Many Ideas

FTL Neutrinos and the Fine Structure Constant

2011-11-03T09:49:00.000-07:00

Hi again,

It looks like the fine structure constant ain't so constant. The fine structure constant is a pure number of about 1/137 that was thought to be a fundamental constant. It's the ratio between the energy needed to overcome electrostatic repulsion between two electrons a distance d apart and the energy of a photon of wavelength 2 pi d. Chemistry is all about the energies involving electrons and light, so the fine structure constant pops up a lot in quite a few fields. The fine structure constant depends on the charge of the electron, the speed of light in a vacuum and Plank's constant, so as long as all these are in fact constant, their ratio will be a universal.

This past Hallowe'en, however, Physical Review Letters published a highly-confirmed yet still extremely controversial paper showing that in old galaxies, the fine structure constant is higher in older galaxies. There are only three possible causes; one of them must be true:

The charge on the electron is larger in older galaxies
The speed of light is smaller in older galaxies
Plank's constant is smaller in older galaxies.

None of these choices are all that appetizing, but #2 is consistent with the idea of my previous post that there's a particle field we haven't found yet that's slowing down photons a bit. As a nice bonus, the order of magnitude of the change in the fine structure constant observed is pretty close to the order of magnitude of the factor of the photon slowdown seen in the OPERA experiment.

These thoughts are still just tantalizing ideas, and there probably isn't a connection. Drop me a line if you have ideas about this!

Cheers,

LeDopore

FTL Neutrino Predictions

2011-10-31T18:25:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd jot down my ideas about the recent OPERA superluminal neutrinos at CERN. In case you hadn't heard, the experiment found neutrinos that (as far as they can tell) move slightly faster than the speed of light.

If correct, this is a big deal, since "faster than light" in one reference frame means "back in time" in another. Being able to send information back in time would lead to implausible, crazy new technology.

My best guess as to what's going on is that there’s a systematic error in OPERA we haven’t found yet.
My second best guess: light actually travels a little slower than c, at least around Earth. This could be due to interaction with some unknown particle cloud that’s consistently uniform and has a refractive index of 1.0002.

No, this isn’t the aether, and this isn’t experimentally contradicted by the fact that the speed of light doesn’t change as the Earth changes velocity through this field. Just as the speed of light through a moving glass rod isn’t greater or smaller than through a still glass rod (neglecting dispersion, which comes into play as the Doppler-shifted frequency of light causes n to change slightly), moving through this weakly-interacting particle background doesn’t change the observed velocity of light, unless the medium is dispersive. A good assumption would be the medium isn't noticeably dispersive: whatever transitions the light interacts with are of such high energy that photons we generate all look about the same, and dispersion isn’t measurable.

Heck, the medium could even be dark matter. This hypothesis solves a bunch of problems, like why the neutrinos from the 1987A supernova were coincident with (and not before) the photons. Under this hypothesis, the photons traveling though deep interstellar space would not be slowed by the presumably rarefied dark matter there.

Like I said, my money’s still on the possibility that there’s a systematic experimental error at OPERA. However, I find the idea of a vacuum/dark matter refractive index a lot more palatable than particles that violate causality. I haven’t yet heard a good reason to discredit this idea, so I thought I’d post it.
Background: I have an honours physics undergrad degree, but I’m now a neuroscientist. None of my colleagues are capable of evaluating this idea; if it’s rubbish please don’t hesitate to point out why.

News Flash: Rocks Too Deadly for Schoolkids?

2010-07-26T08:14:00.000-07:00

Greetings, daredevils.

I just happened upon a great Forbes article about the insane lengths the Consumer Product Safety Commission goes to keep dangerous toys like plain old rocks out of the hands of schoolchildren. I'd write more, but in some ways res ipsi locutor, and I have to get to work too.

Via BoingBoing.

Give Parents a Chance: Part 1: diaper diatribe

2010-07-10T21:58:00.000-07:00

Greetings, potential p1 generation.

It's been a long time since I posted to this blog. My life's been irrevocably improved by a nine-month-old daughter, and I've changed cities as well. I bet you might have thought I was gone for good, but here I am, back with another cold, hard numerical look at our decisions.

Today, I'm going to write a post I wish I'd read a few months before coming a dad; this may evolve into a short series.

Over-educated parents get weird about a whole lot of things and one of them is diapers. It's practically taboo for a Ph.D.-toting couple like us to use throw-away diapers that will sit in a landfill for eternity. We've bowed to social pressure and bought a g-diaper system, complete with multiple reusable covers (that need a lot of laundering nonetheless) and flushable inserts.

The joke's on us, however, since cloth diapers on the whole are not any more environmentally friendly than disposables. Laundering cloth diapers in soap and hot water takes as much energy and releases as many chemicals into the environment as having disposable diapers.

The three big advantages of disposable over cloth are:

Cost (disposables are about half as expensive)
Baby's skin (disposables these days can keep 'em dry through the night)
Time (it's much faster to change a disposable diaper than a cloth one, and when you're only getting 4 hours of sleep a night for the first three months, even an extra 5 minutes 8 times a day is really appreciated)

Item 3 is so important that I'll come out and declare that even if 1 and 2 were not true, it would probably still be best for the family to use disposables overall. When you're taking care of a newborn, you need time. Other things like budgets and environmental concerns - especially the matter of a couple of cubic meters of solid waste (all the diapers that the baby will make over their lifetime) - can and should be put on a back burner. Be with your kid, not your laundry service.

In conclusion, let me absolve any prospective parent out there (I can do this now that I'm officially ordained - another story) of any disposable-related guilt. Disposables are awesome technology - use 'em with a clear conscience.

Getting a D in Health

2007-12-30T14:02:00.000-08:00

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

2007-09-27T09:13:00.000-07:00

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:

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

2007-09-20T08:20:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-31T09:27:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-08-27T13:29:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-08-19T11:27:00.000-07:00

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:

Animals suffering is equivalent to human suffering, so feed lots are equivalent to the WWII concentration camps (reflected in some ad campaigns).
Animals are cute but tasty: let's try to make them reasonably happy as long as we can still eat bacon.
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?

"-", not "/": In Search of Luxury on the Cheap

2007-07-24T12:53:00.000-07:00

Greetings, lotus eaters.

It's been a long time since I've done a post! Let's start this one with some raw data.

Item	Egg	Chocolate	Cheese	Wine	Car /day
Cheap Price/Serving ($)	.15	1	1	3	10
Expensive Price/Serving ($)	.85	5	7	20	60

Today's post is about how to achieve luxury on the cheap. Some people would approach this subject by talking about secret bargain-hunting techniques: how to obtain the latest and greatest without paying through the nose. However, an often ignored avenue to getting a taste of the "good" life is to spend the money where it counts the most. Something that's worked for me is to start using more of the "-" sign on my mental calculator and less of the "/" sign. Let me give an example to explain what I mean.

Eggsample

Let's talk egg selection. My local supermarkets sell eggs for as little as 79¢ a dozen. These eggs are of decent quality in that they're not risky to your health but, since they're made with such narrow profit margins, every choice the farmer makes has to maximize quantity, not quality.

In the same supermarkets it's possible to buy artisanal eggs for about $5 a dozen. Nestled in post-consumer-recycled cardboard carton packaging on which is printed (in natural, organically-farmed vegetable-based dyes) idyllic odes to the chicken pastoral ideal, these poultry-gems might not quite live up to their billing. However, in this humble blogger's opinion a free range egg is a cut above a factory-farmed egg.

Where Classical Economics Fail

The consumer is left with the following dilemma: should she buy eggs which are six times as expensive, even if they taste better? In an ECON 101 class, the critical question would be "do I enjoy the expensive eggs six times as much?". Since I'd derive less than six times the pleasure from a free-range egg meal than from a factory farmed meal, classical economics says that my utility-to-cost ratio is higher for the cheap eggs, so I should buy those. Many shoppers I see have an ECON 101 attitude as well: they eschew the good eggs because they cost a whopping 6 times as much as utility-grade eggs.

Classical economics however fails as soon as one realizes demand for breakfast is woefully inelastic. In fact, my demand for eggs is met after spending such a minuscule fraction of my capital acquiring them that neglecting the inelasticity of my appetite is absurd. Assuming you have about 2 eggs per serving, the extra cost of having free-range eggs is only 70¢. Is it worth a 70¢ premium to have superior-quality eggs? Absolutely! And yet in the supermarkets I see shoppers clamoring for the best bargain eggs. Why are people being so cheap?

Using the "-" Sign

The root of the problem is the division operator. People balk at the idea of spending six times more, while their finances are affected not by this multiplicative factor but by the arithmetic difference between prices.

From the table at the start of this post, you can see that while the relative price differences between the cheap and expensive items tends to be about 6, the arithmetic differences vary wildly. The premium on buying high quality eggs is two orders of magnitude less than the premium on driving a sports car on a daily basis. Are you willing, therefore, to sacrifice about 100 free range egg-level luxuries each day for the privilege of driving a sports car? If not, you should follow my lead: splurge on the cheap stuff and skimp on the expensive stuff.

Enjoy the good life!

LeDopore

Hiatus

2007-05-22T07:41:00.000-07:00

Greetings, California Dreamers

I thought I'd let you know that I'm going to be on a trip for the next few weeks. Many Ideas is going to go dormant until mid July, so tune in then when I'll have a new slab of quirky considerations for your surfing pleasure.

Sincerely,

LeDopore

PS If you come up with any more brilliant ideas for posts (the best ones seem to be user-submitted), please leave them in a comment here.

Liberty and Bandwidth for All

2007-05-11T09:18:00.000-07:00

Greetings, YouTubers*.

In my last post I outlined how our current system of private Internet Service Providers (ISPs) companies is economically wasteful. Although in general the private sector is better than the public sector at providing higher-quality services at a lower cost, with ISPs the product (Internet bandwidth) is a factor of 1000 times cheaper than what ISPs charge. Almost all the ISPs' operational costs come from advertising, distributing and charging for this cheap-as-dirt Internet backbone bandwidth. In other words IPSs are intrinsically so wasteful that publicly-owned networks make sense. This post is going to tackle how I think we should implement municipal data networks.

Letting Demand Drive Expansion

Internet technology changes so fast that it would be unwieldy for a council to try to have a sane policy of technology roll-out which took advantage of the latest and greatest. It would also be hard to periodically gauge the service levels residents truly want. It's much better to make technology policy future-proof, meaning that no new laws or regulations will be required to implement better technology where it's wanted as soon as it's developed.

Here's an example of a future-proof network-building scheme. Have residents pledge (with holds on their credit cards) that they would be willing to pay X dollars for Y service. As soon as a private company notices that enough residents in a neighborhood have pledged enough money to make granting the service worthwhile, they can install whatever hardware they choose which is able to meet or exceed the bandwidth demands Y of all the people who pledged X dollars. The money from the credit card holds would then go into a trust which would pay the hardware companies annuities for as long as the service works (or maybe the trust should be invested with low risk, and 25% of the total equity should be paid to the hardware builder/maintainer each year; since Internet technology becomes obsolescent so much faster than roads it makes sense to make the payment schedule accelerated).

The city would provide all of the (essentially free) backbone bandwidth in exchange for the fact that all Internet services using that bandwidth must be broadcast over authentication-free wireless Internet or users must be able to plug in wired connections for free in publicly-accessible points. (Perhaps encryption could be optional to prevent people from spying, but it shouldn't be mandatory, and passwords must not be secret. With good crypto you can have every user use a different session key, so that even if they know each others' passwords they can't snoop on each other.)

Miscellaneous Points

Here are a few guidelines for details of the policy which might help:

The quality of service could be specified by three numbers: bandwidth, reliability and latency-to-backbone; that way users can communicate what's most important for them to the free market.
Perhaps users should pay on a sliding scale, with payments tied to the quality of service received, so that there is always an explicit incentive to provide better Internet service.
Assuming only 25% of residents who want a given service would pledge for it, maybe the city should match pledges paid out of property tax.
Since optical fiber is cheap but expensive to lay, it's a common practice to lay cables with many more fibers than will be needed in the near future. These "dark" fibers can later be cheaply lit if needed. Policies should probably specify that some percentage (like 95%) of the fiber laid to make a network must be dark.
Depending on political will, it might make sense to pay for city-wide phone-level coverage off the bat through taxes, and let people pledge for upgrades as desired.

Conclusions

In the Chicago example of last post we saw that the entire city could have a free data network for a one-time cost of under $15 per person. People are probably willing to pay a lot more for much faster connections; the plan outlined in this post shows a way in which a publicly-owned network can deliver services the public wants as soon as their feasible to deliver without wasting money on advertising and accounting.

This plan isn't anti-business either. The local companies which would spring up to supply the network services asked for by the people would have a leg up spreading to other municipalities where this same incentive policy gets implemented. (I am fairly confident that other municipalities would want to emulate the digital utopias which would come from this type of municipal Internet service.)

With some organization, the people can have cake and eat it too: they can pay a pittance in extra tax in exchange for hassle-free, state-of-the-art Internet connectivity. Everybody wins except old-school ISP shareholders. (Sell!)

*Web 2.0 couch potatoes?

The Answer is Blowin' in the Windy City

2007-05-09T11:02:00.000-07:00

Greetings, chatterboxes.

Today I'm going to outline why I think municipal wireless networks are a good idea. We depend more and more on Internet connectivity for our everyday lives; it's no longer the case that bandwidth is a luxury item only a small niche desires. However, the way we typically pay for bandwidth (through private Internet Service Providers, or ISPs) is tremendously inefficient. I'm going to outline an estimate of how inefficient privately-owned ISPs are, then in the next few posts I'll talk about a way in which publicly-owned networks can be financially and technologically sustainable.

Getting Hosed by ISPs

Bandwidth at Internet backbones is ridiculously cheap: about $1 per terabyte (TB) and falling fast. (Based on estimates of web-hosting costs which allow 3 TB of transfer per month for $5 per month - the $1 per TB might not be accurate to within more than an order of magnitude. I don't specifically endorse the web hosting company I linked to - it's just an example of how cheap backbone bandwidth can be.) A heavy home user might transfer about 20 GB of bandwidth per month, costing their ISPs no more than a few pennies per customer per month.

However, the rates which ISPs charge their customers is three orders of magnitude higher: $20 per month is considered a good deal. That's a markup factor of at least 1000.

There are at least three main expenses other than backbone bandwidth which contribute to the costs of running ISPs:

The "last mile" connectivity between multiple homes and a backbone connection point
Advertising and promotion
Billing customers

Going Public

If a publicly-operated free (as in beer) municipal Internet network existed, there would be no need for costs # 2 and 3, and I postulate that #1 could take a big hit too by allowing better technology to be used. I think that one of the major reasons private ISPs are scared to deploy city-wide mesh wireless networks is that if users shared their passwords with friends, they could lose customers. Instead they've opted for wired networks (through DSL or cable) which are probably a lot more expensive than wireless mesh networks so they can be sure you don't share your account with friends.

Why do I think mesh networks are cheaper? The City of Chicago plans to roll out a city-wide wireless mesh network for only $18.5 million. A city-wide network would supplant not only ISP communication, but if a few Asterisk servers were part of the setup you could replace aging telephone lines and cellphones with voice over IP (VoIP), obviating the need for phone companies, whose costs are also dominated by the three numbered items above.

Savings

How much do Chicago's 3 million residents currently pay for phone, Internet and cell phones? If we assume one ISP line (at $20/mo.) and one land line (also at $20/mo.) for every 4 residents and one cellphone (at $30/mo.) for every two residents, we'd estimate that Chicago spends $900 million per year on combined data services. Even assuming Chicago's network costs double the estimate with a one-time cost of $40 million, a municipally-funded wireless network is an exceedingly good deal.

If the backbone bandwidth cost were approximately one penny per resident per month it would not be worth the city's while to try to charge people for their individual bandwidth usage, just as we don't try to charge people who use streetlights more for their fair share of electricity costs to the city.

Conclusions

Even if implemented poorly, a publicly-owned data network would give astronomical cost savings over the current arrangement. There are still the potential pitfalls that a publicly-owned network might be terribly cost-inefficient, or that it might not give the quality of service expected by the residents. However, in my next post I will unveil a plan which addresses both of these woes.

Until then!

LeDopore

Keeping Your Autograph Yours

2007-05-05T14:56:00.000-07:00

Greetings, John Hancock.

In today's post I'm going to talk a little about digital signatures and hashes. I'm going to talk about hashes and their use in cryptosystems, and then I'm going to give some crypto “recommendations” for how to stay one step ahead of potential digital signature forgers.

I'm not really sure why, but I just love to learn about security mechanisms, how they can be beat, and how you can really foil intruders. If you don't share my passions for math and security, maybe this post won't hold your attention; I promise I'll post something more sensational soon. If, on the other hand, you read Cryptonomicon and were starved for the numerical details behind the characters' plots, read on, and be satisfied!

Hype Warning

Let me get one thing clear before we start. Current digital cryptography is secure enough for you to rest easy – your weakest link is not going to be that somebody spends thousands of CPU hours to do a direct attack on your data. If somebody wants to steal your information it's much easier to use a “side channel attack,” in other words it's easier for a data thief to push malicious key-logging software onto your Windows computer, infiltrate your organization, or record the sound of your keyboard to get sensitive information than it is to do a brute-force attack on even a relatively weak cryptosystem.

However, I think cryptology is fun, so today I'll talk about a security practice which will keep your digitally-signed documents über-safe. If that appeals, read on!

Digital Signatures

The Internet provides a remarkable degree of anonymity to its users, which can be both a blessing and a curse. (LeDopore isn't my real name, by the way. I enjoy being able to post unfiltered opinions that will never be tied to C.V.-related Google searches. I can prepare a face to meet the faces that [I] meet and have only a select few be able to link my masks.)

The Internet would be much less useful if we couldn't establish the authenticity of any particular source. Because of its decentralized nature (which is one of the reasons it's so robust - 0 seconds downtime since the 1970s is pretty impressive), there's no way to have a trusted path between source and sender; we must let the message itself testify to its authenticity.

Public Key Cryptology

When a message is digitally signed with public key (asymmetric) encryption, you can quickly verify that only a particular sender (actually, a sender with access to the key's corresponding private key) could have sent it. We say "asymmetric" and "public" because for every secure channel, there's one public (in other words, you want everyone to know it) and one private (secret) key; these keys are different (hence "asymmetric").

Let me give a hallway analogy to explain what public key encryption can do. Imagine an apartment building hallway with rows of doors with mail slots, and with glassed-in locked message boards beside every door. You can slip a message into anybody's slot without anyone else being able to read it, and you can post anything you like in your locked message board so that anybody can see it an know you sent it. Slipping a message into others' slots is equivalent to encrypting it with their public key: they need their private key to read it. Posting behind glass is equivalent to encrypting it with your private key: if you need your public key to decrypt it, it's impossible that the message was generated with anything but your unique private key.

For a fully-secure connection, you can encrypt a message first with your private key and then with the receiver's public key; then only they will be able to receive it, and they can be sure that the message came from you. (The hallway metaphor breaks down, since with public key cryptology you can do the equivalent of slipping a message board of yours into someone else's mail slot.) Thus people who have never met can exchange fully private information, which is why you can buy things with your credit card online. (A mixed blessing?)

One of the big potential holes in public key cryptography is that you have to be sure you know what public key to use when sending a message to somebody. The only way around this conundrum is to go through a security broker like VeriSign, whose job it is to physically go to companies to sign hand-delivered public keys with their master VeriSign private key, which your computers are pre-programmed to trust. (Man, talk about a single point-of-failure; if anybody managed to factor VeriSign's product-of-primes it would be "game over" for lots of digital security. If you don't like VeriSign's game, you can always physically share symmetric keys through a trusted, i.e. non-Internet, connection first. That's how I've set up my ssh into work; not that I don't trust VeriSign, but you never know...)

The RSA Algorithm

Signatures typically work through the RSA public key algorithm, which gains its cryptologic strength from the fact that it's easy to check if a number is prime, easy to do modular exponentiation (which I'm not even going to define here), but difficult to factor the product of two large prime numbers. (If you're interested in the math behind RSA, try chapter 1, page 42 of Algorithms, by S. Dasgupta, C. H. Papadimitriou, and U. V. Vazirani, freely available online and very well written).

The Need for Hashes

Theoretically it would be possible to sign entire documents with RSA, and to conduct whole conversations by passing messages through public-key cryptosystems. However, although using RSA with the proper keys is orders of magnitude faster than cracking it (which, as far as I know, hasn't been done ever with long enough keys), it still takes quite a few clock cycles. Typically then you don't send your secret info directly through RSA, but you use a block cypher like AES (Advanced Encryption Standard).

Aside: AES

AES takes a secret 128-bit shared number and generates a bitstream of random-looking data. Both the sender and receiver share the same random 128-bit key through a secure method like RSA, then they use AES on the 128-bit key to make a stream of random-looking bits. Since both sender and receiver have the same key, AES is a type of symmetric key encryption.

AES is in many ways like a random-number generator on steroids: the 128-bit number is the random seed, and from it you can generate as long a random-looking bitstream as you like. The sender of messages ("Alice:" in cryptology it's always Alice who has some interesting secret message) then takes her digital message and the random bitstream and performs the exclusive OR operation between them. (I.e., if the random bit in the bitstream is 1, flip the message bit from 1 to 0 or vice versa, but if the random bit is 0 do nothing.) The result is a totally unintelligible to everyone but Bob (the ever-listening, trusted confidant of Alice), with whom Alice has shared the 128-bit key. Since Bob can use AES to make exactly the same bitstream as Alice, he knows which bits have been flipped, and thus can recover the original message by flipping the bits back.

Aside Over

Back to digital signatures. Just as it's impractical to sign everything with RSA directly, it would take a lot of CPU cycles to sign your documents with RSA. Instead, usually you'll sign a hash of the document you want to verify came from you. In the hallway analogy, think of it as distributing a book you liked to everyone, and then slipping the title page into your secure glassed-in message board so that everyone can see that you endorsed it.

Making a Good Hash Function

There's an immediate problem with the title-page strategy: other people could write a different book with the same title page. If the new interloping book contained inflammatory remarks, you could get into a heap of trouble. Ideally, what we want is some digest, or hash, of your book (other than just ripping out the title page) which had the following properties:

Relatively fast to calculate
Sensitive to the entire document, not just one page of it
Small enough to fit into a message box
Nearly impossible to reverse, i.e. find another book with the same hash

If you have a hash function which satisfies all of the above properties, you can speedily sign documents by distributing the bulk of the document through insecure channels, and then making a hash of the entire document and signing just the hash with your private key. Then receivers wanting to check the authenticity of your document can take the insecure copy of the document, hash it in exactly the same way you hashed it (there are publicly available hash algorithms like MD5, SHA-1, and WHIRLPOOL), and then compare the hash the digitally-signed hash you just made (by passing your signed hash through your public key).

Let's go over why each of the four above points is important. #1: if it takes a long time to calculate the hash, you waste time. (That's why we don't sign whole messages with RSA, right?) #2: every bit of the hash must depend on every bit of the original document in a unique way. (This way changing even a single character in the document produces a completely different hash, making forgery difficult.) #3: hashes are typically only a few bytes long. (MD5 is 128 bits long, SHA-1 is 160 bits and WHIRLPOOL is 512 bits - all small enough that signing them is no big deal.) #4 the hashes should be computationally easy only in one direction: so it's hard to make a message with a specified hash. When I say "hard," I mean that ideally it would take about 2^(hash length) tries to find a message which would have a specified hash.

This last point is vital: when you make a digital signature, you're claiming authorship for every message which has that hash, since the hash is the only thing you sign. (If somebody distributed a forged document withe same hash as a document you signed, they could claimed you signed the forgery.)

Hashes are also used to protect passwords. You want programs to be able to identify if a password was correct, but for security reasons it's a bad idea to store the password itself on your disk. To get around this problem, most software stores only a hash of your password on your disk. To check that subsequent entered passwords are correct, programs do a hash of the entered text and compare it to the stored hash. As long as the has has good crypto strength, people with read-only access to the file containing the passwords will not be able to guess the password from the hash. (Aside: Windows by default uses an infamously insecure algorithm for storing password hashes, the LM hash, which requires only about 2^36 operations to crack. Even a general-purpose modern computer can brute-force Windows passwords in a few hours, and you can speed that up to a few minutes by using pre-computed rainbow tables. Insane!)

Potential Pitfall: Birthday Attacks

SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm) is used industry-wide as a purportedly secure hash algorithm (i.e. one that satisfies #4 above). It's still pretty good, but it's starting to show its age. One of the best ways to attack the signed hash cryptosystem is to use what's called a birthday attack, named after the birthday paradox (which says if you have more than about 25 people in a room, chances are that two people will share the same birthday - the trick works because the number of possible birthday collisions is 25 * (25 -1)/2 = 300 - the number of potential pairs goes as the square of the number of people).

To do a birthday attack, the villain chooses a message you'd be happy to sign (A, which could be some innocuous legal document to be signed by a lawyer) and an evil message he wants you to sign (B which can be anything). He then looks for strings of invisible fluff (c and d) which he can append to A and B such that the hash of Ac will be the same as the hash of Bd. (The invisible fluff can be a string of mixed spaces and non-breaking spaces, or comments in an .html document, or tons of other things which won't affect the appearance of A and B but will change their hashes.)

Here's the bad news: although for a good 160-bit hash you'd have to make 2^159 guesses of d such that A and Bd would have the same hash, for a birthday attack the villain generates only about 2^80 fluff strings c and d. Chances are that for one of the 2^160 pairs of c'd and d's, the hash of Ac will be the same as the hash of Bd.

Real World Implications

Already there have been successful birthday attacks against MD5 (the 128-bit hash I mentioned), and SHA-1, which is an industry standard, is starting to show cracks as well. In 2005, Xiaoyun Wang, Andrew Yao and Frances Yao have found a shortcut to do birthday attacks on SHA-1 such that only about 2^63 computations are needed. (If SHA-1 were a better hash function, no attack faster than brute force would be possible, and that would take 2^80 operations). Even today, 2^63 operations is feasible with the right hardware: if a teraflop specialty purpose machine (like the Geforce 8800) costs about $500, then to make a malicious pair of messages Ac and Bd in a year you'd need about a billion dollars in computer resources.

Computers are going to get faster, and cryptanalysts (maybe) are going to find faster-than-2^63 attacks on SHA-1. My prediction is that birthday attacks against SHA-1 are going to become widespread some time within the next 20 years.

Staying One Step Ahead

Replacements for SHA-1 are in the works. There are hashes with longer digests which are already public standards: SHA-256, SHA-512 and WHIRLPOOL (with 256, 512 and 512 bit digest lengths), but they haven't been as widely scrutinized as SHA-1. (I bet they're all pretty good though, but I'm not a pro cryptanalyst.) If you're a programmer, consider coding software in a modular-enough way that you can drop in different hash functions into your code easily, and that different hash lengths don't mess up your program.

Until better software comes along, I'd recommend that people working on big, secret important stuff adopt the following two policies:

Always edit a document sent to you before signing it in some unpredictable way.
Always keep a copy of the document you actually do sign.

Point 1 will protect you from birthday attacks. If you change Ac even slightly, the billion-dollar crack attempt made by the villain will be completely worthless, since he has a Bd which hashes to the unmodified Ac. Point 2 will make sure that even if your signature gets broken and somebody claims you signed Bd, you can whip out the document you actually did sign and show that somebody made a pair of hash-colliding documents. (You won't be able to prove if it was you or the villain, but at least there would be reasonable doubt.)

Back to the Real World

Of course, these day's it's much cheaper to hire a spy to infiltrate your organization than to generate a billion-dollar hash-colliding document pair and hope it's signed without modification. I'm a silly crypto-hobbyist for suggesting you should worry about anything but a side channel attack. And even then, I've found that the vast majority of folks are too concerned with their own business to try to hack yours. I routinely accidentally leave my door not just unlocked but wide open, and I have yet to be stolen from at home. The world's a safe place; you don't need to worry about digital security. I just have a little-kid-in-treehouse mentality when it comes to fancy computational methods for making rock-solid crypto. How about you? Do any of my readers think crypto is fun? Should I blog more about it?

Cookie Dough: Cold Killer?

2007-04-29T11:57:00.000-07:00

Greetings, bowl-lickers.

A friend of mine who enjoys the odd clandestine spoonful of uncooked cookie dough suggested to me last night that I look into the risks involved in his filthy habit. (Just kidding - I regularly eat raw cookie dough by the scoop.)

We're told never to eat cookie dough because raw eggs may contain the bacterium Salmonella enterica, which can make you sick. Despite all the warnings, cookie dough eating is rampant in North America. Does cookie dough cause widespread poisoning deaths, or is it just another paper tiger? Read on to find out.

Salmonellosis: Symptoms and Rates

Any medical condition with a Latin name sounds scary. However, the majority of Salmonella infections cause gastro-intestinal upset and a fever for 4 to 7 days and then go away without formal medical intervention. If you're old, an infant, or have a weak immune system, you could need antibiotics to make your infection go away, and a particularly bad Salmonella infection can cause lasting conditions like arthritis or death. However, these big-ticket fears are relatively uncommon; this CDC study says the ratio of illnesses to hospitalizations to deaths for nontyphoidal salmonellosis is roughly 2,426 to 28 to 1.

The same CDC study estimates that the number of cases of salmonellosis in the United States is about 182 000 per year, or about 1 in 1 500; but since most infections go unreported it's really hard to tell. Its best guess is that salmonellosis from shell eggs causes about 2000 hospitalizations and 70 deaths per year: in other words, salmonella from eggs is about 1000 times less deadly than the flu (from this .pdf, page 2; this comparison is apt since both flu and salmonellosis are grave threats mostly to people with compromised immune systems).

Is Cookie Dough a Big Culprit?

Most of the salmonellosis outbreaks that make the news come from large-scale slip-ups where dozens of people get ill, rather than from small families tasting the occasional batch of cookie dough. Is this just because it takes a certain number of cases before a story is newsworthy, or is there another cause at work?

This CDC page warns that in large-batch recipes where 500 eggs are used the Salmonella risk is greater, since one contaminated egg could taint the whole batch. So what's the risk of getting salmonellosis from eating cookie dough from a two-egg recipe?

This study estimates that only 1 in 30 000 eggs is potentially contaminated with Salmonella, so at most there is a 1 in 15 000 chance that your dough is going to have any Salmonella bacteria. (If the first egg doesn't have Salmonella, the second egg has a smaller than 1 in 30 000 chance of having it too, so 1 in 15 000 is an over-estimate of the risk.) Assuming that it's certain that you will catch an infection from tainted dough, that puts your risk of death from tasting the dough at less than 1 in 36 million; if you have a healthy immune system your risk is considerably smaller. The daily chance of getting a flu as bad as a non-fatal flu-like Salmonella infection are 1 in a few hundred, so you really don't need to worry about salmonella from cookie dough: background risk levels are much higher.

EDD, LED and GHAF

Let's put that 1 in 36 million figure in perspective. The Equivalent Driving Distance (EDD) is just under 2 miles (for those new here, that means a 2-mile car trip is as likely to kill you on average as eating 2 raw eggs) and the Life Expectancy Decrease (LED) is less than 37 seconds (eating 2 raw eggs decreases your life expectancy by only 37 seconds - here I assumed on average my readers might have 42 years left in life and divided by 36 million). For more on the LED and EDD risk metrics, see this introductory blog post and this wiki page for recording risk levels.

So on average the risk of being killed by your baking is negligible. But is the fear over-hyped? Considering there are 294 000 Google hits for "salmonella raw eggs America" and only 70 Americans die of Salmonella from raw eggs, the Google Hits per Annual Fatality (GHAF) hype-metric is 4 200: about as high as for West Nile virus. (See an introduction to the GHAF metric here and a list of GHAFs for various risks here.)

Conclusion: Lick On!

Eating cookie dough gives you a negligible risk unless you have a particularly weak immune system. Whip yourself up a batch and eat it all: it really doesn't matter. Oh, and please save me a spoonful while you're at it.

Bon Appetit!

LeDopore

Contest Results

2007-04-24T19:32:00.000-07:00

Greetings, Knaldskalle.

Hi all! This is just a quick post to confirm that Knaldskalle has won the metrics contest with his two entries of "terror" and "school shootings," both of which reveal that we over-hype interpersonal violence. As your reward, Knaldskalle, do you have any ideas for a "Many Ideas" blog post?

Cheers,

LeDopore

Taking Ears Off Your Life

2007-04-21T12:40:00.000-07:00

Greetings, colonels.

Today's post is going to look at some of the dietary consequences of US corn subsidies. The United States corn industry is politically untouchable since so many processed foods are made from corn derivatives. (If you're interested in more details about factory foods, I thoroughly recommend Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma.)

While many wary eaters know that corn products like corn-fed beef and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) are wrecking dietary havoc among the American people, it's difficult to assault the entrenched food industry without convincing facts about just how much direct damage corn subsidies do to our health. In this post I'm going to show that we can blame pretty much all of our HFCS woes on corn subsidies, and I'm going to show how much damage HFCS really does.

Corn Subsidies

Ever since 1975, the United States has been paying farmers to grow corn in excess of the quantities which the market would naturally bear. Taxpayers make up the difference between the market price and a government-guaranteed price, which is often in the neighborhood of twice the buying price of corn. Americans pay over $5 billion per year (about $17 per capita) to keep farmers producing way more corn than we could ever safely consume.

Consequences of Corn Subsidies

Corn farmers aren't the ones getting rich; the net effect of corn subsidies is to ensure a huge surplus of raw biomass to be used to manufacture higher-value food products. From The Omnivore's Dilemma, I learned that about 60% of the corn grown in the United States goes to animal feed, and much of the remainder goes into producing HFCS. If you drink diet soda or if you steer clear of US-grown meat, your taxes are paying for someone else's unhealthy diet. (Show of hands: would anyone out there resent subsidizing tobacco?)

HFCS Created by Corn Subsidies

If I'm going to accuse subsidies for making us eat unhealthy corn and corn-fed meat, I'd better be sure the subsidies are actually to blame. There are three factors which make methink corn subsidies are the root cause of pretty much all the HFCS consumed by Americans. First, HFCS is cheaper than cane sugar in the US due to subsidy. Second, in Europe, where corn isn't favored like it is in North America, HFCS is almost never used as a processed food sweetener. Third, the timing of the introduction of the corn subsidy coincides with the explosive growth of HFCS consumption in the US, as is evident in this graph (from this USDA site):

Corn subsidies were introduced in 1975, before which it's plain that HFCS was a bit player. Also note that soft drinks began phasing in HFCS as a sweetener, a transformation completed by 1984. (I fancy I can see the kink in the HFCS curve around 1984 - I wonder if that's caused by saturating the soda market.)

Fat Caused by HFCS

If HFCS were like normal unhealthy food, at least a calorie of HFCS consumed would displace a calorie from some other source, meaning that HFCS wouldn't be more responsible for today's obesity epidemic than any other unhealthy food. However, as I mentioned in this post, a recent study showed that HFCS doesn't make you feel full, so consuming HFCS will not make you eat less of other things. (The 95% confidence limit to this study was that 100 HFCS calories may displace 24 other food calories, but the study's best estimate is that people actually eat 17 more calories of other foods for every 100 HFCS calories they consume. Also note that other liquefied sugars may be just as bad as HFCS at displacing other calories.)

Even if you take the most charitable view towards HFCS allowed by the study's margin of error, 76% of the HFCS calories consumed by Americans go to fat. The average annual per capita consumption of HFCS in the United States is 59 pounds. Even assuming half of that gets wasted, that means annually an extra 22 lbs of sugar per American is consumed just because HFCS happens to be today's sweetener of choice. According to this publication (page 13 - also interesting because it claims HFCS might be not worse than other liquid sugars), HFCS is about 4/9 as calorie-dense as fat, so the availability of HFCS means that on average Americans gain an extra 10 lbs per year.

Conclusion

On average, $17 of your taxes every year go to a subsidy which causes people to gain an astonishing 10 lbs per year just through the HFCS mechanism I've outlined. (I expect subsidized animal feed also makes Americans fatter, but the story there is harder to untangle.) Moreover, the over-fertilized Iowa corn monocultures are horrible on the environment, and have killed Mexican farms which can't compete with American corn prices. (Those of you who object to Mexican farm labor should throw your lot in with the anti-subsidy crowd: it's just the subsidies which enable Americans to pay migrant workers $4 an hour while just across the boarder no farmer can afford to hire at $1 an hour. It's not something magic in the soil which makes American farms magically 4 times as efficient at turning labor into food - its the subsidies.)

In conclusion, corn subsidies do enormous harm. While I haven't supported every anti-subsidy argument in this post, I've shown that without corn subsidies you'd have the equivalent weight loss of 10 lbs per year. (I suspect many Americans diet more because of their HFCS-related weight gain - imagine if you got an extra 10 lbs of "free" fat per year! Mmmm... what I'd do!)

It's going to be a tough fight against the food industry, but there are lots of good reasons to abandon our current destructive corn-driven Leviathan. Let's ditch the subsidies and let 'em howl.

Local Produce vs. International Peace

2007-04-18T14:21:00.000-07:00

Greetings, Macaroni Munchers.

A lot of my friends are concerned about buying food from too far away, in the interests of both helping out the local economy and of reducing fossil fuel consumption. It's a scary thought about how much our food supply depends on non-renewable resources like transportation fuel, and it's appealing to have the visceral connection to what you eat that you can get only from being able to visit the place where your food grows.

Agriculture and the Developing World

The unfortunate consequence of favoring domestic produce, however, is that you deprive the developing world of the much-needed foreign exchange which comes from agricultural exports. In fact, in non-industrialized areas of the third world, pretty much the only thing they produce that we consume is food.

A typical Nicaraguan farm worker earns about $.25 an hour (a quarter the minimum wage of neighboring Costa Rica). The cost of living there may be quite low, but still I'm disgusted by the fact that they could pick coffee for 8 hours and not earn enough money for a singe espresso shot in an American café.

By insisting on buying domestic food, we're just driving developing-world wages down farther. There are plenty of options for Americans: they don't all need agricultural work to stave off extreme poverty. Giving meaningful work to developing nations promotes the sense of coöperation which leads to good feelings and peace.

Dependence on developing nations for food can also lead to peace-making policy. You're less likely to invade another country if you need the food they produce to survive.

Aside: I'm being overly-dramatic. Americans consume on average 3790 calories per day (although some of that is spoilage), so losing even a third of food imports wouldn't spell widespread famine. At the same time, you're less likely to go to war with an entrenched trading partner; the European Union may have ushered in an age of post-historicism, now that individual countries are so economically entwined that it would be sillier than ever to go to war.

Fuel Costs by Sea and Land

Trade and peace aside, many of my friends want to consume as little fossil fuel as possible in getting their food delivered, so they're careful to buy only from locally-grown produce. However, raw distance-from-home is a poor tracker of fuel consumed, since freight by sea is so much more efficient than by land. Let's figure out just how much more efficient it is to ship a container one mile by sea than by land.

By land, a typical mileage rating for a semi truck carrying a 53-foot trailer is about 6 miles per gallon. Page 5 of this document has all of the relevant information: an ultra-sized container ship traveling at 22.5 knots burns 180 tonnes of fuel per day, and carries 10 000 twenty foot-equivalent units of cargo. After a little math, we find the ship transports the same 53-ft container at 44 miles per gallon.

A ship coming to the United States from Chile burns about the same amount of fuel per container as a semi truck traveling about 700 miles, and if people drive 8 miles to the grocery store to buy 50 lbs of groceries in a car rated at 30 miles per gallon, they burn as much fuel per grocery item as that container ship from Chile.

Conclusions

Before jumping on the "local food" bandwagon, please consider the impact of shunning the developing world. Also, consider biking, busing or walking to the grocery store when possible if you're really interested in reducing fossil fuel consumption.

Bon Appetit!

Reacting to the Virginia Tech Massacre

2007-04-17T08:31:00.000-07:00

Greetings, fellow clods.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne, Meditation XVII

And who by brave assent, who by accident,
who in solitude, who in this mirror,
who by his lady's command, who by his own hand,
who in mortal chains, who in power,
and who shall I say is calling?

Leonard Cohen,"Who By Fire"

It's a terrible thing that every once in a while, a human mind snaps so violently that they take out others in their passing form this world. Shootings such as those at Virginia Tech yesterday, which claimed 33 lives, provoke deep reflection from those who hear about it. We all want to know what could make a person so down on humanity, so destitute that they would deliberately try to do it as much raw damage as possible.

Mental Earthquakes

However, people who decide to run on shooting sprees and then kill themselves are exceedingly rare. Only a tiny fraction of people do one-person massacres; it is usually institutions like governments which do the majority of the killing (see below). Mental breakdowns of different magnitudes might follow the same sort of power law as earthquakes, and perhaps there are some analogous reasons; releasing small amounts of tension in such actions as swearing being much more frequent than going on a shooting spree.

Obligatory Dig at Institutionalized Violence

It's interesting to compare the Virginia Tech massacre to the situation in Iraq in terms of raw mortality. It is tempting to visit sites like "Iraq Body Count" to get raw data. However, Iraq Body Count lists only confirmed dead registered with western-style authorities, and its upper limit on civilian casualties is 67 703 as of today. I'm not sure what their motives are, "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity," but a Lancet article shows they're off by an order of magnitude.

On October 11, 2006, this article in the Lancet took a different approach: they did a cross-sectional study of 50 clusters in Iraq chosen at random. They essentially asked "who was alive before the invasion" and "who had since died due to the war", and then extrapolated to get an estimate of the true number of Iraqi killed to date. Since the clusters were chosen at random it's possible to get statistical confidence intervals.

Their estimate is that, as of July 2006, 654 965 (95% confidence interval 392 979–942 636) Iraqis have been killed as a consequence of the war. (About 90% of these through direct violence, and not through secondary causes like the famine and health care breakdowns which accompany war.) That's an average of over 1000 per day, or a death rate of more than one Virginia Tech-scale massacre per hour for more than one thousand days straight. In other terms that's 218 times the total death toll of the September 11 2001 attacks. I feel a little hypocritical devoting a whole post to the Virginia Tech massacre when the war in Iraq causes so much more senseless violence.

My Recommendation: Don't Change Domestic Policy

It seems like the appropriate reflex at times like this is to seek some remedy: some change in domestic policy which will ensure that shootings such as these will never happen again. The anti-gun activists will use this massacre to justify harsher restrictions on weapons, while the libertarians will claim that if each student had been armed, one of them would have been able to have dropped the gunman before he had shot too many people. The Virginia governor has declared a state of emergency (as if that's going to help now). People are madly using this event as a fulcrum to leverage their own political agenda, because there's a public consensus that something must be done.

Even if a non-invasive policy could totally eliminate rampage shootings, it wouldn't change life appreciably. However scary rampage shootings are, they kill few people: on the order of 10 per year. In contrast, traffic claims about 44 000 lives a year (US DOT report, page 8 of a .pdf). If on average Americas devoted about 1 hour to thinking about the Virginia shootings, a collective 438 lifetimes would be spent mourning the passing of the 33 victims. Allowing politicians to push through new measures to monitor us under the auspices of keeping us safe is at best a waste of time: we are already safe.

Conclusions

My heart goes out to everyone who has experienced a loss: the Iraqi victims especially (who I'm sure mostly just want a chance to live a life untorn), and to the many fewer traffic casualties, whose deaths are as senseless as any. Let's not allow our fascination with criminal psychology obscure the truth: that the vast majority of Americans live free from the risk (if not the fear) from violence, whereas 2.5% of the Iraqi population has been killed by the invasion. Don't let the deaths of 33 Virginia Tech victims become a political bargaining chip. Keep things in perspective, or we're going to offer up our freedoms and cheerfulness in exchange for the appearance of removing a risk that's not significant in the first place.

Metrics Contest

2007-04-16T09:33:00.000-07:00

Greetings, high-rollers!

In today's post, I'm announcing a new, exciting contest for my Many-Ideas readers: the Metrics Contest!

LED, EDD and GHAF Recap

If you're new here, let me fill you in a bit on the history and aims of this blog. I'm interested in putting risks into perspective and in deflating over hyped issues.

But how do we know how risky a certain activity is in a way that's easily understood? And how do you quantify hype?

To give risk probabilities a human touch, I've introduced two new metrics: the life expectancy decrease (LED), which gives you the expected amount of time your lifespan decreases from engaging in the said risky behavior, and the equivalent driving distance (EDD), which finds the distance you would have to drive to accrue a risk comparable to the activity in question. The LED is calculated by multiplying 85 years by the chance the measured risk will kill or seriously maim you, while the EDD is calculated by multiplying the risk by 1 billion (10^9) miles and dividing by 14.6, since in 2005 in the US there were 14.6 fatalities per billion miles driven.

The GHAF measures undue hype, not just pure risk. Bigger risks deserve more attention, but they don't always get it. "GHAF" stands for "Google Hits per Annual Fatality," and measures the ratio of the attention an issue gets to the real threat it poses. It's a very approximate measure, but the GHAF for different risks is so variable (from about 1 to over 100 000) that it's still useful in identifying over hyped issues.

The inaugural LED and EDD post is here, and the post introducing the GHAF is here. If you're new here, check them out to get an idea of how they can be calculated.

Risk and Hype Lists

There's a wiki to keep track of both the risks of certain activities (here) and the GHAF of certain phenomena (here). There are many fascinating cases of hype which these lists miss, which is why I'm holding this contest.

Contest Rules

Calculate the EDD, LED and GHAF for a risk of your choosing, and post it to me along with an idea for a Many Ideas blog post. On April 23rd I'll announce my favorite, and I will do a full investigation and posting on the winner's topic.

Submissions will be rated for originality (5 pts) accuracy (5 pts) and for how much they reveal about out risk biases (15 pts). Entering your EDD, LED and GHAF to the wiki pages earns an extra 2 points.

May the juiciest entry win!

Killer Cellphones?

2007-04-15T10:11:00.000-07:00

"Pronto? MoshiMoshi? Hello?"

I was reading Digg today, which pointed me to an article speculating that cellphones are causing "colony collapse disorder," the name for an alarming phenomenon whereby the majority of honeybees in every colony are mysteriously disappearing. (By the way, this isn't jsut about the honey bees produce. The value of their crop pollination is in the billions per year; would anyone like to post a comment with a more exact figure?) The article sounded interesting until they went off the deep end by vilifying cellphones with a few cherry-picked debunked claims:

Evidence of dangers to people from mobile phones is increasing. But proof is still lacking, largely because many of the biggest perils, such as cancer, take decades to show up.

Most research on cancer has so far proved inconclusive. But an official Finnish study found that people who used the phones for more than 10 years were 40 per cent more likely to get a brain tumour on the same side as they held the handset.

Equally alarming, blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today's teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives.

Chilling. Let's go into an account of how much damage a cellphone can do, and let me cite a few studies of my own.

Traffic Dangers

We have lots of evidence that cellphones impair driving ability. A University of Utah study found that cellphone conversations impair about as much as a .08% blood alcohol content, the threshold for the legal drunk-driving limit in many North American states. The World Health Organization says talking on a cellphone while driving increases your risk of accidents by a factor of 3 to 4. Taking a 100-mile drive decreases your life expectancy on average by about one hour, i.e., it has and LED of one hour (see posts with the tags LED and EDD for more, or this one which introduces them). Talking on your cellphone bumps the LED up to three or four hours, meaning that the driving-related risk starts to overcome the old-age-related risk you'd incur anyways if you call people while driving.

Other than impairing driving ability (and repetitive stress injuries from thumb-typing), cellphones aren't going to hurt you. Let's take a look first at the physics of cellphones (which will show them to be benign) and then take a look at the epidemiology of cancer among cellphone users, citing the most thorough study ever done, which happens to be Danish (Long Live Fear-Dispelling Vikings!).

The Physics of Cellphones

Cellphones communicate by broadcasting microwaves to cell towers. They use one of two frequency ranges: either about 850 MHz (the PCS band) or about 1900 MHz (the cell band). The peak power of a cellphone's transmission is about 2 Watts, so the amount it broadcasts into your head isn't more than about 1 Watt.

There are three potential concerns which make cellphones potential health risks: heat, chemical damage, and brain interference. Let's assess each potential risk.

Of Cellphones and Sunbeams

It turns out many of you non-hat wearers heat your head with electromagnetic radiation on a daily basis. A fusion-powered blob of gases over 100 million km away bakes your melon with an intensity of over 1000 Watts per square meter on a cloudless day. If the cross-sectional area of your head is about 3% of a square meter, that means the sun warms your head with over 30 times the power intensity of a cellphone. If cellphone-related heat can cause damage, so can the sun.

Mutagenic Conversations?

The next most commonly-feared etiology of cellphone-related cancer is through the photons in the microwaves causing genetic damage by affecting our DNA. However, the energy in even the highest-energy cellphone photons is far too low: a 1900 MHz photon has an energy of less than 8 microelectronvolts: about 100 000 times less energetic than the kind of photon needed to make any chemical change. At body temperature, random thermal fluctuations give every molecule constant kicks of over 25 millielectron volts: over 1000 times as powerful as a cellphone photon. No cellphone is going to turn you into a toxic avenger.

Nokia Mind Control?

I've seen one more way in which fear-mongers propose that cellphones could harm you:. They think it's possible that the pulses of electromagnetic energy could interfere with brain functions. It's true that neuroscientists use pulses of transcranial magnetic energy to temporarily (and, we hope, reversibly) poke an area of gray matter to try to figure out what it does. Could cellphones be doing the same?

Again, the relative magnitudes are way off: neuroscientists use field strengths around 10 Tesla, while cellphones typically have much smaller magnetic field strengths: around 50 Gauss or 5 mTesla (1 Tesla = 10 000 Gauss: one of those Metric System anomalies). Once again there's a yawning, factor-of-1000 gulf between the strength of a cellphone and the effect size needed to make worrying sane. It's even worse when you take into account the fact that the energy associated with a magnetic field goes as the square of the field strength, so it's more like a factor-of-1-million difference between what a cellphone is and what we'd worry about.

Epidemiology

By now, it shouldn't surprise you to find that the most extensive study done on cellphones (the Danish one I alluded to) "found no evidence for an association between tumor risk and cellular telephone use among either short-term or long-term users." The study followed 420 095 persons for up to 21 years each, and saw that cancer rates were not higher than among the population in general. Breath a sigh of relief, and don't believe the fear-mongers who say cellphones are risky.

What about studies which show a correlation between cancer and cellphone use? There's a dirty little secret in science called publication bias. In a nutshell, it's precisely those stories which seem to defy common thinking which seem most newsworthy, get the most press, and get published. In cases where there's a lot of public interest and attention, it's a good policy to disregard studies with small sample sizes, since there are probably 20 unpublished small studies with null results for every 1 study with a stunning effect that's significant at the 5% level.

Conclusions

I don't know that much about bees, but cellphones are safe to humans, provided that their attention isn't needed elsewhere and that it doesn't over-stress them to have a cellphone. It's not totally outrageous to guess bees might be confused by cellphones, since the Earth's magnetic field is only about 0.3 Gauss. I'm not an expert of bee navigation, but it shouldn't be to hard to experimentally verify the connection between active cellphones and bee death. In the meantime, color me skeptical, especially considering that the article repeats loony fears.

Financing Hippies

2007-04-14T17:36:00.000-07:00

Greetings, venture capitalists.

In my last post, I talked about how it would be a good idea to force all list prices to reflect the expected use cost, so that consumers would be able to more easily compare total costs. In the comments on that post, I also said it would be a good idea to increase energy costs until they hit their "true cost," whatever that might be.

These two suggestions together would be a shock to the economic system, so I'm going to propose a way to finance energy-efficient housing such that the net effect is that nobody gets a stiff bill and energy-efficient technology gets used where appropriate.

Forging a "Standard Deal" with the Banks

Here's the scoop. Everyone want to decrease the taxes they pay towards energy subsidies. Governments are bad at giving environmental incentives proportional to the environmental good done. Banks are greedy. Homeowners don't have piles of cash sitting around, but they're willing to pay huge sums over time in tiny increments.

Here's the plan. Introduce a "standard deal," whereby you can request for a bank to send a housing engineer to your (already-built) home. They will determine which energy-efficient technologies would be most profitable for the house in question. If they decide it to be profitable, the banks could then authorize and pay for energy efficiency updates to be done on the home in question. From that time on, the banks could have a lien on the property for an amount equal to the cost of the thermal upgrading, and for some years' time they would be authorized to take 80% of the difference between the current and pre-improvement utilities bills as estimated by historical usage. The banks would keep the lien on the house until either 10 years have elapsed, or until the amount the bank has drawn has covered the upgrading expense compounded at 15% per year.

Effects of the Standard Deal

The net effects of the standard deal are: homeowners get a short-term small reduction in their utilities bill, and after a few years they get a substantial reduction. Banks get a 15% return-on-investment for their cash, at a fairly low risk. Banks have an incentive to hire engineering firms which will install the most energy-efficient technology which will have a payback time of less than about 8 years. Energy usage will go down across the board. Since the energy-efficiency improvements make the house more valuable, the lien plus improvements actually increase the value of the house (unless the banks made a mistake in terms of what kind of improvements to order).

Case Study: Victorian Toronto Mansion

In the case of the Toronto house I mentioned last post in a footnote, over 10 years they were paying more than $100 000 in heating bills. As long as technology exists which is capable of reducing their winter heating bills to less than $1000 per month, that's more than a $50 000 10-year reduction, so if banks could finance a $30 000 or so insulation retrofit for that house, they'd be rolling in dough. The starving students who lived there would see an immediate but small ($200 - $300) reduction in monthly utility costs, and future students living there would do even better.

Standardizing the Deal

I think there should be no new laws made for this program, but that governments should draw up and promote this standard deal into fill-in-the-blanks contracts between homeowners and banks. If banks want to alter the deal, fine; but governments should provide a default agreement which doesn't screw anyone over as a baseline, in part for efficiency's sake and in part because banks have a lot more expertise at getting what they want out of contracts.

Conclusions: Sometimes Everybody Wins

There doesn't always have to be a trade off between the environment and free enterprise. We can't all be top-notch thermal engineers who know what modifications make the most fiscal sense. With this standard deal, everyone can profit, and there will be an increased economy of scale for energy-efficient technologies which make the most sense. It's win-win-win; let's do it.

Upfront Cost Disclosure

2007-04-14T17:34:00.001-07:00

Greetings, homeowners.

If you're a regular reader, you'll already know that I have both an environmental and a capitalist streak in me. I don't think these two need be in eternal conflict; in fact today's post is going to outline a way in which we can encourage the adoption of green technologies without messing around with the marketplace.

Good Policy Assumes Laziness

First of all, let me fire a diffuse attack at all of the legislated incentives to get people to adopt new green technology. While legislated incentives can be better than nothing, often the incentives are not proportional to the environmental good done (e.g. giving a fixed tax rebate to cars purchased with better than a certain mileage - there's just a threshold and no proportionality), and almost always these bills can't and shouldn't be passed when the technology has only limited applicability. However, I think that there are potentially many diverse opportunities for incremental improvements that just can't be addressed by legislated incentives. Good policy should automatically reward where it should; good policy is lazy and future-proof.

Virtue should be Its Own Reward

In this post I'm going to outline a way to promote environmental benefits in a natural, non-legislative way. Specifically, we should require that the advertised price of goods reflect the total cost of ownership, and not just the sale price. For example, when buying a house, the only price you would be allowed to advertise should be the sum of the sale price and the forecast cost of 20 years of utilities in the house. This way, houses with the same listed price would be equally affordable, and there would be incentives to build houses that were greener. Let me slow down a bit to unpack all of these comments so that they make a little more sense.

I'm Lazy Too

How many of you have bought a house or rented an apartment without first calculating the expected utility bills? I have never requested past utility statements for any property I've rented, and I certainly haven't done any thorough analysis of properties I'm only marginally interested in. I think I'm pretty typical in my laziness too: while I might try to factor in energy efficiency, I don't have a clear idea as to how much a given setup will affect my bottom line.

Modern economists acknowledge that humans make decision (and big ones too) with imperfect information, which results in less-than-optimal buying decisions. The most common numeric piece of information people take into account when looking to buy a house or rent an apartment is its price; my idea is to fold utility costs into the price from the outset so that people can make a lazy but correct decision as to how much they would like to spend on a heated domicile.

Implementation

If I ruled the world, the list price for all houses would have to be the sale price plus 20 years of expected utilities costs, based on prior use records. (Aside: 20 years is a round figure on the order of the inflation-adjusted doubling time of money at prime rates, so if you were to invest this sum at the time of sale its simple interest could pay utilities from the interest essentially for ever. Perhaps 20 years is a little on the short side.) The sale price would be allowed to be advertised only as a line item in conjunction with the utilities cost and the total list price. Lying would be considered fraud.

Guessing the efficiency of a new building might be difficult, but it should be possible to use statistics to fine any construction company which consistently lowball's the heating estimates of the buildings they make.

The same idea could be applied to automobiles: add the cost of driving 50 000 city and 50 000 highway miles before getting the list price. (Aside: this will come out to around $10 000: enough to perhaps convince many people to buy newer, more fuel-efficient cars. Who would want a clunker when the list price is $11 200? We might be able to persuade car manufacturers to lobby for this idea since it would boost new car sales.)

Perhaps major appliances and computers should have a similar addition to advertised price, maybe also including the mean time until failure. At some point gizmos become too small for these advertising restrictions cease to make sense, but I don't know if this transition happens at the "toaster" level or the "microwave" level.

Lazily Greener Incentives

Consider the implications of my idea on builders and house maintainers. If you build a house that's more energy-efficient, its value to the seller will automatically be higher, since it competes with houses of the same list price. The 20-year cost of heating a poorly-insulated house in a cold climate can top $100 000*, so energy-efficient designs and materials could give a significant edge on the open market.

Moreover, if home buyers were to display a fraction of the eco-chic that Prius-cravers show, perhaps small 20-year heating cost stats would carry the same caché as slim cellphones. In any case, energy efficiency could be reducible to a dollar value, which is great for putting things into perspective.

Conclusions

Let me recap a few of the reasons why I think we should add use cost to sale price to determine the list price of automobiles, houses etc.

It's the duty of the government to protect consumers from false advertising.
Markets are more efficient when more information is used.
It's easier to perform cost analyses once per item sold than once per potential sale.
Green policy should provide continuous incentives to make better products, and these incentives should be proportional to the environmental good done.
Legislated incentives are rigid, slow-to-implement, and fiscally inefficient.

In summary, let's get our policy into the adaptive 21st century by making the cost advertised closer to what the consumer is really going to pay.

*Friends of mine in Toronto rented a house with typical winter heating bills of $2000 per month, even though some of them opted to turn the heat down and sleep in arctic sleeping bags. I'm sure that if this heating were advertised in the listed rent they would have rented elsewhere. The 20-year heating cost for this Victorian behemoth would have been over a quarter-million bucks: a significant warning to any prospective home-buyer, and a burning incentive for the current owner to insulate better to protect the house's retail and rental value.

Where Would Gaia Tan?

2007-04-09T21:03:00.000-07:00

Greetings, sun-worshipers.

Today's post in by request. A bronzed goddess I know who's recently traveled aboard a Caribbean cruise wanted to know if cruising takes more or less fuel than a transatlantic airplane trip to Europe. Here's my take.

Fuel Cost of Flying

According to this chart from Nova, a typical transatlantic flight aboard a 747-100 will consume 57.7 gallons of fuel per passenger, or 115.4 gallons round-trip. (I'm not sure why they include three significant figures; I'm sure the variation is at least a few percent.) Incidentally, if you could drive solo all the way to Europe you would burn about five times as much, so flying isn't that bad in terms of mileage relative to driving a car alone.

Fuel Cost of Cruising

On the other hand, taking a one-week Caribbean cruise will burn about 140 gallons of fuel per passenger. (Here I assumed fuel efficiency of about 20 feet per gallon on a modern cruise ship - inspired by the QE II's mileage of 29 feet per gallon; a cruising speed of 22 knots, 3500 passengers and 3 days of full-speed cruising of the 7 total days.) The per-capita mileage of a cruise is then about 13 miles per gallon: about the same as driving alone; perhaps a little worse.

Conclusion

A transatlantic flight and a one-week cruise consume about the same amount of fuel. You're not exactly doing Gaia a great favor by vacationing on either, but the occasional vacation isn't going to outweigh habitual energy usage either. If you have a 2-hour commute in your own car, you'd burn roughly 25 gallons per week, so cruising once a year isn't going to overwhelm your daily habits.

Who knows; maybe the next generation of cruisers will like fuel-saving tech like this too? (Personally I would love a nuclear cruise ship as much for its silence as for its eco-friendliness, but I don't think that's in the cards.)

Coöperative Democracy

2007-04-09T18:54:00.000-07:00

Greetings, citizens.

Today I'm going to talk about ways in which we can improve democracy by changing the way in which we vote. Specifically I'm going to point out a few flaws in the widespread "plurality" system of voting, then I'm going to promote an alternative: approval voting.

What's Broken?

Before I go into my proposed changes, let me persuade you that there is room for improvement in the current system, especially vis-a-vis vote splitting. Vote splitting is what allowed the Nazi party to take power in Germany, and what let LePen into the final round of the 2002 French presidential elections. In both cases, the majority of the electorate detested the above ultra-conservatives, but since the right was united their total vote count was large enough to give them disproportional power.

A similar situation happened in the 2006 Canadian federal election, where only 36% of Canadians voted for the Conservatives, but since there is only one significant right wing party and there are three left-wing parties the Conservatives took power.

Problems with Plurality?

Vote-splitting is a problem in any democracy where the winner is determined by a plurality, or first-past-the-post system. Since the candidate with the most people voting for them is the one that wins, one of the most tragic ways to lose a pluralist election is to have many good politicians agree with you. I suppose in some ways the threat of splitting the vote might be a good thing in that it encourages politicians with similar platforms to amalgamate, fostering simplicity; but this small good in my opinion is outweighed by occasionally electing extremist governments which don't reflect the will of the people.

However, given that there are going to be a few maverick politicos who refuse to take up another's banner, the reasonable parts of the political spectrum will become crowded with egotists whose best chance at getting ahead is by sabotaging their fellows' images, and politicians adopting unreasonable views will enjoy unsplit votes and my be able to wield disproportionate power.

The poor voter's only recourse is to vote tactically: to give power to a lesser evil to defeat a greater evil. Such tactical voting systems result in meta-stable power structures with all the appeal of a prisoner's dilemma; let's look for something better.

Alternative 1: Approval Voting

My favorite alternative to a plurality system is approval voting. Under approval voting, each voter is given a list of checkboxes next to the names of each candidate. She checks off each candidate which meets her approval. The candidate with the highest approval rating wins the election.

Under this system, one can check just one box (if one approves of just one party), one can check a whole range of boxes corresponding to parties that are all compatible with the voter's views (perhaps along with a few one-issue parties to show support without throwing away a vote), or one can officially show disgust with the entire slate by leaving all boxes empty, indicating that the voter trusts none of the meager offerings this year.

Aside from solving the vote-splitting catastrophe, approval voting discourages mud-slinging among politicians, since discrediting others doesn't behoove politicians as much. Politicians can build platforms partially atop of one another: one could declare "my views are similar to the popular Mrs. X's (which are reasonable and well-considered), with the distinction that I would pander less to the unions than she" without fearing vote-splitting disaster. It would finally make reason and politics more miscible than oil and water: it would be a genuinely good strategy to adopt good policies regardless of "whose turf" they belong to.

It goes without saying that the two-party fiasco of the United States (which in my opinion has done harm by dividing the nation into tribes) could be instantaneously remedied by approval voting: if any new party could win power through good centrist policy with bipartisan support, I would expect a lot less extremism in American politics. Sane policy is awaiting your approval.

Alternative 2: Borda Count

Another vote-counting system is to allow each voter to rank each candidate, potentially letting unranked candidates tie for last. While this method seems appealing since it allows voters to give more information than even approval voting, it suffers from complexity and from odd consequences of tactical voting, as will be described.

Assume that, like any current ballot, a Borda-count ballot has a few big shot politicians and alongside a motley crew of amateurs. The tactical voter who wants to maximize her chosen big shot over the other predominant big shot will rank the former first and the latter last, filling in the middle positions with dimwits whom everyone knows won't get elected. The trouble is: I don't trust voters to rank the filler politicians randomly: perhaps there will be a tendency to rank the unknowns from #2 at the top of the page through #(n-1) at the bottom. This will mean whichever dimwit #1 at the top of the ballot (who will be ranked #2 by pretty much every tactical voter) will have a higher voting score than either of the two leading choices (who will get a roughly 50-50 split between first and last place from each tactical voter) and we'll elect only dimwits. That would be horrible!

Borda himself acknowledged the Borda count's vulnerability to tactical voting. From Wikipedia (so beware the source):

In response to the issue of strategic manipulation in the Borda count, M. de Borda said "My scheme is only intended for honest men".

Let me know if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that there's no advantage to voting tactically in an approval voting system: if you don't like a candidate, there's never an incentive to endorse her, and if you do, you should always endorse her. The only potential for failure might happen if a few "single-issue" parties (like the marijuana party) get more approval than any other; if this is the case thought than the leading parties clearly have missed the wishes of the electorate and deserve what's coming to them.

Conclusions

So far, my favorite system of vote counting is approval voting. It gives everybody an equal say, remedies vote-splitting, is invulnerable to tactical voters and encourages collaboration among politicians. Let's start adopting this simple yet powerful method for expressing one's political opinion, and let the reasonable, collaborative, centrist policy begin.

PS: More on Voting Systems

Alas, there is no one perfect method of voting which allows voters to express a nuanced set of preferences, and always elects the best candidate under any criterion. Mathematicians have thus gone berserk in their search for esoteric methods for determining who gets elected; each one is "optimal" for a given view of what should be. If you're interested in the diversity of vote counting systems out there, take a look at the following Wikipedia articles (I'm just amazed by how many there are):

Today's Oxymoron: Airport Security

2007-04-03T10:16:00.000-07:00

Greetings, passengers.

Show of hands: how many of you out there feel safer due to the airport security measures which supposedly keep bombs off planes? If you raised your hand you must think both that there are plenty of terrorists who try to bring down planes, but that the security checkpoints are in general pretty good at keeping them out. In this post, I hope to disabuse you of both of these notions.

First of all let me vent a little. I'm sick and tired of people talking about terrorists in general terms. I hear it all the time: "terrorists look just like us," "terrorists think what bringing down planes is God's will," and other such phrases which imply that there are enough terrorists to lump them into a uniform seething pile of hatred.

In truth, there are very few terrorists in the United States. When was the last time you heard about a US plane hijacking? Terrorism just isn't a big enough threat to justify its looming shadow over the US psyche.

The 90% Hole in the Airport Security Net

Why am I so sure that there aren't dozens of annual attempts at bringing down planes which we don't hear about due to the covert actions of TSA officials who anonymously shield us? It turns out security is regularly audited by undercover teams of agents who try to smuggle bomb-like devices aboard planes, and they succeeded in about 90% of post-September 11 2001 attempts, as reported here.

The take-home message is that the world doesn't hate us as much as militant politicians want us to believe. If about 90% of attempted plane bombings would be successful and yet US passenger planes don't regularly explode, we're left with no other conclusion than airline terrorism is exceedingly rare. If there's been one take-off for every 5 seconds since September 11, that's more than 30 million terrorism-free flights.

Conclusions

We're safe in the air, not because of an army of screeners, but because people don't hate Americans as much as we're told. Now, dear readers, could you let me know if you think our paranoia over plane bombing is just garden-variety misplaced fear, or does it come from a conspiracy of plutocrats in a position to profit from it?

The Google Hype-Meter

2007-03-19T19:03:00.000-07:00

Greetings, West Nile mosquito-swatters.

I hope that by now you will be familiar with my style of putting over-hyped risks in their place. But how do you determine how over-hyped a problem is? Today I'm going to introduce a new metric to assess how out-of-proportion a particular death threat is: the Google Hits per Annual Fatality or GHAF metric.

Google and Hype

First of all, let me admit that reducing such a nebulous idea as "hype" to a number is an inexact science at best. However, I happen to be an inexact scientist: the perfect blogger for the job.

The people who post web content are not representative of the human race as a whole, so if there's something which netizens preferentially talk about, Google is going to reflect that bias. However, in most cases this bias will distort reality by at most about a factor of 10, so any enormous differences in the whole-world hype devoted to certain risk factors should be also present in a subject's Internet chatter. Luckily, some small risks are so enormously exaggerated that even an inexact measure like the GHAF can find them with confidence.

Calculating the GHAF

So, if we're agreed that Google hits will approximate the amount of talk on a subject, we can divide the number of hits by the annual death rate of a scare to get the GHAF, a relative measure of how much that particular problem has been overblown. Let's take a look at a few real-world examples of the GHAF.

Raw Data

Malaria in Africa (GHAF = 1.5, 3 million Google hits [1] per approximately 2 million annual deaths [2])
Cancer in the United States (GHAF = 94, 54 million hits [3] per 570 280 annual deaths: page 1 of [4], .pdf warning: 6 MB)
West Nile Virus in the United States (GHAF = 5 500, 911 000 hits [5] per 165 annual deaths [6])
vCJD, the human disease from eating a mad cow, worldwide (GHAF = 81 000, 1.4 million hits [7] for 139 cases over 8 years [8] - see my blog entry for an editorial[9])
Alligator Attacks in the United States (GHAF = 293 000, 461 000 hits [10] per 1.57 annual deaths [11] - possibly the fatality rate is underestimated by this list and possibly a lot of the Google hits came from attacks on non-human targets)

Summary

The GHAF hype metric has a huge variability. It is a few thousand time greater for West Nile in the US than for malaria in Africa. Working from the assumption that most human life should be treated with roughly the same degree of care, these wildly differing GHAFs indicate that we spend far too much time worrying about the wrong things. With the GHAF, we can measure just how skewed our fears are.

The above list is far from exhaustive; does anybody want to look into adding traffic deaths or killer bees? I've set up a wiki page to keep track of the GHAFs of various risks. Feel free to add to it!

In any case, there's a huge variation in how much hype a risk gets compared with the actual danger involved. I realize there are only so many articles one can read about a certain risk before becoming inured to it, so one would expect the GHAF to be lower for real risks as not as much press will go to the millionth victim as to the first. However, the number of Google hits a risk gets is not even an increasing function of associated body count, showing that our problems run deeper that just weariness over old news.

Conclusions

I've already introduced two new measures of danger, the life expectancy decrease (LED) and the equivalent driving distance (EDD). However, these measures only ask how dangerous an activity is; they do not report how much that danger has been magnified by the media. With the GHAF, we can quantify just how out-of-proportion the hype is around a certain fear, and perhaps allow this measure of exaggeration to shape policy.

I look forward to your additions to my wiki page. What will my intelligent readers discover?

ExChange in the Weather

2007-03-13T09:40:00.000-07:00

Greetings, rain-dodgers.

A few posts ago, I made a case for future-proof policy; that is policy which automatically keeps up with the best that today's technology has to offer. I've advocated the use of results-based prizes for rewarding the discovery of useful medical treatments, since they tend to align public and private interests. Today I'm going to talk about another way we could make our policy future-proof by harnessing the free market: have our government meteorological systems switch over to prediction market-based weather prediction.

The Status Quo

Today, typically large institutions or governments hire meteorologists whose full-time job it is to interpret computer models based (largely) on publicly-available data. It takes a relatively long time for new weather-prediction models to gain acceptance: each one must be academically-verified and promoted, and the uptake of better weather-prediction techniques seems to be a patchwork affair.

At the same time, there are hundreds of math and physics geeks with computer power to spare who like to try their hand at predicting just about anything. Even the private sector has been unable to tap this latent talent pool, as is evidenced by the fact that the Netflix prize has been claimed.

Netflix Prize Exhibits Geek Talent

The Netflix Prize rewards people for discovering new ways of predicting the ratings people give their movies based on which other movies they liked. The contest started on October 2nd, 2006, and by October 15th one team had already beaten Netflix's predictions enough to claim a prize. If even a private-sector firm is unable to efficiently harness the best numerical prediction methods out there, what hope does a government agency have of keeping cutting-edge?

Prediction Markets for Weather Prediction

Imagine instead that any math nerd with a computer and an Internet connection could instantaneously profit by predicting weather better than rivals without having to apply for meteorology jobs. There are already small-scale weather prediction contests (like the WxChallenge), but these are still mostly for bragging rights, not for general-purpose weather and climate prediction.

Prediction markets are like stock markets. You can already buy and sell shares in, for example, Hillary Clinton becoming the Democratic nominee, in an online prediction market. The shares are worth $1 if the event takes place, and nothing if it doesn't. The fact that Hillary's shares trade at about 40¢ means there's a market consensus that there's a 40% chance Hillary will be nominated. Prices fluctuate with every factor that may influence her nomination probability.

If we did the same for weather (and maybe even sweetened the pot a bit to provide incentives for high-volume trading and good predictions) we could find the geeks' market consensus over the chances of it raining tomorrow. Other predictions could be made too, like the total rainfall in a season, or any other season-related information which might be economically, socially or environmentally relevant. Storm warnings could be automatically posted through regular weather channels when the price of storm stocks rose above some (low) threshold, like 20¢.

Probably what would happen is that a few centralized weather servers would emerge which would make predictions about weather at many different locations, while local "old salts" who have a sense for the weather could also make a quick buck while letting the world in on their secret, quasi-instinctual privileged weather-sense.

Conclusions

There is no method as efficient as the anarchy of the market to predict the value of a commodity. If we commoditize knowledge about the weather, we will automatically harness all the disparate knowledges about our turbulent atmosphere to reward the weather-seers and keep the rest of us dry under umbrellas when appropriate.

Stay dry!

LeDopore

PS I have to add a final caveat: if some foreign power (like a government) had deep enough pockets and had a desire to manipulate the market (by, for instance, ruining 4th of July plans by buying shares in it raining everywhere), they could do so as long as they were prepared to sustain a virtually unlimited financial loss. Perhaps a good safeguard in the system would be to include automatic "bizarreness detectors" which would sound an alarm if some fishy market activity starts.

Consuming to Curb Consumption: the Case for a new Prius

2007-03-07T08:40:00.000-08:00

Greetings, fellow humans.

Today's post is by request. One of my readers who is interested in minimizing his environmental impact asked about whether the energy costs of manufacturing a new car outweigh the energy costs of running an older, less fuel-efficient vehicle. The reader in question bikes to his law firm in all weather but snow, so he's already taken the cheapest (and probably most significant) step towards reducing his transportation-related energy consumption. However, many of us need cars at least once in a while, so it will be fun figuring out how many miles of driving you'd have to do to make buying a new car worthwhile.

Manufacturing a New Car

The Internet's too powerful these days. I thought I'd have to sift through details about modern steel-making techniques to get an estimate of how much energy goes into making a new car. It turns out that Google Answers beat me to it though: the average energy consumption associated with making a new car is 73 Gigajoules. Given that a liter of gas has about 32 Megajoules of energy, that means the energy content of manufacturing a new car is equal to the energy content of about 610 US gallons of gas. Since fossil-fuel-burning power plants are only about 40% efficient, the energy cost of making a new car is equivalent to that of burning about 1500 gallons of gas. (Aside: making cars from recycled steel reduces this energy cost by about 20%.)

Comparing Manufacturing Energy to Use Energy

Now that we know how much energy it takes to make a car, let's see how much you would have to drive a new, fuel-efficient car to make up for the extra energy used in producing it. Suppose that your new car gets about 45 miles per gallon while the old one got only 30. Then, for every 90 miles you travel, you'd save one gallon of gas from the fact that you bought a new car. Since making the new car consumed the equivalent of 1500 gallons of gas, you'd have to drive 135 000 miles to get to the break-even point, energy-wise.

Adding Emissions to the Mix

One thing I haven't factored into my account is the fact that power plants tend to have lower emissions than vehicles, since some power plants are zero-emission and others may have scrubbers (i.e., they may clean their exhaust of the worst polluting chemicals before dumping it into the air). In summary, this report says that 68% of the CO2 emissions from the life cycle of a typical car come from fuel consumption, 21% come from fuel processing and only 11% come from vehicle manufacturing, based on a vehicle lifetime of 120 000 miles. That means that, from an emissions standpoint, you have to drive your new hybrid only about 15 000 miles to reduce your net CO2 output.

Conclusions

I guessed that the energy cost of operating an old vehicle would be much greater than the cost of making a new, fuel-efficient one. The marketing behind new, hybrid cars is slick: it had me thinking about ditching old clunkers in the name of environmental responsibility. It's almost as if there's no corporate muscle behind the message "don't buy a new car while your old one still works." I guess that commercial culture will never miss a chance to tell us to buy something new, even when hiding behind the message "consume less!"

It's true that many new cars will probably make it beyond the 135 000 mile mark, meaning that you could ditch your old car for a new hybrid and rest assured that probably your net energy usage would go down eventually. It's also true that if you're worried about emissions as well as consumption, you would have to drive only about 15 000 miles to break even. Still, the environmental impact of buying additional vehicles, even if they're hybrids, is not insignificant, and should be factored into any decision over "going green" by ditching an old but still usable car.

Beam Me Up to Heaven?

2007-02-27T07:57:00.000-08:00

Greetings, friends.

You've heard a lot about risk evaluation so far from me, like why drinking a 2L bottle of soda is millions of times more dangerous than getting your head blown off while twisting the pressurized cap. Today I'm going to tackle an interesting problem in (soon-to-be-)practical philosophy: the ethics of teleportation. If I've done my job right, at the end of this post you will either fear death and teleportation, just teleportation, or neither of them.

What is Teleportation?

First, let me be specific as to what I mean by teleportation. The (now) hypothetical teleportation machine I'm going to talk about would work like this. You walk into a room, and your body is deconstructed while it's scanned, such that the position and composition of every molecule in you body is recorded. (I think that a fair amount of lossy compression would still have the subject live on the other side. Imagine a world with different transport ticket classes: First Class teleportation introducing relatively little distortion by using a full Yottabyte to store your body's information, but Coach using less bandwidth but leaving you feeling not quite right - like a low-bitrate MP3.) On the other side of the world, or years in the future (if you trust the data medium you're recorded on) your body is reconstructed, and you walk away fresh as a daisy.

Teleportation vs. Death

Here's the catch. How confident are you that walking into a room and getting taken apart molecule-by-molecule would feel any better because a suitable (even a perfect) copy of you walks out the door of a machine somewhere else? Suppose other people start teleporting and claim they didn't feel a thing wrong. Is that really any consolation? A perfect copy of my friend would behave just like a friend that didn't feel anything wrong. But how do I know that my actual friend didn't just subjectively die in the scanning room?

Most of my friends consider my reluctance about teleporting a little on the quirky side. They use it as evidence that I believe in a soul, which wouldn't get passed on to the copy stepping out of the teleport receiver. Even some of my friends who declare to believe in souls wouldn't mind being teleported as long as people did it all the time without any obvious side effects. (Maybe that makes sense. If souls don't have physical locations, why would it matter if the physical location of the block of matter "in contact with" the soul were to change locations?) Still, I think that getting my molecules ripped apart would feel pretty much the same regardless of the quality of the clone of me which stepped out into another time and place.

Death as Teleportation

"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice [....]"

-- John Donne, Meditation XVII

"Soon, some by teleportation. The 'better language' has me in Costa Rica right now."

-- Me

If you agree with pretty much everyone I've talked to, you'd say I'd be kooky to eschew teleportation because of its potential metaphysical consequences. If so, you shouldn't be afraid of dying either. Here's why: parallel universes are very likely. Check out the Wikipedia entry on "scientific" multiverses. There are tons of reasons to think that the sum total of reality is much bigger than the observable universe. Here are some reasons to suspect "reality" has more than what we could ever possibly observe:

Space is big. We don't really know how big it is - but if it's at least 10^10^29 units big (What really kills me is that when you do orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude, the "units" could be 1 femptometer or 13.7 billion light years, and it wouldn't make a difference to the "29" part! If you use units 10^80 times bigger, you'd change the exponent from 10^29 to (10^29) + 80: insignificant.), then it's likely that there's an exact copy of you somewhere out there, given the number of possible arrangements of atoms in a universe 13.7 billion light-years across (which is all you can see at this point, so the seperate universes would be effectively identical). Because of quantum fluctuations these universes would diverge, but if space is at least 10^10^29 big, there would always be some universe out there identical to ours in every way.
Baby universes might exist. If universes typically aren't that big, you might still have copies. Some physicists think that some universes constantly spawn children universes (here "universe" means contiguous volume of space), resulting in an exponential growth in the total possibilities explored by reality. In this case, you're guaranteed to have an exponentially-increasing number of exact copies of yourself elsewhere. You might not be able to reach these copies even in principal, but they would still exist.
The "Many-Worlds" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics might be correct. You might have heard that making a measurement of a particle changes that particle in a fundamental way. Quantum computers are hard to make because to make a big one, you have to carefully avoid measuring anything while the computations are running. In this case, "measuring" doesn't mean "recording the measurement," it just means letting some information about the quantum computer's state influence the outside world. But, what counts as "outside" and "inside"? Nature doesn't draw a boundary around the quantum computational mechanism, saying "OK, you particles can interact with all particles in the quantum computer, but as soon as you interact with those particles in the computer case, the show's over." If you assume there's only one reality, you have to conclude that there's something special about our minds that collapses possibilities: whenever information about the state of a quantum computer leaks out into the world which could potentially be observed by a mind, the quantum possibilities collapse, and you're left with a classically-behaving system. (Alternatively, some physicists propose that large enough quantum systems spontaneously de-cohere with no mind needed, but it's not clear how "large enough" should be so defined yet. Every experiment done so far has the definition of "large enough" coincide exactly with "big enough to contain a mind.") If you find it hard to swallow that the atoms making up your mind have special "waveform-collapsing" powers, an appealing alternative is the "many worlds" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, which suggests that possibilities never collapse, they just multiply. In this case, reality always branches whenever a particle makes a quantum decision. Reality always branches so that what you observe is consistent with the branch you took, which is why it appears that you collapse possibilities through observation: you're just forced to go along with a single outcome. So, if a particle in a superposition state decides to be spin-up or spin-down and you interact with it, you will be split into two and exist in two different non-interacting worlds: one where you observed the particle to be spin-down and one spin-up. Since quantum interactions happen all the time, the "many" in "many worlds" in like the "big" in "big bang": a serious understatement. There are so many exact copies of you floating around, it's ridiculous.

Personally, I think reasons #1 and #2 are possibilities we shouldn't discount, and that #3 is really quite likely. How about you guys?

Copies and Immortality

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
[....]
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

--John Donne, Holy Sonnet X

It's extremely likely that not only do perfect copies of you exist somewhere, but also that every reasonable permutation of matter exists, including ones where you have e.g. different social status. If you're not squeamish about teleportation and you bought my arguments about the plurality of possible existences, then you have to believe that even if "Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men" disassemble you as thoroughly as a teleporter scanner would, "One short sleepe past" you'd wake in a reality where everything was the same, except some ridiculous circumstance would conspire to make you actually survive.

If the "many worlds" theory is correct, you wouldn't even have to be physically transported to another place as part of the immortality process. Check out the thought behind quantum immortality if you're interested in more on this.

Practical Issue: Subjectivity/Objectivity Mismatch

I'm more skeptical about my subjectivity being transported with my copy than I am about the plurality of the universe. Luckily, if multiverse #3 holds, I don't have to worry about the teleporter/subjectivity problem at all.

As long as the "many worlds" idea is correct, I think I'd be able to experimentally verify my reluctance to teleport myself, but only subjectively. That's because if I tried to teleport myself, no matter how hard I tried, my subjectivity would be forced down the quantum branches in the universe into realities where I wasn't able to be destructively scanned due to a freak occurrence. This will happed subjectively to everyone, but all of your friends will be able to teleport just fine from your point of view, just like it's possible for your friends to die in your world even though you might subjectively be immortal.

You May Be the Only Person Who Cannot Teleport in the Future

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:

-- Rudyard Kipling, If -

Therefore, let me warn every one of you: there's a chance we're living in a multiverse where nobody will ever be able to teleport subjectively, because every time they try their subjectivity will be forced down some bizarre path where they didn't actually get killed. If you find yourself unable to teleport in the future even after having teleported many times before, it will mean "you" were born a clone from a teleportation machine, and your subjectivity won't be able to fit through a teleportation machine any more easily than a teleportation virgin's.

Conclusions

Be prepared for a future where all your friends can teleport without issues, but you are never able to. Be prepared for finding that teleportation doesn't work for you even if it has in the past: this just means your subjectivity started when you stepped out of a teleport receiver.

In either case, you will have evidence of the "many worlds" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, but you'll never be able to objectively prove it. My advice: keep quiet about it, or they'll think you're crazy. Maybe if you turn Amish you'll be able to hide your existential conundrum.

I'll give a closing note to financial houses. I'm interested in buying a "solipsism fund:" a financial instrument where lots of us (like, millions of us) pay into a pot, and the people surviving split the interest on this cash every year they live. If we are all subjectively immortal, there's no better investment. And no, I don't want a fixed stipend for the rest of my life - I want to be filthy rich if I have to live to be as old as the Wandering Jew. PS - please keep the recipient list anonymous until only I am left, so that others don't have an incentive to do away with me early.

Getting Used to Blogger's Order

2007-02-20T08:26:00.000-08:00

Greetings, friends.

I just noticed that my blogs are all dated the date when I started composing a post, not when I finished. I guess that makes some sense for things like trip diaries, but for essays it's not so great.

In the future I'll try to remember to paste into fresh posts so that the most recently-published entries are always on top. For now, you might want to check out Making Future-Proof Policy, a post that I started before the soda bottle posts, but finished just a little while ago. It's about how we can change policy so that it's automatically ready for unforeseeable new technologies.

Sorry for any confusion!

Warning Labels on Soda Pt 2: the Real Risk

2007-02-15T13:39:00.000-08:00

Greetings, fellow nerds.

Last post, I ridiculed the warnings on the side of 2 liter soda bottles; in-depth studies did not find a single instance of them causing any serious eye injury. Today I'm going to estimate your health risks once the bottle is open.

If the soda you bought wasn't diet, then it's loaded with one of American nutritionists' worst nightmares: high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). HFCS is the most common caloric sweetener in soft drinks in the United States, in part because agricultural corn subsidies make corn plentiful and cheap.

HFCS: Empty Calories Without Filling You Up

It's a real shame that corn was chosen as the US's crutch crop, because HFCS happens to be not just pure sugar, but it's a kind of stealth sugar which doesn't make you feel less hungry. HFCS calories then don't displace other calories in your diet.

In the year 2000, a study was undertaken where human subjects were made to consume 450-calorie portions of either soda or jelly beans on a daily basis. Whereas the jelly bean-eating group ate fewer calories to compensate for the fact that they had to eat jelly beans (if only I were a five-year-old when this study started - talk about your dream job!), the soda-drinking group's appetite did not decrease at all - in fact drinking soda may have increased the subjects' appetite (although this increase was not statistically-significant).

The study I mentioned is not alone: research has shown that HFCS may be a serious culprit in the epidemic of obesity since HFCS can be directly converted to fat easily, and a 2006 summary of recent research has shown sugar-sweetened beverages to be dangerous in cross-sectional, prospective and experimental studies.

There is a mountain of scientific evidence that drinking HFCS in soda is bad for you. There's even been talk of putting a Surgeon General's warning on soda cans, since they are so unhealthy. How unhealthy are they? Here's my estimate.

Health Impact of the HFCS in Soda

If you drink that 2L bottle of non-diet soda, you're adding its whole 1000 calories to your diet, since HFCS doesn't fill you up. According to an earlier estimation of mine, eating 800 extra calories has a 94 in a million chance of killing you, which makes the risk associated with consuming a single soda bottle is about 118 in a million: there's a greater than 1 in 10,000 chance that drinking a 2L bottle of non-diet soda will kill you in the following 15 years.

Conclusion

Drinking the soda in a 2L bottle is at least one million times more risky than opening the bottle. Yet, the warning label on the bottle is for the latter, not the former. I wonder if maybe the label is there to try to assure us that the most dangerous part of enjoying the soda is opening it, lulling us into a false sense of security. In any case, once again we see that Americans are concerned with the wrong risks. Let's stop fear-mongering about things which won't hurt us and try to educate ourselves about things that might.

PS I've added drinking 2L of HFCS soda to the ever-expanding risk list wiki. So far, it's the first activity to warrant a yellow alert.

EDIT: I've added the life expectancy decrease (LED) and equivalent driving distance (EDD) metrics to this post. See this post for an introduction to the LED and EDD.

If consuming a 2L bottle of non-diet soda has a 118 in a million chance of killing you within 15 years, then its EDD is (1 billion miles / 14.6 * 118 / 1 million) = over 8,000 miles. So, it's safer to drive for 8000 miles than to consume a 2L bottle of non-diet soda.

The LED is (80 years * 118 / 1 million) = about 3 and a half days: enough to give you pause.

Under Pressure: Attack of the Killer Soda Pop

2007-02-15T08:57:00.000-08:00

Greetings, fellow nerds.

If you consume soft drinks in the United States, chances are that you've noticed that this warning has begun to appear on two liter soda bottles. When I first saw it, I could hardly believe my eyes. I find it hard to imagine what possible circumstances could conspire to cause the cap to blow off with enough force to do bodily harm. So why the warning label? Does it really help, or is it just the brainchild of a misdirected torte lawyer?

I'm going to argue that the real dangers of soda come from drinking it, not opening the lid. I'm going to expose how skewed our senses of risk and responsibility are by showing that the high fructose corn syrup in soda does far more damage than its allegedly explosive top. This post will cover the risks of getting blinded by a rocketing soda pop top, while the next one will look into the health consequences of drinking that same soda.

The Letter Never Sent

When I set out to uncover the statistics behind the warning labels on soft drink bottles, I had imagined having to write to a representative of some bottling authority with a request for statistics on eye injury resulting from opening plastic bottles. I'd say my friends and I are casually interested in why these warning labels were deemed necessary, and ask for the reasoning behind the warnings.

I was kind of looking forward to composing the letter. Setting the right tone would be key: I'd have to come across as earnest while acknowledging the whimsical nature of my request. Usually, public relations people at corporations give you the benefit of the doubt and respond in good faith. However, it turns out injury statistics from soda bottles are well-known and published, so writing is unnecessary. I might still write that letter; if you'd like me to carry through with this plan let me know in a comment.

The Answer's Before Our Eyes

I'm not planning on writing the above letter because the British Journal of Optometry has already answered my question. In this publication (.pdf warning), titled “Serious eye injuries caused by bottles containing carbonated drinks”, they say “plastic and metal cans pose little danger: we found no related injury among the 12 889 cases.” Their database held combined data from the US, Hungarian and Mexican eye injuries from 1982 – 2002 (although it didn't have data for all countries and all years).

The paper's authors (F Kuhn, V Mester, R Morris and J Dalma) found not one instance of a soda pop bottle causing an eye injury in any of the countries in any year. It would be a stretch to say that absolutely no eye injuries happened because of pop bottles during the 1982-1999 period in the States (2000-2002 US data not published in Kuhn et al.) since the database of eye injuries used (USEIR) collects information of only serious eye damage, and not all states of the US contribute data to USEIR yet. Still, the fact that Kuhn et al. found not one case of plastic bottles causing eye damage over a 20 year span is suggestive that they're pretty harmless. If you know of someone who has been injured by a plastic bottle top, please leave me a reply about it.

Incidentally, champagne is not so benign. Kuhn. Et al. mention 43 cases of severe eye injury from sparkling wine corks to the face; the majority of these (37) were in Hungary. The remaining 6 wine cork injuries happened to Americans. If we assume the USEIR reflects only about half of all eye injuries, that's still less than 1 serious American injury per year. (Aside: Does anybody know what Hungarians put in their hooch that makes it so explosive? Kuhn et al. are baffled too.)

I'm Armed and Carbonated

Because I'm a physical sciences nerd, I'm going to figure out how dangerous pop bottle caps could be under ideal firing conditions. Typical soft drinks are pressurized to about 300 kPa. If the surface area of the cap is 3 square cm, the cap is under about 90 Newtons of force, or about 20 pounds. If we assume that some manufacturing error resulted in the cap suddenly becoming loose after a vigorous shaking of the soda at room temperature, this 90 Newtons would act on the cap for as long as the cap blocks the exit path of the gas: about 2 cm. If that 90 Newtons accelerates the cap for 2 cm, the energy transferred to the cap would be only 1.8 Joules. Most accidental cap accidents would be under less-than-ideal launch conditions, so I would be surprised if caps blew off with more than 1 Joule of energy.

How much is 1.8 Joules? About the same amount of energy as a snapped rubber band (one with a spring constant of about 250 N/m), if you stretch it three or four inches. That might sting if it hit you in the eye, but it's not likely to do permanent damage even with a direct hit. It probably wouldn't be too hard to get pop bottles approved as projectile toys for kids old enough not to try to swallow the cap.

In summary, my analysis suggests there isn't enough punch in a plastic bottle cap to do serious harm, and the lack of any evidence of eye injuries backs up my case. From here on in, I'm going to assume that the risk of serious injury from pop bottle tops to consumers (forewarned or no) is 0. Of course it isn't exactly 0, but the Kuhn et al. study covered about 5 billion person-years of exposure to pop bottle tops and didn't find a single serious injury, suggesting an upper bound on the injury rate of about 1 per 10 billion: close enough to 0 not to matter.

Time lost to the warning label

Even though an in-depth study failed to find even one instance of a plastic bottle cap damaging anybody's eye, one might think that it's better to abide by the precautionary principal, that is to warn people of the pressure danger in opening their soda on the off chance that we might prevent even one eye injury. I can imagine the person making the decision to put warnings on all plastic bottles would have a warm, fuzzy feeling if they saved the vision of even one child.

I disagree with the precautionary principal for two reasons. First, the cost of having warning labels is not zero: the precious seconds of our lives we waste worrying about inflated risks add up. Second, ubiquitous, petty, self-important warning labels can inure the public to warnings on genuine risks.

Time Lost Reading Gratuitous Fear-Mongering Messages

How many lifetimes have been wasted reading this warning message? Let's assume that, on average, every American reads this warning once per year. (I don't know if the rest of the world has adopted the warning label yet. Let's hope the insanity has been confined to the Home of the Mega Lawsuit.) If it takes about 10 precious seconds of your life to read through the text, that means that nationwide, about 95 years of life are wasted every year we insist of putting these gratuitous warnings on soda bottles. Equivalently, as you read this, you can expect 95 Americans are busy reading through the above text about how their life is potentially threatened by the intense pressure of the liquid refreshment in their hands.

Think of the good which could be done with those 95 person-years. Movies, novels and poetry written, walks in the park, vacations; all of these and more might have been accomplished if it were not for these unnecessary, attention-whoring portents of soda pop doom. There are some who balk at doing moral algebra. I think that 95 years of vision wasted by eye injury is in principal equivalent to 95 years of vision wasted by reading a warning label.

Since the net effect of the warnings is to decrease the visual lifetime of the consumer, I propose that the soda bottle companies stop printing the warnings. I also propose that we allow companies complete immunity from lawsuits arising from activities whose associated risk is so small that to post warning labels does more net harm than good.

Warnings, Warnings Everywhere...

... nor anyone to think. Perhaps the most damaging consequence of posting warnings on soda pop bottles is that we end up reflexively ignoring them. I hesitate to read every warning label I see (in truth, I didn't even notice this one below until this minute when I started looking for warning labels).

What's on the bottom of my keyboard? Is there a risk of electric shock? Perhaps deadly chemicals leak up from between the keys every midnight. How would I know? I plugged in my keyboard, it worked, and I'm happy. There's no way I'm going to pursue every last nagging, ass-covering warning I see out there, and that means I'll ignore warning signs when there are real dangers too.

I think we should standardize a color-coded warning label system, where different risk orders of magnitude have different colors. You could ignore anything less than a yellow then, unless you were exposed to the risk all the time. Manufacturers would be immune to lawsuits over correctly-labeled risks, and would be made liable for time lost if they grossly overstate the risk. I've started a list of color-coded risks - check out my wiki and add to it if you feel so inclined.

Conclusions

Gratuitous warning labels (such as the one on pop bottles) make us worry about the wrong things. There are genuine risks out there, but the system we have for making people aware of them is broken. We need to push through laws that protect companies from one-off lawsuits caused by the failure to alert customers of excessively-small risks, and then maybe we can talk about demanding that risk labels be removed when the opportunity costs or reading them outweigh the benefit they do.

EDIT: I'm adding information of the life expectancy decrease (LED) and equivalent driving distance (EDD) for opening a bottle of soda. See this post for an introduction to the LED and EDD.

If Americans open roughly 100 soda bottles per year, and if the annual risk of getting an eye injury from opening a soda bottle is less than 1 in 10 billion, the risk of opening each bottle is less than 1 in a trillion. That means that even if we were to assume any serious injury from a soda bottle were fatal, you life expectancy would decrease from opening a soda bottle by only 2.5 milliseconds (80 years - a typical lifespan / 1 trillion). Opening a soda bottle therefore has an LED of 2.5 milliseconds or less.

The EDD is computed by the fact that 14.6 driving fatalities occur every billion miles. The distance you'd have to drive to incur the same risk as opening a soda bottle is therefore 1 billion miles / 14.6 / 1 trillion; the EDD is less than 4.5 inches; so driving more than the length of a pickle is more risky than opening a soda bottle, once again with the ridiculous assumption that all bottle top eye injuries would be fatal.

Making Future-Proof Policy

2007-02-11T18:45:00.000-08:00

Greetings, fellow nerds.

Today I'm going to address an emerging problem for policy-makers: how to exploit all the latest tech without getting bogged down in implementation details. I'm going to make the case that governments should adopt an adjudicating rather than a micro-managing role in some kinds of service provision.

Today's Tech is a Moving Target

Ours is an age of innovation. The rate of innovation has never been so fast. There's a yawning gap between the cutting edge of (especially) information technology and typical technology usage. As tech speeds up, I see this problem getting worse, not better. Do we want to perpetually wait around for bright ideas to crawl their way through the legislature? Or, do we want an adaptive system where better solutions to public problems can be implemented and rewarded instantaneously? How would such an unregulated system work?

Examples: Road Construction and Power Distribution

I've already given an outline on how we could get the private sector to automatically implement any useful tech in terms of road durability and safety in the form of bonds which annually pay the holder an amount proportional to the good that was done to the community. See my 21st century capitalism post at the bottom for more details.

I'm going to argue that we should trade in our monopsony/monopoly electrical power distribution system for a free market system with fluctuating prices for the same reason. As soon as a new gizmo which does things better gets invented, you should be able to just plug the sucker in and start making cash.

Case in Point: Cold Dutch Ideas

Recently, a Dutch research agency suggested that refrigeration warehouses should turn off their refrigerators during the day (nature article and ZDNet summary) in an idea called "night wind". Excess wind power is generated at night and might get wasted if nobody used it. Since it's OK for some refrigerated goods to vary in temperature a couple of degrees, you would let your warehouse warm up a bit during the day, but get cooled right off at night using green power through a grid that didn't happen to be at peak.

Let's review some of the steps you'd need to go through to put this idea into practice given the current power system.

Some researcher thinks it up.
Political will is mustered to look into the study.
The specifics of which warehouses could use no diurnal refrigeration (possibly season-dependent) are compiled by a central authority.
New regulations have to be developed and approved.
Businesses are notified of discounts (or worse yet - income tax incentives) available for night-only refrigeration.
Enforcers patrol the warehouses which signed up to make sure they don't use their refrigerators at night.

Keep It Simple!

I think letting the price of power float is a much better idea, so long as any approved entity can buy or sell energy to the grid. We already have "time of use" power meters which record the time of day each kWh of energy was used. Usually, energy at peak hours costs a high fixed rate while energy at off-peak hours is much less expensive - often less than half as costly.

Suppose we took the time-of-day concept one step farther and let electrical power be traded like any other commodity. Then, the steps needed to get warehouses to take advantage of extra power would be:

Somebody notices power is more expensive in the day, so she turns off the refrigerators during the day.
Profit!!!

Once people realize that power's cheaper at night, all sorts of things might get switched over to night-only, such as domestic air conditioning (possibly with a heat reserve), industrial processes, electric car charging, winter heating, etc. I can imagine thermostats which take in two variables: the current temperature and the current cost of electricity, to decide whether to turn on. It would be easy to transmit a few bits of information relaying the current price of electricity along power lines at some frequency other than 60 Hz (probably higher, so the signal would die out over a short range, and so local prices could vary somewhat). Then every appliance from fridge to light bulb could (in principal) decide for itself whether to turn on.

Free Market Benefits

There are six benefits to this system:

Consumers would have financial incentives to cut back electricity usage when it's most scarce.
The market would be able to decide exactly when price-dependent operation is worthwhile. Personally, I would say "no" to lightbulbs which dim when power is expensive, but "yes" to a fridge which works most when power is cheap, and "definitely" to a plug-in hybrid car which guzzled late-night 2¢-per-kWh hydro power. No extra laws needed!
Power generation systems would be rewarded for producing electricity when it's most needed (potentially making solar power more financially-feasible in hot and sunny areas - solar needs all the financial help it can get).
If somebody developed a large battery for leveling out peak usage, they would be able to make a quick buck right away. No need for proving the thing first: just buy low and sell high. No public investment risk would be involved, and peak prices would go down as peak supply increased, as if by magic.
The financial incentives for long-distance power cables (such as HVDC) would be immediately apparent, and if they were economical, would be built quickly by profit-seeking companies.
There would finally be some elasticity in demand for power. Trying to match generation with consumption is one of the biggest causes of damage to power equipment causing blackouts. If systems become over-stressed, prices would go up and everyone who had a smart air conditioner would instantaneously decrease the load on the critically-stressed system.

As I see it, the biggest disadvantage of changing to a market-based system is that it would be a change. New hardware would be needed - that's about it.

Conclusions

A market-based power-distribution system has the advantage of instantaneously adding incentives exactly where they would be with an ideal policy system. There would be no lumbering lag between technological innovation and implementation: if it will make money, do it.

Ensuring that financial incentives are aligned with the good of humanity is what 21st century capitalism is all about. Policies where every party has the same goals makes us work together to the benefit of all, harnessing our uniquely human gift of capitalism to do good.

Keeping Bounty Hunters Honest

2007-02-11T13:12:00.000-08:00

Greetings, fellow nerds.

Two posts ago I showed how terribly inefficient big pharmaceutical companies are at finding treatments which actually help people. Less than 7% of what you pay for medicine funds useful research and development. In the last post, I outlined an incentive program whereby research companies get compensation proportional to the good they do us, so the incentive is to do work that actually benefits humanity. Today I'm going to show a few refinements to the last post's incentive program which make it more practical.

Refinement #1: What Counts as "Cured?"

Sometimes the success of a treatment can't be reduced to cured/not cured. In these cases, you'd probably replace the "% cured" number in the example I gave (the one which resulted in a $2 billion reward - see last post for details) with a fixed formula, possibly including prevalence of side effects, time for the treatment to work, cost/complexity of the treatment, or other factors. Health organizations get to decide what counts as success, and the researchers who best achieve it get the most award money.

The same disease might even have multiple prizes if desired: one whose formula emphasized quick recovery while the other's formula emphasized the absence of side effects. Complexity isn't necessary, but might be appropriate in some circumstances.

Skepticism Built-in: Incentives for Thorough Studies

It would be a good idea to reward based on the bottom of the 99% confidence interval of the study, so you would have to be statistically sure (at the 99 in 100 level) that the new treatment was better than the old treatment, and claims would tend to be understated. (This is to prevent companies from designing weak studies with few subjects. If you do many of these weak studies, a few of them will, by chance, show the new treatment to be better.) This measure would also provide an incentive for drug companies to do thorough drug evaluation, since the better the study statistics are, the smaller the confidence interval and the more companies get paid. Companies falsifying results would be dealt with just as they are in today's system.

Avoiding Getting Scooped Without Rewarding Pharmasquatting

It's also a good idea to allow a company to be locked in to a certain treatment/disease pair without competition for a limited time: you don't want to have to rush clinical trials to keep the competition from scooping you. I propose that you be able to take out two-year-long exclusive rents for each trial phase of any specific treatment/disease pair combination. For example, a company could pay (say) $100,000 for the exclusive right to do phase II testing of a new treatment. If it looked promising at the end of two years, they would get an exclusive offer to try phase III testing for (say) $500,000 for two years.

The $100,000 and $500,000 figures probably should be linked to the size of the incentive pot to discourage pharmasquatting (the pharmacological equivalent to cybersquatting: essentially leasing large blocks of treatment-malady combinations in the hopes that someone who does real research will buy the exclusive rights off you). If you made the fees big enough that randomly choosing treatment-disease pairs results in an expected loss, nobody will pharmasquat.

Harness Prediction Markets

Once research starts, these leases would have a value which reflects the probability that a certain therapy-illness combination proves fruitful. Allowing these leases to be tradable (and allowing the possibility of dividing them into shares) would instantly generate a prediction market in therapies, harnessing the full power of the free market to finance medical research. It might not be true that the best treatment discovery companies start out with access to the best funding; selling shares in treatment possibilities would be an efficient way of raising capital and of gaging the expected success of new treatments coming through.

Bounties, Ethics and Intellectual Property Law

Right now there's a huge debate over the ethics of withholding life-saving treatments from those who cannot afford the licensing fees. It's a really tough issue: is it OK to demand that people die for the sake of the survival of a company which produces life-saving treatments? If the bounty system were implemented, there'd be no issue over who has to pay what to whom to use life-saving knowledge: as soon as it's discovered, (as long as you are within the group of nations/HMOs that pay their dues - my great hope is that this group would quickly swell to encompass the whole world) you can use the treatment.

Another great advantage to the bounty system is that there would no longer be a need to enforce medical patents. In general, it's a good idea to replace negative reenforcement systems with positive reenforcement proportional to the good done, since it means you don't have to police the whole world.

Conclusions

The bounty system for new treatment discovery gives incentives for medical researchers to find ways to treat illnesses. It can coexist in a world with the current patent-protection paradigm, although if it works half as well as I expect I doubt many people won't join up.

There are probably more refinements to add to the bounty system, and there may be a few flaws in it that I haven't seen. If you think of anything I haven't mentioned (pro, con or refinement) regarding the bounty system, please leave a comment below. Thanks!

A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Get Found

2007-02-11T10:11:00.000-08:00

Greetings, fellow nerds.

Last post exposed how little incentive there is for drug companies to develop useful new treatments. Only 7% of pharmaceutical revenue goes to finding better drugs. Moreover, this meager 7% isn't normally spent developing any kind of therapy that can't be patented; efforts are skewed towards discovering new and untested substances for the sole reason that they are patentable.

The current system is broken because pharmaceutical companies get rewarded only if the treatments they find lead to widespread purchasing of chemicals they have patented. We need a system whereby private industry gets rewarded every time it discovers a better way to treat pertinent diseases.

Suggestion: Mprize-Like Rewards

The easiest way to reward companies for discovering cures is to do just that: pay drug companies a bounty for each new treatment they show (or discover) that's better than the last one. My favorite way to pay out the bounties would be like they do with the Methuselah Mouse Prize (Mprize for short), similar to the Ansari X prize for commercial spaceflight in that both provide cash rewards for results.

The Mprize encourages scientists to make mice as long-lived as possible, with the hope that some of their techniques could be applied to humans too. Whereas the original X prize offered a single cash reward for the first commercial team to achieve the target (to have one spacecraft fly twice within two weeks to 100 km with a pilot and two passengers or their weight equivalent), the Mprize offers chunks of its money to research teams who provide incremental improvements to the lifespan of mice. Prizes are proportional to how long the winning mouse outlives the old record-holding mouse.

I propose that the financial rewards for research organizations that discover new cures should be awarded incrementally. Like the Mprize, prizes should be proportional to the benefit the new treatment gives above and beyond the current best treatment. For example, say the old treatment for pancreatic cancer has a 25% success rate, the new one has a 40% success rate, and there's $10 billion in the pot for finding a cure to pancreatic cancer. Then, since the company decreased the failure rate (which was 75%) by 15%, they would get (15%/75%) = 20% of the $10 billion, or $2 billion.

Filling the Prize Pots

In a perfect world, we'd solve the prize-funding problem with alphabet soup. The WTO would request a percentage of each nation's GDP to go to the WHO, who would allocate funds as needed. Perhaps nations would get discretion over where 50% of their funds go, so that individual rulers could appease their special interest groups and gain some political capital. (As long as no special interest groups become overwhelmingly powerful in all nations, the WHO could probably end up with the same money distribution they would choose voluntarily by spreading the remaining 50% among neglected but important prizes.)

In an imperfect or intermediate world, only some nations (or a subset of HMOs within a nation) would participate in the bounty system; the others would be required to license any intellectual property discovered by the bounty system. Unfortunately, one of the strengths of the bounty system is that it provides an incentive to discover unpatentable treatments. (I wonder for example how many diseases could be helped by proper exercise. Under the current system that kind of study is hard to fund, so we'll never know.) Groups not participating in the bounty system would thus get these benefits for free (or perhaps at the expense of losing face in the international community for being freeloaders). Researchers outside of the bounty system could choose to claim the cash prize and give up their intellectual property, or they could license their work as they do now.

Still, without the burden of having to market new drugs (recall that only 14% of drug company revenue goes to R & D), it's possible that a bounty-based system could beat drug companies at their own game, producing more patentable treatments per chunk of cash, especially if M.D.s become sick of being hounded by incessant glossy ad campaigns for new drugs of dubious quality. (Hey, I can always dream, can't I?)

Sanity, Meet Drug Quality Regulations

I can't resist adding one more suggestion which would lower the cost of drugs. If you're not squeamish, check out how many rodent hairs and insect parts the FDA allows into food. Here's my question: if it's safe to eat reasonable amounts of contaminants in food (including food we give to sick people), why isn't it OK to allow even minuscule levels of contamination in the medicines we eat? Eating traces of rat hair is either bad (in which case we shouldn't allow it in food), or not a big deal (in which case we should relax the US FDA requirements which keep generic drug manufacturing expensive). Apart from dose and shelf life quality control, generic medicines you eat should have no more regulations than food.

Conclusions

If we want drug companies to work for us, we have to give them incentives to work for us. Right now their incentives are barely aligned at all with discovering new and better medical treatments. By replacing the patent system with a bounty system, we can harness the capitalist desires of pharmaceutical corporations for the benefit of humanity. It will be hard to set up a system which collects money for the rewards, but even if we assume this system is only about 50% efficient and collects 50% of the revenue of today's system, this system would still more than triple the amount of useful treatment research and development going on today. 7% efficiency isn't a hard benchmark to beat.

Let's harness the power of the free market by giving incentives for finding the best (not the most profitable) cures possible.

P.S. There are a few details in the way we'd need to implement bounties to keep people from abusing the system. I'll go into these in my next post. After that, please feel free to point out any remaining flaws in my bounty ideas. Thanks!

Bad Medicine: Big Pharma's Not On Your Side

2007-02-10T17:21:00.000-08:00

Greetings, fellow nerds.

Today's medicines fund tomorrow's miracles. That's what GlaxoSmithKline's publicity department decided was the most palatable excuse for the high cost of drugs: we charge a lot to make more magic bullets to fight new and ominous plagues. It's "pay up or die," with a sugar coating.

"Funding miracles" is stretching the truth a bit (as I will show), but I don't fault GlaxoSmithKline or any of the other big pharmaceutical companies. The way we've set up drug research has public and private incentives badly misaligned.

Today I'm going to show the two biggest ways in which our interests are misaligned, and in the next post I'm going to suggest a fix which will provide an incentive for drug companies to do the most good possible for humanity while still making boatloads of cash.

First Flaw: Drug Companies are Promotion Companies

The overwhelming majority of drug company revenue goes to drug promotion, not drug discovery. Let's take a look at the raw data on drug company revenue and research and development (R & D) expenses in 2004. (From MedAdNews, September 2005. Wikipedia link here for those without a subscription.)

Rank	Company	Revenues (USD billions)	R&D Spending (USD billions)
1	Pfizer	50.516	7.614
2	Johnson & Johnson	47.348	5.203
3	GlaxoSmithKline	37.318	5.204
4	Sanofi-Aventis	31.615	4.927
5	Novartis	28.247	4.207
6	Hoffmann-La Roche	25.163	4.098
7	Merck	22.939	4.010
8	AstraZeneca	21.427	3.803
9	Abbott Laboratories	19.680	1.697
10	Bristol-Myers Squibb	19.380	2.500
	Total	303.63	43.26

Less than $1 for every $7 of drug company revenue is spent on finding new drugs. Now, I have nothing against a company making a tidy sum of money off of its investments, especially when some degree of risk is involved. However, > 600% return on investment is excessive, and indicative of a serious failure of the free market, which is supposed to deliver goods with minimal overhead.

I lied: that $6 isn't all investor profit. In fact, the majority of it goes to promotion: direct promotion to doctors, HMOs and even patients themselves. Here's a more honest slogan for GlaxoSmithKline: "Today's ad campaigns fund tomorrow's ad campaigns."

Second Flaw: Half of R & D has Minimal Benefit

Of the sliver of funding which goes to drug discovery, about half of it goes towards providing novel (and thus patentable) but not superior medicines for diseases we can already treat. Here's a link to a review of "The $800 Million Pill" (which quantifies the money wasted on redundant drugs) by BusinessWeek. I'm linking to this review because it defends the actions of drug companies within the system (as do I) without asking how we could make the system give better incentives for companies to do good for humanity (which is the whole point of my 21st century capitalism idea).

Essentially, since companies can only make money off patented drugs and since patents typically last only about 20 years, there's a huge incentive to discover new cures to already-controllable diseases. The new cures don't even have to be superior: marketing departments of big pharmaceutical corporations have enough muscle to push new drugs into the marketplace regardless of whether or not they're needed.

Drug Discovery: 7% Efficient?

In total, only about 7% of the money paid for drugs goes to finding new useful medicines. It's a tautology then that any solution resulting in as much (or more) useful R & D funding while lowering the cost of drugs would be a good thing for humanity. If you're tempted to counter that it's a good idea to maintain non-productive sectors of the economy (like the $282 billion per year drug companies spend on things other than useful R & D) to create jobs, you should familiarize yourself with the parable of the broken window. In any case, I'm going to introduce a system which beats today's 7%-efficient system in my next post.

In truth, 7% might even be an overestimate of the efficiency with which our drug expenses fund cures. Recently, a group of scientists from the University of Alberta discovered that a small and un-patentable molecule (dichloroacetate, DCA) might cure most cancers with little side effects. (At excessive doses, DCA can cause trouble, but then again, so can water - see line 202.) Whether or not DCA will turn out to be one of "tomorrow's miracles," it's unsettling that the major drug companies have avoided studying it like the plague due to an absence of profit motive. It underscores the fact that drug company revenue really doesn't work in the public's best interest. It's time to align our interests more strongly - I'll suggest one way to accomplish this in the next post.

Conclusions

Eighty-six percent of the cash you pay for your meds funds mostly advertising, not R & D. Half of the remaining 14% goes to try to produce new medicines which aren't better than old ones - they're just patentable. The remaining 7% of drug company revenue is devoted to new cures, but only those new cures which might result in a patentable drug: any promising treatment which isn't patentable will be suppressed.

You're getting a raw deal. Let's change the incentive system for big pharma so that they want to be on our side.

TO BE CONTINUED...

PS If you agree with me, let's try to generate a buzz. Forward a link of this to your friends. If you disagree with my facts or my reasoning, please post your findings as comments.

Fill 'er Up with Air: the 25¢/Gallon Asthma Tax

2007-02-09T09:37:00.000-08:00

Greetings, fellow nerds.

Today I'm going to quantify the asthma cost of burning one gallon of gas in the US. Car-derived air pollution is a major contributor to asthma in the United States. Human suffering aside, let's estimate the cost of providing asthma care associated with burning 1 gallon of gas, and figure out who should bear that cost.

Economic Burden of Asthma

A 2003 study estimates the per-capita cost of asthma to be $4,912, and in 2004 there were 17,624,930 Americans with asthma. The total cost of asthma to the US is therefore about $87 billion, although it's likely to have increased since 2004. To put that in perspective, the US trade deficit for 2004 was $611 billion, less than 7 times the cost of asthma.

In 2004, the US burned 20 million barrels of oil per day, which works out to 318 billion gallons for the year. If we were to attribute all the asthma in 2004 to vehicle-caused air pollution, the asthma cost per gallon of gas burned would be just over 27¢. The 2007 costs of asthma must be greater than 2004's 27¢ per gallon, but on the other hand not 100% of asthma is caused by air pollution. (However, asthma rates have quadrupled in the last few decades according to the WHO, suggesting that human-made factors like air pollution play an overwhelming, if not exclusive, role.) In any case, for every gallon of gas you burn, you do approximately a quarter's worth of damage through asthma.

Benefits of the Asthma Tax

Let's add an asthma tax to gas and make it pay for everyone's asthma treatment. It wouldn't be prohibitively expensive; I bet the per-capita cost of asthma would also go down if treatment were universally free, since the cost of treating acute attacks of people who rush into emergency rooms must be a lot higher than the cost of preventative care. This cost-reduction from efficient treatment would mean the average American would pay less total in health insurance premiums and gas combined. Those without insurance would also suffer less, let's not forget. It would be only those whose lifestyle currently creates disproportionally-large asthma suffering who would suffer under the asthma tax.

The Asthma Tax and 21st Century Capitalism

As long as the asthma tax were related to the true cost of asthma care, auto manufacturers would have a financial incentive to keeping the skies clean: they believe they can sell more cars with the price of gas low, and a low incidence of asthma would lower the at-the-pump price. The public and private incentives would be aligned, which is what 21st century capitalism is all about: getting people working together.

Let's not forget the human element of 21st century capitalism. A disproportionate number of poor urbanites suffer from asthma. Imagine the effect of the goodwill they would feel if the rich showed a little compassion by at least paying for the medical treatment of the damage they've done with their smog. If you actively oppose a measure which lowers costs and brings goodwill to humanity, you're a troll.

Conclusion: Let's Do It

In conclusion, the quarter-a-gallon gas tax would relieve human suffering, decrease the financial burden of treating asthma, and provide a direct incentive to auto manufacturers to start taking better care of us. It's a win-win situation; let's get started.

Mad about BSE

2007-02-08T16:38:00.000-08:00

Greetings, fellow nerds.

This will be just a quick post about the relative risks between the "mad" and the "cow" in mad cow disease. In truth, the danger "tainted beef" poses to us is so small that as a consumer, you should forget about mad cow disease entirely: it's a waste of neurons. I'd even feel guilty making you read this post if it weren't for the fact that it exposes the sensationalism behind mad cow disease reporting.

Assessing Mad Cow Lethality

Mad cow disease in cows is called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and to date there have been at least 188515 reported cases of it worldwide. Common sense suggests that there are a whole lot of unreported cases too, considering the incentives farmers have to keep things quiet. The disease humans contract by eating infected cows is called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), and there have been a total of 170 confirmed cases worldwide. This number is probably not exaggerated (in fact the false positive rate for vCJD might be rather high), so you might think of 170/188515 (or about 900 per million) as an upper bound on the chances of contracting vCJD from eating an entire mad cow. However, probably not all of the 188515 cows were consumed in their entirety, which means that 900 per million might be a good ballpark figure as to the actual transmission rate from eating a whole cow.

If there are roughly 250 lbs of meat per cow, and if a typical beef meal has a quarter pound of meat, the odds of catching vCJD from a single meal of infected beef are 900 in a billion. When you consider that in the time period the 188515 cows were detected, the UK (the country hardest-hit by BSE) produced about 100 million cows, the risk of getting vCJD from eating one randomly-chosen UK beef meal is about 2 in a billion.

No Consensus among Academics

Why aren't I just reporting what the medical journals say about BSE to vCJD transmission rates? Because these estimates are all over the place. This study in the journal "Risk Analysis" by Eric Grist shows that there's nothing like consensus regarding the risk of a human contracting vCJD from eating an infected meal: published transmission rates vary from 0.9 in a billion to 7 in a thousand (c.f. my estimate of 900 per billion based on case numbers). The "Risk Analysis" article continues on to point out that the 7 in a thousand measure is obviously inconsistent with observed vCJD infection rates. (Thank you, Dr. Grist!) Perhaps even researchers are prone to sensationalism, especially if the said sensationalism might result in extra funding.

New Risk Metrics

We need better units for analyzing risks. It's hard to grok these raw numbers without an everyday context, so I'm going to introduce two new metrics:

Life Expectancy Decrease (LED)
Equivalent Driving Distance (EDD)

The LED measures the expectation of the decrease in life expectancy based on taking the risk once, assuming an 80 year lifespan. So for example, the LED from eating a meal with UK beef at the height of the mad cow scare is (80 years * 2 per billion) = 5 seconds. Compare that to the LED associated with the extra calories in your fast food meal: (80 years * 94 per million) = 2.7 days. The extra risk of vCJD is insignificant next to the threat of the extra calories involved with taking a big bite of beef.

Driving cars is a risky activity that most of us have come to terms with. Driving therefore provides an ideal reality check that helps us put new risks in perspective. This DOT report (page 8 of the .pdf) shows that there are about 14.6 vehicular fatalities for every billion miles traveled. The EDD of a new risk is the length of the car trip with the equivalent level of risk. For example, the EDD of the untested UK beef meal is (2 per billion * 1 billion miles / 14.6) = 720 feet; less than one Manhattan city block. Again, if the beef was in a fast food meal, the EDD from the extra calories is over 6400 miles: greater than the radius of the Earth.

Conclusion: Calories Matter More than Prions

If you spent more than 5 seconds worrying about contracting vCJD from beef, even at the height of the mad cow scare in the UK, you've been had. Also, if you think a fast food meal saves time, you should consider the 2.7-day lifespan decrease it brings (unless you're underweight - see my blog entry). It's true that the risk was unknown at the time (so maybe caution was indicated), but I'm getting sick of people worrying about false alarms, especially when there are more pressing issues which aren't getting enough attention.

I'm also disillusioned with the media, although I can see their point. Nobody will buy a paper saying "Get Off Your Butt and Get Healthy," but "New Plague Risk Sweeps the Nation: Will YOU Die?" has more zing.

As new crises come up in the news, I'm going to try to keep up with the LED and EDD metrics for them. With any luck, they'll catch on as popular reality checks for how risky a new terror actually is.

21st Century Capitalism

2007-02-07T13:34:00.000-08:00

Greetings, fellow nerds.

Today, we're going to examine a cornerstone of our western world: capitalism. I'm going to first give a brief history of capitalism starting from its evolutionary roots which set us aside from other animals, then I'll settle down into a rant about what I think is wrong with our current implementation of capitalism, and finally I'll give a few specific ideas about how we can tweak public policy so that capitalism achieves its goals better.

Capitalism and Humanity

Capitalism, and its relative friendship, set us apart from the majority of the animal kingdom. I don't believe that early humans were categorically smarter than other animals; even today's humans would have a hard time without cooperation.

Imagine if you were dropped on a desert island without having had any kind of education. (This is really impossible, because humans need nurturing to develop properly, but stay with me.) I doubt you'd be able to do better than the New Caledonian Crow, which can fashion its own tools (National Geographic video link) even out of metal (significant, since metal hasn't been around long enough to develop instincts involving it). You may counter by saying that this crow probably learned form another crow; that's exactly my point though. Individually, we're puny, but together we can build spaceships and make good cheese.

We specialize, we discuss things and we pass on knowledge to others. Why? It's more than having selfish genes; we are happy to forge friendships and help people totally unrelated to us. It's more than the herd mentality; I've met my share of loner humans, and besides I don't think sheep specialize. We share, lend things, trade, and educate each other because we live in a social construct where we can expect roughly the same degree of favors given to us as we give to others. (Doing nice things without reciprocity is a bad evolutionary strategy. However, the reciprocity needn't come directly from the people you help; doing good without expecting anything in return provides evidence to others that you're not a psychopath; see below.) In small groups, reciprocation is mediated by friendships, where we (usually) keep some sort of tally as to how nice the partner has been to us. We don't numerically quantify the favors our friends do us, although your typical human sees one-sided friendships as unhealthy, as if there must be some deeper, twisted exchange going on.

Genetically,We're All Cold, Calculating Psychopaths

I don't mean to suggest that we're consciously cold, calculating psychopaths who use each other for common gain. Our genes shape us to be good-natured towards each other, and it's a good thing too. Imagine if you knew somebody who appeared friendly most of the time but had a few Jekyll and Hyde moments. You'd steer clear of that shady character, and never want to engage in friendly behavior with them. Moreover, you'd tell your friends to watch out for the creep. As a result, being a conscious psychopath is a poor strategy in the long term, since others won't trust you enough to be friendly with them.

However, if our genes keep us behaving civilly towards one another all the time, we're less prone to the slip-ups that betray psychopaths. If we can demonstrate that we always help our friends, more people will want to be friends with us. We don't have to be cold, calculating psychopaths on a conscious level; our genes do a much more consistent job for us without our conscious minds having to bother.

Does understanding the selfish reasons behind friendship make one cynical about human nature? In some ways, knowing that we're hard-wired to do good does exactly the opposite. What do you think?

Money and Friendship

Money, you got lots of friends

-Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr., "God Bless the Child"

Money becomes necessary when the group of people you want to collaborate with becomes too large to develop a personal relationship with everyone. Money lets you have strangers do friendly things towards you, and to earn it you (usually) have to do friendly things to others. Money is impersonal, quantified, anonymous, fungible friendship, in the sense that it keeps track of the favors you're owed from any member of your trading community.

Capitalism and Human Evolution

Capitalism (if you extend its definition to include its instinctual analogue, friendship) is what lets us specialize, and gives us the incentive to work together to produce all those wonderful creations only large groups of (mostly) cooperative humans have been able to do. Without capitalism, we'd be brawling in the muck.

Language is also one of the fundamental abilities humans have that sets us apart from other animals (if, indeed, we are set apart as far as we style ourselves). Language, however, is mostly useless without capitalism (in the sense I've defined it). Without capitalism, you have no framework within which to trust the speaker. Without capitalism, you have no specialized skill set to describe to others. Without capitalism, you have little incentive to divulge information (especially information about food, mates, etc.), so you probably wouldn't bother. Therefore, language evolved to make us better capitalists; without capitalism language would confer little benefit. Either capitalism predated language in our history or there was so much synergy between the two that sorting out who came first is moot.

People also talk about the "theory of mind" as being important in human evolution. Having a theory of mind means that you try to predict what other entities around you know, often by putting yourself in their shoes and wondering what you would do in the same situation. Clearly, having a theory of mind is useful to both capitalists (for outfoxing your fellows) and speakers (so you can relate exactly what the listener needs to hear given what they already know), so it's no surprise that humans excel at guessing what others are thinking. However, having a theory of mind can also be useful in purely competitive (i.e., non-capitalist) contexts: ravens (but not most birds) notice when something (like food) captures the attention of other animals, and even the odd octopus has demonstrated that it is aware of how others see it. However, these animals lack capitalist tendencies (and therefore have no incentive to develop language), which are the true sine qua non of humanity in evolutionary contexts.

The Octopus: Not a Capitalist

Current Issues with Capitalism

If capitalism really is the Promethean panacea I've proposed, why is everybody complaining about it? Let me list a few possibilities, and suggest a couple of remedies.

People don't feel the love when making economic transactions.
Governments and capitalist institutions often do not share a common agenda.

The Alienation of Commercialism

A few days ago, a total stranger picked a bunch of grapes for me. She set these grapes on a truck in Chile, which proceeded to a port where a monumental ocean-going vehicle waited. This floating steel mountain's sole purpose it to get things to where people want them; in my case it crossed the Equator and continued to an undisclosed location in North America. Total strangers unpacked the grapes, checked them for damage, and then placed them in a location where I could easily reach them for my culinary enjoyment.

By now, you've probably guessed what I'm up to: I've described what we'd consider to be the most mundane of commercial transactions: buying Chilean grapes. However, all the people involved in the chain of events (most of them total strangers to me) performed well-orchestrated diverse tasks for my benefit and enjoyment. If the context were anything but commercial, I would be touched to the brink of tears by the selfless generosity implicit in shipping me grapes out of season. Yet, somehow, in the monetized context of buying grapes from a local supermarket, it's unnatural to feel gratitude to the ship's crew or the shelf stocker - it's all in a day's work for them, and that somehow nullifies the joy I'd feel from having all these people slave away for my benefit.

Does it have to be that way? I'm going to give an exercise to my readers. For the next week, please try, at least once a day, to feel the connection you have to the millions of people who help you through the messy web of financial transactions we call an economy. Just for a split second, imagine that they were all doing you favors without letting money enter into the picture. Then open your eyes, and ask yourself if you really have to ignore the fact that all these people are conspiring to do you good just because you're paying them for it.

If your assignment rings false, we should try to find out why. I bet that financial transactions, by default, don't tickle the "friendship detector" circuits in our brains. Possibly we don't feel that friendship glow at the market because friendship with total strangers is impossible. It's also possible that brands have taken center stage in stores; give me a show of hands: who finds it easier to remember the brand of a product you bought than the name of the person who sold it to you? It's hard to feel friendship with a faceless company (although many people try).

Why not try to get to know the local shopkeepers a little by name? Maybe entering into a friendly relationship will give your instinctual friendship detector a face to latch onto, and maybe some of the gratitude you feel for the stuff you buy will brush off a little onto the human. You'll have your instinctual craving for mutual support reinforced at the same time as getting low, low prices. (Prices are ridiculously low because of specialization: imagine how hard it would be to travel on foot to Chile to grow your own February grapes.)

I promised this post would lead to practical suggestions; here's the first:

Quirky Staff, not Faceless Drones

I bet not many corporate executives are going to read this blog, but if they do (or if you know one - remember the power of talk), maybe suggest to them that instead of having sales-force employees follow the replaceable-parts model (i.e., interchangeable, single-faceted, lowest-common-denominator automata), they should show a little more personality, especially if they work in small enough units that customers might recognize them in subsequent visits.

I was a regular at Enterprise Rent-a-car until I got a car, and let me tell you, that company understands the benefit of human interfaces. Even though the company Enterprise might be a monolithic, faceless mega-corp, the employees I talked to at the branch were all charismatic, genuine-personality outgoing types. It's true that they were made to recite wrote-learned phone greetings, but other than that visits were all fun-loving chutzpah. I don't know exactly how to foster that kind of environment, but staid companies might do better if they encouraged their staff to be lively and idiosyncratic enough to make customers see them as people.

Marginally Legal, Inc.

Let's consider the second problem with contemporary capitalism: capitalist institutions often do things against the public good. I haven't mentioned law yet, but let me try to describe it as succinctly as possible. Capitalism:friendship :: law:enmity. I'm not suggesting that capitalism is intrinsically good and law bad. However, law and enmity both keep you from doing bad things to other humans; the former uses explicit codes while the latter uses the same level of thought as friendship (i.e. feelings of attraction/repulsion based on how you've been treated).

Enmity is the necessary mirror of friendship: it's the instinctual process which makes you try to be a pain to those who do you disservice. It's also a good game-theoretic strategy to demonstrate that pissing you off makes you a formidable enemy for an analogous reason to why psychopathy is a bad strategy: if people know you have a mean side, they'll try to avoid crossing you.

Law and capitalism are based on opposite reinforcement mechanisms, though, so when government meets private industry strange things can happen. Typically, corporations will do for themselves as much good as possible while narrowly avoiding getting sued. It's usually a good thing that laws change slowly: anarchy is just democracy with constant elections and one voter. However, when corporations can take advantage of this sluggishness through loopholes, capitalism can lead to technically-legal injustices. Moreover, using negative reinforcement (law) on entities that respond best to positive reinforcement (corporations) is a recipe for trouble: public-private incentives aren't going to magically align themselves without help.

There's a way to resolve the root problem caused by the negative/positive reinforcement mismatch between government and corporations:

Align Public and Corporate Interests with Results-Based Incentives

If governments encourage companies to do as much good as possible, such that their rewards are proportional to the good they do, we can resolve the negative vs. positive reinforcement conundrum.

Practical Example: Road Bonds

Right now, governments set certain requirements in terms of what they would like in a road: they want it made of X material with Y safety feature, and it should last Z years. The company's reward is not affected at all by the value given to the public by the road, so long as the government's contractual expectations are met. If the road doesn't meet expectations, the government can try to sue the construction company for breach of contract: a long and inefficient process. Even in the best cases, the company has no incentive to build a road which will last longer than Z years (indeed they wouldn't want it to last any longer than Z years, since they're in the construction business), and all safety and durability research has to be done by the government body who decides the specifications of the road to build. Research isn't free, and it's hard for public institutions to make the correct call in terms of what research needs to be done.

Scrap the meets-contract/doesn't-meet-contract model. We can do better. Imagine an incentive system like this. When a government wants a road built, the incentive they offer is in the form of a transferable bond. The bond would pay the holder annually according to a formula like so:

Annually, pay $A if the road is usable, but deduct $B per cubic foot of pothole in the road (averaged over the year), $C per vehicle-hour of delay due to repair, $D for every human life lost on this road due to traffic accidents on this road and E% of the costs to drivers arising from damage to their vehicles due to accidents. If, in any year, the road is not usable or the net value of this payment in negative, this bond is valueless for all subsequent years.

Let the government choose B-E, and issue the bonds to the company which accepts the contract for the lowest value of A. Then, the private sector would be able to use new road durability and safety technologies where they make sense in terms of public benefit, without the government having to test any materials or make any policy regarding the specifics of what materials to use. In this case the lowest bidder won't be the one that does the crappiest acceptable job, it will be the one able to maximally align public and private interests, since it benefits exactly when the public does.

In turn, the construction company has the incentive to make durable, safe roads so as to collect the maximum reward from the bonds. By making the bonds transferable, companies good at construction (but maybe not inspection or maintenance) could sell the bonds to investment firms. The better the job they did the more money they could potentially make in the sale.

Governments are bad at details. If you reward results instead of punishing breeches, you align interests and harness the power of that uniquely human tool: capitalism.

Conclusions

Capitalism (including friendship) is more than just what makes being human so good; in many ways capitalism is the fundamental trait that distinguishes humans from other animals. It's vital for our policy makers to understand what capitalism really is and how to harness it to pull our 21st century in the right direction: towards the fellowship, harmony and cooperation. If you like the idea of aligning interests using rewards proportional to benefits, or if you like the concept of being friendly in your commercial transactions, try them out by all means, but also please talk about them. A million cocktail parties could change the fate of the world.

Why Biometrics Scare Me

2007-02-07T08:56:00.000-08:00

Greetings, fellow nerds.

I am a lover of technology. I love my Mac. I love the Internet. I love my doubly-shock-absorbing bicycle. I even once had a dream in code. Yet today I'm going to tame my technotropic tendencies to warn you against the threat of widespread biometric identification.

There are few technologies less viscerally appealing to tech nerds than biometrics: imagine a world where machines recognize you for the rich, influential 1337 h4xx0or you are just by scanning your body. Nothing short of tech porn.

In some limited circumstances, biometrics might be appropriate. For instance, if a security guard monitors the process of you putting your finger/retina/receding hairline on a scanner as an extra security layer, that's fine. However, biometrics; when substituting keys, credit cards or passwords; have three serious flaws:

Biometrics give thieves an incentive to chop off parts of your body.
You give out your biometric data all the time, whether you intend to or not.
If you get your biometric identity stolen, you're screwed forever (unless you believe in reincarnation).

Don't Give People an Incentive to Cut You Up

Issue #1 means that not only would I personally refuse to use biometrics, but also that I have an incentive to make nobody use biometrics for identification. I don't want to have my hand chopped off only for thieves only for them to discover I didn't have a fingerprint-enabled bank account like most normal people.

Do you think it's far-fetched for criminals to chop off parts of the body for their biometric payload? It's already happened. Even though biometric identification is rare, we're starting to see the criminal reaction to it. I'd rather give up my cards and keys, thank-you-very-much. I'm horrified to see that the ICICI bank in India is also planning on opening widespread fingerprint-based ATMs for rural farmers who might find carrying cards to be too much of a trouble. I suppose a fingerprint-and-pin solution might somewhat discourage finger-theft, but your average robber might take fingers just in case, the same way a North American mugger wouldn't leave their marks' bank cards behind.

Don't Leave Credit Card Copies Everywhere

Issue #2 is pretty straightforward: getting someone's fingerprint is usually not very hard. Moreover, fooling a scanner with a print lifted from a glass is surprisingly straightforward. Even though expert techniques haven't yet been developed for getting a scanner to accept a print lifted off a glass (at least I'm not familiar with these cloak-and-dagger techniques), some first-try methods have a success rate of 80%. Some scanners can even be fooled by fogging them up by blowing on them to reveal the print of the last person to use them. Unless you'd be OK with leaving copies of your credit card on every smooth surface you touch, you shouldn't use your fingerprints as card substitutes either.

Getting Replacement Fingers and Eyes is Hard

Issue #3 illustrates the importance of disposable layers of security. I've had my credit card info stolen, and it was no big deal. VISA* called me one night to confirm some unusual charges which had gone through my account. When I said I hadn't made these charges, they sent me a replacement card and an affidavit to sign two days later (I guess it's in their best interest to keep me buying), and my old VISA card was sloughed off painlessly. I didn't pay a dime. (My story is not uncommon; identity theft happens to about 9 million Americans a year.)

The point is that fingerprints and retinal patterns are not things you want to have to slough off, ever. I like it that getting a new credit card didn't involve surgery. It's a feature (not a bug) that you can dispose of a credit card if its information gets compromised. Let's not take a step backwards in functionality for the sake of some flashy tech porn.

Conclusions: Now is the Time to Rant

Even though biometrics aren't widespread, the time to rant against their replacing credit cards is now. It's easier to nip a bad technology in the bud than it is to defeat it once it gets serious backing. How are we going to execute the said nip? By talking. That's all. I hope the scenarios I've laid out are sufficiently grizzly to spread through pool halls and cocktail parties; if they spread widely enough we will have done our job.

Take care; go do something amazing with your fingers while you still have them.

*I swear they didn't pay me to write this; I think it's important to get the word out if you feel like a company has done you right.

Death match: Big Macs vs. Unprotected Sex

2007-02-06T11:19:00.000-08:00

Greetings, fellow nerds.

My Spanish teacher in Costa Rica (Carlos P. - the P. stands for a word which happens to be the foulest word in the Portuguese language, which was entertaining to the Brazilian immigration officials - that's entirely another story though) asked me why Americans are fanatical about staying AIDS-free, but don't give a pair of dingo's kidneys if they die of being too fat. Carlos, the more I think about it, the more it sounds like you're on to something, and I'm going to follow up your comment with a numerical analysis: today we're going to weigh the risk of HIV contracted from having unprotected sex against the increased risk of dying from obesity by eating one Big Mac™.

HIV risk from unprotected sex: what are the numbers?

First off, let's quantify the HIV risk of having sex with an American chosen at random. The CDC estimates the percentage of HIV-positive US residents to be 0.4% (as of 2003). That's already a low number, but to asses the risk of catching HIV from unprotected sex we have to multiply by the transmission rate: that is, given that you have unprotected sex with somebody who's HIV-positive, what are your chances of getting it?

What is this transmission rate? Take a guess. Now decrease it by a factor of 10. If your guess was like mine, you'd still be way above the truth. I don't know if it's general squeamishness or over-zealous sex ed teachers, but the risk of HIV transmission between otherwise-healthy people is between 5 and 50 cases per 10,000 acts, depending on exactly what kind of (more-than-just-oral) unprotected sex you're having (Wikipedia link + original article). That means if you and your (randomly-selected vis. HIV status) American partner are healthy, you have between a 2 in a million and a 20 in a million chance of contracting AIDS from unprotected sex.

Let's put that into perspective. If you live to be 80, you'll have lived 29 200 days. What are the chances (everything else being equal) that today your number's up? That would be 1 / 29200 = 34 in a million, almost twice the HIV risk associated with receptive anal intercourse from a randomly-chosen American male.

My heart goes out to people who have contracted HIV from unprotected sex. I'm sure they have been demonized for being so careless as to indulge in this (so-called) risky behavior. Let's find out just how risky their behavior really was, in terms of Big Mac™ eating.

What's the Lethal Dosage of Big Macs™?

First of all, I don't want to single out Big Macs™, McDonald's™, or even just the fast food industry as unique bringers of ill-health. The Big Mac™ is however a nearly-ubiquitous unit of culinary over-indulgence; let it here symbolize any overly-calorific meal.

There's a good chance that fast food-related factors other than too many calories cause health problems. Films such as "Super Size Me" suggest that high concentrations of fast food can kill - suppose Morgan Spurlock had spent 100 days on the McDonald's™-food-only diet and found that to be lethal. Then we could estimate the risk of eating a Big Mac™ to be 1 in 300 (for 300 meals). That's a risk of more than 3000 per million meals, or between 150 and 1500 times the risk of contracting HIV from unprotected sex. When spread out over many years, the lethality of Big Macs™ can't be that high, so let's get a low-ball estimate of the risk on Big Mac™ poses by its calories alone.

Weight Gain from a Big Mac™ Meal

Surprisingly, if you eat a Big Mac™ and nothing else as a meal, you get about the right number of calories. Assuming that you should be eating 1800 calories a day, the Big Mac™'s 600-calorie payload doesn't sound so bad. It's the side dishes which add the real risk. Full meals at fast food restaurants can have as many as 1825 calories - 1025 too many for an 1800 calorie-a-day diet. For now, let's assume the typical fast food meal has 800 superfluous calories which will be carried around by the diner essentially forever. (I'm not sure if eating too much has a net positive or negative effect on one's metabolism: if you're heavy you might decide to drive instead of walk so much that it counteracts the need to fuel a bigger body.) That 800 extra calories per fast food meal translates to just under a quarter pound of extra body weight; let's see what that does for your health.

Mortality Increase per Big Mac™

I could give you a laundry list of symptoms you could get by being overweight, but instead I'll just boil it down to a number: how much does your mortality rate increase if you have that extra quarter pound on your paunch? According to this JAMA article, in 2000, 111 909 excess deaths were caused by obesity among the 23.3% of Americans who were obese or extremely obese (defined as having a BMI above 30). In 2000 there were 281,421,906 Americans total, which means that 0.17% of obese people died that year from being obese. That's just for the year though - since HIV can let you live for 15 years or more, the risk of dying from obesity in the same span of time you'd expect as from an HIV infection is 2.5%, or 1 in 40.

The last factor to consider is how likely it is for an extra quarter pound to push you into the danger zone. (Aside: in reality, there probably isn't any sharp divide between safe and risky BMIs, but we can still get a feel for the effect size of being obese by this discretization.) From the same study, 33.8% of Americans have a BMI from 25 to 30. Assuming an even distribution of BMIs in the 25-30 range and an average height of 5'10", about 0.8% of people with a BMI between 25 and 30 would be tipped into the BMI > 30 class from that one extra fast food meal. If we assume the risk of already-obese people is at least as great as the risk to overweight people, that means that for 47.1% of the American population, eating one Big Mac™ has a .8% chance of increasing your mortality risk over the next 15 years by 2.5%. Multiplying probabilities, the total risk of that Big Mac™ killing you within 15 years (again, assuming you're a randomly-chosen American) is at least 94 in a million, or between about 5 and 50 times the HIV risk of unprotected sex! That's an average too; if you're overweight, Big Macs™ are at least twice as deadly.

Caveats

There are a few weak points in my argument; let me list them. Here are some factors which may make HIV more dangerous than I let on.

People who have more unprotected sex with multiple partners tend to have partners with higher HIV risk too.
Other STDs can increase the rate of transmission of HIV by increasing the volume of fluids exchanged.

Additionally, I didn't factor in that being underweight can be risky too; in other words, Big Macs™ could be a benefit to skinny people.

However, my final analysis also didn't take into account the fact that fast food is nutritionally poor, an additional danger I have not accounted for. Moreover, I only counted the obesity risk over 15 years, while the risk in fact continues for as long as you are obese.

Conclusion: Big Macs™ are More Deadly than Unprotected Sex in America.

It would be incorrect to state that every Big Mac™ consumed poses more risk of death than every act of unprotected sex. It also would be wrong to claim that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has been totally eclipsed by a wave of obesity; factor #1 under Caveats is too big to ignore in an epidemiological context. However, given my reasonable assumptions, I find that on average Big Macs™ are 5 to 50 times more deadly than unprotected sex with a randomly-chosen American. Carlos P., your intuition was right.

Here's the take-home message:

HIV is harder to contract than you might think.
Too much food can kill you.
We should worry more about our diets, and perhaps less about disease.
If you're like me, you probably worry too much about the wrong things.

To address #4, I've started a wiki to keep track of the risks around us. Help me complete and update it; then maybe we can keep a sense of perspective when it comes to banal topics like Big Macs™ and ominous-sounding plagues like HIV/AIDS.

Welcome to Many Ideas!

2007-02-06T08:51:00.000-08:00

Greetings, fellow nerds.

Welcome to my new blog, which I plan to use as a lever to TAKE OVER THE WORLD! I know: talk is cheap. However, talk also changes people's minds, and changing people's minds can topple governments. (Note to NSA: I'm not planning on toppling your government any time soon. Go back to sleep.)

However, talk only does good if you say something new. I'm not a great writer, so I can't dazzle you with witty prose. However, I'm a math & science geek. I can take a quantitative look at things which we might have missed. My dream is that one of my "many ideas" (note to self: ironic for a first blog post? Too much hubris?) will snowball through - you guessed it - talk. So, if you find something amusing, mention it to your pals, and maybe together we can TAKE OVER THE WORLD! Seriously.

Keep dreaming!