Cute Albino Hedgehog

Harriet is an albino hedgehog.  I haven't posted any cute animal pictures lately, and she is undeniably cute. If you don't like her, try fupenguin instead.

She happens to be a cancer survivor, and she may have better health insurance than many Americans, but that is another story.
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Insanity is doing something over and over, and expecting different results.

"Insanity is doing something over and over, and expecting different results." This was said by author Rita Mae Brown, who rose to notoriety for writing a mystery novel, that really was a thinly disguised memoir, about her life as tennis star Martina Navratilova's girl friend. She created a furor about lesbianism in woman's tennis in 1984. She said it in "Sudden Death," page 68. (No I haven't personally checked the reference, but I have it from several sources.)

The insanity quote is almost always attributed to Albert Einstein, who would not have said it.  Einstein's earliest work was in diffusion theory, where he made progress in developing a theory for Brownian Motion. A particle in Brownian Motion moves randomly. Secondly, at the end of his life, he was deeply involved in quantum theory, where events are probabilistically determined -- his better attributed quote about god not rolling dice, not withstanding.

This quote attracted me because I don't agree with it. It is pretty common to try things over and over again, like how I try several times a week to do ten pull-ups, but never quite get there. It seems to me it is sometimes used to encourage people to give up when they should persevere. In Alcoholics Anonymous, it is used to encourage people to change, who really need to change.

The quote is also sometimes called an "Ancient Chinese Proverb." This is funny because insanity is a modern idea, and what would an ancient chinese person have thought of that? Confucius valued rote consistency, and would have not developed a proverb encouraging people to think for themselves.

I agree with blogger Visitacion who said that this is a proverb 1990's era "marketers, life coaches, and sofa philosophers" use to get people to make changes.

This proverb would not bother me so much if sometimes doing something over was not the most sensible thing to do.

Garlic, Allicin, and Does Garlic Gets into Human Perspiration?

The aroma of garlic develops when the garlic plant (alliaceae sativum, et al) is damaged. So if a garlic plant stem is cracked or bit off by a rabbit, the adjacent crushed plant cells form allicin from alliin. Allicin is the primary ingredient in garlic extract. Alliin is stockpiled in the garlic cells for just such an occasion, and an enzyme is ready to oxidize the alliin when needed. Allicin is shown below right.

Allicin is an antimicrobial material, and presumably kills microbes which might damage the injured plant. The flavor of the allicin may or may not keep the rabbit from eating more.

Of course, garlic and the allicin within are important gastronomically, but it is also an anti-oxidiant, and an anti-microbial material.

Allicin gets into the blood stream, and it has a half life of 16 hours there.  Allicin also degrades in acid conditions, so don't mix garlic with your lemon juice.

Most people feel it gives them bad breath, and I think that is beyond doubt, but I can't find anything credible confirming that allicin gets into human sweat and makes one smell like pizza while exercising. I have looked pretty hard. There are some personal care sites that want you to simplify your whole diet and include garlic with onions and peppers.  [If anyone can find something on garlic in human sweat, please leave a comment.]

There is the mosquito argument.  One dubious article from Australia that says that allicin causes mosquitos to bite. On the other hand, StableKare produces Garlic-Eze, which is a garlic based mosquitto repellent for horses -- so they think the opposite.

Polymer chemists might note that the double bonds are conjugated with the sulfurs, and may be free-radical polymerizable. Some polymerization occurs in nature, and in fact in the sauce pan -- if you take the allicin and mix it with oil, you can encourage the formation of ajoene - which is an oligomer of allicin. Ajoene is most abundant form when crushed garlic is mixed with oil. Ajoene is an anticlotting agent and broad spectrum anti-microbial. [Ajoene is usually pronounced like a Spanish word with the "j" being an "hg."]

Interestingly ajoene inhibits lipase from metabolizing fat, so potentially more fat will pass though the body undigested. There is one patent on polymer grafted ajoene (and other cysteine blockers) to reduce fat absorption in the body.

Another patent uses ajoene and allicin in polymer coating for arterial stints. No covalent bonding to the matrix polymer though.

==========================See my 20-October-2009 post on Red Baneberry which similarly generates anti-microbials when damaged.===========================================
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The World's Biggest Hamburger

Southgate Michigan's own Steve Mallie of Mallie's Sports Bar on Northline and Allen has made the world's biggest hamburger. Video of the burger is here.

It is 185.6 pounds and is in the Guinness Book of World Records. It was announced in London in at an event promoting the new Guinness Book edition.

It's called the Absolutely Ridiculous Burger, and it is on the menu for just $2000. (The online menu has it at its old humble 150 lb size -- also a Guinness record in the past.) You need to preorder by 30 days, and pay in advance. If you and 29 of your closest friends can eat it in less than 1 hour its FREE! Also available for HOME DELIVERY.

The hamburger bakes for 15 hours before adding the condiments of cheese, lettuce and tomato. The bun bakes for eight hours. I wonder how he made the bun stiff enough to hold a 182 pound hamburger up.

I always thought this restaurant was called O'Mallies, because there is a big "O" on the sign in front.  I have never been to Mallie's, but maybe for the next blacked out NFL game . . .

2008 Escape Hybrid Oil Change

My Escape Hybrid made it to 15,000 miles, and it was time to change the oil. Last time I took it to the dealer, but this time I decided to do it myself. I bought some oil and an oil filter.

The first clue should have been when the oil filter was an odd size. I couldn't find it in stock in Fram or Motorcraft, the first two manufacturers I looked at. This is odd because it used to be the Fords always had the same oil filter.  I did manage to find one in a third brand.

I got home, and looked under the car for the oil plug and oil filter. No luck.

So I fired-up my browser, and quickly found pictures of a standard Escape, and the location of the oil plug which faces the back of the car.  I saw the white plastic oil filter too, and I memorized where it was.  I quickly found the oil plug just slightly toward the passenger side facing the back. It has a 13 mm head.

After I while, I am getting tired of looking, and feeling a bit frustrated, so I broke out my ramps, but put the car up. I got my mechanic's creeper out. I still could not find it. At this point, I open up the oil filter box to get an idea what it looked like, and . . .

Surprise! It did not have a plastic housing -- it was just a filter element. First I thought it was some sort of flow through filter, and then I decided to pound the internet somemore. I found someone who said the filter was in the front center and facing straight down. Some one else said you needed a special wrench to open it.

I went back outside, and found this:






That picture is looking up at the car from the floor. If you look closely you can see the familiar markings of an oil filter wrench on the black plastic housing. [I wanted to put in a picture of the location since I am sure it is the only one on the internet.] 

So I opened the drain plug and empties the oil, and turned my attention to the filter.

Well, happily it was not on too tight, and I loosened it. It did not turn freely once I turned it because it had an "O-ring" inside. The O-ring drags on the housing  a long time, and it takes more torque than you'd think to get it free.

Actually, I put an Allen wrench in the drain screw and cranked it off that way. It is an odd size, but later I found I had a powder screwdriver bit that fit (#6 hex.)

I thought I was lucky that the whole housing came off instead of just the drain screw unscrewing from the housing, until the oil inside spilled all over. Messy.

The inside of the filter is pictured here:

You can see the blue Viton O-ring.

I filled the car up with actual Motorcraft brand "synthetic blend" oil. I think that only a Detroit area auto store would actually stock Ford'd Motorcraft brand. I wonder how little synthetic oil is really in there. 5%?  I got it though, since I intend to wait for 10,000 more miles to change it again, since that is what the manual recommends for the 2008 Escape Hybrid.

The Arctic Ice Update. September is the Beginning of the 2010 Ice Pack

As everyone knows, the arctic ice melts in the summer, and freezes in the winter. In September, the melting stops, and the freezing slowly becomes more important. It is a good time to see what happened.

2009 was a frustrating year for climate-change activists, the sea ice is greater than 2007 or 2008, but the ice pack is well below the 30 year trend.

While green house gas emissions and green house gas content has never been higher, the climate is not monotonically getting warmer. While the sea ice is not the lowest on record, it is the third lowest according to Nature.

David Easterling of NOAA at Berkeley says that the noisiness of the climate data makes interpretation difficult for the impatient. He says it is easy for skeptics to find periods of warming.

This reminds me of how investment advisors claimed the bonds pay higher than stocks, back last February. That was because the market was at record lows. Now you don't hear that as much.

There has been a lot of noise on this issue as passionate environmentalists get shrill to advance their cause. The truth is that predictions about ice-free polar caps in the short run, don't help.

Twenty Dollar Theory of the Universe

Tom Ciarella of Esquire pockets a wad of twenties, and travels the world to see what a twenty dollar tip/bribe will do. Very entertaining.

Boxbe, Trojan Horse Spam Machine

Sorry to everyone who got a Boxbe invitation from me. Boxbe is a "white-list" email program, that I got invitation to, and then it grabbed by address book and spammed others. Also it sends annoying reminders to them to be sure to sign up. Here is a story similar to mine.

Boxbe started in 2005, and it allows mail to pass between approved users, and this should block spam. A white list means that only people on this list can send you mail. Their original business model was to make spammers pay to get access to their email list.  This is sleezy in that clients want freedom from spam, but the plan was to auction their addresses off. Wikipedia says they are not doing this anymore, but the Boxbe site is less clear about that.

Recently, they started automatically spamming the address book of subscribers. I found the whole thing quite embarrassing, and I hope that I have succeeded in disengaging from them.

Thede Loder is one of the founders, and he is a  former PhD student at U Michigan Ann Arbor. The other founder, Corbett Barr, was a consultant. Both lived in San Francisco.


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1-October-2009: I got an reply for Boxbe, so be sure to click on the comments. I liked the fact that they are concerned about their reputation. That suggests they are trying to improve. 

Stevia is Going Mainstream

Several years ago sister-in-law Tonee told me about Stevia, and said it was a great natural, sugar-free sweetener. I thought it had a strange aftertaste but the following year I bought some stevia (stevia rubaudia) seeds, and they were easy to grow. The herb was less than satisfactory as a sweetener. While I could taste some sweetness chewing on the stem, the leaves gave mostly a planty flavor.  After this I used to joke that stevia was not a sugar substitute, that it was a saccharine substitute. At right is a stevia plant.

Well, the organic food movement marched on, and big food companies are going to introduce stevia-based products for the mass market. At left is a prototype Sprite Green bottle with Stevia based sweetener.

Rather than the crude stevia extract, they are taking the best tasting fraction of the plant, and with modern plant hybridization (not gene splicing-- at least yet,) the flavor is much better.

It turns out that there are seven sweet components in the stevia extract, and the best tasting of them is called Rebaudioside A. All of these are glycosides of  a terpene alcohol called steviol. The components are shown on the graph at left which is from wildflavors.com They vary in the modifications. Rebaudioside A has three pendant glucoses. Its structure is at the bottom. It is a larger and more complex sweetener than any of the current synthetic sweeteners, and happily it is not chlorinated.

Rebaudioside A production is being ramped up by some big name food companies including Coke and Cargill, Pepsi and Merisant, who makes Equal (aspartame). Botanists have developed strains that make 4% rebaudioside A on total plant weight, which will help keep costs down, and I am sure better varieties are coming. The new food products will all be based on plant extract rather than synthetics.

Early on there were controversy about whether the base terpene, steviol, caused liver damage. It seems that this has been disproven, and several companies are claiming GRAS status for Stevia extract. Stevia extract has been an FDA food additive for a while. GRAS status means that it is "generally regarded as safe", and a chemical on this list receives the broadest acceptance in foods.


More: Yes this is my second sweetener story in one weekend. For another sugar fix see my posting on non-fermentable sugars. This reminds me of the movie we saw yesterday The Informant! which was about food additives. The link will take you to my review. 

Foreign Media Exaggerate Carter's Racism Charges

I occasionally read foreign papers when I bored with American ones, and I was taken with a piece in the Singapore based Straits Times, that tried to explain Carter's complaints about Obama's critics. I don't mind American pundits waxing on about America's problems, but I don't like critics from half way around the world doing it -- I don't know why.

The different sites run the spectrum, Al Jazeera's english site makes the US look pretty bad.   This German posting plays up the worst aspects of the conflict and amplifies the Nazi connections. They ran the picture at right -- supposedly from a Tea Party street protest. This Austrian article simplifies the argument so much that it sounds like a battle between Obama and Representative Wilson only.

UK's Mirror had a neutral article except that it hopscotched over to Obama's babbling about Kanye West saying "He is a Jackass," -- a quote that mainstream American media edited out based on their dubious "talking on background" rule.

On the other hand, this UK article and video clip were very much like American ones.

I have two observations, most people don't know the difference between a Fascist and a Socialist, and that the World pays more attention to America, than we think.