the conclusion that no human could survive long on such a diet. Besides the unpalatable taste, our weak jaws, tiny teeth and small guts would never be able to chomp and process enough calories from the fruits to support our large bodies.

Then, one cool fall evening in 1997, while gazing into his fireplace in Cambridge, Mass., and contemplating a completely different question — “What stimulated human evolution?” — he remembered the chimp food. “I realized what a ridiculously large difference cooking would make,” Wrangham says. Cooking could have made the fibrous fruits, along with the tubers and tough, raw meat that chimps also eat, much more easily digestible, he thought—they could be consumed quickly and digested with less energy. This innovation could have enabled our chimp­like ancestors’ gut size to shrink over evolutionary time; the energy that would have gone to support a larger gut might have instead sparked the evolution of our bigger-brained, larger-bodied, humanlike forebears.

The podcast interview continued this thread, noting that the current rise in obesity corresponds with the rise in eating ever more processed foods, essentially softer and hotter meals. Wrangham notes that heat from cooking changes the available energy content of food in three main ways:

Heat gelatinizes starches and collagens, allowing the glucose molecules to dissolve and become available to digestive enzymes;

Heat denatures proteins, opening them and likewise exposing them to digestive enzymes; and

Heat softens food.

Don't discount that last point! The less work the digestive tract has to do to free the nutrients from a meal, the more nutrient doesn't have to be converted into energy to allow the tract to do that work. For an analogy, imagine running into a steady headwind. Cooking food can put the wind to your back, helping you rather than hampering and allowing you more energy to make more speed or distance. Comparing a day's worth of meals identical in caloric value but differing in whether or not they were cooked, Wrangham estimates raw meals require extra energy "probably about the equivalent of running a mile." To support this last claim, he cited a study by Oka in which rats eat meals similar in caloric intake, but different in texture. Even with the same exercise regimen, the rats eating the softer diet gain more weight.

We digest with both physical and chemical processes, but for decades now, he notes, diet has been the domain of those concentrating almost solely on biochemistry. Hopefully more emphasis can be placed on the biophysics.


Note: I'm tagging this one in the Worms! category, because though no worms were mentioned, much of what he said reminded me of The Wife's digestive symptoms.

I started writing the Deist Miasma series with high hopes, but little else. I was missing something, a crucial piece of evidence (as opposed to suspicion) that may have finally surfaced. It's a preliminary study that requires some expansion, but it reinforced the niggling thoughts that started this series enough to motivate me to finish it. ( Onward, interested parties! )

PBS's Frontline recently tackled global warming and the corporate forces against change in its most recent episode, Heat. (You can watch the full two hour episode at the site.) Among the interviews, they examined GM's new concept plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt. If you happen to follow the link to the Volt's official site, you'll notice a dearth of actual information on the damned thing, let alone any tech-specs that make such sites in any way interesting. There's a reason. The Frontline crew was invited to shoot some road footage of the Volt as a part of "Heat." The prototype slowed to under 10mph on a gentle grade, finally stalling at the top of the hill. It had to be pushed into the truck that brought it to the shoot.

Martin Smith also interviewed a GM PR hack, asking the one question that everyone in the entire world needs to be constantly asking anyone associated with the Evil Behemoth: Why build the Volt when you had a perfectly good electric in the EV1, a car you recalled and crushed. . . ten years ago? The hack tried to correct the record, noting the cars were near the end of their life cycles had been "recycled," and that several had been donated to museums and universities.

The first part about the cars being "too old to drive" was bogus through and through. Most of the lessees protested the end-of-lease recalls. Many of them offered to buy the cars outright for far more than the market would warrent. Really, see Who Killed the Electric Car. The PR hack's last bit about the museum and university donation program proves only partially true; the donated vehicles came disabled and enjoined with strict warnings for the receivers to never, never, never try to restore the cars to working condition and (gasp!) actually drive the cars. Most of the cars were delivered with key components of the drive system removed. In fact, only the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (NMAH) got a complete car:

Only 40 EV1s were preserved, according to Jill Banaszynski, manager of the EV1 donation program, to be given to museums and institutions or kept for research by GM. Of these, the only fully intact EV1, complete with its (now inert) lead acid battery, is today part of the NMAH collection. “Our requirement is that all the vehicles in the museum have to be complete models,” says Withuhn. “We may remove parts, but we have to know that if we wanted to drive a car, or a steam engine, we could -— not that we would. It’s a question of authenticity.”

This stipulation initially posed a problem for GM, which had decided to take the cars off the road because only a relative handful of technicians knew how to work safely on the powerful batteries. But a series of negotiations proved fruitful, and the museum, in March of 2005, received its own complete example of an exemplary machine. (Emphasis mine.)

That line suggesting that "only a relative handful of technicians" proves reason enough to disable the cars? Bull. Complete and utter bull. Sure, the EV1s do have a pretty high voltage pack, over 400 volts, IIRC, but there are lots of folks out there who work on similar voltages daily. . . and many of them can be found at universities. Duh. No, the EV1 was disabled to prevent anyone from seeing those cars on the road ever again.

You see, it turns out that folks sitting high in GM's corporate office towers, the people who make the core decisions regarding what products it will produce and why, have funny feelings compared to the majority of, say, the majority of scientists in this world. Stephen Colbert reinforced that lesson when he had GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz on his show. Take a peek:



Here Lutz is promoting the car that has at least a chance of pulling GM out of the toxic sea of red ink in which it currently gasps and bobs, and Lutz openly shares the fact that he doesn't believe carbon dioxide build-up causes global warming. "32,000 scientist" believe GW is caused by sunspots? Really, Bob? Really?!? Way to sell the whole Volt concept. I'm sure your target market would agree.

The Bottom Line? General Motors is run by a bunch of old fogies that are not only running their company into the ground, taking all of their employees with them, they furthermore haven't the slightest idea what they are doing wrong, and are therefore highly unlikely to change their corporate course in any positive way anytime soon.

I'm sorry, but when any group runs pell mell through a crowd with a revving chain saw, it's time to act. The sooner GM closes its doors and cedes its market share to companies that don't suck so very, very much, the better everyone both in front of and behind the tailpipes will be.

It's just sad.


*The "Die, Die, Die," of course, refers to a corporate death, not literal death. I may not share, er, any opinions with GM corporate, but that certainly doesn't mean I wish them ill.

. . . Can someone tell me how BlackLight Power might work? This is something my neighbor sent my way. He's far more formally educated on the sciences, and even he had never heard of a "hydrino:"

In (the company's patented) process, the electron in an ordinary hydrogen atom is induced to move closer to the proton, below the prior-known ground state to form more stable hydrogen atoms called hydrinos. The large energy released exceeds that required to extract hydrogen from water, such that water may serve as the hydrogen fuel source for the process.

For a hint that this might be a scam, let me direct you to their company logo:



Compare that to a more familiar image:



Coincidence? We'll see when their tech emerges from the lab. . . if it ever does. Hydrinos might be finicky things.

Very recently, researchers led by Richard Lenski announced something momentous: For the first time in recorded scientific history, researchers have been able to observe evolutionary change in progress, confirming and refining Darwin's epochal 1859 theory on the genetic level.


Flasks of evolved E. coli

One would think that this coffin nail would have silenced the Creationist crowd forever. It didn't. ( If anything, it momentarily energized them. )

Addendum, July 24, 2008: Just for fun, I headed over to Conservapedia and looked up the latest bashing entry for "evolution." I found this sentence:

The theory of evolution posits a process of self-transformation from simple life forms to more complex life forms, which has never been observed or duplicated in a laboratory.

Weird. With such recent communications with the researcher who just observed and duplicated evolution in the lab, one would assume Schlafly would have rushed to his site to make corrections. . . wouldn't one?


*Addendum, April 5, 2009: Forgive me, readers, for I have omitted. When I first started The Deist Miasma, I fully expected to answer that last question, Why the creationists felt so threatened by the scientific explanations of life. After all, the "Fundamentally" in this post's title refers to the fundamental, underpinning assumptions Behe, Schlafly and Walker all hold that forces their science attacking actions. I wrapped up the third and last installment, though, and forgot to answer that question. Why? I am a lazy, forgetful idiot. Let me rectify that omission now, with a supplement to the original entry that runs from the asterisk to the LJ cut.

Solar panels that cost only $1 a watt?!?

Cheaper than coal! Did you hear that? These panels would produce power less expensively than coal.

This. Could. Be. Huge.

Not long ago, I speculated that the economy behaved in an emergent fashion, without a guiding intelligence. The Angry Bear, quoting Carl Zimmer (who blogs at The Loom), supported my speculation:

Profit is simply the difference between expense and income. Each individual measures the effort required to receive a desired amount of income. Some are happy with little; others climb the corporate ladder. Different parts of the swarm "swirl" or move differently, but all parts are driven by a simple and similar principle: Self-interest. . . .

In short, there is a kind of exorable path that will be taken, regardless on any one individual’s intelligence. Why has the U.S. failed to have a sane energy policy? The answer is simple: There was never an immediate need. Each individual in a swarm responds only to its immediate environment. To move en mass to alternate sources of energy—however wise in the long run—violates the principle of immediate response, violates the principle of immediate self-interest, a violation that would force the individual or unit to act with foresight, something he instinctively will not do. Trying to change the principles of a particular swarm is like trying to push water uphill.

Exactly.

For you nihilist economists out there, though, remember:

Governments exist to provide wisdom and guidance, to set rules for behavior, to modify swarm behavior. What happens when the principles of the swarm invade and control the government, when the government cannot in any way guide the swarm? Is that not precisely what is happening, both here in the "democratic West" and in communist China? Consequently, we have no energy policy...and China has no environmental policy. With no controls in place, our credit crunch is becoming disastrous. (Emphasis mine.)

There are ways to control the swarm, to direct both public policy and spending decisions in one action. Conversely, poor taxation policies can derail the best intentions leading to counter-productive consequences. Once I came to this realization -- even before I had the terms and definitions to define what I felt -- understanding situations surrounding me came easily.

It's all about the individuals. Understand those simple impulses that motivate the individuals, and you start to understand the swarm.




X-Posted to home_effinomic.

This is fascinating. I only wish I had the computing chops to do these kinds of simulations.




From flamingnerd in antitheism.

tacit has branched out once again from the LJ to a little side project, a lightning blog. This particular little factoid struck my fancy:

And speaking of lightning rods, most people know that the lightning rod was invented by Benjamin Franklin, but what’s less well-known is that it quickly became a matter of political dispute between King George III and the Republic during the Revolutionary War.



Franklin’s original lightning rod design, an example of which is shown here, called for a sharpened iron rod, mounted to the top of a building and connected by a copper cable to the ground. . . .

King George III favored designs with rounded balls on the top. . . . In 1776, a powder magazine in London was struck by lightning and burned; the Franklin lightning rod protecting it was quickly blamed, and lightning rods with rounded ends were soon mandated by law in England.

As it turns out, ol’ King George was actually right, and modern lightning rods in the US have a rounded top. Lightning doesn’t work the way most people think it does.

I just love the fact that the more efficacious design was mandated not because of rigorous testing, trial and error, all the scientific tests one can apply to new technology. Nope. The real reason rounded balls topped most of the British lightning rods can be found in the sentence I deleted in the second ellipsis: "King George III favored designs with rounded balls on the top, in part because Franklin was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence."

Boys, boys, boys.

According to The Oil Drum, this amount so far represents the largest averaged amount of crude oil extracted from the drilling fields in one month. Write that number down somewhere. Keep that number safe for future reference.

Why?



Because that record was set in May, 2005:

1) Crude oil - Latest available figures from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) show that crude oil production including lease condensates increased by 455,000 b/d from June to July. Total production in July was estimated at 73.28 million b/d, which is 1.01 million b/d lower than the all time high crude oil production of 74.30 million b/d reached in May 2005.

Not long ago, I introduced readers here to M. King Hubbert's concept of Peak Oil. It now looks like Hubbert colleague Kenneth Deffeyes' prediction of a late November, 2005 peak was only half a year off the mark.

Jessica Pikul's Tattoo

She explains her pertinant history and tattoo here:

I am a Chemistry PhD student at University of Washington. My research is in bioinorganic chemistry, specifically modeling non-heme iron-sulfur metalloenzymes. I am also a Celiac (autoimmune disorder triggered by ingesting gluten). The tattoo on my leg is one of the segments of the gluten protein that I can not digest. The ball and stick molecule is of a Proline-Serine-Glutamine-Glutamine peptide that I can't break down which then stimulates T-cells to start the fun chain reaction that ends in my small intestine villi being attacked by antibodies. The background to the molecule is an artsy spacescape. I chose this to speak to the universality of the physical laws that govern the microscopic and macroscopic, an idea that has kept me excited about chemistry and in the lab to this day (and hopefully longer).

The wife also suffers from Celiac (and whatever else is causing her to react violently to all starches, even those that contain no gluten), hence my interest.


From Carl Zimmer's The Loom.