perfidy

I've given up counting the number of things that I do that are haardous to my health and well being. But this one, I think I'll just have to ignore:

Aspartame Kills.

[wik] As an added bonus, not only is aspartame lethal, it's Don Rumsfeld's fault! Republican conspiracy! Worldviews confirmed! Nefariousness proved! Ack.

Two viewpoints: First, Leon Kass (bioethics council member) claims that the council is balanced and that politics are not involved.

Or, you could read this article, in which Elizabeth Blackburn (one of the ejected scientists) is quoted as saying, "I think this is Bush stacking the council with the compliant".

You might also want to read Glenn Reynolds' take on it. He's pretty harsh, and he's GOP.

As with foreign policy, economics, taxation and religion, this President doesn't like being inconvenienced by opposing views.

A recent article describes research that may allow doctors to literally hear disease.

Preliminary research indicates that living cells, with proper care and feeding, pulsate. That pulsation can be expressed as sound. Initial study of yeast cells reveals that they pulse "about a C-sharp to D above middle C in terms of music". Dead or mutated cells actually sound different than healthy ones. Interestingly, sprinkling alcohol on yeast cells- the preferred method of killing them, apparently- raises the pitch of those cells. I don't know if I sing higher after I've been sprinkled with alcohol, but I definitely sing LOUDER.

Nevertheless, with more research and refinement, this sort of nano-sonic listening could yield an entire new set of diagnostic tools. Like really, really sick headphones for starters.

Despite my lengthy absence from these august pages, I have not forgotten the challenge I laid at my own feet. My task was to examine the various problems we face (or don't, as the case may be) with the environment, and to outline a course of action to deal with them.

I was able to do some reading on the matter last month, and the problems boil down to several claims from the environmentalists:

• Pollution
• Resource Depletion
• Loss of Biodiversity/Species Extinction
• Overpopulation/Famine
• Global Warming

Here, I will deal with two of them, and the rest will follow shortly.

Resource Depletion and Overpopulation/Famine have declined in importance, even amongst environmentalists over the last couple decades in large part because they have proven to be untrue. Back in the early seventies the Club of Rome and people like Paul Ehrlich famously predicted famine, running out of natural resources and generally the end of the world. They predicted that it would have happened by now. That this has not come to pass (though I forgot to check Drudge this morning, it might have happened. Nope, I checked and the world hasn't ended) should have chastened them. But Ehrlich among others is still selling his heady brand of doom.

The most recent demographics indicate that the world population will peak somewhere around mid century at about 8 billion people, and thereafter begin to decline. The low end UN projection in fact predicts a peak at less than 8 billion before 2040, and then decline. Since this is only about a 25% percent increase, it seems unlikely that this will cause great chaos in the coming decades. Even without GM foods, recent advances in agriculture (at least in the wealthier nations, though slowly spreading) seem adequate to handle this increase.

Given that there is likely going to be enough food, and that in the last couple centuries most if not all famines have had political causes (Ukraine, China, Biafra, Ethiopia, Somalia) rather than purely environmental ones, I think it is safe to say that this is really not an issue we need to worry about, at least on the big scale.

For the other, resource depletion, we face a similar non-crisis. Most of the projections that led to the Club of Rome and others to declare that we would run out of x resource in y years were based on known reserves of x and current consumption rates. The fundamental problem with these projections is that they are based on known reserves, or worse on proven reserves. This is akin to being hungry and in a large warehouse with a flashlight. You shine the beam around, and see food. You feverishly calculate that you will run out of the food you see in front of you in three days. Certain starvation! Of course, as you eat the food in front of you, you can shine the flashlight around to look for more food. Of course, you might have to walk further to get it, or climb up the shelves, but it is there.

So it goes with minerals and petroleum and other things we dig out of the ground. Despite increasing consumption, proven reserves of every commodity metal are larger than they were when the Club of Rome first published its predictions. Also, prices for most of these are lower - indicating that they are trending less rather than more scarce. The Earth is a very, very big place, and we inhabit only the surface. There is little likelihood that we will ever "exhaust" the Earth of resources. (And if it ever seemed likely that we were about to, there are always asteroids...)

There are a couple things that we can learn here. One, always take doomsday scenarios with a grain of salt. Don't ignore them, but certainly don't begin screaming that the sky is falling. Two, to the extent that these problems ever were problems, technology was the solution. Better agricultural technology has vastly increased our ability to grow food. The Green revolution was happening at the same time that Ehrlich was prophesying doom. The new revolution in GM foods promises to similarly increase our ability to produce sustenance for the teeming hordes. A side benefit of these new techniques is that the land needed for farming is actually reduced - which means that where the new style farming is adopted, there is less pressure on marginally arable land, which means less desertification or encroachment on rainforests. In the United States, there is more forestland east of the Mississippi than at any time since the early 1800s.

A primary reason that population is expected to begin falling is that generally speaking, the wealthier a nation it is, the less children its citizens will have. Europe and Japan are facing a demographic crisis already as their birthrates have fallen below replacement levels. And large areas of east Asia have apparently crossed the line into lowered fertility rates. Of course, the draconian policies of the Chinese communist government have played a role here as well. If we continue to get wealthier, the population will eventually decline. Though this may cause other problems…

The same is true of mining. New technology means that we can affordably (profitably) get at resources that would have been completely unfeasible twenty years ago. So, reserves are larger. And the new methods are almost universally less damaging to the environment. The oil drilling that was proposed in the Alaskan ANWR reserve would have tapped the oil of a region the size of South Carolina from a facility no larger than Dulles Airport outside Washington. Strip mining is becoming a thing of the past, and in general things are getting better. And it is wealth and technology that is making them so.

So, for these two issues, I hereby declare them to be non-issues, and needing no corrective action of any kind.

In the next few days, I will tackle the other issues. Stay tuned.

Let's compare and contrast, class! It'll be our brain exercise for the day.

Eric Schlosser ("Fast Food Nation") has an op-ed piece in the New York Times last weekend about Ann Veneman, spokeswoman for the Secretary of Agriculture. Prior to this gig, Veneman was PR director for the beef lobby. Her message to America, about the threat of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy? "Remain calm, all is well!"

Meanwhile, the USDA is sending 450 calves to slaughter because they have no way of tracking which one is the offspring of the cow diagnosed with BSE. Also, a batch of beef bones sold mostly in San Jose California is being recalled. "Mmmmm, mom! This sancocho is really good! What's the secret ingredient?" "It's prions, mi hijo!"

According to Ms. Veneman, does the USDA need a better tracking system for cow lineages, and tighter observation of existing nerve-matter feed restrictions? Of course not, silly! All is well!

(also posted to blogcritics)

"Juan non-Volokh" at the Volokh Conspiracy writes:

On a Diet? Drink Guinness! Yes, it's true. The rich, thick, chocolate-brown mother's milk of beers has fewer carbs and calories than many lighter (and less tasty) beers. As a story noted in yesterday's print WSJ, 12 ounces of Guinness have only 125 calories and 10 grams of carbs -- less than Budweiser, Coors, or Corona. It might even be good for your heart. So, what are you waiting for? Drink up!

Hell, yes! Guinness is one of the most perfect inventions man has ever devised, right up there with the shovel, the wheel, the waterproof shoe, and US football on CBS.

Moreover, new studies suggest that people that eat fewer calories live longer. What's a long life without beer? Drink Guinness.....

(responsibly)

You always wanted to know, and now here's your answer.

I have a bad, bad feeling about this one. See this USA Today article; Craig Venter and his team have put together a virus based on the recipe, read from the genetic code...

Scary.

Of course, I just watched Terminator 3, with Skynet taking over the world, and all that...so maybe my subconscious is a little overly concerned.

Still.

People are wondering if these things can fix the carbon dioxide problem in the atmosphere? Dumb.

Guinness IS good for you!

This story from the UK is interesting - some physicists from the University of Wales at Aberystwyth have figured out how much damage Guy Fawkes' barrels of gunpowder would have caused had his dastardly plot not been foiled. Apparently, he would have "devastated much of London as well as blowing the palace of Westminster sky-high."

"Using explosion physics the team deduced that streets up to one-third of a mile from the centre of the palace of Westminster would have suffered severe structural damage and windows would have shattered within a radius of two-thirds of a mile from the centre of the blast."

Dr Geraint Thomas, head of the Centre for Explosion Studies, (now there's a cool job title) said that the 2,500kg of gunpowder Guy Fawkes was found with, would be equivalent to the same amount of TNT due to the fact that explosives expert Fawkes had carefully packed the gunpowder tightly in barrels.

Here's a summary of the plot for those in need of one.

The AP is reporting that sales of cloned cattle are increasing in anticipation of an FDA ruling that cloned beef is safe to eat. Personally, I don't see how the FDA could rule otherwise, given that a clone is by definition an exact copy of another animal. If the original ambulatory steak was edible, so will its identical twin. Of course, we must get ready for the deluge of dirty hippies screaming, "Frankenfood."

Meanwhile, I eagerly await my first cloned steak. It has such 50s retro science of the future feel to it. I arrive home from work in my jet car, park in the garage of my circular, all-glass home of the future, tell the robot butler to hold all calls on the videophone, and sit down to a meal of cloned beef and genetically engineered potatoes. What could be better?

You can't resist reading something entitled "Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass", can you?

Check this out! A study from the University of Utah estimates that, for every gallon of gasoline you put in your car, 98 tons of prehistoric plant matter had to die.

I'm not throwing that out there to be an environmentalist doomsayer, though numbers that big do induce a little save-the-world spasm. I just think that's 98 tons is awesomely huge number. The Slashdot story which linked to the study notes that this equates to roughly 4 tons of plants per car per mile. Daaaamn. Thirty-odd tons of plant matter! In my Pontiac! Just to go to the store!

I don't know which is more mind-boggling: the sheer amount of dead plants it takes to move our society, or the sheer amount of dead plants that must have existed.

This Wired article looks at the debate over cloning of food animals. Predictibly, consumers express reluctance to consider buying cloned meat, even though scientists are reasonably certain that it would be safe to eat.

Interestingly, this debate may well be moot: the economics of cloning cattle mean that we won't be eating Clone Steak any time soon. Cloning is not economically effective for raising cattle for slaughter ($72K a pop these days...), but it works when employed instead of breeding to perpetuate a particularly strong genetic line-- making ten copies of your best Hereford. Man! Stud fees galore!

--Editorial handwaving--
People flip out over genetically modified food way too much. Some advances, like the much-touted Vitamin-A enriched Golden Rice, are 100% double plus goods. Others are of more dubious good, like Monsanto seed that goes bad after a year. At this point, the general public is so paranoid about Frankenfood (and note the fear factor in that very slang) that a reasoned debate isn't even possible, even though plenty of food has already been tampered with at the genetic level by pointy-heads with clipboards. This paranoia is no way to feed the world.

On that note, the Wired article does note that the biggest concern of scientists working on cloning cattle is that a clone might escape and try to breed. Although it's hard to imagine a doomsday scenario arising from that event, if the scientists are worried, I'll let them find a solution.

Personally, I would LOVE the economics and technology of cloning to advance to the point that cheap beef could be vatgrown. That would be great! Cheesesteak without the cruelty! Seriously, one reason I don't eat a lot of meat is that I want to do my tiny, symbolic part to help humankind, and a cow takes up a lot of perfectly good grain that could otherwise feed people on the cheap. Vatgrown beef would mitigate this concern, and have the added benefit that a cow didn't have to die. Of course, the Black Angus top-line stuff could/should still be the real thang, but who the hell's going to notice the difference in cafeteria food?

I love the future!

Nature is telling us that those wacky scientists have developed a laser that can zap individual mitochondria inside a cell, leaving the rest of the cell unharmed. Using laser bursts .000000000000001 of a second long, they are able to destroy very small things indeed. Femtolasers! Sadly, they are little use in fighting off Martians.

... or at least the perfect sandwich for Scottish people. Disgusting.

The classic cheese and pickle sandwich, eaten in front of the television, has been shown to constitute the ideal sandwich, according to research carried out for British Bread Month.

A nationwide survey quizzed respondents on the ingredients and conditions of the perfect sandwich they made at home and came up with the following equation:

ps = 0.225b + 0.134c + 0.127s + 0.196f + 0.136p +0.181e

The final equation identifies the optimum thickness and type of bread (b), type and thickness of cheese (c), type and thickness of spread (s), additional filling (f), method of presentation (p), and where it should be eaten (e).

The perfect sandwich is made using strong or mature Cheddar on medium, pre-sliced round-top white bread with a thin spread of vegetable margarine, cut diagonally and eaten at home for lunch in front of the television.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!

White bread: wrong! Margarine!?!??!?? WRONG! Pickle ("chutney")? Meh.

The perfect HOMEMADE sandwich consists of: thinly-sliced very well marbled medium rare roast beef (cold); paper-thin slices of red onion; paper-thin slices of European Swiss cheese; and as much brown mustard containing horseradish as you care to add; all on 2 (two) slices seeded rye bread, lightly toasted if desired. That is all.

Though I will also put in a good word for the Reuben, properly made, any sandwich of roasted vegetables on a baguette, as long as the quality of viniagrette is high, a muffaletta, and hot dogs after drinking.

Every thinking person knows that the perfect STORE-BOUGHT sandwich comes from Primanti Bros. in Pittsburgh, PA, with an honorable mention going to any one of several delicatessens in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States.

The perfect seafood sandwich is a lobster roll, not too much mayo, hold the celery.

The perfect deadly sandwich is the kabob I had that one time in Glasgow, the one that kept me up all night long and led to a rather humilating episode the next day on the train between Newcastle and Bury St. Edmunds. I had to burn that set of clothes.

This is London is reporting that a US research team has made some serious progress in developing a Vaccine for Cancer . The vaccines have produced dramatic results against the most virulent of cancers, such as pancreatic and kidney cancer. Typically, there is a 95% mortality rate over two years for those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, over a third of those receiving the treatment were alive after three years, and one was disease free after five.

The new treatments are tailor made for each patient, using materials from the patient's own body to create the vaccine. Researchers also have reason to believe that the technique might also make possible vaccines against other infectious diseases as well.

Given cancer's place on the list of leading causes of death, this is promising news indeed.

Geitner Simmons links to a story from Germany. Isn't the internet grand?

The story concerns Norwegian researchers who discovered that all the ills of "modern" life, stress, depression, sleeplessness, are shared by the indigenous population of Mindoro Island in the Philippines. 

We were greatly surprised when the data was analyzed and we found that, not only did the jungle dwellers have the same ailments we did, they had them to an even greater degree. Also, we found that the distribution of ailments was exactly like that in modern society," Staff and Hellesnes said.

Fatigue, depression, sleeplessness are all common complaints that are not solved by a hunter-gatherer lifestyle grounded by some basic agriculture.

Like present-day affluent Norwegians, the most common physical complaints were muscle and skeletal pains. But while 82.1 percent of Norwegians answered that they have had such problems in the course of the past 30 days, 100 percent of the Mindoro felt the same.

Stomach ailments pestered 60 percent of Norwegians during the previous month - over 80 percent of the Mindoro had the same complaint.

The lack of control over their existence gave the Mindoro far more to worry about, and even such basic elements like food or childbirth are laden with uncertainty on the fringe of the jungle. A basic difference between the two varying cultures is that the Mindoro do not view their pains as illnesses, but rather as a normal state of affairs.

Huh. People is people.

The researchers also note that "Norwegians also did not consider such afflictions to be illnesses until relatively recently, and place some of the blame on the World Health Organization for defining health as the absence of ailments."

--Pithy moralizing follows--

Too true. A sense of crisis is proportional to your living situation. This is one of the first lessons that any child learns when becoming part of the larger world, and it's too often forgotten by adults. Just take a look at this gigantic blogworld flapdoodle about free lunches for schoolkids.

The original article by John Hawkins at Right Wing News, here, makes a point about free lunches and who should pay for them, in a particularly careless and insenstive manner. Michele at A Small Victory smacks back with a from-the-gut post here, Hawkins smacks back, marveling that " there still are people in America, most of whom seem to be posting at A Small Victory (how they can afford computers, but not food for their kids is beyond me), who believe that everyone else has a responsibility to pay for their kid's food," and a cast of thousands throw in their two cents. Read it and despair, or have a little gut-laugh that we have it so good. Your choice.

Astronomers have discovered that a giant black hole located in a cluster of galaxies in the Perseid Cluster has been vibrating on B-flat for about 2.5 billion years. The tone is 57 octaves below Middle C, and is the lowest, sexiest bass note ever recorded. The Pleiades are expected to give up the booty within another .5 billion years.

Geeky doggerel follows. Consider yourselves duly warned. 

Bass! How low can you go?
Big Bang, what a brother knows.
Once again back is the incredible
the inexorable
the gravimetrical B- Galactic Enemy Number One
Chandra said "Freeze!" and I got numb
Can I tell 'em 30K is the wavelength of my spin?
Theorized by many, hey Hawkins try again
Now I'm in Science and newsweeklies cuz my attractors attract weakly
And a black hole like me will not go meekly
Einstein was a prophet and I think you ought to listen to
what he can say to you, what you ought to do is
Follow for now, the power of the gravity
"Make a miracle, B, pump the lyrical"
Black is back, you'll all be sucked in
Check it out, yeah y'all, here we go again
Turn it up! Bring the noise!
Turn it up! Bring the noise!

Cloning Yields Human-Rabbit Hybrid Embryo Chinese scientists (natch) have succeeded for the first time in creating a human rabbit embryo. German cannibals will be especially happy, as they can have people and Hassenpfeffer at the same time. The Chinese

"team said it retrieved foreskin tissue from two 5-year-old boys and two men, and facial tissue from a 60-year-old woman, as a source of skin cells. They fused those cells with New Zealand rabbit eggs from which the vast majority of rabbit DNA had been removed. More than 400 of those new, fused entities grew into early embryos, and more than 100 survived to the blastocyst stage -- the point at which coveted stem cells begin to form.

Crazy, man, crazy. Of course, everyone expected the Chinese to create the dreaded Pandaman hybrid. This rabbit thing was probably intended to confuse and deceive us while they continue work on the pandaman. Or, combining the known reproductive prowess of the average chinese citizen with the rabbit will result in unstoppable hordes of rabbitman chinese armies. 

Only time will tell.