Science – Page 30 – a sibilant intake of breath

Warning labels for booze

According to a study in the British Medical Journal, alcohol could be responsible for 10% of cancer in men and 3% in women. The scientists performing the study examined data from eight European countries. Reporting on the study, the CBC raised the question of whether there should be warning labels on alcoholic beverages.

I think there should be. They should warn about the risk of addiction, about damage to unborn children, and about other well-documented risks. These days, there are warning labels on everything from plastic bags (choking hazard!) to coffee cups (this beverage is extremely hot!). When governments put warning labels on some things with long-term health consequences, it implies that anything without such a label is considered safe by the government, or at least substantially safer than the things that do bear warnings. Given that alcohol is one of the most lethal drugs consumed by human beings, along with tobacco, it just makes sense that there be warning labels there too.

I think it’s absurd that Canada is considering putting warning labels on beer to alert people of the presence of wheat, but not considering putting on labels advising that if you drink enough of the stuff, it could kill you in a matter of hours.

P.S. Non-alcoholic beer can be a good option for those who enjoy beer, but want to avoid alcohol for whatever reason.

Appreciating Pinker

Now that I am forty pages in, I can enthusiastically endorse Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. It engages with complex and important ideas in a highly accessible way, without the tediousness that sometimes accompanies technical writing. In terms of his brilliance in covering challenging topics comprehensibly, Pinker reminds me of Richard Dawkins and Simon Singh.

It’s one of those books where you want to underline and quote nearly every sentence.

Understanding complex dynamic systems

Complex dynamic systems are the most difficult things in the universe to understand because they are bundles of relationships that interact in complex ways. It’s easiest to explain what they are through an example. Think of the Earth’s climate. It has discrete elements like incoming sunlight and the physical properties of water. The elements interact in complex ways that vary with time. Water forms clouds and icesheets which affect the reflection of light. The amount of ice on Earth has an effect on the totality of life on Earth, which then interacts in complex ways with other elements of the climate system: the erosion of rock, the composition of the atmosphere, etc, etc, etc.

Understanding a complex dynamic system at all is challenging. For instance, there is the task of understanding all the interactions that are ongoing when something is in a steady state. The level of complexity jumps when you consider the totality of steady and unsteady states, and all the ways by which they can turn into one another.

It seems arguable that the main task of thinking entities in the universe is to better understand complex dynamic systems. That understanding is always partial – akin to the French concept of connaitre rather than the concept of savoir. You can write down the totality of a person’s phone number on a piece of paper, but you can only express a partial view of what ‘Paris’ or ‘German’ or ‘physics’ is. In addition, it seems that complex dynamic systems are nested and that if we want to be able to behave intelligently in the world, we need to have some kind of understanding of all of them:

The rules of the universe: gravitation, electromagnetism, the nature of matter, etc
The physical Earth: the composition of the planet, and the way physical elements interact
The totality of life on Earth: genetics, behaviour, the history of life, etc
The human body: cells, organs, genes, the endocrine system, the physical brain, etc
The human mind: cognition, politics, economics, creativity, etc

At some point in history, it may be necessary and useful to consider the physical and/or mental characteristics of life from places other than the Earth.

The better a particular being understands each of these complex dynamic systems, the more capable they are of acting effectively in the world (a concept that presumes the existence of intentions, which ties back to each of the dynamic systems under consideration). Understanding them all better is thus a strategy capable of advancing the achievement of any conceivable goal, with the possible exception of intentional laziness or the avoidance of mentally taxing work.

Science endorses bling

I knew designer labels had a psychological effect on people who see them, but I am surprised by the size of the effects discovered by researchers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. They found that people in designer labelled clothes were rated as significantly higher status and wealthier than those in the same clothes sans labels. They found that 52% of people would take a survey from a person in a Tommy Hilfiger garment, compared with 13% for the same garment without the logo. They also found people more willing to give a job to someone bearing a designer logo, with a recommended salary 9% higher.

The strategies suggested by this data are pretty obvious: even if it seems a bit tasteless, it may be wise to emblazon yourself with labels, especially when dealing with strangers.

‘To-do’ task longevity

It might be interesting to do a statistical examination of to-do lists, specifically of the length of time for which items remain on them. It might seem logical that the longer something has been on a to-do list, the sooner it is likely to get done. I doubt this is usually the case, however. Easy items tend to get added and removed quickly. “Buy soy milk” is an instruction that is likely to be followed in a matter of hours or days. Other items are likely to sit on to-do lists for months or years: “Research doctoral programs”, for instance, or “Photo project with L-series macro lens”.

One natural response to all of this is to have lists that are tailored to different timescales. Few people will retain their grocery lists for longer than it takes to acquire the desired items. By contrast, keeping a list of major long-term projects is probably a good idea, from a life planning perspective. It can be a way to check whether one’s time is primarily being occupied by personal priorities, or whether distractions are consuming most of it.

CR-39

CR-39, or allyl diglycol carbonate (ADC), is a kind of plastic that was developed in 1940 and first used to help create a new type of fuel tank for B-17 bombers during WWII. Since then, its dominant use has become much more civilian – in making lenses for eyeglasses.

Apparently, eyeglass lenses haven’t commonly been made of glass for decades, because of the high weight. CR-39 has half the weight of glass, good resistance to ultraviolet light (which causes cataracts), and a refractive index nearly as high as that of crown glass (meaning lenses can be fairly thin). Unlike polycarbonate lenses (which offer more safety), CR-39 doesn’t scratch too easily. It does, however, produce more chromatic aberration than crown glass. CR-39 is pretty good when it comes to how much light reflects off rather than passing through; normally, lenses made of CR-39 involve a 7.97% loss of light, compared with 8.59% for crown glass.

I am quite happy with CR-39 plastic lenses myself. My only wish is that they could be made more resistant to dust, rain, and fingerprints. In particular, it would be nice if water would bead and roll off of them, rather than sticking in droplets that become smudges.

‘Bling Boxes’

You may recall the much-hyped ‘Bloom Box’ which promised to be a climate change solution, but which mostly just shifted natural gas burning from big central facilities to a handful of small distributed ones.

More promising is the air capture and sequestration system developed by Bling Box Systems. Their system takes advantage of the 1797 discovery that diamonds are composed of pure carbon, along with the High-Pressure High-Temperature (HPHT) synthesis process developed by General Electric and others in the 1970s. The internet-equipped Bling Box calculates the annual carbon footprint of the individual or family who it belongs to, and then uses an amine process to separate an equivalent quantity of carbon dioxide (CO2) from ambient air. It then uses a patented process to subject the gas to over ten gigapascals of pressure (compared with about 100 kilopascals for ordinary atmospheric pressure), inducing the transformation of the CO2 gas into diamonds made of pure carbon, along with oxygen gas.

Naturally, the amine separation and HPHT processing take up energy themselves. Bling Boxes are configured to calculate the associated emissions based on the electricity generation mix in the area where they are installed. They then produce additional gems to compensate. This ‘bonus bling’ can actually be more massive than the ordinary offset variety, for people living in areas where electricity comes from carbon-intensive sources like coal-fired power plants. People living in areas with lots of wind farms or nuclear power stations will find themselves with smaller heaps of bonus bling at the end of the year.

The oxygen produced by the Bling Boxes can also be put to use: for instance, in equipping an oxygen bar or tent for the use of the owners of the device.

The deployment of Bling Boxes is set to substantially alter the global market for diamonds. Even before taking into account bonus bling, the average Canadian’s Bling Box would produce about 23,000 kg worth of diamonds per year. For the sake of comparison, an African Elephant weighs about 5,000 to 6,000 kg. If they become universal, Canada as a whole would be putting out about 700 billion kilograms worth of stones, bonus bling excluded. That compares with a global total of about 26,000 kg of diamonds mined around the world each year. Each Canadian emitter will be a De Beers unto themselves.

As the technology is deployed globally, bling production will increase still further. Total human CO2 production is sitting at around thirty billion tonnes per year. Converted into bling, that would represent about a million years worth of diamond mining, produced each and every year until humanity changes its sources of energy. Diamond output at that scale would swamp any conceivable set of uses for the stones, so I expect they will mostly end up being dumped into depleted oil and gas reservoirs, and perhaps injected into underground aquifers. Diamond-based carbon capture and storage (DBCCS) would have many advantages over plans to inject the carbon underground in gas or liquid form. For instance, there would be no risk of suffocating leaks.

By changing the economics of the global diamond market substantially, Bling Boxes do risk undermining the traditional role of the clear stones as a girl’s best friend. The ability of these rocks to not lose their shape (whether square cut or pear-shaped) will be less impressive when the world is liberally scattered with billions of fist-sized stones. As such, material girls are advised to shift their preferred form of wealth storage before Bling Boxes become commonplace. There is no reason to believe that the deployment of this technology will undermine the traditional relationship between boys having cold hard cash and them being Mr. Right.

Radiation threats to health

I must admit to being perplexed when I see sentences in news stories like: “TEPCO vice-president Sakae Muto said, however, the plutonium 238, 239 and 240 collected were not in concentrations harmful to human health.”

While I am far from being an expert, it seems to me like at least some of the discussion of the risks from radiation is misleading. In particular, I think it is a bit misleading to pretend that radiation is a homogenous mass like a magnetic field. In reality, the radionucleotides that have been released from Fukushima are solids and gases getting blown around in the wind. They are less like the fading signal from a cell phone tower as you walk away, and more like a person’s ashes that have been scattered into the wind. You can take an average measure for the amount of radiation in an area, but that doesn’t give you a good sense of how much exposure a person will get if they inhale or ingest a random batch of windswept particles.

This seems especially true when it comes to plutonium. Imagine a little speck of plutonium that was part of a burning MOX fuel rod in the Number 3 reactor at Fukushima. Burning zircaloy cladding on the fuel rods could have shifted it into a puff of radioactive smoke that either escaped through a crack in the reactor’s containment or was intentionally vented as part of ongoing efforts to cool the reactors. If that little speck ends up in your lung, it certainly seems as though it would be a danger to your health.

Am I totally off base here?

Planning for Vancouver’s mega-quake

Everyone in Vancouver knows that one day, the ‘big one’ will come – a massive earthquake starting at the Cascadia subduction zone that runs between California and Vancouver Island. Back on January 26th, 1700, the zone experienced a ‘megaquake’ of magnitude 9.0 or more that swamped villages in Japan with the tsunami it created. It is estimated that the chances of a similar quake during the next 50 years are about one in three.

That is certainly something that should be borne in mind when deciding whether to construct dangerous infrastructure in the region. That includes nuclear power plants, but also oil refineries, natural gas infrastructure, chemical plants, and more.

It seems possible that lifelong awareness that a massive earthquake could occur might contribute a bit of apocalyptic psychology to the people of Vancouver. Even as a small child, I remembered being grateful to live in one of the parts of the city well above sea level. In elementary school, we each had little emergency preparedness baggies with food and water. They probably wouldn’t have done much good though: both my elementary school and high school had cinderblock walls with heavy concrete slabs for ceilings and floors. In a big earthquake, everyone inside would probably have been crushed.

The measure of a man

An interesting find, from Wikipedia:

Constituents of the human body in a person weighing 60 kg

Constituent – Weight – Percentage of atoms

Oxygen – 38.8 kg – 25.5 %

Carbon – 10.9 kg – 9.5 %

Hydrogen – 6.0 kg – 63.0 %

Nitrogen – 1.9 kg – 1.4 %

Other – 2.4 kg – 0.6 %

Bonus geek points to anyone who remembers the Star Trek: TNG episode with the same title as this post.