Category Archives: Current Events

Fulminating Belief and the Drake Equation

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It seems to me that the character(s) who produced the YouTube video that has caused so much religious fulmination in the sandy parts of the world ought to be parachuted into Cairo to answer for their actions. Surely they can give the best explanation of what their movie represents.

Another thing has occured to me. Perhaps we should make a minor adjustment to the Drake Equation which describes the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible. The equation can be found at this link.  The L factor defines the length of time a civilization releases detectable [radio] signals into space. Given the self destructive behaviours of beings capable of generating radio signals on at least one planet, maybe it is time to define L*.

L* = L(1 – P*/P) where P = average number of intelligent inhabitants of a planet and P* = average number of intelligent inhabitants willing to die/kill for their magical or political beliefs.

Perhaps the reader has a better modification.  Here is the Drake equation copied straight from Wikipedia:

N = R^{\ast} \cdot f_p \cdot n_e \cdot f_{\ell} \cdot f_i \cdot f_c \cdot L

where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;

and

R* = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fℓ = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space

General remarks

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I wish to make a few remarks on current news items of interest.

Country singer Randy Travis was found in a ditch in north Texas allegedly drunk, naked, and belligerent following an apparent one car accident.  Crimony! It’s that awful Nashville music that he sings. If I sang that twangy, mornful, depressing stuff all the time, I guess I’d be sloppy drunk in a ditch too. He should dry out and switch to show tunes or something a bit more cheerful.

It seems that while the televisions and internets of the world are busily dulling enchanting us into the delusion that our ever accelerating consumption of resources and expansion into wild spaces are having no effect on the “natural world”, the global ecosystems are actually in trouble. I emphasize natural world only because so many of us are preoccupied with the on-line world. In fact, many are worried about a “state change” in the global ecosystems.

In Approaching a state-shift in Earth’s biosphere, a paper just published in Nature, the authors, whose expertise spans a multitude of disciplines, suggest our planet’s ecosystems are careening towards an imminent, irreversible collapse.

Earth’s accelerating loss of biodiversity, its climate’s increasingly extreme fluctuations, its ecosystems’ growing connectedness and its radically changing total energy budget are precursors to reaching a planetary state threshold or tipping point. [ The Automatic Earth, August 6, 2012. ]

I know, I know. Sounds like Chicken Little. But we should pay more attention to our small planet. The atmosphere is thinner than most people think, the fisheries are stressed, desertification is happening in Africa, and human population pressures are mounting in many locations.  We can’t keep the extractive industries going forever. We need to find an economic model or culture that allows us to do with less mass. Reduced consumption per capita. Look, it’ll happen anyway as key resources dwindle.

We should be aggressively recycling lithium, gallium, tellurium, indium, and the rare earth elements in particular.  These are key elements in our much beloved electronic devices. There are other materials to watch, including hydrocarbons in general.  A society with infrastructure causing one to hop in the SUV and drive 5 miles from their isolated subdivision to buy cigarettes and beer is a society that is on a rendezvous with destiny.

Curiosity on Mars

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Photo of Curiosity during descent phase, taken from orbit. This shot is amazing all by itself.

Curiosity in descent phase. Photo taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona.

Curiosity is powered by a Pu-238 oxide thermoelectric generator. The Multi-Mission Radiosiotope Thermoelectric Generator, MMRTG, has an output of 2000 watts thermal and 100-120 watts electric. The MMRTG unit sits in the aft end of the rover enclosed by a finned heat exchanger.

Aurora Shooting

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At some point we Americans are going to have to address the peculiar gun fetish that marks the national character.  Between the NRA and the entertainment industry, we have way too much fascination with firearms and destruction for our own good.  When citizens aren’t being entertained by gunplay on TV and the movies, more than a few citizens are out shooting at other citizens or the police, invading foreign countries with guns, cheering bloodlust at National Rifle Association rallies, giving heartfelt testimonials to our devotion to the 2nd amendment, watching reality television programming about gunsmiths and their frothy zeal for firepower, daring people to wrench our guns from our cold dead hands, equipping our municipal law enforcement with militaristic firepower, selling armaments all over the world, and training our young soldiers to be ever more effective in the killing arts.  Obviously soldiers have to kill effectively, but do we put enough energy into avoiding battle with smarter foreign policy and thus making fewer veterans?

All of the bravado about our national ability to kill with pinpoint accuracy from anywhere a drone can fly has the effect of normalizing or sanitizing the act of killing. Firearms and conflict are big business and presently politicians who stand up to these interests are unelectable.  Is this really a desirable consequence of the market- to allow gun violence to thrive as a side effect of the arms industry and laissez faire legitimized by the 2nd amendment?  Perhaps the US constitution is inadequate to provide for the conduct of civilized society with it’s 18th century publication date.  Why do constitutional guarantees like due process only apply to citizens?  How is it “OK” to have a Gitmo?  Who is this great nation that has extraordinary rendition?

Gun control really comes down to urge control. These pitiful, fearful people who have armed themselves to the teeth in their basements aren’t going to lose their guns anytime soon. Hell no. There isn’t an ounce of political courage in the entire continent to cause that to happen. Instead, we are likely to tighten the civil arms race as the rigor mortis of paranoia stiffens our imaginations against new ways to conduct civilized society.

We need to consider that gun bravado of all sorts is substantially a form of violence bravado and is a disfigurement. Mature peace loving adults should reject gun and other violence as entertainment and as a normal fact of life. More to the point, we should challenge Obama and Romney to identify exactly how they will act to turn gun violence around in this country.  Greater law enforcement is not the answer, nor is the imposition of more severe punishment.  We have to find a way for people to make money waging peace. Right now, there is too much profit in armanment and conflict.

We cannot allow the Aurora shooting to become normalized by a quiet passing into the murky depths of history. We, all of us, should push back against this disfigurement on our civilization. One mass killing is one too many. I’ll be volunteering with campaign work monday to put better elected officials in office. What will you be doing to turn this around?

Corporate person Pratt & Whitney provides attack helicopter technology to China

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Lets give a big Bronx cheer for Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of United Technologies (UTC), for illegally providing turbine engine technology to China.  And, while we’re at it, lets give a toot for Hamilton Standard for providing the control software.

According to a recent article in The Atlantic, the Canadian division of Pratt & Whitney provided engines for the production of the Chinese Z10 attack helicopter. It is worth the read.

The Chinese helicopter that benefited from Pratt’s engines and related computer software, now in production, comes outfitted with 30 mm cannons, anti-tank guided missiles, air-to-air missiles and unguided rockets. “This case is a clear example of how the illegal export of sensitive technology reduces the advantages our military currently possesses,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton said in a statement released on June 28.  The Atlantic, July 6, 2012.

According to the Federal Contractor Misconduct Database of the top 100 offending corporations, UTC ranked number seven.

OK. I’ll state the obvious. This is a very eggregious crime.  If an individual did this, the outcome for such a person might be considerably more punitive. But an amoral corporate being like UTS and it’s wayward subsidiary Pratt & Whitney, the consequences are more abstract. A $75 million hit to the bank account for aiding a nation who’s military influence in the eastern Pacific rim is increasingly in conflict with US interests.  Not a trivial consequence, but nonetheless a consequence that does not match the transfer of sensitive technology to a country with values antithetical to US policy.

USPTO to open new regional offices

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Attention inventors!  I just received this from a friend who is a patent examiner. The USPTO is expanding to 4 new locations around the country.

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USPTO to Open Four Regional Patent Offices The Commerce Department and USPTO announced plans today to open regional USPTO offices in or around Dallas, Denver, and Silicon Valley, in addition to the already-announced first satellite office to open July 13 in Detroit. The four offices will function as hubs of innovation and creativity, helping protect and foster American innovation in the global marketplace. They will also help the agency attract talented IP experts throughout the country who will work closely with entrepreneurs to process patent applications, reduce the backlog of unexamined patents, and speed up the overall process, allowing businesses to move their innovation to market more quickly and to create new jobs.

Selection of the four sites was based upon a comprehensive analysis of criteria including geographical diversity, regional economic impact, ability to recruit and retain employees, and the ability to engage the intellectual property community. The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011 (AIA), signed into law by President Obama in September, requires the USPTO to establish regional satellite locations as part of a larger effort to modernize the U.S. patent system over the next three years.

Since the passage of the AIA, the USPTO and the Department of Commerce have been committed to an open, robust, and fair site selection process based on extensive public input. In addition to reviewing more than 600 public comments in response to a public Federal Register Notice, USPTO officials met with hundreds of state and local officials, congressional delegations, and policy leaders. The selection team developed a model to evaluate more than 50 Metropolitan Statistical Areas based on the previously stated criteria to assess operational cost and feasibility, ability to improve patent quality, and ability to employ U.S. veterans.

The USPTO will develop concepts of operations and best practices for the three newly-announced locations based on lessons learned from the Elijah J. McCoy Detroit Office over the coming months and years. While the Detroit office will employ approximately 120 individuals in its first year of operations, including patent examiners and administrative law judges, the USPTO is working to develop specific hiring plans for the other sites.

The agency will also seek to identify and maximize the unique regional strengths of all four offices to further reduce the backlog of patent applications and appeals.

“By expanding our operation outside of the Washington metropolitan area for the first time in our agency’s 200-plus year history, we are taking unprecedented steps to recruit a diverse range of talented technical experts, creating new opportunities across the American workforce,” said USPTO Director David Kappos. “These efforts, in conjunction with our ongoing implementation of the America Invents Act, are improving the effectiveness of our IP system, and breathing new life into the innovation ecosystem.”

Gluten harvest underway

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The annual gluten harvest is underway in northern Colorado.  Winter wheat planted last autumn has pushed through the soil, grown to produce a head of grains on every stalk, and finally, transitioned from a sea of lush green grass to the now dessicated amber waves of grain. Giant harvesting machines are cutting the short-statured hybrid crop and somehow rattling it into chaff and grain.

Now that we are avoiding gluten in our household, I view the wheat harvest a little differently. It is somebody else’s harvest.  It’s odd way to look at it I suppose.

Smokey Mountains of Colorado

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Last evening the layers of mountain valleys to the west and north were filled with smoke from the High Park fire west of Ft Collins, Colorado. The valleys full of haze reminded me of the Smokey Mountains of Kentucky in the evening.

The fire is 25 miles as the crow flies from my house. The prevailing winds have been highly variable, but the recent front that passed through caused the smoke to blow towards my home town over the weekend. The air is usually clear enough to see Pikes Peak 100 miles to the south. But of late the visibility and air quality has been quite poor.

Colorado has seen waves of growth over the years, much of it along the I-25 corridor and the major east/west routes through the mountains. A common aspiration here is to have a home in the mountains. The housing boom of the last 20 years lead to the spread of MacMansions perched on mountain tops and slopes. Buyers with enough wealth or credit were able to pay the high expense of building a dream home in a remote location and pay for drilling a well in hard rock and running a long powerline up to the site.

What we are seeing is the negative side of having a home in the forest- crown fires that burst through the forest at speeds that surprise everyone. The thermal emissivity of a stand of flaming pine trees is quite high, first dessicating adjoining trees then heating the pine resins to the ignition point either by radiant energy, flame impingement, or by the spread of embers.

A major worry for the High Park fire in particular is the effect on rivers and municipal drinking water reservoirs by rain and snow runoff from the burned ground.  A smokey flavor is desirable for a barbeque sauce but not for tapwater.

This fire seems to be headed for the number one forest fire in Colorado history. Time will tell.

ChemSpider Magic with LASSO

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Of late I have been concerned with R&D information and various homebrew means of storing it and retrieving it. Institutionalizing R&D results into easily accessed knowledge can roll into a real hairball if you’re not careful. More on that another time.

My adventures with CHETAH 9.0 have caused me to look deeply into SMILES strings and what utility might be found there. This lead me to rediscover ChemSpider and the many services it provides for free to the user.

Consider the following: if you generate a SMILES structure of acetylsalicylic acid, say, from Chemdraw, O=C(O)C1=C(OC(C)=O)C=CC=C1, and use this character string as a search term in ChemSpider, it will take you to the entry for aspirin. What you get is a treasure trove of information on this substance. Go to ChemSpider, cut and paste the above SMILES string into the search box, and let her rip. I’m not your Momma. Just try it.

The breadth of references is encyclopedic.  But the truly amazing part is found when you scroll to the end of the page. There is a drop down window for SimBioSys LASSO. ChemSpider is working to provide LASSO data on its large database of compounds.  LASSO generates a structure and grinds it through a neural net processor module and produces a score between zero and one. The closer the score is to 1.00, the greater the surface conformity or compatibility of the ligand to a target receptor site.  As you would expect, there is a high score associated with aspirin and the COX-1 receptor. From what I can tell, the software is self-learning in some fashion.

The uses are many. Substances can be screened for drug-like attributes within the 40 receptor types provided.  I would like to hear from someone who might have something to say about the use of LASSO for the estimation of possible toxic effects of substances that have not been biologically tested. I fully realize the hazards of this, but perhaps LASSO scores might help flag particular substances for closer examination by testing.

CT Scans. Who is monitoring a patient’s radiation dose?

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The matter of medical x-radiation dosing is surfacing again. I wrote a post about this in 2009.

Let’s get to the core of the matter. Physicians need to take charge of this since only they have any real control. It’s a pretty goddamned simple concept. Doc’s who are calling for x-ray’s need to begin recording calculated dosing from this hazardous energy. If it is too troublesome for them, then the x-ray techs should record the information.

CT scanning seems to be problematic. There is no business incentive to hold back on CT use in for-profit settings. I suppose that documentation would only reveal the extent and magnitude of x-ray use. It would be fodder for malpractice law firms.

I can just see the billboards- Have you or a loved one ever gotten a tan from x-rays? If you have, call Dooleysquat, Schwartz and Schmuck for a free consultation. Do it Now!