Depth of Processing

Hybrid & Electric Sales Down Again in January 2012

2012-02-19T20:22:00.002-05:00

Perhaps American sense they don't need to conserve fuel, and that it why they are buying more conventional cars and fewer hybrids.

In the popular imagination oil is running out, and gas will increase in price forever. However they buying public is not acting that way. Hybrid sales were down 30% from last year. All electric cars were down 40%, and the GM Volt was down 60%, probably on news on battery fires on improperly discharged batteries.

I actually have two hybrid vehicles, and I think they are a better way to build a car, but they cost too much, and probably still have not paid me back -- unless you count their higher resale value.

Toyota is the giant of hybrid manufacturing. (Source)

I believe the poor economy is making people buy cheaper cars, and that cheaper cars cost more to run over the long haul. Of coarse, $4.50/gal gas may be coming. It seems that every time the economy hints that it might be getting stronger oil speculators run the price of oil up by $5/barrel.

Alternative Medicine

2012-02-12T08:14:00.002-05:00

Alternative medicine are treatments the derive from folk traditions not from modern medicine. Modern medicine is the observation-based approach sometimes credited with starting in Paris about 1796 and developing further during the French Revolution, but which has a long history into Renaissance times.

Today's medicine resides in medical schools and pharma companies. The interface between medical schools and pharma companies is problematic. The interface between Alternative medicine providers and their herbs + treatments is also problematic. Medicine providers fund themselves by selling treatments, and ineffective treatments can cost as much as effective ones.

It is too simple to say that modern medicine is better than alternative medicine because modern medicine keeps trying to incorporate parts of alternative medicine. I was surprised to see there were 72 postings in the last year on Science Daily's Alternative Medicine site, which usually feature popularizations of journal research. When academic research embraces a folk medicine treatment, it become both modern medicine and alternative medicine, for example, acupuncture reduces dry mouth side effects of drugs.

My big problem with alternative medicine is that people with serious illness can take unproven and probably ineffective treatment, when an effective conventional treatment is available.

What makes this worse is growing distrust of science spread started by anti-evolution advocates, pushed ahead by tobacco companies, and now spreading to climate change deniers. In this environment, it is too easy to cast away valuable science-based medicine and embrace the folksy.

Running Shoe Review 2.0

2012-02-01T20:31:00.001-05:00

It has been two and half years since I reviewed shoes, and I have a few new pairs to talk about.

The first running shoe is not really a shoe at all. I confess I have run only a few minutes in it since it hurts my feet.

I think these five toes shoes are a fad.

They are Vibram FiveFingers Bikila shoes. They are kind of funny looking, and I think they might be OK for walking outside. When I run in them, my plantar tendon hurts.

They are also hard to put on.

I like the look of these Nike Flywires. I got them so I could use the Nike pedometer that talks to my iPod. That worked pretty well.

The shoes were great for a while, but they insole wore quickly, and I did not get a lot of wear from them.

I like the soles of these too. My favorite running shoes have heels with the rubber around the outside, and a hole in the middle. The idea is the foot holds weight better on its edges.

.

.

Next up are my current running shoes. They are Nike Lunarglide +3 with the Lance Armstrong Livestrong colors.

I like these shoes pretty well. Even though they look just like the Nike Flywires, they are really comfortable,

don't show signs of wearing out yet.

.

Last are my Adidas, and they have no obvious trade name. I looked at hundreds of shoes on the internet trying to identify it, and I figured out from a model number written under the tongue. They are Adidas Swyft Cushion's .

They remind me of my old Adidas Electras,

Adidas has been making this basic shoe for several years, and changing it a bit cosmetically. They are a pretty good shoe, so why change it?

I like them because of their oversized heel. Thoughout all the problems with my hip and feet, these shoes always felt pretty good. For some reason, I don't give them any respect.

Top E-Commerce Sites in 2011

2012-01-29T15:38:00.000-05:00

Internet sales during the holidays went up 15.3% to 35 billion; Online sales for November and December 2011 were 59 billion.

Who are the big players? Obviously Amazon. I buy too much stuff there, but who can compete with them?

	Company	Headquarters	2010 Rank	Main Product
1	Amazon.com	Seattle	1	general merchandise
2	Walmart.com	Bentonville, Ark.	2	general merchandise
3	eBay.com	San Jose, Calif.	3	online marketplace
4	BestBuy.com	Richfield, Minn.	4	electronics
5	JCPenney.com	Plano, Texas	5	apparel
6	Kohls.com	Menomonee Falls, Wis.	7	apparel
7	Target.com	Minneapolis	6	general merchandise
8	Macys.com	Cincinnati	11	apparel
9	Sears.com	Hoffman Estates, Ill.	10	general merchandise
10	Google.com	Mountain View, Calif.	8	information

Logo for ecommerce consultant Sienna

According to stores.org, these are the top ten stores. Click here to see the longer version of the list. There are seven brick and mortar stores, and three electronic-only retailers.

What is google.com selling? This refers to its sales of data to other marketers which does not sound like regular retailing at all. Google.com dropped two ranks from 2010.

Surprisingly, nearly-dead Sears in the top ten! It looks like starving the maintenance budget is not hurting online sales. Could be helping since no one wants to go to the real stores.

On-line sales together are13% of all retail in November and December -- important but not dominating. Consultants say that 36% of retail sales have an internet component -- such as getting information, reviews, or comparing prices.

Amazon sold $44 billion all electronically. WalMart sold 208 billion; mostly in the store. I guess they would be selling
425 billion online.

Amazon's stock is selling at 103 times its earnings. That's crazy high; Walmart's is 13, BestBuy's 9.

Z-Coil Running Shoe

2012-01-22T20:26:00.000-05:00

Z-Coil Freedom shoe

I got a new running shoe with an actual spring on it. Looks pretty gimmicky, but it is very well cushioned.

It is a "Freedom" model from Z-Coil, who makes elaborate footware for people with sore feet. I found them at a store in Dearborn.

The company is based in Arizona, but the shoes themselves are made in Korea. They have a whole line of shoes with different styles, but all with the big bulky spring in back. They make different strengths of springs for different people, and the springs do wear out.

I don't really have a foot problem, but I did have an Achille's tendon injury last August, and I have not really come back. Unlike my Nikes, this running shoe is rigid, and so tendons in my foot don't flex. All the cushioning is done by the big spring.

The disadvantage of this shoe is that it is heavy, at 1 pound, 8 ounces it is literally twice as heavy has my Nike Lunarglide at 12 ounces. The weight of the shoe is noticeable, but OK for training in. It occurs to me that the spring may provide some mechanical advantage like the spring steel limbs that amputees run in, but this is too heavy to race in.

The hope is that as time passes, my foot will get stronger, and I won't have to wear them all the time.

Table Top Gene Sequencing Machine Can Read Your DNA in a Day.

2012-01-13T21:04:00.000-05:00

It can read your DNA in just 24 hours.

It seems like science fiction, but Life Technologies, has a table top sequencing machine for $100,000 to 150,000. It does a whole human genome in a day.

Life Technologies sequencing chip. Note the tubes that deliver
reagents.

The secret is a multi-parallel sequencing device. The press release text is pretty impenetrable, but they say it: "perform[s] direct, real-time measurement of the hydrogen ions produced during DNA replication. A high-density array of wells on the Ion semiconductor chips provides millions of individual reactors, and integrated fluidics allow reagents to flow over the sensor array. This unique combination of fluidics, micromachining, and semiconductor technology enables the direct translation of genetic information (DNA) to digital information (DNA sequence), rapidly generating large quantities of high-quality data." Link

More recently Life Tech's archrival Illumina is suing them for patent enfringement on their analysis chip design.

Just eleven years ago, a collection of the scientists across the world worked to sequence the human genome the first time, and finished in 2003 after thirteen years. Just eight years later, we can do it in an day.

I remember how crazy it seemed when Star Trek NG's Dr Crusher put a few drops of blood in her "tricorder," and this little box sequenced it in a minute. Crazy because that would take a whole lab years, but now, it is not so crazy.

World Stock Market Performance in 2011

2012-01-01T08:13:00.001-05:00

Percent change in eight stock markets in 2010 and 2011. January 2011 is normalized to zero.

Everyone who is paying attention knows that the stocks were flat in 2011, which means that the S&P 500 went up by only 0.1%.

The graph above has eight stock market indexes, all normalized to 0% on January 1 2011. You can see the big crash in mid-July. The Wilshire 5000 changed less than 1%, and the Nasdaq actually went down.

On the bright side the Dow 30 are actually up. Of course the Dow is often talked about, but isn't really that important.

Foreign indexes are down big. The formerly high flying Chinese Hang Seng crashed 20%. Japan's Nikkei continues its losing streak, going down another 17%. Germany's Dax went down 15% due to the fraying Euro-zone.

Gains and losses in eight stock markets since January 2010.

Still grasping for a silver lining? Two year returns were decent in the US, and bad everywhere else. This does not make sense, since business in the US has obviously been bad. First, the market must have been over-sold in 2009. Second, corporate profits have been pretty good.

What does this mean going forward? Past results usually foreshadow the opposite result in the future since stock traders usually overplay the underlaying trend. Since Europe and Asia are over-sold today, then they probably will do better next year.

Poison in Baby Shampoo Update

2011-12-30T12:43:00.001-05:00

Did you know I use Johnson Baby Shampoo? I use it to avoid an allergy that I have to some preservatives used in shampoos. I often get rashes from the cheap hotel shampoo.

I was really surprised when I learned that Johnson's Baby Shampoo has two strikes against it for health and safety.

One is that it is using Quaternium-15 a preservative that emits formaldehyde as it degrades, and the second is that it contains less than 4 ppm of dioxane. It should be pointed out that dioxane, a carcinogen, is not dioxin. Dioxin is the short name given to chloronated dibenzodioxins which are very toxic, but not very similar to dioxane, but it sounds similar.

Dioxane; found
in shampoos

Dioxane is an unintended biproduct of ethoxylation processes; these are used to make milder detergents. To make a gentle baby shampoo, sometimes this is needed.

Quaternium 15, is a complicated amine that many people are allergic too. It degrades into formaldehyde, because it was made from formaldehyde and simpler amines.

Susan Nettesheim from J&J says that there are only tiny amounts of formaldehyde and dioxane in the product, and that they will try to get rid of the problematic preservatives. I know that in polymers the industry has been switching away from these preservatives for years, and that J&J is behind the curve, although the replacements might be too irritating for a baby shampoo. J&J promised advocacy groups to do this.

In the meantime, I am going to continue using the Johnson's product, though I am worried about Quaternium-15. I have no way of finding out which products have it, and which don't.

How Organic is Organic?

2011-12-28T20:27:00.002-05:00

A central entertainment at Holiday dinners at our family is an argument about what food is healthy, and what isn't healthy.

This year so-called "organic" food was in focus, pushing aside vegetarianism, hi-carb and lo-carb.

There are two ideas: that the "organic animals" are better treated, and that organic food is healthier.

Being a chemist is completely natural to me to divorce the question of animal treatment from the additives used to make the agricultural product. Organic advocates are always saying that organic animals are treated better by their "loving owners" as opposed to "evil corporate wage-slaves" raising other animals. I was surprised to learn there are animal husbandry standards in the FDA organic regulations. I still don't think that organic farmers love animals more than other farms. For example, egg farmers have standards on how to treat chickens in their large cage-based chicken farms. Here is something similar for dairy cattle from a farmers group.

I downloaded the approved additives in organic foods lists from the FDA. This puts forth when synthetic materials can be used in "organic" foods, and still be organic. There are actually two lists, one of synthetic materials that are OK, and another of bio-derived materials that are not OK.

One surprise is the amount of antibiotics that "organic" beef can receive, for example Atropine -- which is a weak toxin and dilates the eyes.

Another is a list of synthetic or non-organic biomaterials that can be used in organic foods, for example, like hops or pumpkin juice for color.

The bottom line is that "organic" does not mean what most consumers think it means. Food is actually a more technical and more complex product than anyone cares to know. Having said that, organic food is not any less healthy than standard foods, although it is less healthy for the wallet.

Christmas Eve Novel in Six Word Shopping List

2011-12-24T13:29:00.002-05:00

I found this shopping list in my shopping basket at Wal-Mart this morning, which is Christmas Eve morning. It is a whole novel in six words. Who wrote the shopping list, and what is her story? Just three items, probably in a woman's handwriting:

Egg Nog
Shoes (Dad)

p test

Egg Nog -- sounds like a Christmas Party. Or is it a treat just a treat for herself? Hard to think you'd make a special trip to the store for Egg Nog to drink alone.

Are the shoes a gift for Dad? Probably, looks like she only has one more gift to buy. Dad is going to get his new shoes from Wal-Mart. I have looked at the shoes at Wal-Mart, and they are not fashion-forward, but they are practical and cheap. On the other hand, maybe Dad is sick and can't buy shoes for himself for some reason.

I think she going to give the shoes to Dad at the Christmas Party.

Most interesting is "p test," which has to be a pregnancy test. There are other things a "p test," could be, but only a pregnancy test is available at Wal-Mart.

How old is she? I'm guessing she was shopping by herself, and so she is old enough to drive. Is she 16 and hoping to be not be pregnant? Is she wondering what she is going to tell Dad at the Christmas Party? Maybe she is she 38, and wishing to be pregnant instead.

Maybe she is a little ashamed, and that is why she wrote "p test," instead of "pregnancy test." The list is torn out of a spiral notebook, and usually students have those, so most likely she is younger than 23.

Is she poor? Not too poor, she has enough money to buy shoes and Egg Nog. If she were wealthy though, she'd be buying Dad's shoes at Macy's instead of Wal-Mart.

Looks to me like a young woman with a little money, not too much, who might be pregnant, and is going to bring Egg Nog to a party. Maybe she even lives with her parents.

I wonder a million other things: Is she really pregnant? Is she happy about it? Who is the guy? Does she live with her parents? Is she still in high school? What do her friends think? Oh, and what shoes did she buy, and did Dad like them? Is her boyfriend going to be at the Christmas party?

Whoever she is, she lives within a few miles of me, and I'll never know her story.

Good Luck to her this Christmas Eve.

What Countries Work the Hardest?

2011-12-21T13:25:00.003-05:00

Where do people work the longest? The Organization for Economic Development calculated it all out.

The most surprising thing is that nearly broke nations like Greece work far more than thrifty nations like Netherlands and German.

Not surprising is that France has a short workweek, but suprisingly it is far shorter than places like Mexico or Italy.

It seems that high wage rates enable people to work less. This is data from 2008, so it is from before the recession. No doubt that the work week is shorter now.

It seems to be more important to work smart than to work hard.

BASF is Number Five on the Happy Employee List

2011-12-13T07:08:00.001-05:00

I was surprised and pleased that BASF has popped to top of the happiest employee list from CareerBliss. CareerBliss is a website that rates employers like Yelp rates restaurants; it also has consulting operations.

This rating should help recruiting at BASF because BASF does not have a lot of visibility.

CareerBliss interviews employees to obtain its ratings. How are the winners selected? According to the company: "CareerBliss data evaluates the key factors which affect work happiness, including: work-life balance, one’s relationship with their boss and co-workers, their work environment, job resources, compensation, growth opportunities, company culture, company reputation, their daily tasks, and job control over the work that they do on a daily basis."

The 2011 Top Ten. .

Who Do Americans Like? Me! or Maybe You? Jesus!!

2011-12-10T14:20:00.001-05:00

Maybe the political process is broken, and partisans all hate the other side. Who is the person that everyone likes? Happily, everyone likes someone -- themselves.

A polling company called Public Policy Polling did the study, and found that nearly everyone likes Abraham Lincoln and Jesus -- besides themselves. I adjusted their numbers so that only people who have an opinion are registered. For example, people who don't know who Mahatma Gandhi are not counted in the Mahatma Gandhi total.

Caravaggio's Narcissus

But people like themselves most. It is too easy to quip that Americans are narcissistic, since I suspect 99% of the world's population think highly of themselves. There are a lot of people who hate themselves too. That would be another interesting poll.

Everyone on the list, except for yourself, is dead -- although Steve Jobs and Nelson Mandela have not been dead that long.

Why don't we like anyone alive? Some of the answer is the rapid communication we have. Spreading information around makes us think that no one is better than anyone else. There is always someone to knock down everyone else -- look at the way the Republican presidential candidates keep knocking each other off. People learn quickly that their hero is just a human like them.

Superbowl quarterback Aaron Roger does pretty well, at least in Wisconsin with 89%.

Another interesting statistic is that Santa only has an 84% favorable rating. I will assert that Santa is not a historical person -- sorry kids. The 21st Century Santa is more complicated than my Holiday English Toffee Recipe. He is a concoction of myth, religion, a poem, a song, and a Coca-Cola ad. He is as real as Ronald McDonald. How real is Ronald McDonald?

How Do 3D Movies Work

2011-12-03T07:07:00.001-05:00

Barco's DP-2000 Cinema Projector
which can show Real D

I just saw Hugo, which is the best 3D movie since Avatar.

Everyone can see that the Real D system uses polarized glasses, but if you look back at the projector, there is only one lens showing only one image on the screen. (Review what polarized light means here.)

How are they putting two different images on the screen at the same time with just one set of optics? The answer is that the images are switching back and forth at 144 times/sec. So the images are flickering faster than your eye can see it. Movie frames change just 24 times a second, so in a 3D projector each frame is shown three times to each eye.

Another part of the secret is the screen; the screen must not change the polarization of the light. One way to do this is to coat the screen with silver -- like in the old days of Hollywood, the silver screen is coming back! If you used a glass coated screen, the polarization might shift, and blur the effect. There are cheaper alternatives like aluminium coatings and pearlescent coatings.

Real D's web site studiously avoids any discussion of their technology or the specs of their equipment. This is because Real D just licenses technology, the projectors are made by other companies like Sony and Kodak. There are some Real D patents, and they relate to the technology for switching polarizations.

Critics, most notably my DW, say that 3D movies are darker. 3D movies are darker due to the absorption of the filters. A projector system designed for 3D would simply use a larger lamp to attain the target brightness that the theater owner wants. If a theater owner is upgrading a theater for the premiere of a new 3D movie, s/he will buy a machine that will provide the best experience he can afford. As always you get what you pay for.

It might pay to shop around for a better theater if you find 3D movies too dark.

Poison in Baby Shampoo

2011-11-23T09:30:00.001-05:00

Did you know I use Johnson Baby Shampoo? I use it to avoid an allergy that I have to some preservatives used in shampoos. I often get rashes from the cheap hotel shampoo.

I was really surprised when I learned that Johnson's Baby Shampoo has two strikes against it for health and safety.

One is that it is using Quaternium-15 a preservative that emits formaldehyde as it degrades, and the second is that it contains > 4 ppm of dioxane. It should be pointed out that dioxane, a carcinogen, is not dioxin. Dioxin is the short name given to chloronated dibenzodioxins which are very toxic, but not very similar to dioxane, but it sounds similar.

Dioxane; found
in shampoos

Dioxane is an unintended biproduct of ethoxylation processes; these are used to make milder detergents. To make a gentle baby shampoo, sometimes this is needed.

How Internet Works on the Plane

2011-11-22T11:26:00.001-05:00

Gogo's EVDO System

I have taken to using Gogo internet when I am traveling on business. The price depends on the length of the flight, a short flight can be $5 and a longer flight $10.

I wondered how it worked. It is simpler than I thought. It is just like a cell phone in the car.

The plane is picking up signals from Gogo's cell tower network across the country. The towers look just like regular cell towers so much that there was no reason to have a picture.

Antenna for reception of ground based internet using
Gogo's EVDO system.

The plane has a small antenna mounted on the bottom to accept the signal. Just like a regular cell phone, the plane switches between towers based on reception.

There is another system for aircraft internet involving an antenna on top the plane and reception from satellites. United just picked Panasonic Avionics Corporation for its Ku satellite based technology. Panasonic Avionics makes the passenger entertainment systems that show movies and plays music. (For example Delta uses Panasonic Avionics to show movies on its longer flights.)

Gogo is planning an upgrade to a faster technology soon, and they are thinking about a satellite based solution for the future. It is possible satellite based is cheaper.

Amazon Kindle Fire and the Whole Amazon Universe

2011-11-19T09:34:00.001-05:00

I sold my old Mac on eBay, and pocketed enough money to buy a new color reader -- even after the exorbitant eBay fee which was over 9%. Anyway, I want a better way to get my news or magazines.

I like my second generation Kindle. I like the size of it at 5 x 8 in and 290 g. The screen (9 x 12 cm; 108 cm^2) could be bigger for viewing pdf files though. The iPad's screen at 15 x 20 cm is a lot better at 300 cm^2. The new Kindle Fire's screen is 10.7 x 14.2 cm or 151 cm^2, or 25% bigger than my Kindle, but half as big as an iPad. The iPad 2 weighs 539 g and the Kindle fire is 414 g. The Nook Color is almost the same size and weight as the Kindle Fire -- 14 g lighter.

A important advantage of the Kindle Fire is that it can show free video for Amazon Prime members, which I am. There are a large number of pretty interesting titles, like the first season of Lost or 24. My problem with video is that I never have time to view it. I could also see it on my Mac easier. My Mac Air has a 432 cm^2 screen, but it weighs 1392 g.

I saw the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet at Best Buy, and they were the same price. The Kindle Fire worked well, but the magazine text was hard to read. It looked like the source file was too low in resolution, and the pages were stored as images. The Nook Tablet's screen was harder to work, and seemed less touch sensitive. The Nook has a faster processor and more storage. It should be faster.

Both the Fire and the Nook Tablet glow in the dark so I can read at night, but they have fairly short battery life compared to the ePaper versions.

Amazon is also allowing Prime Members to borrow one of 5377 book titles for free, and a large number of TV series and old movies. Since I am an Amazon Prime member this is a good deal. This is a pretty good reason to be in the Amazon ecosystem.

In Summary: Color readers are best for video and color books. The magazines are OK, but not great. The newspapers are better on an iPad because Android does only offers a few newspapers as apps like the NY Post. For real books, the ePaper readers are better because they are lighter and have much longer battery life. For text, one does not need the weight or the big screen. The Nook Tablet is better for surfing the web, but Barnes and Noble does not offer the extra sweeteners that Amazon does like the Prime Service.

I'll let you know what I buy.

Super Giant Protozoa

2011-11-04T16:42:00.000-04:00

How big can a single living cell be?

A 4 inch wide single cell protozoa living on the ocean floor. Related
species can be twice this size.

This cell is a xenophyophores from the western Pacific.

They are a single cell with a single nucleus.

However they are pretty disgusting too. They are scavengers who root around in the mud looking for food. They exude mucus and the mucus entraps articles from around them, including their own feces.

The feces get infected with bacteria, and then the xenophyophores eat that.

Scariest Halloween Pictures

2011-10-31T19:01:00.001-04:00

It's Halloween, so here are some favorite spooky pictures.

The Eyes!

Day of the Dead Girl

Probably the scariest of all

A great mask

Attitude.

Yuk.

Haunted.

Big Flyers

2011-10-23T19:29:00.001-04:00

While preparing the previous post on rude passengers, I came across two obese passenger pictures that I could not resist posting.

An obese passenger having trouble fitting in one seat.
(Said to be a stewardess' picture on an American
757)

No words required.

Anti-Social Flyers

2011-10-23T19:21:00.000-04:00

Twice now I have sat next to plane fliers who don't care about flight rules and who distain authority.

The clearest was the guy in first class who kept using his wireless-enabled iPad throughout the flight. Not only did he have it on during landing -- he had the cell phone connection on and was surfing the internet.

I am skeptical about how much electronic interference can really crash a modern jet, but most people give the benefit of the doubt. ABC News did a report last summer on it, and there were anecdotes about interference with the aircraft's electronics. Sensor gear can detect the interference from electronics -- what is unclear is how seriously radar and aircraft computers are affected. Aircraft manufacturers try to design in protection, and Boeing does not say that there is a problem. Landing is a critical time, and this person might be endangering people is a problem.

The second, was a person who put her seat back into recline immediately after the flight attendent sat down for take off -- thus she would not be caught. Airlines keep the seat backs up so that people can evacuate the plane quickly, and the landing and tack-off portions are the most dangerous parts of the flight. This was an early morning flight -- I got up at 3:50 AM to get there, but her priority on her own comfortable sleep should not be at the expense of other people's risk of death.

Carpet Mis-Fire

2011-10-15T19:21:00.002-04:00

We were waiting for the carpet guys to install a new rug today. We moved furniture to get ready, and have it stacked all over the kitchen, so we can hardly walk. Then five minutes before they are supposed to come, the call from the carpet guys: Oh! the brakes are out on our truck. We aren't coming. Forget the installation.

Pretty bad.

It was about the worst case. We did all the moving, and did not get the rug. Now we have to live without furniture until their truck gets fixed, or put the furniture away, and then move it again later.

Wife Jenny, who helped move the furniture is livid. She calls Lowe's which turns out to be a good idea. She gets hooked up with the carpet installation person, and she is mad at the contractor. She makes calls.

When she calls back the excuse is a flat tire, and not bad brakes. Hmmm

Strange Loops in the Brain or Strange Loops are the Brain

2011-10-10T20:45:00.004-04:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vitroids/3746539068/in/photostream/

Two of my favorite books are I am a Strange Loop, and Godel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid both by Douglas Hofstadtler. These talk about the nature of thought and personality. The first is poetic and the second is more an essay.

Into this mix, are two great stories on Radio Lab on these themes. It talks about loops in life. Two relate to the themes in Hofstadtler's books.

One story is about a woman who has short-term memory loss, and she just repeats the same conversations over-and-over like a computer stuck in a loop. It suggests the brain has aspects of a mechanism. One can speculate about causality and free-will in this circumstance. How much control did the woman have over her actions?

The second story is about Godel himself. I thought Godel was a regular mathematician, but it turns out he was frequently mentally ill. The fact that mentally ill people make huge mathematical break-throughs should tell us something. More specifically, mentally-ill people may be more driven to proven revolutionary conclusions than more socialized mathematicians.

Anyway, listen to the episode.

Why was Jobs Successful with Such an Old Fashioned Management Style?

2011-10-09T16:20:00.002-04:00

We know that Steve Jobs was a demanding boss, and that he insisted on his ideas. We know that he sometimes fired staffers who disagreed with him. This seems like pig-headedness.

Business guru have been saying these are BAD practices, but they worked for Steve -- Why?

Sara McInerney agrees saying "He was a "high-maintenance co-worker" who demanded excellence from his staff and was known for his blunt delivery of criticism."

Ironically, business gurus also say that Steve Job's is a business leader in the company of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. First, this proves how fickle business gurus are, and how they will use any example to illustrate their points regardless of how well it fits.

Eric Jackson, a blogger at Forbes, wrote "Top Ten Lessons" from Steve. I like it because it is fairly factual, and has some actual quotes from Jobs. The lessons are in red, and are followed by my commentary.

1. The most enduring innovations marry art and science. My comment: really enduring inventions arn't that arty consider the wheel, or the locomotive or pneumatic tires or penicillin -- none of these seem arty to me. Let's think of an arty invention, how about fat, decorative bows on eyeglasses frames. Do you think fat frames are going to outlast locomotives?

2. To create the future, you can't start with focus groups. I tend to agree with this. Groups of customers mostly give you nothing useful. First you start with a germ of an idea. Groups are useful in refuting bad ideas.

3. Never fear failure. It was a management fad to say this in the 1990's. This is not original advice. Is it true? For people with good job skills and a little bankroll. Failure is tougher on the poor and unskilled.

4. You can't connect the dots forward -- only backward. This is a cute little proverb. On the other hand, forecasting is best when it extrapolates from the past. The problem is it misses the revolutionary changes. I think this is something one says to consultants who disagree with you.

5. Listen to the voice in the back of your head that tells you if you're on the right track or not. I like this one, but normal humans need to persuade colleagues to go along. Only someone who has spent a whole life being the big boss, would think that listen to your heart is a strategy. Real people need to form arguments to support a behavior.

6. Expect a lot from yourself and others. There is nothing wrong with expecting a lot. The problem is getting belligerent when you don't get get it, so some say Steve did. It is unclear how much of this is actually true. Nonetheless, high expectations help achieve high results.

7. Don't care about being right. Care about succeeding. This is good advice. Too often people get trapped in being right, when it is better to be pragmatic. Always agree to another plan when it is better. This is about maturity. It is also about getting along well with others.

8. Find the most talented people to surround yourself with. When I am hiring people, I always go for the over-qualified person if I can get them. Stronger people are always better. Stop worrying about looking weak in comparison -- that is all in your own head.

9. Stay hungry. Stay foolish. I truly don't get this one. He said this during a speech at Stanford. I don't even know what he means. Perhaps don't take yourself too seriously or too stuffy. Maybe someone could help me.

10. Anything is possible through hard work, determination, and a sense of vision. This is a nice inspirational proverb, and I like the focus one work & determination. I think that talent is an over-valued characteristic. However, in today's world some people are too disadvantaged for Anything to be possible. This proverb is a good thought exercise, and the optimism and positive-thinking can only help.

As a big boss, Job once said to Steve Levy that about his role that "My best contribution is not settling for anything but really good stuff, in all the details. That's my job, to make sure everything is great.”

A big boss can only have simple messages to a large organization, and does not have time for all the details. It is good for the boss to insist on fundamentals.

The worst Steve Jobs stories seems to be from his early career when he must have been a big asshole. Perhaps all the Buddhism soaked in, and he mellowed later.

QuasiCrystals Win Nobel

2011-10-07T20:43:00.002-04:00

A very cool pattern of Dan Shectman's Quasicrystals.

Frederick Taylor -- Scientific Manager

2011-10-02T07:30:00.002-04:00

Frederick Taylor was an engineer during the Industrial Revolution in the US working 1883-1906. He was a practical man who wanted to make factory better by making it more efficient --often making it more efficient made the work ergonomically easier.

For example, he did work on the so-called science of shovelling. He determined that a worker should shovel 21 lb per shovelful so that he could go the longest time. He also coached workers to use their body not their arms to lift. Today we know that sore backs are a big chronic problem, and that sore arms are less serious.

Taylor wrote a large book called The Principles of Scientific Management, which happily is free on Kindle and on Google books. Scientific management is not the management of science, but rather the use of experiments to improve productivity.

Taylor's work is hard to summarize, but three principles:

Inefficiency hurts America

Systematic management helps efficiency, not hiring for extraordinarily good workers

Management is a science that has laws, rules and principles.

Some of what Taylor advocates might be called worker training today. That is, if we show people how to shovel, then they shovel better. In the 1890's workers were assumed to know how to do their work, and the bosses often did not.

When I was in business school I admired the idea that studying the work at hand could make accomplishing it easier. I particularly liked taking a detailed approach to relatively simple workplace problems.

Reading Taylor today, social issues problems and class distinction are on every page. Taylor regarded himself as progressive in his day, and he tries to give what he says as a reasonable view. The country, and actually the industrializing world of the time, were all grappling with these issues. It may have taken another fifty years before some resolution is achieved.

More: Taylor writes about "soldiering" which means workers who slow their work-pace deliberately to get paid more or so that the employer needs to hire more workers. Maybe we'd call that goldbricking or featherbedding today. Taylor understood that paying by piece-work only helped so much. He thought his system led to greater productivity, and the ability to pay higher wages which would motivate the workers to have a better attitude and work harder.

Even More: This an excellent web page on early management theorists.

Wine Label Art

2011-09-26T20:58:00.000-04:00

Cool bottle from Honey Moon Winery in Bellingham, Washington.
This is a bottle of mead, which is made from honey.

I came across a great collection of labels in Coolist.

Wine labels are probably the best commercial art out there.

This label was banned in Alabama as too revealing. It is
also pretty weird with the flying bicycle.

Fertilizer from the Air and Its Invention

2011-09-24T20:01:00.003-04:00

Carl Bosch

Carl Bosch, who was a chemist for BASF, and developed a practical industrial process for making ammonia from the air. It is called the most important chemical process ever discovered making fertilizer that allows farmer to feed so many people. It is said that half of the nitrogen in the human body has been synthesized from the air.

Bosch was assigned to the project by his bosses, who bought rights to the invention of Fritz Haber. Haber was a Professor at Karlsruhe, when he developed a high pressure process to fix nitrogen using a ruthinium catalyst in 1907.

Haber had a number of collaborators including Le Rossignol for the pressure equipment, Nerst for the thermodynamics, and Ostwald for prior art in catalyst selection.

The point here is that Haber had a network, and Haber and his bosses at BASF were plugged into it. Networks and the interfaces between organizations continue to be important in transmitting ideas. The isolated genius is not a very important phenomenon in science.

Didn't Fritz Haber have cool glasses? Oh, that is
his lab set up in the hood.

A Bosch Reactor

Bosch's project was the biggest chemical engineering plant at the time. It is an early example of Big Science. Significant technical projects today are increasing efforts of hundreds of people. Bosch's project was fast. He had the plant up in just five year making 7 million kg of ammonia a year. Today BASF makes 110 times that much in Germany. Bosch got that plant up in 4-5 years. He was motivated by the threat of a British naval blockade, but also things just moved faster back then.

Heimliched at McDonalds

2011-09-18T20:13:00.001-04:00

I was at McDonalds killing time before a business meeting on the road. Just behind me woman started choking, and the women at the table were wondering what to do, then they said loudly, "She's Choking!" A guy the next table got up, and grabbed the woman and did the Heimlich maneuver on her. I was wondering what to do, but I didn't do anything.

The woman was chubby, and that made it hard to get good leverage, but the guy kept doing it. The women turned blue in the lips, and kept trying to gasp for air. They just kept trying to Heimlich her, every minute or so.

The McDonald's workers noticed, and soon the store manager was there. He was pretty tall, and he tried to Heimlich her too. He was fast; he just kept Heimliching over and over. He pulled her up in the air when he pulled, and hardly let her down to the ground in-between Heimlichs he was pulling so hard and so fast.

The poor lady looked really desperate, and tired and scared and blue. She fainted or maybe she fell. The manager picked her up and kept trying. She had foam at her month since she couldn't swallow either.

The woman's friend (her 16 year old niece as it turns out) got on the phone to 911, and was trying to work the 911 operators question tree -- no she is not unconscious; no she can't talk; she was eating chicken nuggets and french fries...

The second time she fell; it was all the way to the ground, and she laid back. This time her head was right next to me since she fell across the aisle. She lost strength in her legs or she fainted, and the people couldn't hold her up. She looked just terrible.

In 2-3 minutes, a fire truck is coming down the street, and a guy is hanging out of the doorway waving for the firefighters to come in. The fire captain wasn't tall, but he was beefy, and he stopped the restaurant manager. Then he said something to the woman's friends, and started Heimliching himself. He was slower, smoother and more rhythmic than the others.

I don't know if the woman was breathing, but she much have been getting some air. Soon they stretched her on the ground, and they were giving her an abdominal message -- something like a Heimlich maneuver but lying down. It looked like a heart message, but actually it was in the abdomen not the chest.

The color in the woman's face got better, and I exited the restaurant.

After watching all this, I felt terrible. This poor lady had been thought this terrible ordeal -- frightened and choking. I felt worn out from just being there.

Lion Droppings (Issues with Mac OS 10.7)

2011-09-01T19:23:00.000-04:00

Everyone knows that Apple issued a new OS, and it is the biggest re-write in years. It brings a more iPad feel to the desktop, and geeks say that it brings far more security. It drops support for PowerPC code; that is applications native to OS 8 or OS 9.

This means that lots of specialty applications don't work. I deleted about eight old programs including a screen capture program, and a font manager. Notably the driver for my ancient Canon scanner no longer works. Looks like I am going to start photographing documents.

Most important to me is accounting software that my wife uses in her business -- AccountEdge 2004. This no longer runs in Lion, and it needs to upgrade to AccountEdge 2011 for $300. Jenny's business is a lean operation, and $300 is a lot of money. The main issue is that she uses a few features all year, and then we need to make statements for income taxes at the end of the year. Now $300 is less than an accountant would cost, so I suppose that it is cheaper. I guess a dual boot system is the way to go.

News reports are that Flash is not supported in Lion, but I can say that it is. It runs on my computer fine.

The so-called "iPad" feel of Lion is overblown to me. Notably the window dragging gesture has been reversed on the Mac to make it more like the iPad. This seemed weird at first, but it actually is more natural -- more like push a piece of paper across a desk. On the other hand, I expect I will always be confusing the direction with that on my Windows PC. There are some changes in the menus, and indicator bars. There is a default full screen option, that gets rid of the desktop clutter. Overall look and feel is not that different.

Etsy has Bugs

2011-08-23T20:47:00.000-04:00

DW Jenny makes her living selling stuff and lately patterns on Etsy, the website for crafters. Etsy has attracted mockers in the form of Regretsy, which is adolescent but occasionally funny.

Etsy had been growing rapidly with sales on pace for $450 million for 2011 over the $314 million in 2010.

Etsy Sales; Note the 2011 sales are in
the original caption.

Our issue with Etsy is a bug in their software. Most sellers forward their customers to Paypal automatically to pay. Paypal extracts several percent commission, but usually this goes flawlessly. Yesterday, Etsy sent incorrect email addresses to my wife's customer -- creating confused and angry customers.

I am posting about this since there have been almost nothing on-line about this bug. (We did find a similar issue on the Etsy bulletin board.) It looks like Etsy restored some old data; presumably because the newer data got corrupted. Jenny had her old defunct email address replace her current one, and Paypal posted the funds to the wrong account.

Etsy seems to have had a hacker attack, a virus or perhaps just bad luck with hard drives.

Anyway. Jenny lost a $60 sale, and had a customer leave multiple bad feedback. All for a software bug at the host website.

Etsy is so understaffed that it does not try to answer complaints one-at-a-time. Jenny got a form-letter back when she contacted Etsy.

I suppose it could be worse. The customer will keep her money, and no harm was done.

If anyone has had similar issue, please leave a comment. Thanks.

iPod Nano Woes (5th Generation)

2011-08-20T15:09:00.003-04:00

My iPod died, and I found no helpful posts on-line about fixing it.

Depth-of-Processing fans might remember the multiple posts about my woes with the ill-fated iPod Shuffle (3rd Generation,) and how Apple eventually mailed me a iPod nano (4th Gen) to resolve the problem, which lasted a short while and then died. I work my iPods pretty hard.

Well my current iPod Nano (5th Gen) is seemly irretrievably wrecked after about two years of faithful service. It randomly pauses and/or produces buzzing noise at the pitch of the last note it made. Also the click-wheel works slowly -- like the processor is busy. I tried the usual stuff like resetting (hold menu and center,) diagnostic mode (reset, but quickly hold menu and rewind,) and restoring using iTunes -- and all were no help.

There is very little on the internet about this problem, which suggests it must be a pretty rare problem. It sounds like hardware, and I don't want to try to open up the iPod to fix it.

My solution is to get a new one. Off to Best Buy.

Arctic Tern

2011-08-18T21:07:00.003-04:00

My new hero is a 100 gram bird, the Arctic Tern. We were planning a trip in the fall to a point on Lake Erie in Ontario where birds hunker down before flying across the lake, when I found out about the world champion and utterly amazing bird that flies from the arctic to the antarctic, and back each year.

It flies 22,000 miles each season, from Greenland to Antartica and back! Over 44,000 miles because they don't fly in a straight line; often going 10% too far to catch the wind. The live for thirty years flying 1,330,000 miles in a lifetime, which is just mindlessly too much.

Arctic Terns don't like water, and they don't like land much either. They prefer to catch insects in the air, and they stay aloft. They mostly eat fish like other terns.

Baby Terns fly too much too. One three month old tern was found in Melbourne, over 14000 miles from Britain where it was born.

Stock Market Whammy

2011-08-05T21:14:00.004-04:00

Economic Crisis!
I am recycling my favorite picture from the
2008 recession. Gotta luv this picture of Secretary
Paulson.

I was alarmed like everyone else by the pounding on the stock market Thursday. Everyone was wondering how Congress caused America to lose $930 billion dollars in the last week. That is the $13 trillion value of the stock market times the 7.2% that the Standard and Poors 500 lost in the last week.

Here are the losses in various stock indexes in the last week, Friday to Friday.

-5.8 Dow (US)
-8.1 Nasdaq (US)
-12.9 DAX (Germany)
-5.4 Nikkei (Japan)
-7.2 Standard and Poors 500 (US)
-7.9 DJ Wilshire 5000 (US)
-6.7 Hang Seng (China)
-9.8 FTSE 100 (Britain)

As bad as things are in the US, big US stocks held up best. The Dow only lost 5.8%.

Rock solid and fiscally-sound Germany took the biggest pounding (-12.9%) -- why? Who really knows, but it seems the bailout for Greece, Italy and Spain are really the worry.

Strange as it seems the Tea Partyers are not to blame.

The Power of Experiment and the Limits of Logic

2011-08-03T20:46:00.000-04:00

I am reading a book by James Gleick, called The Information" A History, a Theory, a Flood. For a book about information, it spends a lot of time on the limitations of information and reasoning. For example, we know that mathematical proofs cannot prove everything that is true to be true. Mathematician Kurt Goedel, showed that mathematically in 1931. This is just like computer genius Turning showing that there were some problems a computer could not solve.

This is surprising because science and its logical methods have worked so well in advancing technology for the last 130 years.

On the other hand, application of logic to religious problems seems to lead to mass murder like when Anders Behring Breivik killed 88 Norwegian kids because their parents did not agree with his notions of racial purity. Breivik had 1500 pages of seemingly logical arguments for so-called Christian terrorism and racial purity.

The powerful thing about science is not the theory, but rather the experiments. It is hard to run experiments in religion or philosophy. In science we can test whether our reasoning is true; in morality, or epistemology, or theology, experiments are hard to come by.

Consider evolution, where science is validated by experiment, and creationist bible interpretations are not. Many believers also believe in evolution because of the evidence, but many do not because of Faith. I have nothing bad to say about Faith, because as mentioned above logic can only get us part way.

On the other hand, building a castle of logic on top of a faith-oriented belief can get twisted around. I am reminded of "Let the children come to me ... for to such as these belong the kingdom of God." [Matt 19:14] Implying that getting too complicated isn't the way to the kingdom of God.

Chocolate, Coffee and Vanilla

2011-07-24T20:40:00.002-04:00

Theobromide

It is a nice summer day, but I tired myself out in the heat. So I had some chocolate, which tasted pretty good.

I have been thinking about flavors lately, especially trace flavors in wine, and I thought I'd look up chocolate. The main one is theobromide, which has the wonderful Greek root meaning "food of the gods." Cocoa beans are so highly processed that other ingredients vary.

Caffeine is much like theobromide.
Imagine this rotated 180 degrees to
see the similarity.

Theobromide is related to another caffeine, and the structures are similar.

My wife points out Cage Baker's Immortal's series has a race of people addicted to theobromide. JR Rowling gave chocolate magically properties to drive away demons of depression. I think both ladies just liked chocolate.

Caffeine used to be my friend, but now I avoid it. Both theobromide and caffeine are stimulants, but caffeine is stronger. Both are diuretics too. Of course there is a little caffeine in chocolate. There is no theobromide in coffee though.

One of my favorite flavors is vanilla, and natural vanilla contains dozens of compounds. The prototype is vanillin. I like this because as wood ages with wine, the tannins in the wine breakdown, and the wine reduces the tannins into aldehydes like vanillin. This breakdown is a mysterious process. There is no theobromide or caffeine in (normal) wine.

Football Helmet Manufacturers Step Up Brain Protection

2011-07-17T08:50:00.001-04:00

As high school athletes suit-up for summer work-outs, helmet manufacturers ship helmets with fancier padding, while injury lawyers trawl the sidelines for players with concussions.

Football-related brain injury has gotten a lot of press for long-term injury in pro players and acute injury in high school players. A physician's group says there are 300,000 football related concussions, but no one really knows.

Since my previous post in 2010, manufacturers have introduced better helmets, but they are much more expensive.

Small changes in padding make big differences in
concussion protection.

Another big change is Virginia Tech's large study of helmets using accelerometers and dropping studies to assess helmet design. This ranks major helmet's according to degree of impact reduction. A problem with the study is that concussions are caused by particular kinds of impacts, like side impacts, and the study does not address that. There is also manufacturer funded research like this.

Riddell, has won a patent infringement suit (see also) against two other manufacturers on concussion reducing features of their helmets. This shows large manufacturers want to include these features. Patent violations have driven Schutt Sports into bankruptcy.

Newer helmets have fancier pads and these need to be well-maintained and the helmet still needs to fit. These are air-filled, nitrile foam or polyurethane foam.

Lawyers started suing on behalf of lifetime pro players with brain disease, but have moved onto suing on behalf of high school athletes -- there are a lot more high school players. Some of the high school coaches say stupid things, and this gets their school districts massive legal trouble.

I wonder why polycarbonate remains the material of choice for the helmet, and I suspect it is appearance. Some have made low-gloss polyurethane foam based helmets, but these have failed to catch on. Some advocate for kevlar or carbon-fiber reinforced helmets as are used in motor-sports, but these are much more expensive.

4th of July and a Balanced Budget

2011-07-04T07:51:00.001-04:00

Franklin, Adams and Jefferson
draft the Declaration in this painting
by Jean L.G. Ferris

When the colonists declared independence from King George in 1776, they said, in actions and in words that they would run their affairs better than the King of England. And after the Constitution was established, we began the giant experiment of Jeffersonian democracy, where we demonstrated that an elected government could run a country better than a King.

At the beginning many disagreed (e.g. Canadians), saying the rabble could not understand complexities of government and would make foolish decisions.

235 years later, the United States has generally run its affairs well, and we know that Kings are not any better than elected governments.

American democracy seems unable to run its own affairs lately -- look at our taxes and spending. I graphed this myself with data from the Brookings Institution's Tax Policy Center.

Taxes have been roughly constant since the mid-1990's. Expenditures grow and grow.

Sometimes I wonder if a philosopher-king could do a better job! Taxes have been bouncing around at the same level since the mid 1990's, but expenditures have soared.

Meanwhile a Prince of England tours Canada; a country with a better budget situation than us.

I am confident that Americans can meet the challenges of self-government. There is no King that is going to fix it for us.

BioPunk - A Cool Word in Search of a Cool Definition

2011-07-01T20:56:00.000-04:00

Pris is a bio-engineered Replicant from 1982's Blade Runner

BioPunk - People who do synthetic biology who don't know what they are doing. Usually bored computer nerds.

BioPunks are hacking cells to make something cool. They are actually channeling CyberPunk, which sounds like it is a group of hackers, but it is actually a science fiction genre.

When I think of BioPunk, I immediately think of the synthetic humans used as slave characters in Blade Runner, called Replicants. Blade Runner is a really old movie (1982) but there is a great scene of a guy making little gnomes as a hobby.

A lot of these people are computer hackers, like Meredith Patterson, who has a so-called manifesto on BioPunk. She has high sounding rhetoric on punk biology.

I think that DNA origami qualifies, see this older post on little DNA pictures, and these little DNA boxes.

BisPhenol A Makes Boys More Girly - Literally

2011-06-27T20:05:00.000-04:00

Bis-phenol A feminizes mice.

Bis-phenol A BPA is back in the news.

Depth of Processing fans know that bis-phenol A is common industrial chemical used in packaging materials that happens to be a weak synthetic estrogen, and that it feminizes males including male mice. BPA reduces sperm counts, shrinks male parts, and produces early onset of puberty in girls.

What does that mean? This has shown up a variety of ways, and in a recent study, BPA fed to a pregnant mouse made her male offspring less attractive to females. Presumably by changing their secondary male mouse characteristics -- probably pheromones. This is interesting because the baby mouse got normal food. It was his mom that got the BPA.

Cheryl Rosenfeld at U-Missouri - Columbia showed that feeding BPA affects the unborn male mouse fetuses to make them less likely to mate. This fits the pattern that BPA feminizes as described above. Rosenfeld specializes in sexual differentiation en utero with other related studies.

BPA used to be in re-usable clear plastic bottles, but that has stopped now that polycarbonate is no longer used for baby bottles, pitchers, and water bottles in the US and Canada.

All this is worrisome because BPA is still used in most soda can liners. I would not worry too much because BPA is bound pretty tightly in these liners, but this is more evidence that will eventually lead to an industry-wide shift away from BPA based can liners.

Read my previous post on BPA, and the one before that.

.

The Sponginess of Corporate Culture

2011-06-25T18:42:00.002-04:00

I have worked lots of places. Different companies, even different departments have widely different feels. I can only imagine that trucking, logging and brain surgery would be more different.

The jargon is these are different corporate cultures. What exactly is a corporate culture? Two guys, researched 164 different definitions of culture back in 1952, so sixty years ago it was muddled and vague. It only got more confused when "culture" made its way from anthropology to business in the late eighties and early nineties.

Bjorn Bjerke says about corporate culture that "every concept which has gradually come to contain more and more, sooner or later will become cumbersome and even meaningless. And he says this is happening to "corporate culture."

One culture consultant said culture is transmitted through telling stories. This is self-serving for him because he can give a day of training, and never say clearly what corporate culture is or what to do about it. Stories teach something, but we skip a vocabulary to talk about it. The academic literature on organizational culture spans disciplines from Anthropology to Psychology to Sociology to Business, and each brings their own spin, metrics and vocabulary.

Nonetheless, corporate culture has something to do with the way people relate to each other or the networks they are in. Second it has to do with their sense of right and wrong behavior in the group also called norms and values.

This looks like a corporate culture
ritual! Actually it is a corporate culture retreat: link.

Anthropologists say there are rituals and symbols in every culture. I am sure that budget planning meetings are rituals. How about business dinners and sales meetings? A company promotion letter and organizational chart is a symbol. How corporations handle these events says a lot about their cultures.

Authors and consultants tell leaders that they can change the culture. No leader will know if s/he succeeded because what culture means varies so widely.

Corporate culture is important. Different outfits have differing productivity because of their norms and values. If we could tailor the corporate culture -- that would be great. I think we need to advance beyond the pop business literature to do that.

Look for a flow up posting on how.

Cracking Knuckles

2011-06-19T07:18:00.001-04:00

A cracking finger knuckle at right. A resting knuckle at left.

In fifth grade I was in line to go to gym class, and someone in line cracked his knuckles which I thought was strange. Naturally I had to crack my knuckles too. It took me years to quit.

It is annoying when other people crack knuckles, but it was satisfying when I did it myself.

Cavitation causes the knuckle cracking sound. Cavitation is a fluid dynamics term that means bubbles form in a fluid. Research is pretty clear that the bubble formation and popping is the cause of the sound. It does not sound like bubbles breaking -- it seems like it should have to do with the bones or the tendons -- but it doesn't.

The joint fluid is approximately at atmospheric pressure of course, but pulling the joint causes instantaneous low pressure and bubbles form. Measurements show resting joint fluid is at about 5% lower pressure than atmospheric pressure, that is -4 torr (500 pascal) depending on the joint. This is a little surprising, but if the pressure were higher than atmospheric it would try to leak out. Clearly the joint fluid is well-contained since it stays there.

Physiologists say the joint fluid is "viscous", but measurements show the viscosity is only 100-300 centipoise (0.1-0.3 Pa-s), which is like pancake syrup, way thinner than road-tar or Vaseline. Normal fluid is a saline solution with about 3% protein. It can have a little 0.04% glucose, and should not have blood or lactic acid, which are signs of disease.

For a second or so, the joint is 15% to 25% larger than before, and this means the joint fluid is foamy. The bubbles are almost all carbon dioxide, which means it comes from respiration of the adjacent cells. Once the cracking occurs the joint becomes more extensible, and the joint stretches. Usually it stretches to the limits of the surrounding muscle, and this can cause muscle damage -- and muscle damage lowers strength. People, who crack their hands, have weaker hands. The joint cannot crack again until the gas is reabsorbed in to the joint fluid.

I was leaving work Friday, and my jaw joint made a cracking noise -- something that never happens to me. I thought, this joint cracking is a really odd phenomena, and knowing how it works does not make it less odd.

Bionic Eyes

2011-06-15T20:21:00.001-04:00

Simulated bionic eye image. See link.

Did you know you could implant a microchip on your retina, and have it talk to your optic nerve? It works so well that blind people can see, kind of.

The nerve/implant interface is pretty simple, platinum electrodes embedded in silicone. Workers say it is important that the silicone be conformable around the surface of the nerve. An improvement is a polymer coating that is compatible with the cells neighboring the implant.

People say the optical chip is like a solar cell where it generates a current. This is unlike a CCD chip in the back of a digital camera that needs a battery. There is no room for a battery on the back of the eye. A problem with the solar cell approach is that it is less efficient than a natural eye, and the light needs to be brighter.

In the diagram below, a camera is used to create bright secondary image for the optical chip to detect.

Notice that the camera outputs to a display mounted in front of the blind person, as if on their glasses. There are other systems; see also.

The coolest thing about bionic eyes is that they work at all.

This sounds like the start of a science fiction story, but let me direct you to a very different post on Borg eyes.

Marshmallow Mellow

2011-06-08T20:38:00.000-04:00

One of the most notorious drug commercials is the Zoloft marshmallow commercial because it uses cute marshmallow people to coax people into using psycho-tropic drugs.

Feeling a little down? What to feel better? Take Zoloft.

Of course everyone feels bad sometimes (exhausted, hopeless, lonely.) Like the commercial says: You shouldn't have to feel this way anymore!

Here is the original TV commercial.

The ads were designed by Patrick Smith from NYC. Smith directed many commercials and several MTV cartoons including Daria, which was a favorite of mine.

Below is the print ad. Arn't the little blobby people cute?

I tried to get Zazzle to make me a Zoloft marshmallow-person coffee cup, but they wouldn't because of the copyright.

WHO Says Cell Phones Cause Cancer?

2011-06-07T20:41:00.002-04:00

It was a sad day for the UN when the World Health Organization WHO and its International Agency for Research on Cancer IARC drank the Kool-Aid and irresponsibly declared that cell phones are "possibly carcinogenic to humans." See my original post on this topic from October 2010.

The primary way to tell cell phones don't cause cancer is by thinking about it. Cell phones use radio waves, and radio waves cannot break chemical bonds. At worst they can make molecules rotate faster which makes your ear warmer. The photos below illustrate this. Here is a scientific article biologically showing your head is reacting like it is warm, because it is warm. See also.

At left is before the cell phone, and at right is after. This is

an infrared image showing the cell phone made the head

warmer. This is the only possible effect of radio waves.

Your head gets warmer. You get the same effect from

wearing a hat. Do hats cause cancer?

There are 2,400,000,000 cell phone users in the world. Do you think that it cell phones caused cancer that the rare cancer glioma would still be rare? (Glioma is alleged to be caused by cell phones.) This is not like some never-tested new lab chemical; we have 2,400,000,000 "lab rats" out in the world proving that cell phones don't cause cancer.

I defend the United Nations against global trade opponents and paranoid conspiracy-theorists, but then the UN comes out with a crack-pot report like this. My previous post was based on UN data on energy generation.

Why did IARC make this declaration? It appears to be a self-propagating momentum. Rather than thinking about it, IARC is going to confuse billions of people.

The worst part is that people are going to spend time worrying about cell phones instead of quitting smoking or using sunscreen. Click here to learn about preventable cancers.

Volcanos are Best

2011-05-30T10:46:00.000-04:00

Here is an interesting study about different energy sources and how economical they are. It is a hard to read graph, because there are different ways to implement each technology. Each "mode" is given a darker stripe.

The cheapest energy by far is geothermal. So if you live near a volcano, you need to drill for steam. It is even a reason to move next door to volcano -- although periodic lava flows and explosive eruptions are a problem.

As we all know hydropower from dams is cheap power too. Surprisingly a related water-power technology, ocean tides are not cost-effective. It seems the tidal energy systems need to be big, heavy and expensive.

Burning wood or farm debris for heat is cheap too; this is wood gasification and then running a regular internal combustion engine on that.

Using the sun to produce hot water for your house, also makes sense. Using it to make electricity is pretty expensive. Solar power is best used to make heat not electricity.

All this comes from the UN Climate Change group called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Punishment for Rape Around the World

2011-05-22T19:10:00.000-04:00

IMF Chief and French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn got caught raping his hotel maid in New York. This led the French to say that American law is tougher on rape than French law. In fact the London Daily Mail reports that current French President Sarkozy warned Strauss-Kahn about American prosecution for sex crimes, ‘Over there they don't joke about this sort of thing,’ Sarkozy reportedly said.

I was wondering if this was really true, and I tried to look up rape sentences. This turned out to be hard to do; for example the US has different laws in each state, but the average time served is 5.4 years nationwide; the average sentence is 11.8 year.

In France the standard sentence is 15 years. 20 years for raping a minor. 30 years for killing the victim, and over 30 years for torture. Many countries have similar escalating sentences.

This is cobbled together from a variety of sources, the best at Wikipedia.

There are a number of countries where the punishment is death. In Britain the punishment is "life" although I bet there is more subtlety than that.

Finally the Bible says that a man raping a woman has to pay the father a 50 shekels of silver, and then marry the woman. Raping a married woman is punishable by death.

World Stock Markets are Highly Correlated, but not in Japan

2011-05-15T08:11:00.001-04:00

After the stock market crash, instead of hiding my statements in a drawer, I put them on a spreadsheet and stared at them. Maybe that was masochistic.

Staring did not help much, so I decided to put the stock indexes there too. Now I had something to compare to. Mint.com does that really well, but I did not know about it at the time. I also wanted to see the different countries.

What I learned was that my statements followed the indexes, and the indexes followed each other. Now I just watch the indexes, and save the extra work.

In 2009, I put up a post showing that all the indexes were correlated. Everything was correlated at 0.9 to 0.97. This is a problem, and I'll post on why later this week.

Time has past, and now we see some indexes tracking differently. This should NOT be surprising, because all these different economies should be different. Anyway, now we see Japan tracking worse than everywhere else. Why, well it dropped 10% after the tsunami in March. It was already behind, but now it is way behind. Germany is best. China in the middle.

January 1, 2010 is the zero point. These are percent changes of the various indexes since then.

Below is the correlation matrix for the different indexes. Numbers close to one are most correlated, and smaller numbers have the most diversification. The red numbers representing the Japanese Nikkei index are the only ones with much diversification; the Chinese Hang Sang is second, but 0.87 is still pretty correlated.

Correlation matrix on the above stock indexes. Sorry for having 6 to 9 decimal figures.

Significance - During the crash and the climb-out, money kept flowing around the world equalizing returns. Finance had became a big statistical game, and most of the investments were short-term bets place by computerized arbitrage systems. (See my post on high frequency trading.) That still may be true, but at least we are seeing some difference, and maybe the fundamental soundness of economies can enter in to their valuation. A welcome return of investing over trading.

Blogger Crashes -- My Thursday Post is Off in the Ether.

2011-05-14T16:09:00.000-04:00

Blogger (or Blogspot) is on life support today as old posts from Wednesday through Friday got taken down. Blogger is the host of this blog, obviously.

Google, the parent of Blogger is not saying what happened or when it will go away. Happily new posts are going up again, and I reposted my post from Thursday from the copy on Facebook.

Blogger mostly works fine though, and I suppose I can't complain too much for something that is free.

Every Previous Theory is Wrong!!

2011-05-14T15:58:00.000-04:00

This giant wooden elephant is not a scientific theory,
but it is pretty cool.

"Every previous theory of science was proved wrong, so its just a matter of time until current theories are proved wrong."

Is that a great bit of babbling? The first time I heard it, it really slowed me down. Unless a theory is disproven and replaced, it is not a "previous theory."

Some pretty sound "previous theories" like Newton's Gravity, still work pretty well, although they known not to be actually true.

Ptolemy's theory of the solar system predicts the motion of the planets pretty well, but it has the theory completely wrong.

Each new theory of science is zeroing in on the truth, and is not a random shot in the dark.

Also some theories have impressive antiquity for example, the Atomic Theory for example, has been around for a hundred years in its current form, and two millennia in general principle.

The Theory of Gravity has been around since 1666, and even though quantum gravity and General Relativity might push it aside, high school kids are still learning it.

Anti-Science Cholesterol Deniers Deserve to Die!

2011-05-09T21:10:00.001-04:00

I gotta say that I am tired of science deniers: evolution, global warming, and now cholesterol. Why are people so skeptical of sensible topics and forget skepticism when they need it: astrology, homeopathy, herbal medicine, and the Laufer Curve?

The notion that cholesterol does not cause heart disease got me started.

Look at the graph at the right. See how a small increase in cholesterol from 199 to 240 increases the risk of heart disease by 80%. If you were an actuary, I'd be able to prove that to you.

There is plenty of data -- if data mattered to people. A Lancet meta-study from 2007 that summarized 61 studies involving 900,000 people!!

This showed that middle aged adults were TWICE as likely to have a heart attack with high cholesterol. As you get older, the effect of cholesterol is a little less, only 1 in 3. High cholesterol also increases the chances of stroke.

I think juicy steak corrupts people's minds. If you disagree, try the Flat Earth Society.

Go Adam Beane! What an Obama Head!

2011-05-09T19:41:00.000-04:00

This Obama head looks like it can talk. Makes me think it is photoshopped. Actually it is from Adam Beane. What patience this guy must have!

Pascal Bruckner on Happiness

2011-05-02T19:55:00.001-04:00

Pascal Bruckner on Happiness was on the podcast Philosophy Bites. One of my favorite podcasts.

This discussion takes humanity from a distant past where happiness was an un-important distraction to today's world where happiness is arguably a duty. Bruckner has a book called "The Duty to be Happy. The idea is that people are obliged to be happy in order to feel good about themselves.

It is interesting the capitalism started as a frugal ideology as people saved to produce things, but now it is a happiness oriented ideology with an aesthetic to consume things.

Also interesting are Bruckner's three kinds of happiness: a moment of grace and joy, the feeling our life is moving in the right direction, and a different quality of life from ordinary days.

See also my two happiness and artificial intelligence posts.

Americans and Money

2011-05-01T20:23:00.000-04:00

We all spend too much time trying to make money compared to what we would rather be doing.

Often I say that if people did not have to eat, then there would be many more poets and artists. Similarly I tell my kids to be practical about their job prospects.

Every year Parade Magazine runs an issue on What People Make, which is one of their most popular. I came across some census and polling data on income, and I thought I'd share it.

Data from the Census Dept 2010

The first graph shows two things, first income for men has been flat since 1974. This is all in 2009 dollars -- meaning the effect of inflation has been erased.

This means all the GDP growth has not been going to individual guys. Of course there are more people now that before, but each individual is making the same amount.

Second women still make less than me. This is improving, but not that fast. 77% is surprisingly low.

I am not going to engage the sexual politics of income disparity between men and women. Way too complicated for today.

The above figure shows the average income in the USA in 2009 dollars. The average income is about $50,000. Middle class according to the census bureau goes from half that to 1.5 times that, or 25,000 to 75,000.

From Pew Research 2008

One of the keys to the American Psyche is the American Dream, which is that anybody who works hard can become successful, for example become President.

This figure shows people assessment of how well their standard of living compares to their parent's. See my previous post on this topic.

Upper income and middle income groups believe in the American dream. The lower income group is divided on whether the kids will have it better than their parents.

The housing price crash has certainly helped young people buy a house, and also degraded many older folks standard of living.

On the other hand, the rising cost of education is putting a higher and higher hurdle in front of high achievers from disadvantaged backgrounds. Education is an important part of equality of opportunity.

Cub Fans Low Testosterone Get Them Lower Auto Insurance!

2011-04-30T11:25:00.000-04:00

Extra testosterone in the drivers blood after the ball game may
have lead to this crash.

If we go to a ball game, and our team wins, we are more likely to die in the car going home, than if our team loses. Such is that evidence from Prof Melayne McInnes at U of North Carolina.

She looked at accident statistics when the home team won compared to when the home team lost. She looked at 271 games. Alcohol is a factor in post game accidents, but this effect was not due to drinking.

This is pretty quick and easy study. Just look up some sports scores, look up some traffic statistics, and then a little multiple regression. What an easy way to get a thesis done!

The theory goes that winning increases testosterone in fans which increases aggressiveness when driving which leads to accidents. Losing teams fans decrease in testosterone and that leads to submissiveness and safer driving. The study supports the theory.

The insurance industry owes
a refund to Cub fans.

On the other hand, real data with solid serum testosterone levels are far less clear. The idea that testosterone increases aggression is mostly anecdotal. There is one real study showing the opposite effect -- athletes with LOW testosterone get MORE injuries -- probably because testosterone builds up bulkier muscles that are more resistant to injury. There is one study using blood testosterone levels that observed only weak insignificant effects on aggression.

High testosterone levels would be expected to increase sexual interest in men, but the data are conflicted showing both yes and no.

The bright side is that the Cubs are probably keeping my auto insurance down. Also the Lions.

Is There Any Point to Gatorade?

2011-04-23T07:10:00.002-04:00

There are eight kinds of Gatorade -- several of which are
in test marketing.

About two months ago, I got sick while exercising, and the doctor said I should pay attention to my electrolytes. Prior to this, I just tried to stay hydrated, but never paid attention to electrolytes. I thought that would wash out the excess sodium from all the over-salted food I eat. Of course all that water also washes out other minerals like potassium and calcium which are important to muscle function.

I bought myself some salty Gatorade -- it was G Series PRO 2 Perform. Isn't that a ridiculously complicated name for salty Kool-Aid? There are eight kinds of Gatorade now, but most are not available in the Detroit metro -- looks like test marketing or perhaps Southern US specific marketing.

Yesterday, I made point of drinking about 20 ounces for about 130 calories and an unknown amount of electrolytes over my two hour workout today. I thought I felt better. So was that real or imagined?

Turns out this is a thoroughly studied question, and not only at the Gatorade Sports Science Institute or whatever. Jason Winnick et al gave twenty athletes either 6% sugar water or placebo. The ones with the sugar water ran faster, jumped higher and had a better mood than the placebo of flavored water. This study says sports drinks work.

My question is whether six Jolly Rancher candy would have the same effect as the Gatorade. Is it the sugar or is it the salt?

The National Trainers Association and NIH are more concerned with preventing dehydration that getting peak performance. 1-2% weight loss due to dehydration will cause loss of performance, and 3% will cause muscle cramps. So for me, 2% weight loss is about 3 pounds -- which is a lot, but it probably happens on humid summer days. The trainers recommend drinking about one liter every hour, and measuring dehydration by the color of the urine -- they have a color scale prepared, or better by measuring urine density if you have a densitometer handy.

In 1992, a study recommended sugar water before and during exercise at about 50% of the volume that one sweated out. In 1998 a Gatoraid sponsored study showed that 12 year boys drank more fluid if it had sugar in it, but there was not performance advantage.

In summary, salty sugar water helps performance and mood, so it seems to be worthwhile. I suppose I'll try it again.
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Renewable Energy Geography

2011-04-17T20:33:00.001-04:00

Here in suburban Detroit, especially Downriver, we have an inferiority complex. We sometimes believe life is better in other places, and sometimes friends/relatives tell us so.

One thing that is better other places are natural resources, for example Texas and Alaska have oil, but not here.

Florida and California have tropical fruit plantations, but not here.

The coasts have winds to turn turbines, but not here. Or is it.

It turns out that there are some decent winds in side the Great Lakes, and the mountain passes of the West are great too.

Wind seems to be the most practical in terms of land usage since it produces considerable power, and the land can generally be used for something in addition.

Link to source

Solar power depends on the average cloudiness as well as the brightness of the sun. It helps to live in the desert. The plains states do OK though.

This map is at odds with the Energy Department calculation of energy yield from semiconductor photovoltaics shown below, where cloudiness seems far more important than the brightness of the sun.

In this table Boulder Colorado is the best.

How much energy will a grid-connected photovoltaic system produce?*
System Size	1-kW	2-kW	3-kW	4-kW	5-kW
Seattle, WA	970	1940	2910	3880	4850
Sacramento, CA	1399	2799	4198	5597	6996
Boulder, CO	1459	2917	4376	5834	7293
Minneapolis, MN	1286	2571	3857	5142	6428
Des Moines, IA	1292	2584	3876	5168	6459
Houston, TX	1220	2440	3660	4879	6099
Pittsburgh, PA	1099	2197	3296	4395	5494
Jacksonville, FL	1286	2571	3857	5142	6428
*Estimated annual output in kWh/year (source: PV WATTS). A typical home uses an average of 9,400 kWh per year. National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service

http://www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/data/images/biomass_map.jpg

Michigan does better with biomass, which in this context means wood for fuel. Wood and burnable grasses have a lot to do with rainfall.

This map shows where petroleum is produced today -- obviously Texas and Alaska stand out. Coal and natural gas are on this site.

Having said all this, alternative energy develop is not going to happen until petroleum and natural gas prices climb enough to make these energy sources relatively cheap. Sometimes governments give subsidies, but experience shows that subsidies only last until the party of government changes.

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Anorexia

2011-04-11T20:13:00.000-04:00

I read this comic about a girl with anorexia, and then I found this unforgettable image.

I don't know the source of the image; I hope whoever it was got better.

The World Biggest Burger Again >>> From Southgate Michigan

2011-04-11T18:59:00.001-04:00

Here you see the World's Biggest Burger at 184 pounds of beef and 319 lb of edibleness. This is the third world-record burger made at Southgate's own Mallie's bar, which is just up the road from my humble abode.

You probably don't recall my post on their last burger from 2009.

Here is the video. It captures the excitement, but its hard to see.

Just $2000 to get your own.

Playdoh Car, Why Not?

2011-04-10T20:46:00.000-04:00

This Playdoh car took eight model makers two weeks to make. It was a publicity stunt for Chevy in Britain. http://newslite.tv/2011/03/10/lifesized-playdoh-car-parked-o.html

Synthetic Photosynthesis

2011-04-09T16:15:00.000-04:00

Very much like my undergrad research days, light shining on a
semiconductor drives reactions -- in this case electrolysis of water.

When I was a senior in college I worked on semiconductor photocells that could be used for solar cells. These were solar cells immersed in water not the dry kind.

Now I see there was an announcement of an apparent breakthrough in that field, Prof Nocera of MIT, made a catalyst/silicon composite that splits H2O water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is valuable as a fuel; of course oxygen is just floating around in the air.

Nocera's company Sun Catalytix calls this an "Artificial Leaf," which it isn't. A leaf makes sugar not hydrogen. Interestingly Indian conglomerate Tata is a big investor in Sun Catalytix.

The technology the "leaf" uses is vague probably because they have not had any patents issued -- I could not find any. Nickel and cobalt are used rather than platinum as a catalyst, and an electric current must be applied to keep the device at the right potential for electrolysis of water. Others have used quantum dots to absorb energy, and then simple mineral catalysts like iron sulfide to reduce hydrogen ions.

David Wendel at the University of Cincinnati uses enzymes and foam to make sugars via artificial photosynthesis. This is reportedly 18 times more efficient than a natural cell, because all the synthetic "cell" does is make sugar. It does not grow or feed other cells. See also.

I have often thought that an engineered synthetic "cell" could be more efficient than a natural cell. If people could not make a cell better then that would be an argument for intelligent design.

The Department of Energy has a research center on artificial photosynthesis in California which opened in 2010. They have some plans, but not much in terms of actual results so far. They will do research in the different components of a synthetic photosynthesis system: light collection, energy conduction, catalysis and membranes.

Schematic of artificial photosynthesis. Link.

How Are the Mighty Fallen: Curt Johnson the Child Abuser

2011-03-26T11:07:00.002-04:00

Grim looking Curt Johnson at his hearing.

Former Johnson Polymer Chairman and owner Curt Johnson was arrested and arrained for sexual assault on his 15 year old stepdaughter. For prurient details see here and here.

Being an heir to a fortune is not a good way to raise a child, and Curt has been in trouble before. Bill & Melinda Gates' idea of giving their money to charity and not to their kid seems pretty good.

Depravity and immorality hits billionaires who should know better. Of course, high school dropouts should know better too.

I recall when Woody Allen hit on his step daughter (though she was over eighteen), his wife hit the ceiling and divorced him. I can't imagine Curt's wife would be any different. Of course, Curt's wife is his second wife, and she used to be his secretary . . .

Oh, and Curt could get 40 years.

Curt Johnson looking good during
better times.

I like "The Daily"

2011-03-25T20:30:00.000-04:00

The Daily is a daily download for iPad from media tycoon Rupert Murdock. It is a daily magazine with news, sports, gossip and entertainment. While I still love my Kindle, The Daily is what the iPad is made for. Interesting content refreshed everyday with big pictures. Plus it has stories that aren't just rehashes of what I get on Google News or USAToday.com.

The Daily is a little light on real news; I assume they think you are reading Google News on the side. It is mostly feature story news, which is why I say it is more of a daily magazine. There are an assortment of video stories inside, and The Daily opens with a video teaser for the rest of the issue.

It does have a crossword and a Sudoku, so that is making it more of a newspaper. My Detroit Free Press on the Kindle has neither of these.

Of course, The Daily does not have the movie schedule and neither does the Kindle version of the Free Press.

I like it. After the two week free period I subscribed.

BP: Peak Oil is Here -- well almost.

2011-03-21T20:30:00.000-04:00

Two great graphs from BP's latest annual report. At left is where the energy is coming from, and it is less and less from the OPEC nations. This means that OPEC will have less pricing power in the future. Why is their influence declining, because petroleum will have less and less dominance of the world's energy supply.

At left is the form that the energy comes in, and the black layer at the bottom is petroleum. Notice how it is barely increasing.

The time when the production of oil maxes out is called Peak Oil, and it has been predicted for years. The fact that a major oil company is predicting essentially flat oil production in the face of 40% growth in energy demands says something important about the state of the energy economy. It says that all the cheap oil has been found, and to get the remainder we are going to have to work for it. Just how serious that is, is anyone's guess. I tend to think the peak will be very rounded, as oil companies look harder and harder for more oil. They will also tap more and more unconventional super-heavy crude.

Notice the light gray band at the top. That is wind and solar. Just under that is hydropower, which is a significant piece of the picture.

Civilian War Death Rate in Afghanistan LOWER than Murder Rate in Detroit

2011-03-20T07:43:00.000-04:00

Afghan Civilian Deaths are Lower Than US Cities; photo

The Afghan civilian death rate due to the war in Afghanistan is low, 9.8 per hundred thousand. In 2010 there were 2777 civilians killed, and the population of Afghanistan is about 28.4 million.

By contrast the murder rate in Detroit is 34 per hundred thousand. As high as that is, it is down from 41 in 2009.

Let's think about that. It is three times more likely for a Detroit city resident to be killed, then for an Afghan civilian to be killed in the war. 308 homicides and 900,000 people.

This says two things, that the war in Afghanistan is a slow-motion conflict not affecting many areas, and that there are too many killings in Detroit.

It also shows the military is limiting civilian casualties.

Wine Protects Against Gamma Rays

2011-03-20T07:16:00.002-04:00

In a sign there really is a God, the red wine chemical resivitrol has been proven to protect against gamma radiation. Resivitrol of course is the famous anti-oxidant found in RED WINE.

This shows that heavy drinking is not an irrational response to nuclear attack. Something many of us knew instinctually ;=)

In a nuclear explosion, all three forms of radiation are abundant, but the gamma radiation is hardest to shield against. Oncologist Joel Greenberger of U of Pittsburgh speculated that chemicals that prevent oxidation would help, and they do.

The beneficial effect of wine and resivitrol in protecting against "nuclear fallout," hurts when radiation is given therapeutically to battle cancer tumors. This is because radiation tears up the body forming free radicals, and if oxygen gets to them quickly the free radicals become stable compounds. On the other hand, if the oxygen is absorbed by anti-oxidants, the damage may be repaired. Anti-oxidants help cancer patients feel better, but in doing so they reduce the beneficial effect of the drug on the tumor -- that is they help the tumor too.

Greg's Wine

Cats Can't Taste Sugar

2011-03-12T20:26:00.001-05:00

Kitty is showing her tongue, which does not have sweet

receptors.

I learned today that the gene encoding the Sweetness receptor on the tongue is defective in cats. The gene is there, but the protein does not work. (More genetics here.)

Cats do have an ample number of umami receptors which would steer them to eat more meat, and obviously no sugary plants. Cats show no attraction or aversion to sweets -- completely oblivious.

Some people think that the 20% carbs that are in most catfoods is causing feline diabetes because cats lack the machinery to absorb sugars.

Tigers and cheetahs have exactly the same genetic defect as domestic cats. Chickens also lack a sweet gene. On the other hand, everyone knows dogs love sweets. Interestingly dogs cannot taste saccharine.

Beasts and Viruses in Your Brain

2011-03-08T07:00:00.002-05:00

From the WNYC Show On the Media, there was a story about Stanford's Lera Boroditsky and Paul Thibodeau's research on how we think, and specifically that we think about complex issues in terms of simple metaphors. This approach is called metaphorical framing, and it shows up in political and social ethics contexts. More on what metaphorical framing below.

In this experiment, an imaginary city was either described as having crime problem "like a beast," or " like a virus." In addition groups we given loads of additional details that were the identical. Groups told crime was "like a beast" went for police and prisons. Groups told crime was "like a virus" went for education and after-school programs. This showed that people took the complex issue of crime, and thought about it like controlling wild animals or controlling disease, which are quite different. Further it showed people were open to the suggestion of what metaphor to use rather than developing their own thought devices or metaphors.

Lera Boroditsky

The effect of the beast/virus metaphor was stronger than the political party. 71% were affected by the metaphor. Political party only changed responses by 10%.

Once you know that simple introductory metaphors impact the whole way a problem is framed and then solved, the word choice becomes enormously more important.

Metaphors are not mere flurrishes but rather are tools of thought:

"Metaphorical framing supposedly serves as the transmission belt for experience and position-making. In this manner, metaphors are not mere linguistic devices that illuminate or obscure the issue. Rather, they are tools of thought and social construction. Given similarities in the way the human mind works in relation to a similar environment, a stable and functional body of knowledge or truths may be shared within a group or community. These “shared truths” within a socio-cultural group shape the way problems are set or defined, and decisions or positions are taken."

Decision makers are trapped by their metaphor-based thought processes, in stilted language:

"How does metaphorical framing translate into decision-making? According to William Flanik from the University of Toronto, decision-makers have cognitive and affective biases that bound or constrain the mental tasks of problem setting, option-formulation and option-evaluation. In this regard, metaphors influence the cognitive and affective importance of decision inputs."

Flanik says that the Nuclear Missile Defense project was characterized as a "shield" for use against "rogues," and that this was an integral part of people's understanding without being objectively true or false.

My conclusion is that our brains are not as logical and well organized as we think they are. We are too easily influenced by whatever.
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The Rich Are Getting Richer? Why?

2011-03-04T02:33:00.001-05:00

In the last post I showed that the Rich are getting Richer, so why? I want to get richer, what are the rich doing, and what can we plodders learn from that?

The graph at right shows INCOME GROWTH, not income. So if I make a million dollars a year, and I get a 1% raise, thats $10,000. If I make $10,000 a year, and I get a 1% raise, that is $100. This makes sense. When I was young, and made $1.28/hr, and I got a 0.4% raise, and got an extra nickel an hour or $2 per week.

Top income earners get most of the income, and they get most of the absolute income growth.

The percentage of national wealth controlled by the top sector has increased, but not dramatically. This fraction has jumped up and down in the last 90 years.

So why are the wealthy making more, it seems that money is making more money. That is capital gains from current investments is the main difference.

A person can only work 8 to 14 hours a day, but I can have an unlimited amount of money earning more money for me. Once I get some money invested, I just keep getting more -- as long as I don't spend it. I can have an almost infinite amount invested for me. Once you are wealthy, you keep getting wealthy because you are getting more interest or dividends for your money.

Although that makes sense, data on the recent trends in income disagree. They show that individuals in highly paid industries are making more and more. According to Damanick Dantes (which must be a pseudenym), compensation on Wall Street and for CEO's really took off in the 1980's. Like Dantes I don't have a problem with rich people who work hard and are productive. Further, the people that earn a ton of money this year, are different from last years and next years -- that is there is churn in the top earners from year to year.

The richest people in America started with a wealthy background, but not enormously so. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet became enormously wealthy based on their merit, but had a strong headstart with good educations and access to the family money. In the top 10 richest people in America, six are industrialists who had a large hand in their fortune, and 4 are descendents of Sam Walton.

What seems to be happening is the computer technology is allowing better management and better efficiency creating better returns to entreprenuership. I'd say better returns to capital too, but interest rates are at record lows right now.

Will This Generation Have a Lower Standard of Living Than Its Parents

2011-02-26T15:42:00.000-05:00

Will today's kids be better off then their parents? This question has been buzzed about since polling data shows that today's adults think their kids won't be better off.

Becker and Posner do a nice job spelling out three factors:

1. Per capita income growth. Is the whole society richer? Well yes, each year increasing productivity combined with infrastructure investments make per capita income grow -- except for recessions, but generally growth happens. See the graph below.

2. Income inequality If the society is wealthier on average, but it is only because there is one super-rich guy and lots of poor people -- then the majority of people are poor. Income inequality is growing because labor, especially unskilled labor, is less valuable in the US than it used to be. The richest 1% of the population, makes 35% of the income.

3. Mobility from poor to rich. A lot of the people who are super-rich today were not born that way, and so there is churn in the ranks. One of the equalizers is education. Education helps people make up for an impoverished childhood.

In summary, if young people get an education, then they will make more than average, and since the society is getting richer and richer, most of them will be wealthier than their parents when they reach their parents age. Of course, there will be exceptions -- this is statistics.

Poop at Midnight and HELP in the Morning

2011-02-19T20:36:00.004-05:00

Hospital Adventures continued from the last posting:

On Sunday I got a new roommate because my alcoholic/drug addicted former roommate checked out, and I thought at least I'd be free of his snoring. The Nurse said the new guy was deaf, so I thought he'd be quiet anyway, and besides I could turn the TV volume up all night if I wanted.

At 11:00 PM on Sunday night my new roommate pooped his pants. OMG. The poor nurse and nurse's aid had to clean him up. I would absolutely hate to clean some 90 year old guys pants up. Oh and the smell. I wheeled my IV pump down the hall, and sat in a darkened waiting room -- with my beloved Kindle. The smell was still bad 90 minutes later when I came back.

In the morning, or near morning at about 4:45, suddenly a woman start yelling, "HELP, HELP." So I am tired, and I hear someone yelling "HELP," but I can't get up as I am attached to devices. My sleepy confused mind could not figure out what to do. Should I do something? What?

Then, for the next two hours, this poor person kept yelling "HELP, HELP" whenever the nursing staff tried to calm her down, and get her back to bed. Once again, I would hate to be a nurse if the patient yells like she is being raped every time someone tries to help her.

Finally Monday came, and I had my procedure, and got to go home.

.

Greg on Hospital Life

2011-02-13T10:21:00.002-05:00

Henry Ford Hospital in Wyandotte

Everyone ends up in the hospital sooner or later. This weekend is my turn. I haven't been admitted to the hospital since I was a child, so this is a new experience.

I am not really concerned about my health. I want to clear this problem and go home. More than anything else I am really annoyed at wasting a weekend in this hospital room.

Observations on Hospital Life

1. Wild West - The emergency room had people coming and going. All kinds of people some with trains of hanger-on people with them. There were old and young and severely ill, and me too.

The staff seemed like they had seen it all, and let the people be their own weird selves. I expected a doctor's office experience with more structure -- instead it was the Wild West.

2. Hospital food -- I am at Henry Ford Hospital in Wyandotte. The day before I got here they redid their food service. Instead of regularly bringing identical meals up to each hospital ward, the kitchen waits for the patients to order off the menu.

I am sure the patients like it better. The kitchen still batches the orders together and sends trays of food upstairs. It is must be more work with a custom system, but the old system probably had tons of special requests anyway.

The hospital menu is pretty fancy. You can get four kinds of eggs for breakfast, seven kinds of cereal, two kinds of yogurt, seven kinds of bread/muffins. For lunch there are four kinds of salad, four kinds of soup, about eighteen entrees and thirteen side-dishes.

I can endorse the Salmon Caesar wrap which left me thinking about how to make this at home -- that is my ultimate complement for restaurant food. Last night's tilapia was excellent too.

The kitchen's ordering department needs help- - maybe it is just opening weekend jitters, but I spent over five minutes on hold trying to get my dinner order placed. What this kitchen needs is a web-page to place the order.

The food in the emergency room was truly bad though: a microwaved hamburger and squished turkey sandwich.

3. TV -- The free-TV is medical information videos and music channels. To get better TV (and local phone), you need to pay $7 which is charged to your telephone number -- not the hospital bill. Probably to keep the per/day fee down for the insurance company.

I spend the night watching the CARE Channel's nature scenes and sleepy music because of my roommates's ...

4. SNOORING -- My roommate snoores terribly. Eventually I found some earplugs in my bag from my last red-eye flight. [Ouch he is snooring again.]

5. Hope -- Hope to get out of here soon.

More on hospital living on my next post.

Dreaming of Gardening Despite the Snows of January.

2011-01-29T15:11:00.001-05:00

The Best Part about Winter is Dreaming About Spring.

I have looked back at old garden posts, and they need some information about how different garden plants turned out.

In 2009, I posted on the Profusion Zinnia in the front yard, and they did not work out. They came up and grew, but the fairly shady spot with its weak soil was a disappointment. The plants never were tall enough and showy enough.

I posted on the "well-reviewed" yellow pear tomatoes too in 2009. The plant grew vigorously, but the yellow pear tomatoes tasted like like wheat-paste. Not very good at all.

The Black Cherry tomatoes were a big success. The tomatoes were so good that I wish they would have been more productive.

Last Year's Garden Plants - 2010

Eggplant - standard variety - very product, but took up more space than expected

Leaf lettuce (Burpee Muslin Mix)/Spinach/Arugula (Burpee) - turned out well, I planted them between the tomatoes, and the shade extended the season. The rabbits never found them, or if they did they left them alone. The Arugula was great.

Zucchini (Ambassador) - Very strong and productive, and lasted all season. Large plant that needed more space.

Cucumbers - big success. I just bought them at the store, and it worked pretty well.

Peas - (Burpee Snow Wind and Burpee Mr. Big) Not a good year for these. I only harvested a few peas. the cucumbers grew through the rabbit fence that I had around them, and I never was able to take the fence down.

Catnip - God! The catnip grew and grew. Even with Jenny harvesting continuously, and the cats flopping down on the plants, they still invaded the eggplant and the peas.

Tomatoes - one of each - Burpee Big Boy; Pinetree Seeds Black Cherry, Burpee Black Truffle, Sungold, Sweet 100; The most disappointing part was the failure of the large tomatoes. My tomatoes typically get mold during July, but usually they keep growing faster than the mold can kill them. The plants had a good start, and the red cherry tomatoes produced pretty well. The Black Cherry, Black Truffle and Big Boy were very disappointing. In 2011, I intend to start a second crop of tomatoes in June -- in addition to the main crop started that I put in the garden in April using Wall-o-waters.

Pineapple Tomatillo (Pinetree Seeds) - I only planted one of these, and it was just OK. I have had more productive plants in other years. These taste great though.

Strawberries - This was year four for most of the strawberries, and I was really disappointed. I attributed the bad harvest in 2009 to over crowding, and thinned aggressively. The plants did not seem to take off in the Spring like they should have. I thinned them out again this year, and if I don't get some fruit, I am going to take these out, and put in flowers.

Petunias (White and Red Madness) - One of my favorite varieties, but increasingly hard to find. The white ones were more vigorous than the red ones, and some parts of the planting were out of balance.

Brussel sprouts - turned out pretty well, and tasted like Brussel Sprouts. Ended up with more brussel sprouts than I wanted.

Butternut squash - good year for butternuts. Still have some.

Pimento - I like pimento. It has a thick skin, and never gets hot. The peppers are small enough that half don't go to waste. One thing I have learned is that all my peppers are 100 times hotter than the store bought analog.

French Marigolds - I planted two trays of French Marigolds as a border around the garden, and that worked pretty well.

Basil - I only plant basil for the fragrance in the garden. I seldom use it in the kitchen - perhaps once a season. I don't really like pesto, but it does smell nice outside.

2011 Garden Plants

Eggplant (Lavender Touch) -

Arugula and leaf lettuce -

Cucumber (Muncher) -

Zucchini (Eight Ball, Pinetree Seeds)-

Tomatoes - eight plants - five started in April; three in June - (Sun Gold, Sun Sugar, Black Krim, Early Girl (Improved) and Celebrity) Early Girl and Celebrity are returning to the line-up after several years on the bench. Early Girl is the most popular tomato in the US, so there must be something good about it. I am also after a medium sized tomato. Celebrity has a lot of disease resistance. I have never been too impressed with it in the past, but the Celebrity tomatos look nice and taste pretty good. Black Krim may be a mistake -- it is a Black Russian Beefsteak Heirloom, so there is a 90% chance that next year's posting will talk about how I got only 1 or 2 decent tomatoes from this plant, but I can hope it will be a treasure of flavorful exotic fruit. I hope to plant the Sun Gold and Sun Sugar today.

Pimento - Got these on eBay from Dragonfly183.

ASPARAGUS - The story is that in every house I have lived in, I always get transferred before the asparagus is large enough to eat. I have been hesitating planting it since I am not ready to move. I am ordering asparagus roots this year. I am going to take space devoted to strawberries, and convert it to asparagus.

Zinnea (Queen Sophia) -

Petunia (Prime Time) - I gave up on looking for more of my favorite, the Madness Petunia. I don't want to try Waves; it seems everyone is planting them.

The backyard is waiting for Spring too.

It is the End of Books.

2011-01-27T19:06:00.001-05:00

"For every 100 paperback books sold, Amazon has sold 115 Kindle books since the beginning of the year, the company said." Amazing how paper books are plummeting.

Can you believe that the 560 year run of ink on paper books is drawing to a close?

I love my Kindle, and I won't buy a book that is not on the Kindle. I am so over paper.

I wish Kindle would enable better magazine reading. I think the local newspaper, The Detroit Free Press, is pretty good on the Kindle, but I am not happy with Atlantic Magazine on the Kindle since there are no graphics. I keep finding free Atlantic articles on line that are more interesting than my paid Kindle subscription. The iPad version of Atlantic costs $5.99/copy, and hell if I am going to pay that when I can pay $1.99/copy for a paper subscription.

The truth is that I really want a new Nook Color. It does pictures much better -- that is not needed for books, but what is a magazine without graphics?

Alcohol, Tea, Metabolism, and Fat Guys

2011-01-24T21:02:00.000-05:00

Fat Guy from Feb 2011 Scientific American
Note the blobby folds of skin.

Recently Chemical and Engineering News ran a story about how cheese eaten with wine took twice as long to digest as cheese eaten with black tea. It seems that the effect is not due to the alcohol, but rather to the tea's speeding up the digestion of the fatty fondue.

Strangely, black tea inhibits enzymes that digest starch. Tea drinking would help digest fat, but prevent starchy foods from hitting the bloodsteam too fast -- both good things in that fast starch digestion will cause an insulin spike, and rapid hunger later. There are lots of websites that claim green tea causes weight loss, but I don't think the sources are very credible.

Alcohol does seem to cause weight-loss -- strange as that seems considering its high calorie density. First it seems the calories in alcohol are not as accessible as other foods, so some passes through the body undigested. Second alcohol prevents your body from digesting other food. Consider the skinny alcoholic who consumes enough calories in alcohol to live on that alone, but is skinny. The alcohol is empickling his organs preventing them from functioning.

The fat guy at right is here to illustrate fatness, and he is pretty gross -- specially gross is the size of his love handles. Who thought they could grow into little appendages?

The graph at left shows blood alcohol content versus time. It shows people sobering up after drinking.

Notice how the declining lines are parallel -- meaning alcohol is metabolized at a constant rate. Regardless of how much is in the blood. This is because the limiting step is the amount of alcohol dehydrogenase there. The absolute rate varies from person to person perhaps with a genetic component.

Alcohol is actually oxidized to an acetaldehyde and then to acetate. Acetate is a common molecule in the body and has many uses.

It is interesting to note that each drink takes two hours to clear the blood stream. In regard to getting drunk in the first place, the more you drink the faster it gets in the bloodstream.

Blackberry as a Music Player

2011-01-22T10:22:00.000-05:00

Kingston 4GB Card

I keep all my music in iTunes on my computer.

I got upset this week when the taxi to the airport came early, and I left my iPod on my desk before I went on a trip.

This left me listening to music on my Blackberry 8820-- something I never did. Luckily I had my corded headset rather than my Bluetooth one, which does not work so well.

Happily I had put a few gigabytes of songs on it. This worked pretty well; the Blackberry model 8820 is a decent music player -- too big to exercise with, but it plays music out loud pretty well.

My Blackberry and my company laptop are both locked down, so I had to pull the microSD card from the Blackberry, put it in a card reader to work with the files. No problem, since I keep a card reader in my bag.

Blackberry Model 8820

MicroSD cards are not easy to work with. On the Model 8820, the SD card does not go in a slot, but you need to open the battery compartment and access it there. The mechanism is tricky and small -- it takes practice to change it quickly.

There is no good online help for changing the card. Place your finger on the steel holder, and slide it down toward the keyboard end of the unit. It should slide a millimeter, and then lift the top end of the card up at an angle. Once it is unlocked, the MicroSD card slides out easily.

Soon the card lost its formatting, and the Blackberry would not recognize it, and naturally the company laptop's disk formatting utility is locked. It was a Kingston 4 GB card that got corrupted.

When I got back, I reformatted the card on my Apple, and got the Blackberry working. When I reformatted the card the first time, I manually put all the MP3 files back on. This turned out to be the wrong idea. It is easier to use the Blackberry utility for Mac to do that. The Blackberry utility wants the microSD card to be completely blank.

The Blackberry utility has the clever name "Blackberry Desktop Software," and it works pretty well. It reads the iTunes playlists and downloads them. The utility also puts photos on the Blackberry quickly, but the Blackberry's processer can't show them quickly.

Christina Taylor Green, Part 2

2011-01-21T19:59:00.000-05:00

Christina Taylor Green, born on September 11, 2001 and died January 15, 2010 in Tucson.

What events linked her birth and death? Born on a day of monstrous foreign terrorism, and killed on a day of deadly domestic terrorism.

Determinism is the belief that our life is not our own to determine, but rather events, the universe, or God set it all up. We are just actors reading a script.

This is a little different from Fatalism, which is that Christina was going to die last Saturday regardless of chains of causality.

What were the elements of the determinism. Did hatred of Muslims get confused with hatred of Mexicans get confused with hatred of congresswomen?

I don't want to focus on Jared Lee Loughner. Anyone who would shoot up a shopping center on mid-day with kids and old folks milling about is not worth focus. Clearly deranged.

It is wrong that the deranged can steal the life from the innocent.

How Thin is the Veneer of Civilization?

2011-01-10T07:33:00.000-05:00

Even though Americans act politely and democratically most of the time, aren't we still animals underneath?

How deep and how long does a recession need to be before democracy starts to crumble?

I am particularly taken with the shooting of nine year old Christina Taylor Green, born literally on 9/11.

I am not sure what symbolic meaning someone who is born during the terror and hatred of 9/11 and dies in a politically motiviated assassination has, but there seems like there must be some meaning there somewhere.

The Anti-Science Climate of our Times

2011-01-08T17:03:00.003-05:00

This stylized image of the Virgin Mary is so great that I

needed to put it here despite that its only

connection to this topic is the despondent mood that

it puts me in. (Artist unknown to me.)

Wags and science journalists have been bemoaning the lack of respect Science is getting in political circles. Specifically, how human-caused global warming seems to have receded from being an observation to a politicized conspiracy theory.

My message to scientists is that the lack of respect for Science is the norm, and that relative respectability of the late Twentieth Century was an exception.

There was a period in the late twentieth century when the rapid advance of science and engineering pushed back the popular bias against it. Just ten years ago Einstein was the "Man of the Century." Even then, it was only journalists at Time that said so; others thought war-time politician Winston Churchill just as worthy.

While there is no inherent reason why science and religion need to conflict, partisans have always used scientific facts to batter religion -- just as religion has used scripture to batter science. Just after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, non-believers glommed onto the ideas immediately and used it to justify their pre-existing beliefs.

Aquinas and others have asserted that scientific truths and religious truths cannot contradicted each other. Augustine thought that scriptures should never be interpreted to mean something that is scientifically not so, as discussed by William Carroll:

Augustine observed that when discussing passages of the Bible that refer, or seem to refer, to natural phenomena one should defer to the authority of the sciences, when available, to show what the text cannot mean. In examining, for example whether the light spoken of in the opening of Genesis (before the creation of the Sun and the Moon) is physical light, Augustine says that if physicists show us that there cannot be physical light without a luminous source then we know that this particular passage does not refer to physical light. The Bible cannot authentically be understood as affirming as true what the natural sciences teach us is false.

A central part of the argument of the receding influence of science is that only 6% of scientists are Republican whereas 23% of the general populous are Republican -- Republicans are under-represented by 3-1 among Scientists.

It is not just Republican politicians who hate Science generally and evolution specifically. Recall that the Soviet government in the 1920's battled against Mendelian genetics in agriculture, and set it back four decades. They hated it because genetics emphasizes nature over nurture.

My daughter points out that Republican scientist Kerry Emmanuel is trying to persuade fellow conservatives to give global warming more credence, but he confesses that he may need to switch affiliation due to the opposition he faces.

I wonder why Global Warming has become politicized. I sincerely hope it is not because business interests have compromised politicians into ignoring the facts -- rather like the mercury toxicity analyses in GW Bush's EPA.

Finally, I bet that the bias against the Republican party does NOT extend to Engineers. I don't know why that is. Something about respect for authority.

Budgeting Season Comes After Christmas Season.

2010-12-29T08:13:00.002-05:00

My 2010 expenses. The top 20% of categories have 67% of expenses.

Near New Year I always review my budget. This might be because we spent too much on Christmas gifts.

This year I downloaded 850 transactions from Mint into Excel, and sorted through them. It is good practice using pivot tables.

I spend too much on cable TV and eating out. Although it feels like my DW's indulgences in organic foods are expensive -- grocery spending is not going up.

The mortgage is the biggest expense, then groceries and other household stuff, house repairs, and so on. Taxes would be the biggest of all, but I ignore them. The budget buster this year was the new furniture we bought.

My budget is a legacy of my grad student years when we tracked everything, so we could afford food and toys for the kids both. This system was pretty detailed.

When I came out of grad school, the budget helped us figure out how big a car payment we could afford, and later I used it to help find money for college expenses. These systems got looser and looser.

I used to use Borland Quattro, which was a spreadsheet program. Later I switched to Excel -- then off to Quicken, then Quicken Online and now Mint. Recall that Quicken bought Mint in 2009, and promised millions of users an automated conversion path to Mint. Quicken never delivered on that, instead they just told me and thousands of others to reapply. It was easy to switch though. Took an hour or less.

Budgets are so easy with Mint.com -- at least at the level of detail that I am comfortable with. I know some people track down to the last nickel, and I don't do that. My budgets are trying to get the big stuff, and try to make the little stuff average out correctly over time.

Mint.com can't be as secure as PC or Mac based software, but it sure is easier to use. Far far better than Quicken for Mac's offering.

On the other hand, these programs create canned budgets don't answer the questions I want answered, and I can organize it myself in Excel better. That is why I download everything, and replot it myself. I can also compare this year with the last few years, and that is really useful. For example that is how I know that groceries cost less than last year despite the organic yogurt in the 'frig.

After I look at expenses, I want to look at savings -- so digging into the 401k is next.

The Finches of Darwin

2010-12-28T18:45:00.001-05:00

I came across someone unfamiliar with the story of Charles Darwin on the Beagle in 1831 and his trip to Galapagos, so I thought I'd post on that.

The birds on Galapagos are very similar in structure, and provided Darwin inspiration for his Theory of Natural Selection. At the time they were called Finches, but Moderns call them Tanagers. They are clearly similar in features and color. Natural selection provided slight differences in bills that allowed them to eat from a variety of food sources.

In 1845, Darwin wrote, "Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends".

I can't say it better than Darwin did.

Darwin's Tanager - by John Gould who
was on the Beagle with Darwin

Darwin's tanagers are not actually an example of speciation, but rather, they are can all still interbred. This is an example of a species with huge variety of traits. This provides huge flexibility and adaptability wthin the population.

See my previous evolution post.

2010 Christmas Poem

2010-12-25T09:46:00.000-05:00

Christmas is just another day
when seen from sometime far away.
The winter's dark brings time to pray
and feel the root of my Holiday.

To remind myself that I can be
for a day or an hour during coffee and tea
-- helpful a little more and reaching a little further
As friend, husband, or neighbor or father

Are gifts really bad and simply distractions?
I say they are rather
an increasingly rare reciprocal action
So I buy for you
And you buy for me.

I listened for hints, way back at Thanksgiving.
As I sliced up the turkey, I logged ideas in mind
You mashed up potatoes, and listened for my mine

And together we built and we grew and combined
And all us together built a Giftgiving
So holiday event so grand and so fine
That we remember them all as the best of our times.
-- an emergent holiday meeting of minds

When I gift successfully I feel and I find
That listening and empathy has helped me refine
how to deal with people the rest of the time.

Gifting is best when I've spend time,
-- the time to select, return, and refine.

When I buy gift cards and give cash for propriety,

my money does not built the holiday society

It's really a waste, just a deep well of chaos,
nothing but bother and a flaming deadweight loss.

Jesus' birth and the Christmas story
I hold as dear as piles of money
I love the music, Carol of the Bells
Mannheim Steamroller and the smell of candles
Tinkly lights and front yards all lit
Frank Sinatra and Sarah Brightman

Jesus's birth brings to my mind,
How much better I can be most of the time.
It helps me to focus and helps me to find
A better more moral and higher incline.

Stalker picture

2010-12-21T13:12:00.000-05:00

The Stalker (detail) by 'AlsaPaints'. I found this while looking for Christmas gifts this afternoon.

Michigan Unemployment No Longer Worst in the Nation

2010-12-18T06:31:00.000-05:00

Yes.

Something is going right.

Michigan unemployment is down to 12.4%, from 12.8% last month. Down from 14.4% in 2009!

After years of leading the nation in unemployment, Michigan has achieved 3rd worst. Well, actually tied with California for 3rd worst. So I am grasping for good news -- you can't blame me.

Hopefully this is a sign of improvement in the manufacturing economy, and a better 2011.

Cute Toy Quorra from Tron

2010-12-18T05:44:00.002-05:00

This toy was hand made by Michal Miszta. It is a 'dunny,' which is like a bunny -- it has rabbit ears. I have been spending time on gift sites, and I came across this one.

It is based on the character Quorra from Tron Legacy. It is interesting, because the Tron graphics are so black and cool, and here it is parodied as a toy rabbit.

I have not seen Tron Legacy at this point, but it opened this weekend.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

26-January update: Click here for my movie review.

Ethics of Christmas Gift Giving

2010-12-16T00:20:00.001-05:00

Why do we need to talk about the ethics of giving?

Giving is an absolute good.

Decisions to keep wealth for your selfish little self is clearly less good than giving it away. Isn't it?

Is it ever bad to give?

Well, yes if you are truly impoverished, or if giving food away meant that you could not feed your kids, then yes -- it would be bad to give food away.

Maybe that is a special circumstance, not like the circumstances most of us live in.

Giving is bad if giving creates an unhealthy dependency upon handouts, like American sugar farmers, or other beneficiaries of governments.

If the gift were really a veiled extortion, more like 'Trick or Treat, then giving is not really giving. It is just a bribe or kickback.

Economists talk about the inefficiencies of gift giving because the gift I receive is always an imperfect reflection of what I would have bought for myself. This means some of the gift money is wasted, and to an economist all waste is bad.

It is not especially good to give if I am just expecting an equivalent gift back. That is even in the Bible, Luke 6: 34-36. I'd argue that while it is not actually charitable to do that, but it is still good for the society to trade in this way. It helps build relationships, and society is founded on relationships.

"It is more blessed to give than to receive." Acts 20:35

Yeast Cancels Toxic Acrylamide Threat in Bread not Crackers

2010-12-15T23:51:00.000-05:00

Remember headlines like, "Is Eating French Fries Deadly?" from 2002. It might be, but there is a simple nearly-natural solution for bready foods.

First, the dangerous chemical in french fries and in baked bread is acrylamide, and it is a carcinogen. It ts found in many starchy foods after cooking, including french frieds, crackers and non-leavened baked goods like pancakes.

Second, the normal fermentation of wheat with yeast reduces the toxic acrylamide by 88%. It does this by feeding on the amino acid asparagine, and using it up. The acrylamide forms during baking over 121C (250F.)

Aspargine is a good food source for yeast. Now Canadian yeast maker, Functional Technologies, has a yeast that works even better. It is only nearly-natural because it is a genetically modified yeast which uses up asparagine more effectively that natural yeast.

asparagine, an amino acid

This looks like a solution for wheat breads, but it does not work on rye bread where asparagine is evidently better protected.

While yeast is good news for bread. It is no help for french fries and coffee which also have an acrylamide problem, and no simple way to use yeast.

Greg's Favorite Christmas Songs

2010-12-05T13:47:00.001-05:00

I put up the Christmas tree yesterday, and to get in the mood I broke out the Christmas songs. For me, that means taking Christmas Songs playlist out of its folder and back to the main iTunes menu.

I am looking for better Christmas songs. Why? Because I have not got all the good ones yet.

I poke around on the internet looking for recommended Christmas songs, and I never find much. I thought I'd put mine out there. [It occurs to me that is what iTunes's Ping is all about, but I don't like Ping.]

Greg's Top Christmas Songs

1. Gaudete by Mediaeval Baebes - Great a capella hymn; Happy and pretty. One of my favorite songs of all time. It's the only a capella song on the list.

2. Pat A Pan by Mannheim Steamroller; I'm never tired of hearing this one. Mannheim Steamroller are modern Christmas classic, but they are overplayed.

3-5. Carol of the Bells by The Bird and the Bee
Two more versions of Carol of the Bells: Harry Connick Jr, and the classic by Vienna Boys Choir. This my favorite traditional Christmas hymn. I have a dozen versions. Honorable Mentions are by Celtic Woman, Los Lonely Boys, and Mannheim Steamroller. This will give you a big variety of music styles in the same song.

6-9. The whole album The Christmas Eve by Trans-Siberian Orchestra, but especially Christmas Canon Rock, What Child is This, The Lost Christmas Eve, and Anno Domine.

10. Greatest Time of Year by Aly and AJ - Adult singers are too cynical to sing such happy music. Their "Little Drummer Boy" is pretty good too.

Honorable Mentions

A. Linus and Lucy by Vince Guardaldi Trio - great song, but not Christmassy enough for the main list.

B. Oh Come, Oh Come Emmanuel by Enya - Very slow and quiet, so you need to be in the mood for it.

C. Soul Cake by Sting - This song was new last year, and I really like it. It is a folk song, so it not church music, but still traditional in feeling. It has a great mood. I can picture the poor people in the English countryside asking for food.

D. Baby Its Cold Outside by Dean Martin - This is the best of the Rat Pack Christmas songs. So cute. The lyrics are so well delivered. I don't know who the female singer is, and I have looked. This is better than all the other versions.

E. Christmas Time is Here by the Boston Pops Orchestra - Very traditional and very nice

F-G. The Holly and the Ivy and The Little Drummer Boy by Mannheim Steamroller; Two more of my favorites from the large body of good Mannheim Steamroller songs.

H. Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring by Sarah Brightman; very traditional and pretty.

I. Santa Claus is Coming to Town by the Jackson Five, as a placeholder for the whole Christmas Collection Album. These songs are a little too gimmicky and dated, but they have such a free-spirited feeling that I put them on. I also expected static from the family if I left it off. "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" is really good too. "Little Christmas Tree" is the most sincere on the album.

There are so many others. Snow Angel by Tori Amos is a nice song, but not quite at the level. Tori is probably a Druid anyway.

Sorry Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra fans. Your guys did not measure up.

.