Silicon Valley Redneck

Evolution and such

I'll start this out with a stunning revelation:

I don't believe in evolution.

To paraphrase Terry Pratchett: that would be like believing in the postman.

What's the point of believing in something that's patently true?  Evolution doesn't require belief, any more than gravity requires belief.  It just goes on by itself, regardless of what anyone thinks of it.

As for the truth of evolution?  Well, I've put enough time and attention into studying the subject to conclude that the evidence for evolution as an ongoing process, and as the origin of (currently extant) species, is thoroughly persuasive.  I have a strong suspicion that there are multiple mechanisms at work, some of them not yet understood, but evolution per se is about as well established as a scientific fact can get outside the tidy, repeatable physical sciences.

OK, now: hands up all those who have put in the effort to grok evolution for themselves.

Those who still have their hands down, and who believe in evolution: do you have any actual basis for your belief?  Or do you just believe because someone told you it was true?

There's a point here, when it comes to evaluating politicians' attitudes toward science.  Truly understanding the evidence for evolution, and its importance to modern biology, isn't something you pick up on the way through the public school system.  You have to spend a good many hours of your adult life studying the material.

So: suppose you're a busy politician, or indeed a busy person of any trade.  Why would you spend time studying biology?  Does it have any direct relevance to your career, or your daily life?  Does it, like attending church, offer opportunities for social networking?

Of course not.  So chances are, any position on evolution taken by a politician is based on second-hand opinion, same as for most other people.  Evolution, unless you're a biologist, is a prime candidate for rational ignorance.  There's just no compelling need for most people to understand the subject in any detail.

And, no, I'm not in any way suggesting that creationism be taught in science class, any more than Communism should be taught in economics class.  Science class is for fact-based science, in which category evolution qualifies (if taught properly), while creationism most assuredly does not.  (On the other hand, I think biology teachers should be prepared to give a coherent explanation of the evidence for evolution, not just to answer the inevitable creationist questions with "Shut up, kid.")

Update: The Royal Society, in a desperate attempt not to be mistaken for a moose, has come out in favor of showing respect for creationism.

The statement quotes Reiss saying, "Creationism has no scientific basis."

He goes on to say, "However, when young people ask questions about creationism in science classes, teachers need to be able to explain to them why evolution and the Big Bang are scientific theories but they should also take the time to explain how science works and why creationism has no scientific basis.

That sounds about right to me.

The Universe is a weird and wonderful place...

...and the realm of discovery is far from used up.

Proximity to the Sun may affect - slightly - rates of radioactive decay.

No, I haven't had time to read the paper yet, and I don't really have the background to make sense of it in any case.  It's just... interesting.

Practical implications?  Apart from radiocarbon dating maybe being off by a tiny fraction?  Well, maybe.  Leaning to manipulate decay rates could be useful, if it's possible to make large changes in a controlled space: this could be a decontamination tool, or a weapon, or both... but probably not any time soon.

Now, there's a wrong summary.

Slashdot linked to this PopSci article on "spooky" weapons... some of which are vaguely spooky, some not so much, some just goofy ideas.

Number 17 of 20 is the Project Thor-ish "Rods from God", with this charming bit of nonsense in the description:

To fire, they would simply be released and allowed to fall back to Earth (with a bit of remote guidance).

Er... hello?  Last I checked, if you simply release part of a satellite, it doesn't go anywhere... it remains in orbit, right next to the rest of the satellite.  (Actually, it'll drift away slowly, being as how there are slight forces acting to pull the "up" side of the satellite away from the "down" side.  The pieces won't fall out of orbit.)

The projectiles have to be deorbited... which means, unless you want to transfer momentum to the satellite and thereby change its orbit, that they need their own retrorockets.

"Electromagnetic sensitivity"

Heard on a radio-news soundbite: a hysterical-sounding woman proclaiming that she needs much better notification of plans for, e.g., cell towers, because she's extremely electromagnetically sensitive.

Hmmm.

Has this purported electromagnetic sensitivity ever been demonstrated under controlled conditions?  I mean, apart from fillings and extremely powerful AM radio signals?

Would electromagnetic sensitivity qualify as a paranormal power under the terms of the Randi Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge?

Some things shouldn't be allowed...

...to escape from the laboratory too soon.

Consider, for example, the purported connection between fizzy drinks and heart disease.

As released to the public, it's worthy of a politician, not a scientist.  Politicians love to point fingers at, e.g., fizzy drinks for contributing to childhood obesity, while failing to note that fruit juice has a sugar content on par with sugary soda pop... nope, that's irrelevant, it's the fizz that makes the kids swell up!  Fruit juice is good for you; soda is bad!

Well, this new study supposedly shows bad metabolic effects from both sugary and non-sugary soda.  What seems to be lacking, though, is any sort of breakdown by type of soda, beyond sugar/no-sugar.  This makes it impossible to identify common factors beyond the basics.

The class of "soda pop" has two ingredients in common: water and carbon dioxide.  The human body requires water, so that's presumably not it.  I rather doubt it's the carbon dioxide, either, as the body constantly produces the stuff, and has an effective means of disposing of it.  (Remember, every time you exhale, you make a little flower happy.  Making Al Gore cry is a bonus.)

So... is it some other commonly-used ingredient?

Or... is it the water, after all?  Near the bottom of the linked article, there's speculation that drinking any sort of liquids with a meal leads to increased eating later.  A discovery that drinking water with meals causes metabolic disorders would seem to run contrary to conventional wisdom, but wouldn't make for good politics.  Ya just can't accuse the municipal water-monger of contributing to obesity and heart disease....

Afterthought: D'oh!  Correlation, as they say, is not causation.  What if the headline has it backwards?  What if "metabolic syndrome" causes people to be thirsty at mealtimes, and soda pop is what's handy?

Further commentary may be found, under a suitable title and amusing choice of category names, here.  Read the comments, too.

Curious beliefs

Browsing Slashdot on my lunch break, I came across this item, which contains the assertion:

(without toes you cannot remain standing or walk, btw)

Now, I've often heard this one.  Oddly, Snopes doesn't seem to have addressed it.  A couple of the Slashdot commenters note that they've known toeless people who could walk.  But, really, now...

While I'm personally disinclined to do this, I'm aware that there are people out there who routinely encase their feet in rigid structures which completely immobilize their toes.  (I think these contraptions might be called "shoes" or "boots" or something.)  Despite having their toes effectively nonfunctional, these people still somehow manage to walk.

Given the large number of people who wear shoes, surely almost everyone must know someone who does.  So... how the heck did the "can't walk without toes" belief get started?  How does it persist?

I'll admit that walking without the use of toes can sometimes be challenging; the first few times I put on ice skates, I got toe cramps from trying to grab the ice when (a) my toes were immobilized within the boots, and (b) the ice was 3 inches below toe level anyway.

Perhaps the statement should have been:

(without toes you cannot pick up dropped popcorn without bending down, btw)

Update: I just thought of another test.  I'm going to set a 2x4 on my patio, and fearlessly attempt to stand on it with my toes danging off the edge, into free space!

...Back now.  Not only could I stand just fine with only the back halves of my feet touching the board, but I could step sideways without trouble.  Walking forward seemed inadvisable.  This leads to the new, improved reformulation:

(without having solid ground beneath your toes, you probably shouldn't step forward, btw)

What... is the space-speed velocity of an unladen Skylark?

OK, we've all read the sci-fi tales of great ships of the void zipping hither and yon at extreme speeds, whether it's Doc Smith or David Weber.

Often, the ships must accelerate to some large fraction of lightspeed using some form of conventional propulsion, before being able to zap into hyperspace. Or, they just go Really Fast in normal space.

So... just what are the energy requirements here?  How much of the ship has to be fuel, and how fast can it go?

For simplicity, I'll examine the as-built Skylark, in which Richard Seaton went gallivanting off to Osnome.  (This is based on the heavily-revised 1958 Pyramid edition of The Skylark of Space, 'cause that's the one I've got in front of me.)  This is a fairly simple one, for various reasons:

• Relativistic effects don't apply, for reasons that are hand-waved away.
• The propulsion system uses total conversion of matter to energy, which saves me the trouble of looking up the energy yield of fusion reactions.
• The propulsion system is also, presumably, perfectly efficient, and apparently reactionless.
• The mass of fuel is stated in the book.

So, let's see now: “It was a spherical shell of hardened steel of great thickness, some forty feet in diameter.”  Weight, “thousands of tons.”  The energy source is total conversion of copper: four-hundred-pound bars thereof; with four bars aboard, the energy of one is available for outbound acceleration, so we'll use that.  When the Skylark is rebuilt with an arenak hull, the “great thickness” of the original is revealed to be four feet.

OK, now, we've got some numbers we can work with.  Converting to real units, we have a steel spherical shell of outside radius 610 cm, and inside radius 488 cm, for a volume of 464 million cm³; taking the density of steel to be 7.86 g/cm³, that works out to 3.65E+6 kg, or 3650 (metric) tons, for the hull, disregarding portholes and the massive internal structures.

To accelerate this, we have the energy a 400-pound copper bar, converted entirely to usable energy; 1.814E+2 kg converts, using the famous formula, to 1.63E+19 Joules.

So, when a 3.65E+6 kg object has a kinetic energy of 1.63E+19 J, how fast is it going?  Last I heard, E=½mv², so v=sqrt(2E/m) = sqrt(8.96E+12 J/kg) = 2.989E+6 m/s.

Just about 0.01c.  Well, I guess we didn't have to worry about those relativistic effects after all.

And so much for gallivanting around the galaxy.

Note that none of this applies if the hero has some sort of inertialess, or low-inertia, drive, such as a Bergenholm; with those, the mass of the ship is eliminated or reduced, so that kinetic energy ceases to be a consideration (or at least is scaled down).

Update, a few minutes later: Corrected a couple of numbers; I forgot to apply the 2 in sqrt(2E/m) the first time around.

Sounds a bit witchy, if you ask me.

IMAGINE getting inside the mind of a shark: swimming silently through the ocean, sensing faint electrical fields, homing in on the trace of a scent, and navigating through the featureless depths for hour after hour.

Sounds like something Granny Weatherwax would do, doesn't it?  Only I don't recall Granny ever Borrowing a fish, but then any fishes Granny would normally encounter up there in the Ramtops would likely be the sort of little trouty things that live in streams.

Turns out DARPA is trying to Borrow sharks now.  Only they're not doing it witchily; they're taking the wizard's approach, implanting a chip in the critter's brain to force it to do their bidding.

Expect sharks to start wearing tinfoil hats now, as they learn the power of the orbital mind-control lasers.

(Story via Slashdot.)

More uses for home biotech

Pondering further on the subject of genetic engineering's progress into the realm of plausible activities for a small, even hobby-level, lab, an idea I had back in the 1980s starts sounding close to reality:

How practical would it be to splice hemp genes into oregano?

It doesn't have to be hemp and oregano, of course.  It could be white poppies and California poppies, or magic mushrooms and market mushrooms, or even coca and cola.  Just so you get a plant which looks just like something that's commonly and legitimately cultivated, and which incidentally produces an illicit drug.
It seems that such an enterprise would be profitable enough to justify the investment, assuming that it could actually be done.
Probably not on the drug lords' radar is the notion of splicing dope-producing genes into an otherwise innocuous strain of E. coli - "here, eat this, and it'll keep you hopped up for the rest of your life."  (On the other hand, bacterial dope production, using bacteria not suited to such resident production, would have advantages; bacterial cultures are a lot easier to hide than poppy fields.  You just have to watch out for nasty suspicious people who might think you were using those supplies to grow anthrax.)

Fascinating, and alarming.

Paul Boutin (via Instapundit) reports on an experiment in DIY gene meddling.  He'd wanted to try making smallpox from scratch, but settled for making glow-in-the-dark yeast - easier, and much safer.
It's amazing what equipment and techniques have sprouted in the past few years.
One passage caught my attention in a non-obvious way:

Getting yeast to sport blue genes takes the same skills and gear as adding the genes for something toxic. DNA is just the stuff that tells cells what proteins to make—the only real difference between being able to insert a single gene and inserting all the genes that make  a virus is experience.

Hmmm... the starting assumption was that a terrorist would want to reproduce an existing pathogen.  This, however, is not necessarily the case; a brand-new pathogen would be just as good, and possibly better.
So, suppose we take something harmless and ubiquitous - Lactobacillus acidophilus, say, or a common strain of E. coli - and splice in a gene sequence for a toxic protein?  Ricin comes to mind, but surely there are others.  Actually, ricin might be a good choice, since it acts fairly slowly, so the victims don't start dying for a few days beyond the incubation period.
Now, these particuar bugs wouldn't be much good for biowar, as they're not highly contagious; you'd have to get them into the food or water supply on a large scale (though even on a small scale, this could cause a panic).  Still, it's a conceptual starting point.
No, I don't think I'll take up bioweapons as a hobby.  It's not like you can set them off on the Fourth of July or anything.
Er... wait a minute.  Professional display fireworks.  Imported.  Things that go up in the air, and go bang, dispersing stuff, most of which burns brightly.  While large numbers of people are outdoors, in the vicinity, watching.  Um... encysted infectious agents distributed on the rice hulls used in making firework shells?  A higher-than-normal rate of "dud" shells, which actually turn out to be bio-dust with a weak bursting charge?  I think we have a potential importation and dispersal mechanism here.

Eep.

Updates:
1. If you want something that'll spread, the common cold seems like a good starting point.  Splice in a gene sequence to make it produce, say, cobra venom, and you've got a real nasty.  Or... ragweed with horribly toxic pollen?  (Didn't I see that on Star Trek, way back when?)
2. Is there a song in here somewhere?  "I went to buy some smallpox; they said they wouldn't sell..."