Global Causes of Death

I was discussing with wife Jenny about how the number of suicides when I happened on this data on the causes of death in the world. I thought it was interesting so I graphed it out.  It is surprising that lung diseases (even not including lung cancer) equals heart disease.

The World Health Organization published the number of deaths by cause in 2001. I have combined some catagories and used common language. I did not change the strange spelling "diarrhoeal," but the word "diesease" is actually a mistake.

In developed countries causes of death are moving from acute diseases to chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease. In developing countries, infant deaths, malaria, tuberculosis and sadly measles are still big problems. This is illustrated in this graph from the University of California at Santa Cruz

I always thought that accidents were a bigger cause of death than they are. It would seem that buckling my seatbelt is not that important :-)

Coldgear: For When It's Cold

I was at the sporting goods store, looking for sweatshirts and cold weather running stuff, and I came across this unintentionally funny slogan:


Coldgear - for when it's cold.

It is from the sportswear company Under Armour.

Under Armour had dumbed down their marketing pitch. "For When it's Cold" seems comic to me.  Do you suppose that people could figure out what Coldgear was for without the clever tag line? May be they could have used it for some thing better like  - comfort in the cold or something, but I suppose the Under Armour elite athletes are too tough to be comfortable.

This reminds me of the Levi "Nice Pants" campaign, where they included the tag line "Nice Pants" in all the ads so that their slower customers could figure out what they were advertising.

Creepy Artificial Skin - Not Quite in Time for Halloween

Intercytex is a biotech company best known for the nobel effort to help bald men regrow hair -- hard for me to be against that.

They have branched out into the creepy trade of growing skin.  They are growing little bowls of skin that are later stitched onto burn victims.

The fake skin is more basic than regular skin, it only has two layers, and is grown from a skin cell concentrate spread over a matrix of non-woven fabric.

In contrast, the hair growth treatment involves injecting the patient's scalp with new hair follicle cells.

Despite their new fake skin, the company has hit hard times, and had to lay off workers earlier this year.

One would think with all the popularity of zombies, the market for fresh skin would be booming.

.......

Favre The Viking

Just watched Favre's triumphant return to Lambeau Field. The Vikings with former Packer star, Brett Favre, playing quarterback beat the Packers soundly on their home field. The Packer faithful felt betrayed. The full story about why Favre left Green Bay may never be known, but fans have already chosen sides.

Although I was born and raised as a Packer fan, I can't help but cheer for Farve and his boyish enthusiasm. After the last touchdown he was jumping up and down like it was high school homecoming.

The Vikings did not blow the Packers out, and if the Packers have fewer penalties it might have ended differently.

The saga of one man and his determination to win at his sport is a great football story, and just a great story.

The Push of Politics into Global Warming

It is with great sadness that I have witnessed the push of politics especially from pro-business and libertarian groups against the science of global warming.

People that I respected in economics or business have been irresponsible in their approach to climate change. They have let their political views or perhaps intellectual laziness color the facts about global warming.

While there may be debate about the solution to global warming, it is completely clear that the world is warming extraordinarily fast. It is quite clear that carbon dioxide emissions are a significant cause.

It is not clear at all what to do about it. The science does not say how to fix the problem, or even if it should be fixed.

My foundation for my scientific conclusion is the American Chemical Society statement on global warming which I think is a well considered, balanced and even conservative reaction to global warming. Of course I have been a member of ACS for sometime, and I consider them to be sound organization, that is not taken to extremism. It is a political lobbying organization, but in this case its position paper does not support its short term best interests.

The ACS statement is based on the less prescriptive statements by the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.  There is even a statement of eleven national academies of science including the AAAS supporting the scientific consensus on global warming.

Climate change is well-estabilished like the atomic theory, or that the earth is round or that the moon orbits the earth. I am concerned that the equivalent of flat-earthers or those who believe the moonlanding was a hoax, have too much credibility in this debate.

In the face of this unified statement of the scientific community, we find rogue economists like Freakonomics authors Levitt & Dubner spinning professional economics with pop science into a disheartening politically prescription.

Oxygen and the Flavor of Wine

I opened up the 2008 Merlot Wine now that it is one year old. I have not tasted this wine in six months, and when I took the first sip, it tasted thin, and while alcoholic, I thought it lacked flavor.

I decanted the wine into gallons and only decanted a few bottles for drinking. Later when I tasted it again, it was better, fruiter, and more flavorful. I tasted the same bottle the next evening, and it was much more fruity. Now it tasted like a young wine that needed more aging.

I just think it is fascinating that the flavor changes simply due to reactions with the air. It is so tangible & taste-able, and also I worry since I don't want a whole batch of wine that tastes bad.  Maybe no one else thinks this is interesting, but I do.

What is so interesting to me is how rapidly the flavor changes. It seems that oxygen rapidly reacts with the chemicals in the wine.  Some enologists/wine chemists (Cacho et al) say that iron and manganese are important to how the flavor changes, presumably because they catalyze the oxidation reaction. Peuch (et al) say that the oak heartwood from barrel aging is critically important to the flavor changes. This turns the light on oak tannins -- which are a whole class of phenol/sugar compounds.

The large compound above is an elligitannin. You can see there are lots of different oxidation pathways for it -- reaction of the aromatic hydroxyls to form double bonded oxygen, for example.

The interaction of oxygen in wine, or elsewhere, is measured in terms of the redox-potential, which is a simplified pH electrode, where one electrode is simply a platinum wire. You can measure it with a regular pH meter, and the special electrode.

Wine chemicals can undergo a continuous array of oxidations and reduction reactions, and the equilibrium between them can be measured by the redox potential. An aerated red wine has a potential of 400-450 mV, but an non-aerated wine has a potential of 200-250 mV. In this sense a higher number indicates more oxygen exposure (and paradoxically that the wine has a greater potential TO oxidize.)

One way this impacts the flavor is the behavior of thiols, which are --S-H groups. These smelly compounds affect the flavor of the wine. As shown in the figure, exposure to oxygen couples up the thiols into disulfide bonds, which have 24 times less odor. This makes the wine taste better.

One group of researchers (Tomlinson in New Zealand) found that redox potential correlates with pH for 24 different wines. This is not surprising for young wines which are saturated with carbon dioxide, which would contribute reducing power, but also would drop the pH. This will save me money since I only have a pH electrode at home.

Several people have noted that the bottom of the barrel has more reducing power presumably because strongly reduced materials have floated down to a muck at the bottom, and because subsequent exposure to air at the top of the barrel/tank would remain at the top. This introduces the idea of creating a wine battery with the potential difference between the top and the bottom. It might be a few tenths of a volt, probably not enough to power the household, but enough to light an LED perhaps, or win a bet at the bar.

Neolithic Housing and Wattle & Daub Fireplaces

This all started with Thursday's (Oct 22) Survivor where those poor people spent five days huddled in the rain in wet clothes, mostly shivering.

Of course, Fall has come to Michigan and the leaves are filling up my yard which is wet with rain. Perhaps that is why I could not stop thinking about the sorry shelters that these people were in.

 I thought they should build a fireplace with a little chimney. I did not know how to do that, but  the BBC  had a whole posting on how to build a wattle and daub fireplace.

The network of sticks is the wattle, and the mud is the daub. More advanced daubers put straw or hair in their mud. Even better was a little plaster or cement.

If these are outdoors, they usually did not have chimney's, but one could put in a chimney and put it closer to the house.


Wattle and daub has an long history extending back to Neolithic times.  This is a Native American wattle and daub home.


It is interesting to think about how primitive people live, but I know that it is a whole lot more comfortable in 21st Century America. I suppose I'll pick up that theme at Thanksgiving.

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Windex Makes People Nicer: Scientific Proof from Bringham Young University

Many people believe in aroma therapy, and that fragrance affects mood. One experiment that proved that involved Windex.

Windex, the famous blue Window cleaner, is a simple cleaner with a little blue coloring and some fragrance. It is made by former employer, SC Johnson. The story was that marketers wanted it to smell like ammonia so that people could tell it was working.


Recently researchers studied the effect of Windex and its odor --actually the limonene-scented citrus version-- on the behavior of people. Limonene is the famous natural solvent extracted from citrus fruit peels. It has a nice citrus scent. The Windex probably also smelled like ammonia, and an alcohol probably isopropanol. The study was published in Psychology Science of 2009.


Katie Liljenquist and coworkers sprayed Windex in the air of test room, then volunteers played games involving trusting each other. Rules of that game are described here:

... participants engaged in a one-shot anonymous trust game (Berg, Dickaut, & McCabe, 1995) involving two parties: a sender and receiver. In a typical trust game, the sender is given money that he can choose to keep or "invest" with an anonymous receiver. Any money sent is tripled, and the receiver then decides how to split the tripled money. For example, if the sender passes all of the money and the receiver reciprocates this trust by returning half of the tripled amount, both would be better off. However, sending money can be risky if the receiver chooses to exploit the sender and keep all the invested money (Camerer, 2003).

People in the Windex scented rooms returned 2.6 times more money than people in the fragrant-free room. This means that the sense of Windex clean-ness made people more generous, or at least more trusting.

In a second experiment, volunteers were asked to donate money, and 2.33 times more people volunteered.

Thus Clean Scents Motivate Clean Behavior.

The thought is that clean scents, like clean surroundings, promote a sense of order and well-being that leads to trust and generosity.

Hello Kitty's Slightly Disturbing Internal Organs

I was at the store on Saturday getting a my Mom her birthday gift, and I happened across the Hello Kitty merchandise.

There were two teens there buying greeting cards, and they said to each other, "You should get the Hello Kitty card because everyone likes Hello Kitty." She said that everyone loves her face.

Now the world can see what makes Hello Kitty works -- and it is not clever marketing -- it is cute internal organs.

Medicom Toy, a Japanese toy company in cooperation with Dr Romanelli are introducing a cute and slightly disturbing version of Kitty with her heart showing. I can't find a satisfactory link to Medicom Toys -- maybe if I could read Japanese.

As I should have expected, she has very cute organs.

Autumn Foliage and Red Baneberry

Here is an autumn scene from my backyard, and yes, actually a lot of my neighbor's yard too.  I have been working to get the ornamental grass in the foreground to grow.

At left is Red Baneberry, actaea rubra. I have been wondering what it was, and I finally found it. It has these showy red berries that look like they might be edible or valuable.

But no, actually the berries make you sick, happily few people die from them because they taste so bad. Supposedly two berries could cause a heart attack in a young child. Other people say the worst effects are stomach-aches.

Red Baneberry contains two chemicals commonly found in the buttercup family, ranunculine and its degradation product, protoanemonin. It forms much like allicin forms in garlic when the plant is damaged and an enzyme is released -- see my previous post.  Protoanemonin like allicin is an antimicrobial, specifically an antifungal.

There are a lot of interesting plants, as well as potential pesticides right outside the backdoor.