Hot sauce aficionados may be familiar with the Scoville Scale, used to express the heat of a sauce or pepper. The other day, my friend Antonia sent me an article explaining that the process of determining a Scoville rating might be significantly refined, thanks to carbon nanotubes:

The well-established Scoville method – currently the industry standard – involves diluting a sample until five trained taste testers cannot detect any heat from the chilli. The number of dilutions is called the Scoville rating; the relatively mild Jalapeño ranges from around 2,500-8,000, whereas the hottest chilli in the world, the ‘Naga Jolokia’, has a rating of 1,000,000. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) can also be used but this requires bulky, expensive equipment and detailed analysis of the capsaicinoids.

In Compton’s method, the capsaicinoids are adsorbed onto multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) electrodes. The team measures the current change as the capsaicinoids are oxidised by an electrochemical reaction, and this reading can be translated into Scoville units. The technique is called adsorptive stripping voltammetry (ASV), and is a relatively simple electrochemical method.

The Scoville Scale is pretty easy to understand. A sauce with a rating of 1000 can be diluted 1:1 with water to produce a sauce with a rating of 500. Tabasco sauce, of the sort ubiquitous in diners, has a rating of between 2,500 and 5,000. Dave’s Insanity Sauce - the spiciest one in my kitchen - has a rating of about 180,000. Even taking the upper estimate of Tabasco’s potency, that means one tablespoon of Dave’s is equivalent to about half a litre of Tabasco.

Of course, those who truly wish for their epithelial cells to signal as much heat and abrasion as is theoretically possible can do better. Blair’s 16 Million Reserve, which consists of a little bottle of pure capsaicin crystals, weighs in at 16,000,000 Scoville heat units. One tablespoon is thus akin to 1.31 litres of Dave’s Insanity Sauce, or 47.16 litres of Tabasco. Just the thing you need if you want to turn a bland chili dinner for your million person standing army into something a bit more interesting.

Having spent two evenings searching with little luck, Emily and I have concluded that it can be challenging to find interesting social things happening in Ottawa. The University of Ottawa seems particularly devoid of life, though I suppose classes are not in session.

How do people who have lived here longer work their way into situations where entertainment of some kind is provided, as well as where it is possible to meet new and interesting individuals?

My friend Mark sent me a link to a book in progress about sustainable energy. One of the more interesting sections is on vehicle efficiency. The author stresses that, while some kinds of efficiency gains are physically possible, others are not:

Could we make a new car that consumes 100 times less energy and still goes at 70mph? No. Not if the car has the same shape. The energy is going mainly into making air swirl. Changing the materials the car is made from makes no difference to that. A miraculous improvement to the engine could perhaps boost its efficiency from 25% to 50%. But the energy consumption of a car is still going to be roughly 40 kWh per 100 km.

The story is a familiar one: efficiency can get you a long way, but there are no free rides. Another interesting comment from this chapter is the major design differences between an efficient city car and an efficient highway car. Since the former is always stopping and starting, low weight is really important. Brakes that regenerate energy also make a big difference. For a highway car that avoids major acceleration and deceleration, the most important thing is reducing drag. Weight is comparatively trivial.

One other interesting assertion is that the energy involved in making a car is actually pretty trivial compared to the amount used in driving it around:

The energy cost of making the raw materials for a one tonne car is thus equivalent to about 3000 km of driving; an appreciable cost, but probably only 1% of the lifetime energy-cost of the car’s fuel.

If correct, that makes it seem a lot more reasonable to upgrade from an old and inefficient vehicle to a newer and less gas-thirsty model. It also suggests that government programs to replace inefficient cars with better ones might have strong justification, in terms of climate change mitigation potential.

In order to move to a low carbon society, we need to do a slew of things. We definitely need to increase the energy efficiency of accomplishing most tasks. We definitely need to reduce the quantity of greenhouse gas produced in the process of generating a unit of energy. We probably need to significantly reduce total energy consumption. Finally, we need to take actions that manage the greenhouse gasses that will inevitably be produced by some actions. The protection and enhancement of carbon sinks (mostly forests and soils) are essential for this.

When it comes to reducing total energy usage, the chapter does make one excellent suggestion: “a cyclist at 21 km/h consumes about 30 times less energy per kilometre than a lone car-driver on the motorway: about 2.4 kWh per 100 km.” Those who cycle more slowly are likely to be even more efficient, since doubling the time it takes to travel somewhere apparently reduces energy usage by three quarters.

The Platypus is a strange and intriguing creature. Some of the odder things about it:

1. Males can inject venom from spurs on their ankles. The venom will not kill humans, but is extremely painful and heightens overall sensitivity to pain for a period between a few days and several months.
2. They have ten sex chromosomes, out of a total of 52. Males are ‘XYXYXYXYXY.’
3. They swim using only their two front legs, though the back two are also webbed.
4. Only the left ovary of females is functional.
5. They have no visible ears.
6. They only use their eyes while above water.
7. Underwater, they can detect electric fields generated by muscular contractions.
8. They lose their three teeth before they first leave their mother’s burrow.
9. They forage for twelve hours a day.
10. They have a body temperature five degrees lower than most other placental mammals.
11. Females lactate through pores in their skin. Milk pools in grooves located on their abdomens.
12. The DNA of one female - named Glennie - has now been sequenced by researchers at Oxford.

I recall reading that Australia has three types of animals: the venomous, the bizarre, and sheep. The platypus scores highly on the first two counts.

The Washington Post has an interesting special feature on improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the overall themes are quite common - Western forces are much less effective against insurgents than armies, low cost and low tech weapons can neutralize huge advantages in funds and technology - the specific details provided are quite interesting.

IEDs are apparently the single biggest killer of coalition troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Partly, that is the result of not having large enough forces to monitor important routes continuously. Partly, it is the product of the sheer volume of explosives available in both states. Partly, it is the result of assistance provided by other states or sub-state groups, such as Iranian assistance being provided to some Shiite groups. Explosively formed penetrators - capable of firing six or seven pounds of copper at 2000 metres per second - are an excellent example of a relatively low cost, low-tech technology that seriously threatens a force that is far better trained, supported, and equipped overall.

Seeing how total air superiority, expensive armoured vehicles, and sophisticated electronic countermeasures can be no match for some guys with rusty old artillery shells and some wire is a humbling reminder of the limited utility of military force. Ingenuity, practicality, and humility will probably prove to be essential qualities as the US tries to find the least bad path out of Iraq, and while NATO tries to salvage the situation in Afghanistan.

I have mentioned Facebook and the expectation of privacy before. Now, the blog of the Canadian privacy commissioner is highlighting one of the risks. Because third party applications have access to both the data of those who install them and the friends of those who have them installed, they can be used to surreptitiously collect information from those in the latter group. While this widens the scope of what third party applications can do, it also seriously undermines the much-trumpeted new privacy features in the Facebook platform.

It just goes to reinforce what I said before: you should expect that anything you post on Facebook is (a) accessible to anyone who wants to see it and (b) likely to remain available online indefinitely. The same goes for most information that is published somewhere online, including on servers you operate yourself.