Getting a D in Health

Greetings, indoor, computer-reader.

The Sunbathing Ape

It's natural for us to feel drawn to amazing photographs of sun-soaked landscapes. We humans evolved as mostly-naked, outdoorsy folks in sunny Africa. Although the cultures (and to some degree the genes) of migrating peoples have done what they can to adapt to more polar environments, if you dig at all deep into our biology you'll see we still aren't fine-tuned to live indoor, boreal lives.

One of the biologically unmet expectations humans in the USA and Canada experience is low sun exposure, leading to Vitamin D deficiency. This article in the Globe and Mail suggests that Canadians typically have about one third of optimal concentrations of vitamin D in their bloodstream.

What's D Good For?

Until recently, it was thought that the major effect of vitamin D deficiency was rickets. Since (last time I checked) rickets wasn't an endemic problem to North Americans, vitamin D was seen as being a non-issue; the mandated additions of D and A to dairy products seemed to be sufficient to keep bone formation normal in children.

However, vitamin D has more functions than merely the regulation of bone density. It's also an important chemical precursor to a lot of important cellular signaling mechanisms: not having sufficient vitamin D is the equivalent of trying to run a government when there's a shortage of notepads to write on.

D and Cancer Rates

One of the worst consequences of screwing up chemical messages is to impede natural anti-cancer cellular mechanisms. Does our D-prived culture result in fact in increased cancer rates? The only way to know for sure is with a double-blind experiment where groups are given vitamin D and placebos at random, and to track prevalence of cancers in the two groups. That's exactly what this study did, and what they found is almost unbelievable. Giving 1.5g supplemental Calcium with 1100 IU per day (about 3 liters of milk worth, but the study used pills) decreased cancer rates by 77% after one year.

Great moons of Neptune! That's a huge decrease! The cautious part of me finds it hard to believe that one factor could be responsible for over half of cancers, and to be fair the study tracked only 1200 women over 4 years, and thus wasn't able to notice enough cases of cancer to have really tight confidence intervals: the range of cancer decreases still consistent with the study is 91%-40% 19 times out of 20. Still, I've started feeding vitamin D to my wife as well as taking it, if not daily, than at least often.

Public Health Consequences

Suppose the study's numbers bear up, and that about half of cancers could be prevented by 1100 IU of vitamin D per day. Would it be a good policy for health insurers (or friendly socialist governments like Canada's) to simply hand out vitamin D supplements? It looks like the cost of vitamin D is pretty much nothing: this bottle of 250 pills (almost a year's supply) with 1000 IU of vitamin D is only $10. On the flipside, the annual cancer rate in the US is 1 in 200. If that could be halved by the D supplement, and if treatment costs on average $40 000, that's an expected savings of $100 per year. Pay one dollar into prevention, get 10 out in unneeded treatment. (Oh, then there's the whole increase in lifespan and quality of life issue too.)

Last Word

I suppose the cautious policy approach would be to conduct a larger study to figure out where within the wide confidence interval the truth lies. However, I'm inclined to start ramping up vitamin D production and consumption programs, maybe even with heavy subsidy by governments, HMOs or otherwise. Let's get a D in health.

Editing Miranda

Greetings, lawmakers.

When was the last time democracy had a makeover? Arguably, there hasn't been a big change to the way Americans govern themselves for 200 years. Well, except maybe allowing black people to vote in 1969 and women in 1920; OK maybe there have been some 20th-century improvements in terms of who can vote. However, in almost every one of today's democracies, the only governmental venue where the electorate at large expresses their views is at the polling station.

The Checkbox Menace

Yes or no questions can distort your position. Don't believe me? Try:

Does your wife know you have a mistress?

Elections so far allow only really coarse-grained opinions to pass from the people to the law. Politicians don't have a monopoly on good policy ideas, ergo there are some great ideas floating around which will never see the light of day as long as votes are the only way to influence laws.

Until now, this restriction of opinions has been necessary to keep procedures streamlined: there's been no way of having an intelligent exchange of opinions with 200 million voters. Until now?

Kiwi Wiki

That's right, the New Zealand government has opened up a wiki site where they let you draft the law. Its power so far is only advisory (I think that's wise, at least for now), but it allows good ideas and intelligent debate to percolate up from the people without the government doing a thing (apart from setting up MediaWiki or some such).

I'll be interested to see what comes of the New Zealand experiment. Does anyone below care to register their predictions as to if this will be fabulous or a flop?

Keep on wikin',

LeDopore

Rail Blues

Greetings, Takers of the A-train,

Last night I went to a show in the big city. As you know, I don't own a car, so I took a subway car back, and noticed how very odd it was that about 100 rich patrons waited with me for over 20 minutes for a train. (My metropolitan area has notoriously infrequent trains, especially at night.) It got me wondering: how crazy is it (financially) to run trains infrequently at night?

Extra Costs

It's easy to say "Let's just run trains every minute," but the whole reason why public transit systems work is that many people going the same way can use just one vehicle and driver. Let's figure out the cost of splitting one infrequent but long subway trains into two shorter trains.

If the run lasts two hours and the driver costs $40/hour (including overhead, training, etc.) the personnel expense is $80. The necessary force (hence electricity cost) of pushing an additional train front through the air can be calculated using:

F = .5 A D p v^2,

where A is the area of the train front, D is a drag coefficient (usually about .25 for aerodynamic shapes), p is the density of the medium and v is the speed. Using A D = 4 m^2, p = 2kg/m^3, v = 20 m/s, electricity costs $.15/kWh and the distance traveled is 100 km, we see the extra energy costs is a measly $7. Let's round up and say an extra $100 would be needed to run an extra train.

Extra Benefits

So, how much shorter a commute would there be if an extra train came? The trains come every 24 minutes, and by the time a train came last night there were over 100 people waiting at my station and over 100 at the next station (the two busiest, mind you); let's lowball the estimate and say 250 people would be able to catch a train on average 6 minutes sooner if train frequency were doubled. Doubling train frequency means 25 commuter hours would have been saved at a cost of $100 to the system: $.40 per passenger or $4/hour of passenger time saved.

However, increasing service might increase ridership, so it's possible that the extra train would (at least partially) pay for itself. Increasing ridership eases burdens on parking and roads too; public transit is overall a good bargain.

Summary

It's time commuters got vocal about being willing to pay a fair amount for their time that gets wasted by sluggish schedules. I wish we'd get a consistent metric of how much our time is worth, and use it to make policy decisions. Check out my post on machine wages for equivalent cost-time comparisons; this concept may evolve into a wiki page soon.

Keep on track!

LeDopore

Life in the Slow Lane

Greetings, road warriors.

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

-- William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

This post is about commuting; specifically why I refuse to do long commutes. I don't really understand why people put up with long commuting. Some of my coworkers get up at 4 AM to get to work on time (8 AM), twice a day wasting in traffic more time than it takes to travel by train from Rome to Naples. Where do I start with the problems here? That kind of squandering of human life is so egregious that I don't even know where to start to try to attack it: res ipsa loquitor! If that res still isn't very loquacious, read on!

In an earlier post, I quantified how much you pay labor-saving machines for each hour of chores they save you; here I'm going to figure out how much you're paying yourself to live in a cheap neighborhood and commute to a good job.

Tinned Nation

On average last year, Americans spent 50 minutes per work day commuting to and from their jobs; mostly in a sitting position within oversized metallic cans on wheels. However, like the aforementioned coworkers, over 3.4 million Americans spent more than three hours per day commuting to work. If these extreme commuters value their time at $25/hour and work 20 days per month, they're spending $1500 of their time every month for the privilege of living where it's cheap. Unless housing is drastically more expensive where they work, it's just not worth their time.

Leisure sucker

Commuting is more than just a monetary problem, however: the less free time you have the more precious it becomes. If you're awake 16 hours a day, work 8 hours and spend 2 hours keeping the household together that leaves just 6 hours of discretionary free time per day. If three hours is sucked up in commuting, you have half the time to pursue self-development.

Greeks to the Rescue?

Aristotle thought the best division of waking hours was to spend 6 hours working, 6 hours resting and 6 hours pursuing some leisured activity: being creative and exercising parts of your body and intellect for the shear joy of it. The 8-hour work day already overbalances this ancient ideal; why tip it further into job-is-everything territory?

Personally I'm dismayed with the fact that the remainder of peoples' time usually has to go towards wakeful resting (like watching the tube), and not the active creation of interesting life, tradition and culture. I want life to be more participatory: we should be having a good time with the freeboard that going to work gives, if the work itself isn't fun (a harsh reality I'm trying to avoid).

Staying Un-Canned

What are some ways to keep our commuting hours down? How about the following for a start;
leave comments if you have more ideas.

• Arrange to spend one day a week telecommuting (if possible)
• Use a home office
• Rent an apartment close to your job (and price out the time cost of your commute if you live far from your job - you might consider moving then)
• Live/work arrangements are also great

I hope I'm going to be able to dodge nasty commutes. We'll have to see if that's going to be possible.

Take care, and stay out those cars as much as possible!

LeDopore

Heating with Flops

Greetings, fellow old-world primates.

Today I'm going to flesh out an idea a dear friend of mine had: that waste heat from high-performance computer facilities could be used to heat cold regions of the world.

We humans evolved our big brains in Africa, where it's nice and warm. For better or for worse, these big brains have allowed us to develop means of keeping our bodies at African temperatures even at polar latitudes, allowing us to conquer the planet.

Technology (be it fire or clothing) has always been a factor in allowing our spread into frozen zones; today I'm going to look into something a little higher-end.

Computing in Vegas

A friend of mine works for Cafe Press, an online clothing-designing company which recently moved their main data centers to Nevada. The reason for this move was an unusual one: proximity to the Hoover Dam means cheap power to run the site's computational muscle.

In fact, data centers can generate an enormous amount of heat. A thousand processors working at 100 W each consume 100 kW of electricity: about 50 households' worth. With electricity costing 15¢ per kWh, that's over $130 000 per year in electricity costs alone, and that's before factoring in cooling costs.

Computing in Siberia

Suppose instead that data centers were built where you want to generate a lot of heat anyway. that same 100 kW data center could potentially provide heat most of the required heat to a shopping mall. How economically feasible is this? Let's look into two possible scenarios. For the sake of simplicity I'm going to assume enough people will soon do the Cafe Press trick that electricity costs even out globally around 15¢/kWh.

Scenario A: 1 fixed data center in a place cold in winters.

Here, you'd build a 1000-CPU data center for $500 000, and half of the year you'd be able to use 80% of the waste heat from the data center to heat a mall. Together, you and the mall would save $52 560 in heating costs per year of operation; more if you can use some waste heat more than half the year. Even in the summer, data centers could be used to provide hot water.

Scenario B: 1 data center in a shipping container, moving from pole to pole

Sun Microsystems' "Project Blackbox" will build you a data center in a shipping container already. Imagine having a deal with two different malls, one in each hemisphere, so that the waste heat of the data center could be used always. You'd have two extra expenses: container shipping expenses (about $10 000 for the round trip) and four weeks annually of down-time, but you'd save $100 000 in heating costs. Overall, you'd have to spend 8% more (or $40 000 as a one-time expense) on your computer hardware to compensate for the downtime, but that should be just-about recouped after the first year of operation.

Three Moore's Laws

Technologically, the use of waste heat is only going to make more sense in the future. There are three relevant Moore's laws here: performance/watt, performance/$ and bandwidth/$.

The most familiar Moore's law statement is that computing power doubles every 18-24 months, but one should also look at power efficiency and bandwidth trends. Power efficiency has been climbing slower than computing efficiency, so today's $1500 PC uses more energy than a $1500 PC from a decade ago. Conversely, bandwidths have been doubling more frequently than CPU speeds. Therefore, in the future, bandwidth (especially on the backbone of the Internet) will be too cheap to matter, and the ratio of power expenditure to computer hardware expenditure is only going to increase.

Therefore re-using computer waste heat is only going to become increasingly lucrative in the future, so it's a technology that should be on the up-and-up.

Conclusions

It's already cheaper to operate data centers where power is cheap. I think now it's also cheaper to coöperate with public buildings (which tend to be big enough to act as thermal flywheels to smooth out diurnal heat supply needs) to supply waste heat from data centers. I haven't worked in the added costs of the data center's floorspace, so it's not yet a complete no-brainer to use computers instead of /along side of traditional furnaces, but future trends certainly seem to be pointing in that direction.

Yoursfor a Greener Cyberspace,

LeDopore

PS This post printed with 100% recycled electrons

How Much do You Pay Your Machines?

Greetings, Robot Lords.

The Pitch

How much do you value your free time? In Stephen King's The Stand, the Walkin' Dude comes by Mother Abigail's place in the guise of a vacuum cleaner salesman, making the pitch that he's not actually selling her labor-saving vacuum cleaners. Instead, he's selling her cool lemonade sipped in the shade on a hot day, time to lazily read a novel, or time to do essentially whatever Mother Abigail likes best. The premise is simple and appealing: we buy (or make) machines which save us drudgery, and then allegedly have more free time.

The Catch

In reality, our time-savers often end up owning us instead. It takes a lot of time, energy and money to maintain every piece of equipment we buy. On the other hand, I have a lot more free time than any subsistence farmer I've heard about, so there must be a good side to this tech too. How do we know if a given piece of labor-saving tech is worthwhile?

The Players' Salaries

One interesting analysis is to figure out what effective wage you're paying your labor saving device for your extra free time. Everything doesn't always boil down to money: it's not as if chores are equally onerous (I enjoy gardening more than cleaning the bathroom), but quantifying the hourly rate of free-time-saving makes for an interesting analysis nonetheless. Here's a summary table, then I'm going to talk a little more about some entries. Here "machine wage" isn't how much you pay per hour of operation - it's how much you pay per every hour of labor it saves you. I've ordered this list in descending order of utility.

Item	Price	Cost/y	Lifetime (y)	Hours saved/week	Hours saved	Total Cost	Machine Wage
Dishwasher	500		5	3	780	500	0.64
Non-stick fry pan	100		20	0.05	52	100	1.92
Lawnmower (electric)	400	1	10	0.25	130	410	3.15
Newer computer	1500		2	1	104	1500	14.42
Kitchen Mixer	200	1	20	0.0096	10	220	22
Melon baller	10		10	0.00064	0.33	10	30
Car	5000	2000	5	1	260	15000	57.69

• I'm a dishwasher evangelist. I've been responsible for (or at least influential in) the decisions of no fewer than 5 households I know to acquire a dishwasher by hook or by crook. (If you're renting, look into portable dishwashers - that's what I own.) Until today I just always had a hunch that dishwashers were good time-savers, but the hard numbers really nail it for me. Operating a dishwasher (in hot water and dish soap) costs about the same as washing by hand, and by my analysis my $500 dishwasher will save me 780 hours of scrubbing. Since I value my free time more than 64¢/hour, owning a dishwasher is a no-brainer.
• I just bought a $100 super-high-quality frying pan, with (I kid you not) embedded diamonds as the non-stick coating. So far I have no complaints performance-wise: I get an even heat and the food has been scrumptious every time. As a side effect, I estimate that I spend about 3 minutes per week less cleaning, since now I can use this pan instead of my older stainless steel pan (which was a pain to scrub). Those 3 minutes per week over the 20 years the pan should last amount to 52 total hours saved, so I'm "paying" this machine $1.92/hour for the privilege of not washing dishes.
  
• If I were to buy a new computer (something I dream about way too often) I might spend about 1 hour less per week waiting for my numbers to crunch (I'm a "power user": I run intensive numerical operations on a regular basis; for word-processing I doubt a newer computer would save more than a minute or two per week). If the new computer I'd keep for about 2 years, then it would save me about 104 total hours, so upgrading now (for $1500) would be like paying the machine $14.42 for every hour I save not waiting for that progress bar to end.
• I broke down and bought one of those designer kitchen mix machines the other year. We barely use it, truth be told. If it were to save 15 minutes twice a year, this $200 machine would save us 10 hours of work over its 20-year lifetime. (Inside, I doubt it will save that much time, but the truth hurts sometimes.) It really sucks power too, so I guess its lifetime cost (price + power) will be $220; meaning we're paying it $22 per hour that it saves us. (Note: this mixer brings an invaluable quantity of ancillary joy to my better half merely by gracing our kitchen - which is precisely why this kind of analysis didn't have the last word.)
• We also own a melon baller! If it saves us 2 minutes a year (we hardly use it), we're paying it $30/hour for the privilege. Maybe single-purpose kitchen gadgets should be contraband.
  
• Last (but not least) we don't own a car. I can get to and from work without one (and, considering the parking around where I work, biking is faster), even though it makes doing errands a little more tricky. I estimate I spend about 1 hour more per week doing errands because I can't just hop into a rust bucket. (Aside: if I were to offset time I don't have to spend in the gym because I bike, this 1-hour figure could very well be negative!) In any case, were I to buy a car, over 5 years it could well cost $15,000 in insurance, depreciation, maintenance, parking and fuel. For each of the 260 hours it would save me, I'd be paying it $57.69: a pretty lousy deal. I guess I won't be buying a car until my lifestyle requires one.

The Last Inning

On that note, let me hand it over to you. The numbers I've presented are highly personalized and might not apply to you. I do a lot of serious computing, and even for me a new computer only barely makes sense. I live close to work, so biking is a great option. We do a lot of entertaining, and thus a dishwasher is pretty much essential. If you truly need a car, or if you don't entertain or run scientific computing experiments your personal table is likely to be quite different. Still, I encourage you to do the same sorts of analyses before listenening to the Walkin' Dude.

Rule your 'bots with an iron fist!

LeDopore

Middle Ground Meat?

Greetings, omnivores.

Today I'm going to talk a little about animal welfare, and how we might improve it without getting angry at anyone.

Lately some animal rights protesters have been harassing someone close to me (I'm not going to go into details), and it started me thinking about ways in which animal rights activists might improve animal welfare most effectively. I think there are two main inefficiencies with current animal rights activity: extremism and lack of perspective.

Problem 1: Animal Rights Activists Tend to be Extremists

"You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar...*"

There are three general stances you could take on animal welfare:

1. Animals suffering is equivalent to human suffering, so feed lots are equivalent to the WWII concentration camps (reflected in some ad campaigns).
2. Animals are cute but tasty: let's try to make them reasonably happy as long as we can still eat bacon.
3. Animals are here for human use. Some animals (mosquitoes come to mind) use us without the slightest regard for our well-being, so to hell with our looking after them.

While you can legitimately defend all of the above ethically, those who take stance #1 often feel entitled to, say, bomb the houses of animal researchers. While I acknowledge that you can't "prove" any value system is right or wrong, in general it's a good idea not to espouse any belief system which tells you it's OK to murder, for practical (if not ethical) reasons.

Even if you do believe murder is justified in a few circumstances, it's bad PR to kill your enemies. Homicide undermines your soft power like nothing else. I bet the above bombing did more to inoculate potential animal rights supporters than the combined forces of all the starched-shirted science-defending geeks ever to mumble through a justification of animal use at every cocktail party the world has seen.

Problem 2: Animal Rights Groups Lack Perspective

There are over 250 million egg-laying hens in the United States: almost one per human. There are likewise millions of dairy cows and livestock pigs. Many of these animals suffer for the sake of thrift: it's cheapest to pack animals into the smallest space that won't kill them.

Still, the three biggest animal rights causes I hear about are fur, pâté de foie gras, and medical research. A more quantitative statement: a Google search for "fur activism" turns up more hits than "laying activism."

What do fur, foie gras and medical research have in common? Not everybody comes home from their day quantifying drug toxicity to grab their mink stole on their way to a nice bistro: animal rights activists figure they can win more sympathy from people to counter less-common animal uses. They even turn poverty into a virtue: most of us can't afford blue fox coats while we're starting out, but PETA would have us believe we haven't yet bought fur because we instinctively know it's wrong. Moreover, a lot of rich people feel guilty about being rich (I can treat the root of this problem, incidentally. Please leave your contact info below.), making it easier to attack the morals of self-doubting millionaires.

In short, animal rights groups attack fringe animal usage since these are the issues they think they can "win." If I were them, and if I were really interested in animal welfare, I would recognize that many of us want to reduce animal suffering and would pay to do so (at least a little), so what we really need to do is have animal rights organizations set up a scoring system for farm animal welfare.

A lot of people would pay 20¢ more for eggs from hens which suffered 50% less pain. However, we have no way of really knowing how good each farm is. The time has past (or hasn't yet come) to paint each farmer Joe as a miniature Hitler: what I'd like to see are livestock comfort ratings on beef, milk, pork, chicken and eggs. Make them fair and standardized, and just watch if you don't find a significant minority of consumers support farms that would improve the lives of tens of millions of our fellow creatures.

Conclusions

Polarizing the debate on animal usage is a losing strategy: too many of us won't give up using animals in some form. Many animal activists use terrorist tactics to intimidate minority animal users. Regardless of whether you think animal rights should be equivalent to human rights, it's a better strategy to use market forces to relieve some suffering from mainstream animal uses; that's the easiest way to reduce animal suffering overall.

Chomping tenderly,

LeDopore

Reader poll: Who's a vegetarian, and why? How much extra would you spend on your daily food knowing your meat animals suffered less? How many of you would like the taste of happy meat better, if only through the placebo effect? Please leave me comments.

* Maybe animal rights activists think of the stuck fly's suffering, and so use vinegar deliberately to warn them from the trap?