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This elephant apparently got mad during an elephant polo match in Sri Lanka. I can't say that I blame him. (Yanked from Yahoo! photos)

News Caught my Attention Today

I'm not sure why, but news caught my attention today. I listen to what's going on in the world a lot, but for some reason, several things today made me feel like commenting.

First, somebody wants to replace this artwork with a Walgreens.


I'm not sure why. Drug stores are a dime a dozen, but cars on spikes are a little harder to come by. I only care about this random piece of weird art because I remember it from Wayne's World, which wasn't a great movie by any means, but I had fun with it at the time anyway.

Next there's the latest recall of toys from China, from Mattel again. Several recalls, some for lead paint, which are China's fault, but mostly for detaching magnets, which are Mattel's fault. China made the magnetic toys exactly like they were told to, but it turned out to be a bad design. This affects something like 9 million toys. For those keeping score, that's about 10 times as many as Mattel's recall from earlier in the month. China's not looking too good these days, but for perspective, most toys these days are made in China, so it's not unusual that most of the problems would come from that direction. We're still plenty capable of coming up with automobile parts and food made in America that need to be recalled. You can check this site to see if you have any of the affected toys around. The Mattel recalls are in the "Consumer Products" section. This is a good page for the paranoid to bookmark for future everybody-panic news stories.

Baltimore just announced plans to push for a gun offender registry. From what I understand, it would be similar to a sex offender registry, in that convicted gun offenders would have to notify the police of their whereabouts regularly. There is of course the question of whether it would actually be effective, seeing as the type of person who is going to commit multiple gun crimes might not be likely to keep his address updated on a bureaucratic government list. However, assume for a moment that it would actually deter some people and therefore save lives. In that case, is this a good idea? Any opinion is interesting, but I'm more interested for the moment in hearing the opinions of the more pro-gun side. From the gun-control advocate point of view, this is obviously a no-brainer, so it's not much of a jumping-off point for discussion. I'm not generally against guns, but I don't currently own one either. I understand the historical reasons for the existence of the 2nd amendment and I am well aware that for a large portion of the American population, the right to own a gun is non-negotiable. However, I also understand the "well regulated militia" part of the 2nd amendment and the fact that weapons have shown themselves to cause a lot of problems and therefore require some kind of control in a civil society. The fact is that the people on this list would be convicted of some kind of gun crime and therefore, by definition, would not be the "law-abiding citizens" always touted by the gun crowd. The question is, does this make a difference to the policy's acceptability, or does it still fall under the slippery-slope argument that tends to end discussions before they even get started? I'm actually curious what any of you might have to say about this. Leave a comment if you have an opinion.

I also read about the connection between waist size and heart trouble. So much for BMI. Now we have another number to obsess about. This issue has more meaning to me these days, as Franny and I have both dedicated ourselves to jumping back on the health bandwagon. We've gotten back into running, even getting new shoes, which hasn't happened in a while, but has made a world of difference. Apparently, 6 years is too long to depend on a pair of running shoes, even if you don't run that much. Good to know. Anyway, we're serious this time I think, even to the point of getting up early to do it. Good thing we got this itch now and not in February. Hopefully, by the time the weather gets bad again, we'll be into good habits already.

The last thing that caught my ear this afternoon was Portland's first-of-its-kind biodiesel requirement. All diesel sold in the city starting tomorrow will have to be at least 5% biodiesel, which can be used in any diesel engine. The only exception is the one truck stop in the city limits, which would likely lose all of it's business, since biodiesel is slightly more expensive and trucks could certainly make it another 10 miles to the next option. We have a biodiesel plant in the city that is more than capable of keeping up and is actually well situated to make far more as the need arises. 5% doesn't seem like much, but a 5% decrease in oil-dependence is a good start anyway. I'm guessing the rest of the state and country will be watching this experiment closely.

I'm not sure why I felt the need to expound on all that stuff. I just needed to run off at the mouth I guess (run off at the keyboard?). If you're still reading by this point, I guess you didn't have much better to do either. Sorry about that.

But Officer, I couldn't have been doing more than 25,000 mph

I'm sure by now, everyone's heard about NASA's drunken astronauts. I'm amused that the best an brightest pilots and scientists that the federal government can find need an explicit clarification that, yes, the 12-hour rule about drinking before flying does indeed apply to space flight as well. Oh, well, these are top gun style test pilots after all. And, as one caller mentioned on the radio, "I'd need a few drinks in me too before you got me into a rocket built by the lowest bidder."

Melamine II: The Homegrown Version

In a followup to my melamine rant from a couple weeks ago, it appears that a U.S. Company is guilty of exactly the same thing that we found in China. Once again, the lowest common denominator and the almighty dollar triumph over legality and morality. Yay.

Melamine everywhere

I'm sure everyone has heard about the melamine contamination in pet foods. Mostly just the dog and cat foods have made the headlines, but the contaminated wheat gluten got in lots of other animal feed too. Last week, I was working at a US Fish & Wildlife research fish hatchery and they were in the process of investigating a die-off of some of their juvenile trout. They were concerned because there was nothing they could find about the water or any microbiological issue, but they were loosing fish at a fast enough rate that it might jeopardize their ability to continue the study long enough to get results, which means wasting grant money and not getting it again. Anyway, they were just looking into the possibility that they might have some melamine contamination. According to this article, they were probably right. They do get some of their food from Bio-Oregon, which is listed in the article. Incidentally, I work there every summer too.

The thing that gets me about this melamine thing is how far it got before it was caught even though it clearly has widespread health effects. The problem is an over dependence on China as a supplier for everything: a) because they have as much manpower as we want them to throw at anything, and b) because they are willing to make everything very cheaply. This is fine for a lot of things, but cheap food ingredients are not necessarily the best choice.

The melamine was used because it fools a test for protein, but is much cheaper than actually fortifying the food for real. The normal test for protein in food is a determination of the amount of nitrogen in the food. Melamine has a lot of nitrogen, but unless further testing is done, it just raises the overall result of the nitrogen test, which is taken as higher protein content. Now, the companies involved are no longer in business, but it has been pointed out that this is a widespread practice well known in the industry in China.

So now we've discovered another test to run on foods from China, and I'm afraid that we'll pat ourselves on the back for solving this particular problem and then go back about our business of buying basic food ingredients from the lowest bidder. But how many other kinds of routine deception are happening, in China or elsewhere? If they are not an immediate health issue, would we even know? What if some petroleum byproduct happens to be a good looking substitute for vitamin C or something? What if it accumulates in people and causes birth defects or whatever? The problem is that we are getting our most basic needs filled by the lowest bidder and until something happens, we have no idea at all. Just look at the ingredient list on just about anything you eat. Chances are, unless it says nothing but "apple," there is probably something on it you can't identify. Guar gum, or soy lecithin, or some chemical you can't even pronounce that is added to keep the guar gum from sticking to the soy lecithin while your frozen whatever is shipped to your grocery store. Even the things you do understand (this case was wheat gluten) have unknown origins.

The problem is that we like to pretend that we are at the top of the world food chain, that we have the safest and best of everything, and that all the food companies have our best interests at heart. In real life, we are incredibly dependent on the rest of the world for our food supply, we have food that is safe until we find melamine or e-coli or whatever, and food companies want to avoid contamination only because it causes lawsuits and hurts shareholder value. We love to have anything we want, anytime we want, and as cheaply as possible, and in order to do that we have to keep pretending.

The alternative is making all this stuff ourselves. We have the capacity to do a lot of that, but right now, our main ability seems to be growing freaking corn. So we use it for everything we can imagine: plain corn, corn meal, corn starch, corn oil, animal feed, and high fructose corn syrup. These days we even use it as a fuel and for other industrial compounds. Aside from plain corn, most of these uses are better served by other items, i.e. sugar instead of corn syrup, but we are in a good climate region for corn, so we subsidize the hell out of it, put tariffs on the competing products, pour on gobs of fertilizer and grow as much corn as we possibly can. This is great for products that can be made out of corn, but for many other things, we now have to look elsewhere, and that is what makes us vulnerable.

The irony is that we are one of the most efficient food producers in the world. By sheer volume or total calories or whatever, we make far more than we need. But we've concentrated it into a few basic products (corn, wheat, potatoes, a few other basics), but for most other things, we have to buy from the rest of the world. We grow a lot of other things, but not in the volumes we need. We import meat, fruit, vegetables, and lots of basic ingredients from all over the world, and that puts us at risk for unscrupulous companies or even entire industries taking advantage of any cost-saving shortcuts they can think of.

As a country, we have to change our attitudes about what is worth paying for. There are many reasons I can think of for eating locally produced foods, but this may top the list.

Sorry for the rant.

But not really.

Science With Franny

This is Franny's idea. Most times, Franny finds science and how-things-work of only passable interest, at least when I talk about them. However, once in a while, and usually laying in bed almost asleep, I'll hear something like, "Do rocks have cells?" Actually, that was a question that she apparently asked a friend during biology class in high school, but it's a good example of the kind of stuff that comes up. Anyway, I dare say I have a more extensive science education (and interest) than she does (although in her defense, she does know a lot more than she lets on), and since I'm am also a known nerd, I am obliged to come up with answers or explanations for these sometimes ridiculous issues. Occasionally, these conversations even end up making me think about things in new ways and make connections I hadn't considered before. For me the topic is usually done by the time I fall asleep, but Franny usually at least pretends my explanations were interesting and has several times said that I should blog about them in case someone else is wondering about the rock/cells debate. So here goes. This is science related stuff that was interesting to Franny at least once. (This particular batch of stuff all came up last night.)

Recently, Franny spilled some oil from an oil lamp onto a bathmat. She blotted up most of it and then threw it into the wash. She showed it to me at this point and the spot where the oil had been had melted/dissolved/deformed and looked like a 4 inch wide brain poking out of the bottom of the mat. Anyway I mentioned to her that washing oil soaked things is discouraged and drying them is a big no-no. As the warning on our machine says, drying "anything that has ever had any type of oil on it (even cooking oils)" can cause "death, explosion, or fire." The mat never made it into the dryer thank goodness, and by the time she had blotted up the stain, it probably didn't have much left on it anyway, but I'm glad we didn't test the theory. The problem is that oil becomes much more volatile at higher temperature and presents a fire or explosion hazard due to all the motors and relays and such that can make sparks. It's even worse if you have a gas dryer, for obvious reasons. When Franny and I were moving to Portland, we stopped in Worland, Wyoming, which is exactly in the middle of nowhere and is where my mother spent some years growing up. Anyway, we specifically stopped to do some laundry and I was amused by the signs saying "No Roughnecks". You might think that's a redneck joke, but roughnecks are the guys that work on the oil rigs. Since they are often drenched in oil, this is exactly the issue the signs were about. Most things are not designed for use in environments where explosive conditions exist, and most electrical items have some potential for making tiny sparks during use. Some things are designed as explosion-proof, including some of the scales that I work on, since they sometimes need to be used in places with flammable gases or powders. (I do work in some hazardous environments occasionally, but the only time I've ever had to worry about this type of thing was in a flour mill of all places. I had to get some guys to stop welding because a pipe had developed a leak and was spewing a cloud of flour through the room. They understood just fine, but I still got flour all over everything, included my up-until-then precision weights. What fun to clean.)

We also got to talking about a gift card to Ritz Camera that we have and what she might buy with it. I mentioned a wide-angle attachment for her camera, and I was surprised to find out that despite here excellent photography background, she didn't know what I was talking about. The focal length of a lens determines how much of your field of vision appears on the imaging surface of the camera (either the film or digital chip). Most of you have probably seen this when adjusting the zoom on your camera. You may not have known it, but you were adjusting the focal length of the camera and thus changing how much of what was in front of you would make up the picture. Most people have used a zoom to get more detail about a portion of a scene, but most cameras can only shorten the focal length to a certain point. A wide angle lens or attachment shortens the effective focal length further and allows more of the scene to be in the picture. This isn't much good if you want more detail, but it helps if you are trying to photograph something relatively big and getting further away from it is impractical.

I can't remember what prompted it, but Franny mentioned that she didn't really understand radio waves. I noted that they were basically the same as lots of other things: microwaves, infrared light, visible light, ultraviolet light, x-rays, gamma rays, and I believe cosmic rays too. She said that those didn't make much sense either. We got into a discussion about photons and what they were. A photon is sort of a wave in that it acts like a wave when interacting with other light waves and in the way it can be manipulated, and sort of a particle in that it does not require anything else to propagate it and it comes in discreet, although very tiny amounts. It's not really a particle though in that it has no mass and is moving, ironically, at the speed of light, which particles can't do without infinite energy. It's not really a wave either, in that it has momentum and in large enough quantity, can push things. It can be affected by gravity, as in bending around star or getting stuck in black holes. One thing I couldn't remember last night was whether you could affect any of this with magnetism. I feel like you can, but I couldn't come up with an example. It was late, so the discussion didn't get into much more detail than that.

If you didn't know I was a nerd before, I've certainly confirmed it now. Much of my science is remembered from college chemistry and physics, so it may be remembered incorrectly or just plain wrong. Please leave a comment if you'd like to make any additions or corrections. I assume I got something wrong, or at least incomplete anyway. And Franny, if I mischaracterized anything you said, hey, it was late.