Blackmoor Vituperative

Went to the dentist today and found out two interesting things. First, my left lower wisdom tooth is chipped. I have a rather less pleasant dentist visit scheduled for next week.

Second, I learned that one’s fillings can act as anodes and electrodes, and generate an electric current using one’s saliva as the electrolyte. The hygienist poked my gums up near one of my back teeth, using her pointy tool of dental stabbityness, and it shocked me. Then she did it again! The dentist explained that what I was experiencing was an unusual but not unknown phenomenon caused by the difference in electrical potential between the stainless steel dental pick and my silver filling.

Science!

“Well, once again, my friend, we find that science is a two-headed beast. One head is nice, it gives us aspirin and other modern conveniences… But the other head of science is bad. Oh, beware the other head of science, Arthur! It bites!”
— The Tick

Today’s “My favourite song” is “Ich Bin Ein Auslander” by Pop Will Eat Itself.

I am going to post a photo of a coffee mug every day in August, and talk a little bit about where we got it and why I like it.

You might think this is just an ordinary plastic travel mug. Au contraire! This mug is special. This mug is made from corn.

Susan works in the environmental field. From lead and asbestos, to recycling and greenhouse gas emissions, to domestic and international carbon trading programs, she’s done it all. She was given this mug while doing her environmental thing at Philip Morris a few years ago. It’s made entirely from corn plastic.

You see, when we run out of oil in a few decades, we’ll run out of plastic, too. The USA uses something like 200,000 barrels of oil a day on plastic packaging alone. That’s right: 200,000 barrels of oil a day, on stuff we throw away after we unwrap it. In theory, corn plastic will be the substance that replaces all that petroleum-based plastic when the petroleum is gone. Of course, corn plastic isn’t perfect. We still throw away an enormous amount of, well, everything. But you have to start somewhere.

P.S. “Degesch America, Inc. is located in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley town of Weyers Cave, Virginia, USA. Degesch is a worldwide leader in the specialized field of stored product pest control.” In case you wondered.

I’m not sure people are aware of these numbers. Global warming? Maybe I’ll see it; maybe not. Running out of oil? Running out of helium? Unless I die much sooner than I intend, these things will happen in my lifetime. You think maybe we should be doing something about that?

The last few panels have been really interesting. One was “Costuming on a budget”, which was fun and interesting. The other was not really a panel, but rather a Q&A with the guest of honor, Brinke Stevens. She was really interesting. She had a perspective on the changes in the film industry wrought by technology in the past several decades, and some insightful observations about how the business of selling movies has shifted in response to changes in technology. That was an unexpectedly interesting discussion, and I rather wish I had recorded it. Then she went on to talk about her current work, books she is writing, her interest in the environment (she has a masters in marine biology, was on track to study dolphin communication as she was working on her doctorate before she got into films). The whole science-environment part of her talk was fascinating.

I am really glad that we got to meet her: she is genuinely interesting. I bought one of her DVDs in the dealer room, Dead Clowns. She autographed it for me. 🙂

In a huge ruling, U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet has said that gene patents are invalid. As you may recall, last May, the ACLU was the first to finally challenge whether or not genes could be patented. There was a lot of back and forth over the case, with many saying that a ruling against gene patents would throw a wrench into the business plans of many companies, because so many biotech/medical companies have been relying on the idea that gene patents must be valid for so long. But just because many companies relied on a mistaken understanding of patent law, doesn’t mean that it should be allowed to continue. The judge made the point clear when it came to gene patents, saying that they:

“are directed to a law of nature and were therefore improperly granted.”

The case was brought against Myriad Genetics, who will surely appeal, so this is nowhere close to over. But it involved a test for breast cancer, that Myriad basically had a monopoly over — and the claim was that this not only made it more difficult for women to get tested, but it also greatly discouraged other research in the field. In part, this was because the patents that Myriad held were incredibly broad.

Patents, of course, are not supposed to be granted on things found in in nature — and it’s hard to argue against the idea that genes are found in nature. Supporters of gene patents often claim that they’re not really gene patents, but a patent on identifying the gene, which is a nice semantic game that the judge clearly saw through. This is a huge step forward for encouraging more real research into genetic testing, rather than locking up important information.

(from Judge: Gene Patents Are Invalid, TechDirt)

YES!

At a press conference yesterday, researchers announced the completely unexpected: a Siberian cave has yielded evidence of an entirely unknown human relative that appears to have shared Asia with both modern humans and Neanderthals less than 50,000 years ago. The find comes courtesy of a single bone from individual’s hand. Lest you think that paleontologists are overinterpreting a tiny fragment, it wasn’t the shape of the bone that indicates the presence of a new species—it was the DNA that it contained.

(from Neither Neanderthal nor sapiens: new human relative IDed, Ars Technica)

According to the CDC, roughly 440,000 deaths each year are associated with smoking.

Also according to the CDC, roughly 400,000 deaths each year are associated with obesity.

Many more people die each year in the USA from motor vehicle accidents (roughly 40,000) than in airplane crashes (fewer than 1,000). But people spend a lot more time in cars than in airplanes. The per-hour death rate of driving versus flying is about equal.

And according to the NIH, roughly 12,000 deaths (excluding suicides) each year are associated with firearms.

The leading causes of death in 2000 were tobacco (435 000 deaths; 18.1% of total US deaths), poor diet and physical inactivity (400 000 deaths; 16.6%), and alcohol consumption (85 000 deaths; 3.5%). Other actual causes of death were microbial agents (75 000), toxic agents (55 000), motor vehicle crashes (43 000), incidents involving firearms (29 000), sexual behaviors (20 000), and illicit use of drugs (17 000).

(from CDC: Obesity approaching tobacco as top preventable cause of death, DoctorsLounge)

So “sexual behavior” is just behind “firearms” in terms of the raw number of people killed — and is far ahead of firearms when the roughly 17,000 suicides who used firearms are excluded (as they should be, for obvious reasons).

Interesting.

Another piece of science fiction is on its way to being science fact. “Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated quantum holographic storage, shattering long-held assumptions about the information limits of matter. Moving into the sub-atomic realm, they permanently stored 35 bits in the quantum space surrounding a single electron.” (from ZDNet)

Over the past 20 years, huge swaths of the sky have been searched for slowly moving bodies, and well over 1000 KBOs found. But these wide-area surveys can spot only large, bright objects; longer-exposure surveys that can find smaller, dimmer objects cover only small areas of the sky. A Mars-sized object at a distance of, say, 100 AU would be so faint that it could easily have escaped detection.

That could soon change. In December 2008, the first prototype of the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) was brought into service at the Haleakala observatory on Maui, Hawaii. Soon, four telescopes – equipped with the world’s largest digital cameras, at 1.4 billion pixels apiece – will search the skies for anything that blinks or moves. Its main purpose is to look out for potentially hazardous asteroids bound for Earth, but inhabitants of the outer solar system will not escape its all-seeing eyes.

(from Is there a Planet X?, New Scientist)

Strange days ahead for NASA. They announced a while back that they were going to start relying more on the private sector, and now the Obama collective seem intent on dismantling the agency altogether.

President-elect Obama seems intent on burning down the house of cards that is NASA, presumably to replace it with an agency that can actually design worthwhile missions without wholesale wasting of taxpayer dollars. First, we learned that the transition team has been circling around NASA’s Constellation program.

Now, today I read that Obama is basically going to outsource a good bit of NASA engineering to the Defense Department. Bloomberg reports that Obama may force NASA to use DOD rockets, which will be cheaper and ready sooner than NASA’s planned Ares (right), which isn’t slated until 2015.

And this is all in the context of China’s rapidly advancing space program, which definitely has Pentagon eyebrows raised.

China’s military carried out a spacewalk in 2008, plans to land a robot on the moon in 2012 and a man on the moon thereafter. Meanwhile, the US will be hitching rides with Russia between 2010 when the shuttle is scrapped and 2015 (at the soonest) when Orion is to be launched.

It’s no secret Obama’s team wants to scrap NASA’s Ares rocket. The Pentagon’s Delta IV and Atlas V rockets are “basically developed,” says John Logsdon of the National Air and Space Museum. “You don’t have to build them from scratch.”

(from NASA craft may ride on Pentagon rockets, ZDNet)