Milan – Page 627 – a sibilant intake of breath

Boomtowns and bitumen

Since 1999, the population of Fort McMurray has nearly doubled. Primarily, this is on account of the oil sands: unconventional petroleum reserves whose exploitation is being driven by high prices and geopolitics. The demand for labour is dramatically increasing its price, both directly and indirectly. Apparently, inexperienced truck drivers can expect to make $100,000 per year. Shell has also just opened a 2,500 unit housing complex for its oil sands employees, part of their $12 billion in local infrastructure spending.

With oil around $90 a barrel and the atmosphere still being treated as a carbon dump, this is not terribly surprising. That said, such projects are certain to develop increasing momentum of their own. Once they bring enough jobs and money, they are hard for a provincial government to not support – especially if many of the environmental costs are being borne by people outside the province or by future generations. Internalizing environmental externalities through taxation or regulation becomes progressively more difficult as the incentive of certain parties to preserve the status quo increases. Such asymmetries are likely to give oil sands development a harmful legacy in terms of general policy development, in addition to its climate change effect and local environmental impacts.

Materialism

The terms ‘materialism’ and ‘materialist’ seem to be popularly misunderstood. As such, it bears mentioning that there are two wildly different interpretations of what these terms mean.

Perhaps the more common interpretation is based around a desire for material possessions. In this view, a ‘materialist’ is someone who continually wants to own more things.

A much more interesting definition holds that being a ‘materialist’ means that you believe everything in the universe is made of comprehensible materials, interacting with each other on the basis of laws we can understand. This viewpoint definitely raises important questions in philosophy – and potentially lethal ones in theology – it is also much more worthy of consideration than the fact that neighbour X might want a bigger car than neighbour Y.

Meat and antibiotics

Quite a while ago, I wrote about connections between human disease and the factory farming of animals. Recently, some new observational data has supported the link between the two. In the Netherlands, a new form of the superbug MRSA has emerged. It is strongly resistant to treatment with tetracycline antibiotics: a variety heavily used on livestock. The animals need the drugs because they are kept in such appalling conditions (unhygienic and constrained) that they would get infections too easily otherwise.

Xander Huijsdens and Albert de Neeling found that 39% of pigs and 81% of pig farms in the Netherlands were hosts to the potentially lethal antibiotic resistant bacteria. People who came into contact with pigs were 12 times more likely to contract this form of MRSA than members of the ordinary population; those who come into contact with cattle are 20 times more susceptible. The strain has since been found in Denmark, France, and Singapore. A study conducted by the University of Guelph found the strain in 25% of local pigs and 20% of pig farmers.

Maintaining the effectiveness of antibiotics for the treatment of people is highly important for human welfare. Antibiotics are one of the major reasons why modern medicine is valuable: they help people die dramatically less often after childbirth and surgery than was the case before their development. They have also helped to make diseases that would formerly have been probable death sentences treatable. The fact that we are allowing farms to deplete their value so that they can produce meat more cheaply (by forcing more animals closer together in less clean conditions) seems profoundly unwise. In Pennsylvania, legislators have even banned farmers who produce hormone and antibiotic milk from saying so on their packaging – on the grounds that it would make consumers unduly worried about the other milk on offer.

AXA lock flaw

In a situation somewhat similar to the bump key vulnerability, another serious mechanical lock flaw has been found, this one affecting a popular kind of Dutch bicycle lock.

I found this by means of an interesting blog about mechanical locks.

200 million pieces of Pi

Pi – the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter – is an irrational number, meaning its decimal expansion never ends or repeats. As such, it could never be written out in full. If Pi is also a normal number, roughly meaning that the value of an arbitrary digit is random, an interesting property arises. Specifically, that every possible string of digits will be located in it somewhere. Given that any text can be perfectly converted into a number and any image or sound can be very well approximated by a number, this means that every possible written document, painting, photograph, symphony, and lecture can conceivably be located somewhere within that endless string of digits.

Quite a while ago, I had the idea that you could refer to any information in terms of a ‘Pi address’ – where to look within Pi to find the desired data. It would work for anything from the newest Tori Amos album to the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The biggest problem is that the address would, in most cases, require more storage space than the actual data.

This website proves the point by letting you search the first 200 million digits of Pi for any string you want. My birthday begins at digit 196,469,286; my office phone number begins at digit 124,573,291. Because it is mathematically possible to calculate Pi from any arbitrary decimal place, it isn’t necessary to find all the prior digits to convert those back into the numbers they represent. That said, for large pieces of data (like the book and album mentioned), the Pi address would almost certainly be a lot longer than a data file containing the entire work. Pi addresses may not be a good way to refer to information, though they do provide a relatively dramatic perspective on the nature of infinity.

Passionate Minds

I started Passionate Minds: The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment, Featuring the Scientist Émilie du Châtelet, the Poet Voltaire, Sword Fights, Book Burnings, Assorted Kings, Seditious Verse, and the Birth of the Modern World with high hopes. It promised science, literature, and history in an accessible package. That promise is only partially realized. While the book does reveal some of the most remarkable (and the most flawed) characteristics of both Voltaire and du Châtelet, it sometimes makes claims that stretch the evidence provided. Often, the book simply asserts things rather than seeking to prove them.

Bodanis’ central thesis – that Émilie du Châtelet has been given insufficient historical attention – is fairly robust. Clearly, hers was an extraordinary life: born into nobility, but driven towards science and the sometimes hapless literary life of Voltaire instead of occupying a more traditional position in the Court. At times, the book demonstrates startling contrasts between the way of life at the time and the present. This is especially true of the marriages: purely political and economic unions in which years of habitation with a prominent lover were apparently not too exceptional. When a court rival attacks Voltaire through a lawsuit, her husband comes to his defence – despite how Voltaire has been living with his wife for years and they are a highly prominent couple.

In the end, the book would have been better if it had focused less on intrigue and more on what significant scientific contributions du Châtelet actually made. Saying that “[m]ore technical aspects of her work played a great role in energizing the French school of theoretical physics, associated with Lagrande and Laplace” isn’t a very convincing way of showing historical importance. Likewise, the assertion that “[t]he use of the square of the speed of light, c², in Einstein’s most famous equation, E=mc² is directly traceable to her work” is never adequately argued.

The book does an excellent job of describing how atrocious the medicine of the time was, contributing to du Châtelet’s own relatively early death in childbirth. It also relates some fascinating historical episodes in an engaging way: for instance, the rigged lottery through which Voltaire made his fortune.

A book about du Châtelet written by someone with more of a focus on studying and explaining science would be a better tribute to the woman than this interesting yet flawed volume.

Clearing Indonesian rainforests for biofuel

I have already mentioned how important rainforests are to climatic stability. Likewise, the acute danger that biofuel production will lead to increased deforestation, either directly – through the madness that is palm oil biofuel – or indirectly – by increasing the price of crops like corn, the value of agricultural land, and the profits to be made from cutting down rainforest and growing cheaper things like soy there instead.

This video – found via Grist – does a good job of attaching some visuals to the argument. Unhappily enough, this crazy conversion of rainforest into palm oil biofuels is taking place in the very state where the UNFCCC is meeting right now, in order to try to tackle the problem of climate change.

‘Green’ fuel for military jets

There has recently been a fair bit of media coverage discussing an announcement from the United States Air Force that they are trying to use 50% synthetic fuel by 2016. The Lede, a blog associated with the New York Times, seems to misunderstand the issue completely. They are citing this as an example of the Air Force “trying to be true stewards of the environment.” There is no reason for which synthetic fuels are necessarily more environmentally friendly than petroleum; indeed, those made from coal are significantly worse.

The actual fuel being used – dubbed JP-8 – is made from natural gas. Air Force officials say they eventually intend to make it from coal, given that the United States has abundant reserves. This inititative is about symbolically reducing dependence on petroleum imports, not about protecting the environment. The German and Japanese governments did the same thing during the Second World War, when their access to oil was restricted. Furthermore, it is worth stressing that efforts by militaries to be greener are virtually always going to be window dressing. The operation of armed forces is inevitably hugely environmentally destructive: from munitions factories to test ranges to the wanton fuel inefficiency of aircraft afterburners, the whole military complex is about as anti-green as you can get.

People should be unwilling to accept superficial claims that installing some solar panels and building hybrid tanks is going to change that.

Strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, gravity, and…

In the mail today, I got some neodymium magnets from my brother Sasha as a birthday gift. They are good fun – largely because of how fundamentally counterintuitive magnetism is. Is just seems odd that things are repelled and drawn together by an invisible force that manifests itself at short distances. The danger to nearby magnetic stripe cards and hard drives is trivial when compared to their enjoyment potential.

The only downside of nickel-plated rare earth magnets is their tendency to snap together violently if you aren’t quite careful. Given how brittle they are, this can send tiny shards flying in all directions. This afternoon’s messing about only had one casualty – one of the four smallest magnets among the fifty found its way between the two largest. The larger fragments of the small magnet are now holding papers to my filing cabinet.

On the plus side, I have worked out how to build a reasonably effective magnetic canon using most of the magnets in the set and the barrel from a Bic four-colour pen. It is also trivially easy to make a compass using all fifty magnets in a line, hanging from a piece of floss.

One day, I want to get a full-sized, absurdly powerful supermagnet of the kind at the bottom of this page. At $50 to $275 apiece, they may have the lowest cost-to-danger ratio of anything you can buy online.

The efficiency of solar

Robert Rapier, petroleum expert, and Steve Heckeroth, writing for Mother Earth News, agree that solar power is the future.

Based on their calculations, the overall efficiency of biomass “from sun to wheel” is between 0.01% and 0.05%. By contrast, charging electric vehicles using solar power can produce efficiencies of 3% to 20% on the same metric. Electric drivetrains are also “5 to 10 times more efficient than internal combustion engines.” Even if power from conventional fuels is charging the vehicles, overall emissions are likely to be lower. It is also much easier to sequester greenhouse gas emissions from big power plants than to do the same thing with car exhaust.

If you insist on maintaining a car-based society, basing it around electric vehicles charged using renewable energy or fossil fuel generation with sequestration seems to be the way to go. Hybrids are only a minor improvement and hydrogen fuel cells are a non-starter.