Cavalcade of Mammals

Keeping track of the rising tide of socialism in the US under that fiend Obama:

Still a way to go, but it is never too early to raise the alarm.

Today the US had another domestic terrorist attack, the second in two weeks. This time, a long time right-winger, an anti-semite, white supremacist, and anti-Obama birther attacked the Holocaust Museum in DC. Like the guy last week, today’s shooter had a previous conviction for domestic terrorism.

I was listening to right-wing talker Sean Hannity and a listener called in and told a ‘joke’ that was basically death-wish for the Pres. and VP, wouldn’t it be great if they both died, ha ha. Hannity had a laugh along with the caller. I wonder when these right-wing talkers will stop encouraging the violent talk?

Two recent posts on the theoildrum.com look at the question of wind power. The first post looks at the how practical it is to fit wind power into the US power grid. The main problem with wind power are that sometimes the wind doesn’t blow, so the power grid has to have excess generating capacity to meet the demand. Critics say that because of the ‘no blow’ times, wind power can’t replace base capacity, so even if lots of windmills get installed, the US still needs all the coal, nuclear, and gas power plants.

The theoildrum.com article considers the problem and concludes if wind farms are spread out and high capacity transmission lines are built to pool the power wind farms should be able to provide base power at about a quarter of the total installed windmill capacity. The power grid should be able to accommodate somewhere between 25% to 50% of US power coming from windmills.

‘Smart grid’ capability, having devices like A/C that temporarily shut off when demand is too high is also an option. Wind power is also nicely complementary to hydroelectric generation, as a dam stores power and the turbines can be spun up and down quickly as average wind strength varies.

The other theoildrum.com article looks at the cost of wind power and at whether anything limits the prospect of building lots of windmills today. There appear to be no resource that constrains windmill production. Today windmills are cheaper than anything but coal in the US, and modest carbon taxes would make wind power the cheapest power source:

It is time to build windmills, and lots of them!

A child inherits half each parents genes, and for any individual gene a sibling can either inherit the same or the other allele. Averaged out over the genome, siblings have the same allele for about half the genes.

But genes don’t assort independently of each other, genes are found on chromosomes and due to this inheritance of gene variants is lumpy, a parent has a pair of each chromosome and siblings either get the same chromosome or each gets one of the parent’s pair. This happens randomly for each of the twenty-three pairs of human chromosomes. If humans had only two chromosomes then one forth of the time two siblings would inherit the same pair (out of the four) and be genetically identical. Because humans have twenty-three chromosomes this is vanishingly unlikely. But while on average two siblings have the same gene variant half the time, there is actually a distribution centered at 50%, and siblings can inherit more or less than 50% of same alleles. So how likely are siblings to be 30% or 40% related?

Here’s what the distribution looks like. There are a few more wrinkles to consider. First off, the chromosomes recombine before they assort, so each chromosome a child inherits is a combination of the parents chromosomes. It turns out that in humans, recombination happens more than once per chromosome, about thirty-three times (The Human Genome Project
By Necia Grant Cooper, p31). I include this in my model. I don’t consider the chance that a parent will have two copies of the same allele for a gene, or how recombination is more likely at particular places along a chromosome, or that genes are clumped together in certain chromosomal regions. Here’s the distribution I find:

So siblings don't always share half their gene variants, but rather have a modest chance or being a bit more or a bit less related.


Sometimes I run across a thing so odd that it makes me wonder if I slipped into an alternate world. Today’s example:

Swatch Internet Time was a decimal time concept introduced in 1998 and marketed by the Swatch corporation as an alternative, decimal measure of time. One of the goals was to simplify the way people in different time zones communicate about time, mostly by eliminating time zones altogether.

Swatch Internet Time was announced on October 23, 1998, in a ceremony at the Junior Summit ’98 attended by Nicolas G. Hayek, President and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, President of Swatch Ltd., and Nicholas Negroponte, founder and then-director of the MIT Media Lab. During the Summit, Swatch Internet Time became the official time system for Nation1, an online country created and run by children.

The ACLU went to court and forced the release of Office of Legal Council memos written under the Bush administration to provide legal cover for torture conducted by the CIA. The memos are here. The make for chilling reading, approving the use of medieval tortures on prisoners held by the US.

Republicans have embraced torture, and react with satisfaction and glee to the documentation of US torture. Most people find it appalling. A number of moderates find torture disgusting and are glad that the Obama administration has ordered it stopped but are dead set against prosecution of the torturers. For example, read Kevin Drum, Rob Farley, and Greg Laden. Newspaper editorial boards are split between torture advocates and moderates who oppose torture but also oppose prosecution of torturers. A few editorial writers are calling for what went on to be looked into and publicized–a truth and reconciliation type panel, but they are the rare wild-eyed ones.

The law here is clear. Torture is illegal under several US laws, for example:

TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 113C > § 2340
§ 2340. Definitions

As used in this chapter–
(1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting undepecifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;
(2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm resulting from–
(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
(B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;
(C) the threat of imminent death; or
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and
(3) “United States” means the several States of the United Sof Columbia, and the commonwealths, territories, and possessions of the United States.

And yet moderates argue that government agents who tortured prisoners were told that the OLC memos made it legal and protected the agents from prosecution, and that we must respect this.

As near as I can tell the moderates are making one or more of these arguments: 1) these government agents (CIA, etc.) can torture people because they the OLC memos make their actions legal, 2) that what US agents did to prisoners wasn’t torture, or that reasonable people could disagree over whether the prisoners were tortured, or 3) a combination of the two saying that the law was unclear on how much prisoners could legally be abused and the OLC memo clarifies the law and draws the line. The third argument is what the OLC normally does–interpret ambiguous or uncertain cases for the Executive.

I won’t touch argument one. The other two arguments often get combined–mostly three with a bit of two. The third argument, the ‘normal action of the OLC’ depends on two being true.

I would argue that you are reading the parsed legal language of the memos the wrong way. You read the parsed language, the detailed descriptions of the what is allowed and its limits, i.e. “For walling, a flexible false wall…” will be used and “the head and neck are supported with a rolled hood or towel” and think you are seeing the OLC clarifying ambigous law. This is not the case. What the OLC memo does is give aproval to a set maximal torture techniques, maximal under certain limits.

The torture techniques approved are protocols of torture limited to keep from killing the prisoners not to stay on right side of the law. The OLC is approving a torture regime that has been careful worked out by trial and error to inflict maximal pain, damage, and suffering without killing the prisoners or leaving obvious signs (broken bones, scars, death). The detailed protocol for beating prisoners (“walling”, slaps, grabs) was developed to keep from killing prisoners, not to prevent torturous treatment. Repeated knocking a man’s head against the wall will cause intracranial hemorrhage that kills a man and so a special beating protocol is necessary. It is surprisingly easy to kill a person by banging their head against a wall, the head is much more delicate than the limbs. Slapping and grabbing protocols are specified to prevent broken bones and also to prevent fatal contusions. A US Army report from a few years ago found dozens of homicides of detainees, many inadvertently beaten to death.

The OLC memo limits sleep deprivation to 11 days because that is the longest anyone is known to have survived under sleep deprivation. In experiments, rats have died after two weeks of sleep deprivation, it is not clear when it would kill people. So the OLC memo is endorsing maximal sleep deprivation. After two days, sleep deprivation causes progressively worse mental anguish and physical dehabilitation.

The stress positions endorsed by OLC are extremely painful and can cause permanent joint damage. Stress positions don’t leave scars and are rarely fatal, so they get OLC endorsement.

Previously released memos allow interogation up to the point of ‘major organ failure’. The typical result of ‘major organ failure’ is death of the patient. So the OLC was endorsing interogation up to but short of death.

The OLC memos approve a set of protocols designed cause extreme mental and physical anguish without killing the prisoners. The approved treatment includes many torture techniques of ancient origin, some notorious for their recent use against US soldiers in WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The OLC wasn’t parsing ambiguous law so the ‘normal action of the OLC’ argument fails. As the government agents were using notorious torture techniques the argument that situation is ambiguous also fails. Realistically, can the people who carried this out and ignored the screams of their victims argue in court that this was not torture?

Breakfast of the Gods

Breakfast cereal characters inhabit the world of Cerealia. I didn’t know there were so many of them! Full of sugary goodness.

I saw the MythBusters segment on making a boat out of frozen water and wood pulp, called Pyrete. It is essentially a composite material. Pyrete worked pretty good, except for it melting quickly. A boat might last in the Arctic winter for a while if the boat was made from pure water as the salt water there is a few degrees below 0°C. Even at best it would melt over the summer.

This material could be useful if the freezing point could be raised. Unfortunately, most things added to water lower the freezing point. NaCl, table salt, is the best known example. There are ways to raise the freezing point of water–certain organic acids, salts, sugar alcohols. But they require large quantities of additives, so they are either expensive or toxic or both. Too bad.

I’d heard before that marijuana is the biggest cash crop in California …in Kentucky …in the US. Online you can see a 2006 estimate that puts marijuana on top by Jon Gettman. It always sounded patchy, and here Kevin Drum links to a critical site that estimates the retail value of the cannabis sales at $10 billion.

Even this seems high according to my estimate. I recently (can’t lay my hands on the figure) saw a graph of pot smoking by age in the US within the past month. Highest for people in their 20’s, then about 10% until people hit 60. Older folks smoke very little. So let’s say 10% of people from 15-60 (roughly 24 million people) smoke twice a month:

24 million people x 24 joints/year / 40 joints/ounce x $100/ounce = $1.5 billion retail per year.

By comparison, the US corn crop is $24 billion/year. $1.5 billion/year is about the size of the US tobacco or orange crop. But then we are comparing retail prices to farm prices. So figure growers are getting at best 1/5 or 1/10 or the retail price, and now the marijuana crop is tiny, smaller than the peach crop. Also, considerable marijuana in the US is imported, so the US crop is even smaller.

Running the estimates in the other direction, the $10 billion estimate of spending on marijuana has the monthly US smokers lighting up every other day. This sounds too high, most smokers are occasional smokers. Estimating pot spending at $35 billion as Jon Gettman does has monthly pot smokers averaging eleven joints a week, or every man, woman, and child in the country lighting up once a week. Way high.

Caught a story on the Oprah TV show talking about why the people living on the Nicoya peninsula on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica are long lived. And I asked myself, are these people long-lived? I haven’t heard that before and I should know.

So I went looking, and the special on Oprah was touting a book, The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest by Dan Buettner. Buettner first reported the story for National Geographic. So why does Buettner think Nicoyaians are long lived?

Some populations have been studied and found to be long lived–for example, there are four times as many centenarians in Okinawa, Japan compared to Japan as a whole.

Buettner’s source is Dr. Luis Rosero-Bixby, a Costa Rican demographer. The sole published source I can find is The exceptionally high life expectancy of Costa Rican nonagenarians. I haven’t read the paper, but from the abstract national birth registry data was used to establish date of birth and census data was used to monitor survival, and life expectancy of 90-year olds was found to be half a year longer than anywhere else in the world, for males only.

This seems very thin evidence, I can’t find other studies by Rosero-Bixby or evidence that these people were studied by any other groups. It is especially odd that the effect is seen in males but not females–this was the pattern in other areas where long survival was reported but didn’t pan out-the Caucus region of Georgia, northern Pakistan, and the Andean village of Vilcabamba in southern Ecuador. Usually remote areas with poor record keeping.