aug 2006 / greg goebel
* Entries include: food & farming infrastructure, Dawkins' THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, arctic seed repository, Indian call centers, corporate nurses, 747 fire tanker, Pluto demoted, sleazy adware companies, inside-out surgery, pachislots, war in Lebanon, Jack radio, electronic ICUs, intestinal bacteria, web-based microfinancing, and standby power in consumer products.
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- FOOD & FARMING (5): Of course, there are many other crops besides wheat and corn, with each featuring its own distinctive technology.
Soybeans were almost unknown in the West before 1900, but in the last half of that century they became a staple crop in the US and elsewhere. This was not because an enormous market for tofu emerged, but because soybeans are an excellent source of vegetable oil, being used in everything from margarine to cookies to animal feed. Soybeans also neatly complement the growing of corn. Both crops tend to use much the same equipment, and soybeans, being "legumes" like peas, return nitrogen to the soil, making soybeans a good "rotation" crop to cycle with corn, which depletes the nitrogen. Rotating crops also helps control pests, because pests that infest corn usually don't like soybeans, and the reverse.
Of course, orchards for raising apples, oranges, walnuts, and so on are common. Tending an orchard is much different from growing corn or wheat, with considerable care given to individual trees in the orchard since they take years to come to maturity and will produce fruit for years as well. Orange growers live in fear of snap frosts and keep an eye on the weather channel. Once they made bonfires to keep their oranges warm in a frost, but now they use big fans, which don't warm the air much but keep the frost from settling. Trees in an orchard are arranged in nice neat rows to maintain spacing and to allow access for machinery. A honeycomb (hexgrid) pattern would be more space-efficient, but it's more troublesome to lay out.
Vineyards are one of the last agricultural holdouts against automation. They consist of rows of trellises -- stakes with lines run between them -- on which the vines grow, spaced widely enough to permit pickers to move down the rows. There are grape harvesting machines, which straddle the row and run down it, knocking off the grapes, but they tend to be more the exception than the rule. Incidentally, a single grape vine may support several different grape varieties, with segments of vines grafted on to a single root. Plants have fewer problems with immune rejection than we do.
Wood is a crop, with much logging performed off of natural growth timber, a procedure that can be very politically controversial, but tree farming is done as well. Tree farming is particularly important for production of paper, which uses relatively small, fast-growing trees for "pulp". The trees are stripped of bark (which is then burned for fuel) and broken into chips, which are "pulped" into a soggy mush. The pulp is spread on a moving porous screen, where the water drains off; felt cloths and steam-heated rollers complete the paper production process, except of course for finishing, cutting into sheets, packaging, and distribution to end users.
Vegetables -- peas, carrots, cabbage, beans, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, lettuce -- all have their own particular procedures and technology, but they share one consideration: there's a narrow window between unripe and rotten, and so they have to be harvested and processed quickly. A farmer may have to confront the unpleasant choice of buying an expensive machine that he only uses once every now and then, or trying to line up labor on the spot to do the job. There's also the problem that the packing plant can't absorb all the produce of all the farmers if, say, all the peas are picked at the same time. The result is that vegetable production is often done on a contract basis, with the supermarket chains or packing companies supplying the necessary harvesting equipment and coordinating its use.
Agritech vegetables may have their limitations, the most despised example being the tomato. Advocates for organic farming can sometimes sound like religious fanatics, but they do have a point in that a typical grocery store tomato would hardly be described as very tasty. However, it is also obvious that the tastier home-grown tomatoes go bad a lot faster. Work has been performed to use genetic modification (GM) to produce a tomato that tastes good and lasts a long time. However, GM has encountered consumer resistance. GM technology does need to be treated with care, but some have suggested the reaction against GM crops is so extreme that it has become the Left's answer to fluoridation of water supplies.
Cotton is a traditional crop in the US Southeast. It is notoriously labor-intensive and a picky crop on top of that, vulnerable to diseases and parasites. Its emergence as a crop did much to reinforce American slavery early in the 19th century, reversing the mindset of late 18th century Americans that slavery was on the decline. Now the labor's done mostly by chemicals and herbicides. Since nobody eats cotton -- fans of Joseph Heller's novel CATCH-22 will remember wheeler-dealer Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder's futile attempt to get rid of a load of unwanted Egyptian cotton by coating it with chocolate and trying to pass it off as candy -- herbicides and pesticides are applied with little restraint.
The cotton is harvested by first spraying it with defoliant, which suppresses the leaves, making the bolls easier to strip off by machine. The machine packs the bolls into dirty white bales, like loaves of bread the size of a truck. The bales are hauled off to the local cotton gin, which separates the "lint", the white fibers that go into cloth, from the seeds, which are pressed for oil and so valuable as well.
There are many more crops, some of them by no means obvious until they are pointed out. My original hometown of Spokane, Washington, in the US Northwest, is a major production center for Kentucky bluegrass -- somebody has to grow the seed for lawns, after all. When I was working in Corvallis, Oregon, the factory I spent my days at was next to fields of mint, which could generate a strong but not unpleasant odor downwind when the crop was ready to harvest. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* SEEDS ON ICE: There is a conflict in human planning between thinking over the short term and thinking over the long term, with the pressures of the short term likely to win out much of the time. According to an article in THE ECONOMIST ("Seeds Of Hope", 24 June 2006), the Norwegian government, working with a non-governmental organization named the Global Crop Diversity Fund (GCDF), is backing up its commitment to long-term planning by spending $3 million USD to set up a seed bank on the island of Svalbard, well north of the Arctic Circle.
The GCDF estimates that there are about 1,400 seed banks for crops scattered around the globe. The organization wanted to create a central master seed bank that could survive for centuries or millennia even if it were abandoned. The Svalbard International Seed Vault will store its legions of seed in an underground bunker buried 70 meters (230 feet) deep, protected by meter-thick concrete walls and a massive door. The high-north location will ensure that the climate remains frozen for at least a century, and will also protect the seeds against any disease that wipes out the corresponding crops in the places where they are grown.
Not all crops can be preserved as seeds, however. Bananas, estimated to be the world's fourth most important food crop, are propagated by cuttings that can't be stored indefinitely. Researchers are trying to figure out some way of preserving such crops.
* CALL SOMEWHERE ELSE: The vision of an online support operation in India has become something of a modern stereotype, but according to a BUSINESS WEEK article ("Call Center? That's So 2004" by Manjeet Kripalani, 7 August 2004), it's somewhat out of date. While customers using Indian call centers are not always happy with the service, neither are the Indians running the centers: the work is aggravating, and more to the point it doesn't pay well, since client companies do everything they can to squeeze down the support money they pay out.
The Indian business processing outsourcing industry is now getting out of the call center game. In 2000, 85% of the industry's business was call center work, but now it's down to 35% and continuing to shrink. Now the companies are focusing on higher-value activities, such as processing mortgages, handling insurance claims, overseeing payrolls, and so on. The work is more pleasant, personnel turnover is much lower, and best of all it pays much better, both for companies and employees. The call center business is now starting to migrate elsewhere, such as Eastern Europe, or even back to the home countries where the customers are.
* The bit about unhappy experiences with call centers rings a bell to me. I spent a good portion of my life in online support, and though I have had some problems with online help folk, I am generally very patient with them. This is because I know when I'm getting poor support, it's not the person on the other end of the line who's usually the problem. The real difficulty is rooted in company managers whose determination to cut costs gets so blinkered and blindered that they underinvest in support, resulting in a service whose only result is to antagonize customers. As the saying goes: You can do something or you can do nothing -- but doing only enough to botch the job is just plain stupid.
* THE CORPORATE NURSE PITCH: While the big pharmaceutical companies, or "Big Pharma", get their fair share of public abuse, being accused of such actions as overselling drugs and overprotecting their rights to critical drugs, as a BUSINESS WEEK article discusses ("Big Pharma's Nurse Will See You Now" by Michael Arndt, 12 June 2006), they have taken some actions that at least in part can be seen as praiseworthy.
For example, take Dr. Victor Rivera. When he diagnoses a patient with multiple sclerosis, he prescribes a drug named Rebif -- co-marketed by two Big Pharma companies, Serono and Pfizer -- and then sets up an appointment with Alecia Parks, a registered nurse, who instructs the patient on the proper use of the drug. Ms. Parks keeps in touch with her patients, ensuring that they stay on the drug regimen.
The interesting thing is that Ms. Parks actually works for Serono and Pfizer, operating through an intermediary company named MS Lifelines. The service is free to both the customer and the doctor. Eli Lilly similarly has nurses on the payroll to help diabetics, and Hoffman-La Roche does the same to help HIV patients.
It all seems like too good a deal to be true, but it's a case of enlightened self-interest as far as Big Pharma is concerned. They already have large sales forces and doctors are cramped for time to talk to them anyway, so they have had to come up with better ways to pitch their products to the doctors. The Big Pharma nurses are a help to the doctors, who want patients to stay on their drug regimens. Big Pharma also wants patients to stay on their drug regimens, since that means much more consistent sales of drugs, and also patients who keep on living to buy more drugs.
Some might call that cynical, and certainly the nurses are agents for their companies, promoting the drugs they are helping administer; Big Pharma's nurses also are paid more highly than most hospital nurses, leading some to fear a drain of resources. However, the nurses do not conceal their affiliations, and they have absolutely no authority to make prescriptions or make diagnoses. The reality is that both the doctors and patients appreciate the scheme, with some patients claiming that the nurses provide the most attentive care they receive.
* ED: I was amused by the picture with the article since it had a pretty young blonde nurse who was simply but stylishly dressed in a black pantsuit pitching a product to a patient. I had to think: "This would make medical treatment something to look forward to."
Alas, the shot was obviously posed and I had little doubt the woman was a model. Reminds me of the story comedian Rodney Dangerfield told of the time he went to shoot a TV commercial on a beach, and commented on how good-looking the crowd around him was. The reply was: "Idiot! They're all actors!"
* THE BLIND WATCHMAKER (6): Richard Dawkins' THE BLIND WATCHMAKER is somewhat out of date in terms of what is known, or maybe better put what isn't known, about the spontaneous origin of life. It is worthwhile to take a diversion through another book, THE FIFTH MIRACLE, by the Australian-British physicist Paul Davies, which gives a good survey of what is known as present.
The big problem with pinning down the question of the origins of life is that molecules don't leave very good fossils, and there's little that can be determined by examining the evidence left in the stones. To be sure, it is possible to show that the Earth's environment did go through changes after life became established, in the form of the introduction of an oxygen atmosphere, and it is also interesting that for the bulk of the history of the Earth following the introduction of an oxygen atmosphere, the Earth's life-forms were single-celled creatures. Multicellular organisms are a relatively recent invention.
Darwin himself was the first to guess at how it all got started by famously suggesting that life might have arisen in some "warm little pond" full of a stew of chemical ingredients, though he admitted that this was a pure speculation and didn't take it any farther than that. Nobody tried to do much more until the 1920s, when the British scientist J.B.S. Haldane and the Russian scientist Alexander Oparin proposed some relatively detailed models for how life might have arisen. Haldane followed Darwin's suggestion directly, postulating the rise of biomolecules in an expanded "warm little pond", which Haldane called the "primordial soup". Oparin started out with a similar environment, but suggested that oily blobs could have led to the creation of simple cellular creatures.
Nobody paid too much attention to the ideas of Haldane and Oparin, mostly because the era's knowledge of biochemistry was so very primitive. However, an American chemist named Harold Urey was impressed and eventually decided to perform a simple test of the matter. In 1953, he set a graduate researcher named Stanley Miller to the task, with Miller recirculating what Urey believed to be a sample of the primordial atmosphere -- consisting of hydrogen, ammonia, and methane -- in a flask that was subjected to electric sparks. After a few weeks of this treatment, organic materials, including the amino acids used to build up proteins.
The Miller-Urey experiment was trumpeted up in the textbooks as evidence that the spontaneous origin of live was at least plausible, but though the tale lingers, it has become something of an embarrassment. Hydrogen is a light gas and tends to dissipate into space from the atmospheres of relatively small planets with low gravity like the Earth, and as far as is believed today, the primordial atmosphere was composed of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, which won't produce amino acids anywhere near as easily.
Even the production of amino acids was something of a joke. They're easy to make, actually being found in interstellar gas clouds. The process that produces them is exothermic -- it releases energy -- and so it's thermodynamically straightforward. Assembling amino acids into proteins is an endothermic reaction -- it requires energy. That doesn't rule out the self-assembly of proteins, but it makes it much more troublesome to consider. In any case, the Miller-Urey experiment was like climbing a tree and then claiming that as the successful first step in a flight to the Moon.
* Further consideration suggested that Haldane's primordial soup was likely a thin broth of organic materials where nothing very exciting was likely to happen even over huge timescales. It was back to the theoretical drawing board.
There's been no shortage of ideas. One of the central themes to theories of the spontaneous origins of life on Earth is that the complex, self-replicating molecular system of life as we know it was preceded by one or more simpler, less efficient molecular systems that, in good Darwinian fashion, led to the modern system, which in turn drove the parent system to complete extinction.
One of the pioneers in this line of thought was the Scots chemist Graham Cairns-Smith, who postulated that the original system might have been based on crystals of inorganic materials as often found in clays or mud with crystalline compositions. Cairns-Smith suggests that such a system might gradually lead to more complicated systems until the one we know now came out on top. The dominance of the DNA-based system meant that all the earlier systems disappeared, unable to compete.
The Cairns-Smith idea has its attractions. Everybody knows that crystal structures can grow spontaneously, and it's no jump to think they might be able to achieve higher levels of complexity. He actually doesn't have too much of a following, but his basic approach has been inspirational.
Another approach, with its roots in the 1960s with Leslie Orgel of the Salk Institute in the US, postulates a pioneering molecular system based completely on RNA, DNA's "partner" molecule, that eventually gave rise to the DNA-based system. The DNA-based system inherently requires both DNA and proteins to work, since DNA requires proteins to catalyze its replication, but RNA is capable of acting as an (admittedly inefficient) catalyst itself.
Intriguing test-tube experiments show that a system of replicating RNA molecules will actually evolve to nullify the effects of a toxin that jams up their works, just as bacteria will evolve to nullify an antibiotic. In other experiments, competition between the replication of different strands of RNA led to a natural selection process, in which one type of RNA, stripped down to its absolute minimum, ended up predominating. Even more intriguingly, test-tube experiments show that if the components of RNA are mixed in solution with a metal to act as a catalyst, they will slowly form up full RNA molecules.
Even the scientists who conducted these experiments admit they are contrived and, in terms of what could have happened in nature, not very realistic. They don't provide any solid proof of the spontaneous origin of life, they just suggest that it's not such a wild idea as it might sound at first. Critics have slammed the idea of the "RNA world" on a number of counts, for example the fact that the molecular structure of a living cell does little to suggest that RNA is older than the rest of the machinery, but the debate continues.
There have been other suggestions about the spontaneous origin of life, for example that it began with small self-replicating proteins, but all such suggestions have to be regarded as mere speculations, with little backup in the evidence at present. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- FOOD & FARMING (4): The first step in processing grains for consumption is, of course, milling. This is another process in agriculture with a long history and a surprising level of refinement.
An old-fashioned mill, driven by wind, water, or horse power, ground the grain between two disk-shaped stones, the one on the bottom being fixed and the one on the top rotating. The stones were "dressed" with grooves in a radial or arc pattern. The stones were kept very slightly separated so they wouldn't grind directly against each other and wear themselves out.
In a modern mill, the grain is milled by feeding it through pairs of cylindrical steel rollers, which are also dressed with grooves or ridges in spiral patterns. The two rollers run at slightly different speeds to apply a combination of crushing and shearing forces.
The objective, however, is not to directly grind the wheat into a powder. A wheat grain consists of an outer hull, a layer of starchy endosperm or "middling" underneath, and a core or "germ". The hull has to be removed first, becoming bran, and then the middling has to be taken off the germ. The middling, incidentally, is the most important part of the kernel, the basis of ordinary flour. After this selective milling process, the components are separated by sieving or sifting, with the mix spread out over a screen or cloth that is shaken, the materials falling through becoming "unders" and that remaining becoming "overs".
Corn can be "dry milled" is much the same way, the result being the cornmeal that is used to make cornmeal muffins. Dry-milled corn also ends up in cornflakes and whiskey. However, most corn is "wet milled", the kernels being soaked in warm water for a few days, where they ferment a bit. The end result is then ground up, with bran, endosperm, and germ separated by washing steps. Once again, the starchy endosperm is the most important end product. The bulk of it is treated with acids or enzymes to become corn syrup and fructose, the primary industrial sweeteners, which are hauled off in rail tank cars to snack factories.
The germ is pressed for corn oil, with the residue mixed with bran and leftovers from syrup / fructose production to become high-protein animal feed. Very little of the corn is wasted.
* These days, corn farmers are also making money by brewing ethanol as an additive for automotive fuel. The process is exactly the same as that used for distilling corn whiskey, just scaled up tremendously. Ethanol's a good deal for corn farmers, but about the only real benefit that consumers obtain is that it burns cleaner than gasoline and produces fewer pollutants. It ends up costing about the same as gasoline, and in fact some critics claim it takes more energy to produce corn ethanol than it delivers. This is a minority view, but even advocates admit that the margin between fuel in and fuel out isn't very big.
Nobody seriously sees corn ethanol as an answer to fuel shortages, though there is ongoing work in developing "cellulosic" ethanol production processes that could use plant waste, such as corn stalks, as a feedstock, with advocates claiming that in maturity ethanol costs could be cut in half or more. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: POPULAR SCIENCE ran a series on alternative energy technologies in the July 2006 issue, which mostly "arrested the usual suspects" but did have a few new items of interest. One was a scheme by a California outfit named SkyWindPower involving a different approach to building wind turbines: in the form of kites flown up into the jet stream, driving power back down their tethers. Each kite looks like an "H" charcter with four twin-bladed rotors, one at each corner of the "H". The idea seems a bit dodgy but it does have its appeal: the jet stream is strong and constant, and the kites wouldn't be as hard on birds as ground-based turbines.
Of course, the article mentioned ethanol power, pointing out that work on "cellulosic" ethanol, obtained from waste biomass, is getting a leg up from termites, of all things. Termites can digest wood and the like with the help of the bacteria colonizing their guts that convert cellulose into carbohydrates. Efforts are now being made to sequence the genomes of such bacteria so they can be put to use in producing ethanol from cornstalks, sawdust, and grass clippings.
* In more "energy gimmick" news, WIRED Online reports on a new twist: A British firm named Facility Architects is working on the "Pacesetters" project, in which the tramp of pedestrians on the floors and walkways of high-traffic areas, such as subway stations, is collected by a hydraulic system and used to drive lighting.
Each pedestrian can provide five watts or more. The project started out as an attempt to put electric generators into combat boots to drive a soldier's electronic gear, but boots get wet and muddy, which is hard on generating gear. There's a complementary effort to use piezoelectric generating systems to harvest power from passing road or rail traffic.
* Yet another energy gimmick suggested in an article on the MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW website considered the potential of "thermoelectric" materials -- which convert heat directly into electricity -- for vehicles.
The majority of energy burned in an automobile engine is just discarded as heat, with the remainder used to keep the car moving and drive its alternator to provide electric power to car systems. It would be elegant to get rid of the alternator and use the waste heat to generate electric power instead, increasing efficiency and in principle reducing complexity. New thermoelectric materials that could be wrapped around the exhaust pipe would do the trick.
At first, the thermoelectric system might be used just as a booster for a conventional automotive electrical system. Once efficiency rose enough, it could replace the alternator -- but that wouldn't be the end of the matter. A car's engine also drives oil and cooling fluid pumps, and decoupling those pumps from the engine by driving them with electric motors powered by a thermoelectric system would further boost efficiency.
Thermoelectric materials are often made of semiconductors. Such materials must have high electrical conductivities, but that means in general they have high thermal conductivities as well -- reducing efficiency, since heat tends to pass through without losing much energy during the transition. New nanoscale materials may provide a solution, with the materials featuring molecular lattices that provide high electrical conductivity but trap heat vibrations.
* Finally, an article on the "SuperGrid" in the July issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN outlined a grand scheme for a new power grid -- featuring superconducting underground electrical power trunk lines that are cooled by running liquid hydrogen through the center, with the liquid hydrogen used for fuel on the terminal ends.
I recall seeing grand schemes in the pages of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ever since I was a teenager and have to laugh a bit, since they rarely come to pass. I should keep an open mind, however; many of the things we take for granted nowdays started out as somebody's wild scheme. Every now and then one of them actually works. One of the things that I noticed in my career in industry is that only a small proportion of products are hits. Most are flops or just modestly profitable -- it's the few big hits that keep things going. It would be nice to be able to figure out the big hits in advance and not waste time on the rest, but if we could do that we'd all be rich.
* SUPERTANKER: Each issue of AVIATION WEEK magazine usually has a "flight report" in which a magazine editor takes a ride, sometimes in the pilot's seat, in a particular type of aircraft. In the 31 July 2006 issue, William B. Scott reported on his ride as an observer in a huge, sleek four-engined jet as it maneuvered for a precision approach on a target. At the precise moment, the pilot punched the "pickle" button on his control yoke, plastering his payload over the target area and then zooming away.
The target was actually the airport at San Bernadino, California, and the payload was tens of thousands of gallons of water that created an artificial cloudburst. The aircraft, as described in the article ("Air Tankers Go Big Time") was a Boeing 747-200 jumbo jet, modified by Evergreen Aviation to fight wildfires as the "747 Supertanker", and was on a tour to demonstrate just how powerful a tool the aircraft was.
The Supertanker began life as a "convertible" aircraft that was capable of being switched between cargo and passenger carriage. It was given a set of modifications:
The Supertanker was designed as a system that could be operated at any airport capable of handling a 747. Ground support equipment, aside from that normally required for a large commercial aircraft, consists of a fork lift and a large bladder tank that is filled from a fire hydrant. The Supertanker is rapidly reloaded from the bladder tank using a hose-and-reel system fitted into the aircraft.
Evergreen Aviation hasn't found it simple to sell the 747 Supertanker to the US Forest Service (USFS), but has been able to make a case. Obviously the Supertanker is more expensive to operate than existing tankers like the Lockheed P-3 Orion, but one Supertanker can carry the load of almost seven Orions, and it can get to the target area faster. One Supertanker could put a small fire out on its own, save a specific structure from incineration, or protect trapped fire-fighting crews by laying down a protective cover of moisture.
There were concerns that the big 747 wasn't maneuverable enough to do the job, but its operational weight is over 90 tonnes (200,000 pounds) less than its maximum takeoff weight, giving it a substantial margin of power even when laden and a very large margin of power once it has dumped its load. In tests, the Supertanker easily followed a small lead aircraft into the target area and then departed like a rocket. There were also concerns that the flood of water would wash away firefighting equipment and crews, but laying down effective drop patterns hasn't proven particularly difficult.
The 747 Supertanker has a rival, "DC-10 Supertanker" from the 10 Tanker STC group. The DC-10 Supertanker is a converted McDonnell Douglas DC-10 jumbo jet with a load of 48,500 liters (12,000 US gallons). Both aircraft will need to answer serious questions from the USFS and the US Federal Aviation Administration before they will go into the fight against forest fires. Meeting the challenges will take effort, but company officials involved in the supertanker programs don't regard the rules are unjust. Aerial fire-fighting is a difficult, dangerous business and the regulations often came from bitter experiences that cost lives.
* REDEFINING THE PLANETS: The distant world Pluto was discovered before World War II and immediately designated as the "ninth planet". In the decades after the war, continually improving observations of Pluto kept reducing its size until it began to seem like a pretty feeble excuse for a planet, with a mass only a quarter of a percent that of Earth's mass. (Pluto is very shiny, which is why its size was overestimated.)
Proposals to "demote" Pluto met with considerable public resistance. More recently, astronomers were confounded to discover distant worlds as big as Pluto. There was no way they could ignore the whole obnoxious issue of whether Pluto was a planet or not any longer. Now, according to a BBC WORLD Online article, a draft document to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has proposed a precise definition of the term "planet". The definition involves two conditions:
The second condition can in general be met by any celestial body with a mass 0.6% that of our Moon and a diameter greater than 800 kilometers (500 miles). However, there may be borderline cases that require more observation to see if they belong to the planet "club".
Under the new scheme, the largest asteroid, Ceres, would become a planet, with a few other asteroids being considered as candidates. Pluto plus its comparatively big moon Charon -- the two bodies are close enough in size to be considered a "double planet" -- and a recently discovered distant world temporarily designated "2003 UB313" would now all be regarded as planets. However, the three worlds would be referred to as "plutons", characterized by having noticeably elliptical, high-inclination orbits, out of the plane of the orbits of the eight "classical" planets, and with the orbits taking 200 years or more to complete.
Other distant bodies have been discovered that may end up being classified as planets once they are better characterized. Some astronomers have found the whole "definition" exercise annoying, since no matter what the results are they won't learn a single new thing about the Universe, but it's one of those "paperwork" issues that won't go away until it's finally nailed down.
* FOOTNOTE: A week later, the IAU voted on the matter, with the end result being that a third qualification was added: a planet must clear its orbit of other objects. That rules out the plutinos and the big asteroids like Ceres, which become "dwarf planets". Now it's official -- there are only eight real planets in the Solar System.
* THE BLIND WATCHMAKER (5): There's plenty of reason to feel confident that evolution by natural selection can account for all the diversity of life, but that still leaves one big question unanswered: How did it all get started? The molecular machinery of even the simplest bacterium is, to put it simply, hideously complicated. That leads to Richard Dawkins' next point: Could this complicated system have arisen spontaneously? Just how likely is that?
There's no saying that it's likely at all. Of all the planets in the Universe, we know of only one that supports life, our own, and it's hard to make inferences from a sample size of one. Life may be common in the Universe, but as far as we know, Earth may be the only planet that supports life. We can't calculate the odds, and any opinions that it's common or that it's not are just that -- raw opinions with absolutely no support in the evidence.
There are scientists, usually physicists, who believe that the emergence of life is inevitable given the right conditions. This belief is based on the general notion that the Earth doesn't occupy a privileged position in the Universe, an idea which has often proved sensible and useful in the past -- once upon a time, people thought the Earth was at the center of the Universe, but we've learned better. There's also the fact that life arose on Earth relatively soon after the planet settled down enough to make it possible; if it hadn't been likely, so the thinking goes, the Earth would have remained barren for a much longer time. However, other scientists, usually biologists, point out that there is little basis in physical law for thinking that life is anything but a wild freak accident.
Some advocates have pointed to the notion of "self-assembly" in defense, for example the automatic construction of a neatly symmetrical snowflake, but that's a far reach from postulating the spontaneous emergence of a self-replicating system. It is very simple to write little computer programs to draw more or less realistic snowflakes, but it requires a lot of work to write a program to simulate a living entity in any but the most trivially useless way. A living system contains a certain amount of information about how it is to be replicated and the systems for using that information to perform the replication. It's like the difference between wind chimes and a music box that plays Bach.
Is there life elsewhere in the Universe? We do have a idea that technological civilizations aren't common in our galaxy, since we've performed some fairly extensive radio searches of the sky and found nothing resembling a radio transmission from another planet. It must be added that the radio searches conducted so far aren't remotely comprehensive, and there's also no saying that other technological civilizations are using radio systems. Radio silence indicates a lack of radios, possibly a lack of those capable of building radios, but says nothing about the prevalence of life.
The technology for observing planets in other star systems is likely to be available in a few decades. If we start finding planets that have oxygen in their atmospheres, that would be a pretty good hint that they support life along the lines of our own, since free oxygen tends to oxidize with other elements, removing it from the atmosphere. We only have an oxygen atmosphere because the plants on Earth keep replenishing it.
Anyway, back to the question of whether life could have arisen spontaneously at the molecular level. Although Fred Hoyle could be mocked for comparing the evolution of organisms to a 747 assembling itself, his real target was the origins of life itself, and it's harder to mock him for that. To be sure, he did calculate that the probability of the spontaneous origin of life was 1 in 10^40, which was mockable because it was calculating the probability of an event whose specifics are unknown.
The genetic algorithm discussed earlier in this series was able to perform in seconds what a brute-force search would take up to 175-plus years to work out. Extend the string submitted to the program to a mere 28 characters and the likelihood of simply guessing the right string will jump to 1 in 27^28 = 1.2E40, effectively the same as Hoyle's number. With a million tests per second, the worst-case brute-force search would take 3.8E26 years, which is 2.7E16 times the age of the Universe. The program will make short work of it.
Maybe on a brute-force basis Hoyle's probability of 1 in 10^40 was correct, but since we don't know the scheme, there's no saying that it was based on brute force. Calculating the probability of life arising by a supernatural event would be amusing; the probability could be calculated on the basis of the rate at which supernatural events are provably known to occur. The exercise would have to be for entertainment value, but it would at least have the virtue of being silly on purpose. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- FOOD & FARMING (3): In farm country, distributorships of farm gear are common, featuring rows of machines painted green or yellow or orange or red. It may be hard for a novice to even figure out what some of the gear does.
Of course, few have any confusion over the plain old farm tractor, used to pull a wide variety of farm implements over the fields. The adjectives "plain" and "old" are a bit misleading, however, because a modern farm tractor is a fairly high-tech piece of gear. The classic farm tractor had big wheels in the rear to get traction over soft ground and small wheels in front for steering, with the farmer perched on a metal pan seat. Times have changed: now a farm tractor usually has four wheels, or sometimes eight (four duals), often with all-wheel steering for maneuverability and to ensure that the rear wheels follow the tracks of the front wheels, minimizing damage to a field.
The tractor is run by a diesel engine and has a wide selection of both forward and reverse gear ratios. As did its ancestor, the modern tractor has a "power take off" to link its engine with an external shaft to various sorts of machinery, such as a hay baler or mower. The farmer now rides in an air-conditioned cab with a nice sound system to listen to Randy Travis on CD, even with a computer control system using Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite mapping to work the field according to a predetermined plan, laying down precise amounts of pesticide or fertilizer as needed. Some tractors will follow the plan automatically, with the farmer simply riding along as a supervisor.
* When it comes time to harvest, the tractor gives way to a self-propelled "combine harvester". It is a direct descendant of Cyrus McCormick's horse-drawn reaper of 1831. The reaper was followed by the threshing machine, which separated the wheat from the chaff. In the early 20th century the two functions were "combined" in one machine -- hence the name.
In the days when harvesting was done manually, the wheat had to be cut with scythes and bound into sheaves for collecting. It was threshed on the barn floor by being beaten to knock out the wheat kernels, and then "winnowed", or tossed into the air, to let the wind carry off the lighter chaff.
A combine handles this entire process automatically. A wide cutter head chops off the stalks of wheat, which are then carried by conveyor belts into a spinning drum fitted with "rasp bars" to knock the kernels off the stalks. The kernels fall through a perforated floor, while the chaff is carried away on vibrating belts or chains called "chaff walkers" that shake loose any remaining grain. The chaff is dumped out the rear, either intact so it can be gathered up, or chopped up to act as mulch. The wheat collected in these processes is blown by a high-powered fan to blast away chaff, with the combine leaving a prominent plume of dust in its wake. Some combines have pressurized cabs to keep the dust out.
The grain is stored in an internal bin that can store tonnes of grain, but such is the productivity of the combine that the bin is quickly filled up, so it is pumped out through a chute into a truck about every half hour. Combines have a low utilization rate, since they are only used at harvest time, but crops won't wait long to be harvested and having a machine that can do the job in a big hurry pays off. The combine will be run almost continuously until the crop is in.
Other types of crops -- cotton, tomatoes, sugar cane -- have their own specialized harvesting machines, each worthy of a detailed discussion by itself, but brevity means that they can only be mentioned here.
* Once the farmer has harvested the crop, it has to be stored. Farmers who use grain to feed their own livestock will have a granary on their farm, in the form of a big corrugated galvanized metal drum with a conical roof. Grain is carried to the tip of the cone using a device such as an "auger", a long tube with a rotating screw inside. The granary may be fitted with a fan and an oil or gas-driven heater to dry the grain, preventing it from getting moldy.
If the grain is going to be sold, farmers in a local area collect it in a centralized "grain elevator", usually sited in the local farming community and often run as a cooperative of the farmers. Trains or barges will pick up the grain from the "country" elevators and move them to huge "terminal" elevators, either for sale to bulk buyers at home or abroad, or at the site of food processing plants.
A grain elevator "elevates" the grain using a chain of buckets (called a "leg" for some reason). Traditional grain elevators consist of a row or double row of concrete silos, with a leg at the end of each row feeding a conveyor belt that transfers the grain to the appropriate bin. A conveyor at the bottom transfers the grain back out again when it is needed. These days, a grain elevator usually consists of a set of corrugated metal drums like those use for farm granaries, but bigger. A central bucket elevator feeds an "octopus" system that distributes grain to the appropriate drum through a rotary selector mechanism.
At harvest time, trucks arrive at the elevator, to have their contents sampled through a probe called a "trier" that looks something like a concrete pumper, though the flow is in the reverse direction. The samples are tested for moisture and contaminants. Once cleared, a truck dumps its load through a grate into a "boot", where it is then hoisted up a leg into the grain elevator. The grain may need to be dried before it is stored, being dumped through a "tower driver", a tall metal structure where the grain falls down through a warm column of air.
Grain will generate a fine dust when being stored that can produce a fairly disastrous explosion in a grain elevator. Vegetable oils may be used to suppress the dust, or it may be filtered out using "socks" attached to the vents. Care is taken to avoid electrical sparks; the operation of a leg tends to build up static electricity, and so legs are placed outside the main elevator structure, with the housing fitted with explosive vents that direct the blast outward, where it will do less damage. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* ADWARE WARS: A recent BUSINESS WEEK article ("The Plot To Hijack Your Computer" by Ben Elgin, 17 July 2006) took a microscope to the "adware" industry -- the friendly folks who try to sneak adware onto our computers to pop up ads in our faces, with the focus mostly on an organization named "Direct Revenue". Although the article covered a lot of ground that's very familiar to the computer-literate, it also revealed some interesting new information.
For one, the big Internet advertisers such as Yahoo! and Google Adsense end up having some complicity in adware schemes, though not by intent. I use Google Adsense banner ads on my website, and get a cut on user access to the ads. The adware companies are basically operating the same sort of business, displaying ads for the big Internet ad service providers and taking their cut. Although the ad service providers do have rules on how the advertising should be performed, it's hard to police exactly what the ad displayers are really doing.
Another interesting item in the article was how bitterly the adware companies fought against each other, creating software "torpedoes" that would seek out rival adware on a user's PC and then delete it. Of course, this was likely to do damage to the PC's operating system as well.
That's the worst aspect of adware: the pop-ups are a nuisance, but the adware is intrusive and so tends to break things. Some adware programs, including Direct Revenue's Aurora and a similar adware program from competitor CoolWebSearch, were so badly designed that they often crippled PCs without ever displaying a single ad.
Somehow not surprisingly, adware organizations like Direct Revenue often began as legitimate advertising organizations, but gradually fell prey to greed. They start out trying to play by the legal rules, only to cut more and more corners over time, for example doing their best to hide or obscure the fine print the law demands they display to unsuspecting PC users before downloading adware. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer -- a photo shows a classic sharp-edges New Yorker, along the lines of Rudolf Giuliani -- is now blasting Direct Revenue with a lawsuit for false advertising, computer tampering, and trespassing.
Direct Revenue spokesmen insist the company is playing by the rules and the suit has no merit. The company does admit to getting a lot of feedback featuring sharp language and the occasional death threat. One user commented: "If God exists, He hates you."
* ED: According to the article, Direct Revenue staffers saw naive computer users as their prime targets, calling them "trailer cash". I'm a fairly careful PC user and I don't believe I have any active malware on my computer. When I run into a dodgy website that seems to be doing something tricky or my PC begins to act like it is developing a mind of its own, I use Windows System Restore and reset my PC to a configuration from one or two weeks back. (I've had antiviral utilities at times but have found them clumsy and obnoxious.)
Usually when I get a website trying to download a fast one on me, I simply kill the web browser, but even if the download wasn't completed, it jams up the workings of the PC anyway -- sometimes to the point of making the use of System Restore a seriously anxious exercise. Microsoft has been fairly diligent in working on defenses, but it's an arms race -- I've noticed that an increasing number of websites are able to defy the Windows Explorer pop-up blocker.
I do get the feeling that I have broken bits of inactive adware and spyware on my PC. It reminds me of retroviruses, like the HIV virus that causes AIDS, which operate by inserting their genome into our cellular genomes. During the past history of our species, a number of different retroviruses inserted their genomes in human ova, and the now-broken DNA patterns of these invaders can still be detected in our own genome. Mother Nature is a spammer.
* SURGERY INSIDE OUT: One of the real advances of modern medicine in recent decades has been the development of laparscopic surgical techniques, in which complicated surgeries could be performed through a small incision using various sorts of remote-manipulation surgical tools. The approach meant much less injury to the patient and usually far shorter hospital stays, or even outpatient treatments.
Now, according to an article in THE ECONOMIST ("Invisible Mending", 10 June 2006), some surgeons are refining the technique to allow them to perform surgeries without any external incisions at all. The dodge is fairly drastic, however: the surgeries are performed by inserting laparscopic tools down a patient's throat and performing the surgery through the stomach walls instead of the skin.
Promoters of "transgastric surgery" include Dr. Paul Swain of Imperial College, London, who pioneered swallowable wireless camera capsules, and Dr. Dmitri Oleynikov of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. Transgastric surgery might sound like gross overkill since performing remote-controlled surgery through the stomach and then stitching up the patient is obviously not easy, and it certainly doesn't sound all that safe. Most of us do not have the class of body where a small abdominal incision is much of a problem.
However, although advocates admit that cosmetics are the main appeal of the scheme, from the point of view of access to organs, transgastric surgery is far superior to external surgery, and Dr. Swain believes that gastric incisions are less traumatic and heal faster. As far as the clumsiness of the approach goes, that is a clear problem, but Dr. Oleynikov has been working with University of Nebraska researchers to build tiny cylindrical robots, 1.5 centimeters in diameter and 8.5 centimeters long (0.6 x 3.35 inches) that use twin wheels with a corkscrew thread to maneuver through the interior space of the patient.
The whole concept remains experimental, but it is interesting to consider how far the notion of tiny robots navigating through a patient might be taken. A surgeon might be able to pilot a robot using a virtual environment, in effect taking a real-life "fantastic voyage".
* PACHINKO WORLD: Anyone familiar with Japanese pop culture knows about pachinko, a game that resembles a scaled-down vertical pinball machine and provides a payoff. In Japanese pop stories, pachinko parlors are the place where slacker salarymen hang out when they're goofing off. However, according to an article in THE ECONOMIST ("Rules Of The Game", 29 July 2006), that image is somewhat out of date.
Pachinko has never been particularly respectable. In Japanese samurai stories, the villains are often gangs of gamblers, just as often as Wild West stories feature gangs of cattle rustlers. Pachinko parlors are seen as seedy, and the number of pachinko players has dwindled from 29 million a decade ago to 18 million today. Even at that, Japanese still spend 30 trillion yen -- about $260 billion USD -- on pachinko parlors, about as much as is spent on health care in Japan, and pachinko parlors are believed to account for about half of all Japanese consumer borrowing. Every summer, babies die when pachinko-playing parents leave them in hot cars. There are concerns that some pachinko parlor owners rig their machines to give fewer but bigger payouts, and worries that the owners evade taxes or send profits to North Korea -- parlors are often run by Japanese of Korean origin.
Despite the problems, pachinko persists, and the industry has been given a shot in the arm through the introduction of "pachislot", which combines features of pachinko and slot machines. The introduction of a new pachislot, "Hokuto No Ken" -- "Fist Of The North Star", modeled on a popular martial arts manga / anime (comic / cartoon) series -- was a big hit among those who remain faithful. Pachislot arose when the authorities loosened the rules for pachinko parlor game design, and now about two thirds of the machines in a parlor are pachislots.
The pachislot's big appeal lies in the fact that payoffs can accumulate, permitting jackpots of up to a million yen -- about $8,700 USD. This has made the authorities nervous. Casino-type gambling is actually illegal in Japan; payoffs in pachinko parlors are in the form of "prizes", which as it turns out can always be conveniently and legally redeemed for cash at a shop across the street. In 2004, the rules were changed to cut the maximum payoff by 80%, but pachinko and pachislot machines only have to be relicensed once every three years, so the big jackpots will survive into 2007.
After that, so it is hoped, pachinko and pachislot will simply become a form of entertainment, not gambling. Nobody has any idea what will happen to the industry after that. Gambling may be unsavory to Japanese, but lawmakers everywhere like tax revenues, and Japan has a big budget deficit. A committee in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is considering the possibility of legalizing casino-type gambling in Japan. After the drought, the deluge?
* THE BLIND WATCHMAKER (4): Richard Dawkins builds on the basic concepts of evolution to examine the strategies of evolution and show just how powerful the ability of natural selection to shape life-forms really is. Consider gazelles and the cheetahs that prey on them. A faster gazelle means that slow cheetahs are going to have a hard time making ends meet as predators. That means faster cheetahs survive. Faster cheetahs mean that slower gazelles are likely to end up as dinner -- which means faster gazelles survive. Gazelles and cheetahs are locked in an evolutionary arms race that slows down only when the quest for speed starts running into diminishing returns.
There are other examples of such constructive evolution, sometimes leading to baroque elaboration. For example, there are species of bacteria that have developed the ability to increase their mutation rate when they are under stress, in essence ramping up the throws of dice to test more options for survival under the circumstances. The bacteria in effect have evolved a mechanism for accelerating their evolution.
There are strict selectionists who think that all features of organisms are established by selection pressure. Once that was a common view, but now it's the minority opinion, with the late Steven Jay Gould deriding their scenarios as "just-so stories". All species are subject to a greater or lesser degree of genetic drift all the time, and there is absolutely no reason that they can't acquire traits, even fairly significant ones, that neither impair or enhance survivability. Darwin himself mentioned this as a possibility, and in modern times it has been expanded in detail as what is called the "neutral" theory of evolution.
If, say, a species of bird from one island migrates to another island, in time the two populations are very likely to become different species, gradually different in appearance and unable to interbreed, from simple genetic drift of the two populations. Even a species that remains seemingly stable for a long period of time may well gradually acquire an increasing level of genetic "clutter" -- though this may come in handy if conditions drastically change, giving a greater pool of variation to fall back on to provide a greater chance of producing a new strain that can survive.
In fact, sometimes evolution seems to go off in bizarre directions. Consider the peacock, with its elaborate set of tailfeathers. Everybody knows that it's to attract peahens, but from a strictly functional point of view it's absurd -- a bit reminiscent of a woman who has been made up with an elaborate coiffure, which can look very nice but is a real pain to keep that way. The peacock's tail gave Darwin the shudders, trying to wonder how natural selection might account for it.
Dawkins mocks how his teachers, working in the era when strict selectionism was the fashion, tried to come up with rational explanations for the peacock's tail, instead proposing that it is an example of positive feedback -- or a "cascade" process if you prefer. Peahens were attracted to proto-peacocks that had long tails; these cocks bred with hens that liked long tails. Now cycle through this process thousands of times and it might simply go exponentially out of control, until the tail of the peacock became enough of a liability that it balanced out his enhanced ability to attract hens and sire chicks. The undirected nature of natural selection means that such tangents are perfectly possible, and in fact to be expected under such a scheme of things.
For another interesting example, a human male's penis is on the average four times longer than that of a full-grown gorilla's. Is there any particular advantage from a simple efficiency point of view in the much bigger size -- does size really matter? Or is it just an arbitrary trait of our species, driven possibly by positive feedback? It certainly is a bit comforting for us human males to know that in comparison to our body weight, our penises outmatch those of males of the species around us. But this line of discussion need not be pursued further here.
* Dawkins does, however, take jabs at the notion of the theory of "evolution by fits and starts" promoted by Steven Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, the theory being better known as "punctuated equilibrium". Gould and Eldredge postulated that the well-known "jerkiness" of the fossil record, with seemingly long periods of little change and then rapid bursts of emergence of new forms, is not simply an artifact of the necessary incompleteness of the record as is generally assumed, but the way things really work.
To a certain extent, punctuated equilibrium makes sense. Once a certain ecological order is set up, it is likely to remain more or less stable for a long time -- until some catastrophe upsets the applecart. It is generally assumed that an asteroid impact took place 65 million years ago that at least helped wipe out the dinosaurs, and the calamitous results of the impact provided selection pressures to drive the emergence of new forms of animals -- the dominance of the mammals, creatures which had been around for a long time before but had not been the big players.
Punctuated equilibrium is something of a consequence of the increasing realization of geologists that catastrophes do reshape the world, at least on occasion. Geologists had become accustomed to a belief in "gradualism", the notion that the Earth changes slowly and in a gradual way over the aeons, and had rejected "catastrophism", the notion that the Earth had been reshaped by steps of cataclysms, such as Noah's Flood. In modern times, there has been an increasing willingness to admit that sometimes geologic catastrophes do happen -- for example, asteroid impacts, the giant floods that swept what is now Washington State in the USA tens of thousands of years ago, and the ring of volcanic vents that erupted around what is now Yellowstone National Park hundreds of thousands of years ago to dump ash over a good portion of the North American continent. Obviously such disasters will impose strong selection pressures on the survivors: adapt or die out.
However, Dawkins feels that Gould and Eldredge pushed the idea farther than its merits allowed. He found it particularly discouraging when Darwin critics jumped on the theory of punctuated equilibrium to claim that scientists were divided on Darwin -- and persistently ignored the protests of Gould and Eldredge that they were only suggesting an interpretation of Darwin that was in fact perfectly well contained within the theory, and would have distressed Darwin himself little or not at all.
It is easy to exaggerate the disputes of scientists. They will quarrel, sometimes bitterly and on a few occasions with lifelong personal animosities, over points of interpretation of little interest to outsiders. This is not, at least in moderation, a defect of the sciences, either: the open clash of ideas is regarded as fundamental to the calling, though trading personal insults is discouraged. As was once said in another context: If they were serious, they'd kill each other.
* As a footnote, those who are interested in this particular line of thought might be interested in getting a copy of Dougal Dixon's classic AFTER MAN, a fascinating imaginary bestiary of the future. The book postulates that humanity and quite a few species of animals died out in a catastrophe, with a new world order emerging over tens of millions of years. Rats form the basis of major predator groups, evolving into wolflike or even bearlike forms, while rabbits evolve into creatures like long-eared llamas.
My favorite in the bestiary is the Vortex. Whales died out in the disaster, with the penquin moving into the niche previously occupied by the baleen whales. The Vortex is a penguin the size of a humpback whale, with a beak modified to act as a krill strainer.
AFTER MAN's text is somewhat dry reading, but it's well illustrated and neatly thought out, making it great fun to page through. I do find it a bit naive that Dixon imagined that traditional predators wouldn't survive the fall of humankind. He's British and isn't particularly familiar with coyotes; if rats could survive, so could the resourceful coyotes, at least by eating rats. It likely wouldn't take too long to end up with coyotes the size of their ancient cousins, the wolves -- a fearsome notion, since coyotes are such very smart creatures. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- FOOD & FARMING (2): One of the most distinctive features of a farm is of course the barn -- or at least it is in the USA; in many other countries, separate buildings are used to stable horses, keep cattle, and store feed and grain, but in the US the tradition has been to consolidate these functions in one big structure.
A "classic" barn has two levels: a lower level where the animals were stabled, and an upper level where grain was threshed and binned, and baled hay was stored. A third level, a hayloft, might be used to store the hay instead. An earthen ramp was piled up to allow "drive up" access to the upper level; barns might also be built on hillsides to allow direct access to the upper level.
There are variations on barn styles. In Appalachia, the "upland crib barn" was common, consisting of what amounted to an overgrown corn crib with additions tacked on. In New England, "connected barns" were built, featuring covered walkways to the other elements of the farm so the farmer didn't have to wade through hip-deep snow in the winter to do his chores. The "Pennsylvania barn", based on Swiss and German farm structures and once common in Virginia and Maryland as well as Pennsylvania, features the upper level extended on one site well over the lower level to provide an open-air sheltered space. The "three-bay barn" has a spacious central area with stalls flanking on either side.
The traditional idea of a barn is the "Dutch barn", with a "gambrel" (double-sloped) roof and doors at the ends, not the sides. The Dutch barn is not actually known in the Netherlands; it may have German origins, since the "Deutsch" were often called "Dutch" in 19th century America. It is actually a fairly recent invention, not known before the US Civil War, with 20th-century Dutch barns sometimes having curved roofs. There are a smattering of circular barns in the USA, but they are rare.
Traditional barns feature details such as good ventilation for the hayloft; a roof extension known as "hay hood" where a pulley can be hung for hauling, say, bales of hay up and down; hooks for hanging the carcasses of livestock for butchering; and "owl holes" where owls are invited to nest so they can patrol the barn for mice, rats, and other varmints. Incidentally, most barns are not painted red.
The traditional barn is still around but seems to be obsolescent, being increasingly replaced by prefabricated metal buildings, which are cheap, sturdy, can be put up in a hurry, and have big open spaces convenient for storing farm machinery. In warm climates such as the US southwest, barns, traditional or modern, tend to be uncommon, with hay stored in an open hayrack and cattle taking shelter under what looks like a big carport.
* Livestock has to be fed year round, with their provisions stored as hay -- dried grass -- or "silage", which is moist fodder stored without oxygen and allowed to ferment in a particular way. Centuries ago, hay was obtained by handwork, with the grass being cut with a sickle, piled up to dry in the fields, and then hauled up to the hayloft for storage. Reaping machines and then the mechanical baler did much to automate this previously labor-intensive practice. Balers are generally towed by a tractor; traditionally they gathered up hay and wired it into rectangular bales -- small ones about 60 x 60 x 120 centimeters (2 x 2 x 4 feet) in size, and "jumbo" bales with doubled dimensions (and weight multiplied by 8). In the 1970s, balers were introduced that baled up the hay into giant rolls, sometimes wrapping plastic around them to keep them from getting wet in the rain.
Hay tends to have a pleasant odor, but silage is more reminiscent of a rotten pile of damp grass. To create silage, grass is packed into an airtight silo. It used to be hauled up to the top of the silo with a rope and pulley, but these days a machine chops up the grass and blows it up through a long duct. Once packed in, a bacterium named Lactobacillus gives it a bit of predigestion, producing lactic acid, with the acidity suppressing less welcome forms of bacteria, the sort that makes the rotten pile of grass mentioned above particularly malodorous and inappropriate for animal consumption. The silage is doled out as needed by an unloading machine hung from the ceiling of the silo. Since this means that the oldest and least appetizing silage is hauled out last, a more modern scheme uses a chain-type unloader at the bottom of the silo.
Silage and silos are a fairly recent invention, about a century old. Early silos were made of wood and strapped with metal bands, but these have given way to concrete or metal silos. It is also possible to get by more cheaply with a "horizontal silo", just a trench or pit covered with plastic, and in fact it seems that's how silage technology began. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* TECHWAR IN LEBANON: On 12 July 2006, fighters of the Lebanese Hezbollah Shiite militia attacked Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers on the Israeli border, killing eight Israelis and taking two prisoner. The attack was the last straw for the Israelis, who within a day began a heavy bombing campaign against Lebanon, which has continued into August and been accompanied by IDF ground assaults.
The broad brush of the war is getting plenty of play on the nightly news and discussion of them would be somewhat redundant here. What hasn't been emphasized is the tactical aspects of the conflict, with both the IDF and Hezbollah employing advanced weaponry.
A BBC correspondent in Tyre, wearing a flak vest, commented on video that IDF drones are overhead at all times, though the little drones are hard to spot. The buzz of their "chainsaw" engines was audible on the soundtrack since the streets were otherwise quiet and almost empty of inhabitants, the Israelis having dropped leaflets warning the citizenry to get out. The drones keep an eye on everything that moves, and anything deemed suspicious gets an artillery barrage, or an F-15 or F-16 dropping a laser-guided bomb -- with the target "illuminated" by the drone.
Videos released by the IDF have displayed laser-guided bombs zipping into targets -- and in one case, a Hezbollah rocket being launched against Israel from under the cover of a banana grove. Most of Hezbollah's rockets "Katyushas" -- "Sweet Little Katy", what the Russians called the family of barrage rockets they initially developed during World War II and produced enthusiastically during the Cold War.
There are a number of different types of Katyushas, but they are all simple, cheap, unguided weapons that were originally designed to be fired from a truck with a multiple-launch rocket rack. However, during the war with the Americans, the Vietnamese came up with the notion of building a simple rail launcher, often of wood, then using it to fire a single Katyusha, and departing to evade a counterstrike -- a tactic that has become popular with insurgents and militias such as Hezbollah.
Katyushas are easily built by any country with a modest industrial base. The Katyushas used by Hezbollah are "BM-21" rockets, with a diameter of 12.2 centimeters (4.8 inches), a length of 3.23 meters (10 feet 7 inches), a warhead with a weight of about 20 kilograms (44 pounds), and a range of over 20 kilometers (12.4 miles). Apparently Hezbollah also has an "extended range" variant with a range of 40 kilometers (25 miles).
The BM-21 has been the mainstay of Hezbollah's attempts to shoot back at Israel, but the militia also has Iranian Fajr-3 rockets, a simple spike of a rocket with a range of 45 kilometers (28 miles) and a 45 kilogram (100 pound) warhead -- enough to make quite a bang, as videos of rockets falling on the Israeli port city of Haifa have shown. Hezbollah also has the similar but scaled-up Iranian Fajr-5 rocket, with a range of 75 kilometers (46 miles) and a 90 kilogram (200 pound) warhead, though it is unclear if any have been fired.
The Hezbollah barrage is inaccurate and the number of Israeli casualties caused by it has been low, at least compared to the number of Lebanese killed and wounded, but the attacks have brought normal life to a standstill over northern Israel since everyone scrambles for cover every time a warning siren goes off. The Israelis are also particularly furious at the completely indiscriminate nature of the attacks. So far, the bombardments of northern Israel has reinforced Israeli public support for the war, with the general feeling being that the rockets must be stopped.
Hezbollah is said to have had about 13,000 rockets before the serious shooting began, with most stored in underground bunkers. It is believed that the Iranians have also supplied Hezbollah with the big Zelzal-2 rocket, with a range of up to 200 kilometers (125 miles) -- enough range to bring most of Israel under attack -- and a warhead weighing 600 kilograms (1,325 pounds). It is also believed that the Zelzal-2 has an inertial guidance system to permit to to actually hit something resembling a specific target area.
Some observers have commented that it was Hezbollah's acquisition of larger rockets that pushed the massive Israeli military response -- the militia has raided Israel before, but now the Israelis feel threatened by Hezbollah's long-range rocket capability and want to eliminate it. Certainly the wild comments made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about destroying Israel were not ignored in Tel Aviv, and the idea that the Iranians might supply Hezbollah with chemical or biological warheads for the Zelzal-2 was not dismissed as a fantasy, either. The IDF has been extremely determined in attempts to hunt down and destroy Zelzal-2 launchers, with an IDF spokesman saying that many of the airstrikes against South Beruit were targeted on what were thought to be Zelzal-2 hideouts in garages and warehouses.
Unguided rockets are what might be expected as weapons used by a militia like Hezbollah, but as the IDF has found, the militia has received plenty of more sophisticated weapons as well. On 14 July, an Israeli corvette was hit by a Chinese-made C-802 antiship missile, with four sailors killed; an Egyptian freighter was also hit and sunk in the same attack, with the crew rescued. Israeli intelligence was unaware that Hezbollah had obtained the C-802.
IDF armored forces have also found that Hezbollah has been heavily equipped not merely with the Soviet RPG short-range unguided antitank missile -- a staple of militias and insurgent groups, and highly effective for its class of weapon -- but with wire-guided antitank missiles, including the Russian-made AT-3 Sagger, US-made TOW (presumably obtained from Iran), and even more modern weapons; they have become adept at setting up ambushes, in particular moving through tunnel complexes to pop up where least expected and launch rockets. IDF Merkava main battle tanks are very hard targets, but lighter armor is more vulnerable.
It is also suspected that Hezbollah fighters may have the excellent SA-18 man-portable anti-aircraft missile -- there doesn't seem to have been any launches so far, but videos of Israeli F-15s and F-16s over Lebanon seem to show them often dispensing countermeasures flares. It is know that they have operated Iranian-build Ababil (Swallow) UAVs for observation; some Israelis fear that the Ababils might be fitted with warheads and used for precision strikes deep into Israel.
* JACK RADIO: In the category of "things which have been around for a while but I hadn't heard about", a WIRED Online article discussed what are known as "Jack" FM music broadcast radio stations. There's a network of Jack stations, with each operation set up, at least conceptually, around a digital jukebox with a large hard disc containing thousands of pop-rock tunes and with play set to RANDOM. Prerecorded announcements are spliced in here and there, with commercials at intervals. No disc jockey as such, though they will have an attendant to keep things running and make occasional announcements.
The WIRED article compared it to listening to a middle-aged drunk with an iPod, but the idea appealed to me. My normal tastes in music run to jazz and particularly electronica, but every now and then a pop-rock groove sounds nice for a change of pace. The problem is that most pop-rock stations are overloaded with tiresome disc jockeys and commercials, playing much the same thing over and over again, but the Jack stations kill off the disc jockeys, keeping the overhead low so that they don't have to run too high a proportion of commercials, and get by with greater variety.
I quickly googled KJAC in Denver at 105.5 on the FM dial and tuned in. It works for me -- it sounds something like an extended TV-movie soundtrack, though I won't exactly let it wear a rut in my radios. It has its critics, particularly folks who don't like the idea of replacing a disc jockey with a random-play digital jukebox, but I found the concept an interesting approach to updating an old technology like FM broadcast.
* I'm still trying to replace the old tape-based boom boxes I have around the house -- my cheapo distributed sound system -- with MP3-CD boom boxes, but while MP3-CD capability is not unusual on cheap desktop stereos and even in "handheld" CD players, the consumer electronics manufacturers don't seem to be in any hurry to release updated boom boxes with an MP3-compatible CD decoder chip. I'm sure it will come as they update their product lines, but the attitude seems to be: "Yeah, that would be nice, but nobody's breaking down the door for the feature."
I suspect most folks who are into MP3 compressed audio are focused on iPods and their equivalents. This notion is somewhat borne out by the fact that boom boxes that allow iPods to be plugged into a slot are becoming increasingly available. For myself, I would consider the MP3-CD capability to be much more cost-effective.
The age of the rewriteable CD has certainly arrived with a vengeance. I go for a walk after I get out of bed and carry a plastic bucket to collect street litter. Over the past year, discarded CDs have become a common find -- I picked up three of them one morning.
* I've also been building up, on an intermittent basis, a collection of MIDI files on my PC. MIDI files, if you're not familiar with them, are not audio recordings like MP3, instead being essentially digital "scores" that tell the PC's music synthesis system how to play a certain tune, with the file specifying different instruments, the parameters for modifying the play of each instrument, and the sequence of notes for the melodic track being played by each instrument.
The good news is that they're very compact, a few tens of kilobytes at most, and fidelity is as good as that of the music synthesizer on the PC that plays them. The bad news is that the synthetic instruments are generally toylike and the result is toylike music, which is why I suspect the copyright cops don't seem driven to shut down the MIDI music sites -- at least not yet. The tunes sound too cheesy to compete with the real thing.
However, toylike has an advantage. I like to try to play tunes I hear but don't have the scores for on my piano keyboard, but it turns out that even a pop tune played by a vocal-guitar-bass-drum ensemble can be tricky to translate into a keyboard tune played with two hands that sounds like it's worth the bother. It only gets worse as the ensemble gets more complicated. The nice thing about the MIDI files are that the arrangements are generally simple and easy to backtrack. Another plus is that some of them are actually pretty clever and snappy despite their toylike nature, and I have an idea at the back of my mind to record some of them and put them in my MP3 archives for use in digital music players.
* ELECTRONIC ICU: As reported in an article in BUSINESS WEEK ("The Doctor Is (Plugged) In" by Timothy J. Mullaney, 26 June 2006), in 2000 the nonprofit Sentara Healthcare system in Norfolk, Virginia, had a problem: the intensive care units (ICUs) in the seven hospitals in the system had costs three times higher than the rest of the operation, often got frazzled doctors out of bed in the middle of the night to handle emergencies, and -- worst of all -- had a mortality rate running up to 40%.
Then Sentara's CEO, David L. Bernd, got a cold-call from a salesman from Visicu INC in Baltimore, Maryland. Almost nobody likes salesmen calling from out of the blue, but this one had a pitch that made Mr. Bernd sit up and listen: Visicu wanted to sell Sentara an "electronic ICU" system that used modern networking to link ICUs with the resources needed to run them. Now Sentara operates an eICU system at a total of eleven ICUs distributed over six hospitals, with company officials wondering how they ever got along without it. Costs have dropped and survival rates risen dramatically. The Visicu system paid off its $1.6 million USD purchase pricetag in only six months. The average ICU stay fell from 4.4 days to 3.6 days.
The Visicu eICU keeps an electronic watch on patients with cameras, sensitive microphones, and sensor systems. Patients also have an emergency button they can press if things get dodgy. There are local staff, but the experts are consolidated into a central control center filled with video displays and computer readouts that is staffed in shifts, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The system software gives alarms when a patient undergoes a dangerous change in condition, and prioritizes patients to place those who need the most immediate care at the top of the list. The system also provides database information on patients and treatments.
It all sounds sterile and mechanized, but patients seem to like it, feeling that the new system is keeping a much closer eye on them than the old. The statistics seem to bear that out: many of the ICU fatalities were from opportunistic infections -- blood infections and pneumonia -- and the early signs of infections are now spotted much more quickly and reliably.
The eICU is still far from the norm in US hospitals. The up-front cost is hard for small hospitals to bear, and the cost of maintaining the system is not cheap either -- though Sentara certainly found much it cheaper than continuing on as before. Insurance and Medicare don't cover eICU costs yet, and eICUs also suffer from one of the classic problems of such electronic systems: lack of standardization. The eICU system doesn't neatly link into existing hospital record systems.
Anybody with any knowledge of such system integration issues knows they are a nightmare and can sometimes be all but impossible to fix. However, eICUs are clearly an idea whose time has come. It is estimated that the nation's ICUs require the support of 54,000 specialists to do the job right. With only about 6,000 specialists actually available, technology is just going to have to help carry the weight.
* THE BLIND WATCHMAKER (3): As Richard Dawkins point out, though Charles Darwin got many things very right in his THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, he was hobbled by the fact that nobody understood heredity in his day. There was a general belief at the time that if two organisms mated that had different features, the progeny would have an averaging or blend of the features.
This clearly does happen, but if it were the only truth in the matter it would pose a problem for natural selection: any variation in individuals would soon be averaged out and lost in the population. A Catholic monk in Austria named Gregor Mendel soon figured out, in extensive experiments on pea plants, that blending didn't seem to be the way things worked after all. Mendel noticed that, say, a pea plant that was short that was bred with a pea plant that was tall would produce tall plants, but the tall plants would then produce both tall and short plants in a 3:1 ratio.
Mendel did little to promote his work -- he was a monk with monastic duties to perform, plant breeding was a sideline -- and his research was ignored for decades. In modern times, we know that traits are passed on in units known as "genes". By the early 20th century it was recognized that a set of strandlike structures in our cells known as "chromosomes" carried the genes. Further research showed that the important component of the chromosomes was a molecule known as "deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)". It wasn't until the 1950s that the structure of DNA and its action was first understood. Now we know the precise organization of DNA for humans, and many other organisms as well.
DNA provides the "genetic code" that defines us. It has been called the "blueprint" of life, but this is an inexact comparison. A blueprint is a scaled drawing of an object to be built, for example a house. DNA isn't a structured list of the parts of an organism and a map of their layout as such; it's more like a dynamic, self-modifying computer program that instructs cells how to organize themselves and grow into a complete organism. A genetic command might just say "grow a finger" and then call a "routine" that grows a finger. Sometimes a genetic error may specify the wrong number of fingers -- six-toed cats are not that unusual, they can usually be spotted by their oversized paws, and in extremely rare cases humans can have six fingers as well.
DNA is copied or "transcribed" with mechanisms that ensure high fidelity in the transcription process. Even a good typist has an error rate billions of times greater than the DNA transcription process. The transcription has to be that good simply because there are so many cells in our body, each with their own DNA, grown from the single-celled ovum that we each started out from. If the transcription process weren't almost perfect, we'd never be able to grow all those working cells.
Changes do occur in DNA, of course, due to chemicals or radiation or whatever, and there are occasional errors in transcription. These are mutations, which end up flowing into the pool of variation. From the point of view of evolutionary biology, the fact that DNA is subject to reliable transcription with rare modifications gives us a "telescope" to examine the relationships of organisms. We share some genetic sequences, effectively unchanged, with pea plants and even bacteria, while others are unique to us; and we can gauge how close our relationship is with other organisms by identifying how much we differ.
Another, particularly interesting, revelation is that our genomes are littered with broken sequences, genes that once had a function but now have no directly useful purpose. In some cases, these "pseudogenes" aren't even human in origin. A class of viruses known as "retroviruses" -- the HIV virus is the best-known -- will insert their own genome into the genome of a target cell to take over operation of the cell. In some cases retroviruses will infect ova or sperm, and the retroviral sequences will be passed down through subsequent generations.
In some organisms, a latent retrovirus genome can be reactivated, causing the organism to develop a retroviral infection without any external exposure to the retrovirus -- a phenomenon that definitely baffled the researchers who first noticed animals spontaneously coming down with viral infections. All the retroviral sequences in the human genome are now broken and fragmentary, but their presence as genetic "fossils" still provides evidence of our less-than-straightforward past history. Some have compared the human genome to a scrapyard littered with rusty old parts.
It is a bit puzzling that so much genetic junk is retained in our genomes, since from a Darwinian point of view it would seem like excess baggage that would be thrown out, but it appears that it imposes little penalty, and some suspect the pseudogenes aren't as entirely useless as they look: In some cases, they may perform subtle functions not necessarily related to their original function.
Our cells provide us with another DNA bonus: they carry a set of little baglike "organelles" called "mitochondria" that actually have their own mini-sets of DNA, separate from the DNA in the cell's chromosomes. It appears that sometime in the past the mitochondrion was a separate organism, it seems a bacterium, that formed a partnership with the rest of our cell. This, incidentally, seems like another good example of the opportunism of natural selection: it's as much a kluge as the twisted form of the halibut. In any case, the ova from which each of us stemmed got its mitochondria from the egg provided by our mother; our father's sperm cell didn't carry any mitochrondria along with it. Mitochrondial DNA gives an interesting crosscheck on our ancestry, traced down solely through our line of mothers before us.
* DNA has revolutionized evolutionary biology. Using DNA, we can construct a detailed map of the variations in DNA among the different kingdoms of life, branching off from a root of common patterns. This "tree of life" broadly reflects the classifications of organisms set up by traditional taxonomy, using comparisons of physical features, but in some cases traditional taxonomy has been proven wildly wrong.
With the power of DNA, relationships that were once obscure become clear. Is the giant panda a relative of the little red panda and its relatives, the raccoon, coati mundi, and so on? Or is it a very unusual bear? DNA says it's a bear. Similarly, it was long wondered if little dogs were descended from foxes or jackals while big dogs were descended from wolves. DNA shows that all dogs, even Pekinese, have wolf ancestry, with genetic codes that vary only slightly from their ancestry -- though it's obvious that those slight changes make a really big difference.
The wolf's scientific name is Canis lupus. Traditionally, dogs were lumped together as Canis familiaris, but now they are known as Canis lupus familiaris. I have neighbors who have two dogs, a malamute and a dark-brown chihuahua. I stop on occasion to play with the malamute, which is, as is often the case with its kind, easy-going, friendly, and a bit endearingly ditzy. The chihuahua, as also might be expected with its kind, prances around the malamute excitedly and yaps ferociously at me -- though it will stop on occasion as if to think over if this really makes sense. It always decides it does and goes back to yapping.
The wolf in the malamute is obvious, if clearly diluted; seeing a wolf in the chihuahua is of course harder. It is downright astonishing to realize that both are almost completely wolves under the skin. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- FOOD & FARMING (1): Chapter 3 of Brian Hayes' excellent book INFRASTRUCTURE discusses the industry of food production -- like it or not, it is indeed an industry, one which features a level of high tech and automation.
This is reflected in the numbers of people who actually still farm for a living. In the early days of America, city dwellers were a small minority. By the late 19th century, the balance had tipped towards city folk, and now only about 1% of Americans are farmers. Productivity of this small minority is so great that not only can they feed all other Americans, they have food left to export as well. Surprisingly, although big corporations are heavily involved with US agriculture, American farms themselves are 98% family operations.
* Flying over the US Midwest reveals a checkerboard pattern of farm plots, dotted by small towns. The checkerboard scheme was actually the brainchild of Thomas Jefferson who, before he became president, drafted the Land Ordinance Act of 1785, which defined how the new territories to the West were to be parceled out:
Of course, with industrialization such small farms are no longer economically practical except for specialized crops, and these days the average US farm plot is about 500 acres (202 hectares).
The square plot has the difficulty that squares don't map neatly to the surface of a sphere -- the distance between lines of longitude shrinks the farther north one goes -- and the square patterns are adjusted accordingly. This is why north-south rural roads tend to take a sideways jag every now and then.
The square plot is not universal. Along the US eastern seaboard and in Europe, plots are generally arranged to follow the lay of the land and have a disorderly layout as seen from the air. Another difference between the US and elsewhere is that American farm houses are arranged in an isolated fashion. In Europe and Asia, farmers tend to live together in small villages, but US farming follows a style of proud independence and self-sufficiency.
* While fields planted with crops aren't usually fenced, rangelands for cattle or pastures for horses generally are. Fence styles tend to vary by region. In America's New England, farmers would pile up the stones cleared from their land to build walls. In Virginia and some other parts of the South, timbers were stacked up in a zigzag or "worm" pattern, an approach that used more wood than a linear fence but didn't require digging postholes. In parts of Europe, sturdy hedgerows divide land.
When farmers began to break in the prairies of the American MidWest, they didn't have much stone or timber available, and so they tried hedges first. However, a newfangled invention, barbed wire, created by a competitive set of inventors in the town of Dekalb, Illinois, proved much cheaper and easier to handle. There was bitter competition between barbed wire manufacturers trying to get their piece of the huge market, with a wide variety of barbed-wire patterns devised in order to get around patent protection.
The inventors of barbed wire were later appalled when their invention was used in prison camps and on the battlefield. Today, the military uses "razor wire", which is not so much wire as a very narrow ribbon of metal flanked at intervals by rectangular razor-sharp fins and coiled up in a "concertina". It's much nastier than any agricultural barbed wire, and as carefully avoided by those familiar with it as any porcupine.
Today, ranchers use electrified fences to keep in livestock. The fences are just wires string with electrically-insulating standoffs onto posts. The fence is charged to a high voltage, but with very slight power, resulting in a quick but not particularly dangerous sting on contact. It is a bit of rural wisdom not to urinate on an electric fence. High security military installations and the like use true high-voltage fences: grabbing onto one is likely to result in lethal electrocution.
There are other forms of fences in use in agriculture, for instance the white board fences used in horse country. Chain-link fence, though common in urban settings, isn't much used in the country: apparently it's just too expensive. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* BACTERIAL LODGERS: Everyone is familiar with the fact that there are a number of species of bacteria that make their home in our bodies and do us no harm, but according to an article in THE ECONOMIST ("Hard To Digest", 3 June 2006), there are about 800 species of bacteria living in our gut. The number of bacterial cells in our bodies outnumber our own body cells by an order of magnitude -- simple bacterial prokaryotic cells are generally smaller than our our own more elaborate eukayrotic cells. A recent research paper by Steven Gill of The Institute of Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland, and his colleagues, suggests that the total genome of this society of bacteria is about a hundred times bigger than the human genome itself.
The team sampled the bacteria in the feces of two volunteers. There was no way to decipher the genomes of all the bacteria in one relatively short project, but it was possible to make rough maps to help determine the size of the genomes. It was then possible to compare genes that they mapped with a database of known genes to get an idea of what the bacteria were doing. The conclusion of the TIGR team was that the bacteria were involved in the metabolism of plant nutrients and possibly involved in synthesis of several important vitamins.
In other words, humans are "superorganisms", colonies of organisms instead of a single organism. The next step is to determine how the populations of gut bacteria vary among human populations. Another interesting line of study is to determine how the bacteria become established in the first place. It appears that as human babies are being born, they swallow fluids as they travel down the birth canal, with the fluid containing the bacteria they will need later in life.
Much more research needs to be done to nail down the symbiotic interaction between humans and their gut bacteria, and to determine if that knowledge can be used to improve human health. It is interesting to speculate that at some time in the not-so-near future, we may be able to modify our intestinal flora to provide capabilities we don't have at the present time.
* Another article in THE ECONOMIST ("From Hand To Mouth", 27 May 2006) zeroed in a bit closer on the complicated ecology of our intestinal flora. While much fuss has been made in the press about the nasty "methicillin-resistant Staphlococcus aureus (MRSA)" bacterium that has been killing hospital patients, it has a competitor, Clostridium difficile (CD), that has been scoring kills of its own. About 20% of those infected will have repeated bouts of CD infection, and a few percent, generally the old or those in poor health, will die.
CD is a colon bacterium, normally a small component of the entire intestinal ecosystem. However, when patients are given hefty doses of antibiotics, the result is that most of colon bacteria are killed, allowing CD to move into the vacuum. CD is a hardy bacteria, forming spores that can persist for a long time in the outside world -- on telephones, doorknobs, toilets -- and produce toxins when they hatch.
Getting a handle on CD is difficult because it's hard to culture -- that's why the name includes the term "difficile" -- and standard antibiotics are an uncertain fix, since they are part of the cause of the problem in the first place and are now seen as encouraging the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains in the second place. CD-specific antibiotics are now in trials, as is an interesting drug named tolevamer. It is actually a synthetic polymer, what in plain terms what might be called a plastic, that jams the toxin released by the CD spores when they hatch.
In the meantime, the best available defense is to keep hospitals and clinics squeaky-clean, particularly with bleach, and making sure medical staff scrub up on a regular basis. However, this requires a fanatical level of dedication to hygiene to be effective, and not all hospitals have really appreciated the necessity yet.
* WEB-BASED MICROFINANCING: Back in March, I ran an article in these pages on "web-based microfinancing (WBMF)", which involved websites set up to provide loans from small-scale developed-world "venture capitalists" to entrepreneurs in undeveloped-world countries who wanted to set up a small business. An article in BUSINESS WEEK ("Lots Of Loans But No Banks" by Timothy J. Mullaney, 3 July 2006), describes the emergence of WBMF between developed-world users.
The two main players in this new field are Zopa LTD of London and Prosper Marketplace INC of San Francisco. Prosper is backed by eBay alumnai and claims to have handled 1,500 loans for over $7 million USD in four months of operation. These WBMF operations effectively amount to web-facilitated loan co-ops, with the users setting up a pool of funds that are loaned out. It's not anything resembling a new concept: the practice is common in many Asian countries, such as Vietnam, where it's called hoi -- and in fact Prosper appears to have been at least in part inspired by hoi co-ops run by Bay-Area Vietnamese immigrants.
Nobody's really expecting WBMF to become an economic juggernaut. Financial services are dominated by big players and WBMF is likely to remain a niche player for some time. However, it is a niche with some attractions: there's a sense of community among the users, the loan rates usually beat anything that can be obtained by borrowers through the mainstream financial community, and the return on investment by lenders is well better than what they can get from most banks. The efficiencies are due to the fact that the organizational overhead is so low, with the WBMF companies simply taking a small cut to stay in business.
The threat is defaults on loans -- it is estimated that about 14% of personal loans out in the non-Internet world are never repaid. However, a loan of $5,000 USD on a WBMF site might be funded by a 100 users, spreading out risk, and so far the WBMF operations say the rate of defaults is very low. As with online sales, lenders can obtain "grade reports" on borrowers, giving the level of risk for the loan. Not surprisingly, most bad-credit borrowers have a hard time getting money from a WBMF operation.
The comment that the WBMF operations foster a sense of community might be shrugged off as just a "feel-good" notion, but in fact it is at the core of the concept. The lenders and borrowers know each other online and build up networks of trust. Money can be a source of lasting emnity between associates, but it can also foster strong alliances. Nothing makes for a more durable friendship than one that provides financial profit for both sides.
* In somewhat related news, a sidebar article in THE ECONOMIST ("In Hock", 27 May 2006) describes how major Italian banking groups are into pawnbroking. Banca Regionale Europa, for example, has nine pawn branches. The roots of the practice can be organizationally traced back to the 16th century or earlier, with some of Italy's most venerable banks having actually started out as pawn operations.
The banks seem to see their pawn operations as a business that does pay for itself, but mostly performed to assist poor citizens, with bank officials saying they try to be as generous as they reasonably can with the loans. If the loans aren't repaid, the pawned items are auctioned off, with the bank keeping the cost of the loan plus 5% and passing any surplus off to the borrower. Not surprisingly, the pawn branches of the banks are more in evidence in poor southern Italy than in prosperous northern Italy.
This little article was interesting because an American, with shallow cultural roots, tends to find the notion of a banking organization with a continuous organizational history five centuries long a bit mind-boggling. The article also had a cartoon illustration featuring an ATM with logos for Visa and Mastercard -- plus an image of three globes.
* PLEASE STAND BY: As considered in an article in THE ECONOMIST ("Pulling The Plug On Standby Power", 11 March 2006), it comes as a bit of a surprise to realize that the clock on a microwave oven may be burning up more electricity than the oven does itself. It shouldn't be such a surprise: the oven itself is only used intermittently, but the clock is on all the time.
Any prosperous home is full of electronic gadgetry that simply sits there soaking up energy through its electric cord even when it's not doing anything all that useful. At the beginning of the year, the California Energy Commission put its foot down and specified limits on how much "standby power" an electronic device could draw. It is the first such legislation anywhere in the world.
The exercise owes much to Alan Meier, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, California. About a decade ago, he got to wondering how much power his gadgets ate up, with his curiosity leading to a 1998 LBNL report that estimated it was 5% of total residential electricity consumption. That may not sound like much, but considering the overall scale means that amounts to the output of 18 power plants.
That report was theoretical, based on assumptions. To get a better idea, Dr. Meier and his LBNL colleagues did a field study, rigorously measuring standby power draw, and found that for some devices it was up to 10%. Similar studies in other countries have come to much the same conclusion. What was ironic was that the studies showed much of the wasted power was completely unnecessary: a TV from one manufacturer would have a much lower level of standby power than a comparable TV from another. Dr. Meier concluded that there was no need for an electronic device to use more than a watt of standby power, and that it would not be technically difficult to reduce overall standby power consumption by half or even two-thirds.
One of the biggest power wasters is the power supply. Old-fashioned "linear" power supplies use a hefty transformer to step down the AC electricity from the wall plug, which is then rectified into DC and filtered, with a power transistor essentially burning up the excess DC voltage to give the voltage level needed by the circuitry. A smarter approach is to use a switching power supply, which pulses on and off to gate the needed amount of electricity to the circuitry. A "switcher" wastes far less power and is much more compact.
Switchers are nothing new, they've been around for decades. However, only about a fifth of the power supplies in consumer gear are switchers. Linear supplies are cheaper, and the manufacturer doesn't care much about the cost of electricity to the consumer.
Various nations have implemented programs to mandate more efficient electronic gadgetry. The best-known is "Energy Star", which began in the US in 1992 and is now common to a number of countries. Energy Star is voluntary; it sets power level guidelines and any device that meets them gets to wear an Energy Star label.
The Paris-based International Energy Agency adopted Dr. Meier's 1-watt recommendation in 1999, with Australia implementing it (on a voluntary basis) in 2000. The scheme went into practice in 2002 and most products are expected to meet the 1-watt standard by 2012.
California was the first government to make the 1-watt limit mandatory. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has objected, saying the voluntary schemes worked well enough, but it seems the CEA is fighting the tide. If California's experiment works out, consumer electronics manufacturers can expect to see more of the same in the future.